The Very Odd Case of Julian Assange

I am guessing that most readers of this blog tend towards a sympathy, perhaps a very strong attachment, towards freedom of expression and of the journalistic professions.  But what do we say about Assange?  Perpetrator of a fairly extreme case of leaks of an embarrassing nature (to put it mildly); and as a former soldier I’m sensitive to security issues.  But his subsequent hounding, and treatment in general, has been extraordinary: beyond all reason.  (For Hillary Clinton to ask if he couldn’t be bumped off is pretty extreme, even given what an unpleasant person she evidently is.)  Likewise, his personal commitment to principles is pretty remarkable – he’d have made good martyr material in former ages.

All that said:  by Heaven, he’s patently a really annoying person – just in terms of personality, I mean.  One can’t help but think he has pissed off almost everyone he’s ever met.  Obviously, people with a deeply stubborn streak – eigensinnig, to use the excellent German word – are often like that: and maybe we depend upon them for the expression of the unsayable, when anyone less stubborn (brave?) would have been shaken out of their position a lot sooner than he.

But really, ultimately: do they do their causes any good?  Solzhenitsyn has always seemed to me to be in that category.  Thanks to the interweb and the prevalence of webcasts etc, we can form these views much more readily now, where previously (as with my view on Mr S) we’d have been guessing.  To take a rather more mundane example, Kathleen Stock is a person I greatly admire – at the intellectual level: but watch her in a discussion on the www.  Frankly, I’ll stick with her writings, thanks, and never wish to meet her.    

This line of thought is squarely ad hominem, by very definition.  But I do believe it’s a strong factor in these cases.  Rightly or wrongly.

ND