{"id":87192,"date":"2019-04-12T16:00:47","date_gmt":"2019-04-12T23:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=87192"},"modified":"2019-04-12T16:00:47","modified_gmt":"2019-04-12T23:00:47","slug":"the-assange-arrest-is-a-warning-from-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/04\/12\/the-assange-arrest-is-a-warning-from-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The Assange Arrest is a Warning From History"},"content":{"rendered":"

by John Pilger<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n
\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2019\/04\/C03F73A4-88E9-46FD-BF17-C6B04F4C14AF.png\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\nDrawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

\nThe glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in\nLondon is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law.\nIndecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes\nwincing against his first natural light in  almost seven years.

\nThat this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta,\nought to shame and anger all who fear for democratic\u201d societies. Assange is a\npolitical refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under\na strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this\nclear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

\nBut to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in\nTrump\u2019s Washington, in league with Ecuador\u2019s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American\nJudas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite\nabandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

\nImagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in\nConnaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The\nHague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair\u2019s paramount crime\u201d is the deaths of\na million Iraqis. Assange\u2019s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to\naccount, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with\ntruth.

\nThe shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde\nwrote, sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance\ntowards civilisation\u201d. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What\nhappened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a\nnewspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

\nAssange\u2019s principal media tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with the\nsecret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled\nnew weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and\nWikiLeaks in what its previous editor called the greatest scoop of the last 30\nyears\u201d. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks\u2019 revelations and claimed the accolades\nand riches that came with them.

\nWith not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book\nled to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book\u2019s authors, Luke Harding and David\nLeigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password\nAssange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a\ndigital file containing leaked US embassy cables.

\nWith Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding joined the police\noutside and gloated on his blog that Scotland Yard may get the last laugh\u201d.\nThe Guardian has since published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not\nleast a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump\u2019s man, Paul\nManafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it\nwas fake.

\nBut the tone has now changed. The Assange case is a morally tangled web,\u201d the\npaper opined. He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be\npublished \u2026. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have\nbeen hidden.

\nThese things\u201d are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its\ncolonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights\nto vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the expose of Hillary\nClinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the\ndetailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria\nand Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It all available on the\nWikiLeaks site.

\nThe Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited\nthe newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On\nthis, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall,\nleaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear\nweapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.

\nWhen a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to\nprison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed,\nprosecuted and served six months.

\nIf Assange is extradited to America for publishing what the Guardian calls\ntruthful things\u201d, what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner,\nfollowing him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific\npropagandist Luke Harding?

\nWhat is to stop the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, who\nalso published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the\neditor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and the Sydney Morning\nHerald in Australia. The list is long.

\nDavid McCraw, lead lawyer of the New York Times, wrote: I think the\nprosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers \u2026\nfrom everything I know, he\u2019s sort of in a classic publisher\u2019s position and the\nlaw would have a very hard time distinguishing between the New York Times and\nWilLeaks.\u201d

\nEven if journalists who published WikiLeaks\u2019 leaks are not summoned by an\nAmerican grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning\nwill be enough. Real journalism is being criminalised by thugs in plain sight.\nDissent has become an indulgence.

\nIn Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two\nwhistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra\u2019s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings\nof the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the\ntiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources\nin the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime\nminister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration\ncamps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children\nself harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for\n30,000 people.

\nReal journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of\nDefence in London produced a secret document which described the principal\nthreats\u201d to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and\ninvestigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.

\nThe document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. We had no\nchoice,\u201d Assange told me. It\u2019s very simple. People have a right to know and a\nright to question and challenge power. That\u2019s true democracy.\u201d

\nWhat if Assange and Manning and others in their wake \u2014 if there are others \u2014\nare silenced and the right to know and question and challenge\u201d is taken away?

\nIn the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films\nhelped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.

\nShe told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on\norders from above\u201d but on what she called the submissive void\u201d of the public.

\nDid this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?\u201d I asked\nher.

\nOf course,\u201d she said, especially the intelligentsia \u2026. When people no longer\nask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.\u201d

\nAnd did.

\nThe rest, she might have added, is history.\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by John Pilger Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in  almost seven years. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}