Megan McArdle suspects Julian Assange is unwell.

[Assange says,] “In a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”

Ah. This must be why WikiLeaks has been getting so much material from the governments of China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, and why internal documents from Cargill are currently dominating their traffic. Ooops! That was a flash from an alternative universe where what Assange is saying isn’t nonsense. In the real world, he got a bunch of government documents because the US, in its addlepated, well-meaning way, dumped all of them on a network open to 3 million people where they could be seen by a disaffected 23-year old stupid enough to either believe he could get away with this, or not understand how long the years in jail might be.

Theodore Dalrymple on what’s wrong with WikiLeaks.

The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness.

And Tim Blair notes the vanities and secrets of the WikiLeaks mouthpiece.

[Assange] says that WikiLeaks has “changed two governments, taken the scalp of a prime minister, taken the scalp of a defence minister and [achieved] many other reforms.” Assange doesn’t identify the governments or the two ministers. Perhaps he’s talking about the 2007 election in Kenya, which Assange claims to have influenced by leaking a secret report. Then followed months of deadly violence, with which Assange seems oddly comfortable: “1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak,” says Assange. It’s a chilling statistic, but then he states: “On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya.” So another 1,300 corpses won’t matter much. Tipping an already-volatile African nation into further mayhem might be Assange’s greatest achievement to date.

Update:

Christopher Hitchens weighs in.

The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda… All you need to know about Assange is contained in the profile of him by the great John F. Burns and in his shockingly thuggish response to it. The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is “to end two wars,” one knows at once what he means by the “ending.” In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

John Lennon was never imprisoned or tortured, but he was seen as a threat.

That’s the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland in a piece asking Where Are Today’s Political Popstars? It’s highlighted as an editor’s pick, no less.

They weren’t wrong to think the man who once shook his moptop like a wind-up toy was radical: he was. In Give Peace a Chance and Happy Xmas (War is Over) he had written not one but two anthems of the movement to end the Vietnam War.

Ah, anthems. Written in support of a movement whose most notable gift to mankind was a totalitarian future for the Cambodians and Vietnamese and one of the largest genocides in history.

His politics hardened in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles’ breakup, declaring after Bloody Sunday that in a choice of the British army or the IRA he would side with the IRA.

A terrorist organisation responsible for the murders of close to 2,000 people, many of whom were civilians, and which, according to the Observer, Lennon saw fit to fund with tens of thousands of pounds.

He sang about Revolution; many thought one was on the way.

Indeed. Lennon also found time to lend his pop star gravitas to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, a Trotskyist cult apparently financed by those moral colossi Muammar al-Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, and which entranced such artistic luminaries as Corin and Vanessa Redgrave. The WRP’s ambitions included socialist revolution, the overthrow of private property and the replacement of the police by a “workers militia.” Imagine that. And hey, who wouldn’t feel threatened by a millionaire pop star sprawled on his peace bed high above Manhattan, singing a hymn to global totalitarianism and a world with “no possessions,” while his sidekick Yoko collected fur coats?

For some beautiful dreamers any revolution will do. And this is the Guardian, where communist psychodrama must be given a free pass. That’s what radicals do, apparently.

Update:

Karen points us to today’s Guardian editorial, which is positively engorged with pop radicalism. 

While [Morrisey] is a political weather-vane blown by emotional gales, [Johnny] Marr is a sturdy signpost pointing left – a friend of the great bard of socialist song, Billy Bragg, and the mover behind the Smiths’ involvement with the anti-Thatcher Red Wedge musical collective.

Yes, Johnny Marr:  the vegan socialist who crashed his BMW after another tequila binge. When not strumming his instrument and “forbidding” certain people to enjoy his records, Mr Marr is a “visiting professor of music” at Salford University, where he rails against “an age of stifling conservatism.” And, oh yes, the “great bard of socialist song” Billy Bragg. A man who – proudly and in a very serious voice – told Radio 4 listeners that he’d “learned all of his politics from pop music.”

Some things you just can’t parody.

For newcomers, two more items from the archives.  

Tears and Role-Play.

Transsexuals take umbrage with the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Cue orgy of self-pity and radical spelling.

“I ask that you respect that womon born womon is a valid and honourable gender identity. I also ask that you respect that womyn born womyn deeply need our space.”

Projecting Just a Tad. 

Disabled feminists and gender activists respond to Avatar. Psychodrama ensues.

Not long ago on Radio 4, a legless and rather prickly “activist” insisted that it was “oppressive” to view the loss of a person’s legs as in any way regrettable. Regarding this loss as something negative was apparently “ableist,” “ignorant” and offensive. This claim was repeated several times, emphatically. At one point the activist declared that given a chance to walk again he would refuse, such was his “pride” in having lost a third of his body. Anger had been displaced from the obvious grievance – the traumatic loss of one’s legs – to the supposed “injustice” of regarding limb loss as a dismaying or terrifying state of affairs. As a coping mechanism, it wasn’t entirely honest. Or, it seems, successful.

Contraband may be hidden in the greatest hits. So grope them thoroughly.

Britain’s unions, the “big society” in real life,

So says dissembler, Stalin groupie and Guardian associate editor Seumas Milne.

The election of Len McCluskey as leader of Britain’s most important trade union should be a shot in the arm for anyone who wants to see… the development of a genuine political alternative.

Yes, Labour’s new paymaster – and “the mainstream left candidate” – is a man elected on a 16% turnout by just 7% of the Unite union’s total membership. Mr McCluskey’s greatest claim to fame is his role in the British Airways cabin crew strikes, which began a year ago, have cost the airline around 150 million pounds and have yet to be resolved. McCluskey was formerly a supporter of the totalitarian Trotskyist organisation Militant and is still enthused by class war sloganeering. When not quoting Ernesto “Che” Guevara and predicting a “final victory” over capitalism and private ownership, Mr McCluskey likes to reinvent British history: “We are all supposed to believe now that the 1970s was a horrible time. It wasn’t at all.”

His memorable lines include, 

There is no such thing as an irresponsible strike.

And,

My political principles are clear. Capitalism has failed.

Mr McCluskey, who supported an organisation that planned to “abolish” capitalism, has weathered this failure remarkably well and now takes home a basic salary of £100,000. In June 2008, after tanker drivers rejected a pay increase of 6.8%, McCluskey – then Unite’s assistant general secretary – railed against Shell management, pointing out that they “have themselves enjoyed 15%-plus pay increases in the last year.” However, Mr McCluskey’s union predecessors – Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley– were spared similar opprobrium, despite salaries of £196,497 and £135,330 and despite them enjoying pay rises over three years of 56% and 62% respectively. Interviewed by the Liverpool Echo, Mr McCluskey “fondly” recalled that he had “led lots of strikes” and described his agenda as that of the “progressive left.”

Back to the future, people. A Seventies revival looms.

Previously in MilneWorld: 1, 2, 3.

Misogynist violence is unacceptable, but…

So wrote the Guardian’s Priyamvada Gopal in August this year, shortly before telling us that the Taliban’s misogynist violence and kidnapping of children are actually not that bad compared to the evils of the West and its “bankrupt version of modernity.” A modernity that has “little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators.”

She is, of course, at it again.

Hurling a fire extinguisher into a crowd is clearly wrong, but…

This time, our esteemed postcolonial studies lecturer is conjuring equivalence between, on the one hand, arson, vandalism and attempted manslaughter, and, on the other, cuts to public spending. Cuts that will reduce overall spending to the levels of 2001/2 (ah, the dark ages) and in many cases merely slow the rate of increase in public subsidy.

It is the coalition’s policies that are going to generate bloody mayhem… Focusing on damage to buildings usefully distracts attention from the much more far-reaching and systematic violence now being visited upon our education system and society more widely.

Violence. A word Ms Gopal uses no fewer than nine times. Fiscal responsibility, albeit belated, is violence, see? Reducing the national debt is violence. Extending credit for tuition fees is violence. Attempting to contain the growth of the state –  enlarged by 17% under New Labour – that’s violence too. Audacious, isn’t it? Ms Gopal, who “teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge,” has casually redefined violence to include practically anything to which she takes political exception. A move that slyly elevates thuggery to retaliation. Now one might well have legitimate objections to particular outcomes of the proposed austerity measures, but to frame those measures as violence – and by implication as analogous to rioting and deserving of payment in kind – is not a manoeuvre that resounds with good faith. But then Ms Gopal has form in matters of distortion, hyperbole and wilful fantasy. Regarding the protestors, Ms Gopal enlightens us,

Most adhered to the prescribed rituals of peaceful and legitimate protest. But, as we should expect in times of great injustice, some departed from the script. They lit bonfires, smashed windows, occupied the roof of an unlovely building and ill-advisedly hurled the odd inanimate object.

It is indeed “ill-advised” to throw a fire extinguisher from a rooftop into a crowd, targeting police officers standing below. It’s remarkable that no-one was killed. But hey, for the cause. And readers may note that the claim of a supposedly non-violent “script” is not entirely consonant with the sight of rioters and arsonists wearing official NUS clothing and being cheered on by the crowd. It’s also somewhat at odds with NUS president Aaron Porter calling for a “demo-lition” on a route past Conservative HQ, or promising “we will use every weapon in our armoury” and telling students they needed to be “inside the rooms where the deals will be made.” Radical that she is, Ms Gopal is attuned to such sentiments and what they imply. “Non-violence,” she tells us, “has been perverted… into a subterfuge for rulers… Genteel rallies do not put sufficient pressure on the political class.” How she squares such enthusiasm with her professed disapproval of deadly projectiles is, alas, a mystery. Still, physical intimidation and property destruction are very exciting and Ms Gopal is hardly alone in finding mob violence both excusable and titillating: