Julian Assange Is Now The Litmus Test
David Lindsay
Where you stand on Julian Assange is now a litmus test such as has not been seen since the Iraq War, which was itself a litmus test such as had not been seen since the Miners’ Strike. If you are not for us, then you are against us. If you are not one of us, then you are one of them.
Led by Stella Creasy and Jess Phillips, those who have already failed that test have declared their desire to criminalise male heterosexual activity per se, with no defence to that charge, but with the understanding that there would at least ordinarily be no prosecution unless the female party complained. If they took any other view, then they would no more advocate the extradition of Assange to Sweden than they would advocate that an adulterer or a homosexual be extradited to Brunei.
This case has also shed some much-needed light on this country’s scandalously one-sided extradition arrangements with the United States. They can get pretty much anyone from the United Kingdom simply by issuing a demand, while we cannot get anyone at all from them. Those arrangements need to be repealed.
More people have been arrested for reporting the war crimes in Iraq than for having committed them. And do you remember when seven years and millions of pounds were spent chasing the people who had crashed the economy? No, neither do I. The permanent American State, rather than the Administration of the day, is still pursuing the Russiagate hoax even after it has been completely blown out of the water. Carole’s Codswallop is also a small subplot, so to speak, within that, and it is also still being pursued. But Hillary Clinton lost. Remain lost. Get over it.
They have not got over it in the House of Commons. A House comprised mostly of the same people cheered a war in 2015. And that House cheered this, too. It cheered the fact that Assange was going to be extradited to his death. In the words of the indictment, “Wikileaks solicited submissions” even though Assange did not “possess security clearance”. The cheering of this by MPs and by Lobby “journalists” said everything that needed to be said about both of them.
Yet when the Daily Telegraph published the MPs’ expenses, then it published what it knew to be stolen Government information, information for which, in that knowledge, it had paid. The Guardian acquired its American audience, and found itself garlanded with honours, when it reproduced the revelations of Julian Assange. And so on. The likes of The Guardian, The New York Times, Channel 4 News and the BBC swapped sides only when the line became that Wikileaks had had a part in the defeat of Hillary Clinton.
Seen in that context, it is not a coincidence that the previously abandoned rape charge in Sweden looks set to be revived. But so what? Even if Assange were a murderer, then he would be highly unlikely to have murdered as many people as George Bush, or Tony Blair, or David Cameron, or John Howard, to name but a few. There is no evidence against him in Sweden, and what was alleged against him there would not have been illegal almost anywhere else, including here. It has already had to be dropped once. But what if he were indeed guilty of what would have been, after all, a crime where he did it? Again I ask, would we extradite adulterers or homosexuals to Brunei? And there would still be no way of suggesting, either that bad sexual etiquette was worse than the crimes that he had exposed, or that bad sexual etiquette was worse than the exposure of those crimes.
If the claims about Assange’s recent behaviour are true, then he has understandably developed mental health problems. But apparently, it is now acceptable to mock mental health problems, just so long as you are mocking an enemy of the Empire. Meanwhile, not a dicky bird about the $4.2 billion loan to Ecuador from the IMF, but instead a puff piece on Lenín Moreno in The Economist on the very day of Assange’s arrest. The blue ticks are running around Twitter, making this about the supposed uselessness of Jeremy Corbyn, who now has a consistent lead in the polls.
Apart from their desire to be on television instead of Corbyn or Diane Abbott, and apart from their apparent inability to spell correctly the names of other signatories to an attack on Julian Assange, what motivates the likes of Creasy and Phillips? The only lasting legacy of the #MeToo lynch mob will be the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, whose record on any one of torture, Guantánamo Bay, mass surveillance, workers’ rights, consumer protection, environmental responsibility, treaties with Native American tribes, and healthcare for people with pre-existing conditions, ought to have seen him blocked by all Democrats and by enough Republicans. Joe Biden is complicit in war crimes. That, and not anything #MeToo-related, is why he is unfit to become the President of the United States. Sniffing the hair of a white woman is not worse than blowing the head off a brown woman. Although that would come as news to Creasy, Phillips and their co-signatories, whose argument against Assange is more or less exactly that.
The all-women shortlist system, of which Creasy and Phillips are beneficiaries, has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left in 1994 to 85 per cent Hard Right today. The changes to the British economy since the Callaghan Government’s turn to monetarism in 1977 have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars waged since 1997 have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to no good effect for the women of Afghanistan, and to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya.
A position of being anti-industrial at home but pro-war abroad is ridiculous in itself, and bespeaks a total lack of comprehension of how wars are fought. But those MPs are Thatcher’s Daughters, unable to understand the rage against deindustrialisation and against the harvesting of young men in endless, pointless wars, and probably unaware of a growing number of young men’s closely connected discovery for themselves of the various schools of heterodox economics, and of the traditional Great Books that, for ostensibly if questionably feminist reasons, have been excluded from school and university curricula.
It is possible to detect a connected failure to appreciate that life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and that the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Instead, Mother Gaia reigns supreme, and we are expected to fight wars for Her even while, under Her petticoats, we shiver and starve in the dark.
Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.
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Well, for me the litmus test is this will prove whether our Judiciary truly is independent of our Government and whether we will uphold people’s right to Assylum who are at risk of an unfair and unjust legal system and will be treated extremely harshly by that country. Assange is an award winning journalist. All the MSM presstitutes made a lot of money and enhanced their reputations on the back of the WikiLeaks documents. Doesn’t suit them now as their job is to put out Government Propaganda as and when it is needed.
We can be in no doubt that this Government is so pro-USA that they are beginning to act and speak like that megalomaniac Trump and forcing the UK, against the will of the people, into becoming daily more and more like the USA, repressive, single party domination, extreme right wing policies (Fascism its called) and international aggression.
We deserve better
Predictably we have more anti-Assange gloating from one of the Guardian regulars, Hadley Freeman.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2019/apr/20/badly-behaved-houseguest-julian-assange
Today, instead of her usual drivel about why the rest of the world should be doing more to improve the lives of priviliged women, she uncritically regurgitates Morneno’s account of why Britain and Ecuador no longer respect human rights principles, in this instance those pertaining to political asylum.
Jonathan Cook has correctly labelled the Guardian the go-to platform for US sock-puppets, and if there was ever any doubt then Freeman’s wretched apologia underlines the fact the platform is not only anti-journalist, but now fully aligned with US fascism.
At the Guardian thought is not only silenced below-the-line but increasingly above it as well – they can’t hide this fact by endlessly bleating about ‘fake news’ when they are at the forefront of spinning political events to fit the preferred narrative of the cryptofascists controlling them.
Their long running campaign to vilify Julian Assange illustrates the moral vaccum at the heart of the Guardian together with the fact they are no longer in the business of serious journalism but are instead stenographers to an all pervading security apperatus.
Of course one should not be too surprised by such compliance, especially when this group of so-called journalists are seldom exposed to the excesses of the sinister forces they are in league with.
Just imagine if a hack like Freeman was forced to endure life in the Yemen or Gaza for a year or so – I mean would such a chastening experience change her outlook, or like Moore, Hyde, Ball and the rest of them, is she too far gone?
President Moreno on Assange. Interview for Spanish newspaper:
https://www.abc.es/internacional/abci-lenin-moreno-presidente-ecuador-julian-assange-violo-reiteradamente-convenciones-asilo-201904182021_noticia.html
Moreno is a crook.
Did Moreno spend any time with Asssange at the embassy – of course not, whereas those that did paint an entirely different picture to the account invented by America’s compliant bitches (i.e. Moreno and the Guardian).
https://news.sky.com/story/respectful-assange-put-through-hell-at-embassy-says-former-diplomat-11698113
You must be exceptionally blinkered if you do understand the nature of an orchestrated campaign to persecute Assange which gathered momentum after exposing terrorist activities of supposedly respectable governments (in films like ‘Collateral Murder’).
The role of the liberal media has been instrumental in sending out that the message that whitleblowers will be taken down so that intimidation of weaker states can continue unopposed.
Please stop being an apologist for cryptofascists, we already have quite enough of that at the Guardian.
Outlaw Assange not above the law…!!! There was a time in which, PROUD fighters and paladins of justice, used to MANLY FACE the tribunals and judges to promote, defend and advance their cause and denounce injustice before humanity. Today, wealthy and middle class BRATS of all kinds HIDE, KICK, CRY AND SCREAM before the world, in search of an undeserved pity elicited by the cameras that made them famous for no reason.
OUTLAW ASSANGE NOT ABOVE THE LAW…!!!
Hey Espartaco…you are confused man!…this not the article for your post…or maybe you are just hiding…
Idiot!
Out with the plutocrats!
Out the excecutioners of Truth!
Out the manipulators of the people!
Expell those promoting war in the name of democracy!
Out the enemies of human life and the life of the planet!
Out those profiting from human suffering and death!
Out to the Rober Baron’s!
Out to the merchants of death and deceit!
‘Truth will out’ is a deep saying. The nature of truth is expression or creation in the line of its nature. The fruits bear witness to the roots.
‘Murder will out’ is a variation on the theme and gives a sense of an oppositional will to open and honest expression – so as to fend off an ‘Inevitable’ or buy time and live on borrowed time.
Your slogans express something of your emotional identifications.
But apart from a ritual of vicarious imagination – do they GIVE all power TO truth or hold back a personal sense of private agenda put first – that is justified by the evils of the world?
Emptying ourself of all that doesn’t truly belong in us – is a matter of bringing it to truth of a transparent self-honesty – and discerning the baby from the bathwater.
‘Outing’ the false as false is different from outing targets of demonisation and vilification that are then attacked in the ‘name of truth’ by the ‘righteous’. That is the way to set up an Inquisition or Purge in which Terror denies the expression of Life.
Good and evil operate a narrative overlay upon true and false.
My friend, you have to many words on you…ultimate truth (which needs no defense) is wordless, is silent….But relative truth is not. There is no division in acknowledging the relative truth of the world we live in.
Your intellectualization has blinded the human living a live. Your discuourse sounds like a call to apathy…
Well a man sees what he wants to see, and he disregards the rest.
(Simon and Garfunkel)
Indeed my friend, indeed….
Ramdan: succinct and fully on point mate. You sum up perfectly what nearly all of us feel here, except of course those trolls who have escaped from Breitbart or 4chan, and unfortunately discovered our tranquil oasis (by and large) here at OffGuardian.
Feelings – taken as truth – are the basis for truth’s denial in self-assertion.
I am not attacking of blaming that you feel – but I wonder why you would have the tale wag the dog?
If you do not ‘feel’ agreed with or supported, do you then demonise the communication by smear as a way to shut it down. “If you are not with us – you are against us!” is the harvest of fear made hate.
Are YOU of the choice to shut down communication – but cunningly hidden in the staged events of a world in which you get to present yourself vindicated by the guilt seen in others?
Though you offer an example of emotional reactivity trumping reason, this is of course ‘normalised thinking’ or thinking based on emotional reaction passing off as the true feeling of being.
You are right that the feeling of being is ‘wordless’ – but see not obeying the words behind the call to war as ‘apathy’. Fear is ever the propaganda by which to deny a mind established in peace of feeling and knowing the qualities of being.
Regardless the forms it takes, the ideologies or systems – the nature of humanly defined reality is of a hidden and protected will to power and possession. Having ‘made such a self by wanting it’, we cannot of ourselves escape it – because we are not ‘of ourselves’ but believe and act as if this is so by maintaining a split or gapped and dissociated mind – as both our private possession and our power of control. This cannot be maintained against truth’s undoing without grievance and enemy, of pain of loss and attack.
“Even as ye have done to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it to me” – is to the recognition we but hurt our Self.
I put this to you – not at you or to deny you – but to your recognition and appreciation of freedom in truth – for this is none under deceit.
The energy of emotional reactivity – be it hate or fear – is a distortion of life energy. In other words it is the filtering of a mind that makes it dissonant, or abhorrent and divisive – such as to invoke a counter-mind of imposed order over feared and hated life-denial – pushed out and down by the ‘will to power’.
Regaining wholeness must – in its right timing – ‘lean into the skid’ enough to regain traction – hence I am not suggesting that you or anyone NOT feel what you feel, any more that giving it a blank cheque to direct your mind or your actions therefrom.
What is right-timing? Is it some moment of recognition – given ear – or given way and right to be – that shifts perspective in such a way that one’s whole world changes – because fresh recognition is given welcome instead of being killed or denied.
When is the time for waking from a loss of control to the attempt to possess it and belief one has done so in the fear of its loss – framed in penalty of failure?
Love of truth is ‘abstract’ only in its being the truth of love. Bringing the specific back into alignment is our part in a wholeness – as the moment at hand.
“More people have been arrested for reporting the war crimes in Iraq than for having committed them.”
Several people have been murdered for reporting on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, notably Reuters journalists Taras Potsyuk and Jose Couso when a US coalition tank landed a direct hit on the Reuters suite at the Palestine Hotel in Bahgdad, in an area where there was no known military activity, for but one example.
Apologies if I am repeating an observation already made elsewhere by other contributors but I was thoroughly heartened by the video on RT of hundreds, if not thousands, of protestors in Ecuador voicing their support for Julian Assange and condemning the actions of their Government. Really served to highlight the rock bottom moral decline in the UK where total apathy and subservience now reign.
Hace años que leí el texto del enlace, escrito en clave de humor, y quienes somos humoristas por temperamento estamos hartos de saber que hay pocas cosas más serias que el humor. Lo dejo aquí por si le interesara a alguno de aquellos lectores cuya lengua materna es el español (me consta que los hay porque fue precisamente uno de ellos quien me habló de este medio).
https://lenguacandeal.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/vargas-llosa-marujea-en-la-cama-de-assange/
Off topic but this is a vitally important interview. Max Igan highlights how in Sydney and now other parts of Australia, they have SUCCESSFULLY used the law to make telecom companies back down from installing 5G networks. Please watch this film. 5G is a military weapons system disguised as a communications network and it is being rolled out in your area right now.
The 5G rollout is a threat to all humanity and is being fudged through to accomplice things nobody needs nor wants, like driverless cars. It is a military weapons system disguised as a communications network and it is a threat to your health, your life and that of your family.
SHARE THIS VIDEO AS FAR AND WIDE AS YOU CAN
Military weapons system AND communications network is more factual!
Where they have tested 5G (ie Holland), birds are dying and falling out of the sky in their hundreds. Brussells has BANNED 5G rollout because of health concerns. Do not expect the same regard for citizens’ health in the UK or US. This is serious, stop this madness
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2019/04/02/brussels-becomes-first-major-city-to-halt-5g-due-to-health-effects/
you are wrong the medical doctor MD is not the person to rely on.. the effects of 5 g and higher energies on the human cells is the expertise of the cell and micro biologist, not the MD.. and the issue is calcium channel signalling. .
sight, smell, sound and heart. look it up and learn it before you say medical doctor again..
Dr. Pall in the USA is the expert..
We should not forget those who turned on Wikileaks over the years.
Pierre Omidyar pulled the paypal plug on WL – one of the opening shots against the organisation. Strangely, one of today’s most vocal defenders of Assange is Greenwald, who of course is bankrolled by Omidyar. Greenwald seems to be complicit in the recent closure of the Snowden archive (with perhaps 90% of the leaks left unpublished), something that has passed many by without notice.
As ever, there is more to all this than we are being told.
From Whitney Webb:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/intercept-snowden-archive/256772/
I decided a while ago that Greenwald is either a sophisticated gate keeper amongst alternative media, or just trying to save his own skin as the circumstances dictate.
The Intercept initially hosted a variety of views and some serious investigative journalism but that’s been seriously curbed, at least as far as foreign policy goes. These days its half a dozen people writing critically of the government on the environment and other domestic issues, and 2 or 3 who just reproduce the state line in a more in depth fashion on the foreign policy. It looks really incongruous when you compare it to the other content.
Greenwald seems to have come out of the whole era of big leaks sitting pretty. Whilst Snowden is exiled in Russia, Manning in prison being tortured, Assange’s life in danger, Glenn seems to maintain great media access, free movement, million dollar book deals, and invites to elitist conferences with the big names of big data, all with a Pulitzer thrown in.
Shrewd ?
I am never quite sure whether people like you and Northern are just useful idiots ,or whether you are paid to post.
Very yawn John.
Do you have a comment on Webb’s article or Omidyar’s record :
Omidyar attempted to steal Craigslist’s trade secrets for his company, eBay, in which, in an unusual decision against a corporate principal, a Delaware judge all but called Omidyar a thief in his effort to “learn the ‘secret sauce’ of Craigslist’s success.” See more on Omidyar’s corporate spying scandal here.
With the U.S. government, Omidyar co-invested in opposition NGOs in Ukraine. His substantial funding was pivotal to the country’s neo-Nazi coup d’etat in 2014.
Omidyar engaged in preferential insider trading with eBay, resulting in the payment of a $3 million settlement to shareholders.
After establishing The Intercept and poaching star reporters and staff (e.g., Ken Silverstein, Matt Taibbi, Marcy Wheeler, Betsy Reed), on Omidyar’s watch a virtual freeze on publishing took effect.
Why is such an apparently principled journalist like Greenwald working for such a crook?
What of the open disagreement between Wikileaks, First Look and Cryptome with regard to approaches to publishing secrets (filtered and vetted vs. document dump) ?
What’s your point ?
I think Greenwald is doing a great job and he continues to push against the establishment line on issues such as Russiagate and medicare for all. Yes there are really combatant sites like Jimmy Dore’s who do a great job but Glen Greenwald is talking to a different audience who wold not watch Jimmy’s show. Yet the message is essentially the same. Jimmy and Glen and others who are pushing the same message but aimed at a different audience increase the amount of people who are influenced and informed.
I disagree. Greenwald/intercept have an agenda, which they being as ‘privacy’. That is: it is Greenwald/ Intercept who ultimately decide what is published and what is not from secret state documents. Assange/ wikileaks publish everything they have.
Now to hide your agenda behind ‘privacy’ is very smart of Greenwald et al: you don’t know what they are hiding, so you don’t know their agenda.
This makes me very suspicious of Greenwald et al
Hete is MediaLens’ take on Greenwald who still thinks that the Guardian is a solid newspaper, and for instance does believe that Manafort visited Assange, but would like to see more video evidence before confirming that Manafort visited Assange.
http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2018/888-limits-of-dissent-glenn-greenwald-and-the-guardian.html
Yeah, that was pretty great how they took control of the Snowden archive and then shut it down. Paying a staffer or two a salary is apparently too much expense for this billionaire.
No reply, which makes me think that it is you trolling.
If you are, then I have to wonder why is someone on OffG, trolling against a comment that critiques Greenwald, FLM, Omidyar ?
MOSSANGE IS PSYOP!
Once a litmus paper was 911. Mossange did not pass this test. Now he is the litmus test of the folly of his followers.
It is really sad and does not give any hope that so many people have no idea what is going on around them. Brainwashing works perfectly and the desire of the superhero has been perfectly installed by ziomedia. Only a finite idiot will believe that MSM (your superhero published in NYT, Spigel, Guardian, Economist, etc.) would allow to publish anything against its owners. Mossange did not publish anything that was previously unknown to everyone who was interested. For this he published a lot of useful information for the empire. Mossange helped to make “Arab spring”, war in Libya and Syria and slandered Iran, support 911 official story.
If they were to do anything to silence him, why did they give him MSM to proclaim his “revelations”?
Why did they not block funds?
I am waiting for an answer on these two simple questions
The most wanted man drinks Rothschild tea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_HPLHIBTtA
Apart from your comments being wrong on every count, why would Assange choose to be locked up for seven years and not allowed to see sunlight and be isolated from friends and family. Great psyops that locks up and tortures the people for decades who are by your estimation part of the plot. I am afraid that some people make it easy for the elites and warmongers to call the real left and real progressives conspiracy freaks, There are real conspiracies but yours is has no basis and lacks credibility.
Did not you answer the two simple questions I asked.
How do you know he spent 7 years there? You ate breakfast and dinner with him?
Here you can find the grounds for my allegations:
Wikileaks Is Zionist Poison
http://www.maskofzion.com/2010/10/wikileaks-is-zionist-poison.html
Wikileaks Is A Rothschild Operation
http://puppet99.com/p/1
When Wiki Leaks. Assange Syria Papers
http://www.pravdareport.com/world/121582-wikileaks_assange/
WikiLeaks: Advancing an Israeli Agenda?
Sex, Lies, Iran, Israel and WikiLeaks
Wikileaks: Another Mossad Psyop
if it’s not enough I can give you more
Which UK politicians have supported the Obama-Nuland install Nazi junta in the Ukraine.? Look at the names on the indictment. Understand what impact the news contained below will have on UK politics and the upcoming European elections.
That slag May comes to mind. As do Boris and the greaser Williamson. Pustules. Pox filled pustules the pair of them.
Make no mistake about it. This will rock NATO to the core. It may I return Europe. It will unseated the tapeworm Tories.
The State Investigation Bureau opened a criminal case on the intentional surrender of Crimea, violent upheaval, treason and the organization of mass murders on the ‘maidan’ in 2014 by Ukraine’s top officials, in particular by Arseny Yatsenyuk, Alexander Turchinov, Andrei Paruby, [former head of Ukraine’s Security Service] Valentin Nalivaichenko, [Verkhovna Rada member] Sergei Pashinsky, [Permanent Representative to the UN] Yuri Sergeyev, [Kiev Mayor] Vitaly Klichko, [head of the Freedom nationalist party] Oleg Tyagnibok, [former Acting Defense Minister] Igor Tenyukh, [Prosecutor General] Yuri Lutsenko, [Defense Minister] Stepan Poltorak and others,” Aver Lex said.
More:
http://tass.com/world/1054070
“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism,
loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.” ~ Brock Chisholm,
first Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations (UN).
UN Human Rights, means only toilet calls of duty, g’teed :
nothing more, nothing less.
It was obvious; well before the wholly corrupted & engineered decision process, against Bokova, for Secretary General,
that Guterres was a spineless puppet, therefore perfect for the USUK Mossad’s Dick Cheney Brigade.
I wish I’d found this website earlier. So refreshing to read articles like this. Thankyou!
My pleasure. You are very kind.
Signs up on car windows, on front windows of houses, anywhere that draws attention. Every little effort makes a difference. Let everyone know we support Assange.
I was watching ‘King of Kings’ – a film about life of Jesus (with Jeffrey Hunter) with my pupils for Easter’s RME. When John the Baptist gets carted off someone asks, “What was his crime?”
“Telling the truth,” came back the reply.
I was instantly drawn to the parallel with Julian Assange.
Similar thing happened to Socrates.
Telling the truth and asking awkward questions makes one a target, and enemy of the crooks.
Jesus correctly predicted doom if you follow the truth and walk in the light. But what else to do?
Be brave Mr Assange, you may not believe in Him, but the Word believes in you. God bless.
Jesus predicted doom for telling – or as I prefer – living the truth?
You have it backwards.
This seriously disturbed and disturbing, scattergun, non sequitur neither supports its own conclusion – nor makes any sense at all. If anyone had watched Sky News (or at least a clip of it); or listened to Radio 4 – they would know for sure that it was official Labour policy for Julian to face mythical charges of ‘rape’ in Sweden.
The Creasy letter effectively has 72 signatories, 73 since Thornberry joined the fray. So to whom does this key premise refer?
“If you are not for us, then you are against us. If you are not one of us, then you are one of them.”
The whole article falls apart for lack of basic research, personal bias, and and an extremely false dichotomy, based on an inexistent supposition that anyone is truly pro-Julian – particularly the Labour Party.
The only litmus test is to say that Julian should be free – NOW! Not least on time served for illegal detention without trial, cruel and illegal punishment of solitary confinement. FREE and compensated – hugely – for the crimes committed against him in person. And for the greater state crimes against humanity and the right to dissent, the right to criticise the government without harassment, and the right to purvey the truth to ones hearts content. The truth is above the law. The truth is the law. If the state feels shamed by the dissemination of truth – hurrah! It is up to the state to modify its behaviour in order to better serve the truth. And humanity.
So, unless this article is relatively old – David missed the keypoint when Corbyn backed his MPs. Even though he told the truth over Iraq and Afghanistan: he still has to face the due process of a trumped up sexual allegation. Some fucking support indeed from the Labour leader. In fact this article make more sense if the party is brought into refute inclusively. Who will speak for Julian now that those in power, Pontius Pilate-like, have washed their hands of him …betraying him to his fate. Cowards, class traitors, and betrayers of humanity, one and all.
Humanity stands on its own. The state stands against humanity. There is a line in the sand. That is the litmus test. Do we continue to back a state repressive system that constantly betrays and dehumanises us? Or do we form our own alliances and assemblies against the state repressive powers. Quietly, humanely, and peacefully humanity should one by one say:
¡No pasarán!
This far and no further. We are all Julian now.
BigB,
We need to form our own alliance with Roger Waters at the helm! He has been talking about Julian Assange on RT’s Going Underground, with the wisdom that we now come to expect from him..
I’m there already: not least for his stance on Palestine and the White Helmets …his music speaks for the core of me:
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
¡No pasarán!
Perhaps, the days of a group with ‘One person at the helm’ are fast disappearing. Precisely look at what happened to Assange! The yellow vest formula hopefully will somehow work.
Every one should be Pilger and every one should be Waters. Everyone should be Assange (it is tough to be Assange, but everyone should do as as much as they are able to).
This is so spot on.
It’s so fitting that this crucifixion of Assange should be going down right around Easter … it’s like Darkness at Noon. The symbolism couldn’t be more perfect.
“… it’s like Darkness at Noon,” exactly like during the first Gulf War,
when in Kuwait, 650 oil installations were burning simultaneously,
“Hot air for a cool breeze…” with a stench the world over,
that rendered impotence … simultaneously, glorifying war,
testing new technology.
Operation Desert Storm, just a ride:
like a walk in the park …
“A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?”
Of Censorship & Rage,
born of false entitlement,
iQ-8
A softener, for furthering future censorship, of unprecedented levels.
BigB: this sounds corny, just imagine we had a way to round up the whole lot of the cretinous, treasonous, idpol addled, Neoliberalist politicians and all the media stenographers, espec Luke Harding and Owen Jones, and dump the whole bloody lot of them on Tristan Da Cunha – provide them with gardening tools and seeds, and then make sure there’s no way off the Island. And no internet access either. Exile the bastards from the rest of humanity. Okay, that’s my very wishful somewhat corny thought for the day. I fully agree with your use of the phrase No Pasaran! Also add another one: Ya Basta….
Didya ever read( or see performed) ‘The Mad Woman of Chaillot’,& here I mean the scene in which the perpetrators are sentenced in absentia?!
Gezzah
Sounds a bit corny, but WE DO! We have a great big, unstoppable, get out of jail free card – it’s called humanity. And when it is internationalised for humanity, not borderless capital, we have the the solidarity of a Universal Humanism. Which, irony of ironies, is the Americanist globalist motto: “e pluribus unum” “out of many, one” …but not a capitalised collective corporate identity under global governance – which is death …a pluralistic manifestation of diversified humanity within unity and within nature – a biodiverse interspecies holism and unity of life within life. Freedom!
When we move away from our capitalised state identity to our natural organic identity – we leave behind the ability to be controlled. Everyone is a unique perspective and intimate point of contact with reality that cannot be replicated, duplicated, standardised, or collectivised. But everyone is also inter-related – in intercausal ways we cannot even understand or begin to map – with everyone else. The poetic metaphor is Indra’s Net. We are each jewels of reality, reflecting every other jewel of reality, infinitely. Whatever disturbs the Net, disturbs every jewel in the net. We are an individual, but not individuated, each an essential node of an interconnected, interactive, interbeing, interspecies process reality.
What distracts us from this reality is materialism. Materialism that locks us into a dialectical materialism with the state: and its main client – capital. A capitalised material dialectic that becomes a deflationary death spiral and race to the bottom – when you add entropy to the mix of forces dragging us down. Instead of realising our holism and unity in our birthright organic selves – we displace our spiritual wellbeing into material totem substitutes. A token and symbolic exchange that can never fulfil. Indeed, the process is extremised into never allowing a fulfilment – capitalism flourishes in the alienation and disappointment it creates. Exponential and existential alienation and disappointment. Capitalism flourishes by desire-production away from, over and above, the production we need for healthy functioning infrastructures and systems. It then diverts desire-production to its own ends: abandoning communities, societies, and whole peripheralised nation states – channelling its supra-societal flows into the domination and excessive conspicuous consumption of a monopolising plutocratic elite few.
Witness, the sheer mass of materialised entropic energy and natural resources that have gone into a state of perpetual violence, pollution, and environmental and human degradation. I give you the contemporaneous near-death moribund state of humanity. If we remain hooked in to materialism: we remain hooked into a humanity/state/capitalist dialectical materialism of heat death and entropic decay. There is no escape if we carry through the current dynamics. In fact, it will quicken – due to the exponential nature of both debt and entropy.
So long as we try to maintain our expectations of materialised techno-progress and a return to prosperity – things look bleak. But progress for the sake of progress for the sake of anxiety and existential unhappiness can be redefined as progress toward holism – which is negentropic and already extant. We were just too busy cannibalising humanity, reality, and the environment to notice. We are already in the future: if we want to be. And we could reshape societies by repurposing much of the shit we no longer need – like upcycling F-35s and Abrams tanks into ploughshares – for instance.
And prosperity – we are infinitely rich just be being here with each other – in ways we can never understand if we view everyone as a potential threat for my little pile of entropic schizzel – that costs both of us our humanity and also costs the earth. We cannot be more rich by adding digits to a numbered account. Not if the financial system collapses and our ‘wealth’ is gone. And anyone who has gold in their bedroom…
It is all false: we have more to gain by realising this than we do by trying to keep hold of redundant desiring for shadows …shadows of who we could be.
It does not have to be this way. It does not have to pan out this way. It does not have to end this way. We have unexplored riches, talents, abilities, empathies, and aspects of humanities we have never had time to realise before. Not when “time is money” and our redundant labour our only marketable resource. How many Dostoevsky’s, Mozart’s, Leonardo’s, and Wordsworth’s die in the Global South every year? Or are underdeveloped due to famine or lack of clean water? What a fucking waste of humanity.
It is all so unnecessary. Humanity could live close to negentropically – in perpetuity – if only it put a fraction of the resources we use for war and dehumanisation aside. That change can only come, as I see it, individually by saying No to a pernicious modernity – one that is about to turn on us anyway. We already have more than we need in truly socialised interaction with each other. Communities that can be fed, clothed, and sheltered for an absolute minimum fraction of the cost of the globalised alternatives. Education and healthcare cost a bit more – biophysically speaking. And arts and humanities more than that. The decisions will be whether we have a big militarised bunfight for what is left – which is fucking stoopid – but our leaders do not get in to power through emotional-intelligence or insight-wisdom …or we use the resources to transition to human scale developments that maintain many of our living standards – but with reduced expectations of ever exceeding them. There is only one rational and logical choice to be made. But no guarantee that it will be the one we choose.
BigB: my head is almost spinning on reading your so profound comment…. “Capitalism flourishes in the alienation and disappointment it creates”…. “we displace our spiritual well being into material totem substitutes”…. I agree fully about the lack of a true spirituality in the West, and how so many lose their souls in meaningless consumerism = Hungry Ghosts. On my way to sell The Big Issue mag, and navigating public transport at present. Will reread your comment tonight. Thank you!
Before ‘capitalism’ is the wish to possess something more or special that creates the sense and self of lack. Investment in idols in the hope to get for a special self or by extension a special group. The desire to possess, dispossess us of our peace or wholeness of being – not in truth – because self-illusions do not affect what we are in truth but cover and deny truth in the attempt to get or become something out-from a sense of lack.
Investment in illusion makes us in its image.
True desire is a movement of fulfilment that brings forth from what is by aligning the conditions for its appreciation.
From within wholeness is the nature of being and as if to get a special part for ourself is the nature of forgetting – and therefore seeking outside our self – from and as a sense of lack-driven compulsion, lust and tyrannous subjection that is not recognised in the sacrifice of truth to illusion.
The pattern of generating a lack-need of induced scarcity, supplying it, and capturing its control, is the mind that knows not what it does – because it invests in lack and fear as if to fill and assuage it.
To ‘see’ this mind in the other is through our own.
The sense of lack of integrity or Soul awareness in alienation, seeks outside itself for special hate objects to project or ‘get rid of’ its self-conflict. This works the same pattern of getting a sense of relative worth, reinforcement and temporary gratification as would possessing an object or a status or a sense of power.
Spirit can equate to Purpose and that Life has Purpose is its gift and the sharing in it.
To get for a ‘self’ apart is the forgetting of shared being as both giving and receiving.
When we give in order to ‘get’ we are not truly giving but seeking to bind unto ourself a symbol of lack made real or chaos made order, or pain made joy or fear made love.
The pattern beneath the forms is of a mind serving wholeness or a mind serving idols made in lack or fear of loss given allegiance and believed.
A true account calls on a self-honesty that an investment in illusions and mutual self deceit cannot afford – and will hide from and keep hidden – until the true nature and cost of the investment undoes allegiance and sacrifice to its dictate.
Undoing illusion is of our own willingness to true account and natural desire for true connection or real relationship – and not an ingenious redistribution of psychic energy of judgement and perception of others and world.
It is not wrong to protect investments of energy or attention – but inevitable – the key is at the level of Purpose. To know our Purpose is to be present with – rather than strategically set apart from in a mind of many purposes of dissociating fragmentation under some narrative of shifting self justification.
Hi Binra. I hope your day is going peacefully well, wherever you are on this Planet. “The desire to possess, disposses us of our peace or wholeness of being”. I understand that, which is why I used the phrase ‘Hungry Ghosts’. I sense you are a truly decent person, and I mean no disrespect to you, but I really struggle to understand your comments. The ‘fog in my head’ as I’ve told you before. There are parts I fully get and understand, then the next paragraph, I’m lost again – like a light being turned on and off. My ‘sense’ of spirituality, of connectedness, comes from Nature, what is around me and part of me – part of all of us in effect. I believe everything is interconnected, the Gaia hypothesis if you wish. Maybe I was a Pagan in a previous life? I definately don’t have idols or place people on pedestals. They only end up disappointing us. I had a Catholic upbringing, incl catholic schooling, maybe that’s where I get my sense of social justice and sense of right and wrong from? For example, what has been done to Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning is morally repugnant and disgusting (in my opinion). And yes, I get really angry when I see ‘journalists’ sticking the boot into Assange after his arrest. Its the behaviour of cowards imo. I have strong views Binra, out of my own sense of what is right and wrong. And no, I don’t read very much, except articles on sites like this, but certainly no Gramsci, Debord, Sartre, Friere, Moore, pretty much no one. Maybe I need to read more? Enjoy your day Binra…
Never separate is more ‘native’ than the idea of connecting separate parts.
To judge Reality is to make an image and then give the image priority over reality is the making of idols that are given meaning in order to GET something we seek OUTSIDE Reality – and this is the split of self and ‘reality’ into ‘powers’, struggle and ‘the Fall’ or Separation. Mistaking the image, thought system, symbol or model for truth is an invested identity that ‘knows not what it does’ because it is dissociated from knowing in the attempt to make it reality true. And so all that it seems to know is through a lens or mind of ‘division, conflict, fragmentation’.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
I write as the meanings come up to a desire and attention – if you felt into the recognition, you would release the mind of translation into ‘separateness’ or in Jesus’ terms – the old wine bottles. The communication is not IN the forms or words but an energetic communion within ‘One’ – not one among many but One in all.
This need not be understood or believed – but it does need acceptance for peace to restore the mind to its true function and for that we only need be somewhat willing. In this way it is needful not to hold active belief against healing or a greater Embrace – because nothing true comes to us against our will.
Emotional reaction is the basis OF and for mind-control. Awakening is to Feeling awareness – which is what I meant by ‘knowing’. When you feel what is within you without limit – there is wholeness or indivisibility/individuality. The mind that projects its reality OUT side itself and be-lives subjection to its own definitions is ‘asleep’ in Plato’s Cave (so to speak).
The investment in ‘the kingdom of the human world’ in its framing of power struggle or Caesar is taken from where it is due. This is not ‘idea-play’ but observations seeking phrasing. The fruit of communication here is that you look within and recognize instead of looking out to analyse, predict and control. Not that that need be assigned guilt or sin – but that ‘being an instrument of They Peace’ is not ‘special’ but Natural to true communioned being – or if you prefer, unselfconscious extension of a true acceptance or trust of Self/Reality or Creation that has not left the Mind of its Creator – nor made of truth a lie.
Willingness offers a ‘channel’ through which Life happens – and knows itself Alive.
Wilfulness – or the substitution of true will by a mind set over and apart, knows not what it does, and suffers a life that is ‘done to it’ and over which it seeks to prevail or from which to hide and escape.
In any given moment of noticing, one can readily see the mind-in-act and this releases invested belief and identity.
But of course this will meet our fear and hates, guilts and shames – but from and within a different Purpose.
Anything of the purpose OF mind-control uses fear and hates, guilts and shame as vectors or levers of manipulation.
A manipulated substitution for life can assert itself in any way it chooses – but cannot make it true.
By the fruits we know to the roots – but in seeking false fruit – make a false root as the lie and the father of it.
I don’t and didn’t study philosophy – except in passing synchronicities. The reintegrative movement of our being is not adding to a ‘self’ but its transformation and translation to serve a true function instead of an obstructive ability to use thought against the Thinker. Deceit or self-illusion – that by definition must suppress, subvert or shut down true communication. (Back to the Assange topic).
This theme is raised regardless of anything about Assange, Manning, or deep deceits. The first place truth is denied is in our rushing to the call to war.
The attempt to GET RID of symptoms as if THEY are the disease or indeed the cause of violation, is the disease.
As long as cause is projected away from self – it MAKES a separate-self-sense by definition, ‘subject’.
The re-cognition and acceptance of denied self, undoes the belief and experience of ‘Separation’ – and its apparent effects or fruits – to experience of a different order – for there is no ‘thing’ or ‘self’ apart – but the wish that made it and the fear that keeps it hidden. But this quality cannot be thought or claimed or spoken – being original communion of Life, most associated with the primary qualities of being which are wordless or formless ‘knowing’ as joy, as peace, uncovered – not added.
The development of subjective consciousness as an undercover way of generating private experience as outcomes for which we disclaim responsibility or seek plausible deniability – makes the surface ‘consciousness’ as a filtered or ruled ‘mind’ that knows not what it does, by definition of its own denied (unconscious) self.
It isn’t that the hidden or denied self makes you do it – but that it makes you as the ability of doing from the framing of its definitions that we experience as done unto us and unfairly so – but are the measure of the meanings we give unmindful that we always give unto our Self. Who lives by the sword has given it that power and so it is power for that one. Judgement is a sword by which the One Life is cut into pieces – for the mind that elects to give it power is subject to its own measure. But in giving to GET RID OF – is the self destructive put OUTSIDE the capacity to change our mind about our mind.
Bringing the Unconscious TO a willingness for healing is the condition in which the ‘war mind’ of fear driven reaction is paused enough for something to come into consciousness that would otherwise be pushed down or given a blind eye – by an automatic habit of defence, running default strategies of acquired conditioning.
Without a willingness to heal, the unconscious ‘territory’ has all the wherewithal to re-enact separation trauma that made it – and to persist mind that seeks to force outcomes here, delivers itself unto ‘evils’ rather than being delivered from them.
There IS no ‘escaped world’ set apart from the undercurrent of unhealed or denied self – which effectively runs as ‘shadow power’ of denial given protection. There IS no rational answer that has any basis in Reason that does not acknowledge the nature of the ‘world’ as psycho-physical in its expression of purpose and desire as its foundation.
Aligning in true desire is to restore unified purpose. While we want conflicting things we hold conflicting purpose and definition of who and what we are – which can only ‘split the mind’ which then seeks a narrative unity over the split – which is thus hidden or protected by the narrative control.
The way out of an impossible situation is to recognise we are not in it – but in steps that can be recognised and accepted. The narrative identity is purposed to wishing against reality which induces fear. But can just as well serve a reintegrative alignment in a true movement of being – when such an experience opens the recognition that fear denied.
We cannot directly give another an experience of our choosing, but we can give active willingness to create the conditions in which such a recognition naturally arises. Love’s awareness is not a matter of worthiness or works but of a self-revealing movement that gives itself as the whole situation – along with knowing what to say or how to be in the flowing of unfolding moment. This is entirely natural to us – but a ‘second nature’ interjects to overlay with a mind of filtering rules and roles of normalised lovelessness masking as love and as love provoked, attacked and broken. This need not be.
To ‘put our mind in others’ is a game in which we become invested and hurt ourself.
How was it that an ostensible leftist party morphed into a centrist liberal party – and a reactionary centrist party at that? Well I think we have to back to the Blair years in search of an answer. Blairism was just a continuation of Thatcherism, or put another way Thatcher represented the original thrust of the neo-liberal counter-revolution, but Blairism represented its consolidation. Mrs T was Danton, to Blair’s Talleyrand. The Labour party underwent an top-to-toe resconstruction, old ideas such as nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy was now distinctly passe. Neo-liberalism was all the rage and New Labour was born. Pari passu with this process new young MP’s entering the party after leaving university brought with them the American imports of identity, post-modernism, together with particularly noxious strands of misandry. Then there were the traditional careerists. Those young guys with whom I mixed with at Ruskin College. These red-hot revolutionaries – 2 in particular who shall be nameless who came from northern constituencies – ended up as Knights of the Realm! There has also been contrived infiltration by openly Zionist groups such as Labour Friends of Israel as well as other entrants with the own political and personal agendas. Particularly noticeable were youngish entrants with East European sounding names writing completely ignorant and uninformed Russophobic drivel. One of which who had by her own admission been working for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Afghanistan. I wonder what exactly she was doing in Afghanistan? And there has almost certainly been infiltration by deep-state security agencies. Such has been the rise and fall of the Labour party in the UK and more generally social-democracy in Europe.
That’s the track record I am afraid. Apart from the 1945-50 interlude Labour has not only consistently failed to deliver the promised goods, but now isn’t even trying.
”In many instances in fact, reformism is no more the theoretical expression of the scepticism of the disillusioned, of the outwearied, of those who had lost their faith; it is the socialism of non-socialists with a socialist past.” (Roberto Michels – Political Parties, 1911, p.210
When a socialist party forms an alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie, and institutes a policy of co-operation with the government not only does it repeal its own militants, driving them into the ranks of the anarchists, or into isolated actions, but it also attracts to itself a swarm of bourgeois of very dubious value. (Bebel to Jaures, Speech at the Reichstag, 03 February 1893 – quoted in Michels – p.211)
The ‘for or against’ line in the sand is dangerous here. I think it wrong to enter into the conflation of so-called ‘feminist’ politics with the reality of the Assange situation – which is solely about free speech, media complicity and political/ legal corruption. The narrative writers want it to be about gender/ sex.
As Jimmy Dore points out in some rightful anger: Hillary went to Trump’s wedding, their daughters are close friends. The divide is a sham, and I am sure the intention has always been to divide opinion on Wikileaks through deliberate framing inside a whipped up gender war.
You write:
… Mother Gaia reigns supreme, and we are expected to fight wars for Her even while, under Her petticoats, we shiver and starve in the dark.
This is so far from what I see that it hard to take seriously. We continue to fight a war against Mother Gaia, and in the upside down world in which we live, women inreasingly take to lead warrior role.
At the same time, I note it is people like Code Pink who are often the ones with the ‘balls’ to put their actual bodies in the way of the death machine.
This is not about women and men, it is about human beings.
We need a renewed relationship with a Mother Earth and a Father Sun, not the deranged hubris of promoting ‘economic growth’- a label for social and environmental death.
With regard to XR, Thunberg etc. I hat tip BigB and Tim Hayward for linking to Cory Moringstar’s articles on the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.
This also worth a read:
https://nowhere.news/index.php/2019/04/01/astroturfing-the-way-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/
detailing Gail Bradbrook’s history before XR fame.
OffG tweet:
If you don’t trust the #BBC when they fear monger about #Russia, #Iraq, #Syria, #Brexit or Jeremy #Corbyn, why on earth trust them when they talk about #climatechangefacts? Whatever the truth, it’s clear the establishment has an agenda.
The editors at this site need to get to the bottom of this. There clearly is an agenda, but what is it ?
Is the recognition of social engineering, perception management and astroturfing for a new financial paradigm, grounds enough to sit ‘neutrally’ on the fence with regards to the scientific arguments ?
As Sleboda points out below that tweet, it is not ‘the BBC’ who are ‘fear mongering’, it is pretty much the entire community of research scientists around the globe (in many fields) who are raising the alarm. OffG need to get their thoughts in order.
“The all-women shortlist system, of which Creasy and Phillips are beneficiaries, has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left in 1994 to 85 per cent Hard Right today. The changes to the British economy since the Callaghan Government’s turn to monetarism in 1977 have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars waged since 1997 have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to no good effect for the women of Afghanistan, and to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya.”
“Here, here”. A concise description of the neutering of the British Labour party turning it into the party that has as its mantra “remain and reform”….like that was even possible and in Metropolitan areas is consumed with identity politics.
Of all the dicing of humanity into manageable and conflicted groups by the neolibs’ puppet masters so to better oppress us, the slimy way by which women have been encouraged to lap up the nonsense peddled by that minority of females, the prudes, who I mentally classify as being of the spinster librarian set, is by far the most egregious. (and yep my labelling is egregious too)
There is no doubt that some men have behaved just as appallingly toward women as a cluster of slugs and pigs always do, but the universalisation of that reprehensible behaviour by neolib ‘opinion leaders’ to make it seem this type of unconscionable and frequently criminal conduct is the secret desire of all men, has led to the factionalisation of potential resistance to apply across entire populations pretty much everywhere on the planet.
This far exceeds the factionalisation of gay & straight, white and unwhite which went before, to the point where unity can seem almost unachievable.
By making gender the first interrogation any potential resister must ‘pass’ with comrades, neoliberals are attempting to ensure that solidarity to a common cause becomes practically impossible.
It also has considerable impact on the way we dialectically analyse issues prior to settling on a means to resolve that issue.
A quick example – a little while back a group of comrades were discussing the accommodation ‘crisis’ that has occurred in pretty much every economy and I pointed out we had made some fundamental errors in not correctly thinking through how the campaigns in the 1970’s and 1980’s demanding all women who wanted to work after marriage and childbirth would quickly morph in to both partners being compelled to work right through their lives – whether they wanted to or not.
In other words leaving that elephant unresolved could cause many single income families to remain outside the housing market, irrelevant to how or why the family was a single income family.
Yes I should have phrased it better, but there is no doubt that the initial advantage in the housing market that was enjoyed by families with two spouses generating income had caused price appreciation in the property market, initially led by fully working families increasing demand for more ‘up market’ housing.
As demand for ‘desirable homes’ exceeded supply when more families decided that both needed to work until the mortgage was sorted, price appreciation expanded well beyond homes desired by wannabe upper middle class types into the general market and the price inflation continued until we got where we are now, a world that insists that every adult must work just to stay afloat – forget about paying off the mortgage, now everyone must work just to make the rent!
Of course dual income families are not the only cause of in-affordable homes, but it is one of the major drivers, one that we must creatively and equitably resolve if the spiral isn’t to repeat itself.
However a large proportion of the others in the room had been fed the patriarchy myth, that all males including those who had also copped the rough end of the pineapple since the year dot, were devoted to excusing past oppression of women so they can better devise new forms of oppression.
There was no more discussion about resolving housing as those of us who supported exploring ways to ensure single income whanau accessed housing were (imo) unjustly accused of blaming women for the accommodation shortage.
This is one example of the snares devised by those determined to secure total control of our existences, we must see this for what it is whilst we freely acknowledge the scum behind these ploys are disproportionately male.
Yet even saying that leaves one open to being accused of insinuating females are less perceptive than males when there is nothing further from a reality that is using the accusation of oppression to further subjugation.
The way that Julian Assange has been stitched up indicates that somewhere in behind the greedies, charlatans and enablers there is at least one mind far smarter than the usual third rate thinking and strategising of the military, security and intelligence services.
Of course it is possible that they just got lucky but this has been an exceedingly long run of luck which should get us to at least consider that possibility and inspire some of us to try and uncover this unlikely percipience from among the ranks of the unimaginative plodders who live to assist our overlords.
UreKismet,
Sound words. I know your comments about your mental image of “spinster librarians” are intended to be tongue-in-cheek. But I would proffer my image of the women in question as young, so-called liberal, pseudo-intellectuals who see it as a cause they can use to their advantage so they can delude themselves that they have done something positive for democratic society and, in the case of people in the public eye, to get in the MSM headlines.
Judy (aged spinster, former librarian and very much supporter of Julian Assange!)
No offence taken! 🙂
Judy, I can only apologise for my characterisation and say by way of defense that your description of the ‘new prudes’ as smug budding politicians indicates that persuading other young women that the current stance is awfully self-defeating is going to be much more difficult, becauses careerist politicians of whatever stripe rarely acknowledge their errors before they are fully evident to the rest of humanity. Nevertheless we must keep trying, the alternative is too dark to contemplate.
JudyJ
I think it’s unfair just to have a go at the female anti -Corbynists as I think that is what a lot of the males and females involved in this ( and many other attacks ) are.
True there was a big intake of the ‘ sisters ‘ under Blair and a further intake later.
A lot of the sisters just like their brothers abstained on the Welfare Bill as they didn’t want to be seen as the Party of Benefits. If I remember rightly it was a Labour phrase which the Tories use now – Hard Working Families they were both trying to impress.
Both male and female Labour MPs arrive in politics from the Charity and NGO type organisations and having worked in that particular sector in the mid eighties I witnessed the so called ‘ Beauty Contests ‘ performed by
those who wanted to receive contract funding from the then Thatcher governments and Local Authorities – Labour and Tory.
That world obviously has not dis-appeared just changed its form and the schmoozing and persuading has changed also.
When both sexes who have worked in these parameters land in Parliament they continue what they learnt.from their tutelage.
You have to work with people you don’t like and compromise and socialising will get you what YOU want and not necessarily what the people you represent need.
Many like the prestige and the salary of being an MP but I don’t think they all went into politics just for the money and a lot genuinely think you can compromise around something as big as austerity.
I could go further but my general view is that most of these MPs are not Hard Right but they are certainly not Soft Left. A lot would claim to be socially minded but not Socialists ( not even adherents of the relatively benign British version of Socialism ) and due to their political lessons under 40 years of Neo Liberal economics it’s not a surprise to me that they act as they do.
Naive? – maybe.
Greedy? – many.
Idealistic? – they think they are but they have the wrong ideals and think that they should be arbitrators between the public and capitalists.
Basically they honestly think that is a battle Labour can’t win.
They were shocked when Corbyn’s Labour Party left May without a majority in 2017 and I suspect they will be shocked again in the next GE.
First though the really cynical grouping need to be de- selected and the remaining candidates realy need to brush up on their politics Internationaly never mind Domestically.
Male and female.
‘what motivates the likes of Creasy and Phillips?’ – certainly not a wish to hold to account those who inflicted terrible harms on countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Venezuela.
Their selective rage is restricted to media inventions such as the Guardian’s long running campaign to smear Corbyn as an antisemite.
Creasy and Phillips are both emblematic of the kind of feminism that permeates so much of the Guardian’s output – in particular Phillips could not help snorting her derision when high rates of male suicide were discussed during a parliamentary committee.
It takes a lot to taint the reputation of an important social movement like feminism but somehow it has turned to shit in the hands of certain politicians and the joyless ideolgues they take their inspiration from.
Isn’t it sad that the people who benefit the most from the risks taken by the likes of Assange, Manning and Snowden, are the ones who complain the most about them? Gross ignorance and unfortunately basic stupidity, are the hallmarks of American citizenship. Americans are so brainwashed, that they wouldn’t know the truth if it was served up to them on a silver platter!
Americans just love to destroy other people if they dare to be disobedient.
They can be friendly and nice if you kowtow.
I hope you meant the USAers , not Americans.
Julian Assange has been the litmus test in modern geo politics not just the labour party. Along with others who have suffered to be harbingers of truth. Manning, Snowden et.al. Those that tell the truth get locked up and silenced those that lie, deceive using fake info and news are elevated.
Those that lie and cheat using their innate sociopathic tendencies get promoted and usually end up in positions of power. As MofA writes on the blatant propaganda drive that continues to shape the fake narrative of the Skripal case. This story concerns one of those sociopaths who has returned as if from the dead,
“Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.” Yesterday’s New York Times
It goes on…
” Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option.” White Helmets meme children hospitalised + dead ducks.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/04/cia-director-used-fake-skripal-incident-photos-to-manipulate-trump.html#more
Children affected by the “Novichok”? Where did the MI-GCHQ bu…. dig/create that piece of disinformation from?
There has been no mention – over here in the land of the “free” anyway – by either state radio (BBC or NPR) throughout the “Skripal” dangerous farce of any children being in any way affected. (I have yet to read MofA.)
Honestly, it never bloody stops, does it? Orwell was on the button – and Aldous.
To the judge, jury and executioner here, remember – the hero is the villain, west is east, intervention is humanitarianism, freedom is bondage, cowardice is valour – make your choice – pin your colours to the mast – just don’t make any complaints when the time comes when you will suffer retribution – because you subscribed to it
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/
Frankly I abhor this “If you are not for us, then you are against us. If you are not one of us, then you are one of them.”
It is always used to justify and impose hate as a required ‘correctness’ or groupthink identity.
I am myself and in my own freedom of speech as I support yours – but I do not join with your ‘us and them’.
Hate works all ‘sides’ of a fear conditioned division like predators seeking food.
Whipping up hate is the sure way to bolster mainstream narratives of dangerous extremism.
Freedom from tyranny no matter where it comes from is the freedom to speak truly and not to order or in accordance with presumption to tell others what to think or how to react.
The ‘war on terror’ set up the same basis for polarising in fear.
Now as it happens the arrest of Assange is already saying to ‘journalists’; ” If you are not for us, then you are against us. If you are not one of us, then you are one of them”. Because in the climate change to fear and self-censorship or self denial for survival, anyone risking exposure as ‘one of them’ is risking their career – such as it is.
Yes, the system is corrupt, insane and criminal.
Yes, the power that works corruption from the shadows fights any threat to its maintaining a state of darkness through division and deceit.
A hung parliament would be very desirable. By the neck until dead.