The power of the response is proportional to the threat : Other voices
Other voices
It is heartening and horrifying to see ex-military pro-peace voices finally get a moment in the sun as the USA corporate media struggles to deal with this collapse of exceptionalism in the valleys of Afghanistan. The horror is that it has taken so long, and that this moment will be eclipsed by some next imperial narrative.
There are significant other voices in the civil society choir that are still being ignored by the FCM (Fawning Corporate Media) but have been at the barricades for most of these two decades of deliberate money laundering.
These groups have leaders: Code Pink (Medea Benjamin), Popular Resistance (Kevin Zeese (RIP) and Margaret Flowers), Black Agenda Report (Margaret Kimberley), and the Tricontinental Institute (Vijay Prasad) and others. There is yet another, a lance, Wikileaks.
The USA empire is an oil super-tanker with a decades long arc of turn. The publications of Collateral Murder, The Afghan War Logs, The Iraq War Logs, The Guantanamo Files and Cablegate created reefs ahead. Those reefs were made by people like us; Chelsea Manning (source), Julian Assange (former editor, publisher; in prison for nothing), Kristinn Hrafnsson (now editor), Sarah Harrison (former staff) and Birgitta Jónsdóttir (former staff, and Icelandic parliamentarian) amongst others.
History does not happen, it is constructed
Richard Medhurst, among a very small group of independent journalists, covered in detail the proceedings of the kangaroo court for the USA's second superseding indictment served against Julian Assange. Medhurst has recently published a convivial interview with Julian's father John Shipton (see Sources).
Mr Shipton makes plain but forbidden observations:
The barometer of the "power" [agency given to regular citizens to inform themselves via Wikileaks] is the level of punishment.
He echoes the prohibited declaration that '“You may not empower the people”.
Imperial political power depends on the control of the citizenry; that's why such effort has been made to control the mockingbird consent-manufactured media. Wikileaks is a direct frontal attack on that Ornithopter. If there are 2 000 000 people in the USA with Top Secret "classified information" clearance, what percentage would be sufficiently concerned to report malfeasance if they had access to a high quality anonymous leaking service?
Enter the astronomic Aaron Schwartz.
"Informational Shall be Free" or "The Internet Routes around Censorship"
The author has no knowledge of any connection between the Wikileaks founder and Mr Schwartz, but both were possessed of a desire for "information to be free" and pursued their own strategies. Aaron developed the initial version of "Secure Drop", a facility for anonymous web delivery of "digital information" (e.g documents). The fact that Aaron built this embryonic facility upon the cold-war based DARPA project for redundant communications, the ARPAnet, now the Internet, and the anonymising overlay of The Onion Router (Tor), a former USA Naval Research Laboratory project, shows a brilliance which is depressingly forgotten along with his other novae achievements of Creative Commons and RSS, to name a few.
Wikileaks took this Secure Drop prototype and developed their own version. It has since been embraced by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The derivative is used by major publishers world-wide to burnish their “media freedom” credentials while ignoring revelations which cross political/industrial lines. Perhaps they’re not “ignoring” but getting none because the whistleblowers has been watching the news.
Back to the Barometer of Response
Following (now) Chelsea Manning's rebuffs by major USA news outlets regarding the horrific crimes which he (then) had access to within the USA's military network (SIPRNet), to Wikileaks he turned. It was Wikileak's version of SecureDrop that enabled the delivery of an unprecedented volume of leaked materials (counting is difficult for the FCM) which then created the "reefs ahead" for that super-tanker.
Mr Shipton notes that "forever wars" is a term that comes from society, not a government PR firm, the Royal Institute for International Affairs derivative the Council on Foreign Relations or their mouthpiece “Foreign Policy”. This is a hint towards the recent crackdown on dissident speech on USA aligned social media platforms.
Twitter is trialing a "report someone else's tweet as misleading" "feature". The Stazi would be jealous, for Twitter know not only who said what, but also who is reporting. This will be the greatest gift to COINTELPRO since being able to pay informants.
Recreating social power
In the interview Mr. Shipton observes:
The multi-polar world is not coming, it’s here
The stature of a state is in the unity of its polity and parliament, and this stature matters in a multi-polar world.
Parliaments are very powerful when cross party support is established for an issue, and doubly so if the polity are vocal.
The US+NATO Afghan “effort” based on wavering and strategically inept planning using bribery and the military as a tool for “nation building” was predicted as and now known to be foolish. The unity of polity and policy was shaken by voices of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, with civil groups joining their chorus of the immorality and impending failure of the endeavours.
In the end, it is about the quality of governance. Who gets a seat at the table? Are competing interests being mediated? Do mores, humanity or common sense have a role? Will voices of reason be heard in the courts of law, the chambers of congress or the offices of the executive?
Those silenced voices are now singing seeds into the fissures of long predicted failures.
Sources
Interview With Julian Assange's Father: John Shipton & Richard Medhurst, Richard Medhurst with John Shipton, Youtube, 2021-08-23
“The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Schwatz”, a documentary. Go pay someone for it, ‘cause that wasn’t Aaron’s plan. Go figure.
Hello In There, Roger Waters and artists, Youtube, 2020-08-03