Thursday, October 6, 2011

The smearing of a revolution



The Assange case demonstrates one thing – western claims to support democracy and the mainstream media’s defence of freedom of speech are entirely hypocritical.

By John Pilger

The New Statesman

"....However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a "grave danger" to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a temporary surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the "torturous" dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive "He broke the law".....

The Guardian's Hackgate exposures were a tour de force; the Murdoch empire may disintegrate as a result. But, with or without Murdoch, a media consensus endures that echoes, from the BBC to the Sun, a corrupt, warmongering political establishment. Assange's crime has been to threaten this consensus: those who fix the "parameters" of news and political ideas, and whose authority as media commissars is challenged by the revolution of the internet. The prize-winning former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook has experience of both worlds.

“The media, at least the supposedly left-wing component," he writes, "should be cheering on this revolution . . . And yet, mostly they are trying to co-opt, tame or subvert it [even] to discredit and ridicule the harbingers of the new age . . . Some of [the campaign against Assange] clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle [about] how information should be controlled a generation hence [and] the gatekeepers maintaining their control.""

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