Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/25/julian-assange-released-from-prison.html
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Here we go, with people (ok, me) pointing out that the women he raped won’t see justice, and the fanbois piling in to insist he’s a hero for our times so it shouldn’t matter.
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I don’t know if he belongs in prison or not but he is a terrible human being and I think the world is a worse place for his being in it. May he go back home and live the rest of his days in obscurity.
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His focused anti-US journalism served putin (via putin’s operative Guccifer) and trump (by releasing DNC emails) rather well. Other than being a rapist, did he ever violate a specific law in the country he was located? …probably not. But he did help to give us trump, and for that reason alone he’ll always be a “part of the problem” in my feckless opinion. May we never have to witness Assange activities again (however unlikely that is -sigh-)
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One of seemingly dozens of supposed uber-leftists who were masqueraded right-wingers. Assange, Greenwald, Taibbi, Michael Tracey, Jimmy Dore, the Red Scare podcasters. If they don’t go to jail, I hope they all suffer prodigiously.
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Something tells me that won’t happen. 
I hope I am wrong.
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Capitalism+atheism+feminism = sterility = migration. EU birthrate = 1.6. Replacement = 2.1. Merkel, May, Macron, Gentiloni all childless.
– J. Assange
And:
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He did some genuinely good and beneficial things for the world.
He did some genuinely awful and detrimental things for the world.
I think he is a nihilist with no real angenda other than pursuing infamy to inflate his own ego.
I think he’s a pretty awful and sociopathic person.
He’s probably a rapist.
Wikileaks isn’t even a wiki.
All of these things can be true at once.
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The longer time goes on the harder it is to identify any tangible positive impact that Assange had on the world, or to articulate why any of those things wouldn’t have happened without his personal involvement.
One thing that is astoundingly clear is that he never actually supported the ideals that he claimed to.
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His work with Chelsea Manning and exposure of many W war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan was certainly a net good.
Granted, it was Chelsea Manning who did all the hard work (and she certainly paid the price) but there was some really explosive stuff there.
Indeed. He’s not an ally and I’m not defending him. He’s in the Glenn Greenwald quadrant of “far right wing scumbag who just so happened to do something good”.
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That wasn’t Assange at all, it was Manning. Any jackass can post unedited sensitive documents online once a source has provided them.
If Wikileaks hadn’t existed and Manning had gone to an actual journalist who had experience protecting confidential sources then maybe she wouldn’t have ended up in a military prison.
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Any jackass could, most probably wouldn’t, this one did, and did it with a huge megaphone.
I basically agree with all your points and I’m not trying to defend or even praise the guy beyond pointing out that for all the terrible stuff he did, there was something good in there. Stopped clocks and all that.
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He’ll finally be home in a country that is geographically large enough to fit his ego.
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As far as the US government goes, it seems to be more of a pragmatic approach. They got what they wanted, Assange is no longer a folk hero except to a few cranks, WikiLeaks is also no longer a trusted place to leak documents, and so on. It’s better to let him now return to obscurity than to prosecute further, and have him in the press.
I kind of expected this, I suspect the US prosecutors were only waiting for an opportune time to close the books and move on to stuff that is better for their individual careers.
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I will say what I’ve already said on a previous thread. All comments seem to miss the fact that there was a well-funded and proven character assassination campaign, which means (at least) I will never know if is really true he was a shitty person, or even a rapist, because at this point I literally cannot separate lies from fact from all the noise was posted about him.
I used to keep track of what was true, false and circumstantial but it’s been so long that at this point I don’t care. You cannot see a post about assange without someone metioning he was a rapist or that he decorated the embassy walls with his own shit. My opinions won’t change nobody’s opinion of him, mostly because my opinion of him was never that high.
And it really doesn’t matter. It worked so well that the point has made clear across: nobody will be willing to blow a whistle in a long long time unless they’re completely ready to die (literally or socially)
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So ends over a decade of this story.
In conclusion, Assange turned out to be quite shitty, and so did the USA. I guess the takeaway from this whole story is that imperial powers really don’t like it when you show the world that they’re murdering civilians.
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The only real hero in this whole decade long affair was Chelsea Manning.
But of course she never had anything close to the PR team that Assange did.
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He likely would have spent less time in captivity (including the embassy) if he just complied with the rape investigation and process.
This guy had no character to assassinate.
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He skipped bail in the UK
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