by Farid Farid
One of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, Tim Winton, has re-released Land’s Edge: A Coastal Memoir. Through a series of autobiographical reflections, Winton describes how Australia is a littoral society always on “the edge of things” – floods, bushfires, riots etc… Winton talks about the sensuality of water being central to the Australian imaginary. Through his prose about surfing and sharks, readers can also envision human cargo packed on a floating boat teetering between life and death.
It is perhaps then fitting that this was underscored a couple of days ago by the enthusiastic reception by foreign minister Kevin Rudd and defence minister Stephen Smith of their British counterparts William Hague and Liam Fox at the HMAS Watson on a naval base in Sydney harbour. In an ironic scene on the water, the Australian government’s foreign image untarnished by floods or asylum seekers was tactfully kept and strategic interests were shared between “cousins on opposite sides of the world” according to Hague and Fox.
Hague & Fox in their joint opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald opt for a turgid title that spells out their foreign policy objectives — ‘Stronger alliance required to meet modern challenges’. They probably had Wikileaks in mind as one of these trans-national challenges with both countries agreeing to tighten intelligence cooperation against cyber crimes.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard was and still is facing a backlash from several MPs, even from her own party, for her reckless statements and treatment of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange. Gillard, a lawyer by training, could not identify a specific law broken by Assange and his organisation but was immediately supportive of the United States’ position of prosecuting him. Her subservient foreign policy posturing as pandering to American and British interests has been sickening to an electorate that narrowly voted her in, after a hung parliament for several days, and is keen for her to establish herself as a capable leader.
In his op-ed piece in the national broadsheet The Australian before his imprisonment, Assange defined Wikileaks’ mission as “fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public”. He terms this insistent need as scientific journalism which “allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true?” Unfortunately, the Wikileaks debacle is not as clear cut as Assange makes it out to be.
The voracious coverage by the news media cycle has been mired in a web of political obfuscations, journalistic dishonesty and pundit hyperbole. Assange, partly through his own doing, has become the leftist poster boy of what is left of increasingly ailing western democracies as well as a scapegoat for conservative demagoguery calling for his imprisonment or assassination. Countless filmic comparisons have been made of Assange’s likeness to Jason Bourne or a Bond villain. The media narratives about Assange’s elusive personality are salaciously peppered with references to Wikileaks’s underground operation, literally, in a cave in Sweden. Here, the semiotics of Hollywood is distractingly invoked to blur the lines of what is truth and fiction.
Assange is more than just a nomad with a laptop on a moral crusade. He is a cause celebre, a voice for the voiceless, a saintly revolutionary — one needs to look at the rallies across several metropolitan centres that have advocated his cause to continue with the leaks. But he is not stupid — far from it. Just recently he stood alongside a Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer in another carefully managed press conference triumphantly showing CDs that allegedly contain files of 2000 bank clients suspected of tax evasion. If one reads his op-ed carefully, he is bluntly self-reflexive when he states
People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars…If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.
Whatever happens to Assange from here on in, it is certainly interesting to track how questions of citizenship and freedom of speech have become complicated in international law. Most of the diplomatic cables have been banal in their nature however sensitive material released about Tunisia, Zimbabwe, United States & China has been telling. With the rapid technological proliferation of the internet and the messy politics of authorship and dissemination of knowledge, Assange still stands simultaneously as a reviled and revered figure for politicians, fans and law-makers alike.
– Farid Farid is a final year doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney and a freelance writer. He has been published in several journals including Le Monde Diplomatique,The Australian, The Age, The Australian Literary Review, Al Masry Al Youm, The Canberra Times & Color Lines.
P U L S E 