by Pepe Escobar and crossposted with Consortium News
It’s quite fitting that the – imperially pre-determined – judicial fate of Julian Assange is being played out in Britain, the home of George Orwell.
As chronicled by the painful, searing reports of Ambassador Craig Murray, what’s taking place in Woolwich Crown Court is a sub-Orwellian farce with Conradian overtones: the horror…the horror…, remixed for the Raging Twenties. The heart of our moral darkness is not in the Congo: it’s in a dingy courtroom attached to a prison, presided by a lowly imperial lackey.
In one of Michel Onfray’s books published last year, “Theorie de la Dictature” (Robert Laffont) – the top dissident, politically incorrect French philosopher starts exactly from Orwell to examine the key features of a new-look dictatorship. He tracks seven paths of destruction: to destroy freedom, impoverish language, abolish truth, suppress history, deny nature, propagate hate, and aspire to empire.
Michel Onfray in 2009. (Alexandre López, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
To destroy freedom, Onfray stresses, power needs to assure perpetual surveillance; ruin personal life; suppress solitude; make opinion uniform and denounce thought crimes. That sounds like the road map for the United States government’s persecution of Assange.
Other paths, as in impoverishing language, include practicing newspeak; using double language; destroying words; oralizing language; speaking a single language; and suppressing the classics. That sounds like the modus operandi of the ruling classes in the Hegemon.
To abolish truth, power must teach ideology; instrumentalize the press; propagate fake news; and produce reality. To propagate hate, power, among other instruments, must create an enemy; foment wars; and psychiatrize critical thinking.
There’s no question we are already mired deep inside this neo-Orwellian dystopia.
John “Paradise Lost” Milton, in 1642, could not have been more prophetic, when he wrote “Those that hurt the eyes of the people blame them for being blind.” How not to identify a direct parallel with Le Petit Roi Emmanuel Macron’s army, month after month, willfully blinding protesting Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests in the streets of France.
Orwell was more straightforward than Milton, saying that to talk about freedom is meaningless unless it refers to the freedom to tell people what they don’t want to hear. And he put it in context by quoting a line from Milton: “By the known rules of ancient liberty.”
No “known rules of ancient liberty” are allowed to penetrate the heart of darkness of Woolwich Crown Court.
A Spy at the Service of the People
Juan Branco is arguably the most brilliant young French intellectual – heir to a fine Sartre/Foucault/Deleuze tradition. The French establishment detests him, especially because of his best-seller “Crepuscule,” where he dissected Macronism – branded as a thuggish regime – from the inside, and the French president as a creature and instrument of a tiny oligarchy.
Julian Assange. (YouTube still)
He has just published “Assange: L’Antisouverain” (Les Editions du Cerf), an absorbing, erudite study that he defines as “a philosophy book about the figure of the Anti-Sovereign.” The Sovereign is of course the state apparatus.
Here (in French) is an excellent interview with Branco about the book. There’s nothing even remotely comparable to it in the Anglosphere, which has treated Assange essentially as an unpleasant freak, oozing pedestrian slander and piling up sub-ideology tirades disguised as facts.
The book is essentially structured as a seminary for the hyper-selective Ecole Normale Superieure, the august school in the Latin Quarter here that shapes French elites, a privileged nest of power institutions and reproduction of privileges. Branco takes the reader to the heart of this universe just to make him or her discover Assange from the point of view of one of those students.
Branco was privileged to profit from the interaction between the Ecole Normale Superieure and Yale. He met Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in January 2014, “in a state of radical confinement,” and then followed him as a juridical consultant, then lawyer, “day after day,” until meeting him again in September 2016, “getting ready to no less than change the course of the American presidential election and engineer the fall of the one who had sworn to crush him, one Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
Branco is fascinated by Assange’s “scientific journalism,” and his capacity to “intervene in the political space without occupying a determined place.” Assange is painted as a contemporary oracle, a maniac for free access to information, someone who “never looked for a reward, or insertion, or juridical protection,” which is a totally different modus operandi from any media.
2016 portrait of Juan Branco. (Yale University, Wikimedia Commons)
Branco shows how WikiLeaks “allowed whistleblowers to act,” by growing an archive parallel to the “production of data related to the mechanism of contemporary power apparatuses.” Under this framework “every citizen is able to become a researcher.”
So, Assange’s work has been about redistributing power. It’s as if Assange had become a “spy at the service of the people.” And that leads Branco to draw the connection with the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests. WikiLeaks releasing the “Macron Leaks” in 2017 legitimized the Yellow Vest struggle for direct democracy.
Branco describes Assange as “a strange figure, a bridge between the pre-history of digital civilization and its definitive penetration as a primordial, structural element of political and social space.”
But arguably his best appraisal is of Assange as “a dissident of his own internal space, mostly interested by the sphere of cultural, economic and social domination in which he was born, that of the American imperium, of which his native Australia is one of the most dedicated allies, and that dominates this cyber-space where he constituted himself as a political actor.”
In what could be construed as the top reason for the United States government’s unbounded thirst for vengeance against Assange, he challenged the fact that “American acts have a natural regulatory function for the rest of the world, a result of their over-dominance of the contemporary geopolitical space.”
It’s All in the Algorithm
A view from the Member’s Gallery inside the New York Stock Exchange, August 2008. (Ryan Lawler, Wikimedia Commons)
And that brings us to the heart of the matter: algorithms. As Branco synthesizes it, the “revelation of raw documents aims at reinvesting in the political space those that have been discarded because of their submission to a word of authority whose algorithms have been masked.”
Onfray had already warned about “destroying words,” “impoverishing language” and clinging to newspeak – but Branco takes it to a new level. Because “the word of power is a word assimilated to the algorithm, in the sense that it benefits from a presumption of truth, it does not reveal, to remain effective, any of its assets, settling to enounce a reality impossible to contest.”
Branco is careful to explain that, “Algorithm would not have become a social power without the support of an ethical presupposition (the consecration of Homo Economicus), a postulation towards scientificism (thus to universality) and a technological rupture (big data).”
Branco breaks it down to the formula “Algorithmization is the foundation of sovereignty.” And that’s exactly what Assange challenged. And that’s why he’s such a divisive, eternally controversial figure, unlike Edward Snowden, who’s basically an average guy – with a sterling IQ – who simply wants to reform a system.
A Chance for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity?
When he worked on behalf of Assange, Branco essentially coordinated a team of lawyers responding to star judge Baltasar Garzon, who was present at Woolwich Crown Court earlier this week. Last week, Assange’s legal team said they would apply for asylum in France. Branco can’t possibly be part of the team because of “Crepuscule” – which eviscerates Macron.
President Emmanuel Macron celebrating France’s victory over Croatia in the 2018 World Cup final in Moscow. (Kremlin)
Le Petit Roi, for his part, may now be presented with the ultimate global reach P.R. opportunity. Ending a ghastly neo-Orwellian charade, offering asylum to Assange, and ridiculing Trump and Boris Johnson at the same time would enhance his status in myriad European latitudes and all across the Global South.
Yet there should be no illusions. On July 3, 2015, advised by his legal team, Assange wrote an op-ed for Le Monde asking about the possibility of asylum. Only one hour after publication the Elysee Palace – under Francois Hollande – issued a firm denial. There were no leaks on what kind of pressure was applied by the U.S. Deep State.
Assange lawyer Geoffrey Robertson is under no illusions: “He won’t be pardoned by President Trump, although [a future] President Sanders might do so. I think that’s the objective of the Pentagon — to put him in prison for the rest of his life.”
A measure of the cowardice of all those established newspapers who profited handsomely from the work of Assange and WikiLeaks is this despicable Le Monde editorial that half-heartedly pretends to defend him as a journalist and publisher.
It’s idle to expect from Anglo-American corporate media even a modicum of decency to admit that journalists must not be treated as spies and dangerous criminals. Criminalization of critical thinking – capable of provoking, unmasking and denouncing raw power — is a key plank of the new dictatorship examined by Onfray, and already in effect. Now it comes down to Onfray and Branco not to be lost in translation – and forcefully demonstrate to the Anglosphere that the heart of darkness must not be allowed to prevail.
Wasn’t the ‘West’ born from a massive falsification of Classic and Christian philosophy’s concepts and impoverishment of language?
Assange’s “scientific journalism”?? Challenging “algorithmization”??
I have not read Juan Branco’s book but it sounds like he is over-intellectualising Assange’s tremendous contributions and this risks undermining their significance.
Assange is a modern day Prometheus who gave fire/ information / to humankind and is now being tortured by those whom took it from.
It is true that Prometheus is also considered to be a figure who represents the desire for scientific knowledge, (this is probably where Branco lifted his “scientific” thesis from), however to focus solely on this aspect of Prometheus /Assange completely misses the point.
Btw, when Branco claims that Assange is “divisive” and “controversial”, is he describing his image in the media’ or his true character? Because that is not the way people who know him and interacted with him (John Pilger, Pamela Andersen) have described him….
BY “algorithmization”, he is referring to the trend towards accepting the truth of what power says because it passed through the accepted mechanical filters. Eg, if power declares “the moon is made of blue cheese”, so long as this passes the NGO/open source intel/Corporate media gauntlet without contest, ipso facto it becomes, even without any evidence offered. This already happens – ie the media are more likely to debate what should we do “since the moon is made of blue cheese?” than the central assumption itself (for that central assumption irl, Putin/Russia/Iran is evil/guilty/etc)
Wikileaks and Assange threatened to punch holes through this consolidation of implicit authority.
Yes, one is a bit flummoxed by the ‘scientific’ babble that hides the simple fact that Wikileaks exposed the lies and deceptions of Western propaganda.
Over-intellectualizing? Well, sure, but come on, the guy’s a French intellectual. It’s part of the job description, you gotta cut him some slack. And I mean, for people whose theory is always so obscure the French are no slouches at getting out in the streets.
At the moment the team of its European lawyers (French, Spanish and Belgian) is studying the legal aspects of Assange’s application for refugee status before submitting it to the French President Mr. Macron in the near future.
One of the two French lawyers is the well known Mr Eric Dupont-Moretti.
Michel Onfrey ‘philosopher’? He is an ‘intellectual’ clown like BHL. That both are taken seriously shows only the extreme intellectual degeneration of a nation that was once a beacon of reason and decency.
Then at least 180 degrees radically opposed clowns. My two cents, Onfrey is the intellctual, BHL is a zionazi clown, but not a funny one.
Reply to : Anonymous on February 28, 2020 · at 11:01 pm EST/EDT
/assange-extradition-can-a-french-touch-pierce-a-neo-orwellian-farce/#comment-767096.
«Michel Onfrey ‘philosopher’? He is an ‘intellectual’ clown like BHL. That both are taken seriously shows only the extreme intellectual degeneration of a nation that was once a beacon of reason and decency».
Whoever you are you’ve hit the nail on the head. In France and just about everywhere else political correctness and identity politics have replaced common sense in the “culture wars” ethos which passes for public discourse.
Michel Onfray doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, quotes from the Old Testament (Tanakh), as if they reflected the teachings of Christ and aligns himself with the dangerous ideology of Jewish philosopher Peter Singer. Like that bourgeois nerd Juan Branco he has full access to the mainstream media and is part of the «controlled opposition» in France. I am disapponted , but not surprized, by Pepe Escobar’s choice of these traitors and double gants instead of someone like Alain Soral.
The latter’s clairvoyant best seller Comprendre l’empire dates from 2011 and takes his cue from The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Christopher Lasch’s groundbreaking essay, published posthumously in 1995. Organizing conferences, publishing books and running a website under constant attack from the banks, mass media and the French judiciary : the association he had co-founded in June 2007 Égalité & Réconciliation has galvanized public awareness and continues to act like a magnet to attract genuine dissidence and a host of intellectuals opposed to the official narrative of libéralisme-libertaire, mondialisme et sionisme.
Just to name a few contemporary names featuring alongside classics published by Éditions Kontre Kulture like Maurice Bardèche or Jacques Bainville : Gilad Atzmon, Youssef Hindi, Laurent Guyénot, Lucien Cerise, Jean-Michel Vernochet, Alain Escada, Pierre Hillard, Damien Viguier, la feue Claire Séverac, Usmani Alimuddin, Judith Reisman, Marion Sigault, Julien Teil, Patrick Mbeko, Felix Niesche, Imran Hosein, Claire Colombi, Israël Adam Shamir …
Like any other manmade entity E&R has its faults and its critics. It remains however, alongside Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, one of the few lucid voices crying in the wilderness that is France’s political and cultural landscape today : Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. (To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace : Tacitus circa AD 56-120)
I’ve resumed briefly the theme of several chapters of Comprendre l’empire which, sociologically, impales the vampire at the heart of zombie capitalism :
De la fausse monnaie – de la puissance jouissive et fictive de l’assouplissement quantitatif – sont nés planche à billets, austérité, chômage et délitement culturel, la fin de l’État-Providence, la supplice des faibles et des opprimés, les assassinats ou le renversement des présidents en exercice, gouvernance par le chaos, extorsion, corruption, racket de la dépossession, ingénierie sociale, dissonance cognitive, empoisonnement spirituel, prospérité fantaisiste par pillage et destruction des ressources, avec son alibi l’écologisme industriel, la terreur et la guerre en permanence, la ruse de la bulle financière, la dette anthropophage, le mensonge et la violence, le tout garanti par le chantage à l’antisémitisme et conforme à la doxa messianique, à la haine deutéronomiste, à la rancune vétérotestamentaire
Translation : Funny money – from the fictitiously beneficial power of quantitative easing – comes the advent of printing banknotes, austerity, unemployment and cultural disintegration, the end of the Welfare State, torturing weak and oppressed mortals, the assassination or overthrow of presidents in office, governance by chaos, extortion, corruption, racketeering and theft, social engineering, cognitive dissonance, spiritual poison, illusory prosperity by plunder and the destruction of resources, with its alibi of industrial environmentalism, constant terror and war, the stratagem of the financial bubble, the man-eating debt, lies and violence, all guaranteed by blackmail via the anti-Semitism trope and conforming to the messianic doxa, to the hateful Deuteronomy, to the Old Testament rancor.
Another H*loc*ust Denier?! https://youtu.be/yHMHVZH8LDY 23 899 vues •29 janv. 2020 Daughter of Albion 25,1 k abonnés
(https://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/Quand-une-patriote-anglaise-decouvre-les-persecutions-subies-par-Alain-Soral-58344.html).
NB Personally speaking, I wouldn’t bracket Alain Soral with Renaud Camus. But, as with everything contentious, this lady is entitled to her opinions !
Comprendre l’empire : Demain la gouvernance globale ou la révolte des nations ? Alain Soral, 239 pages (Éditions Blanche 2011).
Mensonges et destruction du sens – Conférence de Pierre de Brague à Marseille 29 novembre 2019 La section E&R PACA a reçu Alain Soral et Pierre de Brague le 9 juin 2019 à Marseille pour une conférence intitulée «Mensonges et destruction du sens». https://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/Mensonges-et-destruction-du-sens-Conference-de-Pierre-de-Brague-a-Marseille-57239.html. Vidéo : https://youtu.be/eulaULyS5Ho. 14 045 vues Source : ER MARSEILLE 970 abonnés.
Gilets jaunes, Pavlenski, Assange, LFI, intelligentsia, Paris, ciné : les 7 tentacules de la pieuvre Juan Branco 2 mars 2020
https://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/Gilets-jaunes-Pavlenski-Assange-LFI-intelligentsia-Paris-cine-les-7-tentacules-de-la-pieuvre-Juan-58360.html.
La pub de Juan Branco est assurée par la milliardaire Badinter rNFO PANAMZA. Visible dans le métro parisien, la promotion publicitaire du pamphlet anti-Macron de Juan Branco a été exceptionnellement autorisée par un groupe dirigé par Elisabeth Badinter, militante sioniste et anti-islam. La preuve en sources.Le 06.05.2019 à 21h12 https://www.panamza.com/060519-branco-badinter/.
Juan Branco “révolutionnaire” financé par un milliardaire suisse https://twitter.com/Panamza/status/1231985056090132480
Stop press : as we fiddle while Rome burns : worrying developments as reported by Veterans Today and Southfront.
Intel Drop: Putin terrified of Erdogan, as Russians pull aside while Israel and Turkey war on Syria from Idlib By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
March 1, 2020 https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/03/01/intel-drop-erdogans-kosher-express-kills-2200-syrian-troops-destroys-100-tanks-and-humiliates-putin/
See-Saw battle continues for Syria’s Idlib province Russia has not supported closing Syrian air space to Turkish air power. Why not ? …from Southfront
By Jim W. Dean, Managing Editor – March 1, 2020 https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/03/01/see-saw-battle-continues-for-syrias-idlib-province/.
There is a free Julian Assange petition at change.org which is now above 300.000 signatures.
https://www.change.org/p/free-julian-assange-before-it-s-too-late-stop-usa-extradition
”In what could be construed as the top reason for the United States government’s unbounded thirst for vengeance against Assange, he challenged the fact that ’American acts have a natural regulatory function for the rest of the world, a result of their over-dominance of the contemporary geopolitical space.”.
I don’t know if the Zionazis are much into this kind of pseudo-intellectual word salads; not even one of their own grovelling lettuce intellectuals BHL seems to be getting much attention. The Zionazis’ fury against Assange testifies to their manifest insanity as their corporate media poison turns out to be less and less effective. If they believe their evil conspiracies were any secret, the less said the better.
Good point. Their incompetence is growing more amazing by the day.
Holding that “Zionazi fury” position involves some major cognitive dissonance. Israel has never been harmed by any Wikileaks revelations.
On the contrary, the release of the leaked DNC and Podesta emails that conclusively prove the level of corruption within the Democratic Party, were a huge factor in getting Trump elected. Trump is the best US President for Israel ever.
Many have asserted that the alleged DNC email leak source, Seth Rich, was a Mossad mole inside the DNC. He did receive IDF training during his time there and could have also been recruited.
Zionazis defend Israel but very few of them live there (Israel is a tiny country). The way the whole thing works is grasped as soon as the West is understood as Israel’s ”security detail”. In this light, the fury against Assange is inexplicable if his findings were not perceived (correctly so or not) as detrimental to Israel.
Personally, I believe the Zionazis are genuinely upset by Assange’s rooting about in their evil designs and plots, especially concerning the Middle East, but what’s disturbing is their sheer hysterics. Assange’s discoveries are not without interest and merit — far from it — but they are not crucial to the solidifying understanding of the sickness and degeneracy of the whole system. This is plain, manifest reality.
There is also the possibility to consider that this “trial” is all just Kabuki Theatre and that a deal satisfactory to both parties was already reached.
Recall the video a few years back where Assange said of his family “they did not sign up for this”. Which followed his revelation of a “dead man’s switch”, that has oddly never been activated. He was effectively silenced from that point forward.
As for Craig Murray’s role, he is clearly a candidate for best supporting actor. He may be a friend of Assange, but more importantly, trusted. However, once MI6 always MI6.
So the “imprisonment”, that oddly only a select few get to see and “show trial”, with clear violations of US/UK treaties and legal protocols is a condition of the US/UK Deep State, to discourage others from doing what Assange did.
So whether he “dies” in prison, like Epstein (who is not likely dead and has a new identity) or is allowed asylum elsewhere (but in very poor health) is irrelevant. The Empire will appear to have exacted its revenge. People will slowly forget that the dead man’s switch supposedly existed, or buy a fable that it was neutralized by the NSA.
That’s an interesting take; most forgot about Assanges ‘dead man’s switch’ threat.
As Assange didn’t die, the ‘dead man’s switch’ either still exists, or was neutralized but not such that the powers that presume to be feel confident about killing Assange.
The Dead Man’s Switch safety didn’t account for Assange just being kept prisoner and effectively tortured.
Branco could have used “a set of rules” instead of algorithms. The United States operates with a Rules-Based International Order, which is used to restrict the options for other countries, one example being that others must use our financial tools like Swift for payments.
The most important thing now is that Assange as a human being is spared further suffering and that his life is saved!
This will also be a great liberation for humanity, even if the majority of people are not aware of it!
Assange symbolizes the free human being!
No fear stopped him to inform us of what was hidden behind appearances…
Nor did he realize that he was putting his life on the line!
Now we see a physically diminished man…those who do not desire the awakening of humanity have humiliated, tortured him physically, emotionally and mentally because he symbolizes the standing Man and not the submissive Man!
I am convinced that his European lawyers will do everything to free him.
As Mr Eric Dupont-Moretti (one of the two French lawyers) once said
“you can’t cheat with sincerity!”
How many of you have actually read any leaks from wikileaks?
I read a selective few. The initial data dump was just raw unusable, stale data. Alots of it.
E.g. operational reports from US army daily routine convoys in Iraq. Honestly, who cares.
Then there were diplomatic wires. What the Americans think of the host countries. Added to wikileaks to belittle the hosts and make them feel inferior.
Then other truths about the AngloZionist empire that already were coming out from other sources – basically wikileaks was trying to forerun them.
All in all, wikileaks didn’t provide anything revolutionary.
Furthermore, Wikileaks was first hailed by the MSM. If that didn’t happen, knowledge of wikileaks wouldn’t be common now. Coincidence? Hardly.
But more important than the content of the leaks was the TIMING. While all the intelligence agencies worldwide were busy to go thru all the leaks data and all eyes were on Assange, the AngloZionist empire planned and executed totally unhindered and under the radar the attack on Lybia, the Arab spring, deposed Mubarak in Egypt, maybe some in Marrocco and Tunis too, prepared the attack on Syria, convinced Erdogan that he ought to be a neo-ottoman Sultan, set up the Moslem brotherhood in Egypt, split Sudan in half and whatever else I forgot. So yea, for me, wikileaks was initially just a diversion to get all those things planned and executed before it was too late to stop them. Later, wikileaks was probably just a honeypot and the treatment of Assange a warning to all others.
Wikileaks was a honeypot from the start. Revelations such as those about Abu Graib were the problem. Wikileaks was the answer. It has never revealed much, if anything, that wasn’t already emerging. Collateral murder? A simple and tragic case of mistaken identity; nobody ever charged. Abu Graib? Many went to prison over that.
I see Julian Assange as a publisher of important matters which has been leaked and deserves publication hence: Wikileaks, a compendium of contemporary leaks that points a finger at Wikipedia, the encyclopedia which do not tell the truth, where something may be true, is politically correct, full of lies and cannot be trusted.
So Wikileaks, the leaked truth. As a publisher Julian Assange may not even be persecuted in the UK as Wikileaks is based in Switzerland and Iceland. So even while in the UK, he did not publish there. As any publisher, he is free to report anything, and especially that which pertains to true matters that need to be told.
There is at this time no criminal charges against Julian Assange, at least not any that are not fabricated.
As the rape claims from Sweden fell apart, what was there to break his bail agreement about? He was questioned for the swedish rape charges and volunteered to such questioning but was ignored, instead
he became a target for imprisonment on false premises as extradiction to Sweden was a cover for extradiction to USA. Now there is not even such a false case. This means that everything is a farse where an innocent citizen is held in a dark cell, with draconion measures against him for purely political reasons. Nothing of this would have held up in any free and fair judicial system. A publisher has certain rights to publish and in this case it was published from Switzerland and Iceland, countries that actually support freedom of speach and privacy, Even as a publisher in Britain there could not have been a charge against him for publishing true stories based on actual sources.
I cannot get over how meaningless this charade court and the judges are, how servile and even mothfrowning evil they are behaving in the service of the totalitarian state. Totally disgusting.