| Question Everything! |
Assange And
The Empire
By Paul Edwards
October 31, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
There is no need to inform the conscious
world that the United States is applying all
its power and influence to extradite Julian
Assange from England in order to put him on
trial in America. The case against him is
based on his having committed journalism in
publishing leaked secret government
information on Wikileaks. While it is
comprised of multiple charges, crafted with
cynicism and malice in order to convict and
imprison him for life, not one of them has
any legal merit.
In truth, the case is not
about commission of crime at all. It is a
cruel, vindictive scam by a shamed empire to
punish an honorable and ethical man for
having revealed damning truths about its
barbaric behavior in brazen, criminal
contempt for the laws of peace and war.
Material he published has
shown the United States to have been
blatantly and contemptibly false to its own
people and the world. That an individual
could be framed and railroaded into a
corrupt process contrived to punish him for
exposing America’s monstrous crimes is a
moral horror that beggars belief, and yet
that is the unstated intention of the
government of the United States.
Virtually the whole American
and Western official press, including all
mainstream news organizations, both print
and television and their reporters, have not
only abandoned Assange as if he were guilty
of something other than what they all
routinely do much less well, but in their
moral cowardice they have made themselves
vulnerable to precisely the kind of dirty,
dishonest state vendetta he is suffering.
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What is most extraordinary
about the astonishing length to which the
American government has gone to persecute
Assange, and the vast amount of money it has
wasted on it, is the fact that all he has
been accused of exposing, and has been so
vilified and anathematized for revealing, is
mere incidental trivia when compared with
the vast body of America’s horrific state
crime so long documented as proven fact, on
the public record, and already well known to
the entire world.
Beginning with the contorted
sham that legitimized black slavery when its
Constitution declared all men created equal,
and the routine violation of sworn treaties
which facilitated the murder of whole native
peoples, America has lied, stolen, bullied,
and subverted as state policy throughout its
era of imperial aggrandizement and continues
to do so well into that of its richly
deserved, and now inexorable decay.
The extent of blind, mindless
loyalty to, and deeply, stubbornly ignorant
worship of, this rogue, dishonest nation
that unstinting poisoning by infantile
propaganda has wrought on the American mind
is profoundly sad. Our people never
deserved to be traduced and shit on so
brutishly. Nothing can justify it. It was
done so that predatory, anti-life Capitalism
could rape and fleece a people largely made
crass, base, and stupid once decent values
were replaced by the shallow, dead-end dogma
of ethicless materialism. Americans now
worship the money none but a tiny few ever
see, in thrall to a monstrous criminal
racket that scorns them as mindless serfs.
So it is that information
readily available that shows, with
irrefutable clarity, the villainous history
of this morbidly rotten, failing empire is
almost universally rejected by a citizenry
whose hope of any decent future depends on
its absorbing and comprehending that
information. The catechism of rank bullshit
marshalled for generations to cover the
frauds, crimes, betrayals, invasions,
assassinations and massacres that are
America’s legacy has been exposed and
documented for any mind not crippled and
poisoned to see, and yet Americans have not
had the mental or psychological capacity to
take it in and act on it.
That said, it’s undeniable
that more people have more exposure to more
sound data than was ever conceivable before,
and in spite of Capitalism doing all it can
to pollute all information streams, more
Americans are more aware, if dimly, that
Exceptionalist notions they’ve been schooled
to embrace are somehow desafinado,
as the bossa nova song had it: out of tune.
As the Presidential election nears, with the
country facing a Hobson’s Choice between two
defective, demented, old white shysters, and
the nasty chore of electing another Congress
of Pimps to represent their owners and
sponsors, there is palpable disgust at the
dysfunction of our polity.
This, though miserably
painful to the spirit, is a good thing since
it indicates a broad wave of actual
recognition, an inchoate but definite
awareness of the appalling depravity that
the smothering gas of Exceptionalist
propaganda has always concealed. How many
now feel this malaise due to dawning
comprehension of the monstrous,
anti-democratic, destructive force America
has historically been cannot be known, but
for a large percentage this has to be true.
Because America’s dark
secrets are not secret any more, and haven’t
been for decades. The horror has been told,
chapter and verse, in scholarly works that
fill libraries, from barbaric rape of the
Philippines and violent subversion of poor
Central American countries reduced to money
farms for Wall Street to the present kill
list of Middle Eastern countries droned,
blown up, devastated and destroyed by
clumsily bungled wars run by stupid,
sycophantic Big Brass Whores to feed the War
Machine that our psychotic ruling cliques
serve and obey.
All this being true, how is
it that this sick, raging, giant monster of
a nation can muster the free-floating fury
to invest so much time and money to destroy
one man who simply revealed a relatively
minor snippet of its grossly criminal
history? Whence comes this obsessive
madness? It is the savage, vindictive mania
of a failing empire. Like the shameful
sixty-year Cuban embargo, it harks back in
spirit to the Roman slaughter of Christians
or Nazi atrocities at Lidice or Babi Yar.
There is no force like humiliating failure
to make a decaying empire lash out in
insensate ferocity at an object that
symbolizes its shame.
Assange is one of the rarest
of men: those who put principles and
personal honor above their safety or gain.
America may succeed in destroying him or
unexpected justice may save him, but nothing
can save this sick empire that has betrayed
and fatally envenomed itself.
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net