Capitalism.

 

 

           Explaining the flaws in capitalism to a believer that accepts that it's the only game in town, can be difficult. They arrive at their decision from the propaganda machine, mainstream media, government policies, the menagerie of parliament, corporate advertising and I suppose we can add Hollywood.  That's why I like reading  Caitlin Johnstone she seems to have this ability to spite out the truth and make it readable and obvious. I love her quote, "Why does China keep aggressively surrounding itself with US military bases"

 

 

Image courtesy of Counter Punch

 

The following is a short extract from a longer article by Caitlin  

            The claim that capitalism is the best system for generating profits is basically correct; it’s hard to beat greed and starvation as a carrot and stick to get the gears of industry whirring. The issue here is that merely generating profits won’t solve most of the world’s problems, and in fact many of our problems come from the fact that capitalism is too effective at turning the gears of industry. Our biosphere is dying largely because capitalism values making lots of things but not un-making things; we’re choking our ecosystem to death because it’s profitable.
           Capitalism has no real answers for problems like ecocide, inequality, exploitation and caring for the needful. Yes “let the markets decide” will generate lots of profits for those set up to harvest them, but profit-seeking cannot address those very serious problems. The “invisible hand of the market” gets treated as an actual deity that actually exists, with all the wisdom necessary to solve the world’s problems, but in reality the pursuit of money lacks any wisdom. It can’t solve our major problems, it can only make more stuff and generate more profit.
              Find me a capitalist business plan for leaving a forest untouched. Find me a capitalist business plan for keeping someone free of illness, for ensuring that someone with nothing gets what they need, for giving resources to a struggling parent. You can’t. Capitalism can’t do this. These are the most important things in the world, and no possible iteration of capitalism has any solutions for any of them whatsoever, apart from “Well hopefully rich people will feel very charitable and fix those problems.” And how is that solution working out? It’s a joke.
            The “Maybe the very rich will feel charitable and fix our problems for us” solution assumes that the very same people who are wired to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top of the ladder will suddenly start caring deeply about everyone they stepped on to get there. Capitalism elevates sociopaths, because profit-seeking competition-based systems reward those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. That’s why we are ruled by sociopaths, and it’s why looking to “philanthropy” as a solution to our problems is a ridiculous joke.
          When capitalism proponents tell socialists and communists “You don’t understand economics,” what they really mean is “You don’t understand that capitalism is the best system for generating profits.” But socialists and communists do understand this; it’s just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient.
            If lack of wealth is your major problem, then capitalism can be a tool to address it; that’s what China is temporarily doing to keep up economically with the western forces who wish to enslave it. But such measures won’t solve ecocide, inequality, exploitation, and caring for the needful. For that other measures are needed.
         If you want to make more of something (money, material goods), then capitalism can be a good way to do that. But if you need to make less of something (pollution, inequality, exploitation, sickness, homelessness, etc) it’s worthless, and other systems must be looked to.

 READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info 

Be The Revolution.

       This extract is what I consider to be excellent advice from one of my favourite journalists, Caitlin Johnstone.

        One of the most frustrating things is seeing where we need to move and not being able to get the collective to come with you. You’re like, “It’s there! Let’s move!”, and they just want to bicker and ego spar. Just blast off into health yourself, and trust that the others will follow if and when they are able.
        Be your own revolution. You have all the media access you need to help wake the world up with the power of your own inspired action. Reject cliques, factions and sectarianism, and have the courage to stand on your own two feet attacking the machine with your own unique abilities.
        This doesn’t mean you can’t organize and work collectively; you absolutely can. If you see people doing something you want to uplift, uplift it. But when you’re done, don’t stay and become a member of the club. Move on and retain your self-sovereignty. If you’re doing something that people want to help uplift and amplify, let them do so. When they don’t want to anymore, let them go. Don’t try to manipulate them into staying.
       You are free to collaborate with anyone on any issue at any time. You don’t actually need to be a member of the Blah Blah Whateverist Club to do this. And when nothing is happening that you want to collaborate with others on, you can attack the machine on your own, using your own unique set of tools based on your own inspiration. You are not owned or bound.
      All these debates we’re seeing lately over who should be let into and kept out of the Revolution Club, how the Revolution Club should act, who should lead the Revolution Club etc are based on the assumption that there has to be a Revolution Club in the first place, and there just doesn’t. Organize and collaborate on a case-by-case, issue-by-issue basis while remaining sovereign.
       Have the compassion to prioritize the needs of the collective and the courage to stand as an individual. Trying to impose your will on exactly how the collective revolution should and should not be moving is a doomed endeavor, because you cannot control the collective, you can only control yourself. So be your own revolution and attack the machine wherever you detect a weak point in its armor.
      I’ve avoided all cliques and factions like the plague, and I’ve been far more effective in this fight than I would have been if I’d chosen to glom onto some faction and uphold all its -ists and -isms. It would have killed my ability to move with agility in whatever way is demanded by each present moment, because I would have been binding myself to the movements of a group that isn’t seeing what I’m seeing and can’t move the way I move.
        This is just what’s worked for me, and of course your mileage may vary. But if you’re like me and you don’t see the various groups, organizations and factions getting us to where we need to go, consider stepping out of the vehicle, standing on your own two feet, and waging your own revolution.

Read the full articlle HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Crime And Punishment.

     It may seem an odd question, "Should criminals be allowed to punish those who expose their crimes?", but in this crazy corporate/state world we live in, that is the question that is being debated. Another excellent article from Caitlin Johnstone, certainly well worth the time spent reading it in full.

      We’re Asking One Question In Assange’s Case: Should Journalists Be Punished For Exposing War Crimes?

By Caitlin Johnstone 

       This is a speech I gave yesterday at a demonstration for Assange with the Socialist Equality Party Australia.

      Tomorrow in the UK a judge will start the process of answering a very important question. It’s a question that many of us knew was the heart of this debate back in 2010, ten years ago, when this all started. It’s a question that they have been obfuscating, bloviating, huffily denying, smearing, gaslighting, and distracting from–basically doing anything they can to hide it from view. It’s a question that they don’t want the public to know that we are answering. A question that goes to the heart of democracy, and to the heart of the role of the fourth estate, journalism. And that question is this:
      Should journalists and publishers be punished for exposing US war crimes? And, ancillary to that question: should we allow them to be punished by the very people who committed those war crimes? Is that something that we want for our world, ongoing? Because our answer to this question is going to shape our society, our civilization, for generations to come. There is no coming back from this for a very long time should the answer be, “Yes! Yes, it’s fine, war criminals should go ahead and punish journalists for publishing true facts about their war crimes.”
      If we allow the answer to be yes, then we’re stuck with the endless stupid wars that everyone wants done with, from Melbourne to Kabul, from Sydney to Syria–right across the world people are done with these stupid wars for profit. Even the people like us who are very insulated from the effects of war want them over with, let alone the children of Pakistan who fear a sunny day because drones only fly in a blue sky, or the children of Syria whose country is being terrorized by “moderate rebels” armed and funded by the US war machine, or the starving children of Yemen who are being bombed constantly by munitions made in the good ol’ U S of A.
      No one wants war except those who make big bucks from it. It’s the most evil thing that humans are capable of. It is murder. It is theft. It is rape. It targets and traumatizes and displaces our planet’s most vulnerable populations. It destroys the environment. It leaves behind cancer-causing waste. It’s like as if the worst serial killer is going on the worst killing spree while dumping planet-killing chemicals behind him, but instead of running from the cops, he’s been given a trillion-dollar budget and immunity from prosecution. This is already happening. This is the world we have currently. The question that is being posed in Assange’s case is, should we be allowed to question this? Should we be allowed to expose it? Should we be allowed to stop it?
       Julian Assange’s case is a nexus point of where to next.
      I was thinking on the way over here what I would most like to say to Julian if I had the chance. If I could tell him anything right now it would be, “Rest now, mate. You’ve done all you can. We’ve got you. Let us take it from here.” Assange acted as a kind of lightning rod for all this bullshit for all those years, and through what they did to him, we saw their true face. We saw their true evil. We know what they are now, and we know how they do it, we’ve seen enough to know how they operate. And in the end it’s never about one man, it’s always about the movement. It’s our job now to stand up now and say as one “We do not consent”, and carry him out of there ourselves if we have to. This is where we’re at. We need to decide, do we evolve, or devolve? Do we pivot towards utopia, or dystopia?
      The persecution of Assange is so blatantly, obviously wrong that the only thing stopping people from seeing it is empire propaganda. You don’t have to be well-read. You don’t even have to be smart. You just have to have to have eyes that are unfiltered by narrative manipulation. Anyone with common sense and a beating heart in their chest can see this is wrong. Should journalists be tortured and imprisoned for life when they expose war crimes? The answer is not complicated. It’s obvious to anyone who hasn’t been propagandized out of their own clarity.
      Assange’s plight only looks complicated when you add on layers of narrative and verbiage. “Ah but Sweden stinky, stink man, hacker not a journalist! Mueller sexist Trump poop on the walls, Nazi Putin!” Without all the spin it’s very obvious he’s being torturously, unjustly persecuted. It really is an “emperor has no clothes” thing. The court propagandists fill our ears with fancy words about what a bad man Assange is, and why he must be dealt with, they’re trying to tell you that the emperor’s clothes are invisible to those aren’t educated. But the unpropagandized just yell “Hey! Why is the emperor ass-dick naked? Dude, I can see him! I can see his willy! ”
     This is why there are no counter protests here today. There are no regular, every day citizens taking to the streets with signs saying “Jail all the journalists! Endless war for all!” Some people still have strong feelings about Assange, but they’re just feelings, and you’ll find that it’s usually about only one or two of the smears, and if they turn and try to find evidence for the particular smears that have snagged them, they find nothing. That’s why Nils Melzer, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture, is such a courageous figure to me. When people first approached him to look in to Assange’s case, he was reluctant because he too had been affected by the smears. When he turned to the evidence though, he found no substance there.
       Because of his honorability, though, he felt through the embarrassment of being duped, and being wrong, he swallowed his pride and he changed course. And he very quickly became one of our most powerful allies in the fight to expose war crimes, expose propaganda, expose the modern-day mobbing and torture tactics used against Assange, and expose the precedent that Assange’s prosecution will set for journalists and publishers world wide. And you know what? I think the power behind his testimony comes from the fact that he realized that he had been duped, and if he, a very intelligent, well read, worldly, informed and educated person could be duped, then anyone can be.
      No one is immune. Human minds are hackable. We’re all very busy with our lives. We’re all kept busy by capitalism, and very few of us have the time to do what he did and sit down and take a look at the facts and assess them. And even if they did that, even fewer of them have had the courage of their convictions to put up with the social consequences of changing course. Being manipulated isn’t immoral, being a manipulator is. People feel ashamed when they’ve been conned, but it’s not their fault; it’s always the fault of the con man. That’s why fraud is the crime, and being defrauded is being a victim of that crime.
       In order for people to see this question that we’re asking ourselves–the question of whether journalists should be punished for exposing war crimes–clearly they have to admit that they have been victims of propaganda. It’s not their fault, but they will be embarrassed to admit it. This shame underpins a lot of reluctance to join us here today, so I think it’s important to outline. So when you’re talking to your friends and family, keep in mind that they’re hurting. They’re afraid of feeling the shame of having been duped, because in our crazy, ass-backwards culture, being duped is considered shameful while duping people just makes you a productive member of society.
     Be gentle with them. Reassure them that it’s not going to be the end of the world if they change their mind. In fact, it may be the end of the world if they don’t. That’s why I find Nils Melzer’s testimony to be so powerful: because it exposes the abusive nature of propaganda, and he modeled how to act when we find ourselves on the wrong side of the debate. His very existence gives me hope because it means that there are others like him waking up all over the world. Actually, I’ve seen it already myself. There’s a huge movement in Germany gaining traction supporting Assange. It was the prisoners of Belmarsh who organized three separate petitions and got Julian out of solitary (how’s that for grassroots activism?). Just on Friday Alan Jones posted a poll on Facebook that posed the question “should the Australian government do more to help Julian Assange and bring him home?”. Thousands of people answered and there was a 75 percent “Yes! Yes we should bring him home.” Underneath the poll there were hundreds of comments in support of Assange.
      So the tide is changing. Is it enough? I reckon it might be. But we have to keep pushing on it like our lives depend on it, because they do.

Viva Assange!      Thank you.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Free And Fair Elections, Aren't We Lucky!!

          Meddling in elections is seen as something other nations do to us in the "free democratic" West, but our system guarantees "free and fair" elections!! Aren't we lucky? According the the powers that be in this country we have just   completed another "free and fair" election, well done Britain.
     Does anybody actually believe that the smear campaign launched against Jeremy Corbyn was based on unbiased honest reporting of facts?
       Of course anyone with an open mind and a knowledge of past elections should know that anybody who stands up and talks about changing the system radically to make it much fairer, and mentions "socialist ideas", will be viciously attacked by the system, they will have their character assassinated and their chances of winning the election completely demolished. That's how the rich and powerful protect their wealth and power, and it is not likely to change for the next election.

     Caitlin Johnstone explains it nicely in her article:

Someone Interfered In The UK Election, And It Wasn’t Russia.

       Ladies and gentlemen I have here at my fingertips indisputable proof that egregious election meddling took place in the United Kingdom on Thursday.
      Before you get all excited, no, it wasn’t the Russians. It wasn’t the Chinese, the Iranians, Cobra Command or the Legion of Doom. I’m not going to get any Rachel Maddow-sized paychecks for revealing this evidence to you, nor am I going to draw in millions of credulous viewers waiting with bated breath for a bombshell revelation of an international conspiracy that will invalidate the results of the election.
In fact, hardly anyone will even care.
       Hardly anyone will care because this election interference has been happening right out in the open, and was perfectly legal. And nobody will suffer any consequences for it.
      Nobody will suffer any consequences for interfering in the UK election because the ones doing the interfering were extremely powerful, and that’s who the system is built to serve.
      As of this writing British exit polls are indicating a landslide victory for the Tories. Numerous other factors went into this result, including most notably a Labour Party ambivalently straddling an irreconcilable divide on the issue of Brexit, but it is also undeniable that the election was affected by a political smear campaign that was entirely unprecedented in scale and vitriol in the history of western democracy. This smear campaign was driven by billionaire-controlled media outlets, along with intelligence and military agencies, as well as state media like the BBC.
      Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been described as the most smeared politician in history, and this is a fair description. Journalist Matt Kennard recently compiled documentation of dozens of incidents in which former and current spooks and military officials collaborated with plutocratic media institutions to portray Corbyn as a threat to national security. Journalistic accountability advocates like Media Lens and Jonathan Cook have been working for years to compile evidence of the mass media’s attempts to paint Corbyn as everything from a terrorist sympathizer to a Communist to a Russian asset to an IRA supporter to a closet antisemite. Just the other day The Grayzone documented how establishment narrative manager Ben Nimmo was enlisted to unilaterally target Corbyn with a fact-free Russiagate-style conspiracy theory in the lead-up to the election, a psyop that was uncritically circulated by both right-wing outlets like The Telegraph as well as ostensibly “left”-wing outlets like The Guardian.
      Just as Corbyn’s advocacy for the many over the plutocratic few saw him targeted by billionaire media outlets, his view of Palestinians as human beings saw him targeted by the imperialist Israel lobby as exposed in the Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby. For a mountain of links refuting the bogus antisemitism smear directed at Corbyn, a lifelong opponent of antisemitism, check out the deluge of responses to this query I made on Twitter the other day.
      This interference continued right up into the day before the election, with the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg flagrantly violating election rules by reporting that early postal votes had been illegally tallied and results were “looking very grim for Labour”.
      The historically unprecedented smear campaign that was directed at Corbyn from the right, the far-right, and from within his own party had an effect. Of course it did. If you say this today on social media you’ll get a ton of comments telling you you’re wrong, telling you every vote against Labour was exclusively due to the British people not wanting to live in a Marxist dystopia, telling you it was exclusively because of Brexit, totally denying any possibility that the years of deceitful mass media narrative management that British consciousness was pummelled with day in and day out prior to the election had any impact whatsoever upon its results.
     Right. Sure guys. Persistent campaigns to deliberately manipulate people’s minds using mass media have no effect on their decisions at all. I guess that’s why that whole “advertising” fad never made any money.
      I am not claiming here that the billions of dollars worth of free mass media reporting that was devoted to smearing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party had a greater effect on the election results than Brexit and other strategic stumbles in the party. I’m just saying that it definitely had a much greater effect than the few thousand dollars Russian nationals spent on social media memes in the US, which the American political/media class has been relentlessly shrieking about for three years. To deny that a media smear campaign the size and scope of that directed at Corbyn had an effect is the same as denying that advertising, a trillion-dollar industry, has an effect.
      Which means that plutocrats and government agencies indisputably interfered in the British election, to an exponentially greater extent than anything the Russians are even alleged to have done. Yet according to British law it was perfectly legal, and according to British society it was perfectly acceptable. It’s perfectly legal and acceptable for powerful individuals to have a vastly greater influence on a purportedly democratic election than any of the ordinary individuals voting in it.
      A free and healthy society would not work this way. A free and healthy society would view all forms of manipulation as taboo and unacceptable. A free and healthy society would not allow the will of members of one small elite class to carry more weight than the will of anyone else. A free and healthy society would give everyone an equal voice at the table, and look after everyone’s concerns. It certainly wouldn’t tolerate a few individuals who already have far too much abusing their power and wealth to obtain even more.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

American Privileges.

 

       Another fine article from Australian Caitlin Johnstone, summing up some American home truths, not a lot I could add to this piece except to say that we citizens of its puppet regimes are equally guilty as our governments bend their knee to all those American privileges. We are complicity in so much as our acceptance our governments unquestioning and safeguarding those American privileges. Our governments are very unlikely to change their stance on these privileges, but perhaps we could change our support for such a corrupt and damaging structure.

American Privilege
By Caitlin Johnstone

         September 14, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -

        American liberals and progressives talk a bit about white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege etc, but one thing I never hear them talk about is American privilege: the ability their nationality gives them to have a relationship with this world that the rest of us do not have.
         American privilege is reassuring yourself that there are problems enough at home without worrying about the trillions your government’s war machine is spending terrorizing the world and encircling the planet with military bases.
     American privilege is reluctantly allowing the potential Commanders-in-Chief have an eight-minute conversation about foreign policy in your presidential primary debates, when your country’s military policy functionally dictates the affairs of rest of the world.
        American privilege is arguing against the legality of assault weapons on the basis that they are “weapons of war”, implying that they’re fine as long as they’re used to kill some foreigner’s kids.
         American privilege is being able to masturbate your outrage addiction over a racist joke while ignoring the way your military murders black and brown people by the tens of thousands every year.
          American privilege is being able to lose your mind over someone using the wrong pronouns while paying no attention to the fact that your government pours your tax money and resources into governments and groups who hang gay people in the town square.
         American privilege is believing your propaganda is the truth, and everyone else’s understanding of the world is fake news.

There are 800 U.S. military bases in 80 countries. https://t.co/yUrf7T5U1B pic.twitter.com/AAqqJ25ZFd

— CounterPunch (@NatCounterPunch) March 5, 2016

          American privilege is assuming your prudish Puritanical brand of sexuality is healthy and normal so it’s no big deal that you insist that all English-speaking social media adheres to your creepy nipple-hating norms.
         American privilege is telling foreigners to butt out of your politics when your politics are literally killing them.
          American privilege is having a shit fit over election meddling in one social media post, while cheerleading regime change in the next.
        American privilege is starting a war on a lie without being charged with a war crime.
          American privilege is committing war crimes with impunity while jailing the whistleblowers and journalists who reveal them and still getting to call yourselves the good guys.
           American privilege is being able to spend all day arguing online about domestic policy while the rest of the world, completely incapable of influencing your government’s behavior, prays you don’t get us all killed.
         American privilege is only having a robust antiwar movement when your own citizens are at risk of being drafted, then completely forgetting about peace for decades while an increasingly robotic military force gives you even more peace of mind.
         American privilege is being able to relax about war because your soldiers are being replaced with drones and proxy militias in US-driven conflicts, even though those kill people just as dead as manually operated killing machines.
        American privilege is being hush-hush about the egregious imperialist stances of progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders because they have some decent domestic policies.
      American privilege is black bloc protests against public appearances by figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and the Proud Boys while murderous war pigs like Bill Kristol, Henry Kissinger, John Bolton, David Frum and arms industry executives go from appearance to appearance completely unbothered.
         American privilege is benefiting from cheap goods and oil and a strong dollar and never wondering how many innocent foreigners lost their lives and homes in the wars your government starts to make that so.
       American privilege is living in a nation whose government can murder an entire family one day with explosives dropped from the sky, and yet you never hearing about it because that isn’t considered a newsworthy occurrence.
        American privilege is being one of the worst-travelled populations in the world while having military bases in countries that most Americans wouldn’t recognize the name of, let alone have been to.
        American privilege is having your insane culture normalized around the world via Hollywood and other media so that nobody stops and wonders why we’re letting this bat shit crazy nation rule our planet, and so no one makes you feel bad about your American privilege.
       American privilege is living in a nation that uses its military and economic might to terrorize, murder, imprison, starve and impoverish anyone who doesn’t go along with its interests, and feeling no urgent need to bring a stop to this.
        American privilege is being fine with being the world leader, but not being too bothered about what exactly that means.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Mockery of Democracy, And The Illusion of Freedom.

        We are told we live in a free society, we are a democracy, but are surrounded by CCTV cameras, every city has its prisons, and today, in the UK a man voted in on the say so of around  160,000 members of a club, can be the dictator of the country. He may be called the "Prime Minister" but he can act as a dictator and be cheered on by mass sections of the media and the public. Our mainstream media spews out a narrative according to the powers that be. dissent is labelled extremism and will be persecuted, free society, democracy, my arse.

          A free society is open to dissent, radical change, is free from persecution for seeking and telling the truth, its institutions and workings are open to scrutiny at all levels and all times, no decisions taken behind closed doors, do you see our society in that description, just think Julian Assange.

      The following article by Caitlin Johnstone:

      A Society Is Only As Free As Its Most Troublesome Political Dissident.

       You wouldn’t know it from any western mass media reporting as of this writing, but musician Roger Waters is about to perform the iconic Pink Floyd song “Wish You Were Here” in front of the office of British Home Secretary Priti Patel in order to draw attention to the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
         Earlier this year, billionaire Richard Branson staged a “Live Aid”-stye concert in Colombia near the Venezuela border with the purported goal of helping the Venezuelan people. In reality the stunt was nothing other than a ploy to advance the entirely false narratives that President Maduro was blockading bridges and turning away all foreign aid, and the funds raised ended up being embezzled by the Trump-backed regime change opposition group led by US puppet Juan Guaido. The British mass media, however, went absolutely bananas over the story. Each word in this sentence is hyperlinked to a different story about the concert from mass media outlets in the UK alone. And that was a concert on the other side of the planet, while the Assange event is happening right in London, in front of the office of a prominent British official, featuring one of the greatest British rock musicians of all time.
          This discrepancy tells you everything you need to know about the so-called “free press” in western society, and indeed about western society itself.
         A society is only as free as its most troublesome political dissident, which today means that you are only as free as Julian Assange. As long as you live in a society which can give rise to a coordinated multi-governmental campaign to lock up a journalist for the rest of his life based on bogus charges because he exposed US war crimes, you are not free, and you should not agree to pretend that you are.

          The old saying “actions speak louder than words” resonates with people because words can lie while actions cannot. And while the millionaire pundits of the billionaire media continually assure us with their words that we live in a free society, the actions of the people who wield official and unofficial power over us tell us that we actually live in a society which tortures and imprisons dissident journalists for telling inconvenient truths.
          The persecution of Julian Assange tells us so much more about our society than the authorized narratives we’re sold:
          The persecution of Julian Assange tells us about the real function of the mass media. The discrepancy between the news media coverage of the Assange benefit event and Richard Branson’s regime change propaganda party are just one of many, many examples we could discuss about the way those outlets reliably slant their coverage in favor of agendas which just so happen to align with the interests of the CIA and the US State Department. Every time Assange’s plight makes headlines, social media lights up with ambitious blue-checkmarked media aspirants posting snarky quips about him in an attempt to show the operators of the billionaire media just how far they’ll go to defend the status quo. We are told with words that the mass media are here to tell us the truth about what’s going on in the world, but we are told with actions the exact opposite.
           The persecution of Julian Assange tells us about the mechanics of empire. Assange was pried out of the embassy and imprisoned by an extremely obvious collaboration between the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador, and Australia, yet they each pretended that they were acting as separate, sovereign nations completely independently of one another. Sweden pretended it was deeply concerned about rape allegations, the UK pretended it was deeply concerned about a bail violation, Ecuador pretended it was deeply concerned about skateboarding and embassy cat hygiene, the US pretended it was deeply concerned about the particulars of the way Assange helped Chelsea Manning cover her tracks, Australia pretended it was too deeply concerned about honoring the sovereign affairs of these other countries to intervene on behalf of its citizen, and it all converged in a way that just so happens to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts. You see this same dynamic constantly, whether it’s with military interventions, trade deals, or narrative-shaping campaigns against non-aligned governments.
           The persecution of Julian Assange tells us about the kind of society we actually live in. We are inundated from early childhood with feel-good slogans about freedom and democracy, which we are told must be spread to everyone on earth as forcefully as necessary even if we have to kill every last one of them. In reality we live in a society made of lies and led by liars, who violently persecute anyone who exposes the truth. These people are your oppressors. These people are your prison wardens. Their sneering faces tell you that you are free from behind prison bars, and that they’ll end you if you disagree.

This is going to have to change.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk