Earlier this month, CNN reported that a British court has denied Wikileaks founder Julian Assange “permission to appeal an order to extradite him to the United States, where he faces criminal charges under the Espionage Act.” Although Assange’s legal team will continue to explore its options, the snare around his neck is clearly tightening. Time is not on his side. The US and British authorities who are pursuing him can afford to wait for any remaining public interest in his case to dwindle in the face of wars, climate change, anxiety about artificial intelligence, and other global issues.
But if we want to manage such challenges, we will need people like Assange. Who else will expose all the abuses and inconvenient truths that those in power want to keep secret?
The recent small-scale drone attack on the Kremlin is a case in point. While the Ukrainian government denied any involvement (attributing it to the Russian opposition forces), Russian President Vladimir Putin promptly denounced it as a “terrorist act,” and some Western observers complained that the Ukrainians were pushing the war too far. But what actually happened? The fact that we do not know means that events are playing out under a dangerous fog of war.
But one is also reminded of the last lines in Bertold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera: And some are in the darkness / And the others in the light / But you only see those in the light / Those in the darkness you don’t see. How better to describe today’s media age? While mainstream media are full of news about Ukraine, notes journalist Anjan Sundaram, “enormous wars” in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere receive almost no attention.
This asymmetry does not mean we should offer anything less than full support for Ukraine. But it does oblige us to think about how we frame that support. We should reject the idea that Ukraine merits assistance mainly because “such things should not happen in Europe,” or because we are “defending Western civilisation.” After all, Western civilisation not only ignores the horrors occurring outside its borders; it is often complicit in them.
Instead, Europeans and other Westerners should recognise that, with the invasion of Ukraine, we have gotten a taste of what has been playing out elsewhere all along – just beyond our scope of concern. The war forces us to consider what we do not know, what we do not want to know, and what we know but do not want to care about. We need people like Assange to force such reckonings – to make us see “those in the darkness.”
Of course, one can criticise Assange for focusing exclusively on the liberal West and ignoring even greater injustices in Russia and China. But those injustices are already highly visible in our media. We read about them all the time.
Assange’s approach allows us to see anew many of the big struggles that consume our media and politics. In a cruel irony, the Western democratic tradition of self-criticism has descended into absurdity, sowing the seeds of its own destruction. What issues are languishing in the darkness while this process hogs all the light? The biggest threat to Western democracies is not Assange and the transparency that he represents, but rather the nihilism and self-indulgence that have come to characterise their politics. — Project Syndicate