Good documentary from BBC Panorama I watched over the last couple of days.
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It's 29 minutes long?
I must commend you on a great post Kai :)
We have a 'Nazi' Prime Minister in Australia: Tony Abbott who seems to happily ape the American government in a similar vein.
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people are growing poor - its sole reason behind national socialists governments to take hold. The US currently has non nationalist socialist - and people get angry on him because of that. Or at least from what I've seen it looks that way.
still Assange strikes me as person capable of rape; also plenty of fake prepared files were also released by wikileaks. Sometimes things are not what they seem to be, when taken out of context.
To paraphrase Immortal tech - Revolutions are not a single person, and revolutionary figures are not omni-benevolent. Great leader, bad parent. Fought for the common good, horrible person.
To hold any figure up as the revolution is to mistake the social situation that enabled that revolution. Revolutions are many people. And nobody is omni-benevolent, humans are by their very nature a mix of good and bad traits. What enables on person to focus on one aspect of life is usually what makes them so floored in other aspects. Julian Assange displays many traits which could be assigned to a person with aspergers.
And yet most media or historical coverage on any topic is in regards to a single person or small group of people and question their character.
The same is true for National Socialism, or any other dictatorial govt, including the current "free market" "democratic" govt's which are currently placing the blame and fears of a society on specific peoples or persons. Humans like simple answers to problems even though the world is more complex than that.
A revolution, good or bad, requires the right social context. In Australia and the rest of the world yes, people are getting poorer and with poverty comes frustration and anger. The focus of this anger is usually directed towards the certain already ostracized people which leads to horrible outcomes. It is a cycle that gets repeated through history.
Wikileaks has both good and bad outcomes, and the people behind wikileaks are both rational and irrational, good and bad.
When we see nationalistic situations, the making of some humans as worth less then others, the ability to wage wars and kill countless people who are worth less then the people of the aggressor nation. The ability to have govt mandated "national security" cover ups of spying and atrocities.. the future is not looking so hot. Transparency is needed counter arguments are needed but none of the people on one side are all good or all bad. And none of them is the entire story.
A story on the character of Julian Assange is not a story of wiki leaks, Wikileaks: the secret story... no this is Julian Assange: part of his story and is he a floored human?, um yes of course he is....
It's a little misinformed regarding the redacted material, The Guardian was supposed to redact the names and sensitive information with Julian and his team but time was running out and Julian just said fuck it and published everything. The people they actually had a chance to interview seemed like they were watching from the sidelines, it's more important to find factual information than getting an opinion from someone involved. Manning of course was the source of the material, but they didn't know this at the time. The Icelandic MP was not the original source of the footage, but may have played some role in publishing it. The connection to the Russian dictatorship situation is clearly undisclosed and seems like pure speculation, it's possible but they're building too much off from it. I can understand why he doesn't want too much attention, especially in this particular situation. He even stated in the video that he doesn't want his personal life mixed in with Wikileaks in his interviews. IMHO Wikileaks and Julian Assange are separate entities and should be treated as such. I wouldn't trust Julian if my life depended on it, but I still support Wikileaks. If you want to see something about Wikileaks The Fifth Estate is pretty good, although it's not completely factual.
Yes, I started watching it rather late and got some half way through and finished it up the next day.
What's interesting is this was Julian Assange's reaction to his face and story being plastered across papers like The Times and The Guardian. Mere months later he's avoiding extradition to Sweden (which was ordered by the Swedish government) by hiding in an Estonian embassy in London.
If you skip to 26:20 you can see he refused to be interviewed, a shame, though that was a few weeks before the extradition was ordered (he was checking into a police station to make sure he didn't run away ext).
Video is not working for me.