Why Asylum For Julian Assange Is Central To Today’s Politics: Torture and the American Character

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Friday August 17, 2012 23:18 by James Justice

If there were a lightening rod to energize political apathy in this heavily propagandized world democratic right of dissent, such as to challenge corrupt government practice, should be it. But certain U. S. leaders’ apparent intention to incarcerate and punish Julian Assange for leaking U.S. secrets puts our black methods in the limelight. What were his motives and equally what has been the character of U.S. foreign policy? It seems revelations were meant to highlight U.S. corruption as people around the world have come to fear American brutality. Many around the globe know the United States as a rogue bully of an empire that regularly uses intimidation to get its way. It takes a real macho government to push around countries like Ecuador, Sweden and lapdog England. As has been shown over and over the United States does not respect law, legal distinctions or diplomatic norms.

Why Asylum For Julian Assange Is Central To Today’s Politics: Torture and the American Character

By James Justice

If there were a lightening rod to energize political apathy in this heavily propagandized world democratic right of dissent, such as to challenge corrupt government practice, should be it. But certain U. S. leaders’ apparent intention to incarcerate and punish Julian Assange for leaking U.S. secrets puts our black methods in the limelight. What were his motives and equally what has been the character of U.S. foreign policy? It seems revelations were meant to highlight U.S. corruption as people around the world have come to fear American brutality. Many around the globe know the United States as a rogue bully of an empire that regularly uses intimidation to get its way. It takes a real macho government to push around countries like Ecuador, Sweden and lapdog England. As has been shown over and over the United States does not respect law, legal distinctions or diplomatic norms.

Of course England was that way too, plenty of times, and continues to also see itself as some important state of almighty power. No wonder their lapdogs are so ready to kowtow to U.S. State Department demands? How different is this then their chicken-shit, go-along on the illegal attack on Iraq? (See “I don’t mean to say I told you so, but…” by Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy Magazine posted February 8, 2010 at ForeignPolicy.com where he explains that both George Bush and Tony Blair admitted the Iraq War was for Israel). So naturally given the kind of illicit relation England has maintained with the corrupt governments like the U.S. and Israel it is little wonder their big, bad wolf is huffing and puffing to blow down the Ecuador embassy.

The Julian Assange story is about State power versus individual rights in a much larger context and a long historical time frame. And it is not at all surprising fear Assange legitimately has stems from well documented U.S. practice to kidnap, rendition, and torture, as well as its illegal tampering with the rights of other countries, dictating who should be in power, what kind of economic system they should have, various illegal wars, etc. This then is another U.S. rendition flight, and we know too many European governments have already shown their willingness to go along with this kind of criminal enterprise of rendition and torture, so it shouldn’t surprise us European leaders, and zero American leaders, have the backbone to stand up to our criminal and imperial state of the United States.

Torture , even under Obama, is still part of American policy. This is a fact that shows us the Democratic Party too has sold out the American people. This is a fact that shows us 99% of Congress should be court marshaled. (Listen to Alfred McCoy interview at Scott Horton Show @ ScottHorton.com). Alfred W. McCoy is author of Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad: How Two Administrations and Both Parties Made Illegality the American Way of Life (Also see Perfecting Illegality at TomDispatch.com.) In case you don’t know, Scott Horton is one highly informed interviewer who talks to people who are truly in the know and tries to get political awareness out there against the psychopathology of lies too much part of the mainstream media. He is also associated with another great website, namely Justin Raimondo’s AntiWar.com. (These highly critical websites of real issues and ideas could use more audience and financial backing.)

Are we so self-centered of a country the only thing that will mobilize a political cause is either fear of the draft (Vietnam War) or fear of financial serfdom like students angry about student loans? Do only egocentric issues get people to care? Are you ready to stand by and watch the likely manufactured lies about some Assange rape (likely by intelligence operatives or assets), and equally how small nations are being bullying by the U.S. with much criminal and torture blood on its hands? How much torture and illegal war is the world going to tolerate before people stand up to what is seriously rogue about U.S. foreign policy—and in respect to the Middle East too often instigated or approved by rightwing Israel? Do we wait for those conditions that produced Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago because after all you never thought it could happen here? (Or is that not enough self-interest to realize this country has employed brutal dictators around the world but somehow we think they would spare the little guys here in the states?)

We are currently being lied to by the State Department and equally the mainstream media about what is going on in Syria and elsewhere in nearby countries, even while we are being “gamed” and “terrorized” by the likes of a conceited Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk, playing their belligerent and self-righteous card of attacking Iran on more lies about a nuclear threat—why because Iranians, like Iraqis, sympathized with the Palestinians and supported their cause.

Not that U.S. demand for cheap oil and our culture’s materialist lifestyle has not equally played its part of U.S. elephant stepping on every form of creature elsewhere. Americans are spoiled par excellence yet somehow naively assumed others in poorer countries did not desire being spoiled in material wealth themselves, that is to exacerbate wars and proxy wars for resources. Corporations and stock holder greed also has been a major force in world violence and exploitation. The U.S. has been running the world like a criminal organization for a very long time, for example our interference of Iranian internal government back in 1950s when we backed a dictator (and this is the context we need to understand Julian Assange and Bradley Manning and Wikileaks).

Much of our overstretch of U.S. budget (will politicians talk about this real financial drain) has been destroying our own economy, for the sake of fighting illegal wars, for fossil fuel corporations, and for a Zionist Israel, that is a culture that does not share our democratic values of separating church and state and treating all as equals?

Why should we Americans support one form of theocracy versus another? Israel is a theocracy like several Muslim states despite all the rationalization and propaganda that tries to deny it. All three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism, are based on authoritarian principles that ultimately came from the mentality of the Torah (as inspired by ancient tribal psychology). To recognize the true meanings of symbolic stories in the Old Testament is not just to identify with its stories of sacred value, but to realize there is a dark side to Judeo-Christianity that goes beyond the sheep skin of ethical life style and respect for community norms. All three religions from the Middle East are related in psychology.

Ask yourself, why would people like Bradley Manning (learn about him), an American citizen who has been tortured in American captivity because he disclosed issues of corruption by the U.S. military, be motivated to reveal classified secrets unless there was a higher morality called justice (and the same for Assange)? Do those who were of the resistance forces against the Nazis evil? Should we think it proper they have gone to trial because they did not abide the policies of lawless Germany? Should governments be protected if they are involved in wrong doing?

Look back to Vietnam and the amount of liquid petroleum burning and all the carnage—for what? Was that not evil? Was not it equally evil for all the massacred in Central America during Ronald Reagan? Too much conflict and corruption is justified by either religious or economic dogma. So we need to understand such dogma at high levels of awareness—because all three Abrahamic religions have been used to justify too many wars, too much persecution and other forms of injustice.

Still this is not to argue these same religions have not produced any positive values, practice and morality. Clearly they have. But it is time to understand the other side of judgmental orientations that choose to see either black or white. We then contemplate how it was evil became a theme in the Torah and Bible because so much of it had to do with war and the psychology of war (and inevitable corruption because of war). There is a connection we imprisonment in society and biblical psychology.

Starting with the story of the serpent and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil of the Torah, that is when God, as ego, decided to punish Adam and Eve for tasting the fruit of this tree; we can realize this is really a story of censorship. Some have argued it is about a sexual theme or some form of psychedelic drug experience but the tree is a tree of what? It is a source of knowledge about good and evil. And good and evil in the real world relates heavily to propaganda versus unvarnished truth.

When an authoritarian power punishes mere humans for wanting to understand secrets being kept from them then there is something political going on. Or why would an authoritarian God, that routinely uses punishment, play such a game about restricting such a tree of knowledge in the first place—unless there was knowledge a less powerful contingency was not suppose to know, because it might realize the great power of authority was not exactly so virtuous after all? This is as arguably the symbolic message—sending the message the power that be can punish at will.

Yet somehow this original sin is still placed on mere humans. Somehow, although we did not create life as it is, we are responsible for all its failure? Does this Middle Eastern God, who supposedly demanded the torture and death of a Jesus Christ for mankind’s sins didn’t take any blame for human faults? But in this so-called moral book if God created imperfections in mortality well then burn them into eternity. No cruel or unusual punishment there? Europeans got so distraught in the Middle Ages they actually tortured people at stakes—being so paranoid of this heavenly divine God of Christianity. Then some of Puritans came to the United States with their hysterical mental diseases to create the crazy stuff for a new culture such as the Boston witch trials.

Now in the 21st century the United States has evolved into a state in which wrong doing must be classified more and more to cover up more and more foul play, that is while the government loots American taxpayers, such as the financial corruption of the Military Industrial Complex that we were warned about in 1962, and now a highly evolving Security Industrial Complex that more and more spies on it’s own citizens, or allowance for killing and corrupting of American soldiers for wars of dubious purpose (as we are driven to wars by the megalomaniac ideas of Neo-Con-Artists to be a superpower). One could expect rebellion against such a fascist state that intimidates people like in Hunger Games.

The People, as the foundation of our American form of governance, have a right to know when government employees are acting illegally. We are at a point we cannot trust our own political system and we need to declare a new Declaration of Independence. Bradley Manning leaked a video of U.S. forces killing civilians in air strikes. Julian Assange played that video on Wikileaks (amongst other caches of document). Now Manning, who has been tortured by our military prison system (something draft dodger Dick Cheney might enjoy) could be prosecuted for aiding the enemy—but who really is the average, tax-paying, American enemy? Manning or corrupt foreign policy? The Pentagon and CIA has been implicated in numerous examples of torture from Guantanamo to various secret detention camps around the world, and yet the Military still refuses to give up its torture center at Gitmo (something many expected Barack Obama to close down a long time ago).

Since 911 a right-wing propaganda campaign was created to augment prejudice against Muslims, for us supposedly white Christians, that was ultimately to create a new Christian Crusade against all things Islamic, that is as Israel stood by and benefited, because we were brainwashed by such distortions. Obviously 9/11 occurred but those who have engaged in-depth and independent investigations show that those 19 Arabs and Osama bin Laden did not likely do it. 9/11 was the lightening rod to change our foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, motivated our people to accept many radical, undemocratic changes. It was about stealing oil from other territories, enriching merchants of death, and implementing a NeoCon, Zionist-centric foreign policy.

And this is another important lesson we can glean from the Old Testament—that people can be brainwashed to think a God who says doing is evil, such as the killing off of foreign peoples, is good then it automatically becomes moral. After all that is the real story of Moses and their tribes occupation of Canaan way back then, as those people too willingly believed their especially chosen God commanded them to kill off the current inhabitants of that land, and supposedly then it was moral, just and necessary.

Where are the diplomats demanding that Israel and other Islamic countries separate church and state, like we do here in the United States, and like some other European countries do as well? No instead we are suppose to sacrifice “our” economic power, and our military strength and personnel, and our mediocre worldly prestige, to back some atavistic ideal to fight for cultural Zionism that has no intention of promoting any real human status to people who are not Jewish—and especially not equal rights? And in the meantime we are suppose to lose our own liberty?

Therefore it is important to understand lessons from the Bible not discussed as the play out in real life. The devil, or Satan, was the opposition, the rebel or challenger against the status quo, and the one who supposedly created lies as he lived by deceit. These were the main accusations of this so-called avenging angel Lucifer—because he was involved in some kind of rebellion against the current power structure. But Satanism in the Bible is really about the human justification to create war and to propagate lies and deceit while doing so. Yet it is always the supposed enemy who is evil (call him Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Bashar al-Assad, etc., but whoever is the current enemy his atrocities are too outrageous to fathom (that is compared to American’s great concern for the civil liberties of the downtrodden). These enemies are portrayed as pure Biblical evil, as they are killing babies, massacring civilians, and engaging various atrocities too barbaric to contemplate. Most importantly the enemy is engaging in a never-ending campaign of lying (exactly what happens over and over again in many military campaigns) as in covert operations today in the Middle East.

This too is about throwing Julian Assange into a penitentiary, like the devils are supposedly in hell, that is so he too can tortured like a good God would naturally do. Because isn’t that the real terrorism of Judeo-Christianity—some idea that an authoritarian God could and would send your soul to eternal torture, and there was nothing you could do about it, and no justice would allow you any right to a fair trial or eventual re-entry into society?

Imagine for a moment the United States was actually a just country like so many people believe? Then why does it fall to Julian Assange’s mother to plea for mercy to a foreign country like Ecuador to get some protection for his some? Where are all the thousands of lawyers than claim to think and feel in this country?

Isn’t that what was going on in Gulag Gitmo, in which our military refuses of have open trials for those prisoners? And isn’t it ironic how the underwear bomber suddenly appeared to timely quell discussions of justice for prisoners in Gulag Gitmo? And equally how the story of a ground zero mosque been built close to ground zero Twin Towers became such a political issue as to quell discussions of trials for the prisoners of Gitmo and the closing of such an American stain?

After all, if you study Biblical psychology, if a Judeo-Christian God can have a hell of eternal torture, with this same God being both judge and jury (with no right for a defense) then certainly any kind of authoritarian government ought equally have such right to declare certain individuals as enemies of the state and be able to lock them up, with no trial, and for eternity? Where in the Bible does it say anything about a mere soul’s legal rights on judgment day, or a right to a lawyer, or a right to challenge allegations, etc. There are no such rights because people are supposed to be brainwashed to assume a loving God knows everything and operates from a position of pure justice.

We need to understand law evolved from free thought and not so much from sacrosanct religions. There will always be violence and deceit; however it is high time to stop letting religious organizations justify human evil. The real American way respects the rights of accused, and has expectation the granted powers of office has a duty to try not just the little guys but also the ones who do big crimes on big scales. Individuals, as whistle blowers, who have no 1%ter support are not likely to get off on charges, yet they should be afforded protection from forces of intimidation and threat.

Why has not China or Russia offered Julian Assange asylum? Why are only smaller and weaker countries like Sweden and Ecuador being bullied by the U.S. when they world knows full well this country borders on being criminal? Is there nothing left to save humanity from itself?

Thank you Julian Assange and Bradley Manning for standing up to the monolithic forces of the Leviathan.