Gotham Diary:
Pipe Dreams
12 March 2014
Phew! I’ve just finished reading Andrew O’Hagan’s lengthy account of his participation in the writing of Julian Assange’s autobiography, “Ghosting,” a muddle of the first magnitude. Most of it is a portrait of one very self-defeating narcissist. If O’Hagan weren’t the gifted writer (and thinker) that he is, the performance would be merely unedifying. Without his byline, I should have skipped the piece altogether. I’m not unhappy to have read it, but I’m not sure how much would have been lost had I confined myself to the following paragraph — which in fact I read first and which seduced me into reading the rest:
And here’s the hard bit. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the United Kingdom under Thatcher and Blair, those of us who lived through the Troubles and the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, the deregulation of the City, and Iraq, believed that exposing secret deals and covert operations would prove a godsend. When WikiLeaks began this process in 2010, it felt, to me anyhow, but also to many others that this might turn out to be the greatest contribution to democracy since the end of the Cold War. A new kind of openness suddenly looked possible: technology might allow people to watch their watchers, at last, and to inspect the secrets being kept, supposedly in our name, and to expose fraud and exploitation wherever it was encountered in the new media age. It wasn’t a subtle plan but it smacked of the kind of idealism that many of us hadn’t felt for a while in British life, where big moral programmes on the left are thin on the ground. Assange looked like a counter-warrior and a man not made for the deathly compromises of party politics. And he seemed deeply connected to the web’s powers of surveillance and counter-surveillance. What happened, though, is that big government opposition to WikiLeaks’s work – which continues – became confused, not least in Assange’s mind, with the rape accusations against him. It has been a fatal conflation. There’s a distinct lack of clarity in Julian’s approach, a lack that is, I’m afraid, only reinforced by the people he has working with him. Only today, he sent me an email – hearing I was writing this piece – telling me it was illegal for me to speak out without what he called ‘appropriate consultation’ with him. He wrote of his precarious situation and of the FBI investigation into his activities. ‘I have been detained,’ he said, ‘without charge, for 1000 days.’ And there it is, the old conflation, implying that his detention is to do with his work against secret-keepers in America. It is not. He was detained at Ellingham Hall while appealing against a request to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions relating to two rape allegations. A man who conflates such truths loses his moral authority right there: I tried to spell this out to him while writing the book, but he wouldn’t listen, sometimes suggesting I was naive not to consider the rape allegations to have been a ‘honey trap’ set by dark foreign forces, or that the Swedes were merely keen to extradite him to America. Because he has no ability to see through other people’s eyes he can’t see how dishonest this conflation seems even to supporters such as me. It was a trap he built for himself when he refused to go to Sweden and instead went into the embassy of a nation not famous for its respect for freedom of speech. He will always have an answer to these points. But there is no real answer. He made a massive tactical error in not going to Sweden to clear his name.
What stood out when I read this paragraph the second time, in the course of reading the whole piece, was the beginning, in which O’Hagan expresses the optimism felt by himself and his cohort when WikiLeaks disclosed all those cables. I never shared it. My misgivings remained unfocused; there were other things to worry about. But I can thank O’Hagan for my sense of what ought to have happened instead, because his experience of Assange’s feckless sensationalism lead him to it. The release of classified information ought to have been vastly more disciplined and strategic. The material ought to have been organized, redacted, and presented in a coherent manner, not tossed like so many leftovers as scraps to a pack of hounds. Instead, it was largely compromised by the unseemliness of Assange’s Swedish problem, a brace of rape allegations that, indeed, he ought to have faced directly, for the sake of his own mission, at whatever personal cost.
What I fear young people miss — and I include O’Hagan among them, his age (46) notwithstanding — and miss especially when they focus on new ways of doing things, is that old power structures persist, whether or not they’re held in high regard by intelligent digerati. Parliaments and Congresses remain powerful, but so do swarms of smaller power centers: sheriffs, school boards, town councils, district attorneys, and regulators of all stripes, corrupt and otherwise. One side effect of democracy seems to be a profusion of public elective and appointed offices at every geopolitical level. To the extent that things work at all, they do so with the consent of people of power. Many of them can be voted out of office, but it’s depressing how often they’re replaced by others just like them. It’s as though political power were an athletic skill, nurtured in apt youngsters with the skills, say, of Chris Christie. People who don’t play the game don’t get into office, because they never get the chance to run.
This has to be changed, but it cannot be changed by being overlooked and ignored. That’s what the Julian Assanges do. They believe that outmoded structures will whither away for lack of their attention. On the contrary: neglected power structures grow entrenched. They may become unresponsive, but people of power continue to seek the benefits of holding office, however empty and pointless the office might be. The chasm between public will and political action deepens, to be filled with dead bodies after insurrections or invasions. Such shocks are rarely productive, and only young people — young people who have grown up far from bloodshed — can believe in their efficacy.
I’m deeply troubled by a dystopian vision that recently occurred to me. Reading about income inequality, and the pile-up of colossal fortunes, together with the lack of interest in public life that young people display — surely they must be forgiven for seeing private action as more effective — I dread a particularly dark resolution of our political impasses. What is to stop men and women whose power flows from not from political office but from vast private riches, riches ample enough to pay for private “security forces,” riches generated by the production of goods valued by society (such as medicine, for example) — what is to stop such people from holding democracy, and indeed all other forms of regular government, hostage? Will it not seem a small price to pay, to sacrifice dysfunctional political power structures to the promise of general welfare?
We’ve made a terrible hash of democratic freedoms, and lost our way in the pursuit of chimerical liberties. But we will not be better off without them.