JOHN PILGER: Assange Arrest a Warning from History
April 12, 2019
Real journalism is being criminalized by thugs in plain sight, says John
Pilger. Dissent has become an indulgence. And the British elite has
abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.
By 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 Trumps Washington, in league with Ecuadors 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.
Moreno: A Latin American Judas.
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, Blairs paramount crime is the
deaths of a million Iraqis. Assanges crime is journalism: holding the
rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the
world with truth.
The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde
wrote, sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no
advance towards civilization. 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.
Assanges 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 books 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.
Revealing Homicidal Colonial Wars
When Assange was still trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, Harding joined
police outside and gloated on his blog that Scotland Yard may get the last
laugh. The Guardian then published a series of falsehoods about Assange,
not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trumps 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 exposé of
Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East,
the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in
Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available
on the WikiLeaks site.
The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already
visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard
drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah
Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise
nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with
praise.
When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going
to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was
betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.
If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what The Guardian calls
truthful things, what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner,
following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific
propagandist Luke Harding?
Even the propagandist Harding could be at risk.
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, hes sort of in a classic publishers 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 criminalized 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 Canberras 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.
Journalism: a Major Threat
Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry
of Defense 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. Its very simple. People have a right to know and
a right to question and challenge power. Thats 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.