By Scott Ross
“Now that is news, Vincenzo, news! And we are a newspaper! We are supposed to print news, not suppress it!” — Carl Kolchak, “The Night Stalker”
I wept this morning, spontaneously, for the first time in a long while. I wept on hearing the news that Julian Assange has been released from that fetid Hell-hole called Belmarsh Prison where he has been kept in inhuman conditions since April of 2019, when, betrayed by the Ecuadorean government for, if you like your whorish metaphors Biblical, either a mess of pottage or 30 pieces of silver, and which then summarily and illegally revoked his citizenship, allowing jackbooted British thugs to remove him bodily from his place of sanctuary. But then, as Bibi Netanyahu knows, what’s so damn special about an Embassy?
As with America’s support for crazed Zionist psychopaths bent on the genocidal removal of the people of Palestine and its current, suicidal, goading of Russia by arming Ukrainian Nazis with the means to murder civilian bathers and Orthodox priests, everything about the Assange case was upside-down. He has been pursued by the permanent government of the United States for years, for the “crime” of journalism — actual journalism, as opposed to the professional lying and official stenography performed daily (and nightly) by the news actors and $30,000-a-day whores of the Fifth Estate, nearly all of whom have, for years and instead of demanding his release and a cessation of his persecution, bayed for the man’s blood. He has been accused, by the devious minds in international governance who know that such a charge will always resonate with mind-numbed liberals who can be relied upon to never investigate for themselves, of rapes he did not commit, much as Hamas was, from October 8th 2023 on, accused of sexual violence not a single case of which has remotely been proven, or is even provable, although their accusers have made something of a fetish of rape against many of their their male Arab prisoners, some of whom have been sodomized with metal spikes attached to chairs, at least one of which resulted in the death of the tortured. He has been traduced, in the Land of the Free, for releasing the information your government and your Pentagon do not wish you to know, such as how many civilians in other lands it habitually murders, and with what videogame-playing adolescent glee. For a decade, as Assange languished in soul-deadening confinement for the crime of free expression, his case was taken up by precisely no figure in the mainstream corporate press aside from Tucker Carlson. (And they eventually dealt with him, didn’t they?) Not once during that time time, at the annual hollow exercise in narcissistic self-regard known as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, has his name been invoked except by the comedian Randy Credico, who was promptly handcuffed and thrown out, in 2018.
There is a temptation, seized upon by the credulous, to fix Assange’s “crime” as the 2016 revelations, perhaps supplied by the quickly-murdered DNC employee Seth Rich, of Hillary Clinton’s incestuous relationship with that body but as Richard Medhurst correctly suggests, Assange’s true offenses (aside from humanizing the many dark-skinned and usually non-Judeo-Christian victims of America’s imperial machine) were Wikileaks’ publication of the “Afghan War Diary, Iraq war-logs, Guantanamo Bay files and State Department cables” revealing the regime’s insatiable appetite for war-crimes against civilians. The work, in other words, of the Press. When joy-stick operators of drones gleefully bomb civilian targets and wait for rescue vehicles to arrive to bomb again, that is news. Or should be. To investigate claims of atrocity, to corroborate them, to interview and interrogate and then to reveal the details of these crimes is what the press is supposed to do, but which it no longer, except in the case of independent journalism, actually does. This, I submit, is the ultimate, hoped-for result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, so eagerly sought by Bill and Hillary Clinton and which quickly reduced 50 media companies in America to six: A press corps that exists, not to check or to challenge the government’s lies but to abet that government in making those lies, and selling them to the public. Hence Biden prattling about freedom of the press while he persecutes a journalist. Hence the irresponsible promotion of experimental gene therapy as “vaccination” against a virus that was almost certainly biowarfare leaked, perhaps deliberately, from a lab in Wuhan and the labeling of anyone who questioned any narrative involved as “conspiracy theorist” or worse, “anti-vaxxer.” Hence the verbal dissemination of that virus as a pandemic when it was demonstrably not a pandemic.* Hence Republicans, after justifiably calling out “Woke” liberals for their perennial sense of victimhood and calls for censorship over the smallest perceived slight, overnight becoming the largest body of would-be censors in America when their AIPAC minders tell them free speech stops at criticism of Israel. Hence the absurd (and endlessly reiterated) claim that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked.” Hence the jettisoning of long-known facts about the Bandarite neo-Nazis there, and the well-established fact of Ukrainian official corruption and the simultaneous bleating about the noble cause we are supporting with our tax dollars. Hence the endless support for bloodthirsty Zionists in Israel/Gaza and the painting of killers as victims. ‘Tis, as Thomas Middleton named his 1605 social satire, a mad world, my masters.
This piece is titled “J’Accuse!” because I accuse not merely the government of the United States, or the Justice Department, or Donald Trump, or Joe Biden, or Hillary “Can’t we just drone-bomb this guy?” Clinton, or even CIA and MI5, which had him under such close surveillance they sought to examine the soiled diapers of his infant son when the mother of his children visited him in the Embassy and who recorded, against all known laws, privileged conversations between a lawyer and client. I accuse the press itself, which prolonged the torture of this man and actively colluded in demonizing him for doing what should be their job but has long since ceased to be. And I wept this morning, not only in relief that Assange’s torture by Britain and America (and, by extension, Holland and Ecuador) was over, or even for the cost to his body and his health of that torture. I wept because to obtain the liberty he should have enjoyed all along he was forced to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit. I wept because he is the example the American hegemon has held up to frighten others from doing the real job of journalism, and at how well it has succeeded. I wept knowing that there are other international crimes that will go unaired, other stories that will remain uncovered, because the example of Julian Assange has been and will be so potent:
Think before you publish; we did it to him, we can do it to you.
*A genuine pandemic kills 50 per cent of the infected. AIDS was a pandemic. COVID-19, however lethal it proved to be, was not.
Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 