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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/08/the-assange-case-isnt-about-national-security-its-about-narrative-control/

The Assange Case Isn’t About National Security, It’s About Narrative Control

Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

As someone whose life’s work before his imprisonment was combing through documents of an often classified nature, he’d have been in a prime position to know. He’d have seen time and time again how a nation’s citizenry are not under the slightest threat from the secret information in the documents that had been leaked to him from around the world, but that it could damage the reputation of a politician or a government or its military.

As the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder continues to trudge on with the UK government’s granting the Biden administration permission to appeal a declined extradition request, claiming that it can safely imprison Assange without subjecting him to the draconian aspects of America’s prison system which caused the initial dismissal, it’s good to keep in mind that this is being done entirely for the purpose of controlling public access to information that is inconvenient for the powerful.

The prosecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act is being touted by the US government as a matter of national security; you can’t simply allow journalists to publish classified information about the things its military forces are doing in the nations they occupy, because that could endanger American lives.

Leaving aside the fact that the Pentagon already admitted years ago that it could not find a single instance of lives being lost due to the publications for which Assange is currently being prosecuted, this case is not and has never been about national security. This case has always been about narrative control.

The US government is not afraid that unauthorized publication of government secrets will lead to Americans being killed, it’s afraid it will lead to their knowing the truth. The powerful understand that narrative control is everything, and that an entire globe-spanning empire depends on keeping the masses from having a lucid perception of what’s really going on in the world. There is an unfathomable amount of power riding on their ability to continue doing this.

Assange isn’t in Belmarsh Prison for doing something wrong, but for doing something right. For trying to give the public information which will help them form a truth-based worldview so that they can make intelligent informed decisions about where they want to collectively steer society together. Because the oligarchic empire depends on the ability to manipulate the way people think, act and vote to benefit the powerful, this was like handing someone who’s being groomed by a sexual predator a guidebook of all of the psychological tactics that are being used.

This good deed could not go unpunished.

Nothing WikiLeaks published endangered the American people, it endangered a globe-spanning empire’s ability to control our understanding of what’s happening in the world. This was a most egregious offense as far as our rulers are concerned, and it could not be allowed to stand.

So an example is being made. In less polite times Assange would have been tortured and drawn and quartered in the town square while the king looked on sipping from a goblet of mead. In the days of polite liberal democracy our rulers must remain hidden, and they must publicly torture dissidents to death in the name of national security concerns.

Beneath all the spin and excuses, this is all being done to show everyone what happens to you if you reveal embarrassing truths about the most powerful people on earth. If you compromise their political security. It’s telling the world, “If you ever try to interfere in our control over the dominant narratives, this is what we will do to you.”

And, whether we fully understand what’s really happening or not, that’s the message that is being ingested here. Journalists who find themselves in a position to publish such things going forward will find themselves thinking thoughts about what happened to Julian Assange.

This is why it’s so important that they don’t win this case. We cannot allow ourselves to be cowed away from the truth in this way, or else we’re flying blind. We’re unable to obtain information which will help us steer society in a truth-based direction.

The Assange case receives so much attention not because of interest in one man’s fate, but because of interest in everyone’s fate. If humanity is ever to turn away from its self-destructive patterns and create a healthy world, it will necessarily need to do so guided by the light of truth and transparency. As long as the powerful are able to keep us confused and deluded using propaganda and government secrecy, such a world will never come into being.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/10/violent-extremists-took-over-the-us-capitol-long-before-january-6/

Violent Extremists Took Over The US Capitol Long Before January 6

No longer content with absurd claims that the January 6 Capitol riot was as bad as the 9/11 attacks, Democratic Party-aligned pundits are now insisting that it was in fact worse.

On a recent appearance with MSNBC’s ReidOut with Joy Reid, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd said he felt the Capitol riot was “much worse” than 9/11 and that this is the “most perilous point in time” since the beginning of the American Civil War.

“To me, though there was less loss of life on January 6, January 6 was worse than 9/11, because it’s continued to rip our country apart and get permission for people to pursue autocratic means, and so I think we’re in a much worse place than we’ve been,” Dowd said. “I think we’re in the most perilous point in time since 1861 in the advent of the Civil War.”

“I do too,” Reid said.

Not to be outdone, Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Smith cited Dowd’s hysterical claim but adding that not only was January 6 worse than 9/11, but it was actually going to kill more Americans somehow, even counting all those killed in the US wars which ensued from the 9/11 attacks.

“He couldn’t be more right,” Schmidt said at a town hall for the Lincoln Project. “The 1/6 attack for the future of the country was a profoundly more dangerous event than the 9/11 attacks. And in the end, the 1/6 attacks are likely to kill a lot more Americans than were killed in the 9/11 attacks, which will include the casualties of the wars that lasted 20 years following.”

A total of 2,996 Americans were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and a further seven thousand US troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Exactly one person was killed in the January 6 riot, and it was a rioter shot by police inside the Capitol Building. Early reports that rioters had beaten a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher turned out to have been false.

These bizarre alternate-reality takes are awful for a whole host of reasons, including the fact that this so-called “insurrection” everyone is still shrieking about never at any point in its planning or enactment had a higher than zero percent chance of overthrowing the most powerful government in the world, and the fact that they are manufacturing consent for new authoritarian measures just like 9/11 did.

But perhaps the most annoying thing about all the melodramatic garment-rending over how close the US Capitol came to being taken over by violent extremists is that the US Capitol has been under the control of violent extremists for a very long time already.

For all the fretting everyone has been doing about fascists and white supremacist groups, those are not the violent extremists posing the greatest threat and amassing the highest body count today. Neither are the communists. Neither are the anarchists. Neither are the radicalized Muslims, nor the fundamentalist Christians, nor the environmentalists, nor the incels. No, the most dangerous and deadly group of violent extremists in our day are adherents of the mainstream status quo politics of the US-centralized power alliance.

And it’s not even close. Certainly many of the groups listed above are dangerous and undesirable, but they’re not the ones raining explosives upon families around the world for power and profit. They’re not the ones brandishing nuclear weapons with steadily increasing recklessness as they ramp up a new cold war against Russia and China. They’re not the ones poisoning the air and the water and rapidly destroying the environment we all depend on for survival. They’re not the ones enslaving humanity to a brutal, oppressive and exploitative global capitalist system which leaves far too many toiling for far too little when there’s plenty for everyone.

That would be the so-called “moderates” of the western empire, who in reality are anything but.

It is violent to wage nonstop campaigns of military mass murder and impose civilian-killing economic sanctions on nations which disobey your dictates. It is extremist to brutalize, brainwash and enslave humanity while continuously shoving the world in the direction of extinction and armageddon in the name of profit and unipolar hegemony. Because US officials sit almost entirely on the right side of the global political spectrum, we can accurately say that everyone is fretting about violent right-wing extremists storming a Capitol building that had already long been occupied by violent right-wing extremists.

And yet when Facebook started sending Americans warnings that they may have viewed “extremist content” scrolling through their feeds, posts supporting this most dangerous group of extremists were not the content they were being warned about, but any kind of content which opposes the status quo those extremists have created. They’re killing the ecosystem and murdering people every single day while imperiling us all with the risk of nuclear war, my social media feeds are full of Americans literally trying to crowdfund their own survival while the world’s worst add trillions to their wealth, but it’s the people who want to change this abusive system who are the dangerous extremists.

Some analysts focus primarily on criticizing the really obvious monsters who spout racist and bigoted rhetoric to advance their toxic agendas. Others focus more on criticizing the monsters that are harder to see through the fog of feigned politeness and propaganda distortion, the ones you see in government buildings and on Fortune Magazine covers and on TV news shows telling you what to think about the world. Those who spend their time criticizing the latter more than the former are often attacked and ridiculed as fascist sympathizers and Kremlin assets, but only by those who don’t actually see the monsters that they are pointing to.

Hollywood trained us to fear psychopathic killers prowling around in the dark so we won’t notice the psychopathic killers who rule our world in broad daylight. We’ve been trained to fear the serial killer covered in blood and wielding a chainsaw so we won’t notice the serial killer wearing a suit and wielding a pen.

Our collective maturity cannot begin until we learn to see the violent extremist monsters where they actually exist, and not just where we’ve been trained to look for them.