Belmarsh Prison London where Julian Assange is being held as an Australian political prisoner
A tribute to the late John Pilger as he salutes Julian Assange
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Freedom of the press now rests with the honourable few: the exceptions, the dissidents on the internet who belong to no club, who are neither rich nor laden with Pulitzers, but produce fine, disobedient, moral journalism – those like Julian Assange.
Meanwhile, it is our responsibility to stand by a true journalist whose sheer courage ought to be inspiration to all of us who still believe that freedom is possible. I salute him.
Let’s do everything we can to carry on John Pilger’s fight against war and fascism and defeat braindead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers. This is my aim at LRC, and this is why we featured so many articles by John Pilger over the past twenty years.
As for Assange’s homeland, Australia has displayed only a cringeing cowardice as its government has secretly conspired against its own citizen who ought to be celebrated as a national hero. Not for nothing did George W. Bush anoint the Australian prime minister John Howard his “deputy sheriff”.
It is said that whatever happens to Julian Assange in the next three weeks will diminish if not destroy freedom of the press in the West. But which press? The Guardian? The BBC, The New York Times, the Jeff Bezos Washington Post?
The Judases on the Guardian who flirted with Julian, exploited his landmark work, made their pile then betrayed him, have nothing to fear. They are safe because they are needed.
(Not forgetting Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd)
THE WORLD suffered a great loss when the Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger died December 30 at the age of 84. One fact stands out foremost in his decades-long career as a writer and intellectual: He opposed war and fascism. He thought that the United States and Britain all too often supported war and fascism, and he often had occasion to criticize other intellectuals as lackeys of the state, in a way that will remind readers of LRC of Murray Rothbard’s similar attacks on “court historians.”
To be against fascism, we have to be able to identify the fascists properly. Pilger argues that in the war between Russia and the Ukraine, those who condemn Putin as a “fascist” have matters backwards. It is the Ukrainian leadership who are the real fascists:
“The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias’ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.” See here.
We need to ask ourselves a question about war. Why is it bad? The answer is obvious. It causes an enormous amount of death, injury, and suffering. We see this happening in the war between Israel and Hamas. Millions of Palestinian have been displaced while Gaza has been bombed to smithereens, and the death toll continues to mount. John Pilger strongly supported Palestinian rights, which earned him the obloquy of pro-Israel lobby:
“In 1977, the award-winning journalist and film-maker, John Pilger, made a documentary called Palestine Is Still The Issue. He told how almost a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967. In this in-depth documentary, he has returned to the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, and to Israel, to ask why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo — refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.
“The fate and struggle of the Palestinians,” says Pilger, “are not just critical to the overdue recognition of their basic human rights, but are also central to whether the region, and the wider world, are plunged into war. Israel is now one of the biggest military powers in the world. While nothing changes, the dangers become greater. This is a film about a nation of people, traumatized, humiliated and yet resilient. In trying to liberate less than a quarter of historic Palestine, they have had no army, no air force, and no powerful friends — and have fought back with slingshots and now with the terrorism of the suicide bombers.”
One of the best features of Pilger’s work was that he was able to set current events within a larger picture that made sense of them. In an article written in 2016, he warned that the US was building up a nuclear arsenal that threatened the total disaster of war with both Russia and China.
“How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.” P/2
Pages: 12
Ed: “Left, right, centre, fascist, communist, woke, ad infinitum all created by the same people. Editor”
Yessiree, Bob. All just tentacles and suckers of the ONE octopus that has humanity firmly covered in its grip.
No point in being distracted and tinkering with one or two suckers at a time when going after its brain and operation centre is the only viable solution.
Joe Bogan: “I think people can’t believe that the British aristocracy is the tail that wags the US dog”
Ever since 1812. America won the war but the British won America.
But when you say “aristocracy” I take it you mean the City of London aristocrats, not Charlie & the boys?
I think people can’t believe that the British aristocracy is the tail that wags the US dog but if they can’t understand the history they have no chance of understanding anything.
Let, right, centre, fascist, communist, woke, ad infinitum all created by the same people. Editor
“It seems that a great many Cold-War indoctrinated Americans throw the term “Communist” about with similar abandon – anything or anyone not to their liking is “Communist”. Never mind the Globalist cabal of mass-murdering billionaire psychopaths arrayed against them.”
True enough. And it’s not solely confined to the dumbass American who thinks America is now “communist”! How screwed in the head would you have to be to conclude that!?
Yes, there are “communists” and there are “fascists”, and they allegedly dislike each other. But they’re simply transitional labels signifying totalitarianism. Communists and billionaires are antithetical. But now we have Chinese communist billionaires? Not quite Marx and Engels, is it? lol
More likely the Left v Right dialectic is DELIBERATELY instilled and conditioned into people’s heads so that they don’t see the Top v Bottom one. Better they shoot at each other than at their masters above them.
As we can see, it works! The Bottom lot is being smashed by the Top while it’s paranoically looking out for the train coming from the Left or the Right.
The shepherds know how to work the sheep. They’ve had plenty of practice observing how it’s done since the Tower of Babel.
Assange is locked up in Britain by Britain, let’s stop pretending this has anything to do with Sweden, the USA or Australia. He is in their dungeon getting the treatment of centuries past, go in the dungeon and rot for the temerity of making a thing called “wikileaks”, even the Nazis got off far, far lighter, that is the handful of Nazis that actually were sentenced, so much for bombing London, a lesser crime.
brianajnz said – “The constant use if the term fascism is wrong and ignorant.”
Perhaps you’re correct. It seems that a great many Cold-War indoctrinated Americans throw the term “Communist” about with similar abandon – anything or anyone not to their liking is “Communist”. Never mind the Globalist cabal of mass-murdering billionaire psychopaths arrayed against them.
However, IMO some leeway is warranted with the colloquial lexicon now some 60 years after the adventures of Exercise WWII. “Nazi”, for example, is almost universally understood by current generations to apply to racial supremacists (the present-day Zionist Master Race comes immediately to mind, particularly with current events, and who can overlook Seinfeld’s iconic “Soup Nazi”?) irrespective of the historic accuracy of that interpretation when applied to the German Nazis of the mid-20th Century.
It would be hard to dispute that the present-day crop of so-called “Ukrainian Nazis” are very nasty pieces of work comparable with the worst of any previous period in history.
Practically speaking, definitions and strict historic fidelity aside, perhaps the best resolution is to simply accept that old adage – “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and our adversaries today are very naughty people indeed.
One of the worst articles I have ever read. The constant use if the term fascism is wrong and ignorant. Fascism is a term to describe Italy between WWI & WWII and specifically the Mussolini era who got rid of the Mafia. The Mafia returned after the war. Story there. Nazi is an applied slur term.
The statement “To be against fascism, we have to be able to identify the fascists properly”. The height of ignorance.
Mussolini and his mistress were stung up by Partisans. Who were they I wonder?
Mussolini’s wife claimed her husbands body?
The Azov Battalion is Jewish owned.
I have Pilgers book Secret Country. I am not a Pilger fan. He wrote from a distance, He never got to the nitty gritty and certainly didn’t go anywhere near naming powerful interests. Pilger may have known if he went further he would be silenced. If he had gone up against the powerful establishment he may have received something a little along the lines of Assange. What did Pilger achieve other than fame for his Leftwing self, nothing.
Ilan Pappe is the one to read on Palestine he wrote The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine and others. A shocking read. now lives in England. Read the book and you will see why.
Julian Assange is a bona-fide World Hero and Martyr for Humanity who will be recorded in perpetuity as such. Children will be learning that name centuries, even millenia, into the future.
Meanwhile, the foreign-owned COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA CORPORATION, registered in Washington DC, doesn’t give a rat’s arse about Julian Assange or ANY Australian, for that matter. They just want us all dead, and the sooner the better.
Even all of the corporation’s sold-out treasonous employees in the fake corporate “judiciary” and the fake corporate “parliament” and the private armies of shit-for-brains hired mercenary goons impersonating our “police” are expendable. They just haven’t figured that out yet, and if they ever do, it will be too late for them.
Well the repulsive constitutional republic, not the people of, known as the United States of America, has just buried democracy and one of their own citizens Gonzalo Lira; so I’m not setting my hopes too high for our Australian brother in truth.
To prosecute Julian Assange for sharing of video evidence of the slaughter of media and Iraqi civilians who were innocent of any wrong doing by a U.S. Apache gunship would also mean the prosecution for said crimes by the then President of the USA who is if that President was not protected by Presidential immunity that person would be held accountable for such criminal behavior.
“Telling the truth is now a revolutionary act.”
Says it all, doesn’t it? Woe are we! How much lower can we fall?
John Pilger, Julian Assange and others – are the heroes of our times and will be long remembered. The Australian government should hang its head in shame – this will not be forgotten.
Very true, they should indeed, to allow the hangman’s noose to be slipped over their heads and around their treasonous necks.
Those humanity loathing, treasonous liars and murderers are from the same ilk as your fake hero: EX POTUS and ‘Father of the Vaccine’: Mr Donald J Trump, who could have easily intervened and had Julian set free or, pardoned.
But he chose to do NOTHING. Refused to even discuss the matter of Julian Assange’s fate.
John Pilger, Julian Assange and others – are the heroes of our times and will be long remembered. The Australian government should hang its head in shame – this will not be forgotten.
Gonzalo Lira, another hero, has just died in a Ukraine prison. A US journalist who reported the truth about the war in Ukraine and the US turned its back on him also. Too many dirty secrets exposed.
One wonders if justice exists at all now. Just read that the Chair of The Hague was actually nominated to the position by Hilary Clinton… so what will the Israel genocide verdict be?
Telling the truth is now a revolutionary act as I think Assange said. He was correct. If he is extradited it will be the final proof what the world is indeed evil and in the grip of monsters.
A very good article by CN and tells it like it is.
Fourize
In the photo above with the caption saying “John Pilger …”, the man pictured is not John Pilger.
You’re right: the man pictured is in fact Mr Llewellyn H. Rockwell of Alt-media site Lew Rockwell.com.
I’ve been a regular subscriber at his excellent site for several years.
Highly recommended.
NO TRIAL BY JURY = NO FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.
In the photo above with the caption saying “John Pilger …”, the man pictured is not John Pilger.