Fellow Aussie Julian Assange in my opinion has been used to create a chilling effect on journalists who risk all to reveal the truth in the public domain.
Fear... I know they tried the same with me...They still do to this day....
I cannot tell you the problems they create to this day as they try for a long time to ruin me completely... financially and spiritually...
This is why I write and why I try to tell the world what I know and having seen the things I saw and knowing what I know... things no one else can... I t is my duty I feel...
But how can you warn people of a threat they would not believe it?
How can you tell someone they have been lied to all their life?
It is like trying to wake up from a deep dream in which they are comfortable in... they don't want to wake up...
I'm very much alone now; not lonely but very much alone. I can no longer bear to be around the people who still consume all official narrative. The last 2+ years have shown me that virtually all those around me have always been fools.
There has never been hypocrisy in world history to rival that of the Saturday morning cartoon villain that is the present US. Cue in a bug-eyed drooling maniac screaming “ I wanna rule the world!” and then cackling… well, maniacally. At least Genghis Khan and the Visigoths weren’t sanctimonious.
They were honest killers. We kill people for their own good and forgive ourselves for it because we are freedom loving. The political Gnosticism of imperial liberalism is violence.
Many yrs ago, the lead singer of a punk band birthing in our garage asked me to suggest a name for them. I suggested Genghis and the Visigoths which was declined. My next offering was taken seriously even though it was not meant to be. In the end “Vulture feces” was vetoed by another parent.
“The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.” ― Joost Meerloo, “The Rape of the Mind” (1956).
What is it that gives some of us immunity (or near immunity) to propaganda, while others have little or no resistance? Why is it that some of us are so completely hypnotized by media, while others—a tiny minority—recognize the difference between truth and lies? Whatever that difference is, the future of the world hinges on keeping our bullshit detectors fully operational.
You might as well ask why some people believe in a deity and an afterlife, neither of which exists. Why do some people believe in QAnon? I believe that it is people who need to be told what to do instead of thinking. Our disintegrated educational system is to blame for a lot of that.
Curiosity, a willingness to admit we are fallible, skepticism. Parent who did not discourage, "Why?" and responded to the question to the best of their ability.
Spot on for a quick take on US propaganda and how it shapes opinion, allowable opinion, that is. Seems a bit like the conformism demands of the 1950's when "commies" were the supreme enemies and were to be abhorred. Russia(as 'The' major player of the Soviet Union) was in the mix back then too. Hmmm! When/if time permits later today, I'll comment further.
Imagine for a moment, Caitlin, that Russia, China, India & the other 85% of non-EU/US countries do form a new IMF, UN, Hague. The precedent that this extradition of Assange sets is that anyone can be extricated from anywhere to stand trial for crimes AGAINST A FOREIGN COUNTRY. I wonder if anyone if the US is thinking about that. How many US and corporate officials would be legal to extradite for crimes in other countries if the US loses its grip on ruling the world?
Saw a video which puts the current war in Ukraine in a very interesting perspective regarding recently discovered natural gas resources, many of which lie off the waters of Crimea. Having Ukraine control and surpass Russia as an exporter of natural gas to Europe would starve billions of rubles from the Russian economy. Thus, the pro-Western revolution of 2014 and Putin's assertion that Ukraine itself constitutes a fictitious country both serve as cover for larger strategies.
No one wants their kids to march off and die for something as prosaic as natural resources and GNP, so wars are sold to us as either preventing dark threats from abroad (Iraq) or as messianic missions to spread freedom and democracy to others (too numerous to mention). Both Russia and the West indulge in their own national fictions.
But things are never black and white and while true motivations are never whispered aloud, real people fight, suffer, and die for their own sense of what's true. For better or for worse, this has always been the case.
So Russia cutting itself off from the European Market over the long run is part of a strategy to preserve it's market share? That's some interesting thinking, reminds me of the stoners jabbering away behind the bleachers at my highschool.
Russia might want to starve the EU of access to that gas, but there is no indication they intend to keep supplying the EU. Rather Russia would want a strong Germany if it was to be in their orbit as Pyotr Nikolayevich Durnovo urged over 100 years ago in his infamous memo, but as Germany has demonstrated time and again, it can't even allow it's best interest to overcome it's inherent racist ethics, and it's word is worth even less than that of America. Failing to get a reasonable Germany, it would be better to wreck it, a Germany that is failing is in no position to raise 100 Billion euros to re-arm, and a Germany that is being eaten alive and burden by a Euro riddled with armed and dangerous criminals from Ukraine will soon be busy just keeping it's head above water.
Rather, Russia is building pipelines to send it's gas to the East, two have been completed and 2 more will come on line in the next 3 years, with a total capacity that dwarfs what was sold, too cheaply, to the EU.
Looking at Putin's desire to eliminate Ukrainian national identity combined with Russia's construction of several western pipelines to europe which skirt Ukraine entirely through the lens of natural gas resources and revenue makes sense to me as contributing factors of the current conflict. I'll be sure to pick up my roaches.
NordSteam 2 was German financed, and mostly German built. Merkel had to fly to Moscow to get him to agree to it, and this is part of the anger over betrayal, as they should have laid on more pipelines to the East earlier. If you don't know the money flows, you don't know the show.
In a 2017 interview with an actual human being, John Pilger, ex-CIA agent Duane McClaridge had the bold-face audacity to dismiss as insignificant the deaths and disappearances of thousands, and torture and incarceration of tens of thousands in the US led coups in El Salvador and Chile. He said it was done in the best interests of all (but perhaps, the elites a tad more, eh?) and it was the new world order way of the future, and those who didn't like it could "lump it". Well there you have a nice mixture of truth and lies that has become the norm today, and we all know it started long before the 1963 Chilean magic trick. They know we know they did it, so they admit it, but it's a good thing, and it's our stubborn stupidity that gets in the way of our understanding and accepting that plain fact.
Same thing with Julian Assange. I've lost the thread of the argument: it isn't sedition or espionage -what? endangering our spies? State secrets? Making a laughing stock of government? Discrediting political parties and the voting ritual itself?
And they want credit as true agents of morality in the world? Arbiters in moral/ethical matters? They want Putin charged with war crimes In a process initiated by a country that puts itself beyond the authority of the ICC, and uses the UN only as a moral blank cheque to dignify it's crimes after the fact, along with an entire hemisphere that has largely ignored the most horrendous crimes against humanity since WWII... because they were perpetrated by the West.
What is happening goes beyond audacious hypocrisy, and "hubris" is a feeble description for what goes down these days. Understandably, many are temporarily mentally stun-gunned. But "lumping it" is not an option. There are many actual human beings out there, Caitlin among them, who would choke on any attempt to "lump it".
Clarridge was the chief of the Latin American division from 1981 to 1987, and recipient of Papa Bush pardon. Watching the film one may feel he was a rogue agent, but as the Bush Sr. pardon demonstrates, he was just one demon among demons all through the government.
Yeah, they get everything mixed up with the Vatican "Papa": a wave of the hand -and you're good with the universe. Well, there are millions whose memories aren't so easily dismissed.
That St. Zelensky (peace be upon him) picture is hilarious. You would not believe how many of my friends and acquaintances actually believe that. People who formerly had brains. Then again, I think probably that those kinds of idiots bombard you all the time.
Thank you Caitlin Johnstone. Today’s narrative with the opinions expressed does you credit.
You see, I live in an electorate where my member of Parliament, her name being Susan Templeman, MP, was one of 10 or so in the Australians Parliament who had the decency and guts to support Julian Assange recently in a story run on Consortium News. It was part of a letter to the feeble US President Biden expressing in no uncertain terms their support for Julian and questioning the actions of the US government. How do you like that? Just ten or so parliamentarians, the rest cowering in a corner anxious to prostrate themselves before the USA as this country has done (with one exception) since 1950.
"But Julian its an Australian, Prime Minister” (a PM just for another 6 weeks, then into the bin).
We should be caring for Julian’s welfare, discarded by the media world by people like The Guardian, an ungrateful publication, who were delighted some time ago to print all he had managed to collect as to the criminal behaviour of the USA. Not now though. He is in a UK prison following a US style show trial with the questionable approvals of a current UK government , a previous empire builder which also goes to some effort to grovel to the killers of 20 million men, women and children since 1945, by the current disgraced empire builder.
An earlier UK associate in US crimes, Tony Blair, walks free as does Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, all the Israeli controlled pseudo-American Neocons, while as a legal contrast we see the highly respected Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) and Chelsea Manning, both walking free in their own country, as they should. As anyone should that tells it how it is. It is called the truth. No one can question it.
If Australia was a country that had decent independent values and some pride in our own people, our achievements as well, one of which had the courage to show the world what the USA was capable of in wars of its making, we, Australia, would be demanding that Julian Assange be freed immediately, a man who should be regarded as a hero to truth and justice following his efforts to show to the world the lies, the criminality and the total disregard the US has for anyone that has a contrary opinion to their own, to show also that their self-styled “exceptionalism" is a fallacy as they go from one criminal action to the next, exampled by their current proxy war in Ukraine.
The USA is the most criminal country in history.
They are a disgrace, as is Australia as well, now a gutless and compliant country and with AUKUS and QUAD, very likely to be full of US military bases as a tame little bag carrier for US hegemonic ambitions.
Your haters? Please, you are pure heterodox. I can’t speak to anyone in my world about your stuff, everyone is fully captured in the narrative matrix and if I demonstrate this fact (fact!) they will simply say go fuck off. Really I dare you, my fellow readers, give this piece to anyone and see if I’m right. Give it to your grown children see what they have to say: LOL. You brought up little cretins, yes, maybe?
Power: that’s it.
Put another way, better to kill them be killed. That’s what we are. That is the retort that Chomsky could not dispel; it is thus because we are thus and your friends will tell you, they, if pressed will say (I m certain of this) :” fuck off I don’t care “
Kill or be killed is the law of the jungle. Some people are stuck in pure jungle mode, no matter how much technology they own. As Chris Hedges says of the warmongers in his terrific article, "The Pimps of War", historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II.
No one would care, there is no honour among even the middle class of America. They are at ease with killing others in mass to gain the smallest luxury.
I've always assumed that the main reason JA is still being silenced is because he knows who hacked the DNC. (Rumor has it it's a cagey Russian named Sethrenko Richevtsky.)
Julian Assange is a prisoner of this war and a hero.
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/julian-assange-prisoner-of-war?s=w
Fellow Aussie Julian Assange in my opinion has been used to create a chilling effect on journalists who risk all to reveal the truth in the public domain.
Fear... I know they tried the same with me...They still do to this day....
I cannot tell you the problems they create to this day as they try for a long time to ruin me completely... financially and spiritually...
This is why I write and why I try to tell the world what I know and having seen the things I saw and knowing what I know... things no one else can... I t is my duty I feel...
But how can you warn people of a threat they would not believe it?
How can you tell someone they have been lied to all their life?
It is like trying to wake up from a deep dream in which they are comfortable in... they don't want to wake up...
I'm very much alone now; not lonely but very much alone. I can no longer bear to be around the people who still consume all official narrative. The last 2+ years have shown me that virtually all those around me have always been fools.
same here... in my case maybe even worse....
Ever since I filed my patent and worked on my invention people treated me like I was insane right to downright hostility .
But with the possibilities I see how can I pretend to be a normal being?
I can't.
Very interesting quote from Gertrude Rothschild in your article: “If my sons did not want wars, there would be none.”
Ukraine...
There has never been hypocrisy in world history to rival that of the Saturday morning cartoon villain that is the present US. Cue in a bug-eyed drooling maniac screaming “ I wanna rule the world!” and then cackling… well, maniacally. At least Genghis Khan and the Visigoths weren’t sanctimonious.
The United States of Americas indirect war against Russian using Ukraine has opened my eyes to the unbecoming characteristics of that nation.
It’s very disappointing to see the sheep nations that follow without question.
What, the decades long American support for what was happening in the occupied territories didn't do it for you?
They were honest killers. We kill people for their own good and forgive ourselves for it because we are freedom loving. The political Gnosticism of imperial liberalism is violence.
Many yrs ago, the lead singer of a punk band birthing in our garage asked me to suggest a name for them. I suggested Genghis and the Visigoths which was declined. My next offering was taken seriously even though it was not meant to be. In the end “Vulture feces” was vetoed by another parent.
I can only guess what the whole list looked like.
I do think the point was to provoke reactions like yours.
“The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.” ― Joost Meerloo, “The Rape of the Mind” (1956).
What is it that gives some of us immunity (or near immunity) to propaganda, while others have little or no resistance? Why is it that some of us are so completely hypnotized by media, while others—a tiny minority—recognize the difference between truth and lies? Whatever that difference is, the future of the world hinges on keeping our bullshit detectors fully operational.
You might as well ask why some people believe in a deity and an afterlife, neither of which exists. Why do some people believe in QAnon? I believe that it is people who need to be told what to do instead of thinking. Our disintegrated educational system is to blame for a lot of that.
Curiosity, a willingness to admit we are fallible, skepticism. Parent who did not discourage, "Why?" and responded to the question to the best of their ability.
Spot on for a quick take on US propaganda and how it shapes opinion, allowable opinion, that is. Seems a bit like the conformism demands of the 1950's when "commies" were the supreme enemies and were to be abhorred. Russia(as 'The' major player of the Soviet Union) was in the mix back then too. Hmmm! When/if time permits later today, I'll comment further.
Imagine for a moment, Caitlin, that Russia, China, India & the other 85% of non-EU/US countries do form a new IMF, UN, Hague. The precedent that this extradition of Assange sets is that anyone can be extricated from anywhere to stand trial for crimes AGAINST A FOREIGN COUNTRY. I wonder if anyone if the US is thinking about that. How many US and corporate officials would be legal to extradite for crimes in other countries if the US loses its grip on ruling the world?
Not "if". More like "when".
Oh, I like the way you're thinking, Carolyn. Totally agree!
I bet Libya would love to get their hands on Hillary.
Saw a video which puts the current war in Ukraine in a very interesting perspective regarding recently discovered natural gas resources, many of which lie off the waters of Crimea. Having Ukraine control and surpass Russia as an exporter of natural gas to Europe would starve billions of rubles from the Russian economy. Thus, the pro-Western revolution of 2014 and Putin's assertion that Ukraine itself constitutes a fictitious country both serve as cover for larger strategies.
No one wants their kids to march off and die for something as prosaic as natural resources and GNP, so wars are sold to us as either preventing dark threats from abroad (Iraq) or as messianic missions to spread freedom and democracy to others (too numerous to mention). Both Russia and the West indulge in their own national fictions.
But things are never black and white and while true motivations are never whispered aloud, real people fight, suffer, and die for their own sense of what's true. For better or for worse, this has always been the case.
So Russia cutting itself off from the European Market over the long run is part of a strategy to preserve it's market share? That's some interesting thinking, reminds me of the stoners jabbering away behind the bleachers at my highschool.
Russia might want to starve the EU of access to that gas, but there is no indication they intend to keep supplying the EU. Rather Russia would want a strong Germany if it was to be in their orbit as Pyotr Nikolayevich Durnovo urged over 100 years ago in his infamous memo, but as Germany has demonstrated time and again, it can't even allow it's best interest to overcome it's inherent racist ethics, and it's word is worth even less than that of America. Failing to get a reasonable Germany, it would be better to wreck it, a Germany that is failing is in no position to raise 100 Billion euros to re-arm, and a Germany that is being eaten alive and burden by a Euro riddled with armed and dangerous criminals from Ukraine will soon be busy just keeping it's head above water.
Rather, Russia is building pipelines to send it's gas to the East, two have been completed and 2 more will come on line in the next 3 years, with a total capacity that dwarfs what was sold, too cheaply, to the EU.
Looking at Putin's desire to eliminate Ukrainian national identity combined with Russia's construction of several western pipelines to europe which skirt Ukraine entirely through the lens of natural gas resources and revenue makes sense to me as contributing factors of the current conflict. I'll be sure to pick up my roaches.
NordSteam 2 was German financed, and mostly German built. Merkel had to fly to Moscow to get him to agree to it, and this is part of the anger over betrayal, as they should have laid on more pipelines to the East earlier. If you don't know the money flows, you don't know the show.
In a 2017 interview with an actual human being, John Pilger, ex-CIA agent Duane McClaridge had the bold-face audacity to dismiss as insignificant the deaths and disappearances of thousands, and torture and incarceration of tens of thousands in the US led coups in El Salvador and Chile. He said it was done in the best interests of all (but perhaps, the elites a tad more, eh?) and it was the new world order way of the future, and those who didn't like it could "lump it". Well there you have a nice mixture of truth and lies that has become the norm today, and we all know it started long before the 1963 Chilean magic trick. They know we know they did it, so they admit it, but it's a good thing, and it's our stubborn stupidity that gets in the way of our understanding and accepting that plain fact.
Same thing with Julian Assange. I've lost the thread of the argument: it isn't sedition or espionage -what? endangering our spies? State secrets? Making a laughing stock of government? Discrediting political parties and the voting ritual itself?
And they want credit as true agents of morality in the world? Arbiters in moral/ethical matters? They want Putin charged with war crimes In a process initiated by a country that puts itself beyond the authority of the ICC, and uses the UN only as a moral blank cheque to dignify it's crimes after the fact, along with an entire hemisphere that has largely ignored the most horrendous crimes against humanity since WWII... because they were perpetrated by the West.
What is happening goes beyond audacious hypocrisy, and "hubris" is a feeble description for what goes down these days. Understandably, many are temporarily mentally stun-gunned. But "lumping it" is not an option. There are many actual human beings out there, Caitlin among them, who would choke on any attempt to "lump it".
Clarridge was the chief of the Latin American division from 1981 to 1987, and recipient of Papa Bush pardon. Watching the film one may feel he was a rogue agent, but as the Bush Sr. pardon demonstrates, he was just one demon among demons all through the government.
Yeah, they get everything mixed up with the Vatican "Papa": a wave of the hand -and you're good with the universe. Well, there are millions whose memories aren't so easily dismissed.
That St. Zelensky (peace be upon him) picture is hilarious. You would not believe how many of my friends and acquaintances actually believe that. People who formerly had brains. Then again, I think probably that those kinds of idiots bombard you all the time.
That image of Zelensky is hilarious 😂 so contrived 🤮
I should say a proper thank you to Caitlin for caring, it’s a terrible thing caring. I’m kind of rooting for nuclear Armageddon.
Apparently, our billionaire rulers would rather give 'war a chance' rather than 'peace a chance'. Gee, I wonder how this will all work out in the end?
Seig Heil Ukraini!, There, fixed it.
Thank you Caitlin Johnstone. Today’s narrative with the opinions expressed does you credit.
You see, I live in an electorate where my member of Parliament, her name being Susan Templeman, MP, was one of 10 or so in the Australians Parliament who had the decency and guts to support Julian Assange recently in a story run on Consortium News. It was part of a letter to the feeble US President Biden expressing in no uncertain terms their support for Julian and questioning the actions of the US government. How do you like that? Just ten or so parliamentarians, the rest cowering in a corner anxious to prostrate themselves before the USA as this country has done (with one exception) since 1950.
"But Julian its an Australian, Prime Minister” (a PM just for another 6 weeks, then into the bin).
We should be caring for Julian’s welfare, discarded by the media world by people like The Guardian, an ungrateful publication, who were delighted some time ago to print all he had managed to collect as to the criminal behaviour of the USA. Not now though. He is in a UK prison following a US style show trial with the questionable approvals of a current UK government , a previous empire builder which also goes to some effort to grovel to the killers of 20 million men, women and children since 1945, by the current disgraced empire builder.
An earlier UK associate in US crimes, Tony Blair, walks free as does Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, all the Israeli controlled pseudo-American Neocons, while as a legal contrast we see the highly respected Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) and Chelsea Manning, both walking free in their own country, as they should. As anyone should that tells it how it is. It is called the truth. No one can question it.
If Australia was a country that had decent independent values and some pride in our own people, our achievements as well, one of which had the courage to show the world what the USA was capable of in wars of its making, we, Australia, would be demanding that Julian Assange be freed immediately, a man who should be regarded as a hero to truth and justice following his efforts to show to the world the lies, the criminality and the total disregard the US has for anyone that has a contrary opinion to their own, to show also that their self-styled “exceptionalism" is a fallacy as they go from one criminal action to the next, exampled by their current proxy war in Ukraine.
The USA is the most criminal country in history.
They are a disgrace, as is Australia as well, now a gutless and compliant country and with AUKUS and QUAD, very likely to be full of US military bases as a tame little bag carrier for US hegemonic ambitions.
Your haters? Please, you are pure heterodox. I can’t speak to anyone in my world about your stuff, everyone is fully captured in the narrative matrix and if I demonstrate this fact (fact!) they will simply say go fuck off. Really I dare you, my fellow readers, give this piece to anyone and see if I’m right. Give it to your grown children see what they have to say: LOL. You brought up little cretins, yes, maybe?
Power: that’s it.
Put another way, better to kill them be killed. That’s what we are. That is the retort that Chomsky could not dispel; it is thus because we are thus and your friends will tell you, they, if pressed will say (I m certain of this) :” fuck off I don’t care “
They don’t care!
Kill or be killed is the law of the jungle. Some people are stuck in pure jungle mode, no matter how much technology they own. As Chris Hedges says of the warmongers in his terrific article, "The Pimps of War", historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II.
I always thought Assange had a huge secret in his pocket to be used in case things ever got like this. I guess I was mistaken.
So did I. Maybe someone else has it and is waiting.
No one would care, there is no honour among even the middle class of America. They are at ease with killing others in mass to gain the smallest luxury.
🤷🏻♂️Ah well, at least Ed Snowden is safe,eh?🥁
Considering the CIA leaked a planned assassination of Julian Assange in London, I'll assume you are being facetious.
I've always assumed that the main reason JA is still being silenced is because he knows who hacked the DNC. (Rumor has it it's a cagey Russian named Sethrenko Richevtsky.)