Assange, material interests and rational discourse

There's a good article by Seamus Milne in the Guardian today. “Don't lose sight of why the US is out to get Julian Assange”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/21/why-us-is-out-to-get-assange?

I commented:

This article is simple and straightforward. Its foundation is the potential consequences for Assange of the material threat posed by his Wikileaks activity to the material interests of the US and its allies, including Britain and Sweden. These consequences are manifestly terrifying. The most evidence for this is the treatment being handed out to Bradley Manning and the whole procedure of extraordinary rendition. In the name of proportion it considers this aspect of the affair to outweigh the elements touted as central by the anti-Assange lobby - law, the legal system, and the rights of women. And the need for justice to be enforced to the letter. Proportionality reveals that this mountain of abstractions is wobbling atop a speck of fly shit in terms of substantial violation of law, legality and the rights of women - the shit is there, but if we compare every component of the accusations being made with similar or worse misdemeanours we know to be committed all day every day but which are never brought to court or given the same headline treatment, then we can see it is a speck of fly shit. No serious drive to discourage rape or other violence against women would use the methods or tone of the anti-Assange campaign or spray ideological filth all over the arena. 

In this affair substantial material interests are at stake, and it's worth noting that in such conflicts rational discourse is not the way things are done. People fight for their interests (or what they think are their interests) using any means they can. The British state spends thousands of pounds on an unprecedented show of police force around the Ecuadorian embassy, for instance. No rational discourse there. 

What we can do, in the interests of rationality, is to analyse the degree of reason in the arguments put forward by the conflicting sides. Where substantial state interests are concerned there is no such thing as an impartial judge, history is clear on that, so our analysis won't decide any conflict, but it will show us which side is closer to reality and the truth, and so which side is most likely to emerge victorious in the long run.

The US, Britain and Sweden will claim they are closest to truth and justice even while they are tumbling into the dustbin of history, and will heckle and bully the world to believe them.

But they look more and more like incompetent enemy agent Chico Marx in Duck Soup when he says: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

On Julian Assange seeking asylum in Ecuador

There's a trite little article in the Guardian purporting to give a Swedish view of the Assange case.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-few-friends-left-sweden
I commented:

Karin Olsson ignores the most important factors in this case.

The first and most obvious - the elephant in the room, the big picture - is the proportionality. 

Assange is NOT under official suspicion of any crime in Sweden. He is NOT charged with any crime, let alone absconding from a trial or a sentence. The offences in relation to which he is wanted for questioning BEAR NO RELATION to the issues relating to his fear of a miscarriage of justice leading to his rendition to the USA, neither in substance nor proportionality. Potential exemplary punishment of bad sexual behaviour during an otherwise consensual encounter would be better exacted in a case WITHOUT THE POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC ASPECTS of this one. 

In this case the severity and seriousness of the political and strategic tensions involved are beyond dispute, which can't be said for the severity and seriousness of the alleged sexual crimes involved. 

Sweden has a concrete record of handing people over to the USA in collaboration with the CIA in breach of international law - the case of the extraordinary rendition of two Egyptians in 2001 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Sweden) is the most flagrant.

The USA has demonstrated very clearly the kind of treatment Assange can expect if it gets hold of him by its treatment of Bradley Manning. Manning is alleged to have supplied Wikileaks with a great number of secret US documents. Assange is the head of Wikileaks and therefore responsible for annulling the secrecy not just of these documents but all the documents published on Wikileaks, most (but not all) of which are diplomatically and politically embarrassing to the USA. So Assange can reasonably expect even harsher treatment. 

And since threats should taken into account where a reasonable assessment of fear is concerned, the threats of execution and assassination made by senior public officials in the US are highly relevant.

There's a good article in the Guardian by Mark Weisbrot about the situation now:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-asylum-ecuador

US-backed piracy and murder - Israel rapes the Gaza peace convoy

In response to a long and toothless thread on a discussion group I wrote:


Israel's arguments remind me of nothing so much as the justifications given by the Argentine junta and the South African apartheid racists for their brutal and inhuman actions. And however "sincere" individual South African whites might have been in their support for these arguments that doesn't make the slightest difference to their responsibility for these actions. I don't consider Argentine supporters of the junta to have been sincere in the least. And I think that any sincere Israeli supporters of the Israeli military and those giving them their orders in this murderous act of piracy on the high seas are either wilfully ignorant and indifferent ("they're only Arabs, and anyway they bring it on themselves" - I've heard it first hand) or completely numbed to any sense of proportionality in political interaction including acts of war.

Israel exceeds the vileness of both the apartheid regime, the Argentine junta and (for what it's worth, the old East German regime) for several reasons. The first is the total support in words and actions and arms supplies by the most powerful nation on earth, the US. US support for the junta was less open, and the SA racists were only supported openly by a second-rate imperialist power - Britain. Every brazen Big Lie by Israel is swallowed whole (camels against gnats) by the States, and not a cent is withheld, not a carbine or bulldozer or bomb or helicopter or "adviser". Legions of university-trained, highly experienced, smooth-talking lawyers fill the newspapers and airwaves with sophistical gunk - brains targeting humanity like those of the American war industry, instead of working on solving problems of disease and poverty that kill thousands of people daily. The wall being erected (much of it already in place) between privileged Israeli areas and discriminated Palestinian areas is larger and more jealously guarded than the infamous Berlin Wall, and even than the much bigger wall the British occupying forces erected for similar reasons in Belfast. Oh, and Israel has the Bomb, which neither Argentina, nor racist South Africa (not quite), nor the GDR had.

All this makes me sympathize with those who refer to the rulers of Israel and their supporters as Zionazis. This is not the case, politically or historically - Israel is a very different kettle of rotten fish from Nazi Germany, as Aristotle would be able to tell us if he were around today. But the symptoms of callous degeneracy are there for all to see and ignore at their peril. Israel is the child of imperialism and is allowed to act out its bad boy tantrums by its indulgent parents (and by god I've seen Tantrums on the boardwalk at Coney Island). And all because it's an invaluable fortress for imperialism - locking the Eastern Mediterranean, keeping a lid on popular sentiment in its neighbouring Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan), and constituting a gigantic military base for the US that allows it to threaten the whole of the Middle East by proxy - most recently by howling for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against a US bogeyman de jour, Iran, which the US can distance itself from (plausible deniability) on the basis that it's "just a tantrum". Not to mention the cataracts of pus pumped out by its propaganda machinery. Or the (unmentionable even by Israeli standards, and that's saying something!) deeds of the Israeli secret service Moshad - KGB, Stasi and Securitate eat your hearts out...

And the rot won't stop with a Two-State solution. We need a single, united Palestine, independent, secular, and democratic. But it won't happen given the current balance of power in the world. Divide and rule coupled with military intimidation and a lack of alternatives - too bad Iraq and Saudi don't do the job as well as Israel - will see to that.

And in the meantime, as Pete wrote: 

Voltaire had a word for it:

Cet animal est très méchant,

Quand on l'attaque il se défend.

(This animal is very evil -

Attacked, it fights back like the devil.)

Chops