Judgment Day for Julian Assange

On political dissidents, war crimes and the critical importance of a free press...

(Source: Getty)

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World...

“Do not be annoyed at my telling the truth; the fact is that no man in the world will come off safe who honestly opposes either you or any other multitude, and tries to hinder the many unjust and illegal doings in a state.”

Thus spake Socrates during his own defense, while standing trial for his life in 399 B.C. The Father of Philosophy was accused of corrupting the youth and believing in gods in whom the State did not.

Bad move.

The trial of Socrates lasted but a single day, at the close of which the fearless Athenian iconoclast was found guilty by a vote of 281 to 220... and sentenced to death by a vote of 361 to 140.

Swift legal proceedings, sure... but swift justice? (Read Plato’s account of the trial here and decide for yourself.)

As history reminds us all too often, it’s no easy task being an “Enemy of the State.” Many and varied are the lives made miserable, or cut down entirely, owing to the victims' proclivity for questioning and/or undermining the prevailing authority of the day.

From the Nazarene to Gandhi... MLK to JFK to RFK... Anna Politkovskaya to Alexei Navalny, who perished in the notorious Polar Wolf penal colony in Russia just this week... those who dare examine the “Statist quo” are in for a rough ride, if they are lucky... a short one, if they are not.

Whether the execution orders are issued from Moscow or Washington D.C. hardly matters. When it comes to murdering those who stand in its way, there is no assassin on earth so brazen, so unequivocal, so unrepentant as a motivated State. 

Just ask modern day Public Enemy No. 1: Julian Assange... 

Pot, Meet Kettle

The Wikileaker in Chief was back in the news this week as his legal team makes its  final appeal against his extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States, where he will almost certainly be relieved of his post among the army of the upright, vanquished to the shades to join the ranks of the aforementioned political martyrs. 

It should come as no surprise to readers of these Notes that Mr. Assange is pursued by both horns of the charging American bull. Mr. Trump spent four years praising the Wikileaks organization (mostly for dishing the dirt on Chelsea Clinton’s mom)...

...and yet, given the opportunity to pardon the Australian-born journalist, the benefactor of all those leaked documents demurred. Likewise, worldwide petitions to the Biden administration for clemency have fallen on willfully deaf ears. 

It is perhaps unsurprising then, given his (ahem...) unique family history, that RFK, Jr. should be the only presidential candidate to declare his allegiance to truth and transparency over the interest of the Deep State. Here is the independent candidate, entreating those with a functional moral compass to stand on the side of freedom and against State-sponsored tyranny. 

And here he is again, on ‘X’, underscoring the blatant hypocrisy of the American pot calling the Russian kettle black: 

Instead of championing free speech, the U.S. actively persecutes journalists and whistleblowers. I’ll pardon brave truth-tellers like Julian Assange and investigate the corruption and crimes they exposed. This isn’t the Soviet Union. The America I love doesn’t imprison dissidents.

Other brave truth-tellers include John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, and Edward Snowden. They were trying to return America to its democratic and humanitarian ideals.

But what, exactly, has Mr. Assange done to invite the rabid wrath of the most powerful Military Industrial State on the planet... and what do that State’s serpentine operatives, spooks and jackbooted goons plan to do about him? Moreover, on what moral high ground do those who would condemn Mr. Assange to death stand when it comes to criticizing the way Mother Russia deals with her own briery dissidents? 

A Brief WikiRefresher...

As founder of the controversial site Wikileaks, Julian Assange is perhaps the most famous (or infamous, depending on whom you ask) whistleblower of all time. His organization has spent the better part of the past two decades shining light on government secrecy and exposing actual crimes committed by various States and State actors.

This it did by releasing to the public hundreds of thousands of pages of leaked documents including the Iraq War Logs, Global Intelligence Files and files on the developing situations in Syria, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan, to name just a few.

The State’s ongoing case against Assange and his organization brings into high relief the meaning behind that old adage, “Don't shoot the messenger.”

And that’s exactly what many apologists for the State wish to do. So potent is the hysteria surrounding Assange and his Wikileaks organization, that public officials openly calling for the man’s murder are, frighteningly, not at all uncommon. 

“He should be killed,” urged Ralph Peters, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, who took it upon himself to unilaterally declare Assange “guilty of sabotage, espionage and crimes against humanity.”

Wishing to appear neither thoughtful nor level-headed by comparison, Tom Flanagan, former advisor to the Canadian government, opined: 

“I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think [President Obama] should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.”

Never mind that Assange had yet to be convicted of a single crime in any court anywhere in the world. Nor had he even been formally charged at the time. But for Peters, Flanagan and their ilk, the verdict was simply a foregone conclusion. To them, the man’s execution should be nothing more than a formality... a “contract,” as members of the common mafia might have put it.

Lady Justicia, Wherefore Art Thou?

In this age of increasingly decentralized information, the debate regarding government secrecy and the public's right to know what is being done in its name (and with its tax dollars) is truly a matter of life and death. And it is against this controversial, emotionally charged backdrop that a curious and troubling tendency has come to infect the public discourse, namely, the conflation of the terms “Law” and “Justice.”

Most folks consider these terms to be near synonymous – not realizing perhaps the greatest inhumanities that Man has ever committed against fellow Man have taken place according to “the Law.”

(Was not slavery legal? Did not Herr Eichmann’s trains run according to government edict? Was not apartheid the law of the land? One could go on, all to easily…)

Thus the conflation of “Law” and “Justice” represents more than a mere transgression of semantics, dear reader, more than a “benign misnomer.” Rather, it is a dangerous practice that baptizes all manner of injustice as “perfectly legal.”

In other words, injustices flourish when the perpetrators can smuggle their rotten deeds into the vast and ever expanding body of arbitrary opinion known as “the Law.”

While it may be true that the former is supposed to represent the latter - i.e., that the Law ought to embody Justice - oftentimes, this is simply not the case. Indeed, when evil people author laws, it is only by accident or mistake that they coincide with justice at all.

The Unexamined State

We leave it to Sen. Mitch McConnell, a man whose bloodlust is matched only by his guffawing ineloquence, to make our point for us. When asked his opinion regarding Assange, he replied: 

“I think the man is a high-tech terrorist. He needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and, if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law.”

The law, according to McConnell, ought to be whatever provides the least resistance to his own whims and desires... not something that protects those who would challenge the system or bring to light the criminal actions of those with their snouts in its trough.

Underscoring this sentiment, here’s syndicated columnist Bob Beckel, who gleefully told Fox News: 

“[Assange] is a traitor and a treasonist [sic] and he's broken every law of the United States. The guy ought to be... well, I'm not for the death penalty, so if I'm not for the death penalty, there's only one way to do it: Illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

The double standards at play here are breathtaking. What passes for “patriotic enthusiasm” when exhibited by military brass and bloviating senators is ordinarily recognized as “incitement to murder” when committed by members of the general populace.

Not that the State – be it Soviet, American or any other gang of criminals so named – doesn't boast a rich historical penchant for hypocrisy. As the 19th Century French scholar and author of The Law, Frédéric Bastiat, reminds us: 

“It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.”

During his trial, Socrates famously declared the unexamined life not worth living. The unexamined State, we hasten to add, is not worth living under.

The time is long overdue for a Free Press…. a Free People… and a Free Assange. 

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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