Secrets & lies: the real Julian Assange

[struggle4progress]

by ALASTAIR DALTON

... O’Hagan said: “He is thin-skinned, conspiratorial, untruthful, narcissistic, and he thinks he owns the material he conduits. It may turn out that Julian is not <Pentagon Papers leaker> Daniel Ellsberg or <18th-century radical>John Wilkes, but <fictional newspaper magnate> Charles Foster Kane, abusive and monstrous in his pursuit of the truth that interests him, and a man who, it turns out, was motivated all the while not by high principles but by a deep sentimental wound.”

O’Hagan further revealed that despite Assange’s public denouncement of Canongate’s unauthorised version of the book, he had secretly encouraged sales and tweeted links to its page on the online retailer Amazon.

Canongate director Jamie Byng yesterday hailed O’Hagan’s account of the “impossibility of trying to ghost Assange’s memoirs”.

He tweeted: “Andy O’Hagan’s compelling, ring side account of Being (& being around) Julian Assange is smart, accurate and fair” ...

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/secrets-lies-the-real-julian-assange-1-3316372

[Wilms]

1. And he probably had boxes in his garage at some point. n/t

[struggle4progress]

2. Unlikely to have a garage: more the sort that keeps multiple rental storage units in various cities

[Wilms]

3. There ya go, right there.

I mean, how many more reasons does one need to ignore Wikileaks revelations?

Storage units give me the creeps.

[struggle4progress]

4. It's quicker than reading O'Hagan to find out what he actually says, anyway

And the current peculiar libertarian impulse under discussion does not seem much interested in reading: Manning released hundreds of thousands of documents he had never read, and Assange turned around and "published" them in bulk, also without reading them; to judge from O'Hagan's piece, Assange somehow even lacked the patience or concentration to read more than a handful of pages from his own ghostwritten autobiography; and we later saw similar release by Snowden of material he could not possibly have read

[Fearless]

5. When you can't harm the actions attack the character

Gotcha.