Published: October 18, 2016
When the ruling class is in panic,
their first reaction is to hide the panic.
They react out of cynicism: when their
masks are revealed, instead of running around naked, they usually
point the finger at the mask they wear. These days the whole world
could witness a postmodern version of the infamous quote “Let them
eat cake”, attributed to Marie-Antoinette, queen of France during
the French Revolution.
As a reaction to WikiLeaks publishing his emails, John Podesta, the man behind Hillary Clinton’s campaign, posted a photo of a dinner preparation, saying “I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy”.
A similar version of vulgar cynicism
emerged earlier this month when Hillary Clinton reacted to the claim
that she reportedly wanted to “drone” WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange (“Can’t we just drone this guy?”) when she was the US
Secretary of State. Instead of denying her comments, Clinton said
that she doesn’t recall any such joke, “It would have been a joke
if it had been said, but I don’t recall that”.
One doesn’t have to read between the
lines to understand that if Hillary Clinton had said that, she would
have considered it a joke. But when emperors joke, it usually has
dire consequences for those who are the objects of their “humor.”
Cyber-war Not with Russia…but
WikiLeaks
During the last few months I have
visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London several
times and each time I came out of the Embassy, where he is spending
his fifth year in political asylum under legitimate fear he might be
extradited to the US, my thought was the following one: although he
lives, without his family, in a postmodern version of solitary
confinement (even prisoners are allowed to walk for up to one hour a
day), although he has no access to fresh air or sunlight for more
than 2000 days, although the UK government recently denied him safe
passage to a hospital for an MRI scan, if his access to the internet
would be cut off this would be the most severe attack on his physical
and mental freedom.
It’s Now “Illegal” to Possess Wikileaks Documents: CNN
It’s Now “Illegal” to Possess Wikileaks Documents: CNN
The last time I saw him, which was only
two weeks ago, he expressed the fear that, because he had already
published leaks concerning US elections and with more to come, the US
might find various ways to silence him, including pressuring Ecuador
or even shutting down the internet.
What seemed a distant possibility only two weeks ago, soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When the Obama administration recently
announced that it is, as Biden said, planing an “unprecedented
cyber covert action against Russia”, the first victim was not
Putin, but precisely Julian Assange whose internet was cut off
just a day after Biden’s self-contradictory proclamation.
No wonder Edward Snowden reacted immediately by saying that “nobody told Joe Biden what ‘covert
operation’ means.
According to the U.S. Department of
Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a covert
operation is “an operation that is so planned and executed as to
conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor.”
It is no secret anymore that the
Ecuadorian government has come under extreme pressure since Assange
leaked the Democratic National Committee email database. We
don’t know yet whether the US pressured Ecuador to shut down the
internet, but it is clear that the present US government and the
government to come is fighting a war with WikiLeaks which is all but
“covert”. Is it really a coincidence that Julian Assange’s
internet access was cut off shortly after publication of Clinton’s
Goldman Sachs speeches?
If at the beginning we still had a
“soft” version of postmodern McCarthyism, with Hillary calling
everyone opposed to her campaign a Russian spy (not only Assange, but
also Donald Trump and Jill Stein), then with Obama’s recent
intervention it became more serious.
With Obama’s threat of a cyber-war,
the “soft” McCarthyism didn’t only acquire geopolitical
significance, but at the same time a new mask was revealed: Obama is
obviously trying to cement the public debate and make the Russian
threat “real”, or at least to use it as a weapon in order to help
Clinton to get elected. Moreover, this new twist in something that
has already become much more than only US elections (US elections are
never only US elections!), shows not only how Obama is ready to
strengthen Hillary’s campaign, but it also reveals that a cyber war
is already in the making.
It is not a cyber war with Russia, but
with WikiLeaks.
And it is not the first time.
What would Clausewitz say?
In 2010, when the Collateral Murder video was published, the Afghan and Iraq war logs were
released, and we witnessed one of the most sinister attacks on
freedom of speech in recent history. VISA, Mastercard, Diners,
American Express and Paypal imposed a banking blockade on WikiLeaks,
although WikiLeaks had not been charged with any crime at either
state, federal or international level. So if the US government
successfully convinced payment companies representing more than 97%
of the global market to shut down an independent publisher, why
wouldn’t they pressure Ecuador or any other state or company to cut
off the internet?
The US is not only rhetorically trying
to “get” Assange (it is worth to check out the Assassinate Assange video for evidence of the verbal masturbation of US
officials), he poses a serious threat to the major elite factions in
the US to remain in power. No wonder panic is rising in the US, which
is now going even so far that a 16-year-old boy in Britain has
been arrested on criminal charges related to the alleged hacking of
email accounts used by CIA director John Brennan, which WikiLeaks
published in October 2016.
What WikiLeaks obviously successfully
challenged–and maybe one day (“history is written by the
victors”, remember?) it will be learned in military strategy– is
what the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz
would call the “centre of gravity” (Schwerpunkt), which is the
“central feature of the enemy’s power”.
Instead of speaking about the Russians, we should start speaking about the Schwerpunkt of the actual leaks, their real essence. Just take the following quotes by Hillary Clinton exposed by WikiLeaks, which reveal her true nature and the politics behind her campaign: “We are going to ring China with missile defence”, “I want to defend fracking” and climate change environmentalists “should get a life”, “you need both a public and a private position”, “my dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”.
Continue reading here: Counterpunch.org
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