Wikileaks Julian Assenge and his Wikileaks colleagues are heroes...

...and the survival of Wikileaks won't depend on the accusation of a CIA plant that he didn't tell her his condom broke.

We admire people who struggle to tell the truth in oppressive societies despite death threats. I admire a friend in Serbia who ran the news agency Beta and told the truth about what was happening in the face of the Milosevic government's threats.

But if we can admire this openness on a national level then we should admire it even more in the lawless international arena where, ELF subsidises and promotes a Coup d'Etat in Congo Brazzeville and answers to no one for this crime. Where wars are declared without justification and hundreds of thousands die. Where a company like Exxon Mobil can destroy the environment of the coastline of Equatorial Guinea with pollution and trick the local population out of petrol billions without possibility of redress. Where Thatcher's son can help to organise an attempted coup with such alacrity, it's as if he were going on an adventure holiday. Where financial speculators can ruin the economies of whole countries short selling government bonds and looking for a quick buck.

It is the lawless and undemocratic international arena dominated by  by the global corporations and their client nations that Assange has stepped into. And he has every right to do so.

Wikileaks Julian Assenge, only one of the loose governing body that manages Wikileaks,  is a hero because he and other people in his organisation have found a space in the World Wide Web to fight back against a lawless and global ruling class that is increasingly using democracy as mere window dressing for its advocacy of corporate power and private enterprise, at the expense of social democracy.

Assange and the Wikileaks team have exposed the obvious lie that we live in an really open  and just capitalist society. We don't exactly. We live in tolerably open and just societies because corporations try not to dirty their nests - from whence they can sally forth, like buccaneers, into the world at large. 

For a long time we have wondered: how can individuals, pressure groups or even nation states fight against this globalised ruling class that has no loyalty to anything, but profit? This is a class that thrives on broken systems of international regulation. Wikileaks is showing us one way the freedom of cyberspace can be used to combat our real 'other'. The sophisticated, immoral and globalized ruling class and their servants. Wikileaks is robust because it is mirrored in many places.

Julian Assange is now being accused of assault against a woman because his condom broke in a consensual act and, apparently, in the throes he didn't tell his partner. His partner wasn't very upset at the time. She even tweeted her conquest. The same thing has happened to many couples, but few people have been jailed for it.

Sexual blackmail is the standard trick of the KGB and the CIA. Find the dirt, any dirt and then dish it in the right moment. This is why keeping track of the proclivities of political activists is one of the best and quickest ways for counterintelligence services to counteract 'loose cannons'. Along with a focused disinformation campaign. And it seems at least one of Assange's partners has connections with the CIA. 

One activist told me he had to stay absolutely clean.

'If you want to oppose the global capitalist system you have to be irreproachable, a saint. And avoid using the Internet because they gather information on you and keep tabs on you.'

Another activist in South Africa who uses the internet to broadcast Marxism and Communist praxis exclaimed.

'Soon they are going to attack you and demonize you using any excuse, perhaps because I smoke.

According to the Swedish prosecutor, the more serious charge made against Assange has actually been discounted and it is only still active because they need to talk to him about it. Notice that none of the media are explaining the circumstances surrounding this 'assault' they just call it an assault. Again identity politics is the weapon of choice as it has been so often. The liberal press are immediately speyed by any use of identity politics. That's why it is used. Attack your target and cover your attack with a coating of identity politics camoflauge paint.

When Clinton opposed the Republican establishment and tried to introduce health care reform the answer was to say that Monica Lewinsky had pleasured him. Jacob Zuma would not play ball in the same way that Thabo Mbeki did and so identity politics was used against him too.  

Don't forget that we were taken to war in Iraq on a confection, a falsehood. The leaders of the USA and the UK lied brazenly to their populations about the dangers posed by Iraq. In doing so they broke the trust of the populations they nominally represent.

Yes, I agree, it is true that Julian Assange and the Wikileaks organisation were not democratically elected and in this sense they do not have the moral and legitimate authority that sovereign governments have. But this moral authority of the nation state has been traduced, if it ever existed. The reality nowadays is that governments are elected - if they are elected - by increasingly lower proportions of extraordinarily manipulated and managed electorates.

These electorates are given extremely narrow choices. They can have any colour they like so long as it is the so called 'middle ground' of  right wing and and pro-market forces. Histrionic right wing alternatives are represented as the extreme to reject, but in truth, a virulent pro-market ideology is the touchstone of nearly all key political players - even opposition leaders like Ed Miliband.  

And into this vacuum of legitimate governance and over-weaning corporate power Wikileaks steps, alongside many, many other NGOs and pressure groups.

Although Julian Assange and Wikileaks do not represent us democratically, they have earned some trust in society. Many of us have taken the red pill and we are all well aware that the world is not governed in the interests of the majority of the population of the world, but in the interests of the global elite. An elite who make clever calculations about how brazen they can be about pursuing their interests. They control the media. They control governments with the flick of a bond-shorting switch.  Most academics and thinkers in the advanced capitalist countries who have risen to prominence can be guaranteed to behave like intellectual prostitutes, almost to a man and woman. They are certain to argue that non-capitalist forms of government are 'impossible' while all the time they eye up the tempting doggie biscuits in their masters' hands. 

Julian Assange and the Wikileaks workers are heroes of our Matrix, Assange is a Neo; a top computer programmer on the side of openness and international justice and truth. And he and Wikileaks show us the reality of the US war in Iraq, behind the soporific speeches of US and UK politicians, behind the propaganda of Hollywood fiction. Assange reminds me of the character  created by Steig Larsson, Mikael Blomkvist. Not perfect, just human, but a campaigning journalist and a tenacious fighter. 

It's a little ironic now that it is the home of  Steig Larsson's character, Blomkvist, liberal, social democratic Sweden, that is trying to extradite him, prompted heavily by the US. But of course we need to remember that Sweden is one of the places that the US government was allowed to carry out acts of extraordinary rendition. What international law does Wikileaks break for leaking confidential US information? None whatsoever. Personifying Wikileaks in Assange and attacking it won't change that. Steve Bell's cartoon puts it very well.

Let's hope that the upshot of what Wikileaks is doing is that we all learn to participate more and more in the international arena. And just one of the things we can do, is to mirror the information they have published if we have the facilities, or express our support on the Internet through posting and blogging.

Julian Assange is currently detained and other Wikileaks key figures are now saying that anonymity is going to be the way forward. Sounds about right to me.One thing's for sure, the survival of Wilileaks won't depend on whether Assange's condom burst or a broken Swedish justice system.

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