Earlier this month, CNN reported that a British court refused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange "leave to appeal an order to extradite him to the United States, where he faces criminal espionage charges." Although Assange's legal team continues to try all options, the grip is clearly tightening. Time is not on his side. The American and British authorities who are persecuting him can afford to wait for what little public interest there is in Assange's case to wane in the face of wars, climate change, concerns about artificial intelligence and other global issues.
But if we are to survive all these challenges, we will need people like Assange. Who will expose the abuses and inconvenient truths that those in power want to keep secret - whether it's war crimes or internal reports from social media owners about how their platforms are affecting teenage girls?
The recent mini-drone attack on the Kremlin is a case in point. While the Ukrainian government denied involvement (attributing it to Russian opposition forces), Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately condemned it as an "act of terrorism", while some Western observers complained that the Ukrainians were pushing the war too far. But what actually happened? The fact that we don't know means that events are unfolding in a dangerous fog of war.
We remember the lines from Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera, which say that some are in the dark and others are in the light, and you can't see them in the dark. How to better describe today's media age? While the mainstream media is full of news about Ukraine, the devastating wars in the Central African Republic, Congo and elsewhere receive almost no attention.
This asymmetry does not mean that we should offer anything less than full support to Ukraine. But it obliges us to think about the setting of that support. We should reject the idea that Ukraine deserves help mainly because "such things should not happen in Europe", or because "we are defending Western civilization". After all, Western civilization not only ignores the horrors happening outside its borders; he is often an accomplice.
Instead, Europeans and other Western societies should understand that because of the invasion of Ukraine, we felt what was happening somewhere else all along - just beyond the reach of our concern. War forces us to consider what we don't know, what we don't want to know, and what we know but don't want to concern us. We need people like Assange to force such a confrontation - to see those in darkness as well.
Of course, Assange can be criticized for focusing exclusively on the liberal West and ignoring even greater injustices in Russia and China. But these injustices are already very visible in our media. We read about them all the time. If Assange is guilty of applying double standards, this is also the case for the West, which condemns Iran while turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia.
As Matthew (7:3) asks: "And why do you see the mote in your brother's eye, but do not feel the log in your own eye?"* Assange taught us to recognize not only the log in our own eye, but also its hidden connections with sawdust in the eyes of our enemies. His approach allows us to take a fresh look at many of the great struggles that have engulfed our media and politics.
Take the conflict between the new populist right and the woke left. In late May, a Utah school district removed the Bible from its elementary and middle schools after a parent complained that it "'has no serious value to minors' because it is pornographic under our new definition" under the book ban law that passed last year. That this is not a case of a Mormon culture war against Christians is shown by a request sent to the district to review the Book of Mormon for possible violations of the new law.
So who is behind these demands? Is it the woke left that is celebrating the banning of books on racial and LGBT+ issues? Is it a radicalized right that applies strict criteria of family values to its own texts? In the end, it doesn't matter, because both the new right and the woke left have accepted the same logic of intolerance. Despite their mutual ideological animosity, they mirror each other. As the woke left dismantles its own political foundation (the European emancipatory tradition), the right may finally have the courage to question obscenity from its foundational texts.
In a cruel irony, the Western democratic tradition of self-criticism has fallen into absurdity, sowing the seeds of its own destruction. What questions lurk in the dark while this process takes all our attention? The greatest threat to Western democracies is not Assange and the transparency he represents, but rather the nihilism and self-indulgence that has come to characterize Western politics.
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* The New Testament translated by Vuka St. Karadžić; prim.trans.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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