John
Pilger
The
glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy
in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle
against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled
a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light
in almost seven years.
That
this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna
Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for "democratic"
societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international
law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain
is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal
ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.
But to
hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists
in Trump's Washington, in league with Ecuador's Lenin Moreno, a Latin
American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the
British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and
justice.
Imagine
Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in
Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the
dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair's "paramount
crime" is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange's crime is
journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and
empowering people all over the world with truth.
The
shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar
Wilde wrote, "sow the seeds of discontent [without which]
there would be no advance towards civilisation". The warning
is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and
editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV
studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.
Assange's
principal media tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with
the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an
editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has
exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous
editor called "the greatest scoop of the last 30 years".
The paper creamed off WikiLeaks' revelations and claimed the
accolades and riches that came with them.
With
not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian
book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book's authors, Luke
Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and
disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in
confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing
leaked US embassy cables.
With
Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding joined the
police outside and gloated on his blog that "Scotland Yard
may get the last laugh". The Guardian has since
published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a
discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump's man, Paul
Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never
happened; it was fake.
But the
tone has now changed. "The Assange case is a morally tangled
web," the paper opined. "He (Assange) believes in
publishing things that should not be published.... But he has always
shone a light on things that should never have been hidden."
These
"things" are the truth about the homicidal way America
conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in
its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos
Islanders, the expose of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary
of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American
ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be
overthrown, and much more. It all available on the WikiLeaks site.
The
Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already
visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of
a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office
clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing
when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The
Guardian was showered with praise.
When a
court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going
to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall
was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.
If
Assange is extradited to America for publishing what the Guardian
calls truthful "things", what is to stop the current
editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan
Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?
What is
to stop the editors of the New York Times and the Washington
Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated
with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel
in Germany and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is
long.
David
McCraw, lead lawyer of the New York Times, wrote: "I
think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad
precedent for publishers... from everything I know, he's sort of in a
classic publisher's position and the law would have a very hard time
distinguishing between the New York Times and WikiLeaks."
Even if
journalists who published WikiLeaks' leaks are not summoned by an
American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea
Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalised by
thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.
In
Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two
whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra's spooks bugged the
cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express
purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper
share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will
be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is
infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees
on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm
and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for
30,000 people.
Real
journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the
Ministry of Defence in London produced a secret document which
described the "principal threats" to public order as
threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists.
The latter was designated the major threat.
The
document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. "We
had no choice," Assange told me. "It's very simple.
People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge
power. That's true democracy."
What if
Assange and Manning and others in their wake - if there are others -
are silenced and "the right to know and question and
challenge" is taken away?
In the
1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose
films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.
She told
me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not
on "orders from above" but on what she called the
"submissive void" of the public.
"Did
this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?"
I asked her.
"Of
course," she said, "especially the
intelligentsia.... When people no longer ask serious questions, they
are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen."
And did.
The
rest, she might have added, is history.
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