The Ideological Foundations of Critical Race Theory - World Socialist Web Site

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The ideological foundations of Critical Race Theory - World Socialist Web Site: 

Excerpt from conclusion below--whole article at link above highly recommended to understand the dangers of embracing Critical Race Theory

While critical race theory postures and presents itself as a continuation of the mass civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, nothing could be further from the truth. With its insistence that white people and black people essentially comprise incompatible species who have been at war with each other throughout history, critical race theory has less in common with Martin Luther King than it does with Adolf Hitler. Among the ideological precursors of critical race theory, in that respect, is the racialist pseudoscience that emerged in the late nineteenth century, “social Darwinism,” which purported to replace the class struggle in history with concepts borrowed from Darwin’s discoveries related to biological evolution, reimagining history not as a struggle between social classes, but as a process of competition and “natural selection” among biologically distinct races.

At the time of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks likewise had to confront efforts to stir up racial, religious and national hatreds aimed at destabilizing and dividing the workers movement.

“When the accursed tsarist monarchy was living its last days, it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews,” Lenin explained in a 1919 radio address. “The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews.”

“It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people,” Lenin said. “The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews, there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations.”

“The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races,” Lenin continued, concluding his address with the words: “Long live the fraternal trust and fighting alliance of the workers of all nations in the struggle to overthrow capital.”

A hundred years later, the basic conceptions articulated by Lenin remain a centerpiece of the Marxist tradition. Within every so-called “race,” there are the working people who form the majority, who are oppressed by capital and who are the brothers and sisters and natural comrades of all other workers on the planet. And within every “race,” there is a minority consisting of the capitalist class and its privileged agents.

Socialists around the world are engaged in the complex and challenging struggle to unite the working class—including people of different nationalities, genders, languages, religions, ages and customs—for a common struggle for peace, progress and equality.

This certainly involves fighting and exposing prejudice and injustice wherever we encounter it, as it always has—if we see it, we won’t stand for it—but we understand that prejudice survives not because it is fixed eternally in human psychology but because capitalism survives to nourish it. We explain to workers and young people how prejudice is cultivated and exploited to undermine class solidarity, and how overcoming those prejudices is not simply morally right but historically necessary.

The coming revolutionary upheavals around the world will bring hundreds of millions of people into struggle. The forces exerted on the revolutionary movement will be tremendous. A movement that is cracked and fractured along racial or national or gender lines will not be able to withstand those forces and will quickly break apart the moment real pressure is brought to bear. A world movement that can weather the revolutionary maelstrom must be prepared to advance a unified world perspective, applicable to all workers, from a shared understanding of its own history to its basic philosophical foundations and method, class orientation, conception of the epoch and strategy for victory. This is the real strength of a political movement—the glue that will hold it together through any crisis.

For these reasons, the answer to the bigotry of the Republicans and Trump is not to give an inch to the racial sectarianism of the Democrats and critical race theory. Rather, we must build international workers’ solidarity, which is an essential condition for the advance of human civilization and culture and for the final defeat of all forms of prejudice.

The Debacle in Afghanistan and the Fight against Militarism | Interview with David North

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Overwhelmed: Inside a Bend, Oregon ICU as They Fight to save COVID Patients [What if U.S. had universal care/real public health? Politicians Refuse Even If Majority of Voters Support]]

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Ken Loach Calls Out Sir Keir Starmer: What were His Dealings in the Julian Assange Case?

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Linda Linda Linda - blue heart [ I just had to put this on here! ]

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The Eradication of COVID-19 is the Only Way to Stop the Pandemic--World Socialist Website

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"Mitigation is to epidemiology what reformism is to capitalist politics. Just as the reformist harbors the hope that gradual and piecemeal reforms will, over time, lessen and ameliorate the evils of the profit system, the mitigationists nourish the delusion that COVID-19 will eventually evolve into something no more harmful than the common cold. This is a pipe dream totally divorced from the science of the pandemic."

 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/21/pers-a21.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

All over the world, COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths are again on the rise. The United States is again at the epicenter of the pandemic, with over 155,000 COVID-19 cases and 967 deaths officially reported Thursday. The number of breakthrough cases among fully vaccinated people rises each day, underscoring the dangers posed by new variants of SARS-CoV-2.

Falsely downplayed as a disease of the elderly, the virus is increasingly infecting young adults and unvaccinated children. In the second week of August, over 121,000 children tested positive for the virus and a record of over 1,900 were hospitalized in the US alone, figures which are set to skyrocket in the coming weeks amid the full reopening of schools.

At this critical juncture, how is the pandemic to be dealt with?

The battle lines in this global struggle have been clearly drawn. Three basic strategies for approaching the virus have emerged: 1) “herd immunity”; 2) mitigation; and 3) eradication. The global spread of the highly infectious Delta variant and the drive to fully reopen schools worldwide, despite the well-known risks to children, have sharpened the antagonisms between these three positions and made clear that global eradication is the only scientifically grounded and effective strategy.

Herd immunity

“Herd Immunity”—the bogus claim that the rapid spread of the virus among the younger and hardier sections of the population will create a human shield around the most vulnerable—is not a strategy for fighting the virus and saving lives. It is, rather, a cold-blooded policy aimed at protecting the financial, business and geopolitical interests of the ruling elites, whatever the cost in human lives. It opposes any anti-COVID measures that impinge on these interests, such as lockdowns, school closures and even masking. It promotes distrust and hatred of science, even to the point of encouraging resistance to vaccination.

“Herd immunity” began as a reckless experiment in Sweden, which refused to implement lockdowns in March 2020 and achieved a death rate nearly 10 times higher than its neighbor Finland. Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell wrote to his Finnish counterpart on March 13, 2020, “One point might speak for keeping schools open in order to reach herd immunity more quickly.”

This strategy was given ideological justification by Thomas Friedman of the “liberal” New York Times, who praised Sweden’s approach and wrote on March 23, 2020, “Is this cure [of lockdowns]—even for a short while—worse than the disease?”

This phrase—“the cure can’t be worse than the disease”—was immediately seized upon by Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India and other fascistic figures. Collectively, the countries that have pursued herd immunity most aggressively account for the vast majority of the estimated over 10 million deaths worldwide.

The herd immunity policy utilizes disinformation campaigns to spread confusion and conspiracy theories within the population, cultivating the most backward and fascistic conceptions. It has no scientific credibility and is based on the application of the 19th century Social Darwinist conception of the “survival of the fittest.” Its utterly reactionary character was summed up in the words of Boris Johnson, who blurted out last November, “No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

Mitigation

The second strategic approach towards the pandemic is so-called “mitigation,” an amorphous collection of measures that tries to negotiate between the realities of the virus and the financial interests of the ruling elites. This strategy amounts to the epidemiology of the golden mean.

There is a broad spectrum of mitigation measures that limit the spread of COVID-19, including masking, social distancing, testing, contact tracing, isolation of infected patients, ventilation, vaccinations, and others. Such measures have a role to play in reducing the velocity of viral transmission. But they do not lead to the effective containment of the virus and, in the absence of a strategy to sever the chain of viral transmission, can actually become counterproductive.

The two major elements advocated by proponents of the mitigation strategy are vaccinations and masking. Extraordinary claims have been made by the Biden administration in the US, Trudeau in Canada and many others worldwide that the simple combination of these measures will bring an end to the pandemic. These claims are based on a gross distortion of the character of the Delta variant.

First, it has been scientifically proven that the Delta variant is too transmissible and vaccine-resistant for vaccinations alone to put an end to infections. A recent theoretical model by Dr. Malgorzata Gasperowicz at the University of Calgary estimated that with 64 percent of the population fully vaccinated and assuming the vaccines have 60 percent efficacy against the Delta variant, the R (reproduction) number would likely remain at the highly elevated 3.7. Her model found that only through the combination of vaccinations and public health measures including lock-downs would the R number be reduced to 0.86.

Second, the types of masks used by the general public are totally inadequate for the Delta variant, which is vastly more transmissible and produces a viral load roughly 1,000 times higher than the wild type of the virus. Given this extreme viral load, some scientists have estimated that one second of exposure to the Delta variant is equivalent to 15 minutes of exposure to the wild type of the virus, with the widely-used cloth and surgical masks leaving individuals largely unprotected. To make matters worse, the masks are often used improperly by a public that does not clearly understand, as a result of miseducation and false information, the process of viral transmission.

This spring and summer, the Biden administration and other world governments proclaimed the pandemic to be over, presenting the vaccine as a magic bullet and telling vaccinated individuals they could remove masks and throw all caution to the wind. They sanctioned the full reopening of schools, claiming that unvaccinated children could be protected simply by mask-wearing. Within weeks, these falsehoods have been exploded by the reality of mass infections in schools and workplaces throughout the US, including an estimated 35,000 symptomatic “breakthrough infections” (the infection of vaccinated individuals) each week.

The mantra for the politicians and corporate media who advocate the mitigation strategy is that everyone must “learn to live with the virus.” Proponents of mitigation fundamentally accept that COVID-19 will become endemic, that there will always be a persistent low level of infections and even periodic surges that strain hospitals to their breaking point. Economically and politically, the mitigation strategy accepts the basic framework that the interests of the corporations cannot be impinged upon.

Mitigation is to epidemiology what reformism is to capitalist politics. Just as the reformist harbors the hope that gradual and piecemeal reforms will, over time, lessen and ameliorate the evils of the profit system, the mitigationists nourish the delusion that COVID-19 will eventually evolve into something no more harmful than the common cold. This is a pipe dream totally divorced from the science of the pandemic.

In reality, as long as the virus spreads it will continue to mutate into new, more infectious, lethal and vaccine-resistant variants that threaten all of humanity. Unless it is eradicated on a world scale, the embers of COVID-19 will continue to burn and create the conditions for the virus to flare up anew.

Those who advocate the mitigation strategy want to negotiate with COVID-19, but the coronavirus refuses to negotiate with them. It is driven not by logical arguments, but by the remorseless laws of viral transmission.

Eradication

Therefore, the only viable strategy is eradication, based on the policies advanced by the foremost epidemiologists, virologists and other scientists throughout the pandemic. Eradication entails the universal deployment of every weapon in the arsenal of measures to combat COVID-19, coordinated on a global scale, to stamp out the virus once and for all.

The mainstream media in every country now advance the lie that the global eradication of COVID-19 is a “fantasy.” But historical precedents for globally-coordinated eradication efforts exist for Ebola, smallpox, polio, and other diseases, all of which required a massive allocation of resources.

In an analysis presented last week in the international journal BMJ Global Health, Professors Michael Baker and Nick Wilson from the University of Otago, Wellington, determined that the global eradication of COVID‐19 is theoretically more feasible than for polio but less so than it was for smallpox. They stress that the combination of vaccination programs, broad public health measures and a global interest in combating the disease could make eradication possible worldwide.

The key elements of containing and ultimately eradicating the pandemic are universal testing, contact tracing, the safe isolation of infected patients, the imposition of strict travel restrictions, and the shutdown of all schools and nonessential workplaces. Vaccine production and distribution must be rapidly expanded to quickly inoculate the roughly 5.8 billion people who remain unvaccinated worldwide.

The significance of regular, widespread testing and universal contact tracing—which have not been implemented in almost every country—cannot be overstated. These methods involve a highly active campaign to locate the virus and cut off its access to human beings. The only vulnerability of the coronavirus is that it relies on a human host to survive and replicate. If deprived of this host, the virus gradually dies off.

All other mitigation measures have a significant role to play, in particular the universal use of high-quality face masks and the renovation of indoor ventilation systems. But these are tactics which must be employed as part of a broader global strategy aimed at eradication. This must entail a relentless campaign of public education and the provision of enormous financial resources by every state to guarantee full income protection for all workers affected by lockdowns.

Undoubtedly, the eradication strategy is difficult. But every correct policy imposes a social cost. The necessary lockdown measures need only last for a few weeks or months, depending on the current rate of transmission in a given country, with travel between countries gradually resumed as they reach zero new cases.

The eradication strategy must be taken up by educators, parents, autoworkers, logistics workers, health care workers and the entire working class internationally in order to put an end to the needless suffering from the pandemic and save millions of lives. The Socialist Equality Party, in support of this program, calls in particular for the immediate shutdown of schools in every country where this policy is being pursued. Those advocating the reopening of schools for in-person learning are essentially calling for children to be sent into burning buildings.

Only a handful of countries have pursued the elimination strategy, including China, New Zealand, and some others, all of which must be studied carefully. However, recent outbreaks in each of these countries, as well as major surges in Australia, Vietnam and other countries that had almost entirely suppressed viral transmission, underscore that the eradication strategy must be global in scope and that no single country can defeat the pandemic alone.

The implementation of the eradication strategy requires the development of a powerful international and unified mass movement of the working class. Only a mass movement that is not driven by the profit motive and fettered to the obsessive pursuit of personal wealth can generate the social force required to compel a change in policy.

The basic principles guiding the eradication strategy are based on science and the insistence that there can be no limit on the amount spent to eradicate COVID-19 worldwide. The social interests of masses of people worldwide interact powerfully with scientific truth.

For this strategy to be successful, its proponents in every country must be imbued with a deep scientific understanding of the pandemic. The working class values and relies on the support of scientists, and the scientific program necessary to eradicate COVID-19 can only be implemented to the extent that great masses of people take up this struggle.

This Sunday, August 22, the WSWS is hosting an international online event involving leading scientists who have advocated for eradication since the start of the pandemic. We urge all our readers worldwide to register today and invite your coworkers, friends and family to attend this historic event.

 

Retired Army Colonel Accuses Pentagon Leadership of Lying to Americans--[Obviously True]

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The Fall of the Afghan Puppet Regime: A Historic Debacle for US imperialism--WSWS Editorial Board

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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/16/pers-a16.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

The sudden fall of the US puppet regime in Afghanistan on Sunday is a humiliating debacle for American imperialism. It marks the collapse of a regime that was imposed through a criminal war and occupation, promoted on the basis of lies, and maintained in power through assassination, torture and the bombing of civilians.

As Sunday began, the Pentagon announced that two battalions of Marines and a US infantry battalion were arriving at Kabul International Airport to bolster the Afghan regime. The puppet Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, issued a video calling on his regime’s security forces to maintain “law and order.”

However, Taliban troops, after briefly pausing their lightning advance at the gates of Kabul, seized key points in the Afghan capital during the day. By nightfall, Taliban officials reported they had taken over the presidential palace and would soon announce the formation of a new government. Bagram airbase, the infamous NATO prison and torture center, fell to the Taliban, who freed the 7,000 prisoners housed there.

A U.S. Chinook helicopter flies over the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, Aug. 15 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

As Sunday progressed, Ghani and his national security adviser fled the country. In the morning, American time, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said US officials were abandoning the embassy for the Kabul airport. But by evening, US diplomats had to admit Washington no longer controls even the Kabul airport and that US citizens in Kabul have been instructed to hide.

In an article titled “Taliban Sweep in Afghanistan Follows Years of US Miscalculations,” the New York Times admitted: “President Biden’s top advisers concede they were stunned by the rapid collapse of the Afghan army in the face of an aggressive, well-planned offensive by the Taliban. … As recently as late June, the intelligence agencies estimated that even if the Taliban gained power, it would be at least a year and a half before Kabul would be threatened.”

In reality, the much-vaunted “democratic” regime set up by Washington and its NATO allies in Afghanistan amounted to a political zero. Maintained in power only by tens of thousands of NATO troops and US warplanes, it dissolved virtually overnight as US and NATO troops were withdrawn.

If American ruling circles were unprepared for the sudden collapse of the regime they propped up at such an enormous cost, it is because to a significant extent they believed their own propaganda. During the course of two decades, no major newspaper, television network or mainstream media outlet examined this neocolonial war of occupation with a modicum of honesty.

The human and social costs of the war in Afghanistan are catastrophic. Official tallies, no doubt massively understated, claim 164,436 Afghans were killed during the war, together with 2,448 US soldiers, 3,846 US military contractors and 1,144 soldiers from other NATO countries. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans and tens of thousands of NATO personnel were wounded. The financial cost to the United States alone is estimated at $2 trillion, financed by debt that will cost a further $6.5 trillion in interest payments.

Yesterday’s events inevitably recall the famous photographs of US diplomats boarding helicopters on the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon, nearly a half-century ago, at the end of the Vietnam War. In its implications and political consequences, however, the US debacle in Afghanistan is if anything even more significant.

The collapse of the Afghan government shatters the delusionary conceptions the American ruling class embraced following the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The disappearance of Washington’s main military rival was viewed by the American ruling class as an opportunity to overcome its global decline and domestic contradictions through the use of force. US military and foreign policy planners proclaimed a “unipolar moment” in which the unchallengeable power of the United States would oversee a “New World Order” in the interests of Wall Street.

The victory of the US and its allies in the first war against Iraq in 1991, before the final collapse of the USSR, was taken as a demonstration that “Force Works!” as the Wall Street Journal proclaimed at the time. President George Bush declared that through its criminal bombing of a largely defenseless country, American imperialism had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” One year later, in 1992, the Pentagon adopted a strategy document declaring that the objective of the US was to militarily “discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

At the time of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, under the Clinton administration, the delusion emerged that US dominance in precision-guided munitions would transform world politics and establish Washington as an unchallenged world hegemon. Responding to these conceptions, the WSWS wrote:

The United States presently enjoys a “competitive advantage” in the arms industry. But neither this advantage nor the products of this industry can guarantee world dominance. Despite the sophistication of its weaponry, the financial-industrial foundation of the United States’ preeminent role in the affairs of world capitalism is far less substantial than it was 50 years ago. Its share of world production has declined dramatically. Its international trade deficit increases by billions of dollars every month. The conception that underlies the cult of precision-guided munitions—that mastery in the sphere of weapons technology can offset these more fundamental economic indices of national strength—is a dangerous delusion.

In the context of the project for global conquest, the war in Afghanistan was seen as central to the US strategy of controlling Central Asia and the “world Island” of Eurasia, so as to strengthen the position of US imperialism against China, Russia and the European imperialist powers. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the WSWS rejected the arguments that the invasion was part of a “war on terror” against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which were themselves the product of US efforts to destabilize the Soviet Union two decades earlier:

The US government initiated the war in pursuit of far-reaching international interests of the American ruling elite. What is the main purpose of the war? The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago created a political vacuum in Central Asia, which is home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. … By attacking Afghanistan, setting up a client regime and moving vast military forces into the region, the US aims to establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control.

In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, based on lying claims, trumpeted by the entire US media, that the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that it would give to Al Qaeda. Comparing the unprovoked attack on defenseless Iraq to the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland that began World War II in Europe, the WSWS wrote:

Whatever the outcome of the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to its internal maladies. Rather, the unforeseen difficulties and mounting resistance engendered by war will intensify all of the internal contradictions of American society.

These words resonate powerfully today. Taken collectively, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the invasion of Libya and the CIA-instigated civil war in Syria, have left millions dead and entire societies shattered. Far from establishing the unchallenged global domination of American imperialism, they have led to one debacle after the next. Conditions in Iraq, three decades after the first Gulf War, are, if anything, even worse than in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is a metaphor for the entire rotting edifice of American capitalism. US budget deficits have been papered over by electronically printing trillions of dollars of fictitious capital in “quantitative easing” funds handed over to the super-rich in bank bailouts. To the fictitious capital on which US capitalism’s bubble economy is based, corresponds the fictitious power conferred on the Pentagon by “smart bombs” and drone murder strikes in countries like Afghanistan.

A serious warning is in order: powerful elements of the American ruling elite are no doubt preparing many contingency plans, each more reckless than the last, to respond to this debacle. They have no intention of simply abiding by the devastating loss of prestige and credibility involved in their defeat at the hands of an Islamist movement armed only with light weapons in one of the world’s poorest, most war-torn countries.

The remarks by former CIA Director and retired Army General David Petraeus in a radio interview Friday point to the discussions taking place behind the scenes. Calling the US position in Afghanistan “disastrous,” Petraeus declared: “This is an enormous national security setback, and it is on the verge of getting much worse unless we decide to take really significant action.”

The US military has a great deal of its prestige invested in Afghanistan and the broader project of imperialist conquest of which it was a part. The American ruling class will not retreat from its efforts to control the world through military force, upon which its wealth depends.

Unlike Vietnam, the American ruling class cannot blame the debacle in Afghanistan on an anti-war movement. With the assistance of the organizations of the upper middle class, which bought into the “war on terror” and “human rights imperialism,” broad-based opposition to war within the United States has been suppressed and directed behind the Democratic Party, which is, no less than the Republicans, a party of Wall Street and the military.

The homicidal response of the ruling class to the pandemic, however, shows that the ruling class has no more regard for the lives of workers within the major capitalist countries than they do for the masses in Central Asia and the Middle East. Even as the pandemic continues to spread, there are growing expressions of working class opposition.

The development of this opposition into a conscious political movement for socialism is inextricably connected to the fight against imperialist war. This is the fundamental lesson of the entire criminal debacle that is the US war in Afghanistan.

 

COVID Delta Variant: Our Biggest Challenge Yet with Eric Topol, MD

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Jeremy Corbyn and the Political Dead-end of the Official Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign--Thomas Scripps, WSWS

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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/13/assa-a13.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

Wednesday’s hearing on Julian Assange’s extradition marked the ignominious collapse of the political perspective pursued by the official Don’t Extradite Assange (DEA) campaign.

Left: Jeremy Corbyn (Garry Knight, Wikimedia Commons), Right: Julian Assange (Cancillería del Ecuador, Wikimedia Commons)

This perspective was summed up outside the court by former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn. Speaking to a small group of protesters, Corbyn said of the WikiLeaks founder, “We have someone who in a different country, in a different world in a different denomination would be seen as a hero by the West for exposing truths somewhere. Journalists expose truths all over the world and they should all be supported in exposing those truths.”

The difference with Assange is that he had exposed truths that “embarrassed” the United States. “My view,” Corbyn continued, “is that he should be released.”

Speaking to journalists, Corbyn also expressed his “hopes” in the High Court and issued moral appeals to Conservative UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden, saying it was “disappointing” that Biden was continuing the efforts of the Trump administration to extradite Assange.

What does this say about the DEA’s campaign?

Corbyn wants to portray Assange as just another journalist exposing truths that are unfortunately embarrassing to the US. But Assange carried out some of the most significant exposures of war crimes perpetrated by US imperialism and its allies, above all British imperialism, in history. He described WikiLeaks as an “intelligence agency of the people” dedicated to opposing such crimes, famously commenting, “If war can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.”

WikiLeaks revelations sparked a global wave of anti-imperialist sentiment and contributed to the Arab Spring. The ruling class recognised a mortal enemy and responded with a ruthless campaign to destroy Assange, which it has waged consistently for a decade, setting a dictatorial precedent for the persecution of its opponents in preparation for new crimes.

To reduce this to mere embarrassment is to deliberately conceal political realities to reinforce the claim that Biden and Johnson can be persuaded by moral pressure to change course.

But Corbyn made his pathetic appeals outside a hearing to determine on what basis the appeal for Assange to be extradited by Biden’s State Department can proceed. And Britain’s judiciary made clear that they, like the Johnson government, are intent on facilitating Biden’s efforts.

All five of the US’s grounds for appeal against the ruling prohibiting Assange’s extradition were upheld—collectively bringing into question Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s conclusion that Assange’s mental health would make him a suicide risk should he be sent to the US and kept in its brutal penal system.

It should be noted that the same agenda has been pursued by the DEA for months, first appealing to Donald Trump and the fascistic elements gravitating to him to pardon Assange before moving seamlessly on to moral appeals directed to the incoming Biden administration.

This has been accompanied by efforts to emphasise the tragic element of Assange’s separation from his wife, Stella Moris, and their two young children. For Assange’s 50th birthday, his tenth in effective or actual detention, the DEA organised a picnic on Parliament Square, complete with birthday cake and string quartet.

This sentimental appeal naturally fell on deaf ears, with the prosecution using the fact that Assange concealed the relationship with Moris to protect his loved ones to accuse the key defence expert medical witness Professor Kopelman of himself misleading the court about Assange’s mental health.

The same false orientation holds true of Corbyn’s efforts to reduce Assange to just another journalist, in line with the DEA’s focus on securing the backing of the media.

Most media groups and their journalists do not “expose truths” but disseminate official propaganda—which is why Assange was subjected to a press slander campaign for years and his appalling treatment either justified or ignored. Even now the clear threat posed to press freedoms by Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act have evoked only the most muted response in the editorial offices of the major dailies.

Corbyn’s statements betray a class agenda which is toxic to the fight for Assange’s freedom. He avoids any reference to the social struggle between the working class and imperialism with which Assange’s case is inextricably bound up and instead seeks to secure his freedom by attempting to make him palatable to layers of the “progressive” middle class and, through them, to win the ear of the political establishment.

But for the most part the “progressive” middle class, the social types that occupy the editorial offices of the Guardian and the New York Times, Labour and Democratic Party politicians, trade union leaders, liberal academia, feminists, and above all the various pseudo-left groups, have either kept silent on Assange or remain openly hostile to him.

And it should not need saying that because Assange’s life’s work has been dedicated to the exposure of imperialist crimes, there is nothing that will make him a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the ruling class in Britain or America.

There is nothing impermissible in seeking the support of journalists, NGOs, celebrities, and even bourgeois politicians for Assange’s freedom, but only as a by-product of a popular campaign to secure support from the one social force that can actually bring an end to his persecution—the international working class.

The DEA makes no appeal to the working class whatsoever, or to any broader layers of the population. It has produced a near hermetically sealed campaign of more or less prominent individuals, held in high regard by each other, who attend each other’s events, and repost each other’s comments. Not one of them conducts any struggle among workers to clarify the issues raised by Assange’s persecution, or to mobilise them in his defence.

Yanis Varoufakis, the founder of Diem25 who played an instrumental role as Syriza’s finance minister in betraying the struggle by Greek workers against austerity, displayed his own contempt and that of his co-thinkers for the working class at a DEA event last year.

Assange’s “worst enemy”, he said, was “people too tired, too exhausted, too disheartened by working zero-hour contracts or whatever to be able to expend the energy” to fight for his freedom. The same held true for “people who are neither good nor bad working in these offices in Whitehall,” the home of Britain’s civil service. But as regards these government functionaries, he insisted, “We have to make them care.”

To the extent that there is a belief among Assange’s supporters that such high-profile figures offer a route to broader masses of people, this is entirely misplaced.

Corbyn made clear that he only attended Wednesday’s protest in a personal capacity, and brought no one else to it. He did not mention Labour, his own party, let alone call on its members to back Assange, studiously avoiding the subject as he does in every public appearance.

Nor did he make even a personal appeal to his 2.4 million followers on Twitter, either before or after the protest outside the court. His tweets from the day were to give “Solidarity and best wishes” to the family and friends of a British solicitor lost mountaineering, to plug Momentum’s World Transformed event, and to extend “Solidarity with students” protesting climate change inaction outside the Department for Education. The one personal event he recorded was a visit to “a new cooperative for ethical food delivery” he made after leaving the Assange protest.

None of this is oversight. Corbyn has published only eight tweets on Assange in his account’s history. They provide a timeline of his rotten record on the WikiLeaks founder’s case.

His first tweet was made in December 2010, saying “USA and others don't like any scrutiny via wikileaks and they are leaning on everybody to pillory Assange. What happened to free speech?” There is then a two-year gap until Corbyn mentions Assange again in 2012. By far the longest silence then begins, after Assange is falsely accused of sexual assault in Sweden, and only broken in 2019. This silence covers the majority of Corbyn’s period as leader of the largest political party in Europe.

After issuing one tweet on April 11, 2019, on the day Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy in London by the British police, saying his extradition “should be opposed by the British government”, Corbyn retreated once again before an onslaught by the Labour right wing, stating two days later that he only opposed extradition to the US and that Assange should answer the sexual assault allegations in Sweden. He did not mention Assange’s name again, in any medium, for the entirety of the 2019 general election campaign.

The next tweet opposing extradition comes in February 2020, during the twilight of his Labour leadership, and the next four a year later in January, June and July 2021, promoting token initiatives by the Council of Europe and the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs.

What does a political figure like this offer in the fight for Assange’s freedom? Corbyn gave the answer on Wednesday—appeals to the media, the British judiciary, Johnson and Biden.

Joining Corbyn outside the court on Wednesday, pseudo-left group Counterfire’s John Rees, the leading figure in the DEA campaign, stated that Assange’s “case has finally reached a serious court”—as if a purely legal approach backed by moral pressure can now finally secure his freedom and the lessons of the pseudo-legal vendetta waged against Assange for the past ten years can be dismissed. As his ally Tariq Ali told a DEA meeting in February 2020, “Hopefully as the case moves upwards to superior courts, we will find some judges who are prepared just to be decent.”

Nothing is left of this perspective. The Biden administration continues to seek Assange, the British courts are supporting its efforts and the WikiLeaks founder’s situation is increasingly desperate. If extradition to the US is to be prevented, now is the time for working people to intervene on his behalf. The fight for Julian Assange’s freedom is a fight against imperialist war and in defence of fundamental democratic rights.

The Socialist Equality Party in Britain, its sister parties, and the World Socialist Web Site call on all our supporters and readers to contact us and take up this struggle in earnest.

 

‘Looks very awful and ill’: Journalist tells RT he ‘couldn’t recognize’ Assange during High Court hearing on his extradition to US — RT World News

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‘Looks very awful and ill’: Journalist tells RT he ‘couldn’t recognize’ Assange during High Court hearing on his extradition to US — RT World News

Excerpt:

Journalist Richard Medhurst claims that he initially didn’t recognize Julian Assange, who looked “awful and ill,” as the WikiLeaks founder appeared in London’s High Court while the United States pushes to have him extradited.

Medhurst told RT said that he “literally did a double take” upon seeing Assange during the High Court preliminary hearing on Wednesday, which he was connected to remotely.

“I couldn’t recognize that it was Assange, he looked extremely old,” Medhurst declared, adding that the WikiLeaks founder looked so “awful and ill” that it took him a “minute” to realize it was Assange as medical witnesses testified that his “health has deteriorated and he’s been tortured” while in detention.

Assange’s voice also “did not sound very well,” according to Medhurst, who noted that “this is absolutely normal given the fact that he’s locked up in solitary confinement” and has been in “arbitrary detention now for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy, two years in Belmarsh Prison.”

“This is a journalist who’s not serving a sentence, he’s not a criminal, and he’s in a maximum-security prison in Britain’s Guantanamo Bay,” Medhurst protested, calling Assange’s imprisonment “completely unjust,” “a crime against press freedoms,” and “an affront against his personal health.”

 

Why This Fall Surge Will Be Worse Than You Think—A Doctor Explains | August 11

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US Facing a Deluge of COVID-19 Hospitalizations as Delta Variant Spreads Rapidly

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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/11/viru-a11.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

 

US Faces Resurgent COVID-19 Catastrophe - World Socialist Web Site

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US faces resurgent COVID-19 catastrophe - World Socialist Web Site

 EXCERPT:

The fact is that, for America’s workers, millions of whom are threatened with death and debilitation by the pandemic, the eradication of COVID-19 is an inescapable necessity.

The danger cannot be overstated, the surge will only be compounded further once schools reopen in the fall. Workers must immediately begin to organize rank-and-file committees to protect their own safety, fighting for the end of in-person instruction, the closure of non-essential businesses, and the stringent public health measures to contain the disease.

There is no solution to this crisis on a national basis, and a globally-coordinated fight to eradicate the disease in every country is required.

In the final analysis, the pandemic has proven that capitalism—with its feuding nation states and inhuman focus on the extraction of surplus value from the working class—is incompatible with the needs of human civilization.

 

The End Game - PopularResistance.Org

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The End Game - PopularResistance.Org

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is slowly dying in a UK prison, as the US maintains its fight to have him die in theirs – but there is hope.

A crush of TV news crews and demonstrators with placards are packed into the street outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court. It’s just before 11 on the morning of January 4, 2021; face masks against an invisible plague, puffer jackets and woollen beanies against London’s midwinter chill. Access to the courtroom has been heavily restricted, and for those assembled out here the only hints of what’s been happening inside have come from the handful of journalists watching a videolink and live-tweeting proceedings. And now, the twist.

“Oh my god,” tweets Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis. “No extradition.”

Shortly afterwards, against all expectations, Stella Moris emerges from the courtroom into the waiting media storm with a hint of a smile. “Please bear with me because I’ve had to rewrite my speech,” she tells the press pack. Lawyers representing her fiancé, imprisoned Australian publisher Julian Assange, have just defeated an attempt to have him extradited from London’s Belmarsh prison to face charges under the Espionage Act in the United States. The US Department of Justice is seeking to jail him for 175 years.

The shock judgement leads news bulletins in every time zone on Earth.

“I had hoped that today would be the day Julian would come home,” Moris says. “Today is not that day. But that day will come soon. As long as Julian has to endure suffering and isolation as an unconvicted prisoner in Belmarsh prison, and as long as our children continue to be bereft of their father’s love and affection, we cannot celebrate. We will celebrate the day he comes home.”

The ruling feels like the circuit breaker that could bring this tortuous marathon to an end. “Today’s victory is the first step towards justice in this case,” Moris says.

Jennifer Robinson has been on Assange’s legal team since the heady days of 2010, and thought she’d seen it all. “The judgement was the right outcome, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s terrifying, because [the magistrate] agrees with the US prosecutors on every single point on free speech and the ability to prosecute and extradite journalists,” she tells me. “It means that any government, anywhere around the world, can seek to prosecute and extradite a British-based or British citizen journalist who has published truthful information.”

In an astonishing cave-in to US prosecutors, the court agreed that despite most of the publications having occurred while Assange was in the United Kingdom and Europe, “the conduct in this case occurred in the US because the publication of the materials caused harm to the interests of the US”.

“Sitting in the courtroom and listening to the judge accept the US grounds was hard,” Moris tells me months after addressing the press outside the court. “I’d prepared for the worst, but my instinct was that the US could not possibly get away with this travesty. So, when the final part of the judgement was read out, it was an incredible relief. It was the first time that there was a rupture to this trajectory that there had been for the past 10 years closing in on him.”

It’s a shocking precedent: the judgement accepted US prosecutors’ arguments that national-security journalism can be considered a form of espionage no matter where it occurs, leaving other publishers and journalists open to being charged as spies.

This chilling finding had a catch: the magistrate recognised that burying people alive in the US prison system could kill them. “I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr Assange’s mental health would deteriorate causing him to commit suicide with the ‘single-minded determination’ of his autism spectrum disorder … I find that the mental condition of Mr Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”

Oppressive. Surely now the incoming Biden administration would reverse Trump’s decision to prosecute. For the first time in recent memory, there’s hope.

It was January 2010, and US Army Private First Class Chelsea Manning wrote a brief cover note originally intended for The Washington Post. “These items have already been sanitized of any source identifying information. This is one of the most significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21^st century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.”

Neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times was interested. Manning turned to a contact on an encrypted chat service. Although it has never been proven, court filings later allege she was talking to Julian Assange at WikiLeaks.

Back then, three innovations had already set WikiLeaks apart from other publishers: the use of encrypted dropboxes to protect the identity of sources, partnerships with established media organisations to add audience reach and institutional protection, and a preference for making whole archives public rather than curating a drip-feed. “You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism,” argued Assange.

WikiLeaks had been publishing large-scale drops of inside information since 2006: a quick skim through the timeline brings up entries such as “The looting of Kenya under President Moi” and “Footage of 1995 disaster at the Japanese Monju nuclear reactor”. The real opening act, the one that would put it on the map, was one that PFC Manning provided.

Glitchy footage from 2007 shows US Apache gunships unleashing cannon fire on a group of men on a street corner on the east side of Baghdad. “Look at those dead bastards,” chuckles one of the airmen. Two of the dead bastards will later be revealed as Reuters war correspondent Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant, Saeed Chmagh. The helicopters continue their slow orbit around the dusty carnage, with casual banter and radio traffic soundtracking the unblinking video feed. A short time later they obliterate a van attempting to evacuate the wounded; when US ground units arrive, it’s revealed the cannon fire has seriously injured two children in the van. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one of the helicopter crew quips, as soldiers hundreds of feet below him cordon off the area and evacuate the wounded children to a field hospital.

Just another day in occupied Baghdad.

WikiLeaks released the clip in April 2010 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, catapulting the horrors of the Iraq invasion back into the headlines. They titled it “Collateral Murder”, a riff on anodyne military terminology reclassifying screaming, bleeding human beings into “collateral damage”: unfortunate and regrettable, but necessary and forgettable.

Like the collateral murder victims, the US soldiers picking through the dead and dying are nameless in the video, anonymous pixels smudging their way across the screen. One of them, US Army Specialist Ethan McCord, later co-signed an open letter of reconciliation and responsibility to the families of the dead and to the Iraqi people more broadly: “… [w]hat was shown in the WikiLeaks video only begins to depict the suffering we have created … we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region.”

For those of us comfortably distant from the sound of gunfire, the magnitude of these everyday occurrences began to dawn two months later when WikiLeaks published 91,000 classified documents known as the Afghan War Diaries. Three months later, 391,000 documents making up the stupendous Iraq War Logs were published. A month later, a quarter of a million diplomatic cables from the far-flung arms of the US State Department went live: the first instalment of “Cablegate”, an archive that would eventually grow to nearly three million cables. In astonishing detail, the whole central nervous system of the world’s sole superpower was being laid bare.

“What makes the revelations of secret communications potent is that we were not supposed to read them,” Assange wrote. “Diplomatic cables are not produced in order to manipulate the public, but are aimed at elements of the rest of the US state apparatus, and are therefore relatively free from the distorting influence of public relations.”

Now in partnership with The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as Le Monde, The Guardian and many others, WikiLeaks kept up an astonishing tempo of bombshell revelations. Assange made the cover of Time magazine; he was suddenly one of the most recognisable people in the world.

Like depth charges going off one after another, the disclosures had profound effects. The fiction that the occupation of Afghanistan was going well was permanently shattered: “The discussion became, how could we get out?” Assange told an audience at the Sydney Opera House by videolink in 2013. “It is a debacle, a quagmire – how can we get out? The discussion from then on saw a very important shift in perception of that war.”

Negotiations over continuing immunity for US personnel in Iraq were taking place against saturation coverage of a State Department cable detailing a US airstrike called in to destroy evidence of the massacre of an Iraqi family in 2006. “Prime Minister Maliki specifically cited that document as a reason for why immunity could no longer be extended,” Assange reminded the audience. “So Cablegate was critical in ending the Iraq war. Perhaps it would have ended sometime later, who knows? But that year, Cablegate ended it.”

The truth of regime collusion with the US government helped fan an uprising in Tunisia that cascaded into the Arab Spring. Details of provisions contained in secret drafts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership helped galvanise opposition and crash the deal. Communities of solidarity and resistance, empowered with the truth, organised in collective self-defence.

Arguably, the enduring value of these disclosures didn’t turn on the high-profile needles in the haystack. The real value is that finally there was a map of the whole. “Only by approaching this corpus holistically – over and above the documentation of each individual abuse, each localised atrocity – does the true human cost of empire heave into view,” Assange wrote.

Other than the US political establishment and its obedient proxies in Canberra, nobody doubted that this reportage was in the public interest. In late 2011, when Australia’s Walkley Foundation added an award to the expanding list of international media prizes received by WikiLeaks, it noted the “courageous and controversial commitment to the finest traditions of journalism: justice through transparency”.

Assange joined the Walkleys ceremony by videolink from London, striking a sombre tone. “Our lives have been threatened, attempts have been made to censor us, banks have attempted to shut off our financial lifeline,” he told the gathering. “Censorship in this manner has been privatised. Powerful enemies are testing the water to see how much they can get away with, seeing how they can abuse the system that they’ve integrated with to prevent scrutiny.”His speech on that long-distant awards night later assumed a mournful prescience. “Well, the answer is: they can get away with too much.”

In December 2012, in London’s posh Knightsbridge district, I joined Julian Assange and a handful of family and friends in the Ecuadorian embassy for a strange Christmas in exile. I’d first met Assange more than a year earlier, in the final months of legal skirmishing prior to the government of Ecuador accepting that “retaliation by the country or countries that produced the information … may endanger [his] safety, integrity, and even his life”. A long white van packed with surveillance equipment was parked in the street outside; it was confronting to make eye contact with uniformed officers in the adjacent building when I drew the curtains back for a moment. Sitting directly in the focal range of the most powerful military intelligence agencies in the world was an experience I was only just beginning to get my head around: for Assange, his team and the embassy staff, that was their life now.

By then we’d spent a year trying to wrench some flicker of interest out of the Australian government using the various tools a Senate crossbencher can bring to bear. Media work, speeches, motions, direct approaches to ministers, long late-night sessions in budget ­estimates committee hearings. Prime Minister Julia Gillard declared the WikiLeaks website “illegal” before being contradicted by the Australian Federal Police. Attorney-general Robert McClelland floated the idea of ­revoking Assange’s passport until that idea was scotched by ­foreign minister Kevin Rudd.

It was a shit-show.

Subsequent government messaging quickly coagulated around two key lines: “We are confident that Mr Assange will receive due process in any legal proceedings”, and “Mr Assange is receiving consular assistance, as is the right of any Australian citizen”. Consular assistance – as though he’s some backpacker in Bali with a lost passport – and due process within the unimpeachable British legal system. Successive prime ministers have played this dead bat as governments have come and gone; all the while the walls slowly closed in around Assange.

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you,” Oscar Wilde once advised. In his public appearances Assange can present as articulate and hyper-focused, as someone who chooses words with great care, but not always as someone who’d make you laugh. This earnest disposition has been warped out of all recognition in an endless series of lurid documentaries, tell-all books and tabloid hit-pieces painting him anywhere along the spectrum from inscrutable cyber-savant to high-tech Bond villain. In person it was a relief to discover Julian Assange to be warm, thoughtful and bloody funny.

This is only worth mentioning because for more than a decade Assange and those around him have been subjected to a systematic campaign of reputational mutilation. In 2011 an appalling pitch deck carrying the logos of Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies was leaked to WikiLeaks. In here we find the basic plan: “Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organisation. Submit fake documents and call out the error … Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities. Sustained pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt among moderates.”

Private security contractor Stratfor added this advice – also subsequently leaked – in 2012: “Pile on. Move him from country to country to face various charges for the next 25 years.”

Even as these suggestions were being made, ­allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden were ­reactivated against Assange, forming the basis of nine years of “­preliminary investigation”. The surreal procedural delays and unexplained obstructions by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service would eventually be ruled as a form of “arbitrary detention” by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. No charges were ever laid.

Nils Melzer is the United Nations special rapporteur on torture: it is his job to call to account the worst humanity can do. In May 2019 he visited Assange in Belmarsh prison, after the Australian’s removal from the embassy, with two medical professionals trained in assessing victims of torture and ill-treatment. “In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution,” he said, “I have never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.

“It was obvious that Mr Assange’s health has been seriously affected by the extremely hostile and arbitrary environment he has been exposed to for many years,” Melzer bluntly concluded. “Mr Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.”

Long-time friend of Assange and Australian activist Felicity Ruby was named as a surveillance target by CIA contractor UC Global, currently before the ­Spanish courts for spying on Assange during his long years of limbo in the embassy. She recalls visiting him in 2019: “Being inside the Belmarsh dungeon for less than two hours still haunts me today. After weeks of ­waiting to get on the list, I got the privilege of being fingerprinted twice, my mouth and ears searched before passing through corridors, gates, razor wire and mesh, to finally arrive to a room full of plastic chairs – green for the prisoners, blue for the visitors opposite. Belmarsh was designed for sensory deprivation and torment and it’s working; he is wasting away in that COVID­-infested cage.”

The adept campaign to divert attention away from the content of the WikiLeaks publications to focus on the character of the publishers has now mutated into something truly menacing.

Jennifer Robinson describes how the process itself slowly becomes the punishment. “If we fail in fighting his extradition, he will be sent to the United States where there will be a criminal trial, there will be appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, which could take another 10 years or more in the end to be proven right in a case that should never have been brought.

“They are punishing him by putting him through these processes, which have been inherently unfair and abusive, and have been dragged out over years and years.”

US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden concurs, warning of the risk that Assange will “remain in prison indefinitely while the [Department of Justice] endlessly files meritless appeals out of spite”.

Stella Moris is blunt when I ask how her partner is holding up. “He’s suffering,” she says. “It’s a daily struggle, to wake up and not know when and how it’s going to end. Julian’s incredibly strong and draws strength from knowing that he’s on the right side of history, that he’s being punished for doing the right thing. He’s a fighter, but no person would remain unaffected by this progressive closing in on him, trying to break him in every respect.”

Assange has now been under some form of house arrest, political asylum or imprisonment for 11 years. Electronic ankle bracelets and long white vans have given way to solitary confinement in a freezing maximum-security prison. “I’m slowly dying here,” he told friend Vaughan Smith in a rare phone call on Christmas Eve 2020.

The Westminster Magistrates’ Court agrees. Continuing down this oppressive path is going to kill Julian Assange.

Yet within days of her judgement the same magistrate refused bail while US authorities considered their appeal options, leaving Assange still trapped in a cell.

“Due process,” recite dead-eyed Australian officials when invited to comment on this slow-motion assassination. “Consular assistance.”

---

There’s a reason why the previous US administration, in which Joe Biden served as vice president, had stopped short of laying charges. Matthew Miller, an official in Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, explained in a 2017 interview that they called it the “New York Times problem”: “How do you prosecute Julian Assange for publishing classified information and not The New York Times?”

In 2017 Jennifer Robinson was present in the Ecuadorian embassy in London when Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Donald Trump associate Charles Johnson arrived to make Assange an offer: give up the source of the 2016 leaks detailing a compromised nomination process within the Democratic National Committee, in exchange for a “pardon, assurance or a commitment” to end the investigation into WikiLeaks.

“They said that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet Mr Assange to discuss a proposal,” Robinson testified to the extradition hearings in 2020.

Assange refused to burn his source. And for the Trump administration, The New York Times winding up as collateral damage in a WikiLeaks prosecution no longer seemed like a deal-breaker. With a green light from a more compliant regime in Ecuador than the one that had offered shelter back in 2012, Metropolitan Police was given the go-ahead: after weeks of rumour and media speculation, Assange was ripped from the embassy and bundled into a van with a copy of Gore Vidal’s History of the National Security State in hand.

With the subsequent unsealing of the indictments relating to the Chelsea Manning leaks, president Trump’s rhetorical war on the press abruptly transformed into a legal one. “Obtaining and publishing information that the government would prefer to keep secret is vital to journalism and democracy,” wrote Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, in 2019. “The new indictment is a deeply troubling step toward giving the government greater control over what Americans are allowed to know.”

Fast forward to June 2021: in an astonishing and under-reported development, the US government’s star witness suddenly blows a huge hole in the prosecution’s case. Convicted child molester and embezzler Sigurdur Thordarson confesses to an Icelandic newspaper that key parts of his evidence were made up. The government’s central argument, that Assange secured classified material through solicitation and conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, is based on testimony that Thordarson now admits was bullshit.

“This is the end of the case against Julian Assange,” Snowden tweets.

“Enough information has emerged to show how hollow and political the entire case is,” Kristinn Hrafnsson tells me. This old-school investigative journalist, who cut his teeth in the Icelandic print and broadcast sector, threw his hand in with WikiLeaks in 2010 to help steer the release of “Collateral Murder”. Since 2018 he’s been the organisation’s editor-in-chief. “The pressure on the Biden administration to overturn the Trump legacy and drop the case is mounting.”

Trump and his appointees are gone, but the “New York Times problem” is no longer a hypothetical. An unprecedented alliance of media unions, press freedom advocates and global human rights organisations has now mobilised to urge Biden and his new attorney general, Merrick Garland, to drop the appeal. In February 2021, an open letter to the incoming administration was signed by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, the American Civil Liberties Union and a dozen other high-profile organisations. “We share the view that the government’s indictment of [Assange] poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad,” the letter reads. “The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely.”

Here in Australia, an unlikely alliance is bringing heightened pressure to bear on the federal government to move beyond empty promises of consular assistance. “The case against Assange has always been politically motivated with the intent of curtailing free speech, criminalising journalism and sending a clear message to future whistleblowers and publishers that they too will be punished if they step out of line,” the federal president of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Marcus Strom, said in a statement. Assange has been a member of the media union since 2007, but the MEAA isn’t a lone voice within the trade union movement.

“The charges against Assange relate entirely to his work, which brought to light serious war crimes committed by the US military in Iraq,” reads a March 2021 resolution passed by the Australian Council of Trade Unions. “Continuing to prosecute him for this work constitutes an attack on journalists, journalism and the public right to know. We urge the Australian Government to do all in its power to lobby US authorities to end their prosecution.”

The ACTU represents nearly two million Australian working people across 36 affiliated unions. It’s an organisation that rarely finds itself on the same side of an argument as Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. Nonetheless, here we are. “So what exactly are you going to extradite Julian Assange – a citizen of Australia – to the United States for?” Joyce asked rhetorically on a live TV cross. “For the actions of a third party … who gave him information which he then published? Surely that is no different to the newspapers who then published what was on WikiLeaks. Maybe they should all go to the United States to be tried under US law? I mean, where does this one stop?”

Joyce is a longstanding member of the Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group, a formal alliance of cross-party parliamentarians co-chaired by a former Office of National Assessments whistleblower, independent MP Andrew Wilkie. Early in 2021 representatives of the group met with Michael Goldman, chargé d’affaires at the US embassy in Canberra, to press the case. “The US’s pursuit of Mr Assange is obviously not in the public interest and must be dropped,” Wilkie said in a statement after the meeting.

“Where there is courage there is hope,” Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson wrote online. “We are building a campaign to bring Assange home.” At last, the campaign has spread beyond the crossbench, with fiery ALP backbencher Julian Hill setting the tone in parliament: “He has been locked up and confined for years, facing extradition to the US and an effective death sentence, on trumped-up, politically motivated charges … treated worse than those responsible for America’s war crimes in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, which he and WikiLeaks exposed.”

It appears the ALP leadership is listening. “Enough is enough,” Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese told a caucus meeting in February 2021. A resolution from the ALP national conference a month later confirmed: “Labor believes it is now time for this long drawn out case against Julian Assange to be brought to an end.”

This rare break in bipartisanship is one sign among many that establishment politicians are finally hearing the message. A strange accord of Greens, independents, Labor MPs and the Nationals deputy prime minister is now on the same page as grassroots organisers, the trade union movement, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Enough is enough.

“My message to other journalists,” Hrafnsson tells me, “is that you need to take note and take action, because it is in your interest to fight this case. This is not limited to the interests of Julian Assange or WikiLeaks: it will have an effect on the work journalists do in general, all over the world.”

Hundreds of grassroots actions have sparked up around the world as the magnitude of what’s at stake has caught the public imagination. The 2021 “Home Run for Julian” speaking tour gave Assange’s father, John Shipton, the opportunity to meet with curious crowds in dozens of towns across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

Yet a decade on from the Walkley awards night, the horizon of “justice through transparency” has darkened. The architects of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan – Bush, Blair and Howard – are free men, celebrated as elder statesmen against a backdrop of hundreds of thousands of dead men, women and children. The Australian Federal Police raided the ABC headquarters and the home of then News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst, hunting the sources of stories on war crimes in Afghanistan and expanded military surveillance of every one of us. Julian Assange turned 50 in July; the whole time you’ve been reading this article, he’s been in isolation in a maximum-security prison, locked in tortuous appeals and counter-appeals with no end in sight.

“The Australian government holds the key to Julian’s prison cell,” Stella Moris tells me on a late-night call from London. “If the Australian government intervened on Julian’s behalf, this would end. It can be reversed by popular pressure, and by pressure from Julian’s colleagues in the media, by constantly drawing attention to the fact that an innocent man is being persecuted for exposing state crimes.”

“Knowing you are out there fighting for me keeps me alive in this profound isolation,” wrote Assange in a letter to a supporter in 2019.

Transparency alone isn’t enough to ensure justice. It’s going to take a fight.

Scott Ludlam is an ICAN ambassador and a former Australian Greens senator for Western Australia.

 

Chacona a la Vida Bona, Juan de Arañés s. XVII. (Realizador: Rafael Cruz

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