The Oligarchy’s Attack On Assange Is A Battle Of State Secrecy Against Individual Liberty
It’d be a tough call, but if I had the choice between being tortured to death the way journalist Jamal Khashoggi was and the way Julian Assange is currently being tortured, I’d say “bring on the knives.” It would be painful, for sure, but it would be a much briefer form of torture, the yank-the-Band-Aid-off-quickly way to go.
There is a certain cold cruelty to be found in the modern approach that is even more terrifying than the hot savagery of Saudi theocracy. Power held in the hands of a cruel few still offers the possibility for human virtues such as mercy or compassion to be at play, whereas power invested in bureaucracy permits every member of the system to believe they have no obligation to their own morals but only to the higher power of the institution itself. The Western world has, for the greater part, distanced itself from the horrors of the older forms of authority. But it is rushing headlong into a new and potentially more terrifying one.
The very thrust of modern civilization has been towards increasing the rights of individuals while limiting the powers of governments. And I’m being liberal with the word “modern”, because it reaches back to the time of the Magna Carta in 1215. It reaches back even to the time of Hammurabi, whose code was written in c. 1792 B.C. and which sought to codify laws to which even the powerful must adhere.
After the Magna Carta, The United States Constitution was the next major milestone in advancing the rights of the individual (well, some individuals) while limiting the power and the right to secrecy of the government. A noble piece of paper for its time, one which we have for centuries used to advance the rights of the people to be in charge of their government. I don’t recall anything in the U.S. Constitution about the rights of intelligence agencies to privacy.
Our intelligence agencies fear that Julian Assange’s leaks are putting agents at risk. I rather think that they are trying to silence him, torture him, and possibly kill him not because of the risk he puts particular agents at but because they don’t want people knowing about the crimes the CIA is involved in.
But let us take them at their own word for the sake of argument, and for that sake alone. Never should we trust people with such power and such a degree of secrecy at their word for any other reason but for the sake of argument. Never for any other reason should we trust an agency whose former director admitted “…we lied, we cheated we stole… like, we had entire training courses.” If we must choose, it is far better to trust Assange based on his record than the CIA. But for the sake of argument, let us suppose Julian Assange put the lives of CIA operatives at risk.
Good. Because people who are responsible for drone bombing innocent civilians should not be able to do so in anonymity. People who murder from half a world away should not feel safe from reprisal. People who torture should not feel they can do so with utter impunity. No one should be above the law and that is precisely what those are who are sub rosa.
It is not that our intelligence agencies occasionally do bad things, it is that they primarily do bad things. If they did the occasional good thing, word would leak out. But the post-world-war history is the history of the CIA and the British equivalent doing bad, written in blood across the globe, in any place former colonies of the West tried to seize sovereignty. They epitomize the opposite of everything the advancement of liberal democracy was working towards. They are an anti-revolutionary force. They are THE anti-revolutionary force. They aim to bring us back to the era a hundred years ago where oligarchic rule was at the peak of its power.
And it is to a hundred-year-old law that they turned to to prosecute Julian Assange. It is the very same Espionage Act they used to prosecute Eugene V. Debs 105 years ago. Eugene Debs, the greatest threat the oligarchy and their two-party system faced at that time. The fact that the average person is unaware of his name or his place in history is evidence that the oligarchs never retreated far from the center of power.
The powerful will employ those who are the masters of law to find rationalizations for their actions, even if they have to go back a hundred years to one of the darkest eras of our country. Legalists will perplex and confound the average citizen with their superior knowledge of the arcane in order to hide the immorality of their actions. The experts will bury in law the obvious wrongness of their behavior.
It is time we move beyond the experts and their manipulations of the law and simply ask, “Is this right? Does this further the cause of individual freedoms in the face of oppressive governments?” We do not all need to become legal scholars, that is neither practical nor possible. Instead, we must strip away the arguments of the legalists and deal with the kind of morality that the common people can wrestle with. That is, if we want a nation ruled by the people — the common people — and not by an elite few who are permitted to work in secrecy and with immunity from the laws the rest of us are bound by.
If we wish to free ourselves, if we wish to continue our cultural evolution towards greater freedom for the individual and less for oppressive government, we must recognize that our own freedoms are inextricably entwined with Julian Assange’s.