What should you make of Julian Assange ? It’s a good question , dear reader. It’s probably the best of all questions you may face this year, or this decade, to be honest. It is so because it’s a question that demands an answer. You cannot occupy any political position in 2010, and not have an answer to that question, and I wonder to myself, if anyone can ever have any credibility whatsoever if they sit on the fence in this issue.
I think not.
I think not, a lot !!
Nevertheless, I think that there is a much more important question, one that is being asked, but not examined enough.
What is Julian Assange trying to do ?
What indeed ?
He, and his friends, like Mr Pilger, who are, and always have been, haters of the USA, say its about freedom of speech. And if you glance at the comments section of any report on this matter you will hear the almost clichéd call that freedom of speech does not exist in the USA, and that the Wikileaks saga is proof thereof.
What rubbish.
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Wikileaks is not speaking it’s mind, no dear reader, what it is doing is publishing other peoples speech, and doing so outside of the very important contextual situation under which those comments were made..
By this, dear reader, I mean simply that what you are reading in your morning paper are words spoken with a certain expectation. The expectation of privacy. I’ll go a little bit further and say, the legitimate expectation of privacy.
What’s that, you ask?
Hell that’s like you and your doctor, or you and your shrink, or you and your wife, or you and your mates after a football match, over a beer.
Privacy.
