If the western world valued justice Julian Assange would not have been rotting in Belmarsh Prison for two years, after being arbitrarily detained for the previous eight, under a campaign of draconian lawfare. theguardian.com/media/2016/feb…
THE WESTERN WORLD DOES NOT VALUE FREEDOM
If the western world valued freedom it would not be imprisoning an award-winning journalist for his journalistic publications. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_As…
THE WESTERN WORLD DOES NOT OPPOSE THE IMPRISONMENT OF DISSIDENTS
If the western world opposed the imprisonment of dissidents it wouldn't be imprisoning and working to extradite him to a nation where he'd be completely silenced and effectively disappeared.
If the western world opposed torture, a UN Special Rapporteur on torture wouldn't have found him showing signs of psychological torture, and they wouldn't be working to send him into a torturous prison system. republik.ch/2020/01/31/nil…
The western world purports to value truth, justice and freedom and to oppose tyranny and oppression, but if you look at how that same western world has been treating a journalist whose only proven "crime" is publishing inconvenient truths about the powerful, you see this is a lie
We believe our society upholds noble values because that's what we've been trained to believe by our schooling systems and by our media, but those same information systems have also trained us to accept a ruling model wherein a journalist is being punished for telling the truth.
We've been lied to.
We've been duped.
Assange has proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt. With his publications, yes, but first and foremost with the brutish and tyrannical response to those publications.
We all owe him a great debt for exposing the lie of the western world.
Article version of this thread with more links facts and stuff:
This is a really really common complaint from lefty commentators @jack@TwitterSupport. Why are so many of them getting notifications flooding in for new followers, but their follower account stays the same? Happens to me too off and on for days on end.
I have no platform; I have followers, and some outlets re-publish my writings for free. If you don't like how I write or what I write about, you've got ten typing fingers and access to all the same free blogging sites I use. Write it yourself. You have the exact same tools as me.
I don't have connections; in fact I actively avoid them. I write directly to the people, and the people decide how much that's worth. The only reason anyone knows who I am is because regular people enjoy and share it. You can do that too. Just don't pester me to do it for you.
And I really do mean that; I wish there were a lot more people doing this. The world needs more indie media. If you see too few people doing it the way you think it should be done, please do jump in and help out with indie content creation. We need all the help we can get.
The ultimate goal of the US-centralized empire is to have such control over the world's economic and financial systems that conventional warfare becomes obsolete, because they'll be able to fully strangle any population which disobeys its dictates by cutting them off from money.
It's a warped and perverse version of what we think of when we utter the phrase world peace; their version of "world peace" is a world where overt warfare is unnecessary because all disobedient populations can simply be quietly strangled to death via economic violence.
The same power structures which enacted the rape of Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia etc are not going to carry us into a peaceful and harmonious world. They do not have the neurological wiring to do that, even if they wanted to. Their vision for our world is dark.
Tankie, Conspiracy Theorist, And Other Pejorative Tools Of Narrative Control
"Pay attention to the way imperial narrative managers try to use smears and pejoratives to file away anti-imperialists into a 'don't listen to the things this person says' box" caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/tankie-consp…
Bloomberg pundit @noahpinion had a very revealing interaction on Twitter the other day that I've been meaning to write about ever since.
It's been obvious for ages that pejoratives like "tankie" are being used by imperialists to control the narrative in a way that benefits ruling power structures, but it's not often you'll have a mainstream narrative manager come right out and admit that that's what they're doing.
Hi my name's Caitlin Johnstone, I spend my life being told by strangers on the internet that they hate China's GOVERNMENT, not its PEOPLE.
Some days I'll have these flashes of self-reflection where the tenth mindless drone bleats the same tired old State Department line at me and I'm just like "I can't believe this is my life now."
Oh? Oh really? Why I've never thought of it that way before! Thank you so much for that brilliant, brilliant, brilliant insight. I will go rethink my entire life now.
Imagine being fully aware that you are starving children with sanctions and then getting up there and saying you're sanctioning them because you care about those children. You'd have to be missing pieces of yourself. Pieces of your humanity. You can't be fully human.
True. No sane parent would trust Blinken alone with their kids.