Julian Assange: A Ghost Even to Himself?
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
... Andrew O'Hagan spent the better part of a year working as Julian Assange's ghostwriter, before Assange's inattention and ambivalence about writing a book at all sabotaged the project ... Some supporters of WikiLeaks argue that all of the attention paid to Assange's peculiar character is a distraction from the substance of his work, but the more up-close accounts of Assange that have been published, O'Hagan's now chief among them, the more inextricable from his personality his work comes to seem ... O’Hagan suggests the truth may be a bit simpler — that Assange grasped so eagerly for a persona because he didn’t have a clue who he was. Not a ghost in the machine, but something more elusive and spectral still: a ghost even to himself ...
... When Assange tries to cut descriptions of his own life on the grounds that they will make him look "weak," O'Hagan comes to suspect that Assange, having been paid to assemble the story of his own life, has no story to tell ...
... Here is how Assange described his childhood to the journalist Raffi Khatchadourian in 2010: “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.” Assange told Khatchadourian that he and his mother had been tracked through his teens by a cult with moles in the government ...
There are now a fairly large number of people who were once close to Assange and who continue to believe in the WikiLeaks project, but have fallen out with the Australian personally because of the sheer difficulty of dealing with him. To O'Hagan, add the celebrity journalist Jemima Khan, the Icelandic politician Brigitta Jonsdottir, the ex-WikiLeakers Daniel Domscheit-Berg and James Ball, and many other writers and thinkers. Among this group, the common lament is that Assange's personality doomed his cause — that if he had simply been more capable of listening to other people, less certain that his allies were plotting against him, able to comprehend that young Swedish women did not necessarily want to have sex with him, then perhaps he would not be locked up in an Ecuadorian embassy and WikiLeaks would be an enduring force for truth and transparency in global politics. There is a regret, as O'Hagan puts it, over "how far all this had taken us from the work WikiLeaks had started out doing" ...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/julian-assange-a-ghost-even-to-himself.html
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