Saturday, February 19, 2011

FT.com / Books / Essays - Secret society

Concluding paragraphs of a review of three Wikileaks-focused books

Assange will be back in court later this month to learn if he is to be deported to Sweden to stand trial for minor rape. It’s been not the least of his unattractive features – and of some of his supporters – that he has painted the charges, and the women bringing them, as inspired by the CIA, or some such agency. Assange has needed to see himself as a solitary iconoclast, grasping the essential nature of the tyrannies that oppress us, possessing the key to our liberation. Instead, very much tamed and contained by his publishing partners, he’s given a substantial heft to our better understanding of the way the world is managed, and maybe, in time, a more sympathetic comprehension of the contradictions, compromises and contrasting goals with which governments must juggle.

It must make him sick.

FT.com / Books / Essays - Secret society

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