Tocky on 23/4/2019 at 14:58
Right. Other western nations. Nothing on Russia. If it were not for those western nations intelligence agencies we would know nothing of Russia's nefarious activities. Assange concentrates on western nations with a particular concentration on the most powerful and able to counter Russia.
lowenz on 23/4/2019 at 15:18
These "traditional values" are used to repress minorities and undermine democracy in the West
It's true but "minorities rights" are the ammo of "progressive" (please, real human progress can't pass by a lobbyistic system such modern "democracy", in Exxon USA or in Gazprom Russia, really) think tanks as well.
Can't we just reboot the mankind at large? It's obviously in a reset-needed pathetic state.
heywood on 23/4/2019 at 15:34
Politics makes for strange bedfellows. I wouldn't go so far as to say Assange is a fan of Putin or supports Russian expansionism. They just share a common hatred for the Western liberal system and the spread of it after the Cold War. That much is OK, we can take it. We endure people like Noam Chomsky opposing and mischaracterizing everything we do meanwhile apologizing for genocide. But unlike Noam Chomsky, who chose to be a dissident, Assange chose to be an activist - the bad kind of activist, who isn't out to solve a problem but to fuck shit up.
He and Wikileaks are a blunt instrument. For every government lie or cover up Wikileaks has exposed in the public interest, it has also needlessly harmed plenty of individuals and relationships and policies. The diplomatic cables are a good example of that imbalance. He plainly didn't care about causing collateral damage. If anything, he hoped for it.
Although he was publicly conducting espionage, it was easy for people to support him in the beginning, because he was playing to a strong anti-Iraq war movement, and a strong anti-American sentiment in its aftermath. The governments of Obama, Brown, and Rudd were sort of sympathetic with Wikileaks in the early years. But his honeymoon with the left seemed to end with the Iraq war, when people realized that he wasn't just an anti-war guy, he was going to indiscriminately smear the whole of the West if he could. No matter who was in charge, if he could get some dirt on you, he wouldn't hesitate to put it out. And because he was really only going after one side, he began to look like a foreign agent.
When the threat of indictments came down onto him, he fell into the hands of Rafael Correa, who had his own reason for hating the US and rest of the West: Ecuador's debt. That put him squarely in Russia's sphere of influence. I view Wikileaks role in the 2016 election as nothing more than a favor returned to the people who protected him from extradition. That doesn't mean he's allied with Putin on policy. He's just desperate to save himself. He's a lot like Trump, and he's driven more by selfishness and ego than principle.
nbohr1more on 23/4/2019 at 20:43
When the entirety of US and US aligned media along with their helpers in the Military Industrial complex
are doing their best to report on "bad things that Russians do", WHY would we then also need Wikileaks
to provide reporting?
Wikileaks is to provide information that is SUPPRESSED by the ESTABLISHMENT.
RUSSIA IS NOT THE ESTABLISHMENT.
Want to know when Saddam Hussein has done something bad?
Read every MSM newspaper.
Wanna know when your own western government has done something bad?
You're now "Shit out of Luck" because the ESTABLISHMENT has crushed Wikileaks.
SEE THE DIFFERENCE????
froghawk on 23/4/2019 at 21:29
Calling Chomsky a genocide apologist is a pretty severe mischaracterization in and of itself. He opposed Pol Pot and certainly never tried to make the claim that the deaths Khmer Rouge caused were 'ok'. His argument was primarily that the US media ignored the western role in creating the situation and also ignored our high death toll in the region, which is true. His refutation of the Khmer death toll was a mistake, but someone who dabbles in that many fields is never going to have a 100% track record. On the whole, he's been far more on point politically than he has been in linguistics for quite a long time, as he failed to stay up to date in that field despite his early pivotal role in it. He rarely mischaracterizes the role of the US - his assessments on that front are generally spot on.
Tocky on 23/4/2019 at 22:53
Russia seems pretty "established" to me and getting more so. It's propaganda arm doesn't need any help from Assange. Without him they will still be able to infiltrate the internet and influence elections as well as pay various sources to work against the west. Don't worry that it can't find another stooge like him to do it's dirty work.
One area I would like exposed is how both Russia and US Republicans are working toward the same goal but from opposite ends. Russia is working toward making it's criminals into oligarchs and Republicans are working toward giving it's oligarchs the means to be criminal. It works out the same in the end and it's why Trump gets along with Putin so well. He openly admires his ability to suppress his press, which of course is done with poison and jail on trumped up charges. But you will never see Assange bite the hand that has been feeding him. Not even with being kicked out. He expects the Republicans to help him out as Russia does and for similar reasons.
heywood on 24/4/2019 at 00:57
Quote Posted by froghawk
Calling Chomsky a genocide apologist is a pretty severe mischaracterization in and of itself. He opposed Pol Pot and certainly never tried to make the claim that the deaths Khmer Rouge caused were 'ok'. His argument was primarily that the US media ignored the western role in creating the situation and also ignored our high death toll in the region, which is true. His refutation of the Khmer death toll was a mistake, but someone who dabbles in that many fields is never going to have a 100% track record. On the whole, he's been far more on point politically than he has been in linguistics for quite a long time, as he failed to stay up to date in that field despite his early pivotal role in it. He rarely mischaracterizes the role of the US - his assessments on that front are generally spot on.
Your characterization of him is very charitable. Not only did he try to refute the death toll, he initially tried to blame it on bombings rather than the Khmer Rouge, and tried to discredit the first hand accounts from refugees by claiming they were being told what to say by American propagandists. He also promoted Gareth Porter's book
Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, which was a pro-Khmer Rouge propaganda piece. You can read one of Chomsky's mainstream writings on it here: (
https://chomsky.info/19770625/) https://chomsky.info/19770625/. You can find the book on Amazon, or Google for book reviews. And you can find a fairly objective analysis of the whole thing here: (
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm) http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm. Note this happened in the late 1970s in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. Chomsky has tried to walk it back since then. But rather than being intellectually honest and admitting he got it wrong, he's tried to spin his own words.
Chomsky also got himself involved in defending Robert Faurisson, a literal Holocaust denier, who included one of Chomsky's essays in his book. I'm not saying that Chomsky is a Holocaust denier himself, he was just unusually vigorous in his defense of Faurisson.
Chomsky was also involved in Bosnian genocide denial, contributing to Edward Herman and David Peterson's book
The Politics of Genocide and supporting Diana Johnstone's book
Fool's Crusade.
More recently, he advocated for Ted Postol's conspiracy theories which try to argue that the Syrian government wasn't using chemical weapons.
Chomsky is great at deconstructing Western propaganda and spot lighting what we do wrong, but he's a propagandist himself. His arguments always boil down to a simplistic indictment of the West and the US in particular, combined with rationalizing or playing down other bad actors (if not outright denial or apologism). Any positive things that happen under his favored regimes are talked up and attributed to the noble efforts of revolutionaries, and any bad things that happen under his favored regimes are invariably blamed one way or another on unjust Western powers. He's doing it now with Venezuela, praising Chavez policies for reducing poverty (ignoring that this was during an oil price boom and the government was draining the treasury) and now that things aren't going so well, he's saying it's because the US is in control. We get the same blame when we're not being imperialist. He blamed the US and Australia for East Timor because we
didn't intervene. It's all black and white to him, good guys vs. bad guys, and we're always the bad guys.
froghawk on 24/4/2019 at 02:16
Thanks for the rundown. I wasn't familiar with his stance on all of those things, and while I'll need to do more research, several of them do seem initially quite troubling after a quick glance - particularly the Postol and Timor cases.
Tony_Tarantula on 24/4/2019 at 14:15
There's one aspect of this entire discussion I find bizarre.
Ever since Trump emerged as being more than a joke candidate, there has been intense rhetoric about the "fascism" of Trump and his supporters. Just this last week we had two major events that constitute, by far, the most "fascist" things that Trump has done: the arrest of Assange on politically motivated charges, and vetoing a resolution against participation in Yemen and continuing to execute a war without approval from Congress.
What is the reaction from the institutions and commentators who have been warning us Trump is fascist?
They freaking LOVE these news stories. The Assange arrest is being hailed as a wonderful moment and Yemen is being spun as being strong on terrorism.
Quote:
Although he was publicly conducting espionage, it was easy for people to support him in the beginning, because he was playing to a strong anti-Iraq war movement, and a strong anti-American sentiment in its aftermath. The governments of Obama, Brown, and Rudd were sort of sympathetic with Wikileaks in the early years. But his honeymoon with the left seemed to end with the Iraq war, when people realized that he wasn't just an anti-war guy, he was going to indiscriminately smear the whole of the West if he could. No matter who was in charge, if he could get some dirt on you, he wouldn't hesitate to put it out. And because he was really only going after one side, he began to look like a foreign agent.
Assange's stated goal was to make the American surveillance state less effective by making them paranoid.
It also isn't true that he's "just helping one side". The actual list of disclosures shows information harmful to China, Scientology, Sarah Palin, far-right British groups, Barclays Bank, and others who aren't just Democrats. Republicans aren't going to help him out because Assange's releases were extremely harmful to the Neocon ideology.
Besides which the Russians reportedly use typewriters for their sensitive records. Digital copies simply don't exist which makes US style "leaks" extremely difficult to pull off.
Quote:
Russia seems pretty "established" to me and getting more so. It's propaganda arm doesn't need any help from Assange. Without him they will still be able to infiltrate the internet and influence elections as well as pay various sources to work against the west. Don't worry that it can't find another stooge like him to do it's dirty work.
One area I would like exposed is how both Russia and US Republicans are working toward the same goal but from opposite ends. Russia is working toward making it's criminals into oligarchs and Republicans are working toward giving it's oligarchs the means to be criminal. It works out the same in the end and it's why Trump gets along with Putin so well. He openly admires his ability to suppress his press, which of course is done with poison and jail on trumped up charges. But you will never see Assange bite the hand that has been feeding him. Not even with being kicked out. He expects the Republicans to help him out as Russia does and for similar reason
Do you have any documentation for that or is everything said speculation?
Quote:
More recently, he advocated for Ted Postol's conspiracy theories which try to argue that the Syrian government wasn't using chemical weapons.
Those "conspiracy theories" are factually aligned with what James Mattis said:
US has no evidence of Syrian use of sarin gas, Mattis saysBy ROBERT BURNS
February 2, 2018
(
https://apnews.com/bd533182b7f244a4b771c73a0b601ec5)
lowenz on 24/4/2019 at 17:05
Trump is not a fascist of course, like our right italian politicians he simply TEASES nostalgic "old but gold values" (God, Country, Family) people 'cause they are some kind of big non-voting reservoir due to *age* (here in Italy the last generations with a large number of "natives" are the ones of from the '40s and '50s so teasing them and push them to the vote is the real goal of the right politicians.....and it shows how the democracy can be easely perverted).