Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden
Three Mirrors Reflecting Our Inhumanity, Intolerance and State Terror Back At Us
The more governments and corporations try to stop the free flow of information and impose their surveillance regimes, the more people will rise up to oppose and dismantle such tyranny. As Julian Assange put it, “The US intelligence agencies have a big budget and immense technological resources, but the more we learn about them, the more we see how incompetent they are. They are definitely not real life James Bonds. More a vast number of sickly office workers dreaming about their next holiday.”
by V Lexander and Lexander Magazine Editorial Research Staff
There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!
—Cosmo, Sneakers (1992)
This is not the liberal democracy that we had all dreamed of. This is an encroaching, privatized censorship regime.
If we are to produce a more civilized society, a more just society, it has to be based upon the truth.
—Julian Assange
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
When Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, he likely expected to face harshly zealous resistance from governments, financial institutions, and multinational corporations, all of which engage in all aspects of information warfare ranging from corporate and political espionage to leveraging such illegally acquired intelligence over each other. What he may not have expected was that there would be people—ordinary, common citizens of Western “democracies”—who would also irrationally freak out over the massive disclosures, supporting calls by their criminally insane and corrupt politicians to imprison and persecute him, going so far as to even call for his cold blooded murder at the hands of thugs or covert assassination by one Special Forces unit or another. This bizarre pro-establishment mob outrage against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in the so-called “Free World” is disturbingly similar to a scene in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the infamous “Two Minutes Hate.”
More than likely, and fortunately for those of us in favor of civil society, such an absurdist position is limited to a very vocal, very violent, and quite psychopathic political minority in the United States and its allied NATO and major non-NATO allied surveillance regime partners. Such a narcissistic level of jingoism and hatemongering against Assange was clearly demonstrated by supposedly “liberal” reporters, including Robert Mackey of The New York Times, Nick Davies (whose absurdly over-the-top smearing of Assange likely makes him the worst and most reprehensible of the Guardian gang), Alan Rusbridger, David Leigh, Ian Traynor, Roy Greenslade, Luke Harding and Miriam Elder of The Guardian, Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair(who has been unsuccessfully attempting to make his magazine the New Yorker of the twenty-first century, but instead is only attracting low-brow tabloid addicts and jaded, anachronistically suburbuan housewives), documentarian Alex Gibney (who has in the past admitted in litigation that his principal motive in producing documentaries is turning out as large a profit as possible), among a number of other useful idiots of the establishment media who have repeatedly and irrationally denounced Assange and WikiLeaks, in spite of the massive upward spike in profits that such outlets enjoyed due to the thankless work of dedicated WikiLeaks staff (excluding saboteurs and snitches like Daniel Domscheit-Berg who ultimately sold out in favor of some great reward—in the end, not much at all except worldwide condemnation and humiliation at being a stooge of the state), not a single one of whom enjoyed any sort of monetary reward nor legal protection from such efforts, but instead persecuted as zealously as one would be in a more overt police state. It is certainly a bit rich for anyone in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel to lambast Assange, considering they have profited the most from the leaks, while at the same time directly responsible for deliberately sabotaging and nearly destroying WikiLeaks in concert with Daniel Domscheit-Berg behind Assange’s back.
Let’s put this into perspective. We’re talking about people whose idea of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of expression” is the right to produce, distribute, and sell all forms of pornography and obscenity. Make no mistake, these loathsome characters at The New York Times and Guardian, as with their political allies in high positions of authority in government, have absolutely no compunction about such extreme exploitations and objectifications, yet when someone like Assange steps forward to promote true freedom of speech and true freedom of expression, who promotes transparency in political affairs and opening up governments to the citizenry, who opposes the global surveillance and censorship regime led by the major powers, all of a sudden they beat their chests and proclaim in the name of nationalism that there are limits to even the freedoms we “enjoy” in the artificial democracies of the West, as if we should be grateful for what they grant us lest we dare bite the hand that feeds us—after all, these criminal elites, the very peak of the global echelon, consider themselves our gods and overlords. Who are we to question such lofty figures of power and petulance? As we’ve observed over the years, they apparently have no problem with the exploitation and trafficking of human beings for illicit sex, prostitution (both legal and illegal), and cheap, undocumented labor in Western countries and the Arab dictatorships of the Persian Gulf, yet they are opposed to the freedom of Julian Assange and other open information activists, and even more forcefully oppose the right of ordinary citizens to have access to information their respective governments strive to keep secret from them. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world wants the United States and its allies to mind their own business and stop exporting to their countries terrorism, genocide, and slavery that they try to pass off as “freedom and democracy”? As one Syrian woman activist once shared with us, “If America’s idea of freedom is the freedom to live in constant fear of being kidnapped and raped by Salafist terrorists and sold into sexual slavery for the rest of one’s life, then we absolutely, absolutely do not want it. No civilized human being would desire such a nightmare.” No, but the United States and its NATO accomplices sure do seem very motivated to try and impose such atrocities on others, don’t they? If this is what Western ideologists would refer to us as a utopian New American Century in opposition to more totalitarian societies as China and North Korea, we’d hate to see exactly what kind of dystopian future they have in store for humanity once there are no longer any enemy states to oppose or be opposed by—it would be precisely at that stage that humanity could become effectively compartmentalized into an Orwellian nightmare indefinitely. One only need watch the news and listen to what these incompetent, ignorant politicians and establishment figures parrot to understand the potential reality of such a dark, murderous future of daily state terror.
There was a time when such so-called “journalists,” particularly those on the allegedly “liberal” side, could be expected to at least make some attempt at editorial balance, to focus on the facts rather than distort them with their own biased prejudices. This is no longer the case. The gloves have long since come off and stayed off, so to speak, and the establishment media no longer bothers to even hide the fact that not only are they out to play dirty, but that they will do the bidding of their respective governments, no matter the circumstances. In the case of Julian Assange, the situation is such that an establishment reporter like Nick Davies did not need any convincing by his superiors in the effort to smear him with totally false allegations of rape in Sweden, where he is wanted by police for questioning—Davies has, in fact, been an amazingly fanatical voice in the mainstream media and state-sponsored “hatefest” against Assange, an overall reflection of the fact that The Guardian is the most zealously anti-Assange and anti-WikiLeaks media outlet in the world, going above and beyond the call of duty. This raises the question as to why this is, and why the Guardian has been persecuting Assange in such a bloodthirsty manner, to an extent one would expect from a Rupert Murdoch outlet like The Times of London or New York Post. This has continued to this day, in spite of the fact that even the United States Justice Department has admitted there is no legal way for the Obama administration to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing the leaks without also having to prosecute major mainstream news outlets that also published the documents, most especially The Times and Guardian. Instead, government officials have made clear that if charges were to be brought against him, Assange would have to be charged and prosecuted for some sort of criminal activity unrelated to the publication of the leaks (and other such journalistic activity), such as breaking into government systems, evidence of which could easily be manufactured, especially taking into consideration Assange’s past prosecution many years ago in Australia while still in his adolescence.
At this stage in the game, there is no doubt that The Guardian has been the principal media partner of the American and British governments in the effort to have Assange arrested and extradited to Sweden, which many believe would then extradite him to the United States to face indefinite detention and/or prosecution on trumped up charges in a manner similar to Chelsea Manning, potentially even worse. However, less discussed is the more real possibility of outright vanishment to nowhere should Assange dare to step foot outside the Ecuadorian embassy. Given that rape trials in Sweden are held in total secrecy and closed to both the public and media, it is not at all a stretch to suggest that such secret prosecution could be used as a cover in quietly disappearing Assange to one of America’s many “nowhere” sites, where he could be kept in absolute detention for the rest of his life. Considering how Kevin Mitnick was illegally detained in federal prison for several years without charge for activity that not only did not have any actual (as opposed to claimed or perceived) negative impact on any institution, but likewise also purely apolitical in nature, in addition to the numerous absurd lies The New York Times and its technology reporter, John Markoff, spread about Mitnick, we can only imagine what sort of permanent hell the US and NATO establishments have been trying to concoct for Julian Assange.
With very few exceptions, it has always been the case in the faux Western democracies that the major news outlets effectively serve as semi-official propaganda organs of their respective governments, both sectors maintaining the illusion of “freedom of the press” and an independent media free of government interference. The difference today is that many people have long since stopped buying what the establishment media are selling, and every year that number continues to grow, as evidenced by the steady decline in profits of most media organs, especially in the aftermath of their sabotage against WikiLeaks. The Times, as well as Guardian, have both made abundantly clear that they are as much part of the blindly patriotic government propaganda machine as their competitors, if not more so. These institutions and the key individuals associated with such, who are anything but liberal, have themselves happily contributed to the birth of a new Cold War between the United States and Russia from the moment President George W. Bush entered the Oval Office in 2001. The principal reason they no longer bother hiding their true motivations and agenda is due to their having become completely overwhelmed by their cognitive dissonance, a mental disorder that allows once venerable “liberal” institutions as The Times and Guardian to claim upholding democratic values and freedom while at the same time supporting the globalist agenda of international finance that has led to perpetual warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all throughout Africa. These are institutions that engage in such flagrantly absurd doublespeak to the extent that while they condemn a genocidal warlord and rapist as Joseph Kony, in the name of spreading “freedom and democracy” they helped Western governments create the abysmal conditions that allowed such a lunatic to come to power in the first place in order to lower the costs of mining highly valued and sought after precious metals.
We tackled this precise issue in our previous article, showing how Hollywood forms an integral part of this hypocritical Western media tyranny and why these pro-establishment sycophants, rather than helping spread “freedom and democracy,” instead propagate an exponentially increasing cycle of perpetual violence across the developing world fueled by globalist financial interests and the Western military-industrial complex. This is why, when someone brave enough to step forward on their own, as Julian Assange did, and reveal not only these truths, but most significantly, providing to the global community of peoples concrete evidence of these atrocities driven by rampant greed and militarism, he becomes the single most persecuted political dissident in history. A human being who cannot be bought at any price, who is unwilling to abandon their moral compass and ethics for the sake of political or ideological correctness, who is driven not by financial gain but by a relentless dedication to the cause of true freedom and human rights, this person is a mirror who reflects back at us all that we try to hide and ignore, the reprehensible inhumanity that we indirectly contribute to each and every day around the world in order to maintain our high standards of living. For one nation to succeed, another must fail. That is the precise definition of nationalism, and why the hopelessly flawed paradigm of the nation-state has long outlived its usefulness, for as long as humans cynically continue to cling to these bureaucratic state monstrocities, there will always be bloodshed, famine, poverty, and what is more and more becoming an irreversible downward spiral into total oblivion.
It is this inability to look away from the reality of this world and the rape of humanity that likewise also motivated Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden to take action when they found themselves in a position to do so, and this digital wildfire that was first sparked by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is growing bigger day by day—the more the establishment tries to put it out, the fiercer and more unwieldy that fire becomes. We stand today at a critical moment in history, where if we are able to expand the free flow of information in order to disrupt and ultimately dismantle the surveillance and censorship regimes our taxes finance, in effect financing both our own oppression and wage slavery, as well as the oppression and slavery of those in the developing world, we have a chance to open the door to an entirely new paradigm, one not built upon a foundation of authoritarianism, but rather one built upon a natural foundation of humanity, equilibrium, and cooperative community.
Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden prove that there are people who still believe in the human race. As much as the globalist media and state bureaucracies try to drive us toward cynicism and inhumanity, we are seeing the exact opposite developing: a rediscovery of that inborn spark of optimism that makes us human and motivates us to try to do good rather than evil, to create rather than destroy.
What will the world of tomorrow be like? If the bravery, honor, courage, and humanity of these three paramount dissidents serves as any indication, a much brighter and transparent future for humanity than our authoritarian elites would ever want or desire for us.
