Julian Assange’s ’06 Conspiracy Essays, Personal Blog (IQ.org) at Internet Archive…

“I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by
false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide
evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.”
[Julian Assange, in 2010.]

John Young at Cryptome.org has just posted ja-conspiracies.pdf. The file contains two essays — or a two-part essay — or two versions of the same essay — written by Julian Assange (‘Proff’) in late 2006. The first version is titled ‘State and Terrorist Conspiracies’, and the second ‘Conspiracy as Governance’.

The source for the essays is IQ.org — a domain owned by Assange which served as his personal blog from 2006-07. [Pages from 2000-06 contain a remote SSH/secure shell, marked "I told you to wait in the car?"]. You need to access it through the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://iq.org

Update. Assange’s blog. A lot of smart, funny writing [although this quote is apparently plagiarized from Douglas Adams]:

Thu 08 Jun 2006 : The history of warfare

The history of warfare is similarly subdivided, although here the phases are Retribution, Anticipation, and Diplomacy. Thus:

Retribution:
I’m going to kill you because you killed my brother.

Anticipation:
I’m going to kill you because I killed your brother.

Diplomacy:
I’m going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it.

Update. There are a few short quotes from the IQ.org blog here:

Sat 23 Sep 2006 : Philosophy vs. Mathematics

It has often been said that mathematics is the cheapest university department to run, for all one needs is pencil, a desk and a waste paper basket. This is not so. Philosophy is cheaper still, since in philosophy we do not even need the basket.

Update. Assange on costumes and roleplay in anonymous autocratic societies, [22-Jun '06]:

[...] Additional freedom is granted alone to the trikster, who through adopting the manner and dress of the establishment may fool the agents of the state into deference.

In full circle, every so often a member of the establishment, foolish enough to believe that power was within, puts on their bathers, or their sweat suit and becomes a victim. The grunts protest… “we didn’t think you were the man; you weren’t dressed right. it’s not our fault. you must play by the rules.” [...]

Update. Assange on art, artifice, and perceptual opium, [18-Jul '06]:

What do guitars, lollies, lipstick, tamagotchis, padded bras, pornography, movies, opium, Ever Quest, and 98% of any Australian newspaper in common? They are all technologies of emmotional manipulation which distort our perceptions for the benefit of their masters.

[...] “But, I like it you cold hearted Lutheran, you Stoic, you stone mason, you Zeno loving stick in the mud!”. Well naturally, since the whole game is to manipulate your feelings, it is not suprising that you have positive associations about your perceptual opium, is is, after all, what keeps you going back to your dealer.

Such deceptions, previously known as “Art”, as in “Artifice” or “Artful” have a long history of successful human parasitation. [...]

Update. Assange on disagreement and the pleasure of self-deception, [17-Jul '06]:

Disagreement is a good spur for conversation, but I don’t know where to begin with your claim. People gain pleasure and power in spreading certain beliefs and certain beliefs are easy to spread. They don’t look for the truth because they want to preserve this pleasure. Truth is rarely important in human affairs and if you want to shift your definition the only truth is power over reality. But it was the will to truth pouring its acid over the false beauty of gods and kings that guided us out of the miasma of the dark ages. You are not stupid. You are perfectly capable of piercing your claim, but you choose not to, since, like most people, you’d prefer to please and deceive.

By ‘you’ I mean the entire ensemble, not merely that part which processes words. To be human is to deceive. All human beings are great self deceivers, but this is not the innocent charm of the naively hopeful. They deceive themselves so that they may deceive others and having tasted this pleasure return to lap at its fountain. [...]

Update. Cryptogon’s Kevin Flaherty on Assange’s conspiracy essays:

There’s very little here; a vague framework for reducing “conspiratorial power” based on connected graphs. This seems like an introduction to a longer essay.

More here: ‘No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency’. 7-June:

[...] He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare. [...]

Relevant? (Fmr DoD Colonel) Fletcher Prouty on The Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg — from preface to ‘The Secret Team’ [1973]:

[...] There is another category of writer and self-proclaimed authority on the subjects of secrecy, intelligence, and containment. This man is the suave, professional parasite who gains a reputation as a real reporter by disseminating the scraps and “Golden Apples” thrown to him by the great men who use him. This writer seldom knows and rarely cares that many of the scraps from which he draws his material have been planted, that they are controlled leaks, and that he is being used, and glorified as he is being used, by the inside secret intelligence community.

See also:

• July 25: Initial skeptical reactions to Wikileaks’ release of DoD Afghan files.
• Aug 9: Is Assange gaming MSM, or is he a sell-out?
• Cryptome.org posts anonymous emails from “Wikileaks Insiders”.
• John Young (Cryptome) comments on Wikileaks, fake whistleblowers, limited hang-outs, and the internets as surveillance apparatus.

Additional freedom is granted alone to the trikster, who through
adopting the manner and dress of the establishment may fool the agents
of the state into deference.

In full circle, every so often a member of the establishment, foolish
enough to believe that power was within, puts on their bathers, or their
sweat suit and becomes a victim. The grunts protest... "we didn't think
you were the man; you weren't dressed right. it's not our fault. you
must play by the rules.".

Advertisement