Swedish human rights activist Anna Ardin is glad Julian Assange is free.
But the claims she has made about him suggest she would have every reason not to wish him well.
Ardin is fiercely proud of Assange’s work for WikiLeaks, and insists that it should never have landed him behind bars.
“We have the right to know about the wars that are fought in our name,” she says.
Speaking to Ardin over Zoom in Stockholm, it quickly becomes clear that she has no problem keeping what she sees as the two Assanges apart in her head - the visionary activist and the man who she says does not treat women well.
She is at pains to describe him neither as a hero nor a monster, but a complicated man.
How dare she not view the world in stark black-and-white terms!
She’s throwing out the whole playbook and trying this new thing the hipsters are calling: “Nuance” . This lady has some balls, what’s next?? CONTROLLING YOUR EMOTIONS???
I would assume most rapists aren’t government whistle blowers and their victims most likely have no reason to hold a nuanced view.
She just seems to believe in due process and fairness. Obviously, what happened to Assange so far hasn’t been either.
What about the 3rd man, who espouses his organization isn’t an arbiter of information, and yet, repeatedly prevented Russian leaks from being published? 🤔
And with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where is wikileaks now?
Cozy Bear really appreciated having such a loyal publisher, I imagine.
This, to me, is less important than the fact that this woman is publicly talking about how someone can do a bad thing but still be a public good, something not talked about enough in a world where when someone does something bad, it makes people ignore everything else they’re doing.
I have struggled with this a lot in recent years. For example, I grew up with Ender’s Game as my favorite book. Orson Scott Card is a racist/misogynistic/etc POS, and it has tainted my view of his books. People are experiencing this with J. K. Rowling right now.
I like to think I can keep the artist separate from their art, but it’s hard.
I dealt with that as a kid with Roald Dahl because he was super antisemitic, but he also wrote amazing children’s books. I guess for me it depends on how much they put such ugliness into their work. Lovecraft, creative as he was, had no problem being racist in his writings and I just can’t read them even though I love the mythos. Dahl didn’t do that.
Card and Rowling are somewhat different cases because they didn’t start by writing terrible things, but they got to the point that their ugly beliefs began to seep into their books.
The Rowling shift is a gut punch in particular for me because I also long admired her specifically. A single impoverished mother writing her drafts on napkins while taking the train to work. Her work for Amnesty International. Her fierce rejection of right-wing extremism and fascism…I remember saving her Harvard commence address as being the most powerful one I’ve ever heard. The road to hell is paved with good intentions? I don’t know. Frustrating because INFJ-to-INFJ I relate to her personality type.
Meanwhile her books were incredibly impactful of my upbringing and my relationship with my mother as well.
Controversial though this may be I don’t view her as some evil anti-Semitic trans-lynching nazi in lieu of her views. Misguided, sure, but in the aggregation of all she is I’m still struggling with the mixed bag of her character. Maybe that’s my own cognitive dissonance; maybe it’s hers.
Edit: Side-note, Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow were incredible books. I’m only heartbroken that the opportunity was missed to have Anton Yelchin cast as Ender in a better film adaptation we shall never see.
I still see absolutely no reason to lock him up. Just because he’s biased towards one side that doesn’t make the crimes of the other side any better. Ideally, yes, he should publish everything. But that’s not the case. And it’s still irrelevant.
Yeah I’m not necessarily in disagreement there. Though I respect those whistle-blowers who are willing to be a martyr for a cause they believe in. Ellsberg faced justice head on, for example. Meanwhile Snowden fled to one of the most corrupt countries in the world with a vendetta against the USA, and Greenwald is now parroting Kremlin propaganda strangely. Assange is somewhere in the middle for me.
At the end of the day, Assange effectively did face justice and came out the other side, so I give credit.
Strictly speaking, he didn’t. He ran out the clock on the statute of limitations for the all but one of the sexual assault charges in Sweden while in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and prosecutors said enough evidence was lost to time that they weren’t going to be able to indict on the remaining charge.
And with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where is wikileaks now?
I mean what do you want him to leak? Everything is out there for everyone to see.
If you’re saying this tongue-in-cheek to note that it’s flatly obvious that Putin is a corrupt imperialist tyrant, true I agree. But there is always more damaging information to be revealed not just to the world but internally to the people of Russia within the echo-chamber. For instance, more on Putin’s personal finances. More on Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s neo-nazi Rasputin, etc.
Did Assange ever have access to that information? I admittedly don’t know the details but I don’t tbink he was ever in that kind of position.
Speaking to Ardin over Zoom in Stockholm…
That place does seem to have a certain effect on people.
I’ve heard accusations that assange is politically biased and refused to publish leaks about rupukelicans on wikileaks so I’m not sure what to think of him
I don’t know that he has refused, but he definitely allowed Russia to play him like a fiddle in having him publish the DNC hack (and let’s not forget, it was a hack, not a leak) while holding on to RNC hacked data.
I have questions on if Trump wins in 2016 without Assange, and that’s enough to make me hate him.
