Why The US Wants to Kill Julian Assange

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Why The US Wants to Kill Julian Assange

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

6-08-22

 

When a writer, or someone that writes something which is how I prefer to refer to myself, takes that first step to put pen to paper, the most important decision is to decide who you want to read it.

 

The audience I would like to read this commentary is working class people. I would like millions of working class people to read what I have to say here, but I know that will not be the case. Not only do I not own a publishing outfit, I also think that millions of us do our best to ignore the madness and potential catastrophic consequences of this madness. But, most of us have children and grandchildren, and we owe it to them not to ignore reality.  It’s not as if we don’t care, we do. We care about the possibility of nuclear war, and climate change. The problem is that millions of workers, and huge sections of the middle class, just do not see a way out. There is a powerful mood in this country that there is nothing we can do.

 

If we consider Julian Assange, his incarceration and the war against Wikileaks, as well as Chelsea Manning) formerly Bradley Manning).  Here are two people that working-class people should embrace and defend. In fact, we owe a debt of gratitude to them. Manning is the whistelbower that leaked the Collateral Damage Video that showed a US attack helicopter mowing down civilians, including a Reuters reporter, in Iraq (and laughing about it). Assange has been incarcerated for years and both have been persecuted and tortured by the US government in its brutal efforts to silence free speech and independent journalism.  Edward Snowden is another US citizen wanted by the US regime for informing us and the world of the crimes of the US ruling class.

 

It is informing the world and the US population about the horrific crimes of US imperialism that Assange and Manning are guilty of. When the US state department or any US administration whether Democratic or Republican, talk of a threat to national security, they are not talking about “our” security, the US workers and middle class. Our security is constantly being undermined and actually destroyed by both these Wall Street Parties.

 

What National Security means to the folks in Washington and the Pentagon, to the US capitalist class and its representatives in these parties, is the right to profits no matter what the consequences. It means protecting the rights of capital over labor, profits over the environment, and the US over the rest of the world.

 

What Assange and Manning did, was expose their phony diplomacy. If they had exposed Russian war crimes, or Chinese war crimes, or torture in Venezuela, they would have been knighted in the UK and had their own talk shows in the US, even movies in Hollywood. Tom Hanks would play Assange and maybe Leonardo Di Caprio Manning.

 

Back in 2015 I bought the book, The Wikileaks Files. It is a book every worker should have as a reference source.

Here are a few comments from the book about Russia and Ukraine and more:

“…in the decade following the century’s turn, the US has pursued a policy of aggressive NATO expansion, challenging Russia’s regional hegemony within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet area and seeking to subvert nuclear treaties to maintain its strategic advantage. As the cables show, these efforts have not gone unnoticed by Russia and are recurring points of conflict….”

 

We know the consequences of this action. But Another area of warfare is trade and agriculture. Ukraine, as we now know (some of us didn’t need a war to inform us) is the largest country in Europe and main exporter of grains, particularly wheat. I remember my father, who spoke some Russian, used to call it Europe’s bread basket. We now know it is very much the former colonial world’s bread basket.

 

When military power may prove too unpopular and might damage its reputation as the world beacon for democracy and freedom, the US regime wages an economic war. US capitalism uses its economic power and the sheer size of its productive forces in industry and agriculture (food production), to deprive other weaker countries of desperately needed commodities including food. The US blockade of Cuba has increased the misery and depravation the Cubans have had to bear during the pandemic by increasing the scarcity of much needed medical supplies. The US sanctions on Venezuela have reportedly led to 50,000 deaths As I wrote previously, the sanctions against Iraq that cost half a million lives, never gave Saddam Hussein hunger pains.

 

Wikileaks released 1000 documents from the Cablegate cache with some published in the 2015 book. Some were related to the US government’s “pushing (US) industrial manufactures on its allies” but beyond that, it points out that US support of the biotech industry is aggressive in Europe and plays an even  “…bigger role……in assuring a place for genetically modified agricultural products (GMO’s) in a region that largely wanted nothing to do with them.”

 

Wikileaks and the leaked cables showed that the “…American campaign promoting biotech products was a worldwide effort. In all, some 1,000 documents from the Cablegate cache address this effort…..”

 

The US state representing Monsanto is evident in this example.

 

I recall a German industrialist during the investigation and eventual fining of VW for cheating with mileage software in its cars, saying that US capitalism is
“merciless” when it comes to defending its profits. Indeed, four million dead in Vietnam can attest to that.

 

The authors of the first three chapters of the book, the footnotes inform us, “wish to remain anonymous”. Looking at Assange in prison in the UK should we expect otherwise? In the first chapter, and I am not going to go much beyond here, the authors remind us of the Wilsonian Doctrine, basically Manifest Destiny and the view that there is no limit to the response when the issue of building a world composed of liberal democratic states (bourgeois democracy) is the order of the day. As the authors state, “this doctrine is generally understood as the justification of military and other interventions by the US if they help produce a liberal world order….” They mean a liberal “capitalist” world order.

 

This strategy takes precedence over the concept of state sovereignty or the right of a nation to self-determination, to determine its own future,that Biden and co. are using today with regard to Ukraine. The Ukrainian working class is being used in the most horrible way as a front for US imperialism in a proxy war with its weaker Russian competitor; better they die than US Americans. The anonymous authors in The Wikileaks Files said as much back in 2015. They write: “The US sees itself as the natural vanguard of such a global order, as well as the chief bearer of any right to suppress, state sovereignty in the pursuit of liberal (capitalist RM) goals”.

 

Britain was invaluable to the US in the second great imperialist war (1939-45) as hundreds of thousands of workers from its colonies were drawn in to this war between European powers.  Nigerian, Irish, and thousands of Indian Muslims, Sikhs and Hindu’s fought for the allies in both world wars (were there any Indians in the movie Dunkirk?). But according to Wikileaks, in order to maintain the Wilsonian Doctrine, the US opposed a “racial equality” motion and “’self determination’”  was denied  “to colonized nations” 20 years before at Versailles.

 

The Wikileaks files points out that “The chief concern of US officials during this period was that ‘premature independence’ might lead to a new freedom for people, as yet unfit to govern themselves.” Even more astounding, Wikileaks points out that a leading US expert on African politics “William J Foltz wrote in 1966, it would take more than a few generations to teach the majority of black Africans, ‘the skills necessary to participate meaningfully and effectively in politics.’” This theoretical grounding explains the reason for the assassination of Lumumba, the installation of Mobutu in the Congo, the overthrow of Albenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran and the support of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the support of the South Vietnamese government that couldn’t get elected by its own people and so much more. Effectively and meaningfully means safeguarding profits, not providing water, health care, infrastructure, food etc. A dictator or strong man regime was more favorable than people attempting to choose their own path.

 

I will not continue in this vein. But, given the tight control and censorship of the US mass media I watch reports from former colonial countries like India for example. The media is so controlled here (admittedly it is not the same as a dictatorial state like Putin’s Russia, (the US bourgeois has mastered the art of self-deception) but there are many former colonial countries that have a different view to the Ukraine crisis and are not happy about being dragged in to a European basically a US/NATO conflict.

In this video, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar confronts the criticism by the US and the UK that India is supporting Putin and the Russian war machine basically. Jaishankar responds perfectly and I am certain his views are held by millions of people in former colonial countries, plundered and/or bombed by the west.

 

I also consider the US bourgeois political strategist, John Mearsheimer to be pretty much right on the button in this analysis of the present situation. Here is what he says about the US, Australian and UK defense pact but more importantly is his straight forward explanation of US history and the US role in our global society in under two minutes.

 

But we never hear these views, these opinions in an serious way. They are not made available to the masses. I am not asking people to forsake the NBA finals but ….it’s in our interest to educate ourselves.

 

This aggression, this almost religious like, acceptance the US ruling class has of its role in the world and human history, is the most dangerous threat to humans as a species on this planet. They call it Manifest Destiny, the view that the expansion of the United States throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable and indeed its expansion throughout the world. And that's what Marx means when he wrote about 170 years ago that the capitalist class that arose from the crumbling feudal society,”….compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.” My added emphasis.

 

I recognize that the Indian External Affairs Minister and John Mearsheimer are representatives of the capitalist class and apologists for capitalism. They do not see the working class as a force for change in society. Mearsheimer in the videos I have watched never mentioned them and Jaishankar is a politician in the Hindu nationalist regime of Modi I assume. There have been massive strikes in India and it’s not likely Jaishankar has supported them. But this does not negate their comments.

 

As I pointed out in a previous commentary, Julian Assange in his other book, When Google Met Wikileaks, had some very astute observations about US capitalism and global capitalism in general, but failed to understand or even see the working class as a major player in the events ahead or even a force at all. Who can blame them in a way.

 

The reality is that we are in a period of late stage capitalism. There is little room for reform and if there is any possibility at all it will be very temporary. The recent upsurge in the class war between workers at Amazon and Starbucks and other 21^st century employers is a positive development and we hope it grows, but everything points in the other direction and if Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is to be taken seriously and I think he should, the proxy war in Ukraine aimed at weakening Russia will continue for some time. The main goal is, as Blinken admitted in a rare moment of honesty, to get Russia out of the way and go for the competitor of note, China.

 

These are scary times and workers should not underestimate the rapacious quest for profits and the willingness of the US ruling class to sacrifice our standard of living and even our lives being the last ones standing in the marketplace of the world.

 

Only a united working class and a global federation of democratic social states can change this situation and drag us back from the abyss.

 

And John Mearsheimer had better watch out otherwise he may end up in the cell next to Assange.