The Swedish view of Julian Assange, who lost his appeal against extradition to face sex allegations on Wednesday, has changed in a year from the James Bond of the internet to a paranoid chauvinist pig. The man who has been holed up in an English country house instead of allowing himself to be questioned here about an alleged rape cuts an increasingly pitiable figure.
His attempts to depict Sweden as a banana republic that would ship him on to the US is another sign of how desperate Assange has become. You can blame Sweden for lots of things – filthy weather, overrated crime novels, Ikea furniture – but to claim this country is the CIA's accomplice, with an extremist law on sex crimes, irritates even his most loyal fans, of whom there are still a few.
WikiLeaks really was a historic moment in the history of journalism, but little is left of Assange's kingdom now.
It is ironic that Sweden, the country Assange once admired because of laws that shield our freedom of expression and of the press, should have been the place where his sun began to set. In the spring of 2010, when the Collateral Damage video had just been released, he announced that he wanted to move central parts of the WikiLeaks operation to Stockholm. This happened with the help of the Pirate Party, a grouping which opposed surveillance on the net and and intellectual property rights.
Ours is one of the most wired-up countries in the world, and a culture of illegal downloading and net activism is strong here. Perhaps that's why the love affair between Assange and Sweden started so strongly. Even among those who would never use their computers for anything but Google and email, the remains of the anti-Americanism of the radical left of the 70s produced a certain admiration for the man.
Last April the freelance journalist Johannes Wahlström conducted a grovelling interview in the leftwing culture pages of the Stockholm tabloid Aftonbladet, in which his hero appeared almost supernatural: "To meet Julian Assange is a bit like meeting James Bond. The man behind WikiLeaks has no public background. His name is spelled in different ways. His age is uncertain. He has no fixed address. No one has seen him in the hotel where he is staying, and when we finally meet he suddenly appears half a metre in front of me."
The journalist who wrote this later became the WikiLeaks representative in Sweden and Norway, while his father – the notorious antisemitic propagandist Israel Shamir – ran the site's dealings with Russia. Assange has subsequently called Sweden "the Saudi Arabia of feminism"; Shamir had earlier talked about "the CIA feminism" that he claimed lay behind the two women who had reported Assange to the police.
Assange-the-hero vanished somewhere in that antisemitic and antifeminist slime. Sweden's relatively high measure of sexual equality and consciousness in gender questions is a matter of national pride. That a dodgy hacker from Australia started knocking it was not popular.
Last Tuesday two women journalists who started a Twitter campaign against Assange's contemptuous remarks about Swedish women were nominated for the most prestigious prize in Swedish journalism. The "Let's Talk About It" campaign got thousands of people openly discussing the grey areas of sexual conduct, and was copied in many countries.
Not even the culture pages of Aftonbladet, which kept up their uncritical admiration for Assange longer than anyone else, can keep it up now. The noted leftwing commentator Dan Josefsson admitted recently that Assange was not the radical hero he had supposed, but "a solitary and shabby libertarian who wants to tear down democratic societies".
It's probably too late for Assange to recover his former glory. But if he could give up his futile struggle against extradition and show a little respect to the Swedish justice system, that would at least be a first, necessary step.
