Couldn’t happen to a better anarchist
(Jonathan Kay, Commentary, National Post, October 25, 2011)
A century ago, a prominent Russian anarchist named Peter Kropotkin defined his creed as a “theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government.” In such a society, order is created “not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups.”
In practice, however, anarchism always leads to chaos and nihilistic violence — or to dictatorships imposed by those who claim to represent the masses’ true desires.
The Occupy Wall Street protestors deployed in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park provide a capsule case study. In a fascinating report filed last Thursday, New York Magazine’s Alex Klein found that the protesters had splintered on the question of music. Many of the Occupiers, apparently, have been passing their time with daily 10-hour drum sessions. The tom toms help keep up morale, apparently. But they also anger those protesters who are trying to sleep, and have disrupted classes at a local high school.
So, the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street “general assembly” — a sort of self-appointed protester executive body — decreed that drumming shall be limited to two hours a day. The general assembly has also imposed a 50% tax on the donations that drummers earn from passersby. “They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music,” complained one drumming protester. “We’re like, ‘What’s going on here?’ They’re like the banks we’re protesting,” said another.
And that’s not all. The general assembly is also ordering protesters to clean up their camp sites in advance of a local community board inspection. In some cases, they’re taking down tents and sending people away, so that new protesters can set up shop. Fist-fights have ensued. But Lauren Digion, a leader of Occupy Wall Street’s “sanitation working group” isn’t phased. “Someone needs to give orders” she told Klein, after barking commands about who could use the communal sleeping bags and who couldn’t. “There’s no sense of order in this f–king place.”
And that’s anarchism in a nutshell for you. It’s all drum circles and “natural flow” and “consensus” — until the time comes to actually get something done; at which point the self-appointed dictators start emerging naturally from amidst the protesters, like mushrooms after a week of rainstorms. For strong personalities, the hyper-egalitarian mantras of anarchism act as a smokescreen for authoritarianism.
Kropotkin’s contemporaries pounded more than drums: Within the space of the two decades between 1893 and 1913, European anarchists managed to kill a president, two prime ministers and two kings. But in our own less violent era, the most famous anarchist is Julian Assange (although he’s never used that term to describe himself), whose WikiLeaks organization has been publishing secret government documents since 2007. Assange has declared that his goal is to cripple U.S. power by destroying the ability of government officials to exchange secure communications. At the Occupy Wall Street protests, a panel truck painted up as a “WikiLeaks Mobile Information Collection Unit” has had a conspicuous presence.
But Assange’s influence may be waning. This week, he declared that he doesn’t have the money to continue WikiLeaks’ publication operations — a state of affairs he blames on the “blockade” imposed by leading financial companies such as Visa and PayPal. He complains that “the blockade is outside of any accountable public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency.” It turns out that national governments are not quite so obsolete as he imagined.
Because he poked Washington in the eye so often and so hard, Assange has become a hero to many on the left. France’s Le Monde newspaper named him man of the year. On Time magazine’s list, he was runner-up to Mark Zuckerberg. He’s been cast as a sort of digital Robin Hood, leading a band of plucky hackers who skip merrily around from country to country, publicizing diplomatic cables and other secret documents as they go.
The truth about WikiLeaks — detailed in a tell-all book published earlier this year by Assange’s former deputy, Daniel Domscheit-Berg — is very different. “What connected Julian and me was the belief in a better world,” Domscheit-Berg writes in Inside WikiLeaks. “There would be no more bosses or hierarchies, and no one would achieve power by withholding from the others the knowledge needed to act as an equal player.”
But by the time the two parted ways in 2010, Domscheit-Berg reports, the group seemed to resemble “a kind of religious cult” around Assange: “The guru was beyond questioning.”
Over time, Assange seems to have become unhinged. He permitted WikiLeaks to collaborate with a notorious Hololcaust denier and then, when confronted with the scandal, claimed that he was being set up by a Jewish conspiracy (he has since backed off). His paranoia seemed clinical. At one point, he told Domscheit-Berg: “If you f–k up, I will hunt you down and kill you.”
One of Assange’s goals was to create an international “data haven,” free of all forms of censorship — as in Neal Stephenson’s 1999 novel Cryptonomicon. (Iceland was one possibility.) But within the WikiLeaks organization, Assange jealously guarded access to money and information. At one point in 2010, he made a list of the people in WikiLeaks who were allowed to criticize him; the others weren’t.
“It was almost funny,” Domscheit-Berg writes. “Julian Assange, chief revealer of secrets and unshakable military critic on his global peace mission, had adopted the language of the power-mongers he claimed to be combating.”
At several points in his book, Domscheit-Berg speculates on the source of Assange’s bizarre personality. Specifically, he wonders if his psychological issues are related to the childhood years he spent in hiding with his mother, who was in constant fright from a stalker in a New Age sect.
Whatever the source of Assange’s neurosis, he embodies the hypocrisy that eventually destroys all anarchist projects. As Domscheit-Berg found out the hard way, every collaborative project inevitably requires a leadership hierarchy — even a project, like WikiLeaks or the Occupy protests, whose goal is to attack the very concept of hierarchy itself. The contradiction drives a wedge between anarchist leaders and their followers, and the group falls apart.
Assange was no genius: The technology behind WikiLeaks’ website is relatively simple. And in any case, most of the technical work was done by Domscheit-Berg and other subordinates. Assange’s main contribution to the project was charisma: He inspired the people around him to believe there was something noble and virtuous about sabotaging the interests of Western governments in the name of some vague, utopian doctrine of information freedom.
In truth, he is a hypocrite and a narcissist — and the world will be a better place if WikiLeaks never publishes another document.
