Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The British High Court has ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may potentially get a final appeal against extradition to the United States, but only within a very limited scope and only if specific conditions are met.

The court ruled that Assange may appeal only on the grounds that his freedom of speech might be restricted in the US, and that there is a possibility he could receive the death penalty. If the US provides “assurances” that neither of these things will happen, then the trial moves to another phase where Assange’s legal team may debate the merits of those assurances. If the US does not provide those assurances, then the limited appeal will move forward.

Absurdly, the court determined that Assange’s lawyers may not argue against extradition on matters as self-evidently critical as the fact that the CIA plotted to assassinate him, or on the basis that he is being politically persecuted for the crime of inconvenient journalism.

Assange’s Fate Awaits US ‘Assurances’ https://t.co/tpbQZHgw1L

The High Court on Tuesday rejected five Assange grounds for a new appeal, agreeing he had only three legitimate arguments but that the U.S. could nullify them with new “assurances,” reports Joe Lauria. pic.twitter.com/IHkQZWZLEL

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) March 26, 2024

The mass media are calling this a “reprieve”, even “wonderful news”, but as Jonathan Cook explains in his latest article “Assange’s ‘reprieve’ is another lie, hiding the real goal of keeping him endlessly locked up,” that’s all a bunch of crap.

“The word ‘reprieve’ is there — just as the judges’ headline ruling that some of the grounds of his appeal have been ‘granted’ — to conceal the fact that he is prisoner to an endless legal charade every bit as much as he is a prisoner in a Belmarsh cell,” writes Cook. “In fact, today’s ruling is yet further evidence that Assange is being denied due process and his most basic legal rights — as he has been for a decade or more.”

Cook writes the following:

“The case has always been about buying time. To disappear Assange from public view. To vilify him. To smash the revolutionary publishing platform he founded to help whistleblowers expose state crimes. To send a message to other journalists that the US can reach them wherever they live should they try to hold Washington to account for its criminality.

“And worst of all, to provide a final solution for the nuisance Assange had become for the global superpower by trapping him in an endless process of incarceration and trial that, if it is allowed to drag on long enough, will most likely kill him.”

Assange’s ‘reprieve’ is another lie, hiding the real goal of keeping him endlessly locked up@Jonathan_K_Cook

https://t.co/wknQDCEaci

— Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) March 26, 2024

This kind of slow motion strangulation is how the empire operates all the time these days, across all spheres. Helping Israel starve Gaza while slowly pretending to work toward solutions. Drawing out a proxy war in Ukraine for as long as possible to bleed Russia. Slowly killing Assange in prison without trial under the pretense of judicial proceedings.

The US-centralized empire hunts not like a tiger, killing its prey with one fatal bite to the jugular, but more like a python: slowly suffocating the life out of its prey until it perishes. It favors the long, drawn-out, confusing strangulation of inconvenient populations and individuals, carried out under the cover of bureaucracy and propaganda spin. In today’s world it prefers sanctions, blockades and long proxy conflicts over the big Hulk-smash ground invasions we saw it carry out in places like Iraq and Vietnam.

These slow suffocations can take more time, but what they lack in efficiency they make up for in the quality of perception management. It’s bad PR to just openly invade countries and murder people, which is why the leaders of the western empire have been able to wag their fingers at Putin despite their being quantifiably far more murderous than Russia. People start snapping out of the propaganda matrix you spent so much time building for them and begin organizing against the political status quo your power is premised on.

So they opt for slow strangulation strategies where they can confuse the public about what’s happening and who’s responsible, outsourcing the blame to other parties while posing as the good guy who’s trying to bring peace and stability. It takes time, but the empire has time to burn. That’s what happens when you’re the most powerful empire in the history of civilization; you have the luxury of biding your time while orchestrating large-scale, long-term operations to advance your power agendas.

Meanwhile Gaza starves, Ukraine bleeds, and Assange languishes in prison, each needing this to end with more urgency every day.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Landjager (CC BY-NC 3.0 DEED)

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

List of things that have been discredited during the destruction of Gaza:

• Israel

• the “rules-based international order”

• liberals

• the label “antisemitism”

• the mainstream media

• Joe Biden

• the “two-state solution” myth

• Bernie Sanders

• Robert F Kennedy Jr

• the label “terrorist”

• the “human shields” lie

• the ADL

• AIPAC

• the US war machine

• right wing “free speech” supporters

• the Democratic Party

• the Republican Party

• Zionism

• all western governments

• all of western civilization

• everything westerners believe about their society

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The US vetoed multiple UN ceasefire resolutions, then put forward a fake “ceasefire” resolution that didn’t actually demand a ceasefire and accused Russia and China of “sabotaging” peace when they vetoed it, then an actual ceasefire resolution was passed which the US abstained from voting on rather than vetoing in order to save face over its Russia/China moralizing, and then the US declared (100% falsely) that the UN ceasefire resolution which passed is “non-binding”.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continues to support and defend Biden and just endorsed virulent Israel supporter Hakeem Jeffries for House Speaker, even after accusing Israel of genocide in a House floor speech. 

If you say this is a genocide and then you support the people who are backing this genocide, it means either (A) you’re fine with genocide or (B) you only called it a genocide to score progressive political points and don’t actually believe what you said.

❖

Israel's obsession with destroying hospitals makes no sense from a military strategic viewpoint but it makes tons of sense from a genocidal viewpoint. https://t.co/U5SKdzITuN

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 25, 2024

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Biden supporters keep trying to spin his genocidal actions as some kind of aberration in his otherwise lovely behavior due to highly unusual circumstances, as though he hasn’t been a bloodthirsty warmonger AND an extreme pro-Israel hawk his entire fucking political career.

❖

Don’t babble at me about how bad and wrong it is for Palestinians to use violence unless you can offer me a coherent plan for what they should do instead.

Civil disobedience won’t work because Zionists have no conscience and don’t care about Palestinian death and suffering.

The doors to a two-state solution with a real Palestinian state are slammed shut by Israel’s political landscape and are being further bolted down by continually expanding settlements deliberately designed to prevent such a solution from ever emerging.

A one-state solution where everyone has equal rights and no ethnicity gets preferential treatment is an even more remote pipe dream which not even Israel’s western allies support.

So what can the Palestinians do? It doesn’t look like anyone who opposes armed resistance has any good answers. Really what they want is for Palestinians to just lie down and submit to whatever abuses Israel wants to inflict upon them and just slowly fade into obscurity and become a forgotten people, but they can’t say that aloud without sounding like psychopaths so they just finger-wag at Hamas without ever offering any legitimate solutions.

Palestinians have been forced against their will into an impossibly horrible situation, and they sometimes use violence out of desperation because all the other doors are closed to them. If you want me to “condemn” them for this you can kiss my ass, especially since you can’t even tell me what they should do instead.

❖

The overwhelming majority of westerners spend roughly zero percent of their day thinking about Jews and Judaism, but because Israel stands accused of genocide people are being gaslighted into believing our society is overflowing with a widespread seething hatred of Jewish people.

❖

All popular online posts about Israeli atrocities will have numerous comments underneath claiming that it didn’t happen, or that it was justified, or that it was good actually, or that it should be blamed on Hamas. Every single one, without a single solitary exception. No matter how strong the evidence is. No matter how horrific the atrocity. 

This shows you that Israel apologists don’t care about truth or morality, and it shows you that they never have. All throughout Israel’s history they’ve been lying and manipulating the public narrative about what the Israeli state has been doing this entire time. That’s why they push so hard to get people de-platformed and censored and to get TikTok shut down: all they care about is controlling the public narrative, so they want to silence anyone who makes that harder for them.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Walking the streets of this ghost town, watching ghost people laugh and play and indulge like Gaza isn’t burning, like children aren’t starving, like people aren’t dying slowly trapped under rubble next to the corpses of their loved ones, like IDF troops aren’t merrily picking off civilians with drones and snipers while children get their limbs amputated without anaesthetic, with the full support of this ghost civilization and its ghost leaders.

This ghost town full of ghost cars, ghost buses, ghost trains, ghost pubs, ghost concerts, ghost theme parks, ghost cinemas, ghost festivals, ghost laughter, ghost feasting, ghost shopping, all going on just the same as it was before all this started. Little children running around with flesh on their bones and their organs inside their bodies like they’re supposed to be, supervised by ghost parents with heads full of social clout and gossip.

Last month a man set himself on fire before the Israeli embassy and screamed “FREE PALESTINE” as he burned. He was not a ghost. He was flesh-and-blood real. He saw it. He responded to it. He treated this nightmare like the thing that it is.

We don’t do that in this ghost town. We stare at screens and shovel snacks and booze into the gaping void within ourselves and flail our attention around looking for anything that will keep us from an even momentary encounter with the real. We do not look at Gaza. We look at everything except Gaza.

So we keep the charade going. Frantically keeping the gears of this ghost town turning like hamsters on a running wheel, running faster and faster because we can feel the wet mouth of authenticity nipping at our heels. It’s like a giant theater improv game we’re all playing together, where the whole instruction is to keep the scene in a constant state of frenetic motion.

Because we all know what will happen if we are still, on some level. We all know that stillness allows the smoke to clear and the mud to settle in the water, and from there it’s only a matter of time before we find ourselves in the tyrannical grip of clarity. And then it will all bubble up. The lies. The phoniness. The discontentment. The feelings. Shame. Guilt. Truth. Gaza.

But there’s only so long you can run from yourself. There’s only so far you can flee before you get exhausted and fall down and find yourself staring up at the sky you’ve been living under your whole life. This fraudulent ghost town can’t keep up this charade forever. None of this is sustainable. At some point and in some way, truth inevitably comes crashing in.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Jonathan Cutrer (CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)