Julian Assange — who once argued that “since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of government” — came out with high praise for both President-elect Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Friday.
“Donald Trump is not a D.C. insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities,” Assange said. “They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilizing the pre-existing central power network within D.C. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better.”
While Assange had the circumspection to at least somewhat hedge his praise for Trump, he became outright dishonest when it came time to discuss Putin’s Russia.
“In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum,” Assange said. “There are also newspapers like Novaya Gazeta, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player.”
According to a 2016 report by the non-government organization (NGO) Freedom House, which studies democracy and human rights throughout the world, Russia has a very repressive track record when it comes to freedom of speech and the press.

Source: Salon: in-depth news, politics, business, technology & culture > Politics
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