Wikileaks and the Arrest of Julian Assange

First let me declare this: rape is bad. All cases of rape deserve investigation. If you do not believe these two statements then you are reading the wrong blog. Now that we have accepted this let us turn to the strange case of Julian Assange. Now I do not know if he is guilty, but nor does anyone else bar Mr Assange and his two accusers. There has yet to be a trial and so I suspend judgement until after this date. However, I object to the reaction of the supporters of Wikileaks (let us call them the ‘Assangists’) toward the arrest of Mr Assange. As I have already stated rape is bad and all cases of rape deserve investigation. Julian Assange is accused of rape by two people, and so I think that Mr Assange should be investigated-after all it is only his word against the two accusers’ at this stage and so it is a very real possibility that Mr Assange could have raped his ex-companion’s. However, the founder of Wikileaks has refused to return to Sweden voluntarily and so that government has issued an arrest warrant. At this the Assangists have declared that Sweden is an American stool, and it is all a great conspiracy orchestrated by the CIA in order to get the Messiah...opps, sorry-Julian Assange into an American prison.

At this point we really need to make some things clear. First Sweden is not and never has been known as an ‘American stool’. There is more chance of Mr Assange being extradited from the UK than Sweden. In other words he is safer from the CIA in Stockholm than London. Second the man is accused of rape. He may be innocent, but while there is a chance that he could be guilty of that horrible crime then he should be tried. However, it is bloody difficult to put a man on trial who refuses to remain in the same country in which the crime he is accused of is committed-hence the arrest warrant. Of course this is where the Assangists point out that St Assange...opps, sorry-Mr Assange will be heading toward a kangaroo court. The problem with this theory is that Sweden has quite a good reputation for education, high living standards etc, but has never really been able to develop a really good corruption problem-I mean to really experience kangaroo courts it is usually customary to head to Burma, or Zimbabwe. This possibility is highly unlikely since it is Sweden that he shall find himself.

This brings me to my third point. Like them or loath them what the documents from Wikileaks have shown over the last couple of years is that there is no conspiracy. What governments say in public tend to be what they do in private plus or minus a fact or two. In other words Mr Assange’s own organisation has shown that a grand conspiracy orchestrated by the American government to slander his name by pressuring two women and the Swedish government in order to get him convicted of rape is not a bet you should make. This kind of thing only happens in cheap airport novels. The far more likely scenario is that the two women genuinely believe that they have been assaulted in some manner and that the Swedish government is doing its duty by investigating a case of possible rape. In other words the Assangists are attempting to prevent the proper investigation of a possible incident of rape. This is utterly wrong even if Mr Assange is found to be innocent.

An Ignorant Lover

In a pre-television age when people where stuck in the house together by adverse weather they would tell stories and poems to each other. In that tradition I have composed this poem. I call it 'An Ignorant Lover':


The Past is a tale which is cold,
Where wrong triumphed over right,
But the future has yet to be told:
A land where everything is still bright.
And even though I am unloved,
And I feel the creeping arm of despair,
Still, let me minister my love,
To that creature with looks so fair.
Even when at the end of days,
In what will be my darkest hour,
I shall be warmed by tender rays,
For unreturned love shall not turn sour.
The Mind is weighed down by the Heart’s chains,
For in life it is the heart which reigns.


I would be interested in anyone's thoughts on the sonnet.

Oh Dear...

Oh dear. I seem to have neglected my duties as a blogger this past little while. I shall endeavour to post more regularly from now on.

Anyway the circumstances which brought this blog to prominence in my mind once more was the snow-I am trapped in the home of my parents unable to return to my flat. While this is not necessarily a bad thing (indeed it is rather like a holiday) all my nice stuff is in my flat. As such cabin fever has set in rather more quickly than it otherwise should have and so, dear reader, I turn to the online community for solace and entertainment.

A rant: why is the comic book genre so under-rated by everyone? I mean we need only go as far as ‘The Watchmen’ (that is the graphic novel NOT that damnable movie adaptation) to encounter quite deep philosophical musing. Indeed ‘The Dark Knight’ is based on the comic book genre (it could not exist without it) and the sociological and philosophical references are everywhere-the Joker’s line near the start of the film ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger’ is lifted from Nietzsche and marks the tip of the ice berg where that particular film is concerned. My point is that while a graphic novel may look entirely different from a novel or a painting this does not mean that it cannot be as deep or as important to the study of art. Of course there is crap out there, but this is the same with every art form and should not detract from the sublime genius of some of the people involved with the genre.