The 'slow crucifixion' of Assange is situated at the crossroads of current international crises - Covid-19, Ukraine, the 'Climate Crisis'. Why is his work and fate so central to our shared future?
Assange, crucified, in the (fictional, dystopic) Gilead (the former US). SOURCE: Original collage; with a screengrab of “The Handmaids Tale“ [S3 Ep 6], Joe Biden & VP Harris commemorating 400,000 Covid US deaths (Covid News), and “Collateral Crucifixion” (2021)by Captain Borderline.NOTES: Ironically, Gilead is also the name of a prominent pharmaceutical company (the makers of Remdesivir), Even more ironically, in the wake of Covid, handmaid has acquired new meaning in Canada - where MAID now signifies legally permitted Medical Assistance In Dying.
Latest UPDATE 13 November 2023
This essay is the tenth and final part of a series about the persecution of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (and, to a lesser extent, all those associated with them).
It may also be the most controversial. (I hasten to add that it contains a very personal point of view which is not - in any way - intended to represent the position of the official Assange campaign or the #FreeAssange community, except where quoted directly.) It is quite long, so you may prefer to read it in chunks.
This series began with an essay, and it ends (for now) with another. In between have been seven living compendia1 (plus one “correct the record” podcast review) - source materials that illustrate various aspects of the persecution of a journalist, publisher, high tech maestro, family man and courageous human being.
All previous episodes are listed at the foot of this essay. There may be further episodes in the future, as events unfold - I will be delighted to create another when/if Julian is finally freed from his incarceration. But for now, here endeth the lesson in the cruelties of the powerful to those who would speak the truth.
[UPDATE: Julian Assange was released from HMP Belmarsh on 24 June 2024 and PART 11 was published after his first public speech (to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe - PACE) on 1 October 2024.]
This series began, in PART 1, with a tweet from Ciaron O’Reilly that drew my attention to a potential link between Julian Assange and Julian of Norwich. This led to my examining parallels between the two Julians who, seven centuries apart, each survived a pandemic that claimed millions, lived much of their lives in seclusion, but whose words travelled out from the small spaces in which they were confined to make a large difference in the lives of people across the world. Both were committed to searching for, and sharing, important truths, while each sacrificed their own comfort and liberty to that end. And each had a cat as a companion (as does this writer).
IMAGES: [L] The cat of Julian of Norwich, from stained glass window, Norwich Cathedral. [R] Embassy Cat. SOURCES: Wikimedia Commons.& [Tweet image]. See PART 1 of this series.
Ciaron O’Reilly was also quoted (from a tweet that now seems to have disappeared) in a John Jiggens article entitled “The slow-motion crucifixion of Julian Assange”.
In both tweets, Ciaron O’Reilly alluded to the “vigil” that the apostles kept (or didn’t keep) in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before the arrest of Jesus Christ.
“To "vigil" is to stay awake while #British society slumbers to [the] ongoing slow motion crucifixion of #FreeJulian #FreeAssange A society where fellow journalists, academics & church leaders keep a house broken silence on ongoing persecution of a publisher who has published the truth.” - Quoted in “The slow-motion crucifixion of Julian Assange“ (14 July 2019)
Emmy Butlin, of JADC, one of those who maintained vigil outside the Ecuadorian Embassy over the whole period Julian Assange was there, described how she and others from that group continued their “solidarity vigils” after his arrest:
“We followed him. We were faithful to what we said we were going to do and follow him to where he is. We continue our solidarity vigils outside HMP Belmarsh, where he is, and elsewhere in London.”
In his first speech from the embassy balcony (Aug 2012) after being granted asylum, Assange himself referred to the “vigil” kept outside the Ecuadorian Embassy by supporters at a time when it looked like the UK police would storm the building. He credits their vigilance with halting that legal and diplomatic catastrophe. He went on:
“So the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the Embassy of Ecuador. Remind them how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world.”
O’Reilly has spoken often about Assange in “Easter” terms. On #Unity4J’s Vigil 2.O (July 2018) he put it very simply: “To me, as a Christian, it’s a slow crucifixion.”2
It is a way of seeing Julian’s persecution that is shared by many others.
For Easter 2019 (just after Julian’s arrest) the Norwegian Street artist AFK mounted this image, complete with mourners at the foot of the (invisible) cross - implied by the crosshairs of the telescopic sight:
“Assange is dressed in a costume similar to that of the prisoners in the US-run torture prison, Abu Ghraib in Iraq. A press card with the inscription “Free Press” hangs around his neck and covers his chest. Julian Assange and the “Free Press” card are placed right in the firing line, framed by a crosshair of a telescopic sight. In the crosshairs, we read the text “If you tolerate this … who will be next?” Under Assange sits two figures with bowed heads. One of them is the American Statue of Liberty, while the other is Justitia or Lady Justice. Both are clearly burdened by shame. Between them is the inscription “1984 is so yesterday.””
In 2020, Kenneth MacAskill MP, for seven years Justice Secretary of Scotland, called the prosecution of Julian Assange a "political crucifixion" which is "about seeking to bury truth and those exposing it".
During Easter 2022 this cartoon by political Mexican cartoonist Antonio Rodríguez was tweeted with the label “Via crucis" (way of the cross)”:
That same Easter, Somerset Bean thought a Leunig cartoon on the same theme suitable for illustrating the powerful example that the persecution of Assange is providing to both current investigative journalists and the younger generation - an example that is perhaps the primary purpose of the exercise. He tweeted this image:
Father Dave, speaking at the November 2021 Sydney premiere of the film “Ithaka”, also thought the crucifixion analogy appropriate:
“There are some people you just can't kill, because there are some messages that just cannot be silenced. The truth ultimately cannot be crucified. The truth ultimately will come out.
Julian is the public face of our resistance. We will not be silenced. We will not allow them to crucify the messenger.
God bless Julian. God bless us all.”
Screengrab from “ITHAKA World Premiere - New Julian Assange Documentary“ (8 November 2021) [YouTube]
At The Belmarsh Tribunal (25 Feb 2022), Chris Hedges (an ordained Presbyterian minister as well as a prize-winning journalist) said:
“Beyond his great public service with WikiLeaks, it is his unwillingness to surrender his integrity and dignity that is key to understanding why the powers that be continue to crucify him.”
Australian journalist Andrew Fowler has also spoken (26 Aug 2020) on that theme:
“If Julian Assange can be tortured and killed in prison so can we. .. He understood how power truly operates in an empire ... he's a journalistic guide ... It's very painful to witness the Calvary3 he's been put through.”
And then, of course, there is the Captain Borderline image from the opening pastiche, that comes alive on their website in video form (unfortunately not reproduceable here) with the soundtrack from “Collateral Murder” playing as the image is animated.
The crucifixion theme is powerful in both Anglo and northern European (predominantly Protestant) countries and in southern European, Latin American, and some Asian (predominantly Catholic) countries. In Russia too (and other predominantly Orthodox Christian countries), and the former European colonies in Africa. It speaks straight to the heart of the issue - one brave and far-sighted man is being tortured by the powerful, and displayed in all his agony in order to create fear and timidity in all of us.
But … (and it is a big but) … the other side of the crucifixion theme is the awakening that follows in those who bear witness to it. A bright light is shone on the possibility of a whole new way of living (or, as Nils Melzer puts it, a candle is lit in a dark room). If we can wake up to the truths Julian Assange has shared (and that his treatment by the authorities in multiple jurisdictions has revealed) and act on our highest instincts, we can save ourselves and our children, and our world, from the psychologically and environmentally polluted and increasingly authoritarian hell that is being enacted all around us.
On the eve of the first episode in the 2020 extradition hearing(22 Feb 2020), a large crowd gathered to protest the whole process. Full speeches here. Kristinn Hrafnsson told them:
“We're dealing with a Dark Force ... Tell everybody that you know they must side with Assange & fight this extradition.
If they say "I would rather fight for [XYZ]" tell them ... "They're about to take every right away from you. You won't be able to fight for any other cause.” We are talking about the fundamentals here.
In essence, if we can save Julian, perhaps we can also save ourselves (and our planet).
In essence, if we can save Julian, perhaps we can also save ourselves (and our planet).
The people who invoke this parallel - between Julian Assange and Jesus Christ - intend no blasphemy. Most take very seriously Christian (and other) teachings that all human beings contain a divine spark, which they can choose to amplify (or not):
“For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are children of God.” - (Romans 8:14) and
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” - (Matthew 5:9)
“I know a lot of people find this image [see above] by my friend Luke Cornish [E.L.K.] of Julian being crucified offensive. They say it makes him out to be a Christ figure. They miss the point.
The Roman Empire crucified lots of people apart from Jesus. They crucified thousands of people in their day. They crucified anyone who dared to question their ultimate authority.
And long before the cross was ever a symbol of faith, it was a symbol of imperial power. After the failed revolt of the slaves under Spartacus (in 73 BCE) the Roman Empire crucified 6,000 slaves and put their tortured bodies on display over a 200 kilometer stretch of the Via Appia. This was their way of saying that: “We are all powerful and you are nothing”. That “We have the power of life and death, the power to imprison, the power to kill. And who are you to question us?”
IMAGE: In Game of Thrones, the crucifixion of 163 slave children by the Masters of Meereen, was returned in kind by Daenerys when she later crucified the same number of Masters after her conquest of the city. That avenue of the crucified was inspired by the Via Appia. SOURCE: Screengrab from Season 4. See commentary here [YouTube]
Father Dave continues:
”Empires changed as the centuries go by, but the lust for power, the arrogance, and the assumption of impunity remains the same. “Who are you to question us? How dare you call us to account? What is your truth compared to our power?”
Today's empire is trying to turn our brother Julian Assange himself into a symbol of their power. Like the crosses that lined the Via Appia, they hold him up for the world to see - as a warning to anyone who had questioned their authority. Dare to call the empire to account and this will happen to you too.
And yet, around 2,000 years ago, the cross was adopted as a symbol of faith by one small group of people who came to believe that imperial violence did not have the final word. Some people, they believed, could not be crucified. Some voices just couldn't be silenced. When the light of truth is genuinely shining, the darkness can never ultimately put it out.
Forgive me if I'm starting to sound a bit religious. It's an occupation hazard. But this really is a battle of light against darkness. Julian is being crucified because he spoke the truth, because he exposed crimes - terrible crimes of murder and violence - and it's the persons responsible for those crimes who should be being dragged before the courts to give account of themselves.
Don't crucify the messenger, that's my plea. Don't bother, because you can't ultimately silence the message of truth. And don't do it because we, the Australian people, demand that you bring this fellow son of our sunburnt country, our fellow Australian Julian Assange, our brother, that you bring him home.”
At The Belmarsh Tribunal Chris Hedges went on in a somewhat milder form (although I am sure he would have agreed with Father Dave’s more dramatic tirade):
“Today I want us to reflect on Julian himself. For Julian, endowed with precocious skills, could easily have been someone else. He could have sold his talents to Silicon Valley, to Wall Street, or to intelligence and surveillance agencies who would have paid handsomely. He could have built a lucrative career, one where he was financially secure, perhaps wealthy. He could have obtained the possessions we are told in our consumer society we should aspire to: an opulent house, luxury cars, financial security, fine clothes, and the status that comes with material acquisition and advancement within the structures of power. No worries. No controversy. No persecution.
But to follow this route, a route many have followed, would have required Julian to surrender his integrity and his dignity. It would have required him to forsake justice and freedom, to suppress and control the aspirations of the vast majority locked outside the golden gates of privilege and power. It would have placed him within the interlocking systems designed by the ruling elites to concentrate privilege, wealth, and power among themselves. It would have required Julian to become a cog in the mega machine, to play a part in constructing our corporate totalitarianism.
Julian chose not to do this. He turned away from the siren call of success, at least as it is defined by the powerful. He set out on the difficult road taken by all who fight the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. A life of meaning is a life of confrontation; when you resist radical evil you jeopardize your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic.
When you stand with the oppressed, the crucified of the earth, then you are treated like the oppressed. You too are crucified.
On 20 April 2022, the ‘case’ of Julian Assange returned to Westminster Court, after an appeal by the defense had been refused a hearing in the UK Supreme Court.
The judge (Paul Goldspring), acting in the place of the original judge Vanessa Baraitser (who had since been moved on), washed his hands of Julian Assange.
“The judge speaks directly to Assange. "Mr. Assange can you hear me?" "Yes" Judge explains that today's hearing "requires me to act as if Baraitser had decided in favor of extradition"”
“Judge to Assange: "I am duty bound to send your case to the Secretary of State".” “Judge to Assange: I'm obliged to explain to you matters in Section 92 (of Extradition Act) a) You have the right to appeal to High Court. If you do, it will not be heard until the Sec of State has made her decision under the act”
“Judge to Assange: The same exceptions to bail apply, and I remand you in custody pending decision from Sec of State. "Thank you very much, you can go with the officers." Hearing ends.”
On 17 June 2022, the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel signed the extradition order, with her staff making much the same handwashing excuses:
A Home Office spokesperson said, “Under the Extradition Act 2003, the secretary of state mustsign an extradition order if there are no grounds to prohibit the order being made.
“Extradition requests are only sent to the home secretary once a judge decides it can proceed after considering various aspects of the case.
“On 17 June, following consideration by both the magistrates court and high court, the extradition of Mr Julian Assange to the US was ordered. Mr Assange retains the normal 14-day right to appeal.
“In this case, the UK courts have not found that it would be oppressive, unjust or an abuse of process to extradite Mr Assange.”
[Of course it is arguable whether there were really “no grounds to prohibit the order being made” and so that is being appealed, but we don’t need to discuss that here.]
The BBC legal correspondent went further (with no link to source)
“Her officials said she was legally bound to do so because Mr Assange does not face the death penalty - nor does his case fall into the other narrow range of categories for her to refuse to approve the transfer.”
Nils Melzer, (then) the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, responded (20 April 2022) to the judge making the order with a tweet4 (which he repeated after Priti Patel signed the order to extradite):
“On this day, let us remember that the «banality of evil» manifests whenever officials, simply by sticking their heads in the sand & «just doing their jobs», enable dehumanization torture & persecution.
On this day, let us look in the mirror & ask ourselves: How far have we sunk?”
The phrase used (above) by Nils Melzer came, of course, from Hannah Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil”.
Julian Assange himself has alluded to this phrase in his (1 June 2013) discussion of the evolution of Google philosophy “The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’” (in the NYT Sunday Review). In it, he examines Google’s raison d’étre through the lens of “two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen” in their recently published book “The New Digital Age”.
Arendt’s book
A 2001 reviewer of “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil” from Thrift Books wrote:
“I first read this book 20+ years ago in my senior year of college, in a political theory seminar on Arendt, and have re-read it from time to time ever since. The seminar professor offered a keg of beer to anyone who could find the phrase "banality of evil" in the text of the book (NOT the cover, in Arendt's text). No one won the keg because Arendt NEVER USES the phrase banality of evil anywhere in the book, and she was NOT saying evil is banal.
What she was trying to drive at is that you don't need a raver like Hitler, or an obvious monster with long fangs, to do evil -- that ordinary people, the kind you live next door to or pass on the street every day without a second thought -- can do tremendous evil. It's a conclusion that I agree with in my brain but still grapple with emotionally. I'm also grateful to her because this book is the first place where she recounted the story of the Danish Jews, who were protected by just about the entire population of Denmark when the Nazis tried to round them up.”
Of that latter episode, Arendt writes
“The story of the Danish Jews is sui generis5, and the behavior of the Danish people and their government was unique among all the countries of Europe - whether occupied or a partner of the Axis, or neutral and truly independent. One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science to all who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.”
My copy of the book, Penguin Classics (2006), comes with a lengthy introduction “The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt” by Amos Elon, which explains the evolution of the book - and how Arendt was initially seen as a heretic by her own people - using Arendt’s letters and interviews.
Amos Elon notes:
“Evil, as she saw it, need not only be committed by demonic monsters but - with disastrous effect - by morons and imbeciles as well …
The storm broke out [after publication] mainly because of Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann as a diligent yet “banal” bureaucratic criminal. (The term “banality” actually appears only on the last page but is implicit throughout the entire book.) […] She concluded that Eichmann’s inability to speak coherently in court was connected with his incapacity to think, or to think from another person’s point of view. His shallowness was by no means identical to stupidity. He personified neither hatred or madness or an insatiable thirst for blood, but something worse: the faceless natureof Nazi evil itself, within a closed system run by pathological gangsters, aimed at dismantling the personality of its victims.
The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on it head, making the wrong and malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness”.”
Whether or not the now famous (and somewhat contentious) phrase “the banality of evil” was the best choice of words, it fits with Arendt’s opening comments in Chapter 8: “The Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen”:
“So Eichmann’s opportunities for feeling like Pontius Pilate were many, and as the months and the years went by, he lost the need to feel anything at all.
This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer’s order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen.
He did his duty, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law.”6 [Italics original, bold added]
This Pontius Pilate attitude7 rhymes exactly with the behavior of the judge who made the order for the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States; to a nation state which, the evidence had shown:
had already spied on Assange’s meetings with his lawyers and doctors (indeed on almost all his activities 24/7),
had already made plans to kidnap and/or assassinate8him, and
which had already been found by several UN Special Rapporteurs (Nils Melzer amongst them) to show contempt for the human rights of prisoners in their care at a level which conflicted with international law; a level which amounted to torture.9
It rhymes not just with the behaviour of that judge. All of the judges in this ‘case’ (so far) - including its first iteration a decade earlier (involving a Swedish request for extradition) - have bent over backwards to find ways within the law to carry out the wishes of Assange’s persecutors. [We are reminded of the famous William Kunstler speech about “The Terrible Myth; The aura of legality” (from February 1970):
“That's the terrible myth of organised society - that everything that's done through the established system is legal, and that word has a powerfulpsychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life, and an order to a system, and that a person that goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him, and therefore society can turn its conscience off and look to other things and other times. And that's the terrible thing about these past trials. That they have this aura of legality …”]
In both the 2012 and 2022 higher court decisions to extradite, the final decision was based on factors which had not been litigated in the lower court (or at all), so there had been no opportunity for the defense to counter them. Video is available of Dinah Rose QC (Assange’s barrister in the first round of court cases) making just that point to the Supreme Court in May 2012.10
IMAGE: Dinah Rose QC, barrister for Julian Assange, arguing his case in the UK Supreme Court in Feb 2012. Assange is not visible in the courtroom in the clip from May 2012 (although his solicitor Gareth Peirce is) when the matter was actually decided. This Democracy Now video uses clips from both events. SOURCE: Screengrab from YouTube.
In the second round (2022), the defence sought to challenge the willingness of the High Court to accept submissions from the US government made after the decision in the court of first instance, but the Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal.
The film
Many years after the Eichmann book, a film was made about Hannah Arendt. In a 20 June 2013critique of the film: “Hannah Arendt: Margarethe von Trotta’s film revisits debate over Eichmann trial”, the authors note:
“Von Trotta has chosen to focus her film on a relatively brief but important period in Arendt’s life, from approximately 1960 through 1963. With her reports on the Eichmann trial, Arendt became a very public figure, provoking vitriolic denunciations from the Zionist establishment, and raising questions about the history and the nature of the Nazi Holocaust. […]
As she observes, Arendt comes to several conclusions. She is struck by Eichmann’s testimony, by what director von Trotta sums up as his mediocrity, obedience and inability to think for himself. These traits, Arendt concludes, combined with hisorganizational skills, made possible his role in organizing the transport of millions of people to the gas chambers at Auschwitz and elsewhere. She coins the phrase “banality of evil” to characterize the bureaucratic mentality and mind of the Nazi leader.
At the same time, Arendt is shocked by testimony at the trial about the cooperationof leaders of the Judenräte, the Jewish councils set up by the Nazis in occupied territories, cooperation that smoothed the organization of the transports to the death camps. […]
The film closes with Arendt publicly defending her characterization of Eichmann. Ostracized by her colleagues at the New School and pressured to give up her teaching duties (an early example of what we now call “de-platforming”), Arendt refuses. Addressing a lecture hall filled with students and faculty, Arendt-Sukowa speaks for a full eight minutes explaining that the only antidote to the “banality of evil” is critical thought on the part of the enlightened individual.”
The critique of the film goes on to denounce it:
“The film is unable to genuinely explore and explain these issues …” “Nevertheless, the film overall is relatively dull and stolid.”
And to criticise Arendt:
“At the same time, Arendt’s whole method led her to conclusions that only strengthened her enemies, enabling them to pose more effectively as opponents of Nazism. Later evidence has demonstrated what should have been quite clear to Arendt at the time. Despite his play-acting during the trial, Eichmann was no naïve and obedient bureaucrat, but a vicious anti-Semite who threw himself into the work of the Final Solution and boasted about the number of Jews whose murder he had organized.”
The authors of the film critique (from WSWS - the World Socialist Web Site) sum up from their own political perspective:
“Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory is not entirely without insight, insofar as it implied that the worst crimes against humanity were not necessarily carried out by the most obvious “monsters.” Indeed, the twentieth century demonstrated that average people could endorse or engage in such behavior. The point is to understand how this takes place—how, for instance, sections of the ruined and desperate middle classes in Germany were won or submitted themselves to the Nazi cause, how they were pitted against the working class, and also how this outcome was not inevitable.”
A wise person may choose to skip the film (I haven’t see it myself) and simply read Arendt’s book and draw their own conclusions. I revisit it often these days. It has left a strong impression on me.
UPDATE Audio tapes that purport to be an authentic interview with Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina, three years before his arrest, have recently surfaced. See “The Eichmann tapes and the comforting myth of the 'banality of evil'” (15 July 2022). From what is currently available, it does not seem to me that these tapes, assuming they are genuine, invalidate Arrendt’s thesis. My own view is that many people simply misunderstand what Arrendt actually said, despite seeing evidence of that phenomena in action - all around them.
♦ A simpler commentary - avoiding madness in crowds
Sjoerd Bekius (20 April 2022) comes at the same problem from a different angle in “Kill The Coward Inside You”. He quotes not only from Hannah Arendt but also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–1956) in The Gulag Archipelago:
“How we burned in the camps later …” [that we had not acted at once, when it was obvious where this was going]. […]
We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation[…] We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
His main point is that most people are not really taken over by the prevailing insanity (or “evil”) of a prevailing regime, but that they go alongwith itbecause:
“The problem is that most sane people are cowards. They don’t stand up to extremists. Therefore, the sanity of the individuals that make up the crowd is useless. Faced with extremism, the sane individuals form an insane crowd. A sane crowd absorbs the insanity of individuals. An insane crowd amplifies it.
Our individual sanity does not matter if we do not show it. You cannot distinguish a crowd that has gone mad from a crowd that fails to stand up to madness.”
There has been much talk lately of this “madness of crowds” and the role that induced fear, followed by blanket propaganda, plays in inducing this madness. A related term that has recently entered the international vocabulary - in the context of the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ - is “mass formation” (sometimes called “mass formation psychosis”). The person who brought this concept to public consciousness (but not its author, who is the Belgian Dr Mattias Desmet) was Dr Robert Malone, who spoke about it on a Joe Rogan episode that got over fifty million views.
[More recently, Mattias Desmet was interviewed (16 June 2022) at length on his new book “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”, and again (June 2022) for an upcoming documentary in the clip “Plandemic - Mass Formation” - see below.]
Speaking on the above video, Dr Robert Malone says:
“So what are the conditions for mass formation, as laid out by Mattias [Desmet]? There is a sense of social isolation that's pervades society. People are disconnected. Now he cites the figure from various studies … [that show] … that there are solid data that something like 60 percent of the population of the United States believes that they have no friend - which is profound. We had become profoundly decoupled from each other as a society. […]”
Hannah Arendt had spoken about this sense of isolation and a human need for ‘connection’ earlier in relation to Eichmann. [This concept was also explored by E M Forster, in his novels eg “Howards End” (1910) and in his essay “What I Believe” (published 1938), often summed up in the phrase “Only connect …”.]
From “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann, Banality, Guilt & Obedience (1964)” available on YouTube
Dr Malone continues:
”So one of the conditions is this decoupling from each other, and from the classic social institutions - churches, Rotarian groups, any of these things, sports events, teams … We've become decoupled, isolated (this is before the virus) and had developed a sense of free-floating anxiety. This is one of the key features - a sense of anger, aggression - free-floating, undirected [… which …] means that you're not sure why …
In standard anxiety we have a mental image of the thing that is causing the anxiety. That can be actually very adaptive. If we have a mental image of a tiger we're anxious because the tiger might eat us […] then the anxiety isn't free-floating. It's directed against a specific thing …”
Once the free floating anxiety reaches a critical level, along comes the propaganda that tells people the object to which they should attach all that anxiety. (Mattias Desmet discusses more on this theme in this video.)
SCREENGRAB: Prof Mattias Desmet - Short clip “Mass Formation” from upcoming documentary. After much discussion in the alternative media, Desmet also wrote a response to various allegations against his thesis here.
♦ Red Queen thinking
In the Nazi era, German state propaganda encouraged Germans to attach the anxiety caused by rampant inflation to the Jewish people. (There was also a contrived “public health” cloud cast over the Jewish people in the prevailing propaganda, in that they were made out to be the carriers of such germs as typhus.) In the Trump era, the mass media encouraged US citizens (and others) to attach their rising levels of anxiety to “Russian interference”. And then along came the virus, and a world-wide propaganda campaign (during both Trump and Biden presidencies) which encouraged people across the world to attach all of their fears to Covid-19 - and later to “the unvaccinated”.
In between times there was the propaganda focus on “terrorists” after the US events of 11 September 2001 and more recently, using the “climate crisis” theory (as promulgated by Al Gore), fears are attached to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
All of these propaganda efforts contain a germ of truth attached to “facts” that are not difficult to refute (and which often have been refuted, at least in retrospect), but which are easily swallowed by people looking for answers to their heightened level of fear.
Alice was a heretic in the land of the Looking Glass. I’ll come back to this concept in the section “The world inside our heads”. But first I want to look at some modern day heretics on some topics that may - at first - seem unrelated to the persecution of Julian Assange.
Ep 3 of the Illustrated Reading was censored by YouTube. This link takes you to the video on Rumble.
In the opening essay (PART 1) of this series, when outlining the main WikiLeaks disclosures, I concluded that section with:
The missing commentaries:
“Julian has never had the opportunity to comment on the coronavirus “pandemic”, nor on related government policies: - “lockdowns” - a prison term, - “social distancing” - first used by Lat-Am military regimes, as discussed here , - widespread mask mandates - and now vaccine (“jab”) mandates enacted around the world. He has been shut out of the internet (ie unable to receive information in bulk, so unable to process it through that formidable intellect, publish it or usefully comment on it), gagged, and in lockdown in HMP Belmarsh for the full duration of this international event. […]
Similarly, he has been “locked down” since before the advent of Extinction Rebellion and the fascistic discourse now emanating from many sources related to “Climate Change” - a topic I will address on this platform in a coming series. While WikiLeaks has published many leaks related to the relationship between states and the fossil fuel companies, and the willful corporate abuse of the environment (part of what Julian of Norwich called “all that is made”) all over the world, that is not the same thing as an analysis of the current discourse of the “Climate Change” agenda.
My own feeling is that the absence of Julian Assange from such debate as can still take place - in the face of brutal and ever increasing censorship - has been part of the central purpose of his continued incarceration.
The absence of his energy and intellect driving the “intelligence agency of the people” has impoverished us all, just as these topics have begun to completely reshape the near and distant future of humanity.”
My own feeling is that the absenceof Julian Assange from such debate as can still take place - in the face of brutal and ever increasing censorship - has been part of the central purpose of his continued incarceration.
Despite all of the above, Julian did point to many of the issues that would arise after his gagging.
In relation to military (kinetic) wars - past, present, and future, the WikiLeaks library, as well as being an exercise in radical transparency, was intended to provide lessons in avoiding war altogether (by helping us recognise the lies that are used to start them), or at least to avoid creating more war crimes.
In relation to the 'climate crisis’ I will have more to say in my next series. WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, have made few statements about this controversy, although they have published a number of leaks about environmentally damaging activities, and did publish the ‘'Climategate’ emails, but without the sophisticated search and display features of later leaks. [NB Some of the more interesting Climategate leaks are summarised on the surviving Bishop Hill website. Unfortunately the links for each are to another site which also published the set and made them searchable, but which has not survived.]
Julian did say (on 12 April 2017), in relation to an attack by Naomi Wolf over the US election publications, that he agreed that “climate change is a very serious issue”, but he was careful not say any more than that.
UPDATE: On 25 August 2023, RFK Jr - by then a declared presidential candidate in the US 2024 elections - tweeted: “Yes, we owe an enormous debt to Julian Assange! Here’s how he exposed the U.S. government‘s corrupt efforts to force Monsanto's toxic Roundup on the world.” RFK Jr was referring to the (linked) Counterpoint article by Mitchel Cohen “Environmentalists Owe an Enormous Debt to Julian Assange”(23 Aug 2023).
All of these areas, and more, have generated their own brand of modern day ‘heretics’. Julian Assange - publicly crucified (at least in effigy) - stands as a warning to all who might think to join them.
Anthony the Great was a Christian monk from Egypt, revered since his death as a saint. For his importance among the Desert Fathers and to all later Christian monasticism, he is also known as the Father of All Monks.
♦ Modern day heretics
Julian Assange reportedly said to Harry Halpin of Assange Dao (at the 2009 26th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin) of the role WikiLeaks plays:
“We are not dissidents. We make tools for dissidents.”
What is the difference between a dissident and a heretic? These days, a few weeks and/or an indication of a rapidly growing following.
In the days of Julian of Norwich (see PART 1 of this series) a heretic was one who spoke out against the teachings of the church (which was central to the systems of authority of the day). Heretics were, at minimum, “scourged” for sharing their views with the people, especially in the vernacular (the language of the people). Those considered more dangerous were burned at the stake.
IMAGE: Burning of the martyrs [Top Left] Cicely Ormes and Margaret Thurston, back to back, [Top Right] Ralph Alderton, Margery Austoo and R. Roth. [Bottom] Cicely Ormes (23 Sept 1558). SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0
What happens to heretics (those who counter the official narratives of those who control governments) in our own time?
♦ Heretics on the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’
Sjoerd Bekius recommends (see above) that people “Kill The Coward Inside You” in the context of the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. [By way of contrast, WikiLeaks uses the phrase “Courage is Contagious” in its own context.11 But both are talking about the ways courage (or a lack of it) is transmitted via the actions of individuals who are visible (physically or via various media) to those in the crowds around them.]
“In the beginning, lying, or failing to correct a lie, can seem like a trivial affair. What does it matter if one person believes that immigration can just go on forever without consequences? What does it matter if one person goes on believing that censorship is a great idea?
A children’s story called There’s No Such Thing As A Dragonmight provide an answer. There was a boy who found a little dragon on his bed. He told his mom. She denied dragons existed, and the dragon grew. This continued on for a while until the dragon grew so big that it picked up the house. The only way to make the dragon smaller was by telling the truth about its existence.
If you deny the truth, it will come back to bite you. When it does, the problem has grown bigger. One dishonest politician can be dealt with. If you allow dishonesty to exist, soon the whole political system will be corrupt.”
Amazing Polly (a pseudonym) agrees, and cites, as an example of cowardly silence betraying itself, the cheering and mass removal of masks on planes in flight as airline officials announced that the mask mandates on planes and in airports had been removed (after a US court case found the mandate to be unconstitutional).
If you must wear a mask, you could always put it to a good use
In an episode called “Permission to breathe freely, sir?” (19 April 2022) she makes the point that the cheering people obviously knew that wearing the masks was serving no public good, but went along with them anyway, instead of calling out those who made the mandates. She says they did this out of cowardice.
IMAGE: Two April 2022 Justin Hart tweets comparing outcomes between states with mask mandates and those without. SOURCES: (L) US states (R) European states
And it was not just individuals who were pretending to believe that masks were effective against the Covid-19 virus. It was companies too.
Amazing Polly points out that, while wearing a mask - despite not believing these flimsy (and potentially dangerous) rags serve any good health purpose - might be seen as a trivial kowtowing to governments (and carefully shaped public opinion), such subservience can have terrible long term effects. She asks: “What would happen to such people, unpracticed in civil disobedience, if a government came along that said “We need your first born - its just a new rule”?
Discussing the UK “Partygate” fiasco, where government Ministers, MPs and civil servants drank wine and ate cake together without masks or “proper” social distancing while the general public were beaten by police and fined for doing similar things (and Queen Elizabeth II was forced to sit alone and masked during the funeral of her husband of more than 70 years), Iain Davis points out (in “The Truth About Partygate That Everyone Seemingly Ignores” 22 April 2022):
The Real Partygate Crimes
“Their behaviour demonstrates that those who attended the Downing Street partiesdid not believe that there was a pandemic. Irrespective of their words, their actions revealed that they were not concerned either about transmitting or contracting any disease. For them, there was no pandemic risk; there was no pandemic.
In a real pandemic or epidemic, people are fearful—for good reason: there is a risk that social activities could prove to be lethal. That was not the case during the World Health Organisation's (WHO) alleged Covid-19 pandemic, just as it wasn't the case in the WHO's 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic.
In both instances, pandemic mortality was only found in the computer models and spurious test-based attributions of cause of death, not in the real data. Covid-19 was another pseudopandemic.
Instead, people were convinced to be fearful by a government propaganda, censorship, and applied psychology operation. Some of those leading the terror campaign were the same members of the political establishment who enjoyed the offending drinks parties. They did so on the implicit understanding that they were at no risk themselves. Why else would they attend or even organise these gatherings in the first place?
They were among the people who supposedly had direct access to the best scientific advice. No one had a better opportunity to be fully briefed on the dangers of Covid-19 than the Partygate and Labour Party "meeting" attendees. Yet they were not remotely concerned.”
UPDATE 29 August 2022: After Rishi Sunak, one of the two contenders for the role of UK PM, came out with comments about the psychological manipulation used to put the UK’s Covid lockdown (and other) policies in place, Dr Christian Buckland was interviewed about the dangers of this kind of approach to “public health”.
It is not only UK politicians who appear to think that wearing a mask (or not) should be suited to the photogenicity of the occasion, rather than the purported lethality of the virus. Canada’s Justin Trudeau seems to have his own criteria in that regard too:
Long before Covid-19, on 15 March 2018, Julian Assange pointed out (in what turned out to be his final interview before being ejected from his place of asylum and arrested by UK police) that states (and presumably the rulers of those states) are a law unto themselves:
“States never never like to be forced to follow their own rules. In fact they define themselves in significant degree as having power by violating their own rules. That's one of the key ways in which states [and presumably those running states] demonstrate the supremacy of their power - it’s that they're the one group that doesn't have to obey its own rules.
And that's true in my situation.”
As Solzhenitsyn has so eloquently pointed out (and the history of Nazi Germany portrays), if we know that the public rhetoric is untrue but wait for the situation to become unbearable before acting, we have probably waited too long to speak out.
Many courageous doctors, nurses, scientists and other public figures did speak out early on the pandemic. They decried government and official fearmongering and their lack of willingness to look at effective preventative and/or early treatment medication (while pushing a “wait for the vaccine” narrative) as causing many to die or suffer serious harm - an unnecessary and avoidable consequence. These ‘heretic’ doctors and scientists conducted research and developed ways to treat patients early, producing what became a deluge of peer-reviewed scientific literature supporting their views. Such scientific evidence was then frequently dismissed by unqualified politicians and almost adolescent ‘fact checkers’ in the halls of Silicon Valley (and eventually by algorithms designed by tech nerds), as “disinformation” about masks, lockdowns and patient treatment.
Later these same well qualified doctors and scientists turned their gaze on the safety and efficacy of the vaccines themselves, with the same result.
To date of writing, 15,883 medical and public health scientists, and 47,037 medical practitioners, and many, many members of the public have signedThe Great Barrington Declarationwhich, among other things, advised - on 4 October 2020 - against lockdowns (in favour of “focused protection”). That petition now has nearly one million total signatures, despite having been largely kept out of the public gaze by the legacy media.
In 2022, more than 17,000 medical and scientific professionals signed the Global Covid Summit (GCS) declaration which goes even further. A video is available explaining the background to this declaration.
IMAGE: World renowned doctors and scientists were some of the ‘heretics’' speaking to a crowd of many thousands at Washington DC Lincoln Memorial for the “Defeat The Mandates“ rally 23 Jan 2022. SOURCE: The Epoch Times, See video summary here.
Things got so bad that the British Medical Journal (BMJ) - the oldest and most respected medical research publication in the world - had an article censored as a form of ‘disinformation’ by ignorant social media bots at Facebook - who dismissed the BMJ as a “health blog”. Cochrane, the international provider of high quality systematic reviews of medical evidence, experienced similar treatment by Instagram, which, like Facebook, is owned by the parent company Meta.
It is in this context that the “mass formation” explanation (discussed above) for widespread views entered the public conversation. Dr Peter McCullough (the most published doctor in his field) has had much to say on the topic:12
“[There are] many recognizable examples of mass formation. Here is one: accept novel genetic product with no long-term safety assurances to prevent an infection every six months, get the infection, and continue taking the same product, get infection again. No questions, no stopping point.”
And again: “Every six months insertions of foreign genetic material coding for a pathogenic/injurious Spike protein should never ever be considered a "new normal" for human life. Let history record the distorted group-think and the complicity of the academic biopharmaceutical complex.”
In a recent conversation with “unjabbed” New Zealand midwives whose ability to practice (and even existence) was ‘cancelled’ (despite a critical shortage of midwives) by the draconian vaccine mandates issued (in Nov 2021) by their government, one midwife said (from 59:40):
“We’ve never been about denying people that decision [to be jabbed]. All we’ve asked is that our decision not to do that is respected … What we’ve been given in NZ is a leader [PM Jacinda Ardern] who has told people that it is okay to have a two tier society. That it’s actually okay to deny people participation in society for their medical choices.”
The interviewer, Liz Gunn, then referred to the time of the Freedom Village when Ardern was called upon to apologise for the Minister (Michael Woods):
“… who called these good people, us, people like us, it was mum and dad New Zealanders, caring Kiwis, mandated Kiwis, injured Kiwis, called us “a river of filth”, and she would not apologise.”
A midwife replied:
“I was there. It felt dehumanising. I felt dehumaned. It sparked people to send private messages to me from colleagues to accuse me of being a violent person. […] I had to try to humanise myself to someone I had known for years … It activated a horrible [sense of] threat in people …
Liz Gunn notes:
“And that was actively promoted by this Prime Minister, this divisiveness …”
[An interesting commentary on the NZ context for all this is available here.]
None of this is to say what Julian Assange might have made of the Covid-19 controversies had he been able to read the many thousands of published papers on the topic (or watch the countless, often censored videos discussing them) and, having processed that information, make his informed views known.
But he has not been able to do that, because he has been informationally blinded and virtually gagged in HMP Belmarsh for the whole of the Covid-19 epoch. He had, however, already published - in 2007 - on the topic of the corruption of scientific institutions, including the biases built in to research funding and publication. So it is likely that he would have recognised and approved of the courage - which is contagious - of Dr Peter McCullough as expressed in this interview with John Leake (19 May 2021):
[Ironically, Julian Assange warned of just this kind of censorship long before the Covid ‘pandemic’ (16 Jan 2018) - in terms that now sound prescient:
“Nuclear war, climate change or global pandemics are existential threats that we can work through with discussion and thought. Discourse is humanity's immune system for existential threats. Diseases that infect the immune system are usually fatal. In this case, at a planetary scale.”]
UPDATE: 1 November 2022 “Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics” [Minerva via SpringerLink]
This use of widespread propaganda, combined with censorship of those holding an officially unapproved view, has produced a generation of “Covid heretics” - now in their millions. Such ‘heretics’ (including doctors and scientists, nurses and midwives) have been dismissed from their employment, and/or cannot enter shops and other businesses, travel on planes (as well as being deplatformed on social media) because of their views on the various mandates imposed by governments on the advice of a tiny group of public health “experts”, who themselves are firmly in the pockets of Big Pharma. That fight goes on, with the records of the very large (and international) rallies also suppressed in the legacy press.
IMAGE: Pastiche of some of the many thousands of ‘heretics‘ in the crowd at Washington DC Lincoln Memorial for the “Defeat The Mandates“ rally 23 Jan 2022. SOURCE: The Epoch Times, See video summary here.
Many have pointed to the Nuremberg “Doctors Trial” of medical personnel who participated in the Nazi medical experiments on prisoners as a parallel to some of the actions in the Covid-19 era. (It is well worth re-reading the opening statement by the US prosecutor in that historic trial.)
Some have pointed out that, in the Nazi era, those who promoted (anti-Semitic) public health policies that led to these debased outcomes were not in the dock, but should have been, and demand that today’s public health officials, especially those promoting scientifically unsubstantiated mandates, be made to answer for their actions (and inaction) in the context of the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. Here is one such demand, backed by detailed analysis of the relevant documents, from New Zealand:
NB The “Show Notes” for the above video (25 May 2021) are extensive, and so may be of interest to those looking more deeply into this topic. If this version of the video is censored (as some in this series have been) another version is available on BitChute.
Some of those among these “heretics” might surprise you.
Dr Vladimir (Zev) Zelenko, a US citizen born in Ukraine, who died of cancer 30 June 2022, was one of the first doctors to come up with a demonstrably lifesaving protocol for early treatment for Covid-19.
In a compilation video published as part of a “Eulogy for a Truth Warrior, in his own words”, Dr Zelenko (an orthodox Jew) explains how the US Public Health mafia blocked the use of effective prophylactic and early treatment of Covid-19, contrary to the express order of then President Trump, and caused the premature death of millions across the world - in what Dr Zelenko termed a “premeditated genocide”.
In the last part of the compilation (54:52) Dr Zelenko speaks from his hospital bed (7 June 2022) just days before his death:
“If I have to leave the world I accept G-d’s will and I encourage and plead with everyone else to up your game and stand up and - resist first within yourselves to give in to fear, and then - resist publicly against the policies of tyranny, which are coming again.”
[He then discusses the Bill Gates prophecy of a coming smallpox pandemic, and the current outbreak of “monkeypox”.]
“The sociopaths [Bill Gates, Dr Fauci et al] have a big think coming for them. They think they are gods. They think that they are ruling the world. We’ll see. So let the games begin. I have no problem falling in battle because this is a hill we need to die on, because otherwise our progeny will have nowhere to breathe free.”
Nazi holocaust survivor and respected medical ethics expert Vera Sharav is one of those calling for public accountability for the medical professionals and public health officials who have knowingly (or through willful ignorance) promoted false “truths” in this era.
Speaking out in Brussels, (23 Jan 2022) Vera Sharav reminded us of the words of Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate, who was regarded as the victims’ voice. Wiesel stated13:
“Indifference and the silence of people led to the Holocaust.
To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”
IMAGE: Vera Sharav speaking in Brussels (23 Jan 2022). SOURCE: Video and transcript at The Vault Project.
As did many of the ‘good Jewish girls’ of my era, I grew up reading the novels of Leon Uris and so knew of many of the stories of the Holocaust through that lens - particularly the shocking story of the destruction of the residents of the walled Jewish ghetto of Warsaw, Poland14, depicted in the novel “Mila 18”, and the courage of brave partisans who fought a guerilla war against the Nazis in Europe (such as in Greece, in “The Angry Hills”) even as their countries were overrun by the German Third Reich and its toxic, ideologically poisoned view of a “thousand year empire” in the making.
I later (in the 1980s) visited Israel, and the quintessential museum of the Holocaust - Yad Vashem(established August 1953).
“The Holocaust was unprecedented genocide, total and systematic, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people. The primary motivation was the Nazis' anti-Semitic racist ideology. Between 1933 and 1941 Nazi Germany pursued a policy that dispossessed the Jews of their rights and their property, followed by the branding and the concentration of the Jewish population. This policy gained broad support in Germany and much of occupied Europe. In 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis and their collaborators launched the systematic mass murder of the Jews. By 1945 nearly six million Jews had been murdered.”
I have also visited (and was deeply moved by) Dachau, one of the Nazi concentration camps, located just outside the German city of Munich. The Memorial website for that camp states:
“On March 22, 1933, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler had been appointed Reich Chancellor, a concentration camp for political prisoners was set up in Dachau. This camp served as a model for all later concentration camps and as a “school of violence” for the SS men under whose command it stood. In the twelve years of its existence over 200.000 persons from all over Europe were imprisoned here and in the numerous subsidary camps. 41.500 were murdered. On April 29 1945, American troops liberated the survivors.”
[I have also visited the Japanese WWII memorial site at Singapore’s Changi Prison (before its demolition in 2000) - where 7,000 Allied prisoners of war were transferred from the original 20,000 in the Changi POW camp. Both the POW camp and prison were further witnesses to the despicable history of “man’s inhumanity to man” (a term coined by Robert Burns in 1784).
IMAGE: Wikipedia ‘'British and Australian POWs in Singapore's Changi Prison” (CC BY 4.0). See also image from C N Trueman "Changi POW Camp".
“King Rat”, a novel by survivor James Clavell, graphically depicts life for the British, Australian, NZ and US prisoners in this hell-hole. While differing from the Nazi concentration camps in scope (the Changi POW camp and later prison were mainly for Allied combatants in the war) and scale, it too reminds the world of values, attitudes and behaviours we must struggle hard to avoid in our own times.]
Dachau
One person present at the opening of Dachau, one of the first concentration camps to be entered by the Allies, was a young Martha Gellhorn - legendary journalist (and, for a brief time, the third wife of Ernest Hemmingway). [As an aside, on 2 June 2011 Julian Assange was awarded the Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism - See PART 7 of this series.]
Martha Gellhorn was later interviewed (in 1983) by a very young John Pilger, during which (after being questioned by Pilger about journalistic “objectivity” and whether journalists should ever censor themselves- she says “No”) she discusses what she experienced at Dachau as she arrived there on the day the European war ended.
“What was there to be objective about? It was a total and absolute horror, and all I did was report it as it was. I did not invent anything […] I did neither suppress nor invent. I reported it. If you report what you see, unless your eyes are bad, I don’t see how you can be anything other than objective.” […]
There was a train on a siding. It was a ‘death train’. The SS had left and they hadn’t emptied it. So Germans, with handkerchiefs over their faces, under the [guns] of the Americans (who had gotten there the day before), were opening the doors of [the train] and digging out the bodies.
You went into the gates [of the camp] and you opened your clothes and were sprayed with [DDT] powder against typhus lice. Inside [the camp] there were figures, still alive, in striped pajamas, skeletons still breathing, sitting and lying about. By the furnaces [the crematoria] there were stacked cords of wood - bodies, yellow, melting the little fat still on the skeletons … because they hadn’t had time to burn them.
In the prison cells, the torture cells, there was a woman screaming - mad … There was a bunch of women in cotton dresses - Jews - who had been sent there from someplace else, who clutched one’s clothes and screamed like mad women. There was the infirmary, which was manned by Polish doctors [also prisoners], very quiet. They had been there as the (sort of) laboratory assistants to the German doctors. Dachau was a great [medical] experimental centre using Jews, Polish priests, gypsies - and they had all the records. It was a very quiet place, and they just showed me the records.
It was the perfect circle of hell.”
She then goes on to describe what was on the “beautiful” medical records15 - many and various medical experiments involving the torture and/or death of the subject.
“I was in the infirmary when the war ended. A very tall skeleton, wearing a blanket, came into the room. He had been dug out of that train that I was speaking of. He was a very young Pole … He spoke in Polish to these doctors [saying “The war is over.”] And the doctor said “Bravo” (she mimes slow-clapping). […] I said to him “Certainly it’s a bit more than ‘'Bravo’”, and he said to me “It’s a bit late.”
NB: It is undisputed fact that there were no gas chambers at Dachau. Despite this, a brief visual review of Dachau in the US Department of Defense [DoD] archive reel discussed in the next section [at 42:45] makes it seem - through poor video editing - that gas chambers were present there.
Contemporaneous records
A 1945 film archive shows compilation footage of Nazi concentration camps in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The footage is described as having been gathered by the US Department of Defense as part of the effort to conduct war crimes trials. You can watch it here, but it is not for the faint-hearted.
It consists of six reels, and covers footage from concentration camps in:
Germany: - Leipzig (R1), “Russian, Czechoslovakian, Polish and French prisoners” - Penig (R1), “Hungarian women and others” - Ohrdruf (R2) a subcamp of Buchenwald, They find “Polish, Czechoslovakian, Russian, Belgian, German Jews and German political prisoners.” - Hadamar (R2), where “Polish, Russian and Germanpolitical and religious dissidents were murdered” Originally a psychiatric clinic where almost 15,000 people were killed. “Resident physicians and staff directly killed the majority of these victims, among whom were German patients with disabilities,mentally disoriented elderly persons from bombed-out areas, "half Jewish" children from welfare institutions, psychologically and physically disabled forced laborers and their children, German soldiers and foreign Waffen-SS soldiers deemed psychologically incurable. The medical personnel and staff at Hadamar killed almost all of these people by lethal drug overdoses and deliberate neglect.” - Harlan (R3) -near Hanover - Arnstadt (R3) “German villagers are forced to exhume Polish and Russian bodies from mass graves” - Nordhausen (R4) This was a camp for building an underground missile development facility “Prisoners consisted of political German prisoners and other Europeans, including those from France, Belgium, Russia, and Poland” -Buchenwald (R5) This camp is used for labour for the German arms industry. “The purpose of the camp is to combat political opponents, persecute Jews, Sinti and Roma, and permanently ostracize “strangers to the community” – among them homosexuals, homeless persons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and ex-convicts – from the “body of the German people”.” - Bergen-Belsen(R6) Until 1943, Bergen-Belsen was exclusively a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp.
Belgium -Breendonck (R3) “Most of the non-Jewish prisoners were leftist members of the Belgian resistance”
Austria - Mauthausen(R4) Originally a work camp to work the granite quarry - “all Germans and Austrians and all men”
These clips were also shown (without a “trigger warning”) in cinemas in many Allied countries - before the main film of the day. I don’t imagine a lot of popcorn was consumed during the screenings.
At many locations (as depicted in the reels above) the Allied occupation forces insisted on the local population touring the concentration camp nearest them, where they had to view evidence of what had been perpetrated in their midst, and in their name - a part of a process the Allies called “de-Nazification” (a term that has recently been used again, by Russia, in relation to their aims in Ukraine). [Iain Davis looks at the case for this in “Does Ukraine Need To Be Denazified?” (13 May 2022). UPDATE See also “Ukraine Parliament Cheers Nazi Collaborator” (6 Jan 2023).]
From a description of the Allied initiative post-WWII:
“Denazification was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of the National Socialist ideology.
It was carried out specifically by removing those involved from positions of influence and by disbanding or rendering impotent the organizations associated with it. The program of denazification was launched after the end of the Second World War and was solidified by the Potsdam Agreement.”
It is interesting that this US DoD selection of clips - used at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials - does not include any from occupied Poland, where it is said that a large percentage of the Jewish dead were murdered. And, apart from a 51 second clip in Reel 5 at 46:22 (wrongly placed here as if it were at Dachau), it does not focus on gas chambers either - and yet gas chambers have become synonymous with the Holocaust in the modern mind.
Further, at Buchenwald, as shown in Reel 5 at 40:00 (a clip included in a fairly recent UK article), perhaps in case the locals (or viewers of the films) were not sufficiently shocked by the sight of starved and ill prisoners, and the stench of piles of dead bodies, the Americans supervising the visit also saw fit to display what they said were ‘souvenirs’ made for the warped (perhaps psychotic) controllers of Buchenwald, including a lampshade said to be made from the skin of Jewish prisoners, and two “shrunken heads”. In other post-war Allied “de-Nazification” propaganda there was also talk of soap made from the fat from cremated human bodies. Many people, even today, talk of these things as real Nazi depravities, when their actual existence is, at best, suspect. You will not find such things showcased in the official commentaries on the Holocaust today.
Also absent from the film is any commentary on the thousands of starving survivors who died on the day their camps were liberated - from inappropriate food given them by the liberating troops.
From the Testimony of Shlomo Cohen on the Liberation from Bergen-Belsen: “They gave us what they had with them – a few biscuits, chocolate – and there was a real battle over who could grab first. We thought we were already rescued, but it was not so. There was still no bread a few days later. They started to give out sweetened milk in the camp, they brought parcels and all kinds of cans of preserves. They started distributing lard freely, as much as you wanted, and that was the great tragedy of this camp. People came down with diarrhea and they started to fill all the toilets, the road, all the paths, and a lot of people died…”
The reviled historians
It is this possibility that somehow, perhaps for good purposes (such as emphasising the evils of fascism), exaggerations - shall we say - have been added to the historic record (and/or other facts omitted), that a number of previously respected historians have spent time looking into the actual contemporaneous records of the Nazi era and reporting their findings. Most of such reports are quite clear that the Holocaust did occur, and that millions of Jews did die during it - of starvation, over-work, typhus, evil medical experiments, torture, and outright mass murder (such as the BabiYarmassacre of nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women and children on the outskirts of Kiev in Nazi-occupied Ukraine). However, these historians have not been thanked for their efforts. To the contrary, in recent decades such historical commentary, if it differs at all from the current received narrative, has been reviled, and often censored, with the writers - if in Europe - accused of “revisionism” and frequently jailed. Even singing about a different point of view in the UK has been cause for jailing one citizen.
Consequences
These days most people know of the Holocaust solely in the context of anti-Semitism, which of course is a very important way to understand this part of our shared history. But by ensconcing the Holocaust in a world apart - one that can no longer be examined or discussed in detail - attention is deflected from alternate understandings, such as the consistent treatment of “the other” (the Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, the intellectually and physically disabled and the psychiatrically impaired, as well as Jews).
It also deflects from the known role of these concentration camps as sources of (disposable) slave labour for industry, and the large part (US and other) multinational corporations from ‘Allied’ countries played in the whole disgusting and deadly debacle.
For example:
IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation is a book by investigative journalist and historian Edwin Black which documents the strategic technology services rendered by American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other European subsidiaries for the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler from the beginning of the Third Reich in January 1933 through the last day of the regime in May 1945 at the end of World War II.
Some of the matters covered in Edwin Black’s book are also covered in “This Is the Hidden Nazi History of IBM — And the Man Who Tried to Expose It” (2016).
Other corporations which collaborated with the Nazis include:
IG Farben (now Bayer) (pharmaceuticals) Not only did IG Farben produce the Zyklon B which is said to have been used in gas chambers in the concentration camps, it also “relied on concentration camp slave labor throughout World War II and the Holocaust. They built a factory next door to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp and would use the prisoners at the camp for slave work.” [Source] [According to Morning Star: “In fact IG Farben had actually built the concentration camp at Auschwitz and was its legal owner.]
Bayer (the source of Bayer aspirin, consumed by millions for decades) has become the modern company sprung from the corporate roots of IG Farben.
“Although 13 of the 24 company directors arraigned were convicted of war crimes, all of these Nazi collaborators received early release, and most of them were reinstated as directors of the new corporations created out of the dissolution of IG Farben. Fritz ter Meer, who directed operations at the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz, became the president of Bayer after the war.
Bayer did eventually apologize for their role in the Holocaust — in 1995.” [Source]
Volkswagon “Throughout [the Nazi expansion and war] period, Volkswagen used more than 15,000 slaves from concentration camps to build their cars. Volkswagen even built the Arbeitsdorf concentration camp near one of their factories where they kept a skilled workforce of slaves.”
“In 1998, Volkswagen agreed to set up a voluntary fund that would benefit the victims of the slave labor they used.” [Source] See also USHMM on this topic.
The Coca-Cola Company The president of the Coca-Cola Company communicated through a third party to convince Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second in command, to allow the importation of the Coca-Cola syrup, despite import restrictions. To safe guard the company against future restrictions, they also created Fanta especially for Nazi Germany. When war was declared the German branch of the company was officially severed from the Allied branch, but once the war was over, it was back to normal business again. [Source] Hmm. See also Timeline on this topic.
Hugo Boss Boss was an early member of the Nazi Party. “In 1933, Hugo Boss was producing the uniforms for the SS and Hitler Youth, as well as the standard Nazi brownshirts. When Germany began to more intensely remilitarize in 1938, Hugo Boss began to produce uniforms for the Nazi armed forces.
[From 1940] the company began to use the slave labor of concentration camp victims in order to produce the large orders that they were receiving at that time. The company used around 140 people from concentration camps to work in their factories, along with another 40 French prisoners of war.”
After the war, the firm went on through leadership of his son. “In 1999, the company finally agreed to contribute to a fund that compensated former forced laborers.” [Source] See also History of Yesterday.
The Associated Press [AP] The extent and length of AP collaboration is just shocking. Read about it here. “In 2017, the AP released a statement where they claim that their cooperation was justified as it allowed them to provide reporting from within Nazi Germany to the outside world. They have not apologized for their actions.”
There are those who perceive the ideological roots of The Associated Press as again showing via their reporting of the current conflict in Ukraine. And their blancmange reporting of the Assange extradition hearing was spread all over the world by the legacy media.
Kodak “Kodak [European] subsidiaries made substantial purchases of photographic equipment from Nazi Germany, providing funds to a foreign enemy of the United States. They also sold large amounts of photographic and electronic devices to the Nazis, much of which was used towards their war effort. […]
In addition to all of that, their German branch used more than 250 slave laborers from Nazi concentration camps.
And after the war, Kodak reabsorbed their German subsidiary and profited off of what they created.”
“Kodak paid $500,000 into a fund providing for families of those used as slave labor for Nazi corporations, but never apologized for their continued business dealings with Nazi Germany.” [Source]
[Many thanks to Gabe Paoletti for this very informative 2017 article, from which I have quoted - extensively - above.]
Nazi technocracy
Another link between the Third Reich and the corporate West, was the impact that the Nazi Chief Architect, Albert Speer, had on post-war management techniques. Western university schools of management teach of the development of “scientific management” techniques as emanating from the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and later from Henry Ford, but the example of Albert Speer, and his emphasis on efficiency above all, strongly impressed itself on the Western curriculum.
Although beginning his career as a Nazi architect of buildings, he later graduated to a position as the very successful architect of the Third Reich’s war machine.
“In the summer of 1941, however, Speer turned to war work and erected factories all over Europe for war production and air raid shelters. He also directed the repair of bomb-damaged transport facilities in the conquered East. Then in February 1942, Speer was named Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and Munitions Production. Speer’s efficiency in planning and organizing production, which had been demonstrated in his construction projects, made him invaluable to the war effort. He became No. 2 in Germany in terms of power and authority.
Thus Speer, one of the best and brightest, joined the “worst” at the top of the Nazi hierarchy. As Minister of Armaments he had to use great ingenuity to acquire workers and keep armament production going during the war. Millions of forced laborers were brought from the east, from concentration camps, and from German-occupied territories to work long hours, often under dreadful conditions, in the plants he willingly controlled.” [Source]
When I first read Gitta Sereny’s “Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth” (1996) I was shocked to discover the extensive parallels between the Speer era of Nazi management and modern (especially US-based) management theory. [Had I known at that time about ‘Operation Paperclip’ and the extensive influx of Nazi scientists and technocrats to the post-war United States (and their eventual creation and control of NASA) I might have been less shocked.]
When a 1999 play about Albert Speer was being mounted, the playwright Esther Vilar was interviewed by The Guardian:
“'Efficiency was so important to Speer that nothing else counted,' says Vilar. 'He didn't care what should be done - he cared for only what could be done. I think modern management needs to look at that and beware.'
Perhaps in an age when no one is guilty and yesterday's villains are rehabilitated as today's heroes, we should not be surprised that many feel equivocal about Albert Speer. Certainly in an age when efficiency and cost-effectiveness are prized above the happiness of human beings, this story is one that we should heed.”
Found guilty on 30 September 1946 for his use of slave labor in the armaments factories, Albert Speer avoided the hangman and was sentenced to 20 years in Berlin’s Spandau prison.
Nazi impact on “The Science”
Nazi influence and impact on science (and what we think of as “The Science”) has also been a problem which I don’t want to go into in detail here. But I do recommend that you watch “Robert Proctor: Nazi Science and Ideology | Lex Fridman Podcast #268” on this topic.
Robert Proctor starts with:
“We tend to think of science as always on the side of liberty, as always on the side of enlightenment, as always on the side of enlarging human possibility. And here we have this phenomenon in the 1930s of really the world's leading scientific power - the Third Reich - which collectively had won a big chunk of all the Nobel Prizes.
Suddenly they go fascist. They go Nazi with Hitler, and instead of being primarily a source of resistance, science in many respects actually is a full collaborator in the most horrific forms of Nazi genocide, Nazi exclusion.
And that's a relatively untold story in the sense that - when we think of science in the Third Reich, we think of Joseph Mengele injecting dye into the eyes of twins, or we think of horrific human experiments. And those are real, but it's also the story of a huge scientific apparatus, a bureaucracy you could almost say, participating in every phase of the campaigns of Nazi destruction.
And what I looked at in particular in my first book was how physicians in particular but also biomedical science was collaborating with the regime - and that it's wrong to think of the Nazi regime as anti-science. It is anti- a particular type of science. In particular it was radically against what they call “Jewish science”, “Communist science”, certain types of science they did not like. […] (8:05) We tend to think of science and ideology as completely separate, when I think the reality is they are not.” (from 23:42) “I guess the saddening thing [I learned from looking at the Nazi science era] is how easily people can become part of a machine. If there's power, people can be found to follow it …” (from 24:00) “… many scientists and physicians16 were willing to work for the Nazi regime for multiple reasons, partly because a lot of them really thought they were “doing the Lord's work” - they thought they were “cleaning the world of filth”. I mean, if you really thought Jews are a parasitic race, why wouldn't you get rid of them?
So there's an ontology there, there's a theory of the world that they're building on.”
Robert Proctor also notes (at 26:33) that “If we imagine that nothing like [the Nazi experiments] went on here in the United States, that would be a big mistake.” He cites many examples of shocking practices at the hands of US scientists.
He goes on to add (at 51:10) that he is interested in the things science doesn’t study due to its ontological basis:
“We have all kinds of blinders … One of the things I'm interested in is finding some of the gaping holes, the ideological gaps, that have been ignored because of ideology (left or right, by the way) … that would prevent us from seeing some deep, objective scientific truth.
Remembering and rethinking (rather than de-platforming, censoring and forgetting) is a big theme in this discussion. Early in the interview (at 10:31) Lex Fridman asks: “So is this a process of ideology polluting science, or is it science empowering ideology?” We all need to think about that in relation to what is said to be “The Science” in our own time.
Relevance in the current age
Commenting on the work of US state employees during his Oxford Union address (2013), Julian Assange referred (as is a theme here) to the Nuremberg Trials when discussing the leak of US Rules of Engagement (one of the documents Assange is now facing a life in jail for publishing):
“WikiLeaks is not an organisation that hates intelligence agencies - far from it. At its very base the idea of intelligence is an optimistic one - it's that one can understand the world, one can apply intelligence to understand the problem.
It is the corruption of those agencies, and that corruption comes about because of secrecy. So when Tom[Thomas Fingar]spoke about, insomewhat glowing terms, the improved process [in the US intelligence community] - that he put down (and I believe him that that is a significant improvement from what was there before) - it all rests upon one thing: it rests upon the abilities of people in those agencies to get out information to the public when those processes are not followed. […] It's only through this pressure of producing analytical product to the public that these sorts of agencies are kept honest and don't become simply robots that are, in effect - perhaps it's drawing the boat too far but - some kind of “Hitler's willing executioners”, mere people who act as robots, who are told to carry out a task and do it.
That is not enough. It is not enoughto agree to carry out a task for superiors (that is the Nuremberg defense). We must all look to ourselves and understand whether what we are doing is right and just - not just according to the views of our superiors, but according to the long view of history, according to human rights, and to our feelings of compassion - if we have any.”
Having viewed first-hand the endgame of the Third Reich’s war machine, Martha Gellhorn, speaking with (a very young) John Pilger (1983) [Vimeo] explained the missed opportunities she saw immediately post-WWII, and especially post-Vietnam, and the long lasting impact she believed this had on the collective West - particularly on the United States.
Four decades later we could apply her words to more recent wars, including one raging (in Ukraine) as I write this:
(From 20:31): John Pilger: “You wrote contemptuously of the Germans. You called them a whole nation passing the buck. […] You mention buck-passing, but surely most nations - after a defeat in war - do that. You yourself have accused the United States of buck-passing since the Vietnam War.”
Martha Gellhorn: “They just brushed it under the carpet. What would help America would have been a real commission of enquiry into that war. A Nuremberg. And it would have been the most useful thing for future military and political attitudes on the part of the US.
Instead of which it gets simply pushed under the rug, and the unfortunate GIs [war veterans], who are the victims of it in America, can go and peddle their peanuts. And as for the Vietnamese, they were promised, apparently, by Nixon something over three billion dollars in reparations - they never got it - and instead they are treated to a policy of oppressive harassment. Imagine being on the side of the Khmer Rouge in Vietnam! All this is absolutely shocking. […]
The worst of it is the spitefulness and the ugliness of supporting the Khmer Rouge who were monsters, who killed their own people, who did genocide in Cambodia, simply because it is too painful to suggest that the Vietnamese in fact saved the remnants of Cambodia by coming in.
You know, this thing about stupidity … Stupidity can become criminal, and this is criminal stupidity it seems to me. We should it admit it was a mistake, a terrible mistake. It was a mistake against America as well as against Vietnam. And then make our policy on the basis of admitting mistakes. But perhaps governments never admit mistakes, and perhaps that’s what wrong with government. People learn from mistakes or they try to […] but if you are not insane you attempt to learn from them, and then alter your behaviour.
But governments cannot or will not admit mistakes, and therefore apparently don’t learn, and don’t change. And that’s rough on the rest of us.”
Martha Gellhorn, speaking with (a very young) John Pilger (1983) [Vimeo]
Prophetic words. Despite periodic changes of governments, from Democrat to Republican and back again, the US has maintained its course since at least WWII as the world’s greatest ever war machine, conducting overt wars and covert ‘regime change’ operations on all continents except Antarctica. The only presidency in which no new war has been started was the one term Trump presidency, but even during that presidency existing war and regime change operations continued.
In the context of the ‘insurgency’ that came at the end of Trump’s term in office, dissident researcher Whitney Webb had this to say:
But Operation Condor17 (US collusion in creating the military takeover of many countries in Latin America) was only a small part of what the US has actually achieved in terms of mayhem and violent death across our planet, through overt and covert action.
The above quote came from the video “Steve Kangas (1997) "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" (Annotated)”. [Steve Kangas “committed suicide” soon after he published his timeline.]
I am always surprised by the number of people (especially US Americans) who are not aware of the enormous and hideous death count - what William Blum called “an American Holocaust” - at the hands (or at the instigation) of the US CIA. This worldwide corruption and massacre has left its mark across Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Africa and, many contend, in the US homeland as well, as many US homegrown leaders were assassinated. [The sidewalks in my neighbourhood are littered with memorial plaques to the up to 30,000 people “disappeared” during the US-backed military junta - the plaques are cemented in place outside homes and workplaces, since those murdered by these criminals have no graves.]
For those with the stomach for it, this video is a primer on the US war against the world - from WWII to 1990.
I suggest you listen to at least the introduction (the first 7 minutes.)
The epilogue (at 43:98, although most people don’t get that far) contains an impassioned cry to US citizens to rid the world of the CIA:
“In a speech before the CIA celebrating its 50th anniversary, President Clinton said: "By necessity, the American people will never know the full story of your courage."
Clinton’s is a common defense of the CIA: namely, the American people should stop criticizing the CIA because they don’t know what it really does. This, of course, is the heart of the problem in the first place. An agency that is above criticism is also above moral behavior and reform. Its secrecy and lack of accountability allows its corruption to grow unchecked.
Furthermore, Clinton’s statement is simply untrue. The history of the agency is growing painfully clear, especially with the declassification of historical CIA documents. We may not know the details of specific operations, but we do know, quite well, the general behavior of the CIA. These facts began emerging nearly two decades ago at an ever-quickening pace. Today we have a remarkably accurate and consistent picture, repeated in country after country, and verified from countless different directions.
The CIA’s response to this growing knowledge and criticism follows a typical historical pattern. (Indeed, there are remarkable parallels to the Medieval Church’s fight against the Scientific Revolution.) The first journalists and writers to reveal the CIA’s criminal behavior were harassed and censored if they were American writers, and tortured and murdered if they were foreigners. (See Philip Agee’s On the Run for an example of early harassment.) However, over the last two decades the tide of evidence has become overwhelming, and the CIA has found that it does not have enough fingers to plug every hole in the dike. This is especially true in the age of the Internet, where information flows freely among millions of people. Since censorship is impossible, the Agency must now defend itself with apologetics. Clinton’s "Americans will never know" defense is a prime example.
Another common apologetic is that "the world is filled with unsavory characters, and we must deal with them if we are to protect American interests at all." There are two things wrong with this. First, it ignores the fact that the CIA has regularly spurned alliances with defenders of democracy, free speech and human rights, preferring the company of military dictators and tyrants. The CIA had moral options available to them, but did not take them.
Second, this argument begs several questions.
The first is: "Which American interests?" The CIA has courted right-wing dictators because they allow wealthy Americans to exploit the country’s cheap labor and resources. But poor and middle-class Americans pay the price whenever they fight the wars that stem from CIA actions, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to Panama.
The second begged question is: "Why should American interests come at the expense of other peoples’ human rights?"
The CIA should be abolished, its leadership dismissed and its relevant members tried for crimes against humanity. Our intelligence community should be rebuilt from the ground up, with the goal of collecting and analyzing information.
As for covert action, there are two moral options.
The first one is to eliminate covert action completely. But this gives jitters to people worried about the Adolf Hitlers of the world.
So a second option is that we can place covert action under extensive and true democratic oversight. For example, a bipartisan Congressional Committee of 40 members could review and veto all aspects of CIA operations upon a majority or super-majority vote.
Which of these two options is best may be the subject of debate, but one thing is clear: like dictatorship, like monarchy, unaccountable covert operations should die like the dinosaurs they are.”
UPDATE 12 Aug 2022: Chris Hedges and John Kiriakou discuss the current state of the CIA in “We don’t need the CIA - The Chris Hedges Report” [YouTube]
UPDATE 20 Sept 2022: Edward Snowden also discusses the history of the CIA in “America’s Open Wound: The CIA is not your friend” giving gruesome recent examples. [Substack]
“Do you believe that the CIA today — a CIA free from all consequence and accountability — is uninvolved in similar activities? Can you find no presence of their fingerprints in the events of the world, as described in the headlines, that provide cause for concern? Yet it is those who question the wisdom of placing a paramilitary organization beyond the reach of our courts that are dismissed as “naive.”
For 75 years, the American people have been unable to bend the CIA to fit the law, and so the law has been bent to fit the CIA. As Biden stood on the crimson stage, at the site where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were debated and adopted, his words rang out like the cry of a cracked-to-hell Liberty Bell: "What's happening in our country is not normal."
If only that were true.”
In the Kangas (and Blum) discussion of the role of the US (and its CIA) we can hear echoes of Arendt - the US really do “kill as if [their victims] were flies”. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the “Collateral Murder” video (where the murderers were simply a speck in the sky above their victims, and their handlers were not at the site at all), and in information leaked by the US drone whistleblowers (for which leak Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison on July 272021).
Interview with Hannah Arendt (1964). SOURCE: YouTube
The Steve Kangas video with its 6 million dead at US hands (reporting on William Blum’s findings) only covered the period up to 1990. The WikiLeaks publications - for which Julian Assange now faces the possibility of a living death in a US supermax prison - are mainly concerned with America’s overt and covert actions, including war crimes, in the 21st century.
21st century wars and covert operations
♦ The 9/11 events
The new century had a ‘big bang’ start with the 11 September 2001 (9/11) destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. As well as an official version of what happened there (culminating in a report on 22 July 2004), much has been said and written about that event by dissident researchers. Dissidents fall into mainly three groups:
Those who use the official narrative as a springboard for questions about the poor functioning of US intelligence in not foreseeing and forestalling the 9/11 operation. Not least of those in this group are former US Intelligence officers and operatives, such as: - Bill Binney (who “was part of an elite NSA team which designed and built an intelligence-gathering system to target and collect data on terrorism threats”, and who believes that “the NSA buried key intelligence that could have prevented 9/11”) and - Ray McGovern (a former CIA officer who “has long been an outspoken critic of what he’s coined as the American Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank (MICIMATT) for leading the world ever closer to a nuclear war”. Both have since become outspoken supporters of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Those who question the official story and point out facts, usually from extensive research, that simply do not fit with the official narrative. These people generally raise well founded questions, and many call for a new inquiry into the events of 9/11. One example of such a group is the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth group who have focused, in particular, on the seeming “controlled demolition” of Building 7 - a building which was not hit by a plane but nevertheless fell on that terrible day. There have even been extensive hearings held on this topic - see the four day “Toronto Hearings” (2012).
Those who disbelieve the whole official explanation, and posit other explanations.
During ‘The Holberg Debate 2017: "Propaganda, Facts and Fake News"” in Bergen, Norway (2 Dec 2017) Julian Assange said (at 1:01:09), when questioned on this topic:
“On the 9/11 issue generally, I don't think it is particularly important in the sense that, every day or every few weeks, WikiLeaks and some other publishers publish proof of very serious existing conspiracies18 that are happening right now, or just a couple of years ago in order to start wars or steal billions of dollars. These things, I think, can have more of a [chance] at change.
There’s a certain view in some quarters that 9/11 is some kind of holy grail that would shake the existing order of things. I don’t think it would, even if there were some rogue agents involved. And that’s how it would be positioned - no matter who it was.”
This did not stop Bogdan Dzakovic, who worked in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Security Division in the lead up to the 9/11 attacks, and who belongs in the first group of 9/11 dissenters above, from saying (28 July 2019):
“The federal government goes way out of its way to silence any employee (from the lowest to the highest paygrade) that dares to upset the status quo; and it doesn’t make any difference how foul that status is or how many die as a consequence. So I started thinking – what if Wikileaks had existed prior to the 9/11 attacks?”
He follows up that question with a litany of intelligence failures related to 9/11 which he traces through multiple bureaucratic government agencies and even to the US Congress itself.
UPDATE: 16 August 2022. While other countries have mostly been silent on the topic of the “true” perpetrators of the 9/11 events, a powerful statement was recently made by Lijian Zhou, spokesman & DDG, Information Department, Foreign Ministry, China, via a Twitter meme - which does not require translation.
♦ Post-9/11 wars and regime change operations
Whatever really occurred on 9/11, the events of that terrible day were the launching pad for a series of US led wars, which eventually became documented (via the US own records) in the WikiLeaks archives and then in multiple legacy press articles and broadcasts.
But before those records were published (starting in 2010) there were voices loudly decrying this US warmongering and, in the case of George W Bush’s Second Iraq War there had been millions marching in the streets all over the world, protesting against the US war plans, unconvinced by the (later identified as fictitious) allegations of Weapons of Mass Destruction [WMDs] held by Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
[It can be helpful at this point to watch Harold Pinter’s dissenting speech (recorded not long before his death) on the role of the US and George W Bush in the Second Iraq War. See “Harold Pinter (2005) "Art, Truth And Politics" - Nobel Lecture”. The very many US military bases he mentions are mapped here.]
The First Iraq War (or “Gulf War”) was perpetrated by the senior George Bush, after the fictitious and orchestrated “they tossed the babies out of the incubators and left them to die on the cold floor” speech on 10 October 1990 by (then unidentified) daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US.
One of those loud voices protesting the Second Iraq War was George Galloway, then a UK Member of Parliament, who testified in 2005 before the US Senate Committee investigating the UN “Oil-For-Food” programme, as part of the pre-war sanctions against Iraq. His testimony in this clip begins with his swearing in at 6:17:
His testimony (17 May 2005) continues over a number of videos in this playlist, including this where he says:
“Here's my answer, and I hope it does delight you. I opposed the oil-for-food program with all my heart, not for the reasons that you are troubled by it, but because it was a program which saw the death - I'm talking about a mass grave of a million people, most of them children in Iraq.
The oil-for-food programme gave 30 cents per day per Iraqi for the period of the oil-for-food programme - 30 cents for all food, all medicine, all clothes, all schools, all hospitals, all public services.
I believe that the United Nations had no right to starve Iraq's people because it had fallen out with Iraq's dictator. David Bonior, your former colleague, senator, whom I admired very much, a former Chief Whip here on the hill, described the sanctions policy as “infanticide masquerading as politics”.
Senator Coleman thinks that's funny, but I think it's the most profound description of that era that I have ever read - “infanticide masquerading as politics”.
So I opposed this program with all my heart - not because Saddam was getting kickbacks from it (and I don't know when it's alleged these kickbacks started), not because some individuals were getting rich doing business with Iraq under it, but because it was a murderous policy of killing huge numbers of Iraqis.
That's what troubles me.”
The unindicted war criminal George Bush (senior) is now dead, and so can only face justice in some unearthly realm. But George W Bush (the son), another unindicted war criminal, has been rehabilitated as an ‘artist’, and some type of kindly and funny elder statesman, who shares sweets with Michelle Obama.
A recent event (May 2022) encapsulates this ‘rehabilitation’ of George W Bush, and the bloody war he perpetrated in Iraq (for which Julian Assange published the US records, and for which he faces a sentence of living death in the bowels of the hellish US prison gulag).
“Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” [Tweet]
The Gravel Institute (responding to that video) wrote:
“If you listen closely, after he corrects himself, he whispers “Iraq too” — here is the former President of the United States admitting to war crimes, to a laughing crowd! Unfathomably evil.”
While George W Bush (US) and Tony Blair (UK) have not yet found themselves in the dock in The Hague, they have been found guilty in a war crimes tribunal held in Malaysia. Al Jazeera reported (28 Nov 2011):
“Kuala Lumpur tribunal: Bush and Blair guilty” ”A war crimes tribunal in Malaysia offers a devastating critique of international criminal law institutions today.”
“In Kuala Lumpur, after two years of investigation by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), a tribunal (the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, or KLWCT) consisting of five judges with judicial and academic backgrounds reached a unanimous verdict that found George W Bush and Tony Blair guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide as a result of their roles in the Iraq War.
The proceedings took place over a four-day period from November 19-22, and included an opportunity for court-appointed defense counsel to offer the tribunal arguments and evidence on behalf of the absent defendants. They had been invited to offer their own defense or send a representative, but declined to do so. The prosecution team was headed by two prominent legal personalities with strong professional legal credentials: Gurdeal Singh Nijar and Francis Boyle. The verdict issued on November 22, 2011 happens to coincide with the 48th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy.
The tribunal acknowledged that its verdict was not enforceable in a normal manner associated with a criminal court operating within a sovereign state or as constituted by international agreement, as is the case with the International Criminal Court. But the KLWCT followed a juridical procedure purported to operate in a legally responsible manner. This would endow its findings and recommendations with a legal weight expected to extend beyond a moral condemnation of the defendants, but in a manner that is not entirely evident.”
Following Afghanistan and Iraq, more wars were waged (or at least supported) by the ever-war-ready US. Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya (under Obama), which decimated the richest country in Africa, murdered and sodomised its president, and sent its people back into poverty and many into slave markets.
Then Syria (still under Obama). And Yemen. Not to mention many smaller wars in Africa.
In Europe what occurred was the “most blatant coup in history”: the (US orchestrated regime change) Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014 (still under Obama). At the time, John Pilger explained (13 May 2014) that “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia”.
A compilation of relevant clips (published 18 March 2014, and including Victoria Nuland’s famous “F*ck the EU” statement) supports the “coup” description:
In a recent video “Ukraine: A Taste of The Truth” (original 7 July 2022 censored by YT, mirrored here) Ray McGovern, a CIA specialist on Russia over many years, outlines the history of Russia’s protest over US and NATO’s interference in Ukraine over many years, leading up to the current “special military operation” (as Russia puts it) in Ukraine by the Russian Federation.
IMAGE: NATO encroachment on Russia to 2020. SOURCE: The Guardian via StPete4Peace.
McGovern goes through US and NATO undertakings and treaties breached and/or abrogated by the US over the long period since the USSR disintegrated and the Russian Federation came into being.
McGovern also points to various speeches by Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin on this topic - warnings of what was to come if the US and NATO did not back off.
I list some of those warnings below - not to be “a Putin puppet” (as Western legacy media likes to call those who draw attention to these things) but because so many in the West have never seen or heard these warnings, due to media censorship.
[Another perspective, focused on the 8 years between the Maidan coup and the Russian action, is summarised by Kim Iversen from an April article by Swiss colonel Jaques Baud. A late May 2022 interview with Baud is translated here.]
[UPDATE: A very detailed discussion on key issues raised by “factcheckers” has now been provided by Consortium News “The Response NewsGuard Rejected”(16 Oct 2022)]
♦ Ukraine / Russian speeches
10 Feb 2007, Vladimir Putin: Keynote Address and Q&A on Security Policy at the 43rd Munich Security Conference", Hotel Bayerischer Hof, Munich, Germany. Transcript and video: [American Rhetoric] [YouTube]
In answer to a question: “Regarding our perception of NATO’s eastern expansion, I already mentioned the guarantees that were made and that are not being observed today. Do you happen to think that this is normal practice in international affairs? But all right, forget it. Forget these guarantees. With respect to democracy and NATO expansion. NATO is not a universal organization, as opposed to the UN. It is first and foremost a military and political alliance, military and political! Well, ensuring one’s own security is the right of any sovereign state. We are not arguing against this. Of course we are not objecting to this. But why is it necessary to put military infrastructure on our borders during this expansion? Can someone answer this question? Unless the expansion of military infrastructure is connected with fighting against today’s global threats? Let’s put it this way, what is the most important of these threats for us today -- the most important for Russia, for the USA and for Europe -- it is terrorism and the fight against it.
Does one need Russia to fight against terrorism? Of course! Does one need India to fight against terrorism! Of course! But we are not members of NATO and other countries aren’t either. But we can only work on this issue effectively by joining our forces. As such, expanding infrastructure, especially military infrastructure, to our borders is not connected in any way with the democratic choices of individual states. And I would ask that we not mix these two concepts.”
1 Feb 2008 US cable from US Ambassador William J. Burns in Moscow; “NYET means NYET: Russia's NATO Enlargement Redlines” [made public by WikiLeaks]
Summary. Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine's intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit (ref A), Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains "an emotional and neuralgic" issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these includefears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. Additionally, the GOR and experts continue to claim that Ukrainian NATO membership would have a major impact on Russia's defense industry, Russian-Ukrainian family connections, and bilateral relations generally. In Georgia, the GOR fears continued instability and "provocative acts" in the separatist regions. End summary.
22-24 Oct 2014 At the Valdai Club: “Vladimir Putin Explains Who Runs ISIS and Why” [YouTube]
In his speech at the Valdai Club, only months after the US-led Maidan coup in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin explained who, in his view, runs ISIS.
Interestingly, in an interview by John Pilger just prior to the 2016 US presidential election, Julian Assange raised the issue of a 2014 email to Hillary Clinton from her campaign manager, on exactly that topic, but only published by WikiLeaks 2 years later. Assange points to this 2014 email as being, in his view, the most important email in the Clinton / Podesta / DNC collection of leaks.
What follows now, are key passages from speeches given by the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, since he is the key heretic challenging the Western narrative on, not only the Ukraine situation, but also the West’s view of current world geopolitics.
As time moves on, the number of other nations supporting his perspective, or at least staying on the sidelines, is gradually building up. Such nations are mostly from outside the West, therefore not part of what Putin has begun to refer to as "the golden billion".
27 Jan 2021 Putin’s speech to the WEF Davos Forum [YouTube] [Transcript]
Putin is asked, by Klaus Schwab, “How do you see the future of European-Russian relations?” Putin concludes:
“Europe and Russia are absolutely natural partners from the point of view of the economy, research, technology and spatial development for European culture, since Russia, being a country of European culture, is a little larger than the entire EU in terms of territory. Russia’s resources and human potential are enormous. I will not go over everything that is positive in Europe, which can also benefit the Russian Federation.
Only one thing matters: we need to approach the dialogue with each other honestly. We need to discard the phobias of the past, stop using the problems that we inherited from past centuries in internal political processes and look to the future. If we can rise above these problems of the past and get rid of these phobias, then we will certainly enjoy a positive stage in our relations.
We are ready for this, we want this, and we will strive to make this happen. But love is impossible if it is declared only by one side. It must be mutual.”
21 Feb 2022 Putin’s speech “Recognition of Donetsk and Lugansk Republics” [Transcript includes subtitled video]
“Overall, it appears that nearly everywhere, in many regions of the world where the United States brought its law and order, this created bloody, non-healing wounds and the curse of international terrorism and extremism. I have only mentioned the most glaring but far from only examples of disregard for international law.
This array includes promises not to expand NATO eastwards even by an inch. To reiterate: they have deceived us, or, to put it simply, they have played us. Sure, one often hears that politics is a dirty business. It could be, but it shouldn’t be as dirty as it is now, not to such an extent. This type of con-artist behaviour is contrary not only to the principles of international relations but also and above all to the generally accepted norms of morality and ethics. Where is justice and truth here? Just lies and hypocrisy all around.
Incidentally, US politicians, political scientists and journalists write and say that a veritable “empire of lies” has been created inside the United States in recent years. It is hard to disagree with this – it is really so. But one should not be modest about it: the United States is still a great country and a system-forming power. All its satellites not only humbly and obediently say yes to and parrot it at the slightest pretext but also imitate its behaviour and enthusiastically accept the rules it is offering them. Therefore, one can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same “empire of lies.”
18 June 2022 Putin’s speech at SPIEF (St Petersburg) [YouTube] [Transcript]
“After declaring victory in the Cold War, the United States proclaimed itself to be God’s messenger on Earth, without any obligations and only interests which were declared sacred. They seem to ignore the fact that in the past decades, new powerful and increasingly assertive centres have been formed. Each of them develops its own political system and public institutions according to its own model of economic growth and, naturally, has the right to protect them and to secure national sovereignty.
However, the ruling elite of some Western states seem to be harbouring this kind of illusions. They refuse to notice obvious things, stubbornly clinging to the shadows of the past. For example, they seem to believe that the dominance of the West in global politics and the economy is an unchanging, eternal value. Nothing lasts forever.
Our colleagues are not just denying reality. More than that; they are trying to reverse the course of history. They seem to think in terms of the past century. They are still influenced by their own misconceptions about countries outside the so-called “golden billion”: they consider everything a backwater, or their backyard. They still treat them like colonies, and the people living there, like second-class people, because they consider themselves exceptional. If they are exceptional, that means everyone else is second rate.
Thereby, the irrepressible urge to punish, to economically crush anyone who does not fit with the mainstream, does not want to blindly obey. Moreover, they crudely and shamelessly impose their ethics, their views on culture and ideas about history, sometimes questioning the sovereignty and integrity of states, and threatening their very existence. Suffice it to recall what happened in Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya and Iraq.
If some “rebel” state cannot be suppressed or pacified, they try to isolate that state, or “cancel” it, to use their modern term. Everything goes, even sports, the Olympics, bans on culture and art masterpieces just because their creators come from the “wrong” country.
This is the nature of the current round of Russophobia in the West, and the insane sanctions against Russia. They are crazy and, I would say, thoughtless. They are unprecedented in the number of them or the pace the West churns them out at.
The idea was clear as day – they expected to suddenly and violently crush the Russian economy, to hit Russia’s industry, finance, and people’s living standards by destroying business chains, forcibly recalling Western companies from the Russian market, and freezing Russian assets.
This did not work. Obviously, it did not work out; it did not happen.”
7 July 2022 Putin’s speech “Russia hasn’t really even started anything yet” - [YouTube] [Transcript] [RT article]
“[W]e hear some people say that we started the war in Donbass, in Ukraine. No, the war was unleashed by the collective West, which organised and supported the unconstitutional armed coup in Ukraine in 2014, and then encouraged and justified genocide against the people of Donbass. The collective West is the direct instigator and the culprit of what is happening today.
If the West wanted to provoke a conflict in order to move on to a new stage in the fight against Russia and a new stage in containing our country, we can say that it has succeeded to a certain extent. A war was unleashed, and the sanctions were imposed. Under normal circumstances, it would probably be difficult to accomplish this.
But here is what I would you like to make clear. They should have realised that they would lose from the very beginning of our special military operation, because this operation also means the beginning of a radical breakdown of the US-style world order.
This is the beginning of the transition from liberal-globalist American egocentrism to a truly multipolar world based not on self-serving rules made up by someone for their own needs, behind which there is nothing but striving for hegemony, not on hypocritical double standards, but on international law and the genuine sovereignty of nations and civilisations, on their will to live their historical destiny, with their own values and traditions, and to align cooperation on the basis of democracy, justice and equality.
Everyone should understand that this process cannot be stopped. The course of history is inexorable, and the collective West’s attempts to impose its new world order on the rest of the world are doomed.”
Putin continues (7 July 2022), evoking the “arbitrary detention” of Julian Assange (see UNWGAD rulings listed in PART 6 of this series):
“The West, which once declared such principles of democracy as freedom of speech, pluralism and respect for dissenting opinions, has now degenerated into the opposite: totalitarianism. This includes censorship, media bans, and the arbitrary treatment of journalists and public figures.
These kinds of prohibitions have been extended not only to the information space, but also to politics, culture, education, and art – to all spheres of public life in the Western countries. And, they are imposing this on the world; they are trying to impose this model, a model of totalitarian liberalism, including the notorious cancel culture of widespread bans.
However, the truth and reality is that the people in most of these countries do not want this life or this future, and really do not want the formal semblance of sovereignty, they want substantive, real sovereignty and are simply tired of kneeling, of humiliating themselves before those who consider themselves exceptional, and of serving their interests even to their own detriment.
Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. Well, what can I say? Let them try. We have already heard a lot about the West wanting to fight us ”to the last Ukrainian.“ This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, but that seems to be where it is going. But everyone should know that, by and large, we have not started anything in earnest yet.
At the same time, we are not rejecting peace talks, but those who are rejecting them should know that the longer it goes on, the harder it will be for them to negotiate with us.”
“The West, which once declared such principles of democracy as freedom of speech, pluralism and respect for dissenting opinions, has now degenerated into the opposite: totalitarianism.
This includes censorship, media bans, and the arbitrary treatment of journalists …”
— Vladimir Putin (7 July 2022)
20 July 2022 Putin’s “golden billion” speech to the ASI forum “Strong Ideas for a New Time”. [Transcript]
22 Aug 2022 UPDATE “PATRICK LAWRENCE: Putin & the Emerging Order”. Lawrence suggests that “The baton of “global leadership,” which Joe Biden mentions every chance he gets, is passing to non-Western leaders.”
21 Sept 2022 UPDATE Putin’s “partial mobilisation” speech to the nation. [Transcript]
22 Sept 2022 UPDATE Lavrov speech: “REPLAY - Russia FM rejects Western accusations on Ukraine at Security Council” [YouTube]
24 Sept 2022 UPDATE Lavrov speech at the UNGA [YouTube]
“The West is now throwing a fit because of the referenda which are being conducted in the Lugansk and Zaporozhye oblasts, but people living there are basically only reacting to what was said to them by the head of the Kiev regime Mr Zelinski in August 2021.
At the time, he said [that] anyone who feels themselves to be Russian, for the benefit of their children and grandchildren, to get out and to go to Russia.
That's what the inhabitants of those regions are doing, taking their land with them - land where their ancestors had been living for hundreds of years.”
30 Sept 2022 UPDATE Putin's HISTORIC SPEECH - The Accession of The Donbass Regions To The Russian Federation. RT version [YouTube] FR version [YouTube] Transcript [Kremlin]
31 Dec 2022 UPDATE Putin’s “New Year Address to the Nation” Transcript & video [Kremlin] Commentary - Alexander Mercouris [YouTube]
5 Oct 2023 UPDATE Putin’s Valdai Club address “Fair multipolarity: How to ensure security and development for everyone” Transcript and video [Kremlin] [RTNews] Commentary - The Duran [YouTube]
7 Nov 2024 UPDATE Putin’s Valdai Club address “Lasting Peace on What Basis? Common Security and Equal Opportunities for Development in the 21st Century” Transcript and video [Kremlin]
♦ Trump on the case (pre-election Oct 2016)
Oddly enough, much of what Putin has said (above) is an echo of what presidential candidate candidate Donald Trump said at one of his rallies (Oct 2016) just prior to his election .
Trump first mentioned WikiLeaks and the role of “the corrupt media”. [Remember that Julian Assange was indicted under the Trump Administration.]
“Our system is rigged. This is reality. You know it, they know it, I know it, and pretty much the whole world knows it. The Clinton machine is at the cenre of this power stuff. We've seen this firsthand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors. Honestly she should be locked up.
The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media, the press. Let's be clear on one thing - the corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism. They’re a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda.
And the agenda is not for you. It's for themselves. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe. They will lie, lie, and then again they will do worse than that. They will do whatever is necessary.
The Clintons are criminals - remember that. This is well documented, and the establishment that protects them has engaged in a massive cover-up of widespread criminal activityat the State Department and the Clinton Foundation in order to keep the Clintons in power.”
Candidate Trump then went on to look at the Washington DC power bloc in a way that Putin has now, six years later, reflected in his most recent speeches, with Trump referring to it as a “corrupt establishment” and a “corrupt machine” [aka President Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex?].
Screengrabs from “President Eisenhower (16 Jan 1961) "Farewell Speech" (Annotated excerpts)“ [YouTube]
Trump concluded that “Our great civilisation has come upon a moment of reckoning.”
How can we reconcile Trump’s 2016 speech with the fact that it was Trump’s Administration that indicted Julian Assange on 6 March 2018 (although Julian was arbitrarily detained for many years before that, under the Obama Administration)?
I don’t have an answer for that question, but I think about it a lot.
♦ Australia’s part
On 21 May 2022 Australians voted in a new federal government, with a new Prime Minister - Anthony Albanese. Based on his signature on a petition and a few lukewarm words prior to the election, some supporters of Assange hold/held out great hope that he would turn the tide on Australia’s neglect of Julian Assange, one of Australia’s greatest sons, and advocate forcefully with the UK and especially the US for his release - via dropping of the charges.
“It is hardly a mystery why Labor refuses to defend Assange.
The primary focus of the new government has been a foreign policy blitz, orchestrated in the closest of collaboration with the Biden administration, which is seeking Assange’s extradition.
Wong and Albanese have been on one foreign visit after another, seeking to shore-up US dominance in the Indo-Pacific, and to further American imperialism’s confrontation with China, which threatens nuclear war.
The highpoint came last week, when Albanese attended the NATO summit in Madrid. There, he gave full support to a new NATO doctrine, which labels Russia and China as threats and calls on member states to prepare “for high-intensity, multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors.”
The persecution of Assange is retribution for his exposure of past war crimes. But it is also a preparation for new, and even greater crimes, associated with these US-led plans for what is nothing short of a global war.
The aim is to intimidate the mass anti-war sentiment that exists among workers and young people, and to establish a precedent for further frame-ups and victimisations. The Labor government is fully committed to Washington’s war measures, so it is hostile to Assange.”
Plus ça change …
♦ Congruent aims
In his address of 24 February 2022, speaking of the Russian Federation’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine (then just begun), Putin announced the aims of that operation (or war, as it is called in the West):
“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime.
To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.”
These aims19 sound very sane to me if adapted and applied to the whole world, and are congruent with aims that Assange and other peace-loving people have already expressed.
Protect people (such as those in Yemen) who have been subjected to ongoing war in their own land, decimating their health, lives, homes, community infrastructure and environment over many years.
Demilitarisation (or at least a down-sizing of arsenals) has been a shared aim before, at least in terms of attack forces and equipment (as opposed to national defence). Apart from all the physical and mental harm done to humans in war (and through fear of war), the military (and especially the US military) are the biggest polluters of the environment on the planet. Ironically, a fair amount of demilitarisation has already been caused in Europe (and even the US) by the Ukraine situation, as it seems that much of the armament stockpile in those countries has already been sent to Ukraine (where most has been destroyed or captured by the Russians). Let’s resolve not to feed the coffers of the armaments industry by replacing it.
Denazification is only superficially the removal of those sworn to the Nazi party or its modern equivalents (often bearing the symbols of that loyalty on their person or even etched on their bodies). It is more importantly the ridding of our institutions and political leadership of attitudes about the worthlessness of “the other” (whether Jew, a particular race, or even the ‘unjabbed’), and of those who behave as “little Eichmanns” (or big Eichmanns). Some serious rethinking must go on everywhere about what good leadership and good citizenship really means, and this is not achieved via propaganda. We need to rethink our educational institutions and employment laws as as well.
Criminal trials for all those still living who have perpetrated serious abuses, especially war crimes (some of whom have been named in this missive) and crimes against humanity, would also be a good thing - in my view. Televise such trials and show them in every country of the world.
China’s Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin echoed Martha Gellhorn’s earlier call for a deep enquiry into US warmongering practices when he said (18 July 2022) :
“Those who are most vocal about defending human rights have turned out to be the deadliest murderers of innocent civilians; and those most fervently attacking other countries’ human rights conditions are the ones who should be put in the dock on human rights. There should be a thorough international investigation into the UK’s and US’s war crimes and human rights violations. Let justice be done for the innocent victims and protect people all over the world from more bullying and cruelty.”
As a journalist from an earlier epoch, friend of Roosevelt, and (now reviled) writer famously said, “Just so.”
♦ Julian Assange - advocate for peace and justice
Marta Gellhorn mourned (above) that “governments cannot or will not admit mistakes, and therefore apparently don’t learn, and don’t change.”
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have already produced more authentic and detailed material on each of two US-led wars - Afghanistan and Iraq - than has ever before been published. Our historic record, and hence our opportunities to learn from our past, has never been greater. And yet the legacy Western media continues to perpetuate falsehoods and myth (as they did about the Collateral Murder events before WikiLeaks exposed the truth).
Sadly, as Assange himself noted, speaking during the press conference (23 October 2010) on the release of the Iraq War Logs (3:43): ‘The first casualty of war is the truth’.
“This disclosure is about the truth. Philip Knightley,20 the great investigative reporter and Australian who, for the past 30 or 40 years has made the UK his home, said that ‘The first casualty of war is the truth.’
But the attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts, and continues long after a war ends. In our release of these 400,000 documents about the Iraq war the intimate detail of that war from the US perspective, we hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued on since the war officially concluded.
In that material the deaths of some 109,000 people are documented internally declared 66,000 civilians. Working with the Iraq Body Count we have seen that there are approximately 15,000 never previously documented or known cases of civilians who have been killed by violence in Iraq.
Graph from Iraq Body Count. Supporting data is available on their website.
That tremendous scale should not make us blind to the small human scale that occurs in this material. In fact, it is the deaths of one and two people per event that killed the overwhelming number of people.”
Julian Assange went on (2 May 2011) to say (on RT, now censored by YouTube, but fortunately archived [Part 1] [Part 2]):
“Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone – it’s not understanding what actually is going on in the world. It's only when you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans.
Now, the question is, who is promoting ignorance? Well, those organisations that try to keep things secret, and those organizations which distort true information to make it false or misrepresentative.
In this latter category, it is bad media. It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is… we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.”
“One of the hopeful things that I have discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies.
The media could have stopped it if they had searched deep enough. If they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could have stopped it.
But what does that mean? Well, that means basically that populations don't like wars, and populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don't willingly and with open eyes go into a war.
So if we have a good media environment then we'll also have a peaceful environment.”
Populations don't like wars, and populations have to be fooled into wars.
Populations don't willingly and with open eyes go into a war.
That means that if we have a good media environment, well also have a peaceful environment.
In his speech (see above) Father Dave alluded to Dorothea Mackellar’s famous poem (c1904) describing her beloved Australia:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains
This poem describes the Australian vicissitudes of drought, flood and wild fire, in a “wilful, lavish land” without any thought of there being a ‘climate crisis’.
In my next series, I will examine the ‘climate crisis’ and associated environmental destruction in considerable detail. Here, I simply want to note that those who have fought to publish the details of the pollution and poisoning of our natural environment - the very air, water and soil on which humanity (and other living creatures) rely for survival - so that those responsible can be stopped and even punished, fare no better that dissidents against war or public health fascism.
Robert Kennedy Jnr, currently thought of as a dissident on the official Covid-19 narrative and matters related to vaccines (he is the founder of Children’s Health Defense [CHD]), was first and foremost a campaigner and legal advocate for clean water - fighting against the very many ways our waterways and oceans are being poisoned, usually by Big Business. He has also been active in the fight against neurotoxins used routinely in modern agricultural practices (most notably Monsanto’s use of glyphosate in their product RoundUp).
For his trouble, he has been ‘cancelled’ by the legacy press, and largely banned from social media.
UPDATE: See “Landmark Lawsuit Slaps Legacy Media With Antitrust, First Amendment Claims for Censoring COVID-Related Content” (10 Jan 2023) [CHD].
UPDATE: See “Documents show how Monsanto, Bayer led attacks on scientists, journalists” (7 Feb 2023) [usrtk.org]
♦ A parallel case - Steven Donziger
One case of a dissenter in the fight against the current environmental crisis parallels the treatment of Julian Assange, right down to Ecuador having been a key actor in his drama, the irregular role of the judiciary, and the role of the legacy press (ie largely absent, but currently improving), is Steven Donziger [Twitter] [substack].
An article in Esquire “'I've Been Targeted With Probably the Most Vicious Corporate Counterattack in American History'” (18 March 2021) outlined what had happened to him to that point:
“Donziger is a human rights lawyer who, for more than 27 years, has represented the Indigenous peoples and rural farmers of Ecuador against Texaco—since acquired by Chevron—which was accused of dumping at least 16 billion gallons of toxic waste into the area of the Amazon rainforest in which they live. Cancer is now highly prevalent in the local population. Some have called it the "Amazon Chernobyl." They first filed suit in New York in 1993, but Texaco lobbied, successfully, to move the proceedings to Ecuador. In 2011, the team of Ecuadorian lawyers Donziger worked with won the case, and Chevron was ultimately ordered to pay $9.8 billion.
[This image of then President Rafael Correa appeared in the article.]
But for Donziger, that was nowhere near the end. Chevron, a $260 billion company, went to a New York federal court to sue him under a lesser-known civil—non-criminal—provision of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. They later dropped their demands for financial damages because it would have necessitated a jury trial. That is something Donziger has been unable to get.
Instead, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former corporate lawyer whose clients included tobacco companies, became Donziger's judge-and-jury in the RICO case. He heard from 31 witnesses, but based his ruling in significant part on the testimony of Albert Guerra, a former Ecuadorian judge whom Chevron relocated to the U.S. at an overall cost of $2 million. Guerra alleged there was a bribe involved in the Ecuadorian court's judgement against Chevron. He has since retracted some of his testimony, admitting it was false.
But Kaplan, who refused to look at the scientific evidence in the original case, ruled the initial verdict was the result of fraud. And he didn't stop there. He ordered Donziger to pay millions in attorneys fees to Chevron and eventually ordered him to turn over decades of client communications, even going after his phone and computer.
Donziger considered this a threat to attorney-client privilege and appealed the ruling, but while that appeal was pending, Kaplan slapped him with a contempt of court charge for refusing to give up the devices.
When the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute the case, Kaplan took the extraordinary step of appointing a private law firm to prosecute Donziger in the name of the U.S. government. The firm, Seward & Kissel, has had a number of oil-and-gas clients, including, in 2018... Chevron. Kaplan bypassed the usual random case-assignment procedure of the federal judiciary and handpicked a judge to hear the contempt case: Loretta Preska, a member of the Federalist Society, among whose major donors is... Chevron. Preska has, like Kaplan, rejected Donziger's requests to have his trial heard by a jury of his peers. Both judges declined Esquire's request for comment on Donziger's cases, citing court policy. […]”
After this introduction, an interview follows.
“Q: It's almost like you're buried under these layers of procedural complaints that they've made. Obviously, at the root of it, it's that Chevron is angry about the initial judgment. But now it's not even just the case about whether you supposedly behaved improperly in the initial case. Now it's about whether you fought the subsequent case in a way that they deem improper.”
SD: “Yeah, that is accurate. I mean, they are trying to claim everything I do is somehow improper or part of a larger criminal scheme. When in reality, what I do is represent clients who have been the victims of a mass industrial poisoning by Chevron and who were successful in winning a court judgment.
So Chevron has paid massive sums of money as part of a demonization campaign targeting me. All of these things they're doing to me are part of that campaign. What they try to do is use the law and weaponize it to criminalize activism, and I'm Exhibit A.”
IMAGE: Steven Donziger in Ecuador. SOURCE: Stevens Donziger website.
On 28 April 2022 Craig Murray, who has also been treated in a totally irregular way (and jailed) by the judicial system in Scotland, commented on Donziger’s plight, publishing “Donziger: A Tale For Our Times”.
“For all these reasons the Donziger case has been described as the first private criminal prosecution by a corporation in US history. Chevron’s ability to control the entire judicial and legal process has been terrifying. Every public affairs NGO you can think of, not in the pockets of big oil and climate change denial, has raised serious concerns about the case.
Contrary to convention, though not contrary to law, Kaplan also personally appointed the judge to hear the case for criminal breach of his order, rather than leaving it to the court system. His nominee, Judge Loretta Preska, committed Donziger to house arrest pending trial. On October 21 2021 she sentenced Donziger to six months in prison; the maximum for contempt of court in the USA (I was sentenced to 8 months in Scotland). After 45 days Donziger was released from prison due to Covid, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. In total, before and after trial, Donziger spent 993 days in detention. He was released two days ago.
Donziger has been disbarred as a lawyer. Chevron have a lien on his home and all his assets for compensation. They have paid nothing to the victims of their pollution of the Amazon.
I really cannot think of any individual story that better incorporates so many aspects of the dreadful corruption of modern western society. We are all, in a sense, the prisoners of corporations which dictate the terms on which we live, work and share knowledge. Justice against the powerful appears impossible. It is profoundly disturbing, and I recommend everyone to take a few minutes to reflect about the full meaning of the Donziger story in all its many tangents.”
On 9 July 2022 Steven Donziger and Craig Murray finally met in virtual conversation on Randy Credico’s “Julian Assange: Countdown to Freedom” programme.
They discussed the parallels in all three trials (Donziger, Murray & Assange), including the role of the media, and the absence of a jury.
What was not mentioned is that, in 2009, WikiLeaks had published a related case, censored in the media - the Trafigura case of toxic-waste dumping on the Ivory Coast in Africa. According to a September 2009 UN report, the dumping drove 108,000 people in the Ivory Coast to seek medical attention.
However, Craig Murray did describe his own observations - from his diplomatic stint in Nigeria, Africa - of outrageous pollution by oil firms (notably Shell) in the local environment, and having been ‘shushed’ by his boss for even asking questions about this matter.
I think there are three main lessons. First, it is clear that the fossil fuel industry feels if it can get away with my wrongful detention in my case, they will be able to use the same playbook to try to target other lawyers and activists with private prosecutions. Already, the fossil fuel industry has pushed through criminal laws and sentencing enhancements in 17 US states to target peaceful protestors at oil facilities, including refineries and pipelines. In their eyes, we are the “terrorists” far more than anybody who took part in the storming of the government on January 6. The fossil fuel industry has created a special legal category for itself that essentially outlaws peaceful protest just for its physical infrastructure. They are trying to outlaw protest of themselves in clear violation of the Constitution.
Second, the most effective way to deal with these attacks is to walk into the fire and not be intimidated. While detained, I worked daily to build support and solidarity. That included getting the support of 68 Nobel Laureates who demanded my release. More than 120 NGOs, including Amnesty International and leading human rights groups, demanded President Biden block my prosecution or issue me a pardon because of judicial and corporate corruption of our court system. The reality is that because of my detention our campaign to hold Chevron accountable for the systematic dumping of cancer-causing oil waste into the Amazon is stronger and has more support than ever. Literally tens of millions of people have learned about this case through social media and independent media outlets.
Third, we need a mechanism to hold US federal judges who receive lifetime appointments accountable so they are sanctioned or removed when they abuse their power or fail to comply with ethical obligations. The federal appeals court in New York repeatedly refused to block Kaplan and Preska from detaining me or using a private Chevron prosecutor. There is no independent body in this country that can adjudicate complaints against federal judges who abuse their power. Judges police themselves and then tend to protect themselves. There is virtually no way to remove them from power. That needs to change.
♦ For heretics, the process IS the punishment
On the day (17 June 2022) the UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, signed the extradition order for Julian Assange, Craig Murray tweeted:
“Priti Patel's endorsement of the extradition of Julian Assange was a given. Now we finally get to take the real meat of the arguments, on political extradition and freedom of speech, to the High Court.
The process of course is part of the punishment as Julian continues to rot.”
The years Steven Donziger spent under house arrest were many times greater than the eventual sentence (still being appealed) for what amounted to a virtual misdemeanour.
In the conversation (visited above in the Covid-19 section) between unjabbed NZ midwives, mandated out of their employment and their careers, one midwife said (from 1:02:02):
“The ‘Covid Vaccine Pass’ was nothing but a policy of discrimination. Purely from a scientific perspective, the purpose of the pass was ‘to protect’ the vaccinated under the guise that they couldn’t transmit Covid once vaccinated. But that was not true. The science has shown us that you still catch and transmit Covid even when you are fully vaccinated. So there was no basis, other than to nudge people to be vaccinated.
[The mandates were] a punishment inflicted on people [who, for whatever reason, did not comply.] … I struggle with the people in parliament who were willingly doing that.”
UPDATE: This point was brought home by Ron Roos MEP, after the Pfizer representative admitted to the European parliament that Pfizer had not tested whether their injectable prevented transmission, prior to the rollout. (11 Oct 2022) [Twitter video]
Punishments for Covid mandate dissenters, for protesting against Covid-19 edicts, came to a head in Canada after the Trucker’s ‘Freedom Convoy’, where the Canadian government not only ensured that many were jailed, but also issued orders for banks to freeze the bank accounts of those contributing funds to the campaign (and even their relatives).
Gareth Peirce, solicitor extraordinaire for Julian Assange, is also the author of “Dispatches from the Dark Side” (2011), a collection of essays written between 2007 and 2011. Before she trained as a lawyer, Peirce was a journalist, during which time she spent a lengthy period covering Martin Luther King Jnr’s campaign in the US.
In these essays Peirce documents some of the great failures of the system of justice in the UK and, in the context of cases related to extradition requests from the US, she comments:
“The concept that its own conformity with international legal principles should be exposed to any outside judgment is entirely alien to America. When, for instance, Jordan refused to endorse exemption for Americans from trial in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, the US threatened immediately to withdraw its contribution of one-fifth of Jordan’s annual budget. The Jordanian parliament promptly revoked its decision.”
“The US is accustomed to filtering out external opinion, it will judge for itself whether or not it has [quoting the US Attorney General of the period] ‘adhered to all the rules’ since it exempts itself from sanction when the politically driven choices it makes fail to comply with international standards.”
She made many other relevant comments too - more than a decade ago. I heartily commend her book to readers.
♦ The world inside our heads
How we see the world, and what we then conclude about it, is dependent - mainly - on three key things:
The state of our body, physically, chemically, since embodiment is a requirement for perception (as AI researchers have found, to their chagrin).
This is clear to us in some ways, such as the effect of natural hormonal changes on our thinking, or the effect of various drugs. But it seems there is a more basic level at which it is also true.
In “Talking with Russians | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast S4: E 74” (13 Jan 2022) Peterson explains this at some length, quoting James Gibson who notes that “biologically …” “a value structure is the preconception for perception itself.” Peterson explains: “We thought we just saw the objects that were there - the material objects that were there - but that isn't the case. It's really not the case. It's so much not the case that if you try to build a machine that perceives the world that's just looking at the objects - that are there, so to speak - you can't. It doesn't work.21 So people like Rodney Brooks, MIT robotics engineer and a genius, he started figuring this out in 1992 - that in all probability a machine would have to be embodied to perceive because perception is so tightly associated with action, and action and perception are also so tightly associated with value. You can't perceive without a framework of values. […] They're a precondition for the perception of material reality itself.”
This will be part of why prisons so carefully manage the physical state of their inmates. As John Shipton once said of his son, Julian Assange (16 Nov 2021):
“He has been vaccinated, of course, because ALL of the prisoners in the jail have been vaccinated. So he has no choice in this. No choice about anything. He has no control over his body. What his thoughts are, are his. The rest is in the complete control of the jail administration.
But given this perspective, with such tight control of his physical state, perhaps even Julian’s thoughts are no longer wholly his own.
The tools we have to encode and process our perceptions. These include visualisation and - perhaps more importantly, at least for logical thinking - words, and a grammar within which to arrange them.22
But now we are being asked to alter our vocabulary on an almost daily basis. Words that mean one thing one day, mean something entirely different the next. More on this topic below.
The information to which we have access, including knowledge of its source and, often, knowledge of the motives of its provider. Our awareness of what information we don’t have is also relevant.
♦ More ‘Looking Glass’ Thinking
Before George Orwell gave us his commentary on the unsafe grounding of knowledge in words - in his novel ‘1984’ and in his essays, such as “Politics and the English Language” - we had already been introduced to the insecure meanings of words by Lewis Carroll:
From “Alice Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There” by Lewis Carroll (Chapter 6). SOURCE: Text and image
We used to laugh at Humpty Dumpty, and generally thought Orwell’s dystopic ‘1984’ unrealistically fanciful. But that was before …
In our post-coronavirus world the Alice adventures no longer seem amusing. And Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ no longer seems unrealistic. Indeed it seems that the US Department of Homeland Security has created one already - although they called it a “Disinformation Governance Board” - something which only came to light when they tried to appoint a warbler (Nina Jankowicz) as its head.
UPDATE: It seems that the Disinformation Governance Board was finally shut down 24 August 2022. I guess we will see if it hasn’t just morphed into something else.
UPDATE: “Truth Cops: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation” (31 October 2022) [The Intercept]
UPDATE: “EPISODE 294: Ministry of Truth” (17 Nov 2022) [The Highwire]
♦ The ‘Ministry of Truth’
As a precurser to the DHS Disinformation Governance Board, the Atlantic Council report (5 March 2018) was published at the height of the “Russiagate” propaganda (subsequently disproved by the Mueller Inquiry).
Here is the report cover - with @wikileaks (who have NEVER had to withdraw a document as 'fake') positioned at the centre, along with Jack @JackPosobiec ("an American alt-right internet troll and conspiracy theorist" - according to Wikipedia). The Atlantic Council make their 'enemy' clear.
At the time it was noted that, in this outline of their outline of their strategy - “straight from the horses mouth” and “filled with loads of#DoubleThink, they explain how they want to build a global #MiniTruth system. But unlike in#Orwell1984it won't be monolithic but distributed.”
Inside, it doesn't take them long to get into their "Russia, Russia" conspiracy theory. RT and Sputnik are "foreign propaganda" - but of course the state-owned BBC are not. Nor is the role of US-owned propaganda organs mentioned.
Rather than go into more depth here, I think the modern Ministry of Truth is rather well summed up in this song (from Tom Stampalia, Mark Posa and Michelle Wood, with music by Leonard Cohen) “How they rule ya, How they fool ya, How they cruel ya”.
“Leni Riefenstahl said her epic films glorifying the Nazis depended on a “submissive void” in the German public. This is how propaganda is done.”
Here’s a prophecy from Julian Assange a decade ago - from “Cypherpunks” (2012):
“The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.”
“What type of place is Western democracy going to be? Is it going to be a place with a collapsing rule of law, with mass surveillance of entire populations - all the practical elements of a totalitarian regime? We don't yet have a totalitarian regime, but we are getting pretty close in the practical elements. Is that going to cross over into something else?
That would be a hard place for an investigative organisation like WikiLeaks to work in. It is a hard place for Glenn Greenwald - he's now in effective exile in Brazil. Laura Poitras is in effective exile in Germany. Sarah Harrison, a UK citizen, is in effective exile in Russia, Edward Snowden in asylum in Russia. Me in asylum here.
The West is becoming a place where the best and the brightest who hold the government to account are ending up in asylum or in exile in other countries. We've seen that before, with dictatorships in Latin America, with the Soviet Union, and it's time it stopped.”
The various Western governments. at least, did not listen - although an increasing number within their populations are now coming to the truth in those words.
♦ The Four Horsemen
The four horsemen (of the apocalypse) is an image of prophesised doom, presaged by the four riders that have taken on different names in different ages, but are often referred to as War, Pestilence, Famine and Death (the ‘Pale Rider’). The story is sourced from the bible - the books of Zechariah (1:8) and Ezekiel, and in Revelations (6:1–8).
Artists have reimagined this story in many ways over more than two thousand years. The version reproduced below is “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, a 1984 retelling in acrylic on unstretched canvas from the psyche of UK artist Keith Piper, purchased by Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA). The work has been described as:
“Each figure is a satirical comment on what Piper saw as the corrupt domestic or international political system of the time:
The first figure is a middle-class Tory voter from Bath ticking the ballot box, thereby examining the vitriolic rhetoric that preceded the Conservative Party’s 1983 re-election;
The second figure shows a police officer involved in the violent suppression of picketers during the UK miners’ strike;
The third figure is an American army officer, and decries the storage of nuclear weapons at Greenham Common RAF Base in Berkshire, England; and
The final figure is of Ronald Reagan, the US president in charge of the nuclear button, and suggests parallels between his earlier acting career and his potential to instigate conflict. [See Helen Caldicutt on this topic here and here in 1983.]
Each panel contains a handwritten satirical text describing the character.”
♦ War
More than a decade further on from publication of the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs and the beginning of the arbitrary detention of Julian Assange, the war criminals - Bush, Blair, and their military and civilian enablers exposed in the War Logs - have still not been brought to account, nor those who came after them (Hillary Clinton and Obama for Libya, for instance), nor those who created the US torture techniques (euphemistically relabeled), nor those who employed them.
Instead, Western governments have connived at legalistic attempts to validate crimes committed by their minions, and to further limit protest or journalistic exposure.
Clare Daly, the Irish MEP, articulated this loudly outside the Royal Courts of Justice (6 Nov 2021) when she cried “The criminals walk free, and Julian Assange is persecuted. That is a crime”.
Now we have yet another war - in Ukraine - one at least partly brought on by the deliberate actions of the West, and the prospect of another - with China - in the offing.
When will we ever learn ….?
♦ Pestilence
Covid offered a perfect opportunity for drilling civilians in the rigid obedience enforced in prisons - masks, mandated vaccines, medical surveillance and loss of bodily autonomy, along with “lockdowns” (a prison term) became a generally accepted (if increasingly contested) part of life, and now - according to Anthony Fauci, might become a permanent part of life.
Very large “quarantine centres” were built in Canada and Australia (as well as China) and have not been dismantled.
It seems we are being prepared for more where that came from - more strains of Covid, and even new forms of pestilence, such as monkeypox.
When will we ever learn …?
♦ Famine (for body and mind)
Now it seems that food shortages are well on their way.
In The Economist: “The Coming Food Catastrophe”(19 May 2022) the authors were quick to blame Russia for what the WHO expect is a coming ‘global food shortage’:
By invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin will destroy the lives of people far from the battlefield—and on a scale even he may regret. The war is battering a global food system weakened by covid-19, climate change and an energy shock. Ukraine’s exports of grain and oilseeds have mostly stopped and Russia’s are threatened. Together, the two countries supply 12% of traded calories. Wheat prices, up 53% since the start of the year, jumped a further 6% on May 16th, after India said it would suspend exports because of an alarming heatwave.
The widely accepted idea of a cost-of-living crisis does not begin to capture the gravity of what may lie ahead. António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, warned on May 18th that the coming months threaten “the spectre of a global food shortage” that could last for years. The high cost of staple foods has already raised the number of people who cannot be sure of getting enough to eat by 440m, to 1.6bn. Nearly 250m are on the brink of famine. If, as is likely, the war drags on and supplies from Russia and Ukraine are limited, hundreds of millions more people could fall into poverty. Political unrest will spread, children will be stunted and people will starve
In an RT article (18 May 2022) "The imminent global food crisis is being blamed on Russia, but the truth is rather more complex" Dr Mathew Maavak saw things a little differently:
“The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict is undoubtedly impacting global grain supplies, as well as the means of growing crops around the world. But is the looming global food crisis solely Russia’s fault – as spun by the Western media machine?
Only a few months ago, Covid-19, government-imposed lockdowns and climate change were repeatedly blamed for this scenario.
A recent White House Joint Statement by US President Joe Biden and EU leader Ursula von der Leyen clearly singled out the supposed new culprit: “We are deeply concerned by how Putin’s war in Ukraine has caused major disruptions to international food and agriculture supply chains, and the threat it poses to global food security. We recognize that many countries around the world have relied on imported food staples and fertilizer inputs from Ukraine and Russia, with Putin’s aggression disrupting that trade.”
The concept of global food security these days appear as fleeting as Biden’s mnemonic prowess. It has been 12 years since the world was shaken by the Arab Spring, a series of events in which hunger played a significant role, and which, in turn, led to violent uprisings and yet-unresolved civil wars in Libya, Yemen and Syria. Big Tech, Western officials and influencers fuelled this mayhem in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’ but never proffered any concrete solutions. Instead, global hunger grew unabated, while its root causes were explicated through the lens of ‘climate change’ and ‘global governance’.
The article looks at the shortsightedness of governments in not establishing national granaries for stockpiles of wheat etc, and not stockpiling fertiliser. It also warns against using human faeces as a substitute for chemical fertiliser, noting that:
… as a recent Mongabay article cautions, “human waste — including pharmaceuticals and microplastics contained in faeces and urine — is a major public health hazard, causing disease outbreaks, and putting biodiversity at risk.” They contain a variety of contaminants and hazardous pathogens that may affect the entire food chain. Contaminants such as nanoplastics cannot be filtered out using conventional means.
Meanwhile the ‘green agenda’ has driven some governments (eg Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, Germany) towards policies that, while (in their view) meeting their objectives re mitigating ‘climate change’, negatively impact their ability to supply energy to their industries, fertiliser to their farmers, and produce food for their citizens.
[Vandana Shiva, who has actively and successfully helped farmers convert from applying chemical fertiliser to natural methods of increasing soil nitrogen levels, has much to say about the botched and farmer-blaming methods of these governments, and suggests that the real aims of these policies are not related to creating healthy soil (nor to reducing emissions). She also discusses the murky history of chemical fertilisers, which she traces back to IG Farben - a name that came up in an early section of this essay.
In parallel with these efforts, a series of ‘unfortunate accidents’ has been putting food processing and local fertiliser plants out of action, especially in the US.
IMAGE: Hungry cat with empty food bowl. SOURCE: Fabio Grandis
Famine means widespread hunger, but this need not be literal. There is also a growing hunger for truthful information. Assange and WikiLeaks tried to feed that hunger, but who will try again, particularly on the scale of WikiLeaks, if the ‘crucifixion’ of Assange reaches the intended conclusion? It does not seem that the legacy press have any intention of filling this void.
♦ Death
Death already seem to be stalking the land, and that is without even counting the 100,000 plus (so far) killed in Ukraine, or in other deadly wars (like Yemen) that get less media attention.
Although rarely mentioned in the legacy press, increased excess mortality has skyrocketed in much of the Western world since the introduction of the Covid-19 vaccines and is the topic of much speculation in the alternative press. Accompanying this, records are now emerging of seriously depressed birth rates in many of the same countries.
Is the pale horse already afoot? And if so, who is its rider?
IMAGE; Statue of a Pale Horse at Denver International Airport. SOURCE: Screengrab from a Feb 2015 YouTube video which interprets the images at the airport in terms of various ‘conspiracy theories’.
♦ What’s Assange got to do with it?
It seems that some kind of ‘apocalypse’ is well under way.
To the extent that such an ‘apocalypse’ can be ameliorated (or even avoided altogether) we all need to focus on the case of Julian Assange because it is critical - not just in relation to his own freedom, to his love ones, and his supporters, but to:
our own personal freedom,
press freedom,
human health,
environmental wellbeing,
the possibility of peace in the world,
and other key aspects a world that seems to be headed for a grand crisis.
Julian Assange has often made clear that the WikiLeaks’ journalism was not an end in itself, but rather a means to justice in the world.
He has also stressed the connection between justice and peace.
At the award 2011 ceremony where Assange received the Gold Medal for Peace, the Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, Professor Stuart Rees, stated:
“Assange’s work is in the Tom Paine Rights of Man and Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers tradition- challenging the old order of power in politics and in journalism. Assange has championed people’s right to know and has challenged the centuries old tradition that governments are entitled to keep the public in a state of ignorance. In the Paine, Ellsberg and Assange cases, those in power moved quickly to silence their critics even by perverting the course of justice.”
In accepting the medal, Julian Assange went on to say:
“With WikiLeaks we are all engaged in a struggle, a generational struggle for a proposition that citizens have a right and a duty to scrutinise the state.”
The slow ‘crucifixion’ of Assange is a disavowal by all states concerned, but especially the US, of those values: justice, peace, and the right of citizens to know - and have a say in - what is being done in their name.
Assange himself has not been optimistic about the possibility of his freedom without radical political change. He was asked about his future in the Rolling Stone interview (2012):
“Q: Where do you want to end up, when all the legal battles are over?
JA: “I don’t want to end up anywhere. I want to do what I was doing before. I lived in Egypt when we had important things that needed to be done, or in Kenya or the United States or Australia or Sweden or Germany. When we have opportunities, then that’s where I am.
When do you think you’ll be able to regain that freedom to do that? In relation to the United States, we’ll have to wait for the revolution.
The UN Rapporteur on Torture, Mils Melzer (see PART 2 in this series), originally a sceptic about Julian Assange, came to believe that understanding and resolving his case in a positive manner (ie Assange’s freedom) was essential to a positive future. He believed this so strongly that he wrote a whole book (and translated it into three languages) explaining the case, and what he saw as the duplicity of the four states involved, and corruption of the rule of law within those states.
“Melzer believes Assange’s case is so important because it sets a precedent to erode the most basic liberties the rest of us take for granted.
[Melzer] opens the book with a quote from Otto Gritschneder, a German lawyer who observed up close the rise of the Nazis, “those who sleep in a democracy will wake up in a dictatorship".”
As Stella Moris says here, at the end of this very moving piece: [YouTube]
“All our liberties are tied up in Julian’s freedom.”
As the countries throughout the West enact legislation shuttering the freedoms of their citizens, and enhancing the powers of their states (such as “New Rules for MI5 and police to authorise crimes”), Nils Melzer has occasionally made sharp comments. In 2020, in relation to the UK, Melzer tweeted:
Nils Melzer [Tweet] [BBC] [alluding to the “Hunger Games”] “Here they are again, chipping away at the rule of law as if it were a walk in the park. Last week they got impunity for crimes overseas. This week they want impunity for domestic crimes. I guess they are almost ready now to let the "games" begin...”
We are now very aware of increasing levels of censorship around us, especially in the West where more and more people we used to follow on Twitter or YouTube are “disappeared” every week for voicing uncomfortable opinions, and/or sharing unpalatable facts.
Julian Assange has been warning us of this trend for more than a decade. In his address to the Cambridge Union (2013) he focused on “the privatisation of censorship”, citing as an example the removal from YouTube of a video response to the Dearlove address made by a WikiLeaks supporter.
“[This is] where the field of public discourse occurs on private lands - when it occurs on the internet - and that archives that are historically important - important to all of us, and become our intellectual record - are no longer something that is safe, and no longer something that we can build our discourse on (and indeed build our civilization on) because they are being ripped out from under us at the very moment we are trying to cite them.
George Orwell said that “he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.”
These high levels of censorship have not only reduced our access to important information. It has also censored many of the voices that could be most productive in talking through and resolving many of the critical problems facing us. This became painfully obvious in the Covid era, and also applies to our collective efforts to redress the damage already done to our natural environment.
“Think for a moment of why Julian Assange is in prison for doing what journalists should do - he searched for the truth.
He searched for the truth about war, about environmental destruction and degradation.
He searched for the truth about the state-sponsored spying that goes on against political activists in many countries around the world, and
He challenged the power that conceals those truths, and revealed it all to the world.
His ‘crime’ - not in my view a crime - his ‘crime’ is that he let the world know the bad intentions of:
Many who've taken us into war - in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, who have bombed bombed the people of Yemen with weapons supplied from Britain,
Those oil companies that are in the rush to the Arctic and destroy that pristine environment, the more to make profits out of it as they drag fossil fuels out of the ground
and so many other issues and cases around the world.
Julian has told the truth and so if we allow Julian to be silenced for the rest of his life, it's devastating:
for him, for Stella for their children, for his friends, for his family,
but it is also a form of censorship on every journalist around the world.
It's a form of self-censorship, because those that are able to speak out about human rights abuses in various places around the world, who speak the truth about the corruption of governments of police of military, they'll say “Well, Julian Assange paid the ultimate price and was silenced and imprisoned” (this is looking down the line some years - he could then be in prison on a triple life sentence in the United States in a maximum security prison) …
The message will be that if you speak out you put yourself at risk and nobody's going to support you.
We're here today to say the very opposite. You speak out, you tell the truth, and we are here to support you - in this square in other cities, and all around the world.”
Max Blumenthal of The Gray Zone (16 May 2022) reminded us that:
“If Julian Assange can be tortured and killed in prison, then so can we.”
It is not just what Julian Assange published that informs us that something is very wrong in the way we are being governed, and in the ways our systems of justice work. It is also obvious in the way Julian himself has been treated.
Gabriel Shipton and Daniel Ellsberg compared notes about the parallels in the trials of Daniel Ellsberg and extradition hearing for Julian Assange. Shipton said:
“The [Daniel Ellsberg] trial was an exposure of how we are being governed. And it is similar in Julian’s case. Julian’s persecution is like another WikiLeaks revelation. At every step along the way - the CIA spying on Julian in the embassy, on his lawyers, on his psychologist …”
“Even if Patel wasn’t already on the way to winning the all-corners record as the most repressive home secretary in modern history, the Johnson government, already in Joe Biden’s bad books, has no incentive to further alienate the US president.
If and when Assange is put on a plane to the US, investigative journalism will suffer a permanent and deadening blow.
And the message will be sent to war criminals not just in the US but in every country round the globe that they can commit their crimes with impunity.”
A powerful summary of the importance of the fate of Julian Assange was made by the Australian Adam Henry in “Julian Assange & the empire of illusions” (31 May 2022):
“The world revealed by Wikileaks is an ugly world, of corruption, lies, deception, criminality, and manipulations. We are not supposed to see this world.
In essence, Assange is being punished by the US government to send a message, namely: The US deep state will not tolerate being embarrassed. It is also a lesson in US exceptionalism. The fate of Assange is irrelevant, the right of the US to pursue any or all means to secure its objectives is paramount. The protection of US exceptionalism is therefore a noble and just cause, there can be no limits on its reach. This is more important than the life of Assange, journalism or freedom of expression. To protect US exceptionalism in its totality, it matters not if Assange commits suicide, or dies in prison, it matters not that the very principles of journalistic freedom will be trashed, the god of US exceptionalism must be placated.
For those who have stood by in silence, or those in the media who used Assange only to later throw him to the wolves, one day they might be next. Other nations will follow the US precedent, and no journalist, blogger, or media outlet, will ever be safe again. In using all means to destroy Assange, the US has revealed itself.
The consequences of its vengeance will reverberate, and like emerging from a dream, we must reconnect with reality. As shown by its actions against Assange, we now see the US government in its true form, an empire of illusions.”
Emmy Butlin (of JADC) described the importance of the Assange case this way:
“[There is] a revelation in front of our eyes about the corruption of our democratic system and what we hold dear in this country, when the judiciary and the political executive are acting hand in glove, and there is no separation of powers. Beyond the aspect of press freedom, beyond the aspect of human rights, we are understanding that the way this case is progressing is corrupting for the entire democratic system that we rely on.
So it is a very, very urgent call to action - very much like Nils Meltzer, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture said - it is a “call for action” for people to take action. Everyone, what we can do - no more, no less - is to put our footprint in this very, very important struggle and path towards reassuring and re-establishing the democratic rights that generation upon generation of people that have come before us have sacrificed their lives, their blood, their sweat to achieve for our societies.
This is what is at stake - whether we are able to preserve those rights for the future or we are willing for these rights to disappear, disappear for us and for our children.
So I encourage everybody find the thing that you can do to support Julian Assange, to defend him, and to finally secure his freedom, and do it. That's all we can do.”
On the eve of the Priti Patel extradition decision, Stella Moris summed up key issues in the case.
A few days later (24 May 2022) she pleaded with us:
"The freedom to communicate is all we have, it's what we need to be able to construct an improved reality around ourselves ... Julian is a symbol of the freedom of speech [and] of the press ... Use your power to help to free Julian."
Julian Assange is at the crossroads of the future for all of us. My own advice is:
Don’t allow his life to slip into the history books, sanitised and massaged into acceptable form by the criminals in power (as happened with JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba and all the other “disappeared” and murdered figures of our past)23.
Don’t allow his slow crucifixion to continue.
Do your part in stopping this abomination.
At the crossroads to the future.”Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” Robert Frost
I’ll close on this very powerful summary of the importance of Julian Assange’s freedom from Nils Melzer : “What the government is trying to do is to criminalise the truth.”
NB: This essay may also be available as a PDF when time allows.
This essay is now available as an illustrated reading, in an 8 part video series. See the video schedule (with links) here.
Thanks for reading Full Focus! SUBSCRIBE for free to receive new posts and support my work. A ‘LIKE ‘ is much appreciated too.
The author of this article lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
As a long time supporter of Julian Assange, I have become aware that many of those new to the story of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange find it hard to get a picture of the enormity and multidimensionality of the abuse that has gone on here, and what that says about the current state of the world we live in.
The third was another compendium “The Persecution of WikiLeaks: Counting the Cost” covering a wide range of costs incurred by those associated, in almost any way, with WikiLeaks. In particular, it looks at the rollcall of the dead, and lists some of the many whistleblowers and truthtellers who have suffered under this regime of persecution. Read it here.
The fifth documents what was mostly a happy hiatus in this litany of abuse: “The Assange Wedding”. But even on that special day, the apparatus of the state managed to intrude with its petty (and not so petty) cruelties. Read it here.
The sixth compendium “A Chorus of Courage: Speaking Up for Assange”, provides a roll call of many of those who have spoken up for Julian Assange - using their professional &/or personal voices - and provides a little information about their role, together with links to some key statements. This list represents only the tip of the enormous mass of support for Julian that exists - especially at the grass roots level. Read it here.
The seventh compendium “Prizes for Assange: Praise where Praise is Due” celebrates many of the prizes and other awards showered on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks over nearly fifteen years. These give the lie to the vile smears by politicians and stenographers to power in the legacy press - that he "is not a journalist". Read it here.
The eighth compendium “Torrent of Truth: A Timeline of Assange Speech” provides a timeline of many articles and videos that record the direct speech of Julian Assange. While not exhaustive, it provides a fairly comprehensive and accessible overview of his online public life. Read it here.
The ninth part “View from the Other Side: Proponents of Prosecution” is a review of a one hour long podcast from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia’s flagship, state funded broadcaster broadcast June 2022. Much of that podcast is preserved and analysed as an exemplar of the kind of misinformation which is spread at the “intellectual” and academic end of the legacy press spectrum. Read it here.
The tenth part (this post) was an essay “All Roads Converge … on Julian Assange”. It looks at the place of Julian Assange - as a man, a representative of free speech and a free press, and as a symbol of the values of the Enlightenment - asking why it matters what happens to him. Why is his fate centrally related to the crises - coronavirus, Ukraine, climate - currently swirling around us? Read it here. This very long essay is also available as an annotated reading, spread over an eight part video series. See more here.
The eleventh contains an annotated TRANSCRIPT of Julian’s first public speech (1 Oct 2024) after regaining his freedom (26 June 2024), plus other details of the PACE context of that speech: “Julian Speaks: a free man among friends, at last”. Read it here.
The SERIES INDEX. This is a one-stop-shop window on the series - listing and linking to all the topics and resources provided within all parts of the archive. See it here.
For those only nowthinking about joining the chorus of courage supporting Julian - please speak up. Your efforts will be appreciated, and you will find yourself on the right side of history. The fight has not ended yet, as although Julian is now free, he still needs a pardon, and safe legal conditions in which to continue his work - when he is well enough to do so.
Many of the reports in this series, while interesting to read for those new to this topic, are mainly intended as ongoing resources: documents to bookmark, dip into, refer back to, and share with those needing sources and perspective, rather than pieces to read at one sitting. The compendia are updated regularly as new events arise, so you might want to check back from time to time.
The video in which he made that statement is well worth watching. Although made nearly four years ago, Ciaron is quite prescient about what was to come. There is also a transcript.
“And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors [thieves], one on the right hand, and the other on the left. 34Then said Jesus, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots. 35And the people stood beholding. And the rulers also with them derided him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself …’ ” Luke 23:33-35 KJV
Blumenthal mispronounced the word Calvary as ‘cavalry’ - as have several other people. This is a kind of Freudian slip, as the cavalry (the war machine) have certainly come for Julian Assange.
The video clip which accompanies this tweet is from a Nils Melzer speech (at 19:46) at a 'Free The Truth' event, held in St Pancras church, London (3 February 2020).
I’ve always wondered why Jennifer Robinson, one of Julian’s lawyers, chose as her Twitter handle @suigenerisjen. The obvious reason was that she saw herself (quite rightly) as “one of a kind” - the literal meaning of the Latin term. But perhaps she also had this quote in mind, inspired by Arendt’s example of what can be achieved when individuals - acting from a truth that the heart knows well - come together to speak out against a current madness? I’m sure she knew, even then, that “Courage is Contagious”.
From this has evolved the phrase “Little Eichmanns”, used by John Shipton (Julian’s father) in an interview (1 July 2022) by Robert Cibis (from 17:42).
“So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves.” (Matthew 27:24)
Of course Mike Pompeo denied that plans to assassinate Assange had been made - see “Mike Pompeo on Whether U.S. Plotted to Kill Assange | The Megyn Kelly Show” (29 September 2021). However, if you listen again, very carefully, you will hear that he didn’t actually deny making plans to assassinate Assange. He denied making plans to break US law. “We never conducted planning to violate US law” were his exact words. Given that US officials seem to think that even torture in black sites does not violate US law, we cannot take much comfort from that. He then goes on to say that the 30 people from the intelligence community that spoke to reporters “should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the CIA,” Which would tend to suggest that there was actually something to talk about.
In 2012, this was in relation to the use of particular materials by the judges when deciding the key question of who is a ‘judicial authority’ able to issue a valid European Arrest Warrant [EAW].
Twitter is a very restricted medium for conveying full information. The links to source absent from these tweets (because there was no room for them) are - re Tweet 1 - “Part 1-COVID Dogma and ‘Mass Formation’ Hypnosis of Society | CLIP | American Thought Leaders” [YouTube] - re Tweet 2 - “COVID-19 Vaccination—Becoming Part of the New Normal” [JAMANetwork]
Although often quoted, and sometimes attributed to various books, reports and speeches (including Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech), I have not been able to find these exact words in any document available online. It is, however, quoted here, so perhaps it comes from the Francois Mauriac’s foreword to the original edition of “Night”. Alternatively, it may appear in another version of the initial conversation between these men, discussed in “A Jew Today”.
These days, some writers note the sadly ironic comparison between the defenders of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Palestinian defenders of their lives and culture in the walled ghetto in Gaza. Many have called Gaza “the world’s largest outdoor prison”. Discussing Sarah Roy’s book of that name, Kristine Currie writes:
“Roy provides a political economic framework for understanding the conflict from the individual to the family to institutions of religion and government. As the child of Holocaust survivors who lost over 100 family members, Roy reflects on what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taught her about the Nazi genocide. In her view, core tenets of Judaism that value dissent and its role in righting the wrongs of the world are under attack and being invalidated.
In post-Holocaust Israel, celebration is joined with oppression; those once fearful and powerless are now fearful and powerful; “renewal and injustice are silently joined, and in their joining Jews also are denied a normal life, something they have not yet found in Israel.” The consequences for Palestinians are catastrophic loss of land, home — and increasing — cultural identity.”
“I came to see that professionals are crucial to carrying out any form of genocide. They're well educated and capable of doing the nitty-gritty work of genocide. So they often develop the rationale for the genocide, the technology, some of the science. Theyoften create images or poems or songs which render the genocide heroic, and in that way professionals are socialised to evil.”
From Sparticus: ”Details of Operation Condor was not fully exposed until 1992 when José Fernández, a Paraguayan judge, discovered what became known as the "terror archives", detailing the fates of thousands of Latin Americans secretly kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The archives provided details of 50,000 people murdered, 30,000 "disappeared" and 400,000 imprisoned.”
Operation Condor in also mentioned in terms of a prior President of Bolivia, Juan José Torres, ousted in a US coup and subsequently murdered in Buenos Aires, in “Evo Morales: UK Role in Coup That Ousted Him”. When asked about Julian Assange, Evo Morales replied: ”When WikiLeaks began publishing U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010, it revealed an extensive campaign by the U.S. embassy in La Paz to remove Morales’s government. There had long been suspicions but the cables showed clear U.S. links with the opposition.” […] “Sometimes the empire talks about freedom of expression, but deep down they are enemies of freedom of expression.” “The empire, when someone tells the truth…that is when the retaliation begins, like with Assange.”
After John Bolton boasted on CNN of having organised several coups, a former senior US intelligence official for Latin America discussed more recent coups in that continent (particularly in Venezuela) on the GrayZone (15 July 2020).
I don’t think it would be presumptuous to guess that one of the conspiracies Assange had in mind was the rise of ISIS (under all its names) and the identity of those who fund and guide the strategies of that group. He raises this in an interview with John Pilger just prior to the 2016 US presidential election, pointing to what he believes to be the most important email (from 2014) in the Clinton/Podesta/DNC collection of leaks. Vladimir Putin pointed to the same issue at the Valdai Club in Oct 2014. An aspect of that conspiracy that neither Putin nor Assange addressed is raised in this video looking at the ancient heritage of Iraq (treasures of humanity), and its destruction by ISIS.
See the Phillip Knightley obituary in the Guardian (7 Dec 2016). “Phillip Knightley, who has died aged 87, was one of the most accomplished reporters of his generation: his craftsmanship underpinned some of the 20th-century’s most memorable newspaper scoops and campaigns. He made a crucial contribution to the Sunday Times’s thalidomide exposé; revealed how the world’s biggest meat retailers, the Vestey family, had avoided taxation for six decades; and shed new light on problematic figures such as Lawrence of Arabia and the spy Kim Philby, with whom he corresponded for 20 years.
He tempered an omnivorous curiosity with a resilient scepticism – not least about his own trade of journalism, which he came to see was greatly overrated as a force for change. His truth-seeking had full play in his 1975 book The First Casualty, an account of the mendacity and myth-making of war correspondents, beginning in Crimea …”
This was put in a different way in (1 March 2022) “We're Building Computers Wrong” [YouTube] by Veritasium (Derek Muller) on the power of analog computers:
Our brains are digital, in that a neuron either fires or it doesn't. But they're also analog, in that thinking takes place everywhere, all at once. So maybe what we need to achieve true artificial intelligence, machines that think like us, is the power of analog. [at 20:17]
’Analog’ as used here as a synonym for physical embodiment.
That such ‘words’ and a ‘'grammar’ need not be oral or written is discussed by neurologist Oliver Sacks in “Seeing Voices”, which examines the visual, spacial language of the deaf. Once one takes on that perspective, it is not a big leap to accepting that other creatures (eg bees, who ‘dance’ directions to fellow bees) might also have some kind of language, with a grammar we simply do not yet perceive. But that is a topic for another discussion.
🇨🇳🇺🇸🇬🇧The Chinese Foreign Ministry called for an international investigation of war crimes by the UK and the US
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