In 2011, on a bright, cold day in May on a resplendent Norfolk jail, Julian Assange reflected on the seismic uprising of a global counterculture, of united students and workers, which could have, and did, scare a thousand kings by reviving the ideals of the 1871 Paris commune within the context of the Information Age.
Against this raw new zeitgeist, and against the backdrop of uprisings in US proxy states engendered by Wikileaks’ exposure of endemic corruption in Cablegate, Assange answered, under duress, to Google Kingpin Eric Schmidt and his motorcade. Of all the erudite evaluations he made later in a long meditation of the event, the most striking – for he has no formal training in the theory of politics – is his deft demystification of the hagiography of fabled “civic society,” debunking the central pillar of the dominant pluralist school of democratic theory by illuminating how agendas are being set and enacted by shadow networks beyond ceremonial government, in think tanks, transnational lobbies, and military committees. Were we to sideline media conjecture for a moment and reflect on the ideas being published everybody has something to learn from those words with their wisdom any jail, any subpoena cannot erase with the bludgeon of its authority. It is wisdom worthy of the megaphone.
Moreover, as a form of acknowledgement of the critical influence of radicals the world around on the febrile atmosphere of protest which snaked from the Arabic speaking nations to the poor underworld of London, he hails, in the introduction, with an equally erudite analysis, a fresh generation of activists, empowered by brave, socially conscientious use of ITC to expose the corruption of ossified officialdom, who in at once hopeful and tragic gestures like those of self immolating democrats, whose names should be spelled across the stars, proclaimed an era of permanent struggle, a species of rebellion in which righteous renegades see possibilities for the collapse of the system of domination today.
Within Julian’s diligently developed philosophy and action of individual and social emancipation – evident not only in his published texts but his activism and interviews – which has come to be a highly regarded and influential source of guidance for opposition movements in a new age of authoritarianism and dissidence, is the idea that the goal of every serious citizen becomes to enlist a progressive arsenal of technological knowledge and critical doubt of establishment claims to scatter the seeds of a nonrepressive society based on fundamentally free existential relations inhibited, incarnated by contemporary society and intensified by the establishment’s monopoly on ITC.
Julian imagines that common cause in communal cryptography collectives and a sort of global agenda to nationalise information so as to give a leg up to informed consent amongst citizens under duress of official lies could help manifest a utopian world and so Julian invests serious time as a cryptographer, publisher and activist bringing his influence to bear on power, for peaceful revolution. On Julian’s view nascent collectives and protest movements bring utopia closer to fruition because they mobilise against the centralised infrastructure that has encoded the dominance of all manifestations of oppression perpetuated by the institutions of civilisation, namely money and war and organised religion.
His meditations on the backlash against informational imperialism, the craven misery beget under its aegis, the geopolitical doom it engineers, made in the zenith of the Wikileaks controversy, reveal his thoughts on liberation in their broader cultural and historical context. It was a time of transition, a seismic era: imperialism was increasingly assailed by protest and revolt organised diligently by those no longer invested in the rigged game of society. They worked together towards laying the foundations of a qualitatively different and unique society, one which transvaluated – transformed the values of – the corrupt civic order they lived in.
The counterculture, and the tide of protest movements which succeeded it, were passionately abloom with a protest against imperialism, a movement to: transcend its conditions of alienation which cuts to the roots of its existence, which argued vehemently against its henchmen in the third world, and despised, mocked its culture, its morality of nihilism and wastefulness.
By this point it had become clear to protestors that the growth and success of the imperial state was an expression of a project at the centre of which is the experience, transformation and organisation of life and people as the mere subjects of domination. Civilisation entrenched tyranny, subjugation, exploitation and alienation of the masses and nature. But Julian, like the counterculture, was incandescent for bubbling with optimism about change. There was a world to win.
The culmination of Julian’s letters, loves and learning experiences represent an attempt to realise the revolutionary potential of radical philosophical experimentation that mark him as truly a man of the counterculture. Whilst the historical trend had been towards the continuation of war and aggression as a policy of the dominant powers on the world stage, Julian nevertheless remains committed to the project of global peace and peaceful enlightenment, in which he sees the potential to manifest a rational and moral utopia banished of social ills and wants such as war, pollution and greed.
He believes in this project presumably because the conquest of the war machine over the natural instincts of love and peace – symbolised most negatively by the atomic bomb – and the exponential development of the productive forces of the war machine in the advanced industrial states signified to him that the utopian designation for revolutionary ideas had ceased to be an operative truth, because the means really existed to rationally and creatively plan society in such a way as to create solidarity, abundance, happiness, and peace.
If that social vision is to be dismissed as utopian, then realism can be called into disrepute. That is to say ideology had concealed the reality of domination and alienation inherent in imperialism. Julian’s message implicitly implored people to think about the terrifying truth of the world we currently live in by imagining one that was better.
The lively life of Assange places him as the crux of an opposition of youth and intellectuals and persecuted minorities against a corrupt authoritarian statist autocracy which engages in military warfare against its own citizens, insofar as it coldly perceived how powerfully they could subvert the continuum of repression perpetuated by the hegemonic and hawkish military-industrial complex.
What makes Assange and his disciples so dangerous to the status quo was the way they acted beyond the continuum of repression, conscientious about liberating themselves from its demanding repressive imperatives, those of a society which they could see was constrained by a carefully managed ideological conformism.
His anger at social injustice and organised repression developed to focus on the ways in which war-makers and the political classes were tightening control of their societies not only through the rule of the iron fist, but also through new technologies like the web, the new religion, which integrated the working classes into regulated modes of thought and behaviour.
Moreover, the doom cloud of the new Cold War looms large in our minds, the battle being, like in the mind of the sixties militants, as two systems equal in degrees of totalitarianism, transcending the Cold War demonology which cast communism as the oppressor against the liberal democratic state.
We see that, save for the nascent counterculture movement, liberal democracies are static societies in which there was a dearth of opposition to the status quo, in which people were integrated in to regulated systems of thought and behaviour.
Julian aims to surprise and stimulate, and his existence helps give inspiration and joy to the parties and groupings that constituted the international solidarity movement, making stone hearts beat and bleed and people united. In the spirit of a genuinely radical critique of society Julian bequeaths a vision rare in its passion, a swan song of the liberation era which distinguishes the new age vision and ideas of the anti authoritarian left. It pays well to flash our eyes on Julian’s letters, for their insight in to the terrifying truth of a culture that alienates the essence of our humanity.