Julian Assange’s nuggets of gold: What you can say about the world in 1,500 days
It's amazing how many of the world's problems you can solve from inside the Ecuadorian embassy.
Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder and one of world's favourite critics of everything, has not let a major world event pass him by without a profound piece of commentary slipping from his lips.
Since he arrived at the embassy in London exactly 1,500 days ago, he has been visited by Vivienne Westwood for lunch and by Lady Gaga for tea, starred in a film without doing a spot of acting, and had a friendly Easter Sunday punch-up with a priest ("Fighting Father Dave", as he is known in religious circles).
But in between his social commitments and constant evasion of the Swedish authorities, he has found time to offer us jaw-dropping political analysis in abundance. Here are some of our favourites:
November 2013
Assange appeals to rap fans by opening M.I.A.'s show via an on-screen announcement before she comes on:
American journalists are actually trying to do something really pretty significant – namely, stop the United States and other countries along with it turning into a military dictatorship.[But] they’ve been pushed off to the four corners of the earth.
We live in a square world.
January 2014
Assange has had enough of the Catholic Church:
Through the Confessional system, the Catholic Church spied on lives of its congregants, while Latin mass excluded most people who couldn't speak Latin from any understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.
March 2014
Everything becomes clear at last:
We're all actually living in a world that we don't understand.
May 2014
Assange confuses everyone by talking about finance:
What we are talking about is the interaction of finance: the abstraction of relationships between organisations and individuals and the quantifications of those relationships.
June 2014
We learn Assange was, in fact, personally responsible for raising awareness about Bitcoin to Google in 2011. He told reporters that he told Eric Schmidt, now-chairman of Google, the following:
You should be an early adopter. Because your Bitcoins are going to be worth a lot of money one day.
According to Assange, if Schmidt had listened to this particular nugget, Google would “own the planet by now".
August 2014
I am leaving the embassy soon.
… hmm. Don't think so.
September 2014
Assange lashes out at about half the world's population:
Every time you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you’re being a rat. You’re being a narc.
October 2014
Having tried to help it with his Bitcoin enlightenment, Assange then launches a verbal attack on Google.
Google is steadily becoming the internet for many people. Its influence on the choices and behaviour of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.
January 2015
In his characteristically controversial manner, Assange accuses the government of not doing enough to stop the Charlie Hebdo attack:
Currently the French security state has tried to present the killers as super villains in order to hide its own incompetence — something the media has been only too willing to aid and abet. The reality is, the Charlie Hebdo killers were bumbling Keystone terrorists, no-hopers, who crashed their car, left their ID, co-ordinated over the phone and swiftly died.