Julian Assange stands for the moment in the select company of heads of state, controlling the future of the world. This is not an exagerration, but an absolute fact. The details of the Third Persian Gulf War, Afghan campaign, etc, were all trivial in comparison to what came about when he published diplomatic correspondence. His life will shortly be crushed out in farce and, one may hope, a deserved punishment, but more on the matter in Sweden later.
A small history lesson is required, viz. the Ems Telegram. This document, in brief, was the pretext which brought about the unification of Germany. An oft-ignored part of this process was how it was brought about in a very traditional fashion, too. The Hohenzollern Dynasty of Prussia had a cadet branch, which had remained Catholic from the reformation (as we may know, the Hohenzollerns became Dukes in Prussia because the Grand Master of the Knights Templar during the reformation when their territory was secularized was a Hohenzollern.This also explains the family split).
Well, naturally this means that the Hohenzollerns themselves were not Prussian, but actually originated from a small principality of Sigmaringen in southern Germany. This provided a large resevoir of Catholic Princes who with a bit of religious flexibility would variously find themselves candidates for several thrones, found the Royal Dynasty of Rumania, and etc. This also provides our first point about Assange. In ancient times, great men were generally created by blood. Even in the Roman Republic, most of the individuals you read about were of fine breeding from responsible families, dutiful sons following the Cursus Honorum. This was part of the fundamental recognition that some people were better than others, and that there must be a way to select them--good breeding was chosen--which would yield reasonably consistent results. This is not the only way, and we will consider a defence of blood selection as a reasonably effective component of a functional government system at a later date, and its alternatives.
As the good Maid should not forget, then, this is how nations selected their leaders. The King of Rumania was not put on his throne by Otto von Bismarck's gleaming halo of a million bayonets. The Rumanians recognized that they needed a King. So too, when the old Bourbonist dynasty was kicked off the throne of Spain and the period started by the old sad madness of Carlos the Enchanted came to an end, that the Republic of Spain was a fleeting thing. The Spaniards were explicitly looking for their fueros, their feudal rights and privileges, and not in the main for a Republic. General Prim, the Marquis de los Castillejos, looked around for a man of respectable blood and Catholic origins to serve as the King of Spain, and one of these individuals was Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
Louis-Napoleon on his throne of bayonets in Paris was not particular interested in seeing repeated the old custom which had brought so much war to Europe of Germany on the one side and Spain on the other, controlled by a single Royal House. This was cause for war, just as it was the effective reason for the Bourbons before him to make war until their success of breaking the encirclement in the War of Spanish Succession, and thus guaranteeing the glory of a century of rampant French arms. The intentional release of a single telegram had provided the simple pretext for war, and the honour of States had guaranteed it would come. In doing so, the Bonaparte dynasty was guaranteed its destruction before the imprint of its victories and time lent to it the same status of having reigned "ab antiquo" and being accustomed to the French people which would have doubtless led to a Bonapartist France in 2010, and with it something perhaps other than modern society. We reject the inevitability of grand courses of history. Deeds may still be made by humans.
Which again brings us to Assange. Now that the historical precedent for diplomatic communications leading to war has been well-established (and remember, it was, yes, a pretext--but pretexts are not things you should ignore, they are focal points for existing tensions--so that matters little. Tensions exist, and they can lead to war), we see that Assange can make history. By far the most damaging thing he released was the fact that the People's Republic of China regards the DPRK (North Korea, for those uninitiated in the custom of communist acronym-republics) as a bother, a danger, an unstable rogue state that they would rather be replaced by a neutral south Korea. Now, there is nothing wrong with the Chinese opinion, it is in fact brilliant. If the United States was not so arrogant as to try and force every contry in the world into subservient alliance and had some idea of its limits, we would at once propose to the Chinese that we, in concert with South Korea and Russia, invade North Korea as four powers of collectively overwhelming strength, end the horrors of the Juche regime which lead to suffering comparable with a nation made entirely of concentration camp victims and their guards (the Party), and honourably withdraw having created a neutralized unified Korea beholden to none of the three Powers.
None of this is positive, however, for now the North Koreans themselves know about the Chinese opinion. No such thrust can be undertaken, as it can be anticipated by the North Koreans, and the Chinese hardliners will have the power to force a resumption of their influence in the Politboro and other governing bodies of the Chinese People's Republic, drawing back to a crackdown on capitalism--which is good--and also a crackdown on personal freedom, which is very unfortunate. They will then proceed to arm North Korea to reassure the Kim dynasty (which at this rate will become an actual dynasty in the same fashion the Bonapartes almost did). This course of events would see a major change in how the world could have, and was, approaching the North Korean State, and Assange is directly responsible.
Assange is also the ideal Man of the modern debased age. He sees himself as absolutely overweening in power, presuming to criticize the executors of sovereign authority for nations, and to determine, like an Autocrat of old times, what data is fit for public consumption and what is not. And who is he? He is a criminal, a common hacker, a--very crudely--Aussie bogan who grew up playing with computers instead of reboring the cylinders on a Ford Falcon. The way he responded to his arrest on hacking charges, the idea that violating personal privacy was but a mere game of children which his solicitor succeeded in pushing, was altogether exactly leading toward the present: Especially the way he treated his wife and young child at that time and the viciously protracted custody battle that followed.. This was a man who knew his Rights in the world, and one of them is to abuse women.
Sweden has some of the best protections for women in the world, though they are of course glaringly imperfect, but then, so are all the protections in all of the world. So, too, the women he consorted with were of the highest leftist calibre. They were anti-American peace activists of decades of advocacy against the violent and repressive policies of states, or what they thought was violent and repressive, anyway. But now the world's supporters of Assange--cowardly men of the internet generation who wish they were half as bold as he was--insist they must have been American plants in a honeytrap, or that they charges are completely bogus. The idea that he should actually face the Swedish courts and the accusations against him is completely lost. Inherent here is the assumption that Julian Assange is the Man Above Morality, a Nietzschean figure of the individual-state in the modern society, an inversion of the Autocrat of old. For Assange is created by the furor of his needs, a modern day Herostratus who destroyed the world of friendly diplomatic concourse for the sake of his own fame. And he is what our society teaches men to aspire to: A position so powerful that they have the ability to neglect morality in it. We see it in the likes of Kobe Bryant and O.J. Simpson in sports, in many of our public officials--Larry Craig, Bill Clinton, etc--of countless affiliations. And of course we see it in the corporate world, which matches and exceeds the greatest excesses of the Roman Principate.
His instant crowning as the champion of the average person--as the man who can best appeal to the base desires of the masses who understand nothing about the savage and violent paranoia of the Kims, and the confidentiality in which the Chinese trusted to negotiate with the United States and make such statements--is a reflection of how he is the ultimate pinnacle of their aims. The people are taught to worship those individuals who, by their manipulation of those same people, arise to such heights as to neglect all social law and ethics. That Assange considers women as property to be raped when they dare to insist he use a prophylactic in sex, is completely in line with the heights of power he has reached. He is the lust of every man who has ever sat down at a computer and wondered why he could not think of eBay and get enough money for cocaine laden toga parties on the Mediterranean, why he could not be, yes, a notorious blogger or a politician. And those same men, too, see such roles in a male light, and women as the property and reward of having achieved them, the right of their having succeeded in touched and directed the fickle currents of the modern social-promotion method.
For social promotion in the modern world is based purely on popularity, and democracy has failed because the selection of candidates occurs on the grounds of their personal characteristics of appearance and charisma, the lust for sameness they induce in the population, their ability to create celebrity appeal. We may soon see the utter disaster of a Palin Presidency precisely because she quit her duties as governor of Alaska and started a Reality television show. And Assange in particular did the same thing; he manipulated the people and manipulated the volunteers of a collaborative website of dubious morality to promote himself to a Man Above Morality, whose stature and the desire of others to be like him, the superhero standing before supposedly evil governments, washes clean his wrongs. And those wrongs, of course, showing that ultimately in the eye of men who can still be consumed with such passions nothing in the view of women has been changed, includes their possession and control. And before a man such as Assange, in all the prominence and power he will enjoy before his short reign is brought to an end by the inevitable tides of both the social response and simple public attention span, even the most liberated of modern leftist, feminist women, will ultimately fail to the position of being known the world over as his whores, condemned to have the wrongs against them dismissed as a conspiracy which dares to infringe on the hollow glories of a Man Above Morality.
No comments:
Post a Comment