Julian Assange in Sweden
Christopher Reynolds reviews a biased and inaccurate account of the WikiLeaks founder’s troubles with the law
Books - Friday March 8, 2013
One effect of digital distribution is that books become that would previously be unreleasable become available. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as books with potential audiences too low to justify a print run can now reach their target market. Julian Assange in Sweden however, is less a book, and more of an assemblage of internet message board rantings. Literally so, as much of the book is given over to conspiracy theories which are noted as being proposed on a Swedish internet forum (the logo of which features a cat smoking a spliff, which tells you all you need to know) ...
The accusers’ interviews are often quite damning and humiliating for Assange, so these are confined to the back of the book as appendices, heavily annotated within the text with disputing statements, and the reconstructions mostly use the interview statements of two members of WikiLeaks: Johannes Wahlström and Donald Boström. After the reconstruction, the book then gets down to smearing the accusers and coming up with theories as to why they would make false accusations ...
The book proceeds to comb through huge amounts of personal information in a way that becomes creepy. No information is too trivial or irrelevant to be included. The officer who took note of the crime makes costume jewellery as a hobby. Pages are devoted to listing the photos in one of the accuser’s Flickr collection.
On the other hand, no effort is made to even scratch the surface of the background of anybody sympathetic to Assange, though a simple search of the internet reveals that Wahlström and Boström have both been involved in promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories ...
http://felixonline.co.uk/books/3449/julian-assange-in-sweden/
