The Fabricated Charges Against Assange Show How Much Our Society Has Drifted Towards Totalitarianism
2019 is a time when we’re supposed to have always been at war with Russia, when those who hold incorrect thoughts
are Russian propagandists who should be censored for spreading “fake
news,” and when the crimes that political prisoners are accused of
become real simply because the official consensus says they are. In this
world, heroes like Julian Assange are turned into the most heinous
villains imaginable through media narrative control and the actions of
corrupt courts.
Assange
is arguably the biggest enemy of the global oligarchy, because he’s
created a tool for exposing high-level corruption that continues to
regularly do PR damage to governments and corporations. And the power
structure’s means for retaliation have been to smear him, and to target
him with the law at every opportunity. This operation to take down
Assange has driven society in a totalitarian direction.
Show
trials, where the government theatrically convicts people for crimes
that they haven’t committed, are a classic feature of dictatorships.
Examples range from the Nazi People’s Court, where prisoners frequently
had charges leveled against them without being able to defend
themselves, to the extrajudicial arrests and assassinations that the
United States has engaged in throughout the War on Terror. The
persecution of Assange and other whistleblowers is taking America to a
point where the state can treat dissidents the way that they were
treated under the Third Reich.
As a U.N. panel found
in 2016, Assange was being arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian
embassy throughout his time there, with threats of prosecution having
given him no choice but to stay confined in his legal refuge. During
this time, his health dangerously deteriorated because his detention
made him lack access to medical treatment. He was kept in this situation
as governments around the world continued to threaten him with
prosecution, and as media outlets throughout the West harmed his chances
for freedom by directing a politically motivated smear campaign
against him. The most damaging piece of slander that these outlets have
directed against Assange is the claim that WikiLeaks got Democratic
emails from Russian hackers in 2016, a now thoroughly debunked lie that’s been floated as a route for prosecuting him.
Since
the U.S. pressured Ecuador to force Assange out of the embassy last
month, several of the popular slanders against him have been used to
target him with the law. The American DOJ’s initial charge against him
was transparently bogus;
the Trump administration’s claim that Assange deserves prosecution for
“conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” comes from the exact same
charge that Obama’s DOJ considered using against Assange, and the Obama
administration found the charge to be insufficient for treating someone
as a criminal. Last month, it was also revealed
that the DOJ is investigating Assange for “obtaining and disseminating
secret information,” a crime that’s punishable by death. If these
charges are carried out, both government leakers and their publishers
will be subject to a dictatorial new legal paradigm where revealing the secrets of the powerful is punished potentially by execution.
Additionally, two weeks ago Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks for a bogus bail charge,
with the Judge Deborah Taylor having told him upon his sentencing:
“Your continued residence in the Embassy has necessitated a
concentration of resources, and expenditure of £16 million of taxpayers’
money in ensuring that when you did leave, you were brought to
justice.”
Taylor
was deliberately misrepresenting the truth in order to exacerbate the
charges against Assange. It was the British government’s decision to
intensely police the area surrounding the embassy while Assange was
being arbitrarily detained, and Assange couldn’t conceivably be held
responsible for the resources that they wasted.
Also
reflective of a show trial has been Sweden’s suppression of vital
evidence that Assange has not in fact committed rape. Even though
damning texts from the women involved in the case include
“I did not want to put any charges against JA” and “it was the police
who fabricated the charges,” Sweden has reopened its rape case against
Assange. Assange will now get a secret trial with no jury once he’s
extradited, at which point he’ll no doubt be “found guilty” of this and
other fictitious crimes.
Assange’s
persecution is resulting in the targeting of additional people who’ve
been implicated in the series of spectacular misdeeds that WikiLeaks has
been charged with. Chelsea Manning could
soon go to jail once again for her refusal to testify about WikiLeaks,
and the Swedish programmer Ola Bini was arrested last month for his
associations with Assange. Ecuadorian officials made it so that Bini’s arrest warrant read “Russian hacker” even though he is neither of these things, baselessly
charged him with “participation in the crime of assault on the
integrity of computer systems” and attempts to destabilize the country,
and claimed that he was attempting to flee the country in the wake of
Assange’s arrest even though he’d been planning his flight to Japan
since long before that point.
These
things are the characteristics of a totalitarian society. Disfavored
individuals are arrested for crimes they haven’t committed, numerous
people surrounding them are deemed guilty by association, and the public
is made to accept the government’s absurd narratives. We are all Julian
Assange. We’re all living under the boot of the Orwellian oligarchy
that’s ensnared him and his colleagues.
At
least Assange has been able to incorporate this final stage of his show
trial with an aspect of stylish irony. When he left the embassy, he was
seen holding a worn copy of Gore Vidal’s book “History of the National
Security State.” This transcript of Vidal’s political discussions with
the journalist Paul Jay, which Assange was evidently reading before and
after his arrest, includes this passage:
There
is nothing in our history to guide us; we’ve never been in this
situation in which one gang basically has seized power. We’ve been very
lucky: never — we’ve had dictators before. Lincoln was a dictator, but
he was a dictator of the republic. The republic still stood when he was
dictator, and we needed him. Franklin Roosevelt was a dictator, and we
needed him. And they were — only briefly were they dictators. Now we
have a dictatorial system, as best personified by the USA Patriot Act,
which just removes us of our Bill of Rights. This is the most serious
thing that has happened in the history of the United States, and how we
get out of it’s anyone’s guess.
By
choosing to hold the book at that moment, Assange was trying to give
people this message. The message that tyranny has taken over, and that
we need to fight back. Let’s find out how we can do that.
No comments:
Post a Comment