Julian Assange’s mother reported yesterday that the WikiLeaks founder has not been permitted any visitors during his detention in Belmarsh Prison, including from doctors and his lawyers. Doctors who visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy have attested that he urgently needs medical care. Belmarsh is a maximum security prison sometimes referred to as “the UK’s Guantanamo Bay“.
And yet we’re asked to believe that this has something to do with an alleged bail violation and a US extradition request for alleged computer crimes carrying a maximum sentence of five years. If you zoom out and listen to the less-informed chatter of the overt propagandists and the brainwashed rank-and-file western mass media consumers, you will also see that people believe this has something to do with Russia and rape allegations as well.
Actually, none of these things are true. Assange is being imprisoned under draconian conditions for journalism, and for journalism only. The Obama administration declined to prosecute him after WikiLeaks’ publication of the Manning leaks out of concern that doing so would endanger press freedoms, and the Obama administration didn’t have any more evidence at its disposal than the Trump administration has now. The “crime” Assange is accused of consists of nothing other than standard journalistic practices that investigative journalists engage in all the time, including source protection and encouraging the source to obtain more material. The only thing that has changed is an increased willingness in the White House to prosecute journalists for practicing journalism, and there are an abundance of reasons to believe that he will be hit with far more serious charges once extradited to US soil. They’re not going to all this trouble for a bail violation and a five-year maximum sentence.
But if you zoom out even further, in the grand scheme of things this barely even has anything to do with Assange. Sure, he has of course been a thorn in the side of those who operate the transnational western power alliance, and given the choice they would of course prefer him to be locked up or dead than free and alive. But that’s not what the corrupt influencers who are strangling our world are shooting for here. They are making a grab for something much, much bigger. Assange just happens to be a stepping stone along the way.
As we’ve discussed previously, the prosecution of Assange is really designed to set a legal precedent which will enable the US government to imprison journalists for trying to hold it to account using journalism. The reason you are seeing the phrase “Assange is not a journalist” bleated constantly by empire lackeys all around the world today is because they need a counter-narrative for the indisputable fact that this precedent poses a threat to journalists around the world, the argument being that since Assange isn’t a journalist (pure bullshit by the way), this isn’t setting a precedent for journalists. As though their personal definition of what a “real journalist” is will be the one used by the US government when determining whether or not to prosecute other people for doing things similar to what Assange did, instead of whatever definition happens to suit US government agendas in that instance.
But in order to get the really, really big picture perspective of what these bastards are going for, we need to zoom out even further than that.
In the sci-fi novel Ender’s Game, the young protagonist applies a vicious beating to one of his bullies, killing him. When asked why he did this by his handlers, the boy, who has been bred and raised to become a strategic savant, explains that he did it not out of malice toward the bully, nor only to win the fight, but to win all future fights as well. If the kids at school see what savagery he’s capable of and know he’s not to be trifled with, he won’t ever have to fight them.
If this sounds a bit sociopathic to you, that’s because it is. And, with the notable difference of the bully and victim roles being reversed, this is exactly the principle we are seeing exercised with Assange.
The entire world is watching what is being done to Assange currently. No matter how propagandized you are, no matter how much you hate the man personally, you’re watching that happen and learning a lesson from it. And that lesson is, never do anything remotely like what that guy did, or you’ll meet the same fate. This is the real goal of Assange’s persecution, and it doesn’t impact merely one Australian publisher in a UK jail cell, nor even merely the investigative journalists around the world who are interested in practicing the lost art of holding power to account using journalism, but everyone in the world who consumes news media.
And it works. I know it works because it works on me. I’ll say right here and now, if you’ve got information that incriminates the most powerful people in the world, keep it the hell away from me. Give it to someone else, literally anyone else, because I myself am far too cowardly and have far too much to lose by getting involved in anything that could lead to me rotting in some overseas prison cell. I’ve got kids. I’m in love. I cannot and will not go down that path. And if this is true for me I know for certain that it’s true for countless others as well. They’ve brutalized whistleblowers to the point that it’s surely had a severe chilling effect on those who would otherwise become key leak sources, and now they’re brutalizing the journalists who publish those leaks as well. The odds of someone willing to blow the whistle on real power meeting a journalist who is willing to help them are rapidly diminishing to zero.
They’re trying to win this fight against Assange in brutal fashion to ensure that they win all future fights as well.
Which is why it’s absolutely stupid that this conversation so often gets fixated on Assange the man, whether it’s smears or praise.
The other day I published a massive mega-article attacking the major smears about Assange I’ve encountered. There are 27 of them in total so far, and I’ll be adding more soon. This mountain of smears exists because instead of paying attention to the world-shaping dangers I just outlined which threaten to make it impossible to oppose the leaders of the US-centralized empire who are marching us towards either extinction or dystopia, people are babbling about Assange’s personality, or whether or not he cleaned up after his cat while at the embassy.
The flip side of this is people who fixate on Assange as a hero, which can of course help draw attention to his plight and therefore be of some benefit, but ultimately that’s also missing the forest for the trees. This is so very, very much bigger than Assange, and we need to oppose it for reasons that are far, far more significant than the individual characteristics of one man who, depending on what we’ve heard, we may or may not believe is a nice person.
Never lose sight of this: the intimidation of whistleblowers and leak publishers threatens to stop truth from informing the behaviors of our entire species, leaving only the whims of the most powerful to decide our fate. The most powerful people are those most dedicated to pursuing power, those sociopathic enough to step on anyone’s head and do whatever it takes to secure as much control as possible over as many humans as possible. That’s who we’re handing the steering wheel of our world to if we allow truth to be intimidated into silence.
And never lose sight of this, either: with the imprisonment and prosecution of Julian Assange, these same sociopathic oppressors have exposed themselves. They have ripped off the friendly Big Brother mask and exposed the dark infernal entities which squirm and hiss underneath. This sudden interest in the legal technicalities of bail protocol and journalistic source protection protocol happen to look exactly the same as prosecuting a journalist for publishing facts because that is exactly what is happening. Don’t ever let anyone gaslight you into believing otherwise, and don’t you dare miss this rare opportunity to point out to your fellow humans how our oppressors have revealed their true nature.
Reprinted with permission from CaitlinJohnstone.com.
Support Ms. Johnstone’s work on Patreon or Paypal.
