Srećko Horvat & Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London – Sunshine Press Publications. All rights reserved.When the
ruling class is in panic, their first reaction is to hide the panic.
They react
out of cynicism: when their masks are revealed, instead of running around naked,
they usually point the finger at the mask they wear. These days the whole world
can bear witness to a postmodern version of the infamous quote “Let them eat
cake”, attributed to Marie-Antoinette, queen of France during the French
Revolution.
As a reaction
to WikiLeaks publishing his emails, John Podesta, the man behind Hillary
Clinton’s campaign, posted a photo of a dinner preparation, saying “I bet the lobster
risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy”.
A similar
version of vulgar cynicism emerged earlier this month when Hillary Clinton
reacted to the claim that she reportedly wanted to “drone” WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange (“Can’t we just drone this guy?”) when she was the US Secretary
of State. Instead of denying her comments, Clinton said that she doesn’t recall
any such joke, “It would have been a joke if it had been said, but I don’t
recall that”.
One doesn’t
have to read between the lines to understand that if Hillary Clinton
had said that, she would have considered it a joke. But when emperors
joke, it usually has dire consequences for those who are the objects of their
“humor.”
Cyber-war – not with Russia…but
WikiLeaks
During the last few months I have visited
Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London several times and each time
I came out of the Embassy, where he is spending his fifth year in
political asylum under legitimate fear he might be extradited to the US, my
thought was the following one: although he lives, without his family, in a
postmodern version of solitary confinement (even prisoners are allowed to walk
for up to one hour a day), although he has no access to fresh air or sunlight
for more than 2000 days, although the UK government recently denied him safe
passage to a hospital for an MRI scan, if his access to the internet were cut
off this would be the most severe attack on his physical and mental freedom.
The last time I saw him, which was only
two weeks ago, he expressed the fear that because he had already published
leaks concerning US elections and with more to come, the US might find
various ways to silence him, including pressuring Ecuador or even shutting down
his internet access.
What seemed a distant possibility only
two weeks ago, soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When the Obama administration recently
announced that, as Biden said, it is planning an “unprecedented cyber covert
action against Russia”, the first victim was not Putin, but precisely Julian Assange whose internet was cut off just
a day after Biden’s self-contradictory proclamation.
No wonder Edward Snowden reacted immediately by saying that
“nobody has told Joe Biden what ‘covert operation’ means.
According to the US Department of
Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a covert
operation is “an operation that is so planned and executed as to conceal the
identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor.”
It is no secret any more that the
Ecuadorian government has come under extreme pressure since Assange leaked the Democratic National Committee email database. We don’t know yet whether
the US pressured Ecuador to shut down the internet, but it is clear that the
present US government and the government to come is fighting a war with
WikiLeaks which is all but “covert”. Is it really a coincidence that Julian
Assange’s internet access was cut off shortly after publication of Clinton’s
Goldman Sachs speeches?
If at the beginning we still had a
“soft” version of postmodern McCarthyism, with Hillary calling everyone opposed
to her campaign a Russian spy (not only Assange, but also Donald Trump and Jill
Stein), then with Obama’s recent intervention it became more serious.
With Obama’s threat of a cyber-war, the
“soft” McCarthyism didn’t only acquire geopolitical significance, but at the
same time a new mask was revealed: Obama is obviously trying to cement the
public stance and make the Russian threat “real”, or at least use it as a
weapon in order to help Clinton to get elected. Moreover, this new twist
in something that has already become much more than only US elections (US
elections are never only US elections!), shows not only how Obama is ready to
strengthen Hillary’s campaign, but it also reveals that a cyber war is already
in the making.
It is not a cyber war with Russia, but
with WikiLeaks.
And it is not the first time.
What would Clausewitz say?
In 2010, when the Collateral Murder video was published, the Afghan and
Iraq war logs were released, and we witnessed one of the most sinister attacks
on freedom of speech in recent history. VISA, Mastercard, Diners, American
Express and Paypal imposed a banking blockade on WikiLeaks, although WikiLeaks
had not been charged with any crime at either state, federal or international
level. So if the US government successfully convinced payment companies
representing more than 97% of the global market to shut down an independent
publisher, why wouldn’t they pressure Ecuador or any other state or company to
cut off the internet?
The US is not only rhetorically trying
to “get” Assange (it is worth checking out the Assassinate Assange video for evidence of what US
officials get up to), he poses a serious threat to the major elite
factions in the US who wish to remain in power. No wonder panic is rising
in the US, when a 16-year-old boy in Britain has been arrested on criminal
charges related to the alleged hacking of email accounts used by CIA director
John Brennan, which WikiLeaks published in October 2016.
What WikiLeaks has obviously
successfully challenged – and maybe one day (“history is written by the
victors”, remember?) it will be taught in military strategy – is what the
Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz would call the “centre
of gravity” (Schwerpunkt), which is the “central feature of the enemy’s
power”.
Instead of speaking about the Russians,
we should start speaking about the Schwerpunkt of the actual leaks,
their real essence. Just take the following quotes by Hillary Clinton exposed
by WikiLeaks, which reveal her true nature and the politics behind her
campaign: “We are going to ring China with missile defence”, “I want to defend
fracking” and climate change environmentalists “should get a life”, “you need
both a public and a private position”, “my dream is a hemispheric common
market, with open trade and open borders”.
What WikiLeaks has shown is not only
that Hillary is a hawkish war-monger, first it was Libya (over 1,700 of the
33,000 Clinton emails published by WikiLeaks reference Libya), then it was
Syria (at a Goldman Sachs conference she explicitly stated she would like to
intervene in Syria), tomorrow it will be another war.
It is now clear – and this is the real
“centre of gravity” where we should focus our attention – that the future Clinton cabinet may already been filled with
Wall Street people like Obama’s was. No wonder WikiLeaks revelations create
utter panic not only in the Democratic Party itself but also the Obama
administration.
One question remains, isn’t WikiLeaks,
by leaking all these dirty secrets, influencing the US elections? Yes, it
certainly is, but the current criticism misses its point: isn’t the very point
of organisations such as WikiLeaks to publish the material they have and to
influence public opinion?
The question should ultimately be turned
around: isn’t the US mainstream media the one influencing the US
elections? And isn’t Obama, by announcing a cyber-war with Russia, influencing
the elections?
WikiLeaks is not only influencing the US
elections, but transforming the US elections – as they should have been from
the very beginning – into a global debate with serious geopolitical
consequences at stake. What WikiLeaks is doing is revealing this brutal fight
for power, but, as the old saying goes, “when a wise man points at the Moon,
the idiot looks at the finger”. Instead of looking at the finger pointing to
Russia, we should take a look at the leaks themselves.
If democracy and transparency means
anything today, we should say: let them leak!
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This piece was originally published on Counterpunch on October 18, 2016.