As
attempts to evict Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London
get more and more aggressive, we are seeing a proportionate increase in
the establishment smear campaign against him and against WikiLeaks. This
is not a coincidence.
The planned campaign to remove Assange from political asylum and the
greatly escalated smear campaign to destroy public support for Assange
are both occurring at the same time that Assange has been cut off from
the world without internet, phone calls or visitors, completely unable
to defend himself from the smear campaign. This, also, is not a
coincidence.
The ability to control the narrative about what is going on in the
world is of unparalleled importance to the plutocrats who use
governments as tools to advance their agendas. The agenda to make an
example of a leak publisher with a massive platform who has repeatedly
exposed the corruption of the establishment upon which western
plutocrats have built their empires will require continuous narrative
spin, since the precedent set by prosecuting a journalist for publishing
authentic documents would arguably constitute a greater leap in the
direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act.
Among the latest components of this campaign has been a viral dump of
Twitter DMs being promoted as a hot news item by outlets like
Motherboard, The Hill, Forbes and Think Progress and across #Resistance
Twitter. The fact that the juicy bits from those DMs had already been
published months ago by The Intercept, and the fact that the smears and
spin we’re seeing reruns of today were long ago ripped to shreds in
journalist Suzie Dawson’s epic essay “Being Julian Assange” after the
Intercept publication, has not dampened the orgiastic frenzy with which
this non-story is being bandied about by establishment loyalists and
defenders of power as evidence of Assange’s nefariousness.
This is entirely illegitimate. It is not legitimate to make claims
about someone who has been deliberately deprived of the ability to
defend himself. It is not legitimate to spin a narrative about someone
whose ability to participate in that narrative has been deliberately cut
off. You don’t get to silence a man and then legitimately take over the
public narrative about him. That is not a valid thing to do.
But that of course is the idea. By cutting Assange off from internet
access, phone calls and visitors, he has been deprived of the ability to
give his side of the story in another interview with Fox News, for
example, or in tweets to his millions of followers, thus making his side
of the story mainstream knowledge. Every voice has been shoved off the
stage but that of the political and media establishment which just so
happens to be owned and operated by the same powerful oligarchs who want
Assange silenced and prosecuted for challenging their rule. This is not
a coincidence.
I have said it before and I will say it again: whoever controls the
narrative controls the world. If you can control the stories that the
public are telling themselves about what’s going on in the world, you
control the public itself. So many of the plutocratic establishment’s
most aggressive spin campaigns recently have been about securing
narrative control in a new media environment with unprecedented public
internet access, from constant warnings about “fake news” and
“conspiracy theories”, to fearmongering about “Russian bots” and
“Russian propaganda”, to promoting and legitimizing the persecution of
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Every claim made about Assange since his silencing in late March of
this year can therefore be safely dismissed by the public on general
principles. As long as they are rigging the debate in their favor, the
debate is invalid. Literally any attack on or criticism of Assange being
promoted in public discourse can legitimately be dismissed with
“Assange has been deprived of his ability to defend himself from that
accusation. As long as he is cut off from the world, that’s an invalid
accusation to make.”
Feel free to say this to every blue-checkmarked establishment crony
on social media who is bravely kicking Assange while his hands and feet
are tied behind his back. Their smear campaign is intrinsically invalid,
and they should be told so at every opportunity.
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Caitlin
Johnstone is an uncouth heretic and unapologetic rabble rouser writing
out of Melbourne, Australia. A prolific writer. Rogue journalist. Bogan
socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerilla poet. Utopia prepper. You will
disagree with her sometimes. That's okay.
