Source: Counterpunch

His fight against extradition has just begun. He is fighting for his life, but also he is fighting for all of us.

Nozomi Hayase, PhD, is a writer who covers issues of freedom of speech, transparency and decentralized movements.  Find her on twitter @nozomimagine

Source: Countrpunch

Bombarded with the imagery of empire and capital, our minds have become both a marketplace and a commodity to be traded.

“The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.” ― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.” ― Edward Bernays, Propaganda

“We think we’re searching Google; Google is actually searching us. We think that these companies have privacy policies; those policies are actually surveillance policies. We’re told that if we have nothing to hide, then we have nothing to fear. The fact is, what they don’t tell us and what we are forgetting, that if you have nothing to hide, then you are nothing, because everything about us that makes us our unique identities, that gives us our individual spirit, our personality, our sense of freedom of will, freedom of action, our sense of our right to our own futures, that’s what comes from within. Those are our inner resources. That’s our private realm. And it’s intended to be private for a reason, because that is how it grows and flourishes and turns us into people who assert moral autonomy—an essential element of a flourishing, democratic society.” ― Shoshana Zuboff, author of Master or Slave: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization 

“Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.” ― Edward Snowden

Every day we are bombarded with the imagery of empire and capital. It is relentless. Our minds have become both a marketplace and a commodity to be traded. And it is a lucrative industry with Facebook and Google as prime examples. Their data collection and surveillance typify a conjoining of the state and capitalist economy; and they have carved out insidious new spaces in the human brain to coerce self-imposed censorship and conformity to the prevailing consumerist global order.

Mass compliance

This social conditioning is a process which requires mass compliance. The infamous propagandist for industry and vaunted “father of public relations” Edward Bernays understood that. It takes time to manipulate the multilayered strata of the human psyche, especially in regard to large populations of people. But history is replete with tragic examples of its successful implementation by powerful interests. Today those interests lie squarely with capital and empire; but the effects are the same, distraction, censorship, alienation, coerced, compliance with the norms of the status quo and the numbing of the critical mind.

Debord said,

“Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.”

This profound observation is even more important today. The state, via mass media, informs us of the villains and phantoms they believe we should fear. Other, far more destructive, deadly and oppressive threats such as the continued proliferation of nuclear arms, catastrophic climate change, collapse of ecosystems, dangers to public health from industrial pollutants, vastly unequal, racist and brutal economic and legal systems, militarism or plutocratic tyranny can then be relegated as non-issues, or at least lesser ones.

Most people on the planet will not suffer or die from a terrorist attack, but they are very likely to be severely affected by the other issues mentioned above. Imagery on portable screens that virtually everyone in the West and around the world has access to communicates messages that may speak to some of these dire or existential problems, but they do so in an abstract manner that divorces the observer from the subject.

Culture of spectacle

As Debord observed, this kind of culture of spectacle informs our personal relationships as well. Whether one is “present” on social media or not has become a sort of litmus test of ones presence in life itself. “Likes” or emojis have replaced and truncated language to such an extent that now older forms of communication are often looked at with novelty, suspicion, or even disgust.

What’s more is that emojis in social media, particularly Facebook, have been employed all too often as tools of ridicule or even harassment of weak or vulnerable people. But what is perhaps the most striking about the current social media age is its repetitive narrative of self-aggrandizement. One so repetitive and hypnotic that it almost appears invisible.

The “selfie” and “status update” are examples of the unending drive of social media to create a false sense of self to present to the world. Of course this self must conform and be well adjusted to consumerist society in one form or another lest it be tagged for “mental health issues,” subversive thought or behavior, or simply be rendered unnoticed or unimportant by society in general.

Indeed, I am certain Debord would be horrified at the age of social media. At no other time in human history has there been a greater confluence of authoritarian dominance or social control implemented in such an intimate and ubiquitous manner. Unlike Debord’s time, social media provides a new medium to not only socially condition the masses but for the corporate state to gather what was once private information about those masses via their personally owned devices and apps.

Democracy masquerade

That it masquerades as a form of democracy is equally disturbing, especially since at its core it represents the policing of thought and dampening of dissent. He wrote as if penning a prophecy:

“The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his ‘mirror image.’”

This spectacle reigns supreme in today’s social media culture. It is essential to its formulation and operating guidelines. Under such a paradigm history must be sterilized of analysis and ultimately atomized into unrelated instances to make an eternal present, divorced from any transformative potential.

Therefore corporations and industries which have long records of polluting the environment or lying to the public about the safety of their products can continue to expand and even be celebrated by the corporate owned media.

Religious institutions with long histories of abuse, patriarchy and repression can maintain their status as trusted institutions.

The military can repeat the lie over and over that it is noble despite a history drenched in the blood of well documented atrocities and ongoing crimes.

The United States and many other nations can keep calling themselves democracies despite quite obvious facts that strongly refute that designation. The mere notion of revolution then is made to be farcical or even dangerous. After all, how could revolution ever be seen as necessary within a democracy?

Nail in the coffin of democratic freedom

Social media does not necessarily signal the death of democratic freedom, but in its current form and under the aegis of capital it is certainly a nail in its coffin. This is because under such circumstances it is incapable of being anything other than a means for capital accumulation for the corporate state and a platform for its narrative, and it will do this through ever more invasive, censorial and repressive means.

As Edward Snowden pointed out, people are less free when they feel that they are being observed. This is especially so when the observer is the state. Several studies have indicated that there is a sharp decline in certain online searches among the general public following any indication that government agencies are logging those searches, even if those citizens have not committed any crime.

And the chilling effect is not unfounded. One incident involved an innocent couple who were visited by counter-terrorism police after searching Google for pressure cookers and backpacks. Since the internet has become the world’s public library, the implications for democracy are as dire as they are clear.

Unplugging from any of this isn’t easy, nor is it necessarily virtuous, but there are ways to divest from its social control personally and collectively. There are also ways to use it which defy its dominant algorithms. Détournement, which merely means rerouting or hijacking in French, is one of those ways. This involves inverting the imagery or messages of capital and empire to illustrate and even amplify their mendacity. It has a long history of effective use in bending the dominant narrative to one which reflects reality.

All of this is not to say that technology or social media are inherently bad, but to recognize that much of it has become a vehicle for a rather pernicious authoritarianism. And its danger lies in the fallacy of its benign appearance.

Whether it be Google maps or one of countless other “helpful” apps one uses on a daily basis, surveillance capital becomes a means of controlling behavior, transactions, choices, as well as determining which members of society present a threat to the order.

In other words, conformity is strongly reinforced while any form of dissent is rendered dangerously subversive. But although the algorithmic maps to our collective psyche are being endlessly drawn by programmers and their corporate and state masters, we still have the agency to navigate these landscapes with our eyes open. And indeed, the best tool we possess will always be that critically informed dissent the powerful so fear the most.

Kenn Orphan is an artist, sociologist, radical nature lover and weary, but committed activist.

The Society of the Spectacle: Part One

The Society of the Spectacle: Part Two

Source: Counterpunch

The only issue is whether he will be extradited to the US and sent to prison for decades for publishing true facts about US crimes around the world.

If the US government succeeds in doing this, it will strike a devastating blow to the fundamental elements of democracy throughout the world—the freedom of the press and the related ability of citizens to know what their governments is doing.

I say “throughout the world” because It’s important to understand that the US government in this case is asserting its prosecutorial authority over someone who is not an American and whose journalistic activity took place outside the United States. The United States is demonstrating its ability to get a foreign government to arrest and extradite journalists who are neither Americans nor citizens of its own country and send them off to the United States to face charges under American law. It’s not only a brazen attempt to quash press freedoms; it’s a further extension of the United States’ arrogant assertion of extra-territorial—indeed, universal—jurisdiction of its laws.

As Jonathan Cook says, those who accept this have “signed off on the right of the US authorities to seize any foreign journalist, anywhere in the world, and lock him or her out of sight. They opened the door to a new, special form of rendition for journalists.”

Whether anybody says it out loud or thinks it explicitly, and no matter how slight it might be right now, the sight of Julian Assange being dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in handcuffs is already working in the minds of journalists throughout the world, engendering some pause or consideration about what’s worth the risk to report on. It cannot not be so. The consummation of his extradition and prosecution, the sight of him disappearing into the American prison system, will radically change that calculus of risk for every journalist in the world. The minute after sentence is pronounced, every journalist and citizen will open their eyes in a world where a lot of important things they could expect to reveal and see a minute ago will now stay hidden. And they will know it. At that moment, all the bullshit irrelevancies and avoidance mechanisms will instantly dissipate, and it will be clear to everyone what the only issue always was. Too late.

It’s incumbent on everyone who claims to value free speech and freedom of the press to do everything in their power to prevent the United States government from getting away with this. That requires focusing one’s own discourse and one’s interlocutors’ and audience’s attention on the core issue.

Unfortunately, for seven years, pundits throughout the political spectrum have been assiduously avoiding exactly that, and have instead been blowing smoke, insisting on diverting attention from the core issue of the USG’s attack on journalism via its attempt to imprison Assange. They have denied it was really happening and characterized it as an artifact of Assange’s paranoia, and/or they insisted that something else was the real issue, the thing we should really be focussed on and concerned about.

One would think that the actual fact of an indictment and extradition demand from the United States would put an end to that diversionary discourse, but unfortunately that smoke is still blowing, from all the same lips.

And most of that smoke is wafting out of the garbage fire fueled by one accelerant: “Assange is an asshole.”

At this point, there are two types of discourse about Julian Assange.

There’s A: “Assange may be an asshole, but that’s irrelevant. The USG is not going to drag him here, prosecute him, and put him in prison for a very long time for being an asshole. The USG is doing that to punish him for revealing embarrassing truths about its crimes, and to intimidate every other journalist who might think about doing that again. That’s the only relevant issue here, and we are obliged to focus our energies on it and on preventing that from happening.”

Then there’s B (a position roundly skewered by C. J. Hopkins): “Assange is a real asshole. He’s a dirty, smelly-cat, skateboarding, shit-smearing rapist and Russian agent. Yeah, it may not be such a good idea for the USG to be prosecuting him, though it’s such a minor charge and it’s about hacking and not publishing secrets and not all that dangerous. And did I tell you what an asshole he is?! In the context of what’s going on, I really want to make sure to detail for you day after day what an asshole he is. That’s the important thing that you should know. He’s such an asshole. And don’t forget Russian agent! Have I mentioned that he’s an asshole?”

These are two different discourses, which have, and are meant to have, opposite political effects. It’s clear that people spreading each of these discourses spend their energy on, care about, and are doing different things, and really want their audience to care about and do different things. One group of people is defending Assange and encouraging its audience to defend him from USG prosecution; the other, while ostensibly distancing itself from the USG position, is in fact acting as the USG’s amicus curiae, helping to prosecute Assange on “other” charges, and encouraging its audience not to be concerned about what happens to him. Let’s not be fooled about this. Assange may be an asshole, but the people spreading the latter discourse are definitely scumbags.

The lies and diversions will not stop. But I do want to deconstruct two of the favorite deceptive and irrelevant cinders that becloud the eyes of those hesitant to see themselves as accomplices of the USG’s and the Trump administration’s war on a free press.

Held Harmless

The first is the denial that the charge the USG has brought against Assange poses any threat to press freedom. The New York Times (NYT) practically celebrates it: “The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime”—that is, “not with publishing classified government information, but with stealing it, skirting — for now — critical First Amendment questions.”

Hey, if the NYT, publisher of the Pentagon Papers, whose own lawyer warned that “the prosecution of [Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers,” says that the charge against Assange is “well begun” and not critical to “First Amendment questions”—well, that’s going to be good enough to calm the fears of most liberals.

Indeed, according to the Washington Post, [WaPo] not only is Julian Assange ”not a free-press hero,” and not only is his prosecution “not the defeat for civil liberties of which his defenders mistakenly warn,” but his case can be considered “a victory for the rule of law.” That’s because “the indictment does not charge Assange with violating the Espionage Act.” Besides, “he is long overdue for personal accountability.”

Thus, the other iconic liberal journal, recently idealized by iconic liberal Hollywood (Spielberg-Hanks-Steep!) for its iconic liberal courage in publishing iconic liberal hero Danial Ellsberg’s thousands of stolen (“an indisputable crime”) “Top Secret” national security documents, The Pentagon Papers, has issued its authoritative verdict. It has told its post-The Post, virtue-assured, iconic liberal audience that the prosecution of Julian Assange, who published Chelsea Manning’s stolen documents—not a single one of which was classified “Top Secret” and most of which, including the Collateral Murder video, were not classified at all—is, again, something to celebrate. No threat to civil liberties. Long overdue. Personal accountability and all. Well played, Mr. President.

Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg—the real one, not the one in the movie—expresses quite another opinion, in a voice that has earned its authority [with his emphasis]: “The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

Two little things here.

One, contrary to the NYT assertion, Julian Assange did not commit the “indisputable crime” of “stealing” classified government information, and he is not charged with that. Chelsea Manning committed that crime, and was prosecuted and convicted for it. Chelsea Manning downloaded classified and unclassified government data without any help from Julian Assange. Manning did not get, and did not need, anyone’s help to get “unauthorized access” to and “steal” information.

Nobody “hacked” into anything. Chelsea Manning had authorized access, had her own password, and downloaded tons of data before Assange was even in the picture. In fact, Manning first tried to give the data to the NYT and WaPo—‘cause, you know, she, too, was still dreaming the iconic-liberal-hero-Pentagon-Papers dream. Only when they—out watching the movie, maybe—sent her to voicemail did she turn to Wikileaks, where the dream was not yet impossible.

So, contrary to the impression given by the iconic liberal papers of record, Julian Assange is not charged with “hacking” or helping Manning “hack” into a computer. He is not charged with doing anything that made it possible for Manning to get the information she gave to the American and the world public through Wikileaks.

The indictment charges Assange with trying (and failing) to help Manning decrypt (“crack”) another user’s password—not because Manning needed it to gain access, but because it might help conceal that it was she who was downloading data. Assange is accused of helping Manning cover her tracks. As Glenn Greenwald says, in his piece methodically making the point: “even if one accepts all of the indictment’s claims as true, Assange was not trying to hack into document files to which Manning had no access, but rather trying to help Manning avoid detection as a source.”

Of course, the government’s theory of the crime will be that Assange’s failed attempt to help Manning avoid detection in that way is an intrinsic and necessary part of Manning’s “theft” of data itself.

In the abstract, it’s not a ridiculous theory, because helping someone get away with it is undeniably abetting the commission of the crime. In the context of journalism, it is also a dangerous theory. Because every journalist who receives classified information is, undeniably, abetting that crime. (Just as every journalist of any worth is a “hostile, non-state intelligence agent.”)

If the iconic liberal press wants to cheer on the USG/Trump administration’s prosecution of that action, as part of a “conspiracy” to “knowingly access a computer without authorization,” it is cheering on an expansive definition of that charge to include, as Greenwald says, journalists’ “ethical obligation to take steps to protect their sources from retaliation, which sometimes includes granting them anonymity and employing technical measures to help ensure that their identity is not discovered.” It is cheering on the prosecution of any publisher in the future doing what the NYT and WaPo did with the Pentagon Papers.

It is also, we should all acknowledge, cheering on Donald Trump for undertaking precisely the criminalization of standard journalistic abetting of sources that, it is said, the Obama administration declined to pursue, on exactly the same evidence. If the NYT and WaPo are praising the Trump administration for it’s “well begun” and “long overdue” prosecution of Assange on this charge, they are implicitly, it should be pointed out explicitly, denouncing the Obama administration for its ill-advised failure to be as aggressively reactionary. That is how the iconic liberal media rolls.

Not to fear, I am sure the government will be successful in presenting its theory of this crime in the Eastern District of Virginia, known as the “Espionage Court.” Ask John Kiriakou about Assange’s chances there.

I am also sure that this will not be the only charge Julian Assange faces in that court. If you think that, after pursuing and demonizing him as a “terrorist” and “hostile non-state intelligence” agent (for Russia yet!) for 9 years, the US government is going to be satisfied with a maximum five-year (out-in-three) sentence for Julian Assange, I have a bridge to sell you.

The moment he sets foot on US soil, Julian Assange will be hit with other charges—charges, probably under the Espionage Act, that carry long prison sentences. I know that, anyone who is not a child knows that, and the editors of the NYT and WaPo know that. When the editors of the NYT write that the government is: “skirting — for now— critical First Amendment questions,” they are telling you they know that.

This is another round of that cowardly game where liberal pundits pretend to believe in the professed objectives of the government so they can claim to be abetting its actions in innocent good faith, and when it all turns to shit they can say: “We didn’t know that was gonna happen!” and be all liberal-outraged at the danger to the un-skirted First Amendment.

The mainstream media will cover is asses on that now by parading legal analysts who point out that the extradition treaty with the UK does not allow additional charges to be added after extradition.

First of all, I’m sure Theresa May and all sorts of UK pols and pundits will be really mad and stamp their feet if the US government somehow reneges on that. So Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo wouldn’t dare.

But here’s how I know, and know that the NYT and WaPo know, that the government will bring more charges against Assange: The lawyer who represented the NYT in the Pentagon Papers case, whom they all know very well, and who, we know, knows what he’s talking about, tells us so.

In his article entitled, “The Indictment of Assange is a Snare and a Delusion,” James Goodale, explains how the USG has written into the present indictment the legal justification for bringing new charges without violating the extradition treaty. The treaty—surprise, surprise—makes an exception for new charges “based on the same facts as the offense for which extradition was granted.” While the indictment does not charge Assange under the Espionage Act, it does lay out a set of facts that predicate a case for conspiracy under the Act, which it mentions explicitly—per Goodale,  on Page 5 of the indictment, referring to Title 18 U.S. Code, Sections 793(c) and 793(e).

As Goodale says: “The indictment is…a snare and a delusion…Once [Assange] is here, he will be hit, no doubt, with multiple charges.”

No doubt. A done deal. And all on the legal up-and-up. Theresa won’t even have to stress her sensible shoes. Though I’m sure, along with the NYT and WaPo editorial boards, she’ll say something like “We didn’t foresee that. But it is within the law”

But there is not a chance, not a scintilla of a shred of a possibility, that the editors of the NYT and WaPo, and of the major television networks, do not know what James Goodale, and now you and I, know about the inevitability of the USG bringing more charges against Assange. They are deliberately deceiving you when they pretend that they don’t.

In fact, an ABC report suggests that other, “death penalty” charges were already made, or were at least “on the table” against Assange.

The Ecuadorian government has been working with the UK government for over a year, and with the US government for six months—through the two countries’ ambassadors in Germany—to craft a deal that would enable them to eject Assange without looking too villainous. And the single sticking point of that was the death penalty. U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell,“one of President Donald Trump’s closest envoys in Europe,” eventually got Rod Rosenstein to agree to take the death penalty “off the table,” and Grenell then made a verbal pledge to Ecuador.

The negotiation process and timing presented in this account indicate that death penalty charges was definitely on the table, and only taken off recently and reluctantly.

Furthermore, the telephone game of passing on an indirect, second-hand, “verbal pledge” through Trump’s pal, combined with the fact that the DOJ will “not confirm that the U.S. agreed to take any sentence off the table,” does not inspire confidence in the durability of this “pledge.” Lenin Moreno may be the one stamping his feet in disapproval, after depositing the $4 billion the US arranged for him to get from the IMF.

At any rate, everyone who is not a child knows that, if Julian Assange is extradited to the United States, different charges with stiffer penalties will be added, and he will spend at least twenty, and probably all the remaining, years of his life in prison. As John Kiriakou says, from experience: “No matter what happens, no matter what the charges, Julian cannot and will not get a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia.”

Swedish Victims Unit

The other deliberately deceptive diversion, an especially alluring bait for liberals, is the infamous Swedish case. This is being resurrected in an oddly pernicious way in the UK, where the battle over what happens to Julian Assange and any possible independent media is being decided. There, a multi-party coterie of MPs and peers is leading a campaign, with an open letter to the present and shadow Home Secretaries, urging them to “do everything you can…to ensure” that Assange be extradited to Sweden, “in the event Sweden makes an extradition request.”  This campaign has been a great success, and “extradition to Sweden” has become the main theme and demand of the British liberal commentariat regarding the Assange case.

It might strike one as a little odd that there should be a furious political campaign to pressure the British government to honor an extradition request that has not been made. The signatories of the letter express no concern—“we make no assessment”—about whether the UK should honor the extradition demand that has been made and is actually in process, that of the United States. But the signatories definitely assess, in its absence, that the non-existent Swedish extradition request is valid, and that, just in case it appears, the UK government must pledge in advance to “give every assistance to Sweden” in honoring it.

Why? Well, clearly the letter writers stand in a different relation, and assume their audience stands in a different relation, to the issues involved in the actual U.S. versus the hypothetical Swedish extradition request. Thus, they feel comfortable flatly expressing no interest at all in the inevitable and terrible consequences that would result from honoring the U.S. extradition, while insisting, regarding the presumptive issue of a Swedish extradition, that “We must send a strong message of the priority the UK has in tackling sexual violence and the seriousness with which such allegations are viewed.” On a 1-10 scale of what issues are worth assessing, Sweden’s imagined interrogation of Assange for sexual allegations gets a 10, the US’s actual drive to imprison Assange for revealing war crimes is set at a firm 0. It’s a discourse in which the concerns about US extradition disappear.

To be clear, about what’s being done behind the “sex crime allegation” smoke, they explicitly do not oppose extradition to the US, and do not urge anyone to do so. They are trying to replace “no extradition to the US” in the public discourse with “extradition to Sweden”—which ends up meaning extradition to the US anyway. The purpose of this rhetorical rigamarole is, by getting everyone to think or do nothing about it, to surreptitiously but effectively support extradition to the U.S, It permits politicians and the public to support it by allowing it, while thinking/telling themselves they are supporting something else.

Let’s not think and talk and do something about Julian Assange being extradited to and imprisoned in the United States, which is actually about to happen. That would require us to make a fight we really don’t want to wage against our government, based on our professed free-speech, free-press principles that we really don’t want to protect for a guy we’ve been trained come to loathe.

Let’s instead think and talk and do something about the imaginary alternative of Assange being extradited and questioned in Sweden. That will confirm our virtuous seriousness about sexual assault allegations and wash our hands us of the stains that would come—and we are implicitly admitting we know would come—from delivering him into the hands of the U.S. government/Trump administration’s prison system. Let Sweden do that! We make no assessment about it.

As Jonathan Cook demonstrates, the British Guardian-liberal commentariat is now firmly committed to promoting that diversionary discourse: “In other words, the public conversation in the U.K, …, is going to be about who has first dibs on Assange….So, the concern is not that Assange is facing rendition to the U.S. It is that the U.S. claim might ‘overshadow’ an outstanding legal case in Sweden.”

It’s the epitome of an avoidance mechanism; it substitutes in people’s minds a non-existent problematic, which they can be more comfortable thinking about and acting upon, for the actual problem and decision they face.

A principal target of this campaign by those in the UK is, of course, Jeremy Corbyn and his left Labourites. Corbyn, who may become Prime Minister and have the real power to stop Assange’s extradition, came out of the gate, on April 11^th, with a very strong and clear statement:: “The extradition of Julian Assange to the US for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan should be opposed by the British government.”

This statement was reinforced by being embedded in a tweet that includes a clip of the Collateral Murder video, in which his shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbot reminds us that, in that incident, the US “killed 18 civilians and two Reuters journalists” and that “Julian Assange is not being pursued to protect US National Security. He is being pursued because he has exposed wrongdoing by US administrations and their military forces.”

For the many partners of US imperialism scattered across the spectrum of British politics, this kind of strong, simple, and direct refusal of the US’s extradition order—especially by a man and woman who may form a government—cannot be allowed to stand. On the other hand, it so powerfully echoes the disgust so many Britons feel about US imperialism that it makes it hard for the ostensibly leftist politicians and commentators to come out and say directly, “We must not oppose the US extradition.”

So, a “left” reason must be conjured up to steer Corbyn and Abbot away from their clear and explicit rejection of the US extradition request and into that murkier discourse where concerns about actual US extradition disappear, and “no extradition to the US” is replaced with “extradition to Sweden.”  ‘Cause nobody wants to be soft on sex crimes.

And the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn has worked. He now says Julian Assange “must answer” sexual assault allegations if Sweden decides to re-open their investigation.

This is Corbyn, on April 13, acceding to the demand of the letter that was sent on April 12^thand reinforced by a tsunami of pressure from the British media, to change the subject: Yes, OK, the important thing to talk about is the hypothetical Swedish extradition over sex allegations, not the actual American extradition for exposing war crimes.

Repeating, again, the strange insistence that the hypothetical is more urgent than the actual, that everyone must take a position on what the UK must do if Sweden does something it hasn’t.

The point of this campaign, the reason the letter was put out the day after his tweet, was to get that statement from Jeremy Corbyn. The present volatility in British politics makes it quite possible that there will soon be a general election, and quite possible that Corbyn will win it—all before Assange’s extradition case plays out in British courts. It was very important to get Corby on record saying: “the British government must extradite Assange to Sweden.”

The British imperialist poodles are laying out the plan B in the case Corbyn becomes Prime Minister. It is very unlikely that Sweden will reopen their Assange investigation, but the message is being sent to Swedish poodles and the US big dog: If he does become PM, we’ve already arranged a way out. We’ve created a political frame which allows Corbyn to keep his word not to allow direct British extradition to the US, while forcing him to allow extradition to Sweden (from which Assange will immediately be passed on to the US). In that circumstance, Sweden, at the behest of the US and UK, will obediently play its assigned role, re-open the investigation and demand extradition. Corbyn has already complied. He has been played. In two days.

We might even see in this discourse the British liberal imperialists’ not-so-subtle plea to Sweden, whether or not Corbyn is elected: Please, reopen the damn investigation and demand that we extradite Assange to you! Knowing full well Sweden would onwardly extradite him to the US. It’s UK Guardian lefties, caught between the popular disgust with US imperialism and their own toadying commitment to it, sending a message to Sweden: Don’t make us be the bad guys here. You started this. You end it.

Of course, the real point here, which the advocates of this line are pretending to miss and energetically trying to disappear from everyone’s line of sight, is that Sweden is no more interested in prosecuting Assange for his alleged sexual offense then the UK is for his bail jumping. The sex allegation from Sweden, like the bail jumping allegation in the UK, is just a doorway to his extradition to the United States.

It may make it easier for UK and US liberals to swallow the extradition of Assange if it’s slathered in “sex crime” rather than “bail jumping” dressing. But whatever pretext it’s done behind, that’s the endgame for the UK and Sweden. Either you accept that’s the case, as Assange and his legal team have been saying for years, or, in the face of the irrefutable fact of the American extradition request, you continue to deny it. Really, does anyone—does Jeremy Corbyn or a single one of the signatories of that British letter—think the USG/Trump administration would notdemand extradition from Sweden? Or that Sweden would not comply? What mental gymnastics does it take to make the inevitability of that disappear from your mind? “Let’s pretend!”

This is a desperate attempt by Assange-haters who want to maintain some leftist credibility to revive a specious smear that is irrefutably belied by the reality of the American indictment and extradition demand: that Assange sought Asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in order to “flee” sexual allegations, to “escape Swedish Justice.”

I will not attempt to judge the allegations that were made against Assange in Sweden. The specifics of those allegations, which have undergone a number of permutations, and the peculiarities of Swedish law, which can be misleading to Americans, make for a rat’s nest of sexual and political complications. The more you look into it, the more you are struck by how banal, confused, and sad the incidents in question are.

I share the opinion of Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape that “the pursuit of Assange is political” and “the allegations against him are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction.”You can find comprehensive accounts that will help you make up your mind here, here, here, here, here, here.

I’ll point out three crucial things to know in the present context, which are usually presented in deceptively fallacious ways.

First, of all, Assange is not, and never was. charged with a crime in Sweden. No decision to prosecute him was ever taken. The British letter itself recognizes this, speaking of the hope that “the formal investigation … can be concluded and, if appropriate, a charge can be made.” It was, in the prosecutor’s language, a “preliminary investigation.” Assange was wanted for questioning, and the Swedish government demanded his apprehension and extradition for that purpose, not to bring him to trial.

Second, Julian Assange was always available for questioning by Swedish prosecutors. He appeared voluntarily for questioning in Sweden, after which he was told he was free to leave the country. He and his lawyers always said he was available for questioning by Swedish prosecutors in London, via satellite (options that were standard practice), or in Sweden, if Sweden would assure him that he would not be extradited to the U.S. It was the British Crown Protection Service (CPS) that dissuaded the Swedes from coming to London to question Assange early on, in 2010 and 2011. And, when “Swedish authorities were eager to give up the case” and “drop extradition proceedings” in 2012-13, it was the British who pressured them to keep it going, with a CPS lawyer exclaiming: ““Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

Third, the Swedish prosecutor did interview Assange about the last remaining allegation in 2016 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, without any extradition, as she always could have. (The investigation into other allegations was dropped in 2015.) Assange submitted to the Swedish prosecutor’s insistence that the questioning take place without his lawyer present. After that questioning the investigation was dropped. No criminal charges were filed; no decision to prosecute him was ever made.

What’s quite clear in all this, although made to disappear from consideration and appear as its opposite, is that Julian Assange was never trying to “escape Swedish justice”; he was, as his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson says (in a Sky News interview with Sophy Ridge that I urge everyone to watch), “escaping American injustice.” As Robinson points out, if Assange had gone to the Ecuadorian embassy to flee the Swedish charges, he would have left the Ecuadorian embassy when they were dropped. But, of course, it wasn’t those charges he was trying to avoid. Assange’s one consistent concern in all this, his reason for seeking and being granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, was to avoid being extradited to the US, by Sweden or the UK. He had, and was right to have, a fear of that.

There is an obvious fault in the logic of people who continue to push the “Assange was fleeing sex crime allegations” line, which they somehow never see. They say Assange is responsible for not confronting sex crime allegations because he would not go to Sweden; they never say Swedish authorities are responsible for refusing to confront the sex crime allegations on their own terms because they wouldn’t give up on an irrelevant extradition to the US. The Swedes’ first priority was not questioning Assange; it was getting him to Sweden with the option of onward extradition to the US. Assange was saying, “Let’s get rid of an entirely irrelevant third-party that is preventing an investigation into the allegations on their own terms.” The Swedes were saying: “No, we insist on preserving the prerogatives and interests of that irrelevant third-party as a condition of our investigation into these sex crime allegations.” The Swedes weren’t taking that position for the sake of the women making the allegations. Who was centering and who was deprecating “the seriousness with which such allegations are viewed”?

Even under the worst interpretation for him, there is no conceivable logic here in which the Swedish prosecutors are not at least as responsible as Julian Assange for not doing what was necessary to deal with sexual assault allegations. Nobody who did not demand that the Swedes abjure American extradition can claim that their primary concern was the sexual allegations. If you say he’s bluffing, call it! Unless it’s you who doesn’t want to show your cards.

But in order to see that logic, you have to remain aware of the third party that’s in the game, and the pushers of that narrative construct it in such a way to make that third party disappear. Again, the purpose of this discourse is to hide the role of the U.S. in order to protect it.

These facts also show how hypocritical it is for the British to be now promoting this line of diversion. Never mind how utterly phony it is for the government that refused Spain’s extradition request for human-rights criminal Pinochet, despite its own highest court’s ruling, to be now proclaiming its sacred duty to obey the Swedish and American extradition demands. As we’ve seen, it was the British who prevented the Swedes from interviewing Assange early on in this whole affair. They, too, were more concerned about something else then they were about seriously investigating sex-crimes allegations. They, too, were more concerned about someone else than they were about the women making the accusations. Now, rather than accounting for what they did in that respect over the past seven years, British imperial poodles are hypocritically posing as defenders of sex-crime investigation in order to continue diverting attention from the real dealer at the table.

Sweden isn’t going to re-open the sex-crime investigation and take Julian Assange off their hands, and they know it. (Absent a post-Corbyn-victory Plan B above. And if the Swedes did, the investigation would be quickly concluded with no charges brought on the basis of the allegations, and whole case would disappear into the ether as Assange was quickly bundled on the plane to America.) The issue isn’t whether Julian Assange will be prosecuted for sex-crime allegations, for bail jumping, or for being an asshole. The only issue is whether he will be extradited to the US and sent to prison for decades for publishing true facts about US crimes around the world.

End Game

That fight is now taking place, and will be decided, in London. It is imperative that everyone in the UK and US keep constant pressure on that one point. It is imperative that everyone refuse to be drawn into a discourse that changes the subject and diverts attention on to some other issue. The only purpose of such a discourse is to protect the US extradition project by disappearing it behind something else.

There’s no avoiding it. We have to support Julian Assange. Period.

Jim Kavanagh edits The Polemicist.

What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which]there would be no advance towards civilisation”. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

Assange’s principal media tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years”. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding joined the police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”. The Guardian has since published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.

But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.

These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the expose of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.

The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.

When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.

If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what the Guardian calls truthful “things”, what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?

What is to stop the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is long.

David McCraw, lead lawyer of the New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange]would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between the New York Times and WilLeaks.”

Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalised by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.

In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.

Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defence in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.

The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”

What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?

In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.

She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.

“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”

And did. The rest, she might have added, is history.

John Pilger – Julian Assange’s arrest is an assault on journalism

Source: RT

For the army of smug liberals, many of them leading columnists in newspapers such as the Guardian, that noise they hear right now is the death rattle of their collective moral conscience.

Source: Rogue Journalist

Everyone who has ever denied that this was happening needs to hang their heads in shame for scoffing at a very real threat to press freedoms everywhere.

“Just confirmed: #Assange has been arrested not just for breach of bail conditions but also in relation to a US extradition request,” tweeted Robinson.

“From #Assange: The US warrant was issued in December 2017 and is for conspiracy with Chelsea Manning in early 2010,” Robinson added.

So there you have it. Extradited for journalism. In a blur, everything that Assange and WikiLeaks have been warning about for years has been proven correct, contrary to mountains of claims to the contrary by establishment loyalists everywhere. The same government which tortured Chelsea Manning is in the process of extraditing her publisher so that they can silence him forever. Everyone who has ever denied that this was happening needs to hang their heads in shame for scoffing at a very real threat to press freedoms everywhere when they could have been opposing this obscene agenda. It’s time for some serious soul searching.

The time to act is now. It’s too late to prevent Assange from losing his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy, so the goal now is to fight extradition. Activist groups are swiftly organizing as I type this, so it will be easy for people around the world to find rallies to attend and online movements to help boost. I encourage everyone in the US, the UK and Australia to contact their elected representatives and politely but urgently inform them that the agenda to extradite Assange to the US must be fought at all costs. Educate yourself as best as you can on Assange’s case, and inform everyone you know about what’s going on.

This is seriously gut wrenching news. Here are ten thoughts on the matter in no particular order:

1 – The Metropolitan police were let into the embassy by the Ecuadorian ambassador, his political asylum revoked under entirely false pretenses in gross violation of international law. Shame on Ecuador.

2 – Assange is an Australian citizen. As of this writing, the Australian government has still not interceded to protect its citizen. Shame on Australia.

3 – The US government is setting a precedent which, if carried out, will constitute a grave threat to press freedoms the world over and a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act. Shame on America.

4 – The UK government is collaborating with the US government’s efforts to imprison a journalist for publishing evidence of US war crimes, just as it has collaborated with the US government in perpetrating war crimes. Shame on the UK.

5 – This arrest warrant was issued under the Trump administration, in full alignment with what the Trump administration has openly been saying about its agenda to silence WikiLeaks. Shame on Trump, and shame on anyone who continues to support him.

6 – This arrest is a Trump administration action, and has nothing to do with the 2016 Russia nonsense that Democrats have been shrieking about, yet these same Democrats who claim to oppose Trump and oppose his war on the press are currently cheerleading for Trump’s prosecution of a journalist who told the truth. Shame on Democrats.

7 – I am going to have a zero tolerance policy for QAnon cultists who try to tell me that this is actually 5-D chess by Trump to overthrow the Deep State. Stay out of my comments, stay out of my social media notifications, stay the hell away from me, and please rethink your worldview.

8 – The precedent set by imprisoning a foreign journalist under the Espionage Act will enable the US government to arrest leak publishers anywhere in the world who expose its crimes. This will cripple our ability to hold the most powerful institution on the planet to account in any way. There is no excuse for any journalist anywhere not to oppose this tooth and claw. If you see anyone calling themselves a journalist but failing to oppose Assange’s extradition, you should call them out for the frauds that they are.

9 – And yes, like it or not, Assange is a journalist. There is no legitimate argument to the contrary.

10 – This is it, folks. This is where we find out what we’re made of as a species. This is where we find out if humanity gets to survive, and if it deserves to. If we can’t stop the empire from imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts right in front of our eyes, we might as well roll over and tap out right now, because if we lose this one it’s never going to get any better from there. If we can’t pass this test, the oligarchs and the opaque government agencies which are allied with them will march us into extinction or Orwellian dystopia, and there’ll be no tool in our toolbox to stop them. We need to seriously dig deep on this one.

WHAT TO DO

• FOLLOW / share widely @Wikileaks and @DefendAssange
• RALLY
  *UK court hearings
  *Global Rallies
• PRESSURE Politicians
  *No US Extradition
  *Abide by @UN Decision
• MONITOR Media
  Correct disinformation with FACTS
• DONATE Legal DefenceFund http://Defend.wikileaks.org

Caitlin Johnstone’s articles are entirely reader-supported. See https://caitlinjohnstone.com/

What he has revealed about state duplicity, human rights abuses and corruption goes beyond anything published in the world’s “mainstream” media. 

Source: Middle East Eye

After over six months of being cut off from outside world, on 14 October Ecuador has partly restored Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s communications with the outside world from its London embassy where the founder has been living for over six years.

The treatment – real and threatened – meted out to Assange by the US and UK governments contrasts sharply with the service Wikileaks has done their publics in revealing the nature of elite power, as shown in the following snapshot of Wikileaks’ revelations about British foreign policy in the Middle East.

Conniving with the Saudis

Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.

The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall’s fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008 cable, for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the US embassy that the British “want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it.”

A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had “put measures in place to protect your interests”.

American influence

It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no US officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former US President George W Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.

Also in 2009, then prime minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK’s Cabinet Office, privately assured US officials that his government “would consult with the US regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be ‘no daylight’ between the US and UK”. The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the US is undermined by this cable.

The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I’ve extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him.

However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the US deputy secretary of state, having talked with foreign secretary William Hague about a “post-Qaddafi” Libya. This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.

Deception over Diego Garcia

Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major US base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s.

A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a “marine reserve” around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve”.

A week before the “marine reserve” proposal was made to the US in May 2009, then UK foreign secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the US, apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the US to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at US bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.

Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow US cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in parliament that could have “complicated or muddied” the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the US was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.

Spying on the UK

Cables show the US spying on the Foreign Office, collecting information on British ministers. Soon after the appointment of Ivan Lewis as a junior foreign minister in 2009, US officials were briefing the office of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about rumours that he was depressed and had a reputation as a bully, and on “the state of his marriage”.

Washington was also shown to have been spying on the UK mission to the UN, along with other members of the Security Council and the UN Secretary General.

In addition, Wikileaks cables reveal that journalists and the public are considered legitimate targets of US intelligence operations. In October 2009, Joint Services Publication 440, a 2,400-page restricted document written in 2001 by the Ministry of Defence, was leaked. Somewhat ironically, it contained instructions for the security services on how to avoid leaks of information by hackers, journalists, and foreign spies.

The document refers to investigative journalists as “threats” alongside subversive and terrorist organisations, noting that “the ‘enemy’ is unwelcome publicity of any kind, and through any medium”.

Britain’s GCHQ is also revealed to have spied on Wikileaks itself – and its readers. One classified GCHQ document from 2012 shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly collect the IP addresses of visitors to the Wikileaks site in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines such as Google.

Championing free media

The British government is punishing Assange for the service that Wikileaks has performed. It is ignoring a UN ruling that he is being held in “arbitrary detention” at the Ecuadorian embassy, while failing, illegally, to ensure his health needs are met. Whitehall is also refusing to offer diplomatic assurances that Assange will not be extradited to the US – the only reason he remains in the embassy.

Smear campaigns have portrayed Assange as a sexual predator or a Russian agent, often in the same media that have benefitted from covering Wikileaks’ releases.

Many journalists and activists who are perfectly aware of the fake news in some Western media outlets, and of the smear campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, are ignoring or even colluding in the more vicious smearing of Assange.

More journalists need to champion the service Wikileaks performs and argue for what is at stake for a free media in the right to expose state secrets.

– Mark Curtis is a historian and analyst of UK foreign policy and international development and the author of six books, the latest being an updated edition of Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.

Source: Medium

Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you’re suspicious of him you won’t believe anything he’s saying.

I write a lot about the plight of Julian Assange for the same reason I write a lot about the Iraq invasion: his persecution, when sincerely examined, exposes undeniable proof that we are ruled by a transnational power establishment which is immoral and dishonest to its core.

Assange started a leak outlet on the premise that corrupt and unaccountable power is a problem in our world, and that the problem can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt and unaccountable power has responded by detaining, silencing and smearing him. The persecution of Assange has proved his thesis about the world absolutely correct.

Anyone who offends the US-centralized empire will find themselves subject to a trial by media, and the media are owned by the same plutocratic class which owns the empire. To believe what mass media news outlets tell you about those who stand up to imperial power is to ignore reality.

Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they’ll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they’ll be far more likely to consent to Assange’s silencing and imprisonment. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you’re suspicious of him you won’t believe anything he’s saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it’s as good as putting a bullet in his head.

The fact that the mass media can keep saying day after day “Hey, you know that bloke at the embassy who shares embarrassing truths about very powerful people? He’s a stinky Nazi rapist Russian spy who mistreats his cat” without raising suspicion shows you how propagandized the public already is. A normal worldview unmolested by corrupt narrative control would see someone who circulates inconvenient facts about the powerful being called pretty much all the worst things in the world and know immediately that that person is being lied about by those in power.

Relentless smear campaigns against Assange have given the unelected power establishment the ability to publicly make an example of a journalist who published uncomfortable truths without provoking the wrath of the masses. It’s a town square flogging that the crowd has been manipulated into cheering for. Narrative control has enabled them to have their cake and eat it too: they get to act like medieval lords and inflict draconian punishment against a speaker of undeniable facts and leave his head on a spike in the town square as a warning to other would-be truth tellers, and have the public believe that such a bizarre violation of modern human rights is perfectly fine and acceptable.

There are people who worked really hard to get journalism degrees, toiled long hours to earn the esteemed privilege of appearing on the front pages of a major publication, only to find themselves writing articles with headlines like “Julian Assange is a stinky, stinky stink man.”

Ordinary citizens often find themselves eager to believe the smear campaigns against Assange because it is easier than believing that their government would participate in the deliberate silencing and imprisoning of a journalist for publishing facts.

And yes, Julian Assange is most certainly a journalist. Publishing important information about what’s going on in the world so the public can inform themselves is precisely the thing that journalism is. There is no conventional definition of journalism which differs from this. Anyone who says Assange is not a journalist is telling a lie that they may or may not actually believe in order to justify his persecution and their support for it.

Another reason people can find themselves eager to believe smears about Assange is that the raw facts revealed by WikiLeaks publications punch giant holes in the stories about the kind of world, nation and society that most people have been taught to believe they live in since school age. These kinds of beliefs are interwoven with people’s entire egoic structures, with their sense of self and who they are as a person, so narratives which threaten to tear them apart can feel the same as a personal attack. This is why you’ll hear ordinary citizens talking about Assange as though he attacked them personally; all he did was publish facts about the powerful, but since those facts conflict with tightly held identity constructs, the cognitive dissonance that was caused to them can be interpreted as feeling like he’d slapped them in the face.

We live in a reality where unfathomably powerful world-dominating government agencies are scrutinized and criticized far, far less than a guy trapped in an embassy who published inconvenient facts about those agencies.

Assange disrupts establishment narratives even in his persecution. Liberal establishment loyalists in America still haven’t found a rational answer to criticisms that in supporting Assange’s criminal prosecution they are supporting a Trump administration agenda. You now have the same people who’ve been screaming that Trump is Hitler and that he’s attacking the free press cheering for the possibility of that same administration imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts.

The precedent that would be set by the US prosecuting a foreign journalist for merely publishing factual information would constitute a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act, for America and for the entire world.

The billionaire media has invalidated itself with its refusal to defend Assange. They know the precedent set by his prosecution for WikiLeaks publications would kill the ability of the press to hold power to account, but they don’t care because they know they never do that. For all their crying about Jamal Khashoggi and Jim Acosta’s hurt feelings, they do not actually care about journalism or “the free press” in any meaningful way.

Whenever I see a blue checkmark account on Twitter bashing Assange I mentally translate whatever they’re saying into “There is nothing I won’t do to advance my career in corporate media. If you’re in a position to promote me I will literally get down on my knees right this very second and let you do whatever you want to my body.”

I sometimes feel like I respect professional propagandists who smear Assange more than I respect ordinary citizens who go around smearing him for free. What do these people think they’ll get as a reward for their work as pro bono CIA propagandists? A gold star from Big Brother? They’re like slaves who beat and betray other slaves that fall out of line in order to win favor with the master, except they’re not even achieving that. The professional manipulators are at least cheering for their own class to continue to have its leadership’s interests advanced; ordinary people who do it are cheering for their own oppression.

Even lower in my view are the self-proclaimed leftists and anarchists who view themselves as oppositional to the establishment but still help advance this smear campaign. It is impossible to attack Assange without supporting the Orwellian empire which is persecuting him. I don’t care what mental gymnastics you’re doing to justify your pathetic cronyism; what you are doing benefits the most powerful and depraved people on this planet.

Anyone who participates in the ongoing smear campaign against Assange and Wikileaks is basically just saying “Extremely powerful people should be able to lie to us without any difficulty or opposition at all.”

Everyone should always be extremely suspicious of anyone who defends the powerful from the less powerful. It’s amazing that this isn’t more obvious to more people.

Contrary to the narratives promoted by establishment smear merchants, Julian Assange is not hiding from justice in the Ecuadorian embassy. He is hiding from injustice. Everyone who knows anything about the US government’s prosecution of leakers and whistleblowers knows he has no shot at a fair trial, and would face brutal mistreatment at the hands of the same regime which tortured Chelsea Manning.

The persecution of Assange is essentially a question that mankind is asking itself: do we want to (A) continue down the path of omnicidal, ecocidal Orwellian dystopia, or do we want to (B) pull up and away from that trajectory and shrug off the oppressive power establishment which is driving us toward either total extinction or total enslavement? So far, A is the answer we’ve been giving ourselves to that question. But, as long as we switch before it’s too late, we can always change our answer.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: RT

The murky relationship between British intelligence and establishment journalists reaches far back in time and continues in the present.

Because if a clutch of right-wing reactionary billionaires owning the bulk of a nation’s major newspaper titles and media constitutes a free press, the word ‘free’ has been stripped and shorn of all meaning.

Yet, while the aforementioned – let’s be kind here – ‘anomaly’ has long been understood by anyone of adult years with the ability to put their underpants on the right way round in the morning, the extent to which the British establishment press and media has been penetrated by intelligence services and acts as a conduit for their agenda is less well known.

That it is less well known remains one of life’s great mysteries nonetheless. Scratch your average British journalist and you have yourself a frustrated spook; someone who would be on their toes at the sound of a car door slamming shut in the street, while harbouring fantasies of coming across Vladimir Putin in a dark alley one night and scoring one for the Empire.

Take Con Coughlin, for example, Defence Editor at The Daily Telegraph (more colloquially and accurately known as The Daily Torygraph). Coughlin is a product of a private school production line that has unleashed more knaves on the world than spittle on a dentist’s chair. While his outing as an MI6 asset may have been a long time coming, now that it has, it marks yet another nail in the coffin of a media class whose relationship to truth and objectivity belongs in the box marked non-existent.

Though I hold no candle for Guardian columnist, Owen Jones, it remains a truism that even a blind chicken gets a piece of corn sometimes; and on this basis Jones has rendered us a service in outing Coughlin in a recent series of devastating tweets. Also providing an invaluable service in helping join the dots of the story is The Canary, independent left-wing news and views web journal that currently boasts a larger readership than a growing section of the mainstream media.

As it turns out, Mr Coughlin’s links to MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence agency) go back some time. As Jones writes: “A 2000 article reveals Coughlin was fed material by MI6 for years, which he then turned into Telegraph news articles.”

The Guardian article Jones is referring to was published at a time when the centre-left newspaper was a worthy source of information and analysis, home to the likes of Seumas Milne, one of Britain’s finest-ever columnists currently plying his trade as chief press adviser to Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. It just goes to show that whoever said evolution only moves in one direction had never taken the time to follow the trajectory of The Guardian in recent years.

But that’s another story.

We are informed in the aforesaid 2000 Guardian article that “There is – or has been until recently – a very active programme by the secret agencies to colour what appears in the British press, called, if publications by various defectors can be believed, information operations, or ‘I/Ops’.”

Further on: “A colourful example of the way these techniques expanded to meet the exigencies of the hour came in the early 70s, when the readers of the News of the World were treated to a front-page splash, “Russian sub in IRA plot sensation”, complete with aerial photograph of the conning tower of a Soviet sub awash off the coast of Donegal.”

This story was of course entirely bogus, as was one published in the Sunday Telegraph, sister paper of the aforementioned Daily Telegraph, over two decades later, written by – you guessed it – Con Coughlin.

From the article: “he [Coughlin] regaled [the newspaper’s]readers with the dramatic story of the son of Libya’s Colonel Gadafy (sic) and his alleged connection to a currency counterfeiting plan. The story [implicating Saif Gaddafi]was… falsely attributed to a ‘British banking official.’ In fact, it had been given to him by officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years.”

Coughlin, by the way, is also revealed, according to Jones, to have been an eager shill for the Saudis.

In the wake of the disappearance of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, whom according to Turkish authorities was brutally murdered and dismembered by a group of Saudis, who, equipped with a bone saw, flew in to the country from the Kingdom to carry out the deed especially, Coughlin went to work shrouding matters in a fog of benign uncertainty. Consider: “It could well be, therefore, that the unfortunate Mr Khashoggi has become the victim of the region’s dangerous and conflicting currents.” Ahem… indeed.

Coughlin also saw fit to describe current Saudi tyrant – sorry Crown Prince – Muhammad Bin Salman (affectionately known as MbS) as a “human dynamo,” after he was afforded the privilege of a sit down interview.

At the risk of focusing too much on Mr Coughlin and his work, however, we are obliged to make the point that he is merely one among many British establishment journalists who have eagerly embraced the role of conduit of the nation’s intelligence services over the years.

In his classic work on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, The Enemy Within, Seumas Milne writes: “The incestuous relationship between the intelligence services and sections of the [British] media is, of course, nothing new. The connection is notoriously close in the case of foreign correspondents… Sandy Gall, the ITN reporter and newsreader, boasted of his work for MI6 in Afghanistan during the 1980s.”

Milne, in the same passage, goes on to reveal how “After US Senate hearings in 1975 revealed the extent of CIA recruitment of both American and British journalists, ‘sources’ let it be known that half the foreign staff of a British daily [newspaper]were on the MI6 payroll.”

So there you have it, the murky relationship between British intelligence and the country’s establishment journalists is one that reaches far back in time and continues in the present, as redoubtable and reliable as Big Ben itself.

In fact considering where we are, the indefensible positions taken by prominent newspaper journalists and columnists at not only The Telegraph but also The Times and, yes, The Guardian over Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela et al. – in other words, the way that almost to a man and woman they have fallen into line behind their own government when it comes to who the officially designated enemies of the moment should be – the question we need to ask ourselves is not how many of them might be in the pay of MI6 and MI5, but how many of them might not?

Source: Fair

The false narrative portrays Israelis and Palestinians as harming each other to a roughly comparable degree, and sharing proportionate responsibility for the absence of peace.

The media’s attempt to present a “balanced” version of these events is a fundamentally flawed approach, because it erases myriad, consequential differences:  between colonizer and colonized; between oppressing people and people resisting oppression; between, on the one hand, the regional military superpower backed by the global hegemon and, on the other, unarmed and lightly armed protestors.

These inequities are buried when Palestine/Israel is presented as though it were a civil war, or a “he said, she said” story where the reality of what’s happening—ethnic cleansing, apartheid and resistance to these—is impossible to unravel. Such “both sides” coverage wrongly suggests to readers that this is a mere “conflict” between parties on equal footing and with equally valid claims of injury against each other. It is the formal expression of what I show in my book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, is the false narrative that Israelis and Palestinians have harmed each other to a roughly comparable degree, and share proportionate responsibility for the absence of peace.

On a day when Israel killed seven Palestinian demonstrators, two of whom were children, a Reuters report (9/28/18) devoted 62 words to the Palestinian account of the violence and 57 to Israel’s. One 43-word paragraph is spent presenting the issues animating Palestinian protest as statements of fact:

About 200 Palestinians have been killed since the Gaza protests began on March 30 to demand the right of return to lands that Palestinian families fled or were driven from on Israel’s founding in 1948, and the easing of an Israeli/Egyptian economic blockade.

One 35-word paragraph presents the Israeli perspective as statements of fact:

A Gaza sniper killed an Israeli soldier in an earlier protest, and Palestinians have used kites and helium balloons to fly incendiary devices over the border fence, destroying tracts of forest and farmland in Israel.

Presenting Palestine/Israel in such an “even-handed” manner necessarily involves elisions. The latter passage lists the weapons Palestinians have used during the protest (a sniper, “kites and helium balloons”) but there is scant mention of the weapons Israel is using—drones, helicopters, jets, a naval blockade—to try to quell the protests, maintain apartheid, and prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their lands. Had these been inventoried, it would be obvious that there is nothing balanced about the deadliness of the weaponry available to the parties involved in this struggle.

Similarly, readers are told that Palestinians have “destroy[ed]tracts of forest and farmland in Israel,” but no details about the consequences of the blockade of Gaza are noted. These include the theft of Palestinian farmland, which is one part of Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s economy, as well as Israel’s obstruction of  Palestinians’ access to clean water, electricity and medical care. Such specifics would belie the symmetry these articles attempt to construct.

CNN (9/28/18) spent three paragraphs on the Palestinians’ version of events and three on Israel’s. This structure encodes the message that Palestine-Israel is a story of two parties on a level playing field. Yet one party has international law on its side—and, frankly, any minimally coherent conception of justice—and the other doesn’t: Israel’s blockade of Gaza is illegal; the Palestinian refugees have a legal right to return to their homes, and a legal right to resist occupation, including by force.

When Israel killed three Palestinian demonstrators, including a thirteen-year-old, the Associated Press (10/6/18) spent 68 words describing what Palestinians say happened. These are set against 52 words given to Israel’s side of the story. Readers are told that

responding to calls by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza, thousands of Palestinians thronged five areas along the fence, burning tires, throwing rocks.

And also that

the Israeli military said about 20,000 protesters participated. They threw explosive devices and grenades toward the troops which used tear gas and live fire to, it added.

Allotting almost the same number of words to the colonizer killing three Palestinian civilian protestors, including a child, as to anti-colonial resistance against an occupier’s military forces implies that these actions are equivalent. Yet this supposed equivalence rests on omission: A reference to Palestinians “chanting slogans against a stifling Israeli/Egyptian blockade” of Gaza is the only reason for the protests that the article provides; that the Palestinians are attempting to exercise their right of return is excised from the conversation. Mentioning that more than two-thirds of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugees displaced by Israel, and that Israel and its allies are preventing these refugees from  exercising their right to return to their homes, would expose the absurdity of giving equal weight to Palestinian and Israeli grievances.

A CNN story (10/12/18) on Israel’s killing of seven more Palestinian protesters spends 186 words on what Israel has done to Palestinians and 190 on what amounts to Israel’s point of view. Mentions of the deaths of Palestinians are consistently paired with a reference to ostensible Palestinian violence:

• “Seven Palestinians died Friday after being shot by Israeli soldiers along the security fence between Gaza and Israel during violent weekly protests.”
• “The deaths occurred during Friday protests, which often turn violent.”
• “Israeli soldiers have killed more than 200 Palestinians in the clashes, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, with thousands of others injured. Israel asserts it is protecting its sovereignty from violent rioters. During one protest in July, a Gaza sniper shot and killed an Israeli soldier. The last few months have also seen Gaza militants fire more than 100 rockets and mortars into Israel, which has responded with dozens of air strikes.”

A fake “balance” between Palestinians and Israelis is a “balance” that favors Israel, because it requires a downplaying of the severity of the wrongs Israel has done and is doing to Palestinians, and an amplification of Israel’s untenable rationalizations for these. “Balance” ought not to be the goal of coverage of Palestine/Israel. Instead of pretending that the conduct of Palestinians and Israelis is qualitatively and quantitatively the same, what’s needed is an honest accounting. That necessarily entails foregrounding the dispossession, oppression and murder Israel has inflicted on Palestinians, and situating Palestinian actions in this context. Presenting a wildly unbalanced situation as balanced is as morally bankrupt as it is intellectually indefensible.

Source: Media Lens

This is John Pilger’s foreword to the new Media Lens book, ‘Propaganda Blitz – How The Corporate Media Distort Reality’, published by Pluto Press.

Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.

Driven from the “mainstream”, Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism’s veneration of “approved opinions” while “unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality.”

Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new “groupthink”, as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.

Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the willful abandonment by the “MeToo” zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a warning of world war.

With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the “mainstream”, a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful “democracies” regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle.

In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens — remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4 News.

Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths.

The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species.

I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media’s power.

What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards was a teacher, David Cromwell is a former scientist. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism — a term rarely used; let’s call it true objectivity — is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches.

I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do.

Take the chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain’s pioneering health service.

The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as “austerity”, with its deceitful, weasel language of “efficiency savings” (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and “hard choices” (the willful destruction of the premises of civilised life in modern Britain).

“Austerity” is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes.

Using a vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to justify its selling-off. The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear to oppose this, but does it? The answer is very likely no. Little of any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained.

Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.

Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to “providing a breadth of view” and to properly inform the public of “matters of public policy”, the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation’s most cherished institutions. A BBC headline said: “Bill which gives power to GPs passes.” This was pure state propaganda.

There is a striking similarity with the BBC’s coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed. A study by Cardiff University, Wales, found that the BBC reflected the government line “overwhelmingly” while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation’s much-vaunted “principle” of impartiality was never a consideration.

One of the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitz describes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistleblowers. The Guardian’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing.

Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to the Guardian, was abandoned when he was no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative – and cowardly — onslaught of a kind I have rarely known.

With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables.

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”.

The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, “I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd.”

Moore, who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after attacking Assange, she had suffered “vile abuse”. Edwards and Cromwell wrote to her: “That’s a real shame, sorry to hear that. But how would you describe calling someone ‘the most massive turd’? Vile abuse?”

Moore replied that no, she would not, adding, “I would advise you to stop being so bloody patronising.”

Her former Guardian colleague James Ball wrote, “It’s difficult to imagine what Ecuador’s London embassy smells like more than five and a half years after Julian Assange moved in.”

Such slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its editor, Katharine Viner, as “thoughtful and progressive”. What is the root of this vindictiveness? Is it jealousy, a perverse recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be “one of us” and shames those who have long sold out the independence of journalism?

Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of “fake news” is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo.

“[It is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh alternatives,” wrote Katharine Viner. Her political writer Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as “a form of narcissism”.

“How did this man ….,” brayed the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, “get on the ballot in the first place?” A choir of the paper’s precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general election in spite of the media.

Complex stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in Syria, including those related to ISIS.

Supported by a “psyops” campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and the US Agency of International Aid, the aim is to hoodwink the Western public and speed the overthrow of the government in Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war with Russia.

The Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency, Purpose, funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to be “Syria Civil Defence” and are seen uncritically on TV news and social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told this. George Clooney is a fan.

The White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not questioned by major news organisations is an indication of how deep the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert Fisk noted recently, no “mainstream” reporter reports Syria, from Syria.

In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as “propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government”.

This abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as Edwards and Cromwell document. I saw the list of questions Solon sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet — “Have you ever been invited to North Korea?”

So much of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the “perception”.

When he was US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called “a war of perception… conducted continuously using the news media”. What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home.

Nothing has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerised the German public.

She told me the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above”, but on the “submissive void” of an uninformed public.

“Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked.

“Everyone,” she said. “Propaganda always wins, if you allow it.”

Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell is published by Pluto Press.

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: Rogue Journalist

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. We need to cultivate an aggressive disgust for all attempts by the powerful to manipulate the public dialogue.

The Guardian has just published an actual, non-fictional op-ed that is titled “Is my Jewish three-year-old too young to learn about antisemitism?”, about a concerned mother who is teaching her toddler about the Holocaust in case Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister.

“Perhaps they’re right and it is too soon even for this gentle introduction,” muses Hilary Freeman. “I certainly don’t want to frighten or traumatise my daughter. And yet, in the current climate, with accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party making headline news virtually every day, and a rise in antisemitism all over Europe, this is an issue that is pertinent to her life and to her future, not just a story in a book. Many Jews in the UK are feeling very unsettled.”

Surely this is as far as they can take this whole “Corbyn is a secret Nazi” narrative? Surely? How could they possibly take it any further into cartoonish lunacy than this? “Terrified by Tory polling decline, I took my cocker spaniel on a tour of Auschwitz”?

I hate mocking the fear of antisemitism, which is a real thing that does happen and should be condemned unequivocally. Even more, though, I hate the British media for making it both extremely easy and one hundred percent necessary to mock them for it.

They say that Corbyn is a secret Nazi who loves antisemitism over and over and over again like it’s a real thing despite the complete absence of anything remotely resembling facts or evidence, then publish op-eds by ostensibly terrified mothers citing “accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party making headline news virtually every day” as the basis for her fear of her three year-old daughter winding up like Anne Frank. And then when this unconscionable behavior sees Corbyn decrying the mass media and pushing for reforms, the British press responds with headlines like “Corbyn is following the Donald Trump playbook on persecuting the media”.

How could they possibly take it any further into cartoonish lunacy than this?

They can make this link because across the pond the narrative is being spun that the President of the United States is treating the mass media propaganda machine unfairly. Last week hundreds of outlets released coordinated op-eds decrying Trump’s “war” and “assault” on the “free press” because he occasionally says mean things about CNN, meanwhile completely ignoring this administration’s horrifying attempts to silence WikiLeaks and persecute Julian Assange for practicing journalism.

“We are not the enemy of the people!” these outlets proclaimed with one voice, chanting as one, repeating the same mantra over and over again like a hypnotist. “We are not the enemy of the people! We are not the enemy of the people! We are not the enemy of the people!”

The mass media absolutely are the enemy of the people. Without question they are. They are the enemy of our entire species.

“Neither the great political or financial powers of the world nor the population in general realize that the engineering-chemical-electronic revolution now makes it possible to produce many more technical devices with ever less material,” the brilliant inventor and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller once said. “We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be ‘you or me,’ so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before. Only twelve years ago technology reached the point where this could be done. Since then it has made it ever so much easier to do.”

Fuller said this in 1981. So why hasn’t it happened yet? Why hasn’t humanity turned its creativity and resourcefulness toward human thriving instead of warfare, exploitation, domination and ecocide?

Stuffy intellectuals who’ve spent too much time indoors might scoff and say it’s because Fuller was wrong, that it is simply human nature that we should all be scrambling to get to the top of the heap by clawing at each other’s flesh and stepping upon each other’s heads until we kill our ecosystem and choke to death on dust and ashes.

I say that’s bullshit. The reason we have not turned our creative power toward health and harmony instead of death and destruction is because we are being manipulated by powerful people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And they are doing so using the mass media.

Humans don’t want to suffer and toil in order to make a few billionaires even more rich and powerful than they already are. Literally nobody wants that for humanity besides those billionaires and their immediate underlings. The reason we haven’t yet used the power of our numbers to create a system wherein everyone gets their basic needs met and we all work in collaboration with ourselves and our environment instead of poisoning our air and water and spending medicine money on bombs is because there are screens in our lives convincing us all day in and day out that this is not in our best interest. Keep consenting to increasing degrees of corrupt crony capitalism. Keep voting for the same oligarch-owned two-headed one-party system day in and day out. Keep ignoring how the US military is the worst polluter on earth and how the cost of the Iraq war could have purchased the planetary conversion to renewable energy.

Day after day after day the public’s psyches are pummeled with these deceitful narratives which manufacture consent for war, exploitation and oppression instead of health and thriving. The only thing keeping us from rising like lions in unvanquishable number as in the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem and creating a healthy world is because we are imprisoned in a psychic cage made of propaganda narratives. The billionaire-controlled mass media are the enemy of the people in the same way a cage is the enemy of a bird.

We have native parrots here in Australia. Sometimes I think about how cool it would be to have one for a pet, but then I look outside and see the galahs and cockatoos playing around in the trees and think, “Nah.”

The billionaires who control the mass media lack that part of themselves. They are our enemy. But we are the many. And they are the few. And we are waking up.

Caitlin Johnstone is a 100% reader-funded journalist. She posts articles regularly on her website Rogue Journalist

Source: Newsweek

We are witnessing one of the most serious attacks on journalism in recent times. A simple retraction and apology will not be enough.

The story went viral, repeated uncritically by many media outlets around the world, including Newsweek. This falsely cast Assange into the center of a conspiracy between Putin and Trump. The Guardian even had the gall to post a call to its readers to donate to protect “independent journalism when factual, trustworthy reporting is under threat.”

These three meetings with Manafort did not happen.

As The Guardian admitted, the Embassy’s visitor logs show no such visits. The Guardian claims they saw a separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency that lists “Paul Manaford [sic]” as one of several well-known guests.’

Manafort, through his spokesman, has stated: “This story is totally false and deliberately libelous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him.”

It appears The Guardian editors tried to backpedal from the original story with post-publication stealth edits, but they have not issued a correction or apology.

The journalists who wrote this story must surely know that guests who enter the embassy must be registered in logs, as pointed out by the former first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy from 2010 to July 2018.

Ecuadorian intelligence has spent millions of dollars on setting up security cameras inside its embassy in London to monitor Julian Assange and his visitors. The Guardian has previously published still shots from those cameras. However, in the case of the claimed Manafort visit, they apparently demanded no such verification.

They also overlooked the simple fact that millions of pounds have been spent over the years by the Metropolitan police and secret services on monitoring the entrances of the embassy 24/7.

This is part of a series of stories from The Guardian, such as its recent claim of a “Russia escape plot” to enable Assange to flee the embassy, which is not true.

What do these stories have in common? They all give the UK and Ecuador political cover to arrest Assange and for the US to extradite him. Any journalists worth their salt should be investigating who is involved in these plots.

Mike Pompeo, when he was CIA director, said the U.S. was “working to take down” WikiLeaks. This was months after WikiLeaks released thousands of files on the CIA, the “largest leak of CIA documents in history,” called Vault 7. The Guardian seems determined to link Assange to Russia, in full knowledge that such claims are prejudicial in the context of Mueller’s probe in the US and the Democratic National Committee lawsuit against WikiLeaks.

Numerous commentators have criticized The Guardian for its coverage of Assange. Glenn Greenwald, former columnist for The Guardian, writes that the paper has “…such a pervasive and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to malign him.” Another former Guardian journalist, Jonathan Cook, writes: “The propaganda function of the piece is patent. It is intended to provide evidence for long-standing allegations that Assange conspired with Trump, and Trump’s supposed backers in the Kremlin, to damage Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race.”

Hours before The Guardian published its article, WikiLeaks received knowledge of the story and “outed” it, with a denial, to its 5.4 million Twitter followers. The story then made the front page, and The Guardian asserted they had not received a denial prior to publication—as they had failed to contact the correct person.

A simple retraction and apology will not be enough. This persecution of Assange is one of the most serious attacks on journalism in recent times.

Kristinn Hrafnsson is an Icelandic investigative journalist who has worked with WikiLeaks since 2009, as spokesperson for the organization from 2010 to 2016 and editor-in-chief since September 2018.

Courageous free speech activist, journalist and whistleblower, whose only “crime” is that of a true journalist — telling the world the truths that people have a right to know.

The signs are that Ecuador could be on the brink of evicting Julian Assange from its London embassy, with the prospect that the British government will deliver him into the arms of Donald Trump. In this open letter, originally published in April 2018, twenty-seven writers, journalists, film-makers, artists, academics, former intelligence officers and democrats call on the government of Ecuador to allow Julian Assange his right of freedom of speech.

Citing his critical tweets about the recent detention of Catalan president Carles Puidgemont in Germany, and following pressure from the US, Spanish and UK governments, the Ecuadorian government has installed an electronic jammer to stop Assange communicating with the outside world via the internet and phone.

As if ensuring his total isolation, the Ecuadorian government is also refusing to allow him to receive visitors. Despite two UN rulings describing his detention as unlawful and mandating his immediate release, Assange has been effectively imprisoned since he was first placed in isolation in Wandsworth prison in London in December 2010. He has never been charged with a crime. The Swedish case against him collapsed and was withdrawn, while the United States has stepped up efforts to prosecute him. His only “crime” is that of a true journalist — telling the world the truths that people have a right to know.

Under its previous president, the Ecuadorian government bravely stood against the bullying might of the United States and granted Assange political asylum as a political refugee. International law and the morality of human rights was on its side.

Today, under extreme pressure from Washington and its collaborators, another government in Ecuador justifies its gagging of Assange by stating that “Assange’s behavior, through his messages on social media, put at risk good relations which this country has with the UK, the rest of the EU and other nations.”

This censorious attack on free speech is not happening in Turkey, Saudi Arabia or China; it is right in the heart of London. If the Ecuadorian government does not cease its unworthy action, it, too, will become an agent of persecution rather than the valiant nation that stood up for freedom and for free speech.

If the EU and the UK continue to participate in the scandalous silencing of a true dissident in their midst, it will mean that free speech is indeed dying in Europe. This is not just a matter of showing support and solidarity. We are appealing to all who care about basic human rights to call on the government of Ecuador to continue defending the rights of a courageous free speech activist, journalist and whistleblower.

We ask that his basic human rights be respected as an Ecuadorian citizen and internationally protected person and that he not be silenced or expelled.

If there is no freedom of speech for Julian Assange, there is no freedom of speech for any of us — regardless of the disparate opinions we hold.

We call on President Moreno to end the isolation of Julian Assange now.

LIST OF SIGNATORIES (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)

Pamela Anderson actress and activist
Jacob Appelbaum freelance journalist
Renata Avila International Human Rights Lawyer
Sally Burch British/Ecuadorian journalist
Alicia Castro Argentina’s ambassador to the United Kingdom 2012-16
Naomi Colvin Courage Foundation
Noam Chomsky linguist and political theorist
Brian Eno musician
Joseph Farrell WikiLeaks Ambassador and board member of The Centre for Investigative Journalism
Teresa Forcades Benedictine nun, Montserrat Monastery
Charles Glass American-British author, journalist, broadcaster
Chris Hedges journalist
Srecko Horvat philosopher, Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25)
Jean Michel Jarre, musician
John Kiriakou former CIA counterterrorism officer and former senior investigator, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
Lauri Love, computer scientist and activist
Ray McGovern former CIA analyst, Presidential advisor
John Pilger journalist and film-maker
Angela Richter, theater director, Germany
Saskia Sassen sociologist, Columbia University
Oliver Stone film-maker
Vaughan Smith English journalist
Yanis Varoufakis economist, former Greek finance minister
Natalia Viana investigative journalist and co-director of Agencia publica, Brazil
Ai Weiwei artist
Vivienne Westwood fashion designer and activist
Slavoj Žižek philosopher, Birkbeck Institute for Humanities

Source: Rogue Journalist

You can’t get more despicable than someone who attacks the powerless on behalf of the powerful while calling themselves a journalist.

Wired has just published what might be the single most brazenly dishonest and manipulative piece of down-punching empire smut that I have ever read.

An article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The Real Houseguest of the Ecuadorian Embassy” revolves around the outright lie that Julian Assange is suing the Ecuadorian government because he doesn’t feel like cleaning up after his cat and maintaining basic hygiene in the embassy he’s been confined to since 2012.

In reality, the legal case arose from the fact that despite being granted political asylum for his journalism, Assange has for months been cut off from the world and forbidden to practice journalism by the new government of Ecuador, and would remain unable to practice journalism under the new conditions Quito recently imposed upon him.

The article reads as though its author is attempting to force snarky humor through a thick fog of hatred and personal misery while seeing how many lies she can pack into each paragraph.

Heffernan claims falsely that Assange is “wanted on various criminal charges”; Assange has not been charged with anything.

Heffernan claims falsely that Assange “has been closely linked to the Kremlin and Russian president Vladimir Putin”; this is just objectively false with no evidence backing it up whatsoever.

Heffernan claims falsely that “the distinct possibility has surfaced that during his embassy tenure Assange communicated with Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s consigliere, via magic decoder rings or the internet”; there’s no evidence that Stone had any “back channel” with WikiLeaks, and the information he notoriously amplified was already public.

Heffernan claims falsely that WikiLeaks is “Russia-aligned”; another assertion for which there is zero evidence and much evidence to the contrary.

You get the picture. I’m not going to spend an entire article beating up on some writer for Wired just for authoring an amazingly horrible article about Julian Assange, especially when there are so very, very many other ambitious presstitutes falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to do the exact same thing right now.

Just as new information begins surfacing that Assange’s safety and security may be in immediate jeopardy, the brave, dauntless journalists of the establishment press have been working around the clock to bring their audiences as many versions as possible of the crucial bombshell news story that the WikiLeaks founder is a stinky, stinky man. Like it would even matter if that were true. Like the barely disguised plot to extradite a journalist for the crime of publishing facts to the same nation which tortured Chelsea Manning would be any less Orwellian if that journalist didn’t change his sheets often enough.

But that,  of course, is not the point. The point is to create public revulsion for Julian Assange, thereby killing sympathy for his unconscionable persecution and dampening the impact of any future WikiLeaks releases. The point is to marry Assange’s name with the idea of bad smells, so that the public will begin to find themselves increasingly disgusted by him and everything he stands for without quite remembering exactly why they feel such disdain for him.

And there are more than enough aspiring pundits out there trying to do exactly that. Every story you see about Assange’s plight in mainstream media now goes out of its way to drag the focus away from the fact that a political prisoner has had his important voice silenced, and suck it into some vapid narrative about personal hygiene and kitty litter. Every few minutes there’s some blue-checkmarked goon making a juvenile tweet about how weird and gross Julian Assange is like a high school bully. There is no shortage of empire loyalists looking to prove themselves worthy lackeys before the watchful eyes of current and future employers.

And make no mistake, that is all it is ever about. The reason almost every journalist below a certain age has a Twitter account these days is because they are taught in no uncertain terms that building a social media profile is an essential part of the job. They know that their social media presence can be just as much a determining factor in whether or not they keep climbing the ladder of prestige and influence as their resume is.

Reporters in western corporate media aren’t usually explicitly told to protect establishment interests, but the ones who consistently do are the ones who get hired to the choice jobs. Making a big show about what a good empire lackey you are by smearing Julian Assange at a key juncture in his fight is a great way to show your peers and superiors that you’re someone who plays along with the beltway groupthink, and the fact that Assange cannot defend himself from those smears makes it extremely risk-free.

So when you see some political writer yukking it up about Julian Assange and kitty litter, what they are really saying is, “Hey! Look at me! You can count on me to advance whatever narratives get passed down from on high! I’ll cheer on all the wars! I’ll play up the misdeeds of our great nation’s rivals and ignore the misdeeds of our allies! I’ll literally spit on Assange if you’ll give my career a boost!”

They are saying, “I support everything the media-controlling oligarchs support, and I hate everything they hate. I will be a reliable mouthpiece of the ruling class regardless of who is elected in our fake elections to our fake official government. I will say all the right things. I will protect what you need protected. I will hide what you want hidden. I understand what you want me to do without your explicitly telling me to do it. I’ve got what you need. I have no principles. Look, I’m even joining in the dog pile against a political prisoner who can’t defend himself.”

Reporters who bash Julian Assange while he is silenced instead of using their platforms to draw attention to the many, many wicked deeds that are being perpetrated by the powerful in their own country are the lowest of the low. They are scum. They are the scum that scum scrapes off its shoes. There is no more despicable, sniveling waste of space on this earth than someone who attacks the powerless on behalf of the powerful while calling themselves a journalist.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Morality and ethics are not even in the same universe as a corporation that is richer than all but 16 countries on the planet.

This is an extract from Apple, Inc: Slice the Fruit, Find the Cyanide by Ales Nesetril, which can be read in full here.

It has been about twenty years since Apple, Inc. released its “Think Different” marketing campaign. The advertisement beamed with reverence for figures such as Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. It encouraged viewers to challenge the status quo, rebelliously question authority, and push the human frontier forward. The connection between executing difficult acts of defiance and buying consumer electronics was not clarified. No explanation was necessary.

The success of the ad campaign, as measured by the boost in Apple’s brand value, presumably did not rely on how many free thinkers it actually generated. I just watched the minute-long clip again a few moments ago, and I too ballooned with glorious purpose to expose the first atrocity that came in my sights: Apple, Inc.

With a value of $1.06 trillion, Apple is the largest corporation in the world by market capitalization. This makes it a richer entity than all but 16 countries on the planet. It is what smaller corporations aspire to rival. Corporate boards around the world ponder over its success techniques. LinkedIn users vicariously celebrate Apple’s wealth through memes. Even outsider executives gleam at this monument of our global economic order, while business managers tenderly clutch copies of Apple’s innovation stories in their beds.

As can be attested by those in the tech industry, Apple directly or indirectly controls many industry-wide decisions made by various companies. This sway is not limited to consumer electronics only. It spans branding and marketing, venture investments, and practices in supply chain and operations. Hence, the company owns an intellectual monopoly within various industries, influencing domain experts, policy-makers, media members, and other agents of business society. Entire countries and communities are tied to great shifts caused by the moves of mega-corporations like Apple.

Further, corporations like Apple cumulatively operate political and economic monopolies in a supposedly democratic society. The public’s only role is to consume the outputs of their business and tolerate all associated externalities, so that the $1.06 trillion can grow boundlessly, as in Apple’s case. As Walter Lippmann, a leading political commentator in the 20th century remarked,

“The public must be put in its place, so that the responsible men may live free of the trampling and roar of a bewildered herd, ignorant and meddlesome outsiders whose function is to be interested spectators of action, not participants, lending their weight periodically to one or another of the leadership class (elections), then returning to their private concerns.” (Year 501, Chomsky)

For Apple and its owners, “living free” fundamentally means the unopposed ability to cheaply extract raw materials around the world; manufacture, package, and hawk products to make limitless profits; and continue to appreciate that capital in investment markets. This paragraph captures their life’s work and meaning.

Despite lofty PR claims about thinking differently, and the tasteless juxtaposition of Martin Luther King, Jr. while peddling electronics, the very existence of Apple’s concentrated wealth sufficiently proves the absence of democracy. Like all corporations, Apple will stop at nothing in its quest to maximize profit and market capitalization. Quaint constructs like democracy of wealth and decision-making are of immense concern, but only to the extent that they need to be stomped by influencing the state.

Evidence was provided in a 2014 Princeton Study, which showed that the US is decidedly an oligarchy. As the study describes,

“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.”

At the behest of corporations, political and economic democracy is obliterated. From 2017 to date, Apple has poisoned the veins of the electoral process with $10.9 million in campaign contributions to various political representatives. 35 out of their 42 lobbyists have previously held government jobs.

This is only symptomatic of a much larger epidemic, as explained by Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Thomas Ferguson in Golden Rule: The Investment Theory Of Party Competition And The Logic Of Money Driven Political Systems. In summary, Ferguson compellingly shows, with high predictive success, a truth that citizens instinctively know — that US elections are occasions in which coalitions of private capital invest to control the state.

Simply put, elections are bought and the buyers expect to be rewarded.

Maximizing revenue and minimizing costs are not conspiracies. These are programmatic requirements from corporations like Apple. Their profit-oriented operations operating under capitalist rules are fundamentally incapable of making sound engineering, planning and distribution decisions.

Morality and ethics are not even in the same universe, barring cheap PR stunts. Lighting up scarce resources, wasting limited energy and exploiting creative human energy to generate immense profits for a few owners is the central commandment. These are not mistakes, oversights or errant behaviors, but the predictable outcomes of a state-sponsored capitalist economy.

Political democracy and communal self-ownership of economies are threats to this commandment. Rejecting the notion of privatizing profits and socializing risks and costs is a step towards building alternatives. Much can be said to break the intellectual chokehold of corporations, raise spirits in the age of such titanically oppressive institutions, and encourage imaginative combat against tyranny. For now, two words should suffice:

Think different.

Extracted from Apple, Inc: Slice the Fruit, Find the Cyanide by Ales Nesetril. Read the full article here.

One of the all-time greatest actors speaking the provocative and profound words of one of the all-time greatest playwrights and political agitators.

Sir Mark Rylance is recognized as one of today’s finest actors, both in theatre and film. In 2016 he won the Oscar for best supporting actor in the film Bridge of Spies.

Harold Pinter was also a fine actor, but is best known as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, not least for his hugely influential plays.

The performance was part of a season of Pinter plays, which runs to February 2019, in celebration of Pinter’s literary legacy and to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his passing.  Artistic Director for the season,  Jamie Lloyd, said: “This is sure to be a powerful evening; one of the all-time greatest actors speaking the provocative and profound words of one of the all-time greatest playwrights and political agitators. The Nobel Lecture concerns the quest for truth in art and the scarcity of truth in politics. These performances couldn’t be more timely.”

And how right he was.

As well as in their professional lives, Mark Rylance and Harold Pinter were linked by their political activism, particularly in their opposition to injustice and war. Unsurprisingly, this led both to a close involvement with the Stop the War movement (STW), which was founded nearly two decades ago in response to the war in Afghanistan, and is one of the most significant mass movements in British history.

Pinter was a regular contributor to Stop the War events, speaking on demonstrations at which he often read a poem he had written especially for the occasion.

Mark Rylance says the STW demonstration on 15 February 2003, when two million came onto London’s streets in protest against the Iraq war, was “one of the most profound moments of my life”. Rylance is today a STW patron, regularly appearing at its events. His two performaces of Pinter’s Nobel lecture were also fundraising events for Stop the War.

Harold Pinter was seriously ill in 2005 with advanced cancer and other health issues, so was unable to travel to Norway to make his acceptance speech in person, delivering it instead on film from his wheelchair. It was – despite Pinter’s obvious physical discomfort and his seriously weakened voice – an electric performance, in which his anger at the injustices of the world were given powerful expression, in a speech which stands in its importance as one of the great radical speeches since the end of World War Two.

Mark Rylance’s performance brilliantly caught the rhythms and intonation of Pinter’s own voice, and the intensity of his outrage over the momentous crimes against humanity that went unrestrained and unpunished – particularly those committed in the name of US foreign policy.

He moved purposefully round the stage, savouring every sentence of Pinter’s text, the theme of which centred on truth, and how it is portrayed both in literature and in the world generally. Pinter opened his speech with this statement:

In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth is forever elusive in drama, says Pinter. But truth is also elusive in political language, due to how it is filtered through the media, and because

… the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

Behind this “vast tapestry of lies”, says Pinter, lies a reality in which “the United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War”, from Nicaragua to Greece, from Indonesia to Chile.

This is in addition to US wars in Korea and Vietnam and – in Pinter’s final years – Afghanistan and Iraq, which, he says, “was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law”. Pointing his finger at George W Bush and Tony Blair, Pinter asks, “How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought.”

And since Pinter’s death, we have had the invasion of Libya, the catastrophic subversion by the US and its allies in Syria and countless other interventions.

Was all this mass slaughter and destruction attributable to American foreign policy? asks Pinter. “The answer is yes,” he says. “But you wouldn’t know it”. Adding in a now much quoted passage:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

This was a theme taken up by the audience in the Q&A which followed the performance, in which Mark Rylance was joined by two founder members of Stop the War, Lindsey German and Chris Nineham.

One of the first quesions raised from the audience was whether the root cause of endless war we experience today was the result of human nature, rather than a consequence of US foreign policy, as Pinter argues. To which Chris Nineham replied that people are not ‘naturally’ predisposed to be aggressive and uncaring; look at people’s daily lives and we see that it is collaboration and unselfishness which are the main characteristics. Lindsey German added that how people act depends on the social context in which they live: there are many examples of societies in which war and conflict are not the predominant values, as they are today, particularly in the world as dominated by US imperialism.

The musician Dave Randall asked about Jeremy Corbyn, who has inspired a movement for justice and peace which grew directly out of the anti-war movement. Corbyn was for many years the chair of Stop the War before his leadership transformed the Labour Party into the biggest political party in Europe. How could he be supported?

Mark Rylance replied that it is in collective action that we can best support a politician like Corbyn. But Harold Pinter had also given an answer to this question in his summing up at the end of his Nobel speech:

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.  

The final question from the audience asked the panel why we are so powerless when there are so many of us, and why is it that those in power, who are so few in number, are not scared of the vast majority.

To which another audience member replied: But they are scared, which is why they do everything they can to vilify and smear someone like Jeremy Corbyn, who has inspired a mass movement committed to the causes of peace and social justice, and looks like he is on the brink of forming a government based on those values.

It is a reply that Harold Pinter would have welcomed.

This was a very special evening to be long treasured by all who were there, and it is hard to imagine another actor who could have captured both the spirit and meaning of Pinter’s words with the clarity and emotional force that Mark Rylance gave to them.

Mark Rylance interviewed on BBC Andrew Marr programme

Source: Fair

Calling a government a “regime” suggests a lack of legitimacy, with the implication that its ousting would serve humanitarian and democratic ends.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an article in the Miami Herald (8/5/18) reported that “a clandestine group formed by Venezuelan military members opposed to the regime of Nicolás Maduro claimed responsibility.” A New York Times op-ed (8/10/18) mused, “No one knows whether the Maduro regime will last decades or days.” AFP (8/12/18) reported that “Trump has harshly criticized Maduro’s leftist regime.”

The word “regime” implies that the government to which the label is applied is undemocratic, even tyrannical, so it’s peculiar that the term is used in Venezuela’s case, since the country’s leftist government has repeatedly won free and fair elections (London Review of Books, 6/29/17). One could argue that, strictly speaking, “regime” can simply mean a system, and in some specific, infrequent contexts, that may be how it’s used. But broadly the word “regime” suggests a government that is unrepresentative, repressive,  corrupt, aggressive—without the need to offer any evidence of these traits.

Interestingly, the US itself meets many of the criteria for being a “regime”: It can be seen as an oligarchy rather than a democracy, imprisons people at a higher rate than any other country, has grotesque levels of inequality and bombs another country every 12 minutes. Yet there’s no widespread tendency for the corporate media to describe the US state as a “regime.”

The function of “regime” is to construct the ideological scaffolding for the United States and its partners to attack whatever country has a government described in this manner. According to the mainstream media, the democratically elected government of Nicaragua is a “regime” (Washington Post, 7/11/18). Cuba also has a “regime” (Washington Post, 7/25/18). Iraq and Libya used to have “regimes”—before the United States implemented “regime change.” North Korea most definitely has one (New York Times, 7/26/18), as do China (Washington Post, 8/3/18) and Russia (Wall Street Journal, 7/15/18).

When, for the media, does a government become a “regime”? The answer, broadly speaking: A country’s political leaders are likely to be called a “regime” when they do not follow US dictates, and are less likely to be categorized as such if they cooperate with the empire.

‘Regimes’ in Latin America

A search run with the media aggregator Factiva finds that in the nearly 20 years since Venezuela first elected a Chavista government, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have used the phrase “Venezuelan regime” 74 times, “regime in Venezuela” 30 times, “Chávez regime” 68 times, “Maduro regime” 168 times and “regime in Caracas” five times. All of these governments have been democratically elected, but have sinned by trying to carve out a path independent of US control.

Consider, by contrast, coverage of Honduras. The country is hardly lacking in characteristics associated with a “regime.” On June 28, 2009, a US-backed military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya, replacing it with a US-friendly administration. Since then, Honduras has become the most dangerous place for journalists in the Americas; labor leaders and environmental activists have also been regularly targeted for assassination.

According to a Factiva search, the phrase “Honduran regime” has never appeared in the Times, Journal and Post in the years following the coup, and collectively they used the phrase “regime in Honduras” once: It appeared in a Washington Post article (3/31/16) about the assassinations of Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres and other environmentalists in the region, in a quote by a professor critical of US support for Latin American dictatorships.

While Honduras’s three post-coup presidents have governed a country where “impunity for human rights abuses remains the norm,” according to Human Rights Watch, these leaders have almost never been described as running a “regime.” A Post editorial (9/5/09) included the only appearance of “Micheletti regime” in any of the three papers. “Lobo regime” returns zero search results. The New York Times (2/16/16) has used “Hernández regime” once, but Factiva indicates that the Post and Journal never have. Searches for “regime in Tegucigalpa” or “Tegucigalpa regime” produced zero results.

Middle Eastern ‘Regimes’

Since the war in Syria ignited on March 15, 2011, “Syrian regime” has been used 5,355 times, “Assad regime” 7,853 times, “regime in Syria” 836 times, and “regime in Damascus” 282 times in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

Washington’s economic and military partner Saudi Arabia is described as having a “regime” far less often than is Syria, despite its rather “regime”-like qualities: Its unelected government represses dissidents, including advocates for women and its Shia minority, and carries out executions at an extraordinary clip, including of people accused of adultery, apostasy and witchcraft. Saudi Arabia crushed an uprising in neighboring Bahrain in 2011, and with its US and UK partners, is carrying out an almost apocalyptic war in Yemen.

In the same period examined in the Syrian case, the phrase “Saudi regime” was used 145 times by the same papers, while “regime in Saudi Arabia” registers four hits and “regime in Riyadh” can be found once, in the Post (11/29/17).

Saudi leaders can rest assured that their names are unlikely to be associated with running a “regime”: Factiva indicates that the three publications never used the phrase “Abdullah regime” in the relevant period, while “Salman regime” pops up only once, in a Post editorial (5/3/15).

The Iranian Revolution culminated on February 11, 1979, and the US ruling class has seen Iran’s government as an arch-enemy ever since. Factiva searches of the intervening years turn  up 3,201 references to “Iranian regime,” in the Times, Journal and Post, as well as 326 to “regime in Iran,” 502 to “regime in Tehran,” 258 to “Khomeini regime,” 31 to “Ahmadinejad regime” and five to “Rouhani regime.”

The case of stalwart US ally Israel offers an illuminating counterpoint. Even though Israel violently rules over 2.5 Palestinians in the West Bank and keeps 2 million under siege in Gaza, and even though Palestinians living as citizens of Israel face institutional discrimination, the Israeli government is almost never described as a “regime” in a way that carries the negative connotations discussed above.

A New York Times article (8/2/91) on the Gulf War used the phrase “the obdurate Israeli regime” to describe Israeli conduct in regional negotiations. In 1992, a Washington Post op-ed (3/11/92) called for America to accept Jewish people from the just-collapsed Soviet Union in part because “elements in the Israeli regime are quite ready to place the [Jewish people who moved to Israel from the USSR] in harm’s way,” a reference to the idea that Palestinians are a threat to them. A Wall Street Journal article (7/12/99) employed the term “Israeli regime” in 1999 to describe Ehud Barak’s administration as taking over from “the previous Israeli regime” of Benjamin Netanyahu, and a piece in the Washington Post (10/1/96) used the phrase in the same way.

Otherwise, “Israeli regime” appears in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post when the phrase is attributed to critics of Israel (e.g., Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying, “Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken”—New York Times, 5/12/08), or is part of a compound referring to a country other than Israel, as when Egypt is described as having a “pro-Israeli regime,” or Syria is called an “anti-Israeli regime.”

“Sharon regime” yields four results. There are no results for “Olmert regime.” Since Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, Factiva shows, the only use of “Netanyahu regime” in any of these papers was a Washington Post article (3/1/15);  there are three instances of the phrase in these papers from his first go-round (1996–99). The New York Times referred to Israel as the “regime in Jerusalem” once in 1981 (3/2/81) and again in 1994 (1/6/94). “Regime in Tel Aviv” only appears when it’s part of a quote from someone criticizing Israel.

Calling a government a “regime” suggests a lack of legitimacy, with the implication that its ousting (by whatever means) would serve humanitarian and democratic ends; it’s no accident that the phrase is “regime change,” not “government change” or “administration change.” The obverse is also true: The authority of a “government” is more apt to be seen as legitimate,  with resistance to it or defense against it frequently depicted as criminal or terroristic. Thus corporate media help instruct the population that the enemies of the US ruling class need to be eliminated, while its friends deserve protection.

Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, is published by OR Books.

Source: Middle East Eye

The Labour leader’s opponents don’t care about anti-Semitism. They’ll just do anything to remove Corbyn – smearing, libelling, intimidating.

Last week, Britain’s three Jewish newspapers, who usually feud with each other, joined forces to post a joint editorial declaring that a Corbyn-led government would pose “an existential threat” to British Jews.

The campaign’s real purpose

On Saturday, the Daily Mail claimed that Corbyn had laid a wreath at the grave of two Palestinians who had allegedly organised the Munich Olympic massacre. Today the mass circulation tabloid, The Sun, ran two pieces in the same edition. One was a “letter’s special” declaring that Boris Johnson was “bang on” when he said that women who wear burqas resemble letter boxes or bank robbers: “Boris must be allowed to speak honestly, he has nothing to apologise for.”

Just imagine what would have happened if Corbyn had mocked the Kippah, overtly and brazenly, in a national newspaper.

The other was an editorial saying that Corbyn was unfit to be Labour leader and “cannot be allowed near government”.  At least – at last- we are arriving at the purpose of this campaign. It is clear now it has nothing to do with the actual and verifiable state of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, or Corbyn turning up at cemeteries in Tunis in 2014 for Palestinian refugees.

It is crystal clear that its purpose is to take out the leader of the opposition by using the tactics of fascists – smearing, libelling, intimidating.

Unable to put up a candidate capable of defeating him by democratic means, at the ballot box, unable to attack him on his polices for which there is majority support in the country, Corbyn’s detractors have methodically and consistently set about the task of character assassination.

And, of course, it works.

Feeding the crocodile

Corbyn is facing the biggest threat to his leadership since the “coup” organised by his parliamentary party. He is also increasingly isolated among his own supporters. John McDonnell, Corbyn’s closest ally, who shuns foreign policy, thinks this is not Labour’s fight. Emily Thornberry, his shadow foreign secretary, has not said a word.

Ed Milliband, the former Labour leader under whose tenure anti-Semitism was historically greater than during Corbyn’s reign, has offered little support. Union leaders are pealing away. Muslim groups do not want to know. Corbyn is alone.

And the result is that Corbyn feels he is left with no option but to back down, apologise, accept the contentious “working examples” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism one by one, in a slow, painful retreat.

This is a disastrous miscalculation. Corbyn’s “apologies” for crimes of which he is innocent, only feed the crocodile. As the Georgians say: “Once you run out of chickens to throw the crocodile, it will have your arm.” Whether Corbyn survives this onslaught or not, everyone who is taking part, either wittingly or unwittingly, in this campaign should beware of getting what they want.

Whatever happens to Corbyn, there are three victims of this dirty episode.

The victims

The first is the truth: Almost every time you take a specific allegation and examine it, the evidence crumbles like sand in your hands. Let’s take the latest: that Corbyn laid a wreath at the graves of two Palestinian terrorists. It turns out he didn’t lay a wreath at that grave, which was 15 yards away, but was present when a wreath was laid. The wreath was for everyone at the cemetery: Palestinians who died under bombardment, those who were assassinated, and those who had simply died in exile.

And who were these two terrorists, anyway? Both were PLO men, the Palestinian faction that went on to negotiate Oslo and recognise Israel. One was Salah Khalaf, who met with the US ambassador in Tunis as part of the dialogue with the PLO authorised by the then US Secretary of State James Baker. Does this make Baker guilty of the same crime Corbyn has just committed?

Khalaf was identified by the Americans as a pragmatist who was shifting PLO policy. The second one was Atef Bseiso, the PLO’s liaison officer with the CIA. Israel accused him of involvement in the Munich massacre, although it is a matter of historical dispute as to how many of those assassinated were directly linked to Munich. French intelligence traced his assassination in Paris to Abu Nidal, and the PLO accused the Mossad.

Khalaf, also known as Abu Iyad, was head of intelligence for the PLO and Arafat’s right hand man. Jack Straw laid a wreath at Arafat’s grave. Should Straw be now outed for doing so? Bseiso and Khalaf hail from the days in the early 1970’s of Black September.

So how far do you want to go back in history? Israel had two prime ministers who were former terrorists from the bombings they helped organise in 1944.

Menachim Begin was a leader of Irgun, an underground Zionist paramilitary group whose aim was to force the British to leave Palestine. Irgun staged a series of bombings in 1944 against British targets, the Immigration Department, the tax offices, a series of police stations. His face appears on a wanted poster issued by the Palestine Police Force.

Yitzak Shamir was a member of Lehi, or the notorious Stern Gang, who assassinated Lord Moyne, the British resident minister in the Middle East. Both Begin and Shamir are celebrated as freedom fighters in Israel.

McCarthyism at work

The second victim of this campaign are the Palestinians.The aim is to terrify all Labour politicians from any contact with Palestinian organisations either in the present or the past. The IHRA’s anti-Semitism definition, which is not legally binding, will be used as a retro-active weapon.

If this sounds like the tactics US Senator Joseph McCarthy used in the early 1950s against suspected communists – “reds under the bed” – at the height of the cold war, it is because it is. From now on, any past contact, any event, any platform shared with Palestinian groups, supporters, activists, and photograph that emerges from the bowels of Israel’s psych-ops servers could be used to destroy a British politician’s reputation as effectively as Corbyn’s has.

It is every British party’s policy to back – the now moribund – two state solution. That means to set up a viable Palestinian State. This campaign effectively paralyses any communication between Palestinian activists and British politicians.

I am addressing this point specifically to Corbyn’s enemies on the right of the party and to the Parliamentary Party. Do you seriously want the same tactics you have used, or colluded with, against Corbyn, to be used against you? Do you really think British democracy is the winner as a result?

If anyone seriously thinks that having taken out Corbyn this campaign will stop there, they are deluding themselves.

Everyone’s fight

The third victim of this campaign is anyone, be they Palestinian or Israeli, Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, who is identified by Israel as a dissenter.

Let’s just record what happened to Jewish American journalist Peter Beinart at Ben Gurion Airport. Beinart, who has publicly expressed his support for boycotting products manufactured in the settlements in the occupied West Bank, was interrogated for an hour about his political writings and activities .

“The session ended when my interrogator asked me, point blank, if I was planning to attend another protest,” Beinart wrote. “I answered truthfully: No. With that I was sent back to the holding room.” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu immediately rowed back and claimed Beinart’s interrogation had been an “administrative mistake”.

For US Jews and indeed British ones, this is a real canary in the coal mine. This is the path on which Israel is headed, and Israel is dragging the Jewish diaspora along. Speak up now and resist it before it is too late. Corbyn’s fight for his own integrity, reputation and honesty is everyone’s fight.

If you don’t, if you stand aside, if you stay silent, if you grin knowingly and do nothing, you will be next.

– David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He was chief foreign leader writer of The Guardian, former Associate Foreign Editor, European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, European Correspondent, and Ireland Correspondent. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: Medium

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. We need to cultivate an aggressive disgust for all attempts by the powerful to manipulate the public dialogue.

One of the weirdest things about the post-Iraq invasion world is how the mass media has actually gotten less accountable instead of more accountable for its reporting since that time.

Right now in the UK there’s an amazingly viral smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn running across all mainstream outlets, which, from what I can tell, consists entirely of narrative spin and no actual evidence. The powerful elites who control British mass media have an obvious vested interest in keeping the UK government from moving to the left, so they advance the absolutely insane narrative that Corbyn is a secret Nazi. They just keep saying it and saying it like it’s true until people start believing it without feeling any pressure at all to substantiate their narrative with facts. It’s been jaw-dropping to watch.

More and more we are seeing narratives about cyber-threats being used to advance reports of “attacks” and “acts of war” being perpetrated which, as far as the public is concerned, consist of nothing other than the authoritative assertions of confident-sounding media pundits. There was a recent NBC exclusive which was co-authored by Ken Dilanian, who is an actual, literal CIA asset, about the threat of hackers working for the Iranian government. The alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections is now routinely compared to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, despite no hard, verifiable evidence that that interference even took place ever being presented to the public.

After the mass media’s complicity in selling the Iraq invasion to the western world, we should have seen scores of people fired and changes put in place to prevent such unforgivable complicity from ever occurring again. Instead, no changes whatsoever were made to ensure that news media outlets never facilitate another disaster at the hands of secretive government agencies, and now these same outlets are allowed to promote world-shaping narratives on no evidentiary basis beyond “It’s true because we said so.”

There’s a consensus, agreed-upon narrative about what’s going on in the world that is advanced by all mass media outlets regardless of what political sector those outlets market themselves to. Exactly what should be done about individual events and situations might vary a bit from pundit to pundit and outlet to outlet, but the overall “how it is” narrative about what’s happening is the same across the board. This is the official narrative, and the plutocrat-owned media/political class has full control over it.

We all know the official narratives, right? The US and its allies are good, the latest Official Bad Guy is bad. You live in a democracy where your vote counts and your government is accountable to you and your countrymen, just like they taught you in school. The two political parties are totally different and their opposition is totally real. The news man on TV never reports any falsehoods because if he did he’d lose his job, which means that the Russian hacking thing, the Syria thing, the 9/11 thing, all happened exactly as the government told us they happened. Iraq was maybe kinda sorta a mistake, but nothing like that could ever happen again because mumble mumble cough hey look what Kanye West is doing.

Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario, though. Let’s imagine a world where there were no official narratives. About anything. At all.

What if there was no dominating elite class telling the public how they were meant to interpret events and situations? What if there was only the raw, publicly available information about what’s going on in the world, and people individually interpreted that information for themselves? And what if they came to differing conclusions, and that was allowed to be okay? What if there was no elite class telling everyone that whoever doesn’t believe X, Y and Z is a paranoid conspiracy theorist, a raving lunatic, and/or a Kremlin propagandist who needs to be shunned and silenced? What if all that were solely determined by the collective, without the control or oversight of any powerful, dominating class?

What would that be like?

You may find that your results in this thought experiment depend largely on where you place your trust. If you trust the dominating class more than you trust people as a collective, you probably find this idea terrifying. What if everyone starts thinking wrong thoughts and believing wrong beliefs? What if everyone decides that humans can fly when they leap from rooftops and running with scissors is safe? What if everyone decides the Holocaust never happened and says “Hell, that means we get a freebie! Let’s get our Final Solution on y’all! Yeehaw!”

If, however, you trust humanity as a collective more than you trust a small group of sociopathic, omnicidal, ecocidal oligarchs who killed a million people in Iraq, you might suspect that whatever happened would surely be better than what happens in the current paradigm.

Without an elite class manipulating the way people think and vote into alignment with plutocratic interests, people would still be able to take actions in response to their best guess about what’s going on in the world. The narrative of anthropogenic climate change for example would in my opinion have a much better fighting chance of winning out in the marketplace of ideas if it were permitted to stand on the merit of the raw supporting data, rather than the manipulations of big oil on one hand and an elite faux liberal class convincing everyone that climate chaos can be averted by banning straws and buying a Prius on the other, and the collective would be able to democratically mobilize to avert catastrophe far more effectively than it can now.

Now let’s consider another hypothetical scenario: what if one day, everyone gets tired of official narratives? What if something happens and everyone gets fed up with being told how they have to think about the world by a thoroughly discredited media and political class? What if, to borrow from a popular Marxist meme, the public decides to seize the means of narrative production?

This might look like the increasingly distrusted propaganda machine of a failing empire pushing an increasingly oppressed populace too far and too hard at some point, maybe in the direction of war, mass censorship or austerity, and losing control of the narrative in a nonviolent populist information rebellion. Instead of the elites being lined up for guillotines, the mass media outlets and talking heads on TV are simply seen for the discredited voices that they are, and people begin creating their own narratives about situations and events. The most popular narratives rise to the top and determine the direction that society takes itself, rather than the narratives forcefully promulgated by media-owning plutocrats. This would be made far easier without the imperialist divide-and-conquer tactics of the establishment manipulators who keep us all pitted against each other in insulated political factions.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The world is better off being controlled by the collective will of the people rather than the will of a few sociopathic oligarchs, and we absolutely have the ability to take that control by force whenever we want to. All we have to do is shift value and credibility from plutocrat-generated narratives to popular collective narratives, and cultivate an aggressive disgust for all attempts by the powerful to manipulate the public dialogue.

Once the way people think, act and vote is no longer manipulated by an elite class which does not represent the interests of humanity, our species will have a fighting chance at moving society out of its patterns of exploitation, war and ecocide and into a direction of health, harmony and thriving. I’m just going to keep pointing out that this is always an option, hoping for a spark to catch someday.

Caitlin Johnstone posts articles regularly on her website Rogue Journalist

See also:
Noam Chomsky: The five filters of the mass media