The Hump of the Camel

The journalist Julian Assange has been under confinement of various kinds for the last decade, and is now held in solitary at Britain’s top security prison whilst the lawyers debate the appeals to his extradition. Now, as I understand it, the reason is that by releasing whistleblower reports that lifted the lid on government corruption, he is said to have endangered the lives of US operatives and agents, although it seems not to have been possible to produce any actual examples, and the chief witness against him turns out to be a self-confessed perjurer.

Have you noticed the convenient and universal scapegoating that’s going on over President Biden’s Afghanistan debacle? In normal times, a cock-up on this scale would indeed be seen both as a major scandal, but also as a complete aberration or (like the Vietnam withdrawal) as an historical inevitability. In living memory, presidents of greater or lesser competence have come and gone, with their errors usually well-covered, or in some cases (think, for example, of Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco) seen as blots on otherwise decent records. To err, after all, is human.