A Mythical Manichean World by Heather Marsh

“I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil.” ― Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands With The Devil

In Shake Hands with the Devil, Romeo Dallaire, former head of the UN mission to Rwanda, described shaking hands with commanders of the Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 Tutsi genocide. He felt he was in the presence of evil, or, to his Christian outlook, the devil. When faced with incomprehensible savagery it is hard to find human nature behind it and natural to look for some invisible hand of evil. The same outlook is understandable to some in west African countries, where the leaders have for years been suspected of complicity in ritual killings, or torturing their own citizens and using their body parts as amulets for power. Compulsory membership of politicians in certain Masonic lodges and the undeniable power and wealth wielded by the powerful, support both the cult rumours and the presumed effectiveness of evil forces being invoked. These so-called powers are also sought by some militias.

If a person is thought to embody evil in themselves, the person is demonized in the eyes of the other. Once a large group has designated another entire group as evil, actions no longer matter. The ensuing war will have nothing to do with good actions and bad actions and everything to do with one side exterminating the other. Those facing the side designated as evil are then depicted as Good, and any behaviour of theirs will be justified thereafter as can be seen in the excuses made for Rwanda actions even today. Some groups can carry their indestructible Good status in the face of all evidence of their actions for generations and against completely different opponents, as we see with Israel and the fact that they still have defenders justifying their ‘right’ to torment and murder others.

Countries that have had an acknowledged atrocity are much more self aware and able to recognize and stop new ones. If an atrocity is outside the Overton window of what a people will believe about themselves they will deny it happened or ignore it. For Canadians, the pull of the manufactured self-image of ‘nice’ is too attractive to confront, even when faced with human rights and environmental disasters Canada is responsible for worldwide. To acknowledge that global mining atrocities are a fundamental part of Canada, that a Canadian child has now been tortured and imprisoned for the thirteenth year, that these actions cannot be blamed on one government but are part of Canada itself, is an attack on their self-image that many Canadians refuse to face. The US was previously the same with their acceptance of ‘freedom’ propaganda and their refusal to see their own police state as anything but protection.

A good guy / bad guy, personality based morality is very helpful for any who wish to wage wars or destroy the lives of others. No one has to think, just identify the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, be for the one, beware the other. We really don’t need legions of security analysts, militaries and intelligence to sort out Good Guys from Bad Guys. Bad Guys are destroying, killing, enslaving and robbing, Good Guys are creating, researching and caring for others. Bad Guys are capable of becoming Good Guys as soon as they stop the actions harmful to society and start the ones helpful to society.

The myth of free will and the myth of equality

I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter. – Ishmael Beah

In order to designate someone as evil and deserving of any horror that the powerful wish to inflict on them, they must be held personally responsible for the actions of themselves and their ‘side’. In order to hold people personally responsible even for their own actions, the public must believe they had free will, something that does not exist. The idea of personal responsibility also depends on an assumption that people have equal access to information and the ability to process it. Propaganda and coercion which comes from the top is denied and blame is cast to those at the bottom who acted upon it. The propaganda masters convince the public that the weak-minded and the vulnerable must take responsibility for acting as the zombie army of the powerful who are absolved of responsibility.

For punishment to be applied equally to all, the public must believe that all are equal, which is also false. The myth of equality is essential for sustaining this binary outlook and careful censoring of information is essential to maintaining the myth of equality. ‘Hamas is evil, bomb Gaza’ cannot stand in the face of relentless social media pictures of babies, beautiful children and wonderful people well-known to the online community being blown up by Israel. ‘Boko Haram is evil, Nigeria military should kill them all’  is shocked by images of little boys fighting and being killed on both sides or Nigeria military torturing a little girl working for Boko Haram. Hillary Clinton deplores the loss of imperial control over information and Netanyahu bitterly calls his victims “telegenically dead“. The old media control which depicted all enemies of militias as adult men with guns was essential to justify any war.

We have a tendency to think of our villains as geniuses or assume they at least have the ability to predict the outcome of their actions but for those filling prisons and dying in wars that is not always the case.

While most people recognize the ability to rehabilitate child soldiers, what of those who are not rehabilitated? If they do not bear responsibility as children, why does the responsibility for their formation descend upon them as adults? How can anyone presume to know what has happened to the mind of anyone who has lived completely different experiences than them and possesses a completely different mind?

If it is agreed that charges should only be applied to criminals who have attained a certain standard of cognitive ability, why is the same penalty applied to all at that point? If the spectrum of ability and advantage continues above the line labeled competent, should the penalties not be a corresponding spectrum? If they must attain a standard of cognitive ability, why are moral imbeciles judged by the same standards as the socially normative? Why is sociopathy not recognized as a mental illness if insanity is? What if sociopathy is a physical disease? What of those with fetal alcohol syndrome and other forms of physical brain damage that currently fill prisons and militias?

The role of drugs in convincing militias to commit atrocities and overcome guilt is seldom reported. Not only non-state militias employ drugs, the US military even has a follow up anti-guilt nasal spray to prevent troops from feeling natural remorse.

Not all opponents are worthy of hate.

Social auto-coercion

Few believe that all of their own ancestors should have been wiped out, but everyone has ancestors who displayed what we like to call inhuman characteristics. Why do we believe they are absolved from the personal responsibility we bear today if not because we accept the power of social coercion and social norms? If social coercion and social norms applied in the past, why is their power denied today? The US government acknowledged the power of seductive coercion with what they cynically called the battle for hearts and minds in Iraq. They of all people understand coercion and knew that their actions would have the opposite affect.

Any suggestion of deliberate social auto-coercion is met with howls from free will advocates, especially from the US, that bastion of personal freedoms perverted to suit corporate ends. Every intelligence agency in the world, all corporations and all militaries constantly manipulate public norms and behaviour, but an attempt for a community to regain control is depicted (by corporate media) as an attack on freedom and autonomy instead of the assertion of it.

People can somehow become convinced that if we only kill enough people, inherent goodness will shine from the survivors. In the end, we can’t kill enough people to make the world a kinder gentler place. We have proven enough times that there is no time and place immune to an outbreak of human savagery. UN peacekeeping is incompetent, political, and after the fact. We need societies resilient to violence. In the end we will need to understand each other and use social auto-coercion as we do after the horrors of every war in order to return to normal life. We need to start using it before the outbreak of any violence, not to stop Bad Guys but to stop bad actions. Instead of spending vast sums tracking individuals and their connections in the search for Bad Guys, we need to strengthen social auto-coercion and fight the coercion coming from sociopathic power.

For those who insist societies will never function without military and police hard coercion, societies worldwide did, very well. For those, usually the same people, who insist that seductive coercion is immoral, seductive coercion is what creates a society out of a group of disconnected people. For those who do not believe that coercion ought to be in the hands of the people, coercion ought never to be anywhere else. The only way to prevent coercion by a secret oligarchy is to use it as community.

“If we don’t harness their potential for good, their societies will continue to reap their capacity for evil.” ― Roméo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

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Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands With The Devill: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003)

Ishmael Beah, Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007)

Roméo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children (2010)

Inside The Assassination Complex - Edward Snowden

"I've been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths.

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn’t have to wait 40 years to witness other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now here we are in 2016, and another person of courage and conscience has made available the set of extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)

We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines; it permits the people of this country to learn about critical government actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way that allows direct action through voting — in other words, in a way that empowers an informed citizenry to defend the democracy that “state secrets” are nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who are able to bring information forward, it gives me hope that we won’t always be required to curtail the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant task, to uproot official lawbreaking as routinely as we mow the grass. (Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe remote killing operations, as “cutting the grass.”)

A single act of whistleblowing doesn’t change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue, despite reforms. But those who perform these actions now have to live with the fear that if they engage in activities contrary to the spirit of society — if even a single citizen is catalyzed to halt the machinery of that injustice — they might still be held to account. The thread by which good governance hangs is this equality before the law, for the only fear of the man who turns the gears is that he may find himself upon them.

Hope lies beyond, when we move from extraordinary acts of revelation to a collective culture of accountability within the intelligence community. Here we will have taken a meaningful step toward solving a problem that has existed for as long as our government.

Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Gen. David Petraeus.

David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

Not all leaks are alike, nor are their makers. Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, provided his illicit lover and favorable biographer information so secret it defied classification, including the names of covert operatives and the president’s private thoughts on matters of strategic concern. Petraeus was not charged with a felony, as the Justice Department had initially recommended, but was instead permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Had an enlisted soldier of modest rank pulled out a stack of highly classified notebooks and handed them to his girlfriend to secure so much as a smile, he’d be looking at many decades in prison, not a pile of character references from a Who’s Who of the Deep State.

There are authorized leaks and also permitted disclosures. It is rare for senior administration officials to explicitly ask a subordinate to leak a CIA officer’s name to retaliate against her husband, as appears to have been the case with Valerie Plame. It is equally rare for a month to go by in which some senior official does not disclose some protected information that is beneficial to the political efforts of the parties but clearly “damaging to national security” under the definitions of our law.

This dynamic can be seen quite clearly in the al Qaeda “conference call of doom” story, in which intelligence officials, likely seeking to inflate the threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, revealed to a neoconservative website extraordinarily detailed accounts of specific communications they had intercepted, including locations of the participating parties and the precise contents of the discussions. If the officials’ claims were to be believed, they irrevocably burned an extraordinary means of learning the precise plans and intentions of terrorist leadership for the sake of a short-lived political advantage in a news cycle. Not a single person seems to have been so much as disciplined as a result of the story that cost us the ability to listen to the alleged al Qaeda hotline.

President Barack Obama talks with Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, April 15, 2015.

Photo: The White House

If harmfulness and authorization make no difference, what explains the distinction between the permissible and the impermissible disclosure?

The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it’s not seen as a threat, as a challenge to the prerogatives of the institution. But if all of the disparate components of the institution — not just its head but its hands and feet, every part of its body — must be assumed to have the same power to discuss matters of concern, that is an existential threat to the modern political monopoly of information control, particularly if we’re talking about disclosures of serious wrongdoing, fraudulent activity, unlawful activities. If you can’t guarantee that you alone can exploit the flow of controlled information, then the aggregation of all the world’s unmentionables — including your own — begins to look more like a liability than an asset.

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers detailing U.S. policy in the Vietnam War, Oct. 10, 1976.

Photo: Susan Wood/Getty Images

Truly unauthorized disclosures are necessarily an act of resistance — that is, if they’re not done simply for press consumption, to fluff up the public appearance or reputation of an institution. However, that doesn’t mean they all come from the lowest working level. Sometimes the individuals who step forward happen to be near the pinnacle of power. Ellsberg was in the top tier; he was briefing the secretary of defense. You can’t get much higher, unless you are the secretary of defense, and the incentives simply aren’t there for such a high-ranking official to be involved in public interest disclosures because that person already wields the influence to change the policy directly.

At the other end of the spectrum is Manning, a junior enlisted soldier, who was much nearer to the bottom of the hierarchy. I was midway in the professional career path. I sat down at the table with the chief information officer of the CIA, and I was briefing him and his chief technology officer when they were publicly making statements like “We try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” and everybody still thought that was a cute business slogan. Meanwhile I was designing the systems they would use to do precisely that. I wasn’t briefing the policy side, the secretary of defense, but I was briefing the operations side, the National Security Agency’s director of technology. Official wrongdoing can catalyze all levels of insiders to reveal information, even at great risk to themselves, so long as they can be convinced that it is necessary to do so.

Reaching those individuals, helping them realize that their first allegiance as a public servant is to the public rather than to the government, is the challenge. That’s a significant shift in cultural thinking for a government worker today.

I’ve argued that whistleblowers are elected by circumstance. It’s not a virtue of who you are or your background. It’s a question of what you are exposed to, what you witness. At that point the question becomes Do you honestly believe that you have the capability to remediate the problem, to influence policy? I would not encourage individuals to reveal information, even about wrongdoing, if they do not believe they can be effective in doing so, because the right moment can be as rare as the will to act.

This is simply a pragmatic, strategic consideration. Whistleblowers are outliers of probability, and if they are to be effective as a political force, it’s critical that they maximize the amount of public good produced from scarce seed. When I was making my decision, I came to understand how one strategic consideration, such as waiting until the month before a domestic election, could become overwhelmed by another, such as the moral imperative to provide an opportunity to arrest a global trend that had already gone too far. I was focused on what I saw and on my sense of overwhelming disenfranchisement that the government, in which I had believed for my entire life, was engaged in such an extraordinary act of deception.

At the heart of this evolution is that whistleblowing is a radicalizing event — and by “radical” I don’t mean “extreme”; I mean it in the traditional sense of radix, the root of the issue. At some point you recognize that you can’t just move a few letters around on a page and hope for the best. You can’t simply report this problem to your supervisor, as I tried to do, because inevitably supervisors get nervous. They think about the structural risk to their career. They’re concerned about rocking the boat and “getting a reputation.” The incentives aren’t there to produce meaningful reform. Fundamentally, in an open society, change has to flow from the bottom to the top.

As someone who works in the intelligence community, you’ve given up a lot to do this work. You’ve happily committed yourself to tyrannical restrictions. You voluntarily undergo polygraphs; you tell the government everything about your life. You waive a lot of rights because you believe the fundamental goodness of your mission justifies the sacrifice of even the sacred. It’s a just cause.

And when you’re confronted with evidence — not in an edge case, not in a peculiarity, but as a core consequence of the program — that the government is subverting the Constitution and violating the ideals you so fervently believe in, you have to make a decision. When you see that the program or policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you’ve sworn to your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be reconciled with the program. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?

One of the extraordinary things about the revelations of the past several years, and their accelerating pace, is that they have occurred in the context of the United States as the “uncontested hyperpower.” We now have the largest unchallenged military machine in the history of the world, and it’s backed by a political system that is increasingly willing to authorize any use of force in response to practically any justification. In today’s context that justification is terrorism, but not necessarily because our leaders are particularly concerned about terrorism in itself or because they think it’s an existential threat to society. They recognize that even if we had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people to car accidents and heart disease, and we don’t see the same expenditure of resources to respond to those more significant threats.

What it really comes down to is the political reality that we have a political class that feels it must inoculate itself against allegations of weakness. Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism — of the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously — than they are of the crime itself.

As a result we have arrived at this unmatched capability, unrestrained by policy. We have become reliant upon what was intended to be the limitation of last resort: the courts. Judges, realizing that their decisions are suddenly charged with much greater political importance and impact than was originally intended, have gone to great lengths in the post-9/11 period to avoid reviewing the laws or the operations of the executive in the national security context and setting restrictive precedents that, even if entirely proper, would impose limits on government for decades or more. That means the most powerful institution that humanity has ever witnessed has also become the least restrained. Yet that same institution was never designed to operate in such a manner, having instead been explicitly founded on the principle of checks and balances. Our founding impulse was to say, “Though we are mighty, we are voluntarily restrained.”

President Barack Obama walks with U.S. Secret Service agents to Air Force One at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, Calif., May 8, 2014.

Photo: The White House

When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath — not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there’s this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you’re asked to participate in.
These disclosures about the Obama administration’s killing program reveal that there’s a part of the American character that is deeply concerned with the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is no greater or clearer manifestation of unchecked power than assuming for oneself the authority to execute an individual outside of a battlefield context and without the involvement of any sort of judicial process.

Traditionally, in the context of military affairs, we’ve always understood that lethal force in battle could not be subjected to ex ante judicial constraints. When armies are shooting at each other, there’s no room for a judge on that battlefield. But now the government has decided — without the public’s participation, without our knowledge and consent — that the battlefield is everywhere. Individuals who don’t represent an imminent threat in any meaningful sense of those words are redefined, through the subversion of language, to meet that definition.

Inevitably that conceptual subversion finds its way home, along with the technology that enables officials to promote comfortable illusions about surgical killing and nonintrusive surveillance. Take, for instance, the Holy Grail of drone persistence, a capability that the United States has been pursuing forever. The goal is to deploy solar-powered drones that can loiter in the air for weeks without coming down. Once you can do that, and you put any typical signals collection device on the bottom of it to monitor, unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example, the different network addresses of every laptop, smartphone, and iPod, you know not just where a particular device is in what city, but you know what apartment each device lives in, where it goes at any particular time, and by what route. Once you know the devices, you know their owners. When you start doing this over several cities, you’re tracking the movements not just of individuals but of whole populations.

By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they’re in our pockets. It sounds like fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it’s so trivial to implement that I cannot imagine a future in which it won’t be attempted. It will be limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.

Here we see the double edge of our uniquely American brand of nationalism. We are raised to be exceptionalists, to think we are the better nation with the manifest destiny to rule. The danger is that some people will actually believe this claim, and some of those will expect the manifestation of our national identity, that is, our government, to comport itself accordingly.

Unrestrained power may be many things, but it’s not American. It is in this sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and lifts the lamp, inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that begins with Paul Revere.

The individuals who make these disclosures feel so strongly about what they have seen that they’re willing to risk their lives and their freedom. They know that we, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen.

And there are more of us than there are of them.

The Revolutionaries by Heather Marsh

The last shall be the first and the first last. – Frantz Fanon

The objective of a revolutionary is to keep everything exactly as it was but replace those in power with themselves, to become what they hate, to gain the approval of those they despise. The mark of a successful revolutionary is recognition and acceptance into the circles of oppressors.

A typical revolutionary is driven by a desire for justice and no imagination. They can see injustice, they see oppressors and oppressed, and they follow the obvious impulse to reverse the two without changing the system that allows for oppression. Revolution almost always sounds like a new system because revolutionaries almost always call themselves The People, or at least The [oppressed category] People, but in practice there is no change. Revolution follows a Good Guy / Bad Guy, Manichean morality and the goal is to kill all the Bad Guys until there is nothing left but Good Guys. Fanon replaces white with black, Marx replaces master with worker, no one replaces the paradigm. Malcolm X and Robert Mugabe desired a perfect negative image of the apartheid state. Feminists celebrate ‘what women have achieved’ along their path to be exactly like caucasian men.

A revolutionary outlook is binary. They see themselves, as they are usually elite or part of the large, cohesive block of powerful commoners required to keep the ruling class in power, and they see the ruling class. Anyone else is outside their consideration and will remain so. “I know nothing about her,” [1] says Fanon of indigenous African women as he derides the work where they detail their experience and describes the revolutionary desire to be a white woman’s master. Marx sees those below the proletariat and calls them “The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.” [2] When Marx speaks of the abolition of class, he means the abolition of all class except the proletariat.

Since people are never binary, revolutionary theory almost immediately has to start addressing the classification problem, who is black, who is white, who is bourgeoise or proletariat, who is male or female, and the rush to be at the extreme end of your side creates a new class war within the class war. If the last shall be first, the almost last have a new fight to be last. “Since the sole motto of the bourgeoisie is “Replace the foreigner,” … the “small people” of the nation… will be equally quick to insist that the Dahomans go home to their own country, or will even go further and demand that the Foulbis and the Peuhls return to their jungle or their mountains”[3]

If, as Fanon said, “The black man wants to be white”[1] then the justice sought is a very personal justice, for themselves only as Malcolm X proposed in his desire for a new black state within the US which would leave indigenous and others as unseen as always. Colonized revolutionaries seek to decolonize by becoming the colonizers as women seek to end subjection to men by entering masculinist establishment. Even if they have no wish to enslave their former masters, the revolutionary oppressed wish to master someone, to sit atop the patriarchy, to claim their turn as a matter of justice. As long as the paradigm remains, it matters not at all if those on top become the former oppressed, they are just branch managers for the empire and oppression continues uninterrupted. In no way did it make the world a better place or change the paradigm for the better to have Barack Obama as Commander in Chief of the world’s largest military or Condoleeza Rice as US Secretary of State. In no way did women holding 56% of the seats in Rwanda’s parliament, or having Louise Mushikiwabo, as Rwanda’s Minister of Foreign Affairs & Cooperation, make Rwanda a kinder, gentler state. In the end, the problems were not tied to gender, race or class, but to the paradigm itself.

In the middle of a revolutionary frenzy it is unwise to point out that oppressed may become oppressors as they are the Good Guys who must never be accused of wrongdoing, but we really don’t need any more Israels or Rwandas to prove the point. ‘You can’t be racist/sexist against the oppressor!’ shrieks the illogic from the revolutionary top, and any who question it are condemned as reactionary, racist and sexist regardless of their race or sex. Those lower in the revolutionary ponzi scheme of power are permitted be part of the revolution only by exact adherence to the utterances of power. Deviance is dangerous in a binary world.

Since the new power wants to be exactly like the old power, continuing revolutions have created a world where everyone of every race and gender strove to prove they were the same as powerful caucasian men. A world where everyone sought the top of the ponzi schemes of power, celebrity and wealth, where their desperate effort towards the centre created the centripetal force that kept the Great Men in power, that upheld the ponzi scheme of empire for all these years. Everyone is defined in relation to the caucasian man of power. It is the revolutionaries as much as the reactionaries that refuse to let the old system go.

A dual spotlight and those in the shadows

The history of revolution is the history of Great Men overthrowing Great Men. The revolutionary stories of oppression tell of the oppressiveness of unsated envy and covetousness. The glory that follows these revolutions is the glory of the new Great Man. Unheard forever are those condemned to just get on with it, the so-called lumpenproles who are understandably disinterested in who is currently atop the ponzi scheme they have no entrance to. 

Fanon overlooked completely the effect of European patriarchy meeting matriarchal societies and what that did to class relations between men and women. He exhaustively examines European attraction to African indigenous men but he speaks not at all of any attraction to African indigenous women despite admitting almost all mixed race children had indigenous mothers. He attributes European fear of the African to a repressed homosexuality in the men and a desire to be raped in the women, but finds no such cause in the Antilleans fear of the Senegalese. Everything pivots around the point at which he exists. His myopic, binary gaze at the balance of power between African and European in a patriarchy disregarded the imposition of the patriarchy in the first place. Fanon described men who wished to overthrow other men and sit in their place.

Marx ignored the fact that his proletariats were part of a system of dissociation that recognized as workers only those who served the powerful, not those who served the weak or themselves. He also wanted to overthrow the oppressor without acknowledging the first oppressed or the true size of the oppressive structure itself. His ambition to flip the proletariat with their masters required that autonomous individuals be locked in an even more solid and cohesive block of commoners than before. His failure to recognize the block of commoners as a creation of oligarchy caused him and all communists after to strengthen the club which held oligarchy in place.

Engels felt women lost their social power due to their loss of property ownership[4] instead of seeing that property ownership was created to remove their social power. The masculinist lens of Engels and Morgan was used to reinterpret matriarchal indigenous cultures as communist, as societies where everyone was assigned property and a place in society as birthright instead of as social approval. This owned property and its allocation must then be controlled by a patriarchal power or mini-state. The approval of First Nations women that for generations was essential, was suddenly to be disregarded as men were taught that to be a man meant to humiliate and degrade their own source of approval. The vicious degradation of women in formerly matrilineal societies served to destroy not just the old power but the old structure. Indigenous women were now last, their approval was replaced by control of currency, and colonial government structure was taken over by property thieves both petty and grand. Autonomy for First Nations in Canada now means following a colonial construct of band councils revolving around communist allocation of funds and property in formerly (mostly) moneyless gifting cultures. Management of nations no longer includes the most important authority, acceptance or rejection of individuals from the nation.

A perpetual motion pendulum of revolution

As long as it is people, not actions, which are classified as Good and Evil, we will maintain a perpetual motion pendulum of revolution. As every revolution is a simple reaction to the initial action, they are mirror images. Slave morality is a reaction to master morality, revolutionary militias are a reaction to a police state, feminism is a reaction to masculinism, men with guns are a reaction to men with guns. The centripetal force that creates power also creates the centrifugal force that destroys it. In every case, reactions will become what they destroy.

If you define yourself in relation to your enemy, you’ve lost. You cannot believe armed militias are a solution unless you believe in the worth or inevitability of a police state. You cannot be a Feminist without endorsing the gendered world of the Masculinist. The death penalty for murder reaffirms the right to murder. Mirrored reactions are a result of a lack of imagination to see outside the paradigm we live within. A reaction adds force to the initial action. Overthrow by men with guns will be followed with rule by men with guns. Justice through institutionalized bigotry will result in institutionalized bigotry. “The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity.”[3] We will have equilibrium when we step off the pendulum.

Those that protest the revolution are told they must be reactionaries. Any criticism of the left brutality and you must support the right brutality. Self-professed US anti-imperialists are even more rigid than the imperialists because they discovered the second spotlight and think they’ve seen all that there is. Those that scream for solidarity ‘on the same side’ attempt to hide the fact that a ponzi scheme has no sides, only a top and bottom. They will cling to the messiahs of revolution and support revolutionary ponzi schemes until it becomes absolutely indisputable that the two are one again. As the revolution fights for and wins seats on the same panels and the same international bodies as the reaction, the same dark alliance is formed once more. Empire remains intact.

Revolutionary replacement of authority will co-opt resistance. Revolution looks up not down. It seeks approval and acceptance from the spotlight, not the shadows. Not only does revolution not bring change, it brings progression down the same path and frequently widens the window of acceptable oppression. All revolution has simply entrenched and strengthened the hierarchy of power, all revolutions will need to be followed by more revolutions unless they are immediately replaced with resistance.

Between reaction and revolution there is nothing to choose. Neither leave the track, they just allow different people to drive while the same people are run over.

Revolution fights tyrants, resistance fights tyranny

It is not revolution we need, another turn of the same wheel along the same path, it is resistance. Resistance uses the tyrant’s own power against them rather than strengthening that power by reaction. Resistance fights all forms of oppression and bigotry regardless of source by building and defending a tolerant society. Resistance to patriarchy is not feminism, it is removal of masculinism. Resistance to bigotry is not bigotry, it is diversity and tolerance. Resistance to capitalism is not unions, it is dismantling of the trade economy. It is not enough to weed, a new system must be planted or the old seeds of tyranny will instantly grow again.

Oppressive power of the size in place today will not be removed by the creation of revolutionary power. Even if one chooses to think a new leader would stop the oppression it is no longer in the power of a leader or leaders. Mass disobedience and a refusal to acknowledge the authority of the powerful are the only hope to collapse the current empire.

Anyone who occupies the old places of power in a hierarchical ponzi scheme is an enemy of those below, even if they just fought alongside them and ‘earned’ their place. It is the position that is the enemy and it must be constantly collapsed by a removal of support from every ponzi scheme of celebrity, wealth and power. It is not enough to remove oppressors, the system of oppression must be dismantled. 

– – –

[1] Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952

[2] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Das Kommunistische Manifest), 1848

[3] Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre), Grove Press, 1961

[4] Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: in the light of the researches of Lewis H. Morgan (Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats) 1884

How Rejecting Neoliberalism Rescued Bolivia's Economy - Federico Fuentes

The small Andean nation of Bolivia has received praise from many quarters due to the economic transformation it has undergone over the past decade.

Curiosity regarding this conversion from “economic basket case” to the fastest growing economy in the region has been heightened by the fact it occurred under left-wing president Evo Morales. Understanding how the Morales’ government achieved this transformation is of great interest for those seeking an alternative to crisis-ridden neoliberalism.

Before Morales’ election in December 2005, Bolivians suffered through 20 years of neoliberalism. Successive right-wing governments privatised state-owned companies and handed over control of important chunks of the state to international financial institutions.

As public revenue shrank, the country entered a vicious cycle of deficits and debt. Each new budget required further international loans that were always accompanied by greater restrictive conditions. International loans and aid ended up covering about half of Bolivia’s public investment.

However, since electing their first indigenous president in a nation with a majority of previously excluded indigenous peoples, Bolivians have experienced economic growth rates higher than any period during the past three and a half decades.

At the same time, inequality has been greatly lessened and public debt brought under control. These successes are the result of the government’s overall strategy of focusing on recovering sovereignty over the economy and state.

Nationalisations

When Morales was sworn into office in January 2006, he said: “After hearing the reports from the transition commissions, I have seen how the state does not control the state and its institutions. There is a total dependency.”

He described Bolivia as “a transnationalised country” and noted that, under the pretext of “capitalisation” — a euphemism for privatisation — “the country has been decapitalised”.

Morales said, therefore, Bolivia needed “to nationalise our natural resources and put in process a new economic model”.

This new model, known as the “New Economic, Social, Communitarian and Productive Model”, has sought to roll back neoliberalism by:

• Reasserting state sovereignty over the economy, particularly Bolivia’s natural resources;

• Breaking out of Bolivia’s traditional position as an exporter of primary materials by industrialising these resources;

• Promoting productive sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture;

• Redistributing the nation’s wealth to tackle poverty; and

• Strengthening the organisational capacity of working class and campesino (peasant) forces as the two essential pillars of the transition to socialism in Bolivia.

According to the minster of the economy Luis Arce Catacora, this economic model rests on two pillars: strategic sectors, such as hydrocarbons and mining, which generate rent; and productive sectors, such as manufacturing, tourism, housing and agriculture, which generate profits and jobs.

To break the economy’s dependency on raw material exports, the government has begun using rent generated in the strategic sector to industrialise natural resources and promote productive sectors, with an emphasis on collective, cooperative, and family-based enterprises.

A key plank of the new economic model was the May 2006 nationalisation of the hydrocarbon sector. Before nationalisation, transnational capital claimed 82% of the wealth generated by gas royalties. Under the new system, the state keeps about 80% of gas rent.

This means the total amount of gas revenue received by the Bolivian government during Morales’s first six years was about seven times greater than that obtained during the previous five years.

Revenue collection is set to rise further as Bolivia starts to export value-added processed gas as a result of its industrialisation program.

The Morales government has also carried out nationalisations in other strategic sectors such as mining, telecommunications and electricity. Taken as a whole, these nationalisations have enabled the state to become the largest player in the economy.

Unlike transnational capital, whose sole motivation is profits, the state has directed its economic activities towards ensuring Bolivians have greater access to basic services.

Within the first five years of the Morales government, the number of households with gas connections had risen by 835%. The percentage of rural households with access to electricity jumped from 20% to 50% and the number of municipalities with telecommunications coverage has gone from 110 to 324 out of 339.

Bolivians have also benefited increased spending on health and education, the introduction of social security benefits, wage rises and price controls on staple foods.

These pro-poor policies have helped push a surge in internal demand. This has been the real driving force in Bolivia’s spectacular economic growth. External demand — hit by the global economic crisis — had a negative impact on growth. But internal demand rose at an average 5.2% a year between 2006 and 2012.

State redistribution of funds has also helped fuel a dramatic rise in the number of registered enterprises – from less than 20,000 in 2005 to more 96,000 by mid-2013. This in turn has created jobs, leading to a big fall in unemployment.

To help foster the “communitarian” (collectively run) sector, the government has experimented with small state-owned enterprises in food processing, gold and cardboard production. The plan is to hand these companies over to local communities to run.

Furthermore, more than 20 million hectares of land have been handed over to campesino communities as communitarian property or placed under the direct control of the land’s indigenous owners. Small agricultural producers now have preferential access to equipment, supplies, no-interest loans and state-subsidised markets.

Refounding the state 

These economic advances have been accompanied by changes in the political arena aiming to empower Bolivia’s indigenous and popular classes.

The Morales government continues to function within the framework of deeply entrenched capitalist culture and social relations. But it has been able to use the increased revenue from gas nationalisation to break its dependency on international funding and begin “nationalising” the state.

As taxes and royalties collected by the state went from 28% of GDP in 2004 to 45% in 2010, public debt dropped from 90% of GDP in 2003 to 31.5% in 2012.

This strong economic position has allowed the government to dictate its own domestic and foreign policy, free from impositions set by international financial institutions.

Today, it is not US or International Monetary Fund officials who develop government policies; instead, Bolivia’s social movements play this role. To facilitate this process, the government initiated the National Coalition for Change (CONALCAM) in 2007.

CONALCAM brings together Bolivia’s main indigenous and popular organisations with state representatives to coordinate and debate strategies.

When debates between the government and its social base have spilled out onto the street, the government sought dialogue and consensus. It has retreated where necessary, but always tried to continue to drive the process forward.

The most important step taken by the Morales government in the political sphere was convening an elected Constituent Assembly. Established to rewrite Bolivia’s constitution, the assembly’s goal was to create a new “plurinational” state that finally recognised the previously excluded indigenous “nations” and provided them with a legal framework to help advance their demands.

Bolivia’s traditional capitalist elites tried to block the changes pushed by the Constituent Assembly. Their opposition to the threat to their interests from a new constitution triggered their unsuccessful September 2008 coup attempt.

The profound nature of the class mobilisations during this period, combined with the Morales government’s ability to expand and unite its support base among the indigenous working classes, the military and internationally, was the key factor in its ability to crush the right-wing revolt.

Notwithstanding some important weaknesses, the final version of the constitution approved at the end of 2008 is generally viewed as a significant achievement of the social movements. It satisfies three key social movement demands: plurinationalism, indigenous autonomy and popular control over natural resources.

The new constitution has facilitated the process of “decolonising” the state. For example, it paved the way for Bolivia’s first popular elections to elect judicial authorities.

After the October 2010 elections, a record number of women (50%) and indigenous people (40%) flooded into a judiciary, whose membership was previously restricted to those with connections to the traditional ruling parties of the old elite.

‘Govern by obeying’

The Morales government has showed that an alternative to neoliberalism is possible. At the heart of this alternative has been the recovery of popular control over the state and economy. The results are plain to see.
None of this has been easy: the government has had to face down a right-wing revolt that threatened to become a military coup. It also had to deal with an inherited capitalist state apparatus that is largely ill-equipped to implement progressive reforms.

Finally, it has faced protests from among its own supporters who have mobilised to raise their particular sectoral demands.

Despite this, 10 years on, the Morales government maintains the support of most Bolivians. This has been possible because the majority agree with their government’s strategy and because Morales has remained true to his word of “governing by obeying” the people.

Those seeking lessons from Bolivia’s example should also learn from this approach to governing.

Assange: The Untold Story Of An Epic Struggle For Justice - John Pilger

This is an updated version of John Pilger’s 2014 investigation which tells the unreported story of an unrelenting campaign, in Sweden and the US, to deny Julian Assange justice and silence WikiLeaks: a campaign now reaching a dangerous stage.

The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice and a gruelling farce.  For three years, a police cordon around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost £12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His “crime” is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.

The persecution of Julian Assange is about to flare again as it enters a dangerous stage. From August 20, three quarters of the Swedish prosecutor’s case against Assange regarding sexual misconduct in 2010 will disappear as the statute of limitations expires. At the same time Washington’s obsession with Assange and WikiLeaks has intensified. Indeed, it is vindictive American power that offers the greatest threat – as Chelsea Manning and those still held in Guantanamo can attest.

The Americans are pursuing Assange because WikiLeaks exposed their epic crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale killing of tens of thousands of civilians, which they covered up, and their contempt for sovereignty and international law, as demonstrated vividly in their leaked diplomatic cables. WikiLeaks continues to expose criminal activity by the US, having just published top secret US intercepts – US spies’ reports detailing private phone calls of the presidents of France and Germany, and other senior officials, relating to internal European political and economic affairs.

None of this is illegal under the US Constiution. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama, a professor of constitutional law, lauded whistleblowers as “part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal”. In 2012, the campaign to re-elect President Barack Obama boasted on its website that he had prosecuted more whistleblowers in his first term than all other US presidents combined. Before Chelsea Manning had even received a trial, Obama had pronounced the whisletblower guilty. He was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in prison, having been tortured during his long pre-trial detention.

Few doubt that should the US get their hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him. Threats of the capture and assassination of Assange became the currency of the political extremes in the US following Vice-President Joe Biden’s preposterous slur that the WikiLeaks founder was a “cyber-terrorist”. Those doubting the degree of ruthlessness Assange can expect should remember the forcing down of the Bolivian president’s plane in 2013 – wrongly believed to be carrying Edward Snowden.

According to documents released by Snowden, Assange is on a “Manhunt target list”. Washington’s bid to get him, say Australian diplomatic cables, is “unprecedented in scale and nature”. In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has spent five years attempting to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy. The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers.

Faced with this constitutional hurdle, the US Justice Department has contrived charges of “espionage”, “conspiracy to commit espionage”, “conversion” (theft of government property), “computer fraud and abuse” (computer hacking) and general “conspiracy”. The Espionage Act has life in prison and death penalty provisions.

Assange’s ability to defend himself in this Kafkaesque world has been handicapped by the US declaring his case a state secret. In March, a federal court in Washington blocked the release of all information about the “national security” investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was “active and ongoing” and would harm the “pending prosecution” of Assange. The judge, Barbara J. Rosthstein, said it was necessary to show “appropriate deference to the executive in matters of national security”. This is the “justice” of a kangaroo court.

The supporting act in this grim farce is Sweden, played by the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny. Until recently, Ny refused to comply with a routine European procedure routine that required her to travel to London to question Assange and so advance the case. For four and a half years, Ny has never properly explained why she has refused to come to London, just as the Swedish authorities have never explained why they refuse to give Assange a guarantee that they will not extradite him on to the US under a secret arrangement agreed between Stockholm and Washington. In December 2010, The Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed his onward extradition to the US.

Contrary to its 1960s reputation as a liberal bastion, Sweden has drawn so close to Washington that it has allowed secret CIA “renditions” – including the illegal deportation of refugees. The rendition and subsequent torture of two Egyptian political refugees in 2001 was condemned by the UN Committee against Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; the complicity and duplicity of the Swedish state are documented in successful civil litigation and in WikiLeaks cables. In the summer of 2010, Assange had flown to Sweden to talk about WikiLeaks revelations of the war in Afghanistan – in which Sweden had forces under US command.

“Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England,” wrote Al Burke, editor of the online Nordic News Network, an authority on the multiple twists and dangers facing Assange, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is every reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”

Why hasn’t the Swedish prosecutor resolved the Assange case?  Many in the legal community in Sweden believe her behaviour inexplicable. Once implacably hostile to Assange, the Swedish press has published headlines such as: “Go to London, for God’s sake.”

Why hasn’t she? More to the point, why won’t she allow the Swedish court access to hundreds of SMS messages that the police extracted from the phone of one of the two women involved in the misconduct allegations? Why won’t she hand them over to Assange’s Swedish lawyers? She says she is not legally required to do so until a formal charge is laid and she has questioned him. Then, why doesn’t she question him? And if she did question him, the conditions she would demand of him and his lawyers – that they could not challenge her – would make injustice a near certainty.

On a point of law, the Swedish Supreme Court has decided Ny can continue to obstruct on the vital issue of the SMS messages. This now go to the European Court of Human Rights. What Ny fears is that the SMS messages destroy her case against Assange. One of the messages makes clear that she did not want any charges brought against Assange, “but the police were keen on getting a hold on him”. She was “shocked” when they arrested him because she only “wanted him to take [an HIV] test”. She “did not want to accuse JA of anything” and “it was the police who made up the charges”. (In a witness statement, she is quoted as saying that she had been “railroaded by police and others around her”.)

Neither woman claimed she had been raped. Indeed, both have denied they were raped and one of them has since tweeted, “I have not been raped.” That they were manipulated by police and their wishes ignored is evident – whatever their lawyers might say now. Certainly, they are victims of a saga which blights the reputation of Sweden itself.

For Assange, his only trial has been trial by media. On August 20, 2010, the Swedish police opened a “rape investigation” and immediately – and unlawfully – told the Stockholm tabloids that there was a warrant for Assange’s arrest for the “rape of two women”. This was the news that went round the world.

In Washington, a smiling US Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that the arrest “sounds like good news to me”. Twitter accounts associated with the Pentagon described Assange as a “rapist” and a “fugitive”.

Less than 24 hours later, the Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finne, took over the investigation. She wasted no time in cancelling the arrest warrant, saying, “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” Four days later, she dismissed the rape investigation altogether, saying, “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.”  The file was closed.

Enter Claes Borgstrom, a high profile politician in the Social Democratic Party then standing as a candidate in Sweden’s imminent general election. Within days of the chief prosecutor’s dismissal of the case, Borgstrom, a lawyer, announced to the media that he was representing the two women and had sought a different prosecutor in the city of Gothenberg. This was Marianne Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well, personally and politically.

On 30 August, Assange attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered all the questions put to him. He understood that was the end of the matter. Two days later, Ny announced she was re-opening the case. Borgstrom was asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it had already been dismissed, citing one of the women as saying she had not been raped. He replied, “Ah, but she is not a lawyer.” Assange’s Australian barrister, James Catlin, responded, “This is a laughing stock… it’s as if they make it up as they go along.”

On the day Marianne Ny reactivated the case, the head of Sweden’s military intelligence service – which has the acronym MUST — publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article entitled “WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers.” Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAPO, had been told by its US counterparts that US-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be “cut off” if Sweden sheltered him.

For five weeks, Assange waited in Sweden for the new investigation to take its course. The Guardian was then on the brink of publishing the Iraq “War Logs”, based on WikiLeaks’ disclosures, which Assange was to oversee. His lawyer in Stockholm asked Ny if she had any objection to his leaving the country. She said he was free to leave.

Inexplicably, as soon as he left Sweden – at the height of media and public interest in the WikiLeaks disclosures – Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol “red alert” normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals. Put out in five languages around the world, it ensured a media frenzy.

Assange attended a police station in London, was arrested and spent ten days in Wandsworth Prison, in solitary confinement. Released on £340,000 bail, he was electronically tagged, required to report to police daily and placed under virtual house arrest while his case began its long journey to the Supreme Court. He still had not been charged with any offence. His lawyers repeated his offer to be questioned by Ny in London, pointing out that she had given him permission to leave Sweden. They suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard commonly used for that purpose. She refused.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote: “The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction… The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?”

This question remained unanswered as Ny deployed the European Arrest Warrant, a draconian product of the “war on terror” supposedly designed to catch terrorists and organised criminals. The EAW had abolished the obligation on a petitioning state to provide any evidence of a crime. More than a thousand EAWs are issued each month; only a few have anything to do with potential “terror” charges. Most are issued for trivial offences, such as overdue bank charges and fines. Many of those extradited face months in prison without charge. There have been a number of shocking miscarriages of justice, of which British judges have been highly critical.

The Assange case finally reached the UK Supreme Court in May 2012. In a judgement that upheld the EAW – whose rigid demands had left the courts almost no room for manoeuvre – the judges found that European prosecutors could issue extradition warrants in the UK without any judicial oversight, even though Parliament intended otherwise. They made clear that Parliament had been “misled” by the Blair government. The court was split, 5-2, and consequently found against Assange.

However, the Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, made one mistake. He applied the Vienna Convention on treaty interpretation, allowing for state practice to override the letter of the law. As Assange’s barrister, Dinah Rose QC, pointed out, this did not apply to the EAW.

The Supreme Court only recognised this crucial error when it dealt with another appeal against the EAW in November 2013. The Assange decision had been wrong, but it was too late to go back. With extradition imminent, the Swedish prosecutor told Assange’s lawyers that Assange, once in Sweden, would be immediately placed in one of Sweden’s infamous remand prisons..

Assange’s choice was stark: extradition to a country that had refused to say whether or not it would send him on to the US, or to seek what seemed his last opportunity for refuge and safety. Supported by most of Latin America, the courageous government of Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis of documented evidence and legal advice that he faced the prospect of cruel and unusual punishment in the US; that this threat violated his basic human rights; and that his own government in Australia had abandoned him and colluded with Washington. The Labor government of prime minister Julia Gillard had even threatened to take away his passport.

Gareth Peirce, the renowned human rights lawyer who represents Assange in London, wrote to the then Australian foreign minister, Kevin Rudd: “Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions… it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.”

It was not until she contacted the Australian High Commission in London that Peirce received a response, which answered none of the pressing points she raised. In a meeting I attended with her, the Australian Consul-General, Ken Pascoe, made the astonishing claim that he knew “only what I read in the newspapers” about the details of the case.

Meanwhile, the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice was drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks were aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the US threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, to freedom of speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious.

Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive. The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”. It became part of his marketing plan to raise the newspaper’s cover price.

With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”.

The injustice meted out to Assange is one of the reasons Parliament reformed the Extradition Act to prevent the misuse of the EAW. The draconian catch-all used against him could not happen now; charges would have to be brought and “questioning” would be insufficient grounds for extradition. “His case has been won lock, stock and barrel,” Gareth Peirce told me, “these changes in the law mean that the UK now recognises as correct everything that was argued in his case. Yet he does not benefit.” In other words, the change in the UK law in 2014 mean that Assange would have won his case and he would not have been forced to take refuge.

Ecuador’s decision to protect Assange in 2012 bloomed into a major international affair. Even though the granting of asylum is a humanitarian act, and the power to do so is enjoyed by all states under international law, both Sweden and the United Kingdom refused to recognize the legitimacy of Ecuador’s decision. Ignoring international law, the Cameron government refused to grant Assange safe passage to Ecuador. Instead, Ecuador’s embassy was placed under siege and its government abused with a series of ultimatums. When William Hague’s Foreign Office threatened to violate the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, warning that it would remove the diplomatic inviolability of the embassy and send the police in to get Assange, outrage across the world forced the government to back down. During one night, police appeared at the windows of the embassy in an obvious attempt to intimidate.

Since then, Julian Assange has been confined to a small room under Ecuador’s protection, without sunlight or space to exercise, surrounded by police under orders to arrest him on sight. For three years, Ecuador has made clear to the Swedish prosecutor that Assange is available to be questioned in the London embassy, and for three years she has remained intransigent. In the same period Sweden has questioned forty-four people in the UK in connection with police investigations. Her role, and that of the Swedish state, is demonstrably political; and for Ny, facing retirement in two years, she must “win”.

In despair, Assange has challenged the arrest warrant in the Swedish courts. His lawyers have cited rulings by the European Court of Human Rights that he has been under arbitrary, indefinite detention and that he had been a virtual prisoner for longer than any actual prison sentence he might face. The Court of Appeal judge agreed with Assange’s lawyers: the prosecutor had indeed breached her duty by keeping the case suspended for years. Another judge issued a rebuke to the prosecutor. And yet she defied the court.

Last December, Assange took his case to the Swedish Supreme Court, which ordered Marianne Ny’s boss – the Prosecutor General of Sweden Anders Perklev – to explain. The next day, Ny announced, without explanation, that she had changed her mind and would now question Assange in London.

In his submission to the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor General made some important concessions: he argued that the coercion of Assange had been “intrusive” and that that the period in the embassy has been a “great strain” on him. He even conceded that if the matter had ever come to prosecution, trial, conviction and serving a sentence in Sweden, Julian Assange would have left Sweden long ago.

In a split decision, one Supreme Court judge argued that the arrest warrant should have been revoked. The majority of the judges ruled that, since the prosecutor had now said she would go to London, Assange’s arguments had become “moot”. But the Court ruled that it would have found against the prosecutor if she had not suddenly changed her mind. Justice by caprice. Writing in the Swedish press, a former Swedish prosecutor, Rolf Hillegren, accused Ny of losing all impartiality. He described her personal investment in the case as“abnormal” and that she should be replaced.

Having said she would go to London in June, Ny didn’t go, but sent a deputy, knowing that the questioning would not be legal under these circumstances, especially as she had not bothered to get Ecuador’s approval for the meeting. At the same time, her office tipped off the Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen, which sent its London correspondent to wait outside Ecuador’s embassy for “news”. The news was that Ny was cancelling the appointment and blaming Ecuador for the confusion and by implication Assange.

As the statute of limitations date approaches – August 20 – another chapter in this hideous story will doubtless unfold, with Marianne Ny pulling yet another rabbit out of her hat and the commissars and prosecutors in Washington the beneficiaries. Perhaps none of this is surprising.  In 2008, a war on WikiLeaks and on Julian Assange was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch”. It described a detailed plan to destroy the feeling of “trust” which is WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”. This would be achieved with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. Silencing and criminalising such a rare source of truth-telling was the aim, smear the method. While this farce and judicial scandal continue the reputation of Sweden is diminished and the shadow of America’s menace touches us all.