As Australia agrees to host a second US military base among the 800 to 1000 US bases and installations round the world, it also stands almost silently by as the US pursues Julian Assange's extradition to the bowels of the bent and fractured US legal system. This appalling system is now poised to outlaw free speech indefinitely in the United States and wherever its tentacles reach around the globe. Ironically, its prosecution of free speech won't affect Russia or China, which have cut themselves loose from its so-called 'democratic' chains.
No-one holds any hope that the 'trial' Julian will undergo in the US will give him justice. Julian realised years before that extradition was just a prelude to torture and indefinite imprisonment, a pretense at fair legal process, in order to silence him and bring despair to those who support human rights.
What Julian is facing personally is truly demonic, but all journalists, including any bloggers, now potentially face the same, should anything they produce displease the billionaire oligarchs who now command the highest offices in the United States and destabilise and loot countries all over the world. For that is the point of the US pursuit of Assange: it is to prevent criticism of modern corporate capitalism's real basis, which is the old-fashioned one of looting and violence. Those who dominate our western governments have no love for self-determination and fairness, but they don't want the masses to understand this. Widespread comprehension of how dishonest and malign they really are would actually undermine their power stucture.
Was it always so?
Post-WW2 western democracy and human rights
After WW2, with vast amounts of cheap fossil fuel available, and an apparently viable alternative political system possible in the USSR, western countries seemed to become generous, humane and truly democratic. Education, health and housing were made accessible, often free, as human rights. Politicians were also accessible, with offices at ground level and no guards positioned outside. Mere indignation seemed to spur them to action. Unemployment was something that only happened to the truly incompetent and indigent, inflation was low and wages easily caught up with it.
After the oil shocks of the early 1970s, when the governments of oil-producing states, including Australia's Whitlam Government, attempted to take control of their assets away from foreign corporations and prioritise them for their own peoples, nationally representative leaders were toppled, western populations were reeducated to endure scarcity and, gradually, education, health, and housing became more expensive, banking was deregulated, unemployment became rife, and wages stagnated whilst inflation sky-rocketed.
The many local newspapers and political publications were bought up by fewer and fewer corporate operators and infotainment became the dominant journalistic value, with the aim of marketing resources and products. Whilst this consolidation at the upper echelons took place, the common consumer became a lonely atom, with little to usefully orientate him or herself in the greater scheme of history, geography, politics, society.
Fall of the Soviet Union and any competition with corporate capitalism
In 1991 the President of the Soviet Union resigned and left the remains of the Union to to corporate looting and pillaging by local and foreign oligarchs. This seemed to signal the end of any competition to the notion and practice of capitalist democracy. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called, The End of History and the Last Man, where he suggested that 'liberal democracy' with parliaments and markets was the pinnacle of human evolution. In hindsight, it was as if all obstacles to corporatisation of government and continuous wars had been removed.
We atoms were authoritatively reoriented into falsely oppositional human silos like 'millenials,' 'generation x'ers,' 'zeds,' 'baby-boomers,' 'home-owners, mortgagees, renters, homeless, and 'NIMBYs.' And political movements were also siloed. We could vote for housing parties, population parties, environmental parties, democratic parties, road transport parties, freedom parties, green parties, anti-migration parties, animal rights parties, independents ... but still, somehow, the Libs or the Labs won government. And, although they won government with fewer and fewer first preferences, they made wilder and wilder changes to our lives.
The last anti-war protests covered by the mainstream press
An illustration of this deterioration in political representation was the silencing of the anti-war movement. On the 15th of February 2003, a coordinated day of protests was held across the world with people in more than 600 cities expressing opposition to the imminent Iraq war, which they had learned - through whistleblowers like Katharine Teresa Gun - was based on criminal lies by US President George Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. (A great film called Official Secrets was made in 2019 about how the UK government started then dropped a court case against Katharine Gun when they realised that going ahead would expose their own corruption to the world. You can often see a free version on youtube.)
Since the beginning of the Iraq war there has been no effective coverage of anti-war protests in the mainstream press. Although the anti-war movement is still active and continues to have protests, because people continue to source most of their information from the mainstream press, fewer and fewer people are aware of the anti-war movement. This failure by the mainstream press to represent people's disapproval and protests against war is a hallmark of why good independent journalism is critical to democracy and of how wars are now the biggest business on the planet.
Wikileaks reinvigoration of reporting standards in the mass media
In 2006, however, there was a renaissance in the information wars, when Julian Assange founded Wikileaks. The political and war-crimes this publication uncovered even rebooted real reporting in the mass-media for a while. There had never been a more powerful voice in publishing than Julian Assange's
The US, which relied on a compliant media to cover up its crimes, had two options - either to police and prosecute its own war-crimes and criminals, or to go after the man who had exposed them. They chose the latter. Julian Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in June 2012, where he managed to continue to publish hugely important stories until shortly before he was forcibly removed from his refuge as a UN-recognised asylum-seeker, illegally by UK police, on 12 April 2019.
Massive Censorship has followed Assange's silencing
The modern corporate press has evolved to sell stuff for billionaires, not to represent what we think. Without a voice to report our opinions and to unite us, we have no means of recognising our fellows and organising. Where we once lived and worked in neighbourhoods made up of families and clans, we now live in synthetic neighbourhoods fractured by infilling, bloated through mass migration, disconnected through commuting, and mixed, matched, and marketed to by developers, who have overwhelming economic and political influence in government and the mass media. Although there have been continuous protests in all cities affected by this top-down restructuring of population, property-rights, power, and environment, like anti-war protests, these have gone unreported in the mainstream press, ignored by our so-called leaders, and unknown to the vast majority of atomized citizens.
As our civil rights evaporate we are also on the brink of world war
The USSR may be dead but Russia (which was once part of the USSR) has made a remarkable political and economic recovery since 1991. During its decline, however, western corporates and states cooperated to exclude Russia from new petroleum gas and oil pipeline routes in the surrounding region. (See http://candobetter.net/node/726.) Like the oil-producing states in the 1970s oil-shocks, Russia wants to retain the national control it has reestablished over its petroleum and other mineral assets, and naturally it wants to be a part of the pipeline-network in the region.
The corporate forces behind the US-NATO states, however, want to maintain Russia and the whole neighboring region in a balkanised and lawless condition, suitable for pillaging, in the tradition of colonial Africa, India, China, Canada, the Middle East, Central and South America, and Australia.
They made their criminal ambitions extra clear when they blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline and Germany said absolutely nothing about it.
Towards these ends, in the face of Russia's increasing economic and political competence, the US has resuscitated US-NATO's old ideological war against the defunct USSR as if Russia were actually a communist state. With the help of the compliant mass media, their dumbed down populations - including politicians and journalists - have accepted this nonsense.
The war-tactics became overt with US-sponsored and organised regime-change in Ukraine, designed to violently alienate its ethnic-Russian populations and establish it as a US outpost with US and UK military bases. Russia's attempts over several years to mitigate this violent power-grab diplomatically, via the Minsk Agreements, failed because US-NATO simply got Ukraine to use these negotiations as a cover while it developed Ukraine as a hostile military power to Russia.
Due to US-NATO arms-support for Ukraine's fascist government, we are now all at risk of nuclear war, yet there is almost no debate heard at the level of the western press.
It is cruelly ironic that, in a time when technology should permit all the world to know all sides of the story, Assange is hidden and gagged in an English dungeon and western press and governments have, through censorship and propaganda, forbidden their populations to know Russia's side of the story. Furthermore, Australia's ideological alliance with the United States has cut us off from participation in the burgeoning new multi-polar world now interacting with Russia and China. Likewise our military alliance with the United States brings us into senseless opposition with our neighbours.
More than ever, we need to free Assange in order to be free.
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