Ghosting (Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books re Assange)

[struggle4progress]

... He said he’d hoped to have something that read like Hemingway. ‘When people have been put in prison who might never have had time to write, the thing they write can be galvanising and amazing. I wouldn’t say this publicly, but Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison.’ He admitted it wasn’t a great book but it wouldn’t have been written if Hitler had not been put away ...

I asked him if he had a working title yet and he said, to laughter, ‘Yes. “Ban This Book: From Swedish Whores to Pentagon Bores”.’ It was interesting to see how he parried with some notion of himself as a public figure, as a rock star really, when all the activists I’ve ever known tend to see themselves as marginal and possibly eccentric figures ...

Filming was going on. There was always filming or the possibility of filming, which was odd for people who liked to think of themselves as hiding in the shadows ...

People turned up out of nowhere. No one introduced them properly, and they didn’t have titles anyway: they were just Carlos or Tina or Oliver or Thomas. One night in Ellingham Hall, a French guy called Jeremy came in with a sack of encrypted phones. Julian always seemed to have three phones on the go at any one time – the red phone was his personal one – and this latest batch was designed to deal with a general paranoia that newspapers were hacking all of us. It was always like that: sudden bursts of vigilance would vie with complete negligence. There was no real system of security or applied secrecy, not if you’ve read about how spy agencies operate. Julian would speak on open lines when he simply forgot to take care. The others kept the same mobiles for months. And none of them seemed to care about a running tape recorder. Granted, I was there to ask questions and record replies, but still, much of what they said had nothing to do with the book and they simply forgot about it. Only once was I asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, when Julian gave me a hard-drive containing very sensitive material, but they forgot I had the drive and never asked for it back ...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2014/02/21/andrew-ohagan/ghosting

[djean111]

1. Do tonight's plethora of anti-Assange OP's discredit anything Wikileaks has given us?

It seems like the people who hate him are more responsible for keeping him in the public eye, these days.

[struggle4progress]

3. It's fun that Assange wanted the ghostwriter to make his book sound more like Ayn Rand

The O’Hagan piece is really quite informative

[djean111]

4. I guess I just don't understand the obsession with Assange, when it is what Wikileaks

gives us that is important. If all of this poking at him discredited Wikileaks releases, maybe I could see the point in spending any energy in jeering at him.

But Assange the man and the Wikileaks releases are totally separate entities.
The worst things in the universe could be true of Assange, and it would make no difference to Wikileaks content.

[aquart]

6. This article is pretty much basic reporting, some editorializing.

It doesn't deserve defensive hostility.

I HOPE no one assumes that good information only comes from the perfect mouth of God.

[MADem]

7. I agree. Any pushback with regard to it suggests ideological bias, never mind the validity of the

reportage.

[MADem]

8. You seriously think the author of that piece "hates" him? You plainly didn't read it, or if you did

you did not understand what the man wrote.

What I found most interesting in that entire article was that Assange believes that PRIVACY is not necessary. That rather flies in the face of Snowden's take on things. The envy WRT the latter individual is unsurprising, too.

But Julian is unsackable, and, like the unsackable all over the world, he makes decisions with the kind of hubris that trumps clear-sightedness and experience. There was no point in dumping those cables. By doing so, he risked exposing people mentioned in them. (No privacy is necessary, according to Assange, but he’s wrong about that.) After he released all the cables, many of his allies turned against him. He had ruined the last of his reputation as a responsible publisher, just to get one over on the Guardian. I hung my head when I learned what he’d done, feeling it spelled long-term disaster for him.

[frazzled]

2. A friend sent me this earlier today

Fascinating read. Totally pathological, but fascinating.

[aquart]

5. Wonderful article.

For some reason it made me think of Marley and Me.