Column by Glen Allport.
Exclusive to STR
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Exposed as Criminals and Psychopaths, the Coercive Elite are Desperate to Stop the Flow of Honest Information
"When Bush cancelled his trip to avoid prosecution, the human rights groups who prepared the complaints made it public and announced that the Bush Torture Indictment would be waiting wherever he travels next."
"It was three months into Barack Obama's presidency, and the administration -- under pressure to do something about alleged abuses in Bush-era interrogation policies -- turned to a Florida senator to deliver a sensitive message to Spain:
"Don't indict former President George W. Bush's legal brain trust for alleged torture in the treatment of war on terror detainees . . . ."
WikiLeaks: How U.S. tried to stop Spain's torture probe [12], Carol Rosenberg in the Miami Herald [Note: the Spanish investigation is separate from the criminal complaint that Bush dodged by canceling this week's Geneva trip, but is "against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five other senior Bush lawyers" rather than against Mr. Bush]
The coercive elite's frantic assault [13] on Julian Assange and on the WikiLeaks organization is explained by a single fact: WikiLeaks is not merely threatening to expose the coercive elite's characteristic pattern of behavior – WikiLeaks is actually doing so. Other sources are also stepping up the leaks and exposures of vile and criminal behavior among the coercive elite in and out of government, and with enough such exposure, people will wake up to the con – a prospect that terrifies the coercive elite. (This, of course, is the only sense in which Assange is a “terrorist”).
The elite's power, privilege, and stolen plunder are at risk because the myths and lies used to justify elite power and elite control over the masses may not survive the truth. That is the reason, and at bottom the only reason, for the bizarre and desperate attacks on Assange and on his carefully-crafted tools for encouraging and protecting whistle-blowers in government, industry, and elsewhere, and for disseminating the material leaked by those whistle-blowers.1
As others have pointed out, WikiLeaks is only doing what the New York Times, CBS News, and other news organizations have intermittently done from their inception and what they by rights should be doing: reporting the news and seeking in particular to hold government and business accountable. This is simply a free press at work, and need for such reporting is the main reason that freedom of the press was included in the very first of the ten constitutional amendments that make up the Bill of Rights [14].
But in line with their overall pattern of behavior, the power elite consider such reporting to be treason, at least when done by a person or group outside the elite's control. The elite own and control the major media; governments also control the media by force, whether directly or via regulatory power, licensing, and other indirect methods. So the corporate media can be counted on to provide "fair and balanced" counterpoint to whatever negative information they do report about the elite in and out of government.
(An aside: The corporate media may have slightly increased their reportage of truth and actual news of late. Ron Paul gets coverage of his campaign to audit – and ultimately to dismantle – the Federal Reserve; Julian Assange gets positive coverage in addition to coverage of the death threats and smears against him. Steve Kroft interviewed Assange on 60 Minutes [15] recently [here's Part 2 [16]], and CBS ran the interview even though it made Assange look quite credible and sympathetic – as does his longer and commercial-free TED interview [17] from several months ago [19 min 34 sec; highly recommended]. The media's corporate owners are between a rock and a hard place: they can keep lying directly and by omission, and become ever-more irrelevant and ignored, or they can help WikiLeaks expose what has really been going on in the world – which will prove that the public's long-growing mistrust of the media has had strong basis in fact, and will threaten elite power generally).
WikiLeaks is providing enough unfiltered, damaging information about the psychopathic elite and their psychopathic system (of corporatism, of Statism, of a small group in power feeding on the wealth generated by the masses) that the elite's damage control is being overwhelmed by truth. Government and corporate support for the cruelest and most corrupt dictators [18] overseas – and so many other stunning evils committed by the elite – shows the true nature and agenda of those in power, both in and out of government. "Compassion" and "support for freedom and human rights" are NOT characteristic of the elite, including the upper echelon of the U.S. government, and as people come to understand this, they see coercive State power and the coercive elite generally as less and less legitimate.
In all of this, WikiLeaks is only highlighting what we already know, and have known for a long time [19] – but as with news video of combat horrors in Vietnam shown by the less-compliant and less-complicit media of the time, WikiLeaks' steady reminder of what is really happening has woken people up, shocked them, angered them, and energized millions to do something to stop the evil. For the coercive elite, this is not good – not good at all.
"Political Ponerology then, is the nature of evil in politics--according to Lobaczewski, organizations can become infested with psychopathic personality types and, given the proper amount of time and growing conditions, psychopaths will busily fill all positions of power in the organization with psychopathological personalities. In the case of governments, what emerges is defined as a pathocracy: tyranny at the hand of psychopaths. Lobaczewski defined governance by a pathocracy as a macrosocial disease, something unhealthy and if untreated, brutally deadly. "
Six Percent Psychopaths [20] by Jack Mullen
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The Keystone Cops Run a Psy-Op?
As for the idea that WikiLeaks is a psy-op by the elite, or by Israel, or by the CIA or other U.S. government apparatus – if true, then it is the most counter-productive psy-op imaginable, blowing back in the faces of the elite (including the coercive power structures of Israel [21] and the United States). If WikiLeaks is a psy-op by shadowy, pro-elite forces, then it's a psy-op that the masses should support with everything they have, because the predictable and actual RESULTS of this torrent of leaked information are that millions of people are waking up and seeing the bizarre and evil system of coercive control for what it is – or at least, seeing a glimmer of that truth. In turn, this awakening has caused a growing revolt against the evil of the coercive State [22] and against the psychopaths who run and benefit from the coercive State, and who are always and everywhere attracted to the one organization that allows them to use force against others with impunity [23].
"The world feels wrong because psychopaths run it."
Why Does the World Feel Wrong? [24] by Will Groves
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Possible Failure or Betrayal are Not Arguments Against Seeking Freedom
Will a new evil replace the old evil in Tunisia, in Egypt, and elsewhere as the revolutions spread? Yes, it probably will. Evil-replacing-evil has been the usual way of things in history – and the false meme of the State as parent figure, as compassionate protector, as somehow necessary is still very strong. The elite's most subtle and powerful deception – that an all-powerful State can impose compassion and actually wants to – may in the end fool people into re-enslaving themselves willingly, in the neurotic expectation that psychopaths will somehow not (for the first time in history) gain control of the resulting power structure, either immediately or over time. Another all-too-likely possibility is an imposed military dictatorship or other blatant tyranny as the end result for one or more of the protests and revolts now underway.
But regardless of possible negative outcomes, which we cannot predict with certainty in any case, how could anyone of good will suggest that a people being oppressed, impoverished, and often tortured or raped or murdered by their own government not try to gain their freedom? Does anyone really believe that the victims of, say, the Mubarak regime [25] should continue being victimized because trying for freedom might fail, or because the Wiki-leaked documents that ignited the public's long-smoldering resentment against Mubarak's U.S.-supported tyranny might have been clumsily crafted as a psy-op by the elite? Is anyone willing to argue that the people of Egypt, Tunisia [26], and elsewhere should stay enslaved because Assange might have ulterior motives or because some other tyrant might replace the tyrant now in power?
Let me be clear: People have the right to freedom regardless of what anyone else says or believes. If the revolution currently threatening elite power structures and obliterating the elite's false veneer of decency and legitimacy is a psy-op by the elite, then – at the risk of repeating myself – it is the most inept and foolish psy-op ever conceived. The results of Julian Assange's clever assault on Power are positive beyond anything freedom-loving people had reason to hope for until recently. If WikiLeaks is a psy-op, then cheer it on and make use of it to free more minds from the illusion that coercive Power is anything but evil and that those who wield Power against mankind are somehow kind-hearted and well-meaning instead of psychopaths [27] and torturers [28] and thieves [29] and warmongers [30] and fools.
For far too long, the vast majority of people on this Earth have been impoverished and abused by a coercive elite – by people in governments and people in corporations and in other groups that have managed to "partner" with government. Wars; genocides and other mega-murders [31]; torture; trillion-dollar [32] thefts; mal-regulation [33] and other corruption and disruption of civil society [34]; poverty and despair caused by the elite's appropriating ever-more of the wealth created by the people; and destruction of the Earth's environment [35] are only a short list of the evils that coercive States and their partners in crime have brought to mankind. WikiLeaks has only slightly displaced the omnipresent propaganda designed to make this devastation appear as kindness or at least as inevitable and unstoppable, but the resulting small shift in world-view is emerging at just the time when large numbers of formerly-comfortable people are losing their savings, their jobs, and their homes, and when the global poor – many of whom spend 80% of their incomes on food [36] – are seeing food prices rise dramatically. In short, the truth is emerging into view just as people are finally ready to see it, and the effects are exactly what the coercive elite has worked so hard to avoid.
Revolutions and changes in worldview are messy and do not always end well, but they don't always end badly, either, as an earlier America shows. In any case, people suffering under tyranny are not obligated to continue being victimized, and if leaked information about their corrupt and murderous "leaders" gives the masses courage to try throwing off their chains – despite poor odds for success – why would anyone but a stooge for Power complain?
Assange wants to empower people and to expose the elite for what they are; he says so in plain language (in the two linked interviews above, for example) – and his actions and the results of those actions support his claim. Every freedom-loving person has reason to cheer the ongoing, world-wide awakening that WikiLeaks is causing.
What is it, I wonder, that the anti-WikiLeaks commentators are trying for?
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Note:
1. In What WikiLeaks Revealed to the World in 2010 [37], Glenn Greenwald makes an insightful comment on the frenzy against WikiLeaks and Assange: "It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, 'journalists' now vehemently believe that as well." This last – the brownshirt [38]-like willingness of many in the press and general public to side vehemently with Power and to oppose whatever reveals Power's true nature is especially chilling.
STR's Scott Lazarowitz describes this as The WikiLeaks Critics’ Pathological Obedience to the State [39], and reminds us that such symptoms have often had terrible consequences in the past. He also reminds us that how children are treated matters; that love and compassion, especially for the young, are a cornerstone for any society that hopes to become or to remain free. A nation of damaged (unfree and unloved) children growing into angry adults wanting revenge and desperately seeking the caring parent figures they needed in childhood is not a nation likely to embrace freedom or to support the rights of any group that can be painted as scapegoats. Love and freedom require each other [40] and indeed are complimentary parts of a whole.
[41]
