We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, September 2, 2018

An Online Vigil in Defense of Julian Assange With Daniel Ellsberg, Craig Murray, Bill Binney and Ray McGovern

Click here to access article and lengthy (nearly 4 hrs) video posted on ConsortiumNews which was conceived by an international group of people and organized as United in solidarity for Julian Assange. They are rightfully concerned about the whistleblower-in-chief and the ongoing Empire's vendetta against him. 

This is a monumental task for this movement to protect and free Julian Assange from further harassment by agents of the Empire. However, it is evident to me that they are operating with a limited budget: the quality of the recordings, the lack of publicity up to now in alternative news media, and other mishaps. I wish to make clear that I am wholly in support of such actions even though I am offering some criticisms.

I have only listened to the first interview with Bill Binney conducted by New Zealander Suzie Dawson, and thus my commentary mostly applies to him although I think his thoughts are representative of the group as a whole.

Binney, a former employee of the National Security Agency (NSA), the Empire's primary spy agency, expands with his intimate knowledge of the NSA and the threat posed to them by whistleblowers such as Julian Assange. He offers numerous examples of NSA's lies, violations of laws and the Constitution, conspiracies by the NSA to keep Congress from meddling into their criminal affairs of running the Empire, and keeping the public in ignorance about their nefarious activities. However, his remarks only suggest the corruption of government by powerful private agencies and individuals, and the necessity to fight this corruption which he argues is leading to a "totalitarian government". Although at one point he refers to a "deep state", he nowhere expands on the implications of this. 

This ideological position precisely identifies where most of the US educated left exist. Although they might occasionally use words like "deep state", they refuse to believe that the concept refers to anything other than private entities trying to take over what, in their mind, is a genuine democratic government. They simply don't believe that our their (capitalist) government was established as a democratic facade which hides the rule by a class of self-serving owners and made possible by the system their ancestors created called capitalism.

For anything of significance to change in our nation and its Empire requires a rejection of the entire liberal mythology and the recognition of the reality of rule by a self-serving tiny class. I am not referring to the modern sense of liberal, but to the classic liberalism of the self-serving capitalist revolutionaries like John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton that still exists today.  The modern sense of liberalism is simply a deceptive construct to distract people from reality.

I am convinced that only ordinary people who, after suffering so much pain and poverty, finally reject capitalism and take matters in their own hands to establish a system that works for them. This conviction means that "educated" upper-middle class leftists can not alone accomplish any significance change. They are frequently too indoctrinated and compromised by the rewards provided to them by ruling capitalists to risk anything for the establishment of another system. At least I hope that they can free Julian Assange.