Who Is Afraid Of Julian Assange?

Dear Friends , in the series of fresh & fruitful(hopefully) articles & write ups i am adding a book review written by my student (who has a bad habit of reading & thinking!) Ms. Ankita Singh.Please go through it & give your valuable feedbacks.

Book Review

The unauthorized Autobiography: By Julian Assange

‘A compelling portrait of a brave, complex, difficult, brilliant and essentially humane individual,  Assange is not easy to like but his intellectual gifts, his moral courage and his carelessness of his own physical safety make him impossible not to admire.’

Assange was the product of a relationship between his country girl mother, Christine, and a man with a gentle voice who spoke to her at an anti-Vietnam war rally in Sydney. "It [the voice] belonged to a 27-year-old, cultured guy with a moustache. He asked if she was with anyone and when she said 'no' he took her hand."

Not long afterwards, Julian was born into a hippie set-up in north Queensland. They moved house often and quite soon he learned "how to master the environment and conquer danger". He spent a lot of time exploring a disused mine, sometimes burning ants with a magnifying glass. "At an early stage," he says, "I realized there was a social element to all this. I put a gang together, the better to get things done and have fun while doing it." A solemn-faced, slightly scary Tom Sawyer or William Brown emerges.

Assange's upbringing consisted of one cult, multiple homes, more than 30 schools and two stepfathers, one of whom left him with the name Assange. He was clearly a handful and probably manipulative. He advises his schoolmates that dirt is a certain way to stop bleeding and on another occasion organizes his friends to dig a tunnel under the neighbors’ fence in order to supply his folks with tomatoes. As he gets older, his mother's peripatetic existence seems more pathological and a fugitive pattern set in. His father and two stepfathers disappear from the narrative without much explanation and it becomes clear that Julian has fairly big issues in the authority department.

The unfinished nature of the book, I suspect, means that quite a lot has been let through by Assange that a second or third round of editing might have seen adjusted or eliminated. At times, it looks as though he is artfully supplying scenes from childhood to explain the adult outlaw, but then there are real shafts of light such as the moment when he talks about a teacher called Mr. King. "In my view, even then, a lot of teachers were prissy, but this guy was strong in a way that seems important. He was a very competent individual and I felt safe with him – I clung to the idea of manly competence."

There is a really good section in which he talks about the first computer hacking placing a large part of his mind in the space of the computer. You glimpse the thrill of his trespass when he hacks into the Nortel network of 11,000 computers, which he likens to "walking in the Sistine Chapel at midnight". He writes: “That’s how hacking begins. You want to get past a barrier that has been erected to keep you out”.

The story of the Wikileaks founder, currently under house arrest and fighting extradition over sexual assault charges in Sweden, opens with Assange being taken to jail, the press photographers "scrabbling around the windows [of the police van] like crabs in a bucket", and delves back into his past as a computer hacker and "cypherpunk", where the first seeds of WikiLeaks were planted.

You don't know whether to believe the man who once gave himself the handle Splendide Mendax (nobly untruthful). Littered in his wake over the past 12 months are many well-known journalists, lawyers, activists and helpers who will have no more to do with him because of his congenital bloody-mindedness and what they see as his shaky grasp on the truth. Yet this book seems remarkably candid. He admits to measures of autism, arrogance and insensitivity and, in a rather bewildered passage, remarks that he can empty a room faster than most.

All this and probably much more is true of Assange. Whether you take Assange as a reliable narrator (he himself seems ambivalent about the idea) it is an exciting tale of “life on the run”, and the revelations, leaks and power games that came to dominate his life—and our media.

This one’s surprisingly revealing. It reminds us of the huge amount Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have contributed to this epochal time and how important is the principle of free publication.

An intriguing self-portrait, Although Mr. Assange makes an easy target, he has interesting things to say, however controversial. And the world does sometimes need such annoying, single-minded people move forward. Mr. Assange and his creation, WikiLeaks, have made it a more open and transparent place, and hence a bit more just.

Book Review By Ankita Singh

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