People v. State

The U.S. State Department has said he is:

“He is not a journalist. He is not a whistleblower. He is a political actor. He has a political agenda,” State Department spokesman P J Crowley told reporters here.

“He is trying to undermine the international system that enables us to cooperate and collaborate with other governments and to work in multilateral settings and on a bilateral basis to help solve regional and international issues,” Crowley said in response to a question.

“What he is doing is damaging to our efforts and the efforts of other governments. They are putting at risk our national interest and the interests of other governments around the world. He is not an objective observer of anything.

“He is an active player. He has an agenda. He’s trying to pursue that agenda, and I don’t think he can qualify as either a journalist on the one hand or a whistleblower on the other,” Crowley argued.

“I think he is an anarchist, but he is not a journalist,” he said.

L. Gordon Crovitz at the Wall Street Journal has agreed, calling Assange an “Information Anarchist”:

The irony is that WikiLeaks’ use of technology to post confidential U.S. government documents will certainly result in a less free flow of information. The outrage is that this is Mr. Assange’s express intention.

. . .

Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he’s a whistleblower—there’s no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracy as Governance.” He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed,” he writes. “Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate,” he writes, and “pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result.”

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—”conspirators” in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, “We can marginalize a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself.”

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange’s view this way: “While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to ‘think’ as a system, to communicate with itself.” Mr. Assange’s idea is that with enough leaks, “the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.”

Or as Mr. Assange told Time magazine last week, “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it’s our goal to achieve a more just society.” If leaks cause U.S. officials to “lock down internally and to balkanize,” they will “cease to be as efficient as they were.”

Julian Assange himself, however, says he’s not an anarchist:

Frost: Do you think of yourself- when you see references to yourself as anarchic, or an anarchist, is that an accurate description of what you are?
Assange: No, it’s not at all an accurate description.
Frost: Why not?
Assange: That’s not what we do. We’re an organization that goes about and has a long record all over the world of exposing abuses, by exposing concrete documentation, proof of bad behavior. That’s not anarchy. That’s what people do when they’re civil, is that they engage in organized activity that promotes justice.
Frost: So therefore it’s — in that sense you’re not anarchic because you’re actually, you’re in favor of authority if it’s doing the right thing.
Assange: Correct. Correct.
Frost: You’re not automatically opposed to authority.
Assange: You know, having run an organization I understand the difficulties in building institutions, having a good institution. Institutions are very important. I mean anyone who’s worked in Africa, as I have, knows that successful civil institutions don’t just come from nowhere. It’s a — you’ll find a difference going between particular African countries or European and African countries well, clean roads and so on don’t just come from nowhere. There is an institutional infrastructure behind this. But secret institutions start to become corrupted in their purpose. They’re able to engage in secret plans which would be opposed by the population and carry them out for their own internal purposes. So they’re not performing the function that people demand that they perform.

It’s not surprising that someone currently as much in the media spotlight as Assange would not embrace publicly a loaded label as commonly misunderstood as “anarchist,” when the inevitable misunderstandings don’t lend themselves to being readily dispelled with a sound-bite. But note the giant caveat in the principle proposed by the interviewer which Assange did appear to accept: “you’re in favor of authority if it’s doing the right thing.” Placing that condition on authority contradicts and negates the very essence of authority. I am an anarchist and even I am not automatically opposed to “authority” when it happens to be doing the right thing. But if I’m deciding whether to oppose an “authority” based on my own judgment of whether it’s doing the right thing then it’s not much of an authority, is it? I would not oppose an ex-con taking the bus to work or going to the grocery store, either. When it comes to States, however, they will only occasionally and accidentally do the right thing, because their very reason for existence is the exploitation by the politically-connected class of the politically-unconnected class. This historical fact does not of course preclude the institution of new organizations with altogether different purposes — e.g., to secure rather than violate natural rights.

Anarchism is thought of as a radical philosophy, and it is, but it’s also the most obvious thing in the world: No one has the right to do anything wrong to anyone else. A lot of people have no qualms in proclaiming that capital punishment is state-sanctioned premeditated murder. Others do not hesitate to proclaim that taxation is theft. Likely most people would recognize themselves as anarchists if they really thought about it, as this excellent blog post asking whether Assange qualifies as an anarchist suggests:

At their core . . . most people around the world value anarchistic ideals.  Even the masses of religiously-minded people are not usually at odds with the principles of anarchism.  The Mahatma Gandhi was a Hindu who identified himself as an anarchist.  The Christian ideal of Jesus Christ is fundamentally anarchist in his earthly habits.  Lao Tzu (author of the Tao Te Ching and originator of Taoism), practically made a religion of anarchism.  And the list of anarchistic saints could surely go on across many other cultures and religions.

One needn’t totally agree with the pacifism of those spiritual anarchists to recognize that their anarchistic ideals resonate with many people across most cultures of the world.  The point is… many people already value anarchistic ideals but are nevertheless controlled and manipulated by people who have polar opposite values.  And it may not be the pacifism of the aforementioned religious figures that enthralls people but, rather, their sense of basic justice.  That’s why archetypes like Robin Hood, for example, are also held in high regard.  And, when it comes down to it, all of humanity descended from, in the not-so-distant past, relatively egalitarian and peaceful primitive tribes.  The majority of humanity has the same underlying values, buried in the very needs of our existence, but we have been manipulated, domesticated, and made subservient to those who do not have our best interests at heart.

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