Assange: ask not for whom the bell tolls

8 Sep

I began a recent post with this assertion:

The western world is inhabited by those who know we are ruled by sociopaths … and that much larger group which, taking at face value the surface forms of democracy informed by independent media, either cannot or will not accept this admittedly frightening truth.

You find me hyperbolic? I’d love to hear your factually based reasons.1 Ditto if you had a similar reaction to my many allusions to the USA – and other imperialisms defined as such by financial domination of the global south – as lawless.

I look to facts rather than lifelong imbued depictions, powerfully impressionistic and implicitly racist, of a morally superior West when all the evidence points quite the other way. Take the US Empire. It really is an extraordinary achievement by narrative managers that slavery, colonial plunder, land grabs, coups, color revolutions to install US puppets, and genocidally internecine quarrels (the last one ending in the Pentagon testing newly acquired death technology on the Japanese people) have been variously ignored, justified by half truths and flat out lies, or simply filed under the Bad Old Days before “we” learned to behave better.

The agents of this PR success story are by no means confined to news media. They also take in our entertainment industries, education systems and other ideological gatekeepers. What’s more – see my July post, political economy of our media – this success does not presuppose consciously mendacious actors. In the main, the normal incentives of career motivation apply.

Here’s what I wrote in 2016:

Journalists who know what’s good for them please editors. Editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors. Proprietors need advertisers and crave honours.

And here’s a now famous exchange from February 1996, between the BBC’s Andrew Marr and Noam Chomsky:

Marr: How can you know I’m self censoring?

Chomsky: I’m not saying you are self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

By 2017 Marr had honed his riposte:

I was nervous of Chomsky. When he said “if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be where you’re sitting”, I immediately realised this was not so much brilliant as unanswerable … I had said that the Guardian and the Telegraph posed very different world views. And that journalists varied hugely in politics and temperament. Chomsky is brilliant, but a brilliant conspiracist, so no, it wasn’t a matter of the penny dropping, still less an epiphany.”

Which tells me several things. One is that Marr is intellectually vain. “I immediately realised …” can be read as defending his being lost for words at the time. Another, more important, is that he really does believe Guardian and Telegraph pose very different worldviews. For reasons I’ve set out many times, on issues that most matter to class rule, Marr, product of a privileged but narrow education (Dundee High, Cambridge), is quite wrong on this point.

(Or have I missed some profoundly subtle yet shatteringly radical difference between Guardian and Telegraph coverage of Assad, Assange, Chavez, Corbyn, Maduro, Mugabe, Putin and Xi? My, in a world of thugs and robbers, mostly in the global south, we can thank our lucky stars for a  West, with its 500 year record of altruism, ready and willing to act as its selfless gendarme!)

As for “journalists varying hugely in politics and temperament”, that is so spectacularly point missing, from an otherwise sophisticated man, as to corroborate an opinion I’ve long held. In a corrupt status quo, career mindedness begets cynicism which in turn begets, for reasons to do with our limited capacity to tolerate cognitive dissonance, its own forms of obtuseness.

Finally, Chomsky is emphatically not a conspiracy theorist in any meaningful sense of the term. Read him at source on media matters. Far less is he one in the degraded sense routinely used to dismiss, without the inconvenience of addressing their specifics, arguments which challenge covert class rule. Implicit in Marr’s usage is a circular reasoning2 which he then, and this too is implicit, lays at Chomsky’s door.

Not that self interest leading to self censorship, without our being consciously involved in the process, is confined to news media. It can be detected in all ideological agencies, aided by the reality that homo sapiens sapiens, for all her remarkable powers of reason, is first and foremost a psychological rather than logical animal.

Which goes some way to explaining why myths imbibed since infancy about the fairness of our political and judicial systems, about media independence and about a moral entitlement – nay, duty – to police the planet so often trump cold facts. Especially when, on matters which do not cut to the heart of ruling class interests, the myths are not wholly inaccurate.3

It is Julian Assange’s misfortune – and ours, if we could but see beyond the ends of our noses – that the threat he posed through truthful journalism did indeed cut to the heart of ruling class interests.

But that’s quite enough from me. Here’s Oscar Grenfell, writing today in WSWS.4

The working class5 must defend Julian Assange!

Oscar Grenfell, 7 September 2020

The latest stage in the decade-long persecution of Julian Assange begins today, with the final three weeks of British court hearings for the extradition of the WikiLeaks publisher to the US, where he faces 175 years in prison for exposing American war crimes, human rights violations, coups and meddling operations around the world.

Whatever the court decides will likely be subject to years of legal appeal, but the scenario that Assange has warned of for the past ten years—that he risks being hauled before a secret US court, prosecuted for lawful publishing activities and thrown into a hellhole run by his CIA persecutors—is all too real.

The innumerable pundits and media commentators who derided these warnings as a conspiracy theory and promoted the slanders used to undermine public support for Assange have fallen silent.6 The legal travesty underway in the land of the Magna Carta either goes unmentioned in the official press, or is discreetly buried in brief columns halfway through the papers.

The hearings are only proceeding because the attempt of the British state to kill Assange by exposing him to the danger of coronavirus infection has so far failed.

Throughout the pandemic, Assange has been held in the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has been denied a mask or any other protection, even as dozens of inmates and staff have contracted COVID-19. A bail application has been contemptuously dismissed, despite the fact that Assange has been convicted of no crime, as have warnings that his health continues to deteriorate.

Assange, facing the most consequential legal proceedings of his life, has been unable to meet with his lawyers for the past six months. Weeks before the resumption of the trial, US prosecutors filed a superseding indictment, based on the lies and slanders of FBI informants, over a year after they were required to submit their final charge sheet. The transparent purpose was to inundate Assange’s legal team with tens of thousands of documents, after they had finished preparing their case, to prevent even the possibility of a defence.

As a matter of law, the US extradition request should have been thrown out as soon as it was submitted.

It violates innumerable treaties, laws and international conventions, including a ban on extraditions from Britain to the US for political offenses …

Read the full piece here.

*

  1. A newbie here may see in my challenge a reversing of burden of proof. To which I say two things. One, this site has set out in many posts my evidenced arguments on the lawlessness of our rulers, the illusory nature of our democratic forms and the media degradation which largely – not entirely but largely – subverts informed choice at the ballot box. Two, I’m happy to summarise, again with evidence, my grounds for saying these things. My only condition is that, as a token of good faith and serious intent, my challengers summarise their reasoning. Those who write as I do grow wary, after a few years in the job, of the frivolous. In fact with the exception of fascists or anti-semites – the real kind – nobody to the right of me, and certainly nobody from the liberal ‘centre’, has ever offered reasoned challenge. (A few anarchists or ultra-leftists have, but that’s a separate issue.) Once in a blue moon I’m asked to remove a name from my mailing list for post alerts, on the ground that “your politics are not the same as mine”, but in my book a request so phrased speaks volumes on its author’s ability to tolerate difference or set out a counter argument.
  2. Marr’s circularity is rooted in his inability – see my remark on the links between career focus, cynicism and obtuseness – to grasp that Chomsky’s model does not hinge on assumptions of corrupt journalists. Nor does it hinge on dishonest proprietors. At the end of the day, even kingmakers like Murdoch and Rothermere have to sell content to audiences, audiences to advertisers. (Chomsky famously asked: what pictures of the world would a rational person expect from this arrangement?) Marr doesn’t get this, so assumes Chomsky locates corrupt media in corrupt individuals (how else explain those irrelevancies on the temperament and worldviews of journalists?) when the rot is not only systemic but inextricable from wider economic and ideological realities. In personalising Chomsky’s critique he wrongly supposes the circular claim that media are corrupted by biased journalists, journalists by biased media. While there is some degree of truth in that dialectic, it is remarkably perverse to see it as fundamental to Chomsky’s political-economic analysis of our media. And while we’re on the subject of conspiracism, those who detect it in my frequent referrals to a ruling class should note that I mean those whose monopoly ownership of some essential of wealth creation – typically land, plant or liquid capital – not only confers extraordinary power, veiled by the trappings of a largely illusory democracy. It also ensures that their worldviews are the prevailing worldviews of the age. Does this make me a conspiracy theorist? Happy to debate the matter!
  3. The great irony here being that, in those areas where the West is indeed superior to the global south, it is past and present exploitation of the latter which enables it to be so. Besides differences in prosperity, hence in the affordability of free speech, I refer to a judiciary for the most part fair where ruling class interests are not threatened. In circumstances that have held since 1945, for Western ruling classes confident of their continuing tenure such threats have been few and easily marginalised. On the more recent rise in authoritarianism, one sign being the introduction under superficially diverse administrations of checks to such hallowed ‘fundamentals’ as habeas corpus, materialists (most social commentators are idealists in the epistemological sense) look for explanation to our rulers preparing for stormy weather as their ability to buy off dissent declines. I refer also to electoral transparency. Gerrymandering certainly does go on but crude vote rigging is rarely necessary given the West’s levels of mass prosperity, falling but still high in global terms. To this prosperity factor we can add an Overton Window of ‘sensible’ political discourse, maintained by media themselves corrupted by oligarchic ownership and advertising dependency: corruptions slightly less direct in the case of state broadcasters financially dependent on governments wary of displeasing the Murdochs and Rothermeres. And I refer to a welfarism very much on the wane now that the business case for it, rooted in a cold war drive to win hearts and minds for Caring Capitalism, has gone.
  4. See also the observations of former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, at the Old Bailey for the resumption of Julian’s Extradition Hearing. Also not to be missed is Jonathan Cook’s brief but lucid setting out of why Julian matters in CounterPunch yesterday: The Stalinist Trial of Julian Assange.
  5. Misconceptions abound as to what ‘working class’, means. I can’t speak for WSWS or its Socialist Equality Party hosts but I mean that part of humanity, by far its largest, which does not own the means of production and survives only by selling its labour power, blue collar or white, on markets it has vanishingly small control over.
  6. Emphasis here is mine. It is my view that of all the media vilification of Assange, the worst was from the Guardian. Its columnists – from Luke Harding to Marina Hyde and Suzanne “massive turd” Moore – led the way in cutting Assange loose from what should have been his natural support base, the liberal intelligentsia. Owen Jones also merits a mention. His prissy balancing act – yes, Assange has delivered important truths but must still answer to these serious ‘charges’ – was knowingly or otherwise specious. It ignored so many room elephants; most importantly the timing of the ‘rape’ allegations and Sweden’s track record, as bad as Britain’s, of craven capitulation to Washington. (Contrast this with the stance of plucky Iceland.) Jones was derelict – his employer’s title implies a duty of vigilance, no? – in failing to scrutinise the details and circumstances in which two women were pressured by Swedish authorities. In which the initial Chief Prosecutor, having declared “no case to answer”, was replaced by one more hawkish  – hence more to Washington’s liking? Because Jones positions himself on the left flank of liberalism and identity politics, his influence on a Left itself less than fully supportive of Julian should not be underestimated.

8 Replies to “Assange: ask not for whom the bell tolls

  1. Bravo! Assange has been betrayed by most leftists, and all liberals. He represents rights won in struggle over centuries. The old choice is coming to the foreground: socialism or barbarism. But those who abandon the gains of the past, will not resolve that impasse.

  2. In the light of Marr’s later comment I think that Chomsky’s observation:

    “if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

    can be updated to:

    “if you started to believe something different you wouldn’t continue to be sitting where you’re sitting.”

  3. Off topic, Philip, but there was an article by one Gregory Sinaisky over on OffG. It critiques the COVID matter, but I know that this is an unproductively contentious issue and I only mention the article because of this part:

    “…we live in a unique time, at the tail end of a European colonial project that existed for 500 years, making Europe and the US the richest, most influential part of the world and the envy of most of its inhabitants.

    From the end of WWII through the 1960’s, this colonial project was gradually replaced by neo-colonialism, controlled almost exclusively by US plutocrats. In the last 10-20 years, the systems of neo-colonialism began to break down due to the economic rise of China and also due to the degeneration of Western elites. In recent years, what we call the Free World maintains its way of life simply by going deeper and deeper into debt.

    This situation cannot continue indefinitely, and very soon we can expect an abrupt fall in the standard of living in the US, the UK and most European countries, accompanied by tremendous social upheavals. The US plutocracy has no economic or military means to stop this collapse.”

    I am thinking that, whatever the status of the COVID crisis (i.e. the question of its “genuineness”), there are very deep alterations afoot requiring radical restructuring of our entire system. Any thoughts?

    • Yeah, tons of ’em George. For now though let me just say that Gregory Sinaisky’s appraisal, as set out by you, is very much in line with my own thoughts on the situation now unfolding.

  4. Craig Murray – who faces his own similar battle with an out of democratic accountability and control corrupt (in every sense, morally, ethically, intellectually) judiciary – once again today provides a antidote of a report for any guillible citizen who still swallows the myth and bullshit of blind British justice; a judiciary independent of the (Deep) State; and the British Isles as an independent democratic state rather than a vassal State of an out of control Corporate State fascism.

    And the problem is multi-faceted. Firstly because this is not just about Assange. Or Murray. Or Salmond. It’s about the future of civilisation.

    To paraphrase the Scottish Independence blogger Stuart Campbell; you should only believe the evidence and the facts.

    Anything and everything else leads us down the road of the Salam Witch Trials; the Stalinist Purges; the Concentration Camps (only 15% of arrests by the Gestapo were as a result of active surveillance, whilst 40% were neighbours denouncing each other in a lethal Purity Spiral); the McCarthy Red trials; Mao’s Cultural Revolution; Pol Pots Year Zero; Blacklisting (The Economic League was set up in 1919); and similar. Leading society back to the 17th Century in which Galileo was forced to recant reality becuse it did not fit the dominant dogma on which social control was based.

    The problem for those control freaks of that era was a ‘failure’ to apply full spectrum dominance by reference to the go to approach currently the favourite methodology of social control : subjectivity.

    In which everyone is gaslighted and encouraged to jettison old fashioned notions of objective reality (one awaits with bated breath the moment in which physicists are cancelled and deplatformed with no debate for their Gravity Fetishism the way in which biologists are similarly treated over sex and gender) in favour of making up their own subjective reality and forcibly imposing that fantasy on everyone else on pain of whatever punishment takes the current mood (see the link provided below).

    An approach which also has no time for old fashioned notions of due process; objective based evidence; and a right to a defence.

    In this Brave New Post Modernist bullshit approach subjective feelings trump objective reality. As a result you get self styled and self identifying (so called) “left” individuals and groups seriously putting forward the notion that any, subjective, allegation of something is, implicitly, sufficient to demonstrate automatic guilt with the only “correct” response being any denial of a defence with the accused required to denounce themselves.

    As Campbell, again, observes who decides what is offensive and worthy of punishment such as cancelling, deplatforming, loss of livelihood or worse – see this piece for a classic example of the Pandora’s Box of dangerous projection which rejects any notion of material reality in favour of extreme crude reductionism and atomisation:

    https://queeratxlaura.wordpress.com/2020/05/27/resisting-terfs-and-transforming-their-organizations/#respond

    Is it those with the most Twitter followers? Those who post on Twitter first? Those who can afford the most expensive lawyers? If it’s via a majority, whose doing the counting?

    Because the point is that the subjective pick and choose approach of the judiciary in the Assange Trial and the prosecution of Murray on Contempt of Court (see Campbell’s Wings articles on this saga in which “respected” so called “journalists” are left alone when supplying jigsaw identification whilst those who report that fact are prosecuted) is endemic everywhere.

    It’s why the Labour Party Complaints and Compliance process is not fit for purpose as a result of sectarian misuse of procedures and rules for subjective power with not even a pretence of due process principles and standards.

    It’s why people are losing their jobs and livlihoods, or worse, on the basis of unevidenced allegations which are never allowed to be tested because subjective opinion based ‘reality’ cannot be allowed to be debated – as it will most certainly collapse the narrative.

    As a result, and secondly: the preference for Karl Rove’s “making up our own reality” over “the reality based community” has a genine trickle down effect and impact. After so many blatant and obvious official lies and mendacity- the list is substantial – no one knows what to believe or not to believe anymore.

    Which is why you end up with the grotesque spectacle of the left and right of the Labour Party and wider movement using the same flawed and dangerous subjective reality based approach over their pet issues.

    Or the ultras on both sides of the Brexit debate/Covid-19/etc picking and choosing which experts, evidence, statistics, whatever to suit their own pre-determined conclusions. Though, to be fair, the adherents of the pseudo pretend science of economics have been assuming what they aim to deduce for generations.

    Or even dispensing altogether with any objective experts or evidence based approach which contradict subjective individual “feeling.” Whether it’s “Russiagate”, “Pizzagate”, “Cultural Marxism”, “QAnon”, The BoD exclusive and hegemonic definition of AS, conflating and confusing sex and gender, or whatever. There is no possibility of ever arriving on the same page because no one, or very few, in what used to be considered to be “society” seem to be using the same medium never mind the same book.

    And when the majority of the citizenry are in such a confused state in a war of all against all, with no common shared reality on which to relate to or forge any kind of common ground grounded in material reality unity and solidarity are nowhere to be found.

    The reality of class based social hierarchy is replaced with a reductive atomisation in which the competitive approach is redirected inwards towards climbing to the top of an ever increasing salami sliced hierarchy of oppression.

    Which is a lot easier for elites, and their paid scribes of fifth columnists masquerading as the fourth estate, to control. No wonder they prefer the Occult Enlightenment of post modernism to the genuine Open Enlightenment.

    • The problem for the control freaks of [the past] was a ‘failure’ to apply full spectrum dominance.

      Indeed. And in a West still sleepwalking, few recognise that our less obvious rulers have weaponry, surveillance capacities and counter-insurgency skills honed in the global south – the IDF in Gaza, CIA collusions with death squads in Latin America – beyond the wildest dreams of the totalitarianisms you invoke.

Leave a Reply to George McI Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *