ASSANGE 8 DECEMBER

I’m running out of cutesy ways to entitle these Posts on the Assange matter, as it continues to spiral and jink like those old launch-gone-wrong missiles of the Cold War days, 50-plus years ago. So I’ll simply date them in the title.

Matters remain of interest to the SO Mania Regime since we are now beginning to see some sort of (unavoidable) effort to sort out the actual sex-offense charges.

I invite your attention to this article by an Australian attorney who represented Assange in London and this article by ‘The Guardian’ of London.

Call the two self-reported victims 'A' and 'W', both females.

Both are over 30, both have above-average international experience, either working for the Swedes in embassies or conducting international symposia. Both of them have left a Tweet and text-message communication trail boasting after the alleged events of their respective hook-ups with Assange, and never in that time implying rape or any large dissatisfaction with the course of the encounter. (It was not until almost a week after the alleged rapes that they both sought out the police for ‘advice’.)

‘A’ had invited Assange to speak at a conference or symposium she, a politically active and involved person, had set up, held in a Swedish town. She invited him to stay the night at her apartment although she had never met him. She had been employed as a university gender-equity officer, fielding the panoply of gender-related complaints that now constitute a hefty chunk of collegiate alarums these days. The Australian attorney speculates that ‘A’ may now use some of her own old field notes, claiming that Assange’s “celebrity” created an imbalance-of-power relationship, overwhelming her better judgment, and that Assange wielded this like a weapon to conquer her.

‘A’ is well-known for her claim that all males deploy a “master suppression technique” against her and all women: she had reported one male student in a (Swedish) college class in which she was speaking for taking notes instead of looking at her, and, when advised by of the sexual-harassment complaint she had lodged against him he tried to speak to her to apologize, she reported him a second-time for that, apparently because he was trying to use the male ‘master suppression technique’ to avoid the consequences of what he had done the first time. The Looking-Glass world of the Red Queen as government policy.

While on the subject of Sweden, this article by a Swedish defense attorney limns some of the problems Assange might face, since – perhaps news to many in the American SO community – the Swedish government has come even more lethally under the sway of radical-feminism than the American. (As best I can make out, Sweden’s substantial Socialist Party saw its future salvation in an embrace of radical-feminism as Communism began to wane; a variant of Saul Alinsky’s effort to cast the 1960s New Left cadres as merely historical replicants of the Old Left labor-organizers of the 1930s who would, he fondly hoped, continue The Struggle).

‘Gender equality’ – which is a pleasant and decent-sounding phrase, a harmless-looking suitcase that is yet stuffed with all manner of things not necessarily good – was adopted by the Swedish Socialists as the replacement for the failed Marxist ‘economic equality’ and the Swedish polity and its laws are now rife with it.

While this suggests that the entire Swedish polity has taken on the tone of an American college campus at the height of the Gender-Multiculti whackery of the early 1990s, it bodes lethal difficulties for males accused of rape in Sweden. Courts not only tend to ‘believe the woman’ in all of the often he-said/she-said scenarios BUT ALSO refuse to accept recantations from women who had made charges, assuming as a matter of Correct dogma (once a socialist, always a socialist!) that a) the woman was ‘raped’ in some form or another simply because all sex is rape and that b) the woman’s recantation is probably nothing more than her being temporarily overpowered by the ‘male master suppression technique’ either as deployed against her (magically, one would have to imagine) by the defendant-male at bar OR simply deployed against her from the larger male-tainted social surround. In which case the court will do her the great favor of ignoring her recantation and finding the defendant-male guilty anyway.

There is something verrrrrry wrong with this.

And if there is any up-side to it, it is that the American Constitutional tradition was still strong enough to prevent American feministical cadres from pressuring the Beltway pols and jurists to go this far. The Swedish polity, far more European and Socialist in orientation and far less grounded in the American Constitutional ethos, was apparently taken as far down the garden path as any American college campus.

It seems to me that in this frakkulent symbiosis of radical-feminists and a socialist-leaning polity looking for a replacement ‘Vision’, there has been created some feminism-based government, in a dynamic that resembles nothing so much as the Mob – in the immediate postwar era – finding in a dictator-run Cuba a sovereign entity that would host and protect its operations; think of Lee Strasberg’s mobster character, in the film “Godfather II”, hosting other Bosses at a rooftop birthday party he threw for himself at a Mob-run Havana hotel, giving thanks that the Mob had finally found a ‘friendly government’ that would not interfere with the Vision they all shared. What was not to like?

At present, there is official talk in Sweden of erecting into national law the campus policy that made Antioch College the laughing-stock of this country 2 decades ago (it has since closed up shop entirely): sex requires a step-by-step approval-and-permission process. Which may actually sound like a halfway good idea for college-campuses in the ‘hook-up’ age, but is certainly not prudent for erection into national criminal law and policy.

I can strongly invite your attention to this 3rd hyperlink, since the article offers a view of what has gone off the rails in Sweden, under the intense pressures of a radical-feminism getting control of sex-law legislation.

The relevance for the American SO community is, I think, that this sort of thing has been held off here for this long only by a Constitutional ethos that is, alas, weakening. And while it is possible that the Assange case – as it may play out in a Swedish trial – might well bring a great deal of this whackulence to light, there may well also be increased pressure (recall your Alinsky) over here to ‘reform’ or ‘strengthen’ or ‘close the loopholes in’ sex-laws over here.

Additionally, the current Swedish attorney representing ‘A’ and ‘W’ is – see below – a longtime feminist and bureaucratic office-holder in gender-equality type matters, and he and ‘A’ have worked together before on gender-equality issues (which, of course, strongly increases the possibility that ‘A’ and ‘W’ knowingly colluded or collaborated with him on this case, whether simply for feministical reasons or as pretext-fronts for larger government forces).

Assange and ‘A’ apparently agree that they had consensual sex on the night he stayed at her apartment.

The following day, while ‘A’ was apparently Tweeting happily, Assange met ‘W’ at the conference, they attended the luncheon together and then went to the movies where, apparently, W performed oral sex on him, after which they went back to her place, spent the night together, and parted amicably the next morning with both in agreement that a condom had not been used.

Although they had apparently not known of each other’s sexual encounters with Assange beforehand, ‘W’ then contacted ‘A’ and the compared notes, subsequently leaving a post-‘rape’ series of SMS communications to each other discussing if not also planning their moves vis-à-vis the Swedish media and the attorney they selected and the Swedish police .

‘A’ has been trying to delete her Tweets but – I’m no expert in this technology – it’s apparently too late for that; either the Tweets are undeletable or else by now they have been reviewed and copied and put up on the Internet.

‘A’ has previously published an internet guide and some blogging about the “7 steps” by which you can get back at a cheating boyfriend using “legal revenge”, in which she writes: "Go to it and keep your goal in sight. Make sure your victim suffers just as you did."

As best can be made out, the gravamen of each of the alleged victms’ plaint is centered around condoms: ‘A’ claims that Assange purposely ripped the condom and ‘W’ claims that she had consented to sex only with the proviso that a condom be used, which – she claims – wasn’t used.

The attorney representing both ‘A’ and ‘W’ first earned his spurs at the beginning of the feministical Nineties by getting a female candidate for Prime Minister off a fraud charge, after which, by amazing coincidence, the government hired him as a factotum in the marvelously named “Bureau of Equality”.

He has now come forth to try to square the impossible circle between Swedish prosecutors asserting there was No-Consent or Withdrawn-Consent and the two victims’ undeniable declarations that there was Consent and that it was great. Says the attorney: the two ‘victims’ aren’t to blame because the law there is sooooo complex that “you would need a law degree to know whether you are raped in Sweden”.

On this point, surely, the SO community can well sympathize: the SO Mania Regime has passed so far through the Looking-Glass that in this most intimate, personal, interpersonal, and rather vivid and unmistakable of human encounters, you as a participant still need the advice of a trained attorney to know if what you’re doing is legal or – since the encounter began – has remained legal all the way through to completion.

Oh, and of course it is also possible that the encounter may also become retrospectively illegal (and criminal) if on second thought on some unspecified future date the party of the first part decides that s/he had indeed been criminally raped by the party of the second part. And yes, I am thinking of the Marx Brothers’ famous ‘contract scene’ in “A Night At The Opera”. You may recall: Da pahty of da foist paht, hereinafter refoyyed to as da pahty of da foist paht … et cetera and et cetera and et cetera.

As the Australian attorney notes, the solution to the problem posed by the fact that you are trying to prosecute a rape charge brought (or at least reported) by two adults who had previously proclaimed themselves quite happy with their experiences … that solution, smugly thrown down before the incredulous eyes of the world is: You aren’t a Swedish lawyer so you wouldn’t understand.

Ovvvvvv courssssssssssse.

We have now reached the point in sex-offense law where apparently the government can step in if the party of the first or second part didn’t actually realize she (more rarely he) had been raped at all. What has happened to rationality and the grounding of good law? What will happen to the majesty – as the jurists like to call it – of the Law as all this plays out?

The Swedish jurist is going to start looking more like the Swedish Chef (and upon Jim Henson be peace).

It used to be the mantra that You aren’t a woman so you wouldn’t understand because you just don’t get; then it was You aren’t a Victim so you can’t judge me (as if every human being on the planet has not at one time or another been cast into the task of being a victim of one thing or another!). Now it’s: You’re not a Swedish lawyer so you don’t really know if you’ve been – within the jurisdictional boundaries of Swedish law – raped.

There is some speculation that ‘A’, having worked for the Swedish government and put out some anti-Castro or post-Castro writing, is a CIA plant. This has got the non-SO laity all worked up. But to the SO-savvy, the CIA connection is a red-herring and unnecessary to boot. Because there is more than enough room for skullduggery and conspiracy and revenge-lying and everything else already built-into the sex-offense Mania Law Regime, with the primary framing power assigned to whomever can get to a microphone to proclaim victimhood in a past sexual encounter.

The SO Mania Regime, in other words, is so crooked and rigged that any CIA involvement would just get in the way.

NOTES

I would advise that if you decide to follow the articles relating to this case on your own, take a moment to read any Comments as well. I am finding – even on avowedly feminist sites – that the majority of the Comments to this or that article demonstrate a healthy skepticism and a legitimate impatience with much of what had been for so long the ‘SO Mania-Victim Script’. And that is encouraging.