"British Secret Police" Have Entered the Ecuador Embassy and Arrested Julian Assange. What Kind of War Will It Start?

Waiting the fate of Julian Assange

by Thomas Neuburger

The news, Julian Assange has been arrested at last:

"Images of Ecuador's ambassador inviting the UK's secret police into the embassy to drag a publisher of -- like it or not -- award-winning journalism out of the building are going to end up in the history books," the whistleblower said on Twitter.

Confirmation here, via the Guardian. Apparently, they did this on behalf of the U.S. government:

And there it is. https://t.co/jEhIRM0Sj4

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 11, 2019

("British secret police" in the title is Edward Snowden's term, by the way.)

I think this will start a war, and not the usual kind. If the US government succeeds in prosecuting, torturing, and perhaps even killing Assange, look for a global response, and look for that response to be ... unconventional. The response to this response could change the world.

Our Eager and Shared Illusions

Here's what Patrick Lawrence has to say about Julian Assange, the hegemonic American state, and our eager and shared illusions:

Cú Chulainn asks readers to consider a casual harvest of developments drawn simply from the last week’s news. I was on a television shout fest the other day when someone made mention of Washington’s view of China’s Belt and Road initiative. Apparently the running perspective is that it’s “a vanity project.” That takes care of that: Nothing more to do or say or think about. Sure thing.

A couple of days later I read that, nearly two decades after the Bush II administration’s assault on international law and common decency, the American military is still arguing about whether evidence of the torture our sadistic spooks let loose in their “black sites” should be brought into the light. It was Barack Obama who made this kind of dodge possible, let us not forget, rather swiftly after he took office. (And said spooks include the current director of the CIA—in effect, another gift from Obama.)

In the very same news cycle (and in the very same newspaper) came a report that the U.S. has revoked the visa of the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, “because of her attempts to investigate allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, including any that may have been committed by American forces.” These reports can be found here and here respectively. I always love The Times for its habit of publishing stories such as these in the same edition and never any hint that there is a connection between the two. Heaven forbid knowledge might lead to understanding—the very last thing our press wants to encourage.

Why do these apparently disparate bits of news warrant mention together? Why does the Celtic giant take them up in a Journal entry that has to do with Julian Assange? Because they are all instances of our mass self-illusioning, if you will tolerate the awkward term. The Assange case is thoroughly embedded in this culture of illusion. I do not think it can be fully understood without this context. We are a nation hiding from who we are and how we conduct ourselves and how we view and treat the immense Other beyond our shores. We are dedicated to fooling ourselves while missing the fact that we fool only ourselves. Anyone who thinks this is a constructive and productive way to proceed into the 21st century is fooling himself or herself twice over. It is nothing more than our style of self-determined decline. It is in this context we must consider Assange’s sin as defined above. (emphasis added)

Not every change is analog, a continuous move from one microscopic level to the next, like points that move tick by tick on a stock market chart, bounded by well-defined ranges above and below.

Some change comes suddenly and alters the world ... forever. The world before the French Revolution was nothing like what came after, and all attempts to return to the old world failed, each one ending in blood. Because a building fell to a mob in France, a threshold that kings had been pushing against for decades was crossed forever, and nothing in Europe was ever the same again.

World War One destroyed completely the stable world that spawned it. As the soldiers marched out to fight, their nations believed they'd be home in a couple of months. Eight million corpses later, that world was gone, politically and socially wrecked, never to be return.

We sit today near another of those thresholds, one as little recognized now as the others were then. The hegemonic American state is not more popular than it used to be — far from it. Resistance to America the destroyer, inside the country and out, grows by the day. We're sick of our wars, and the sisters and brothers of the murdered are done with us waging them. The anger of the world, however, stays mainly offshore ... so far. 

At home, the cruel and pathological predation of the wealthy is not only more hated as each year passes to the next, it's also more recognized, identified, named out loud — even and especially by MAGA-hatted masses, and especially by the Bernie-birdie crowds that swell his appearances. Every time he says "billionaires," they cheer his anger and what they imagine will be his redress for decades of legalized crime. The MAGA hats want their own revenge as well.

Can all that anger against the hubris and predation of the mighty be kept in electoral bounds, especially if it's consistently denied electoral release and its candidates sidelined? Perhaps. Maybe a "return to normal" — the world of Obama, in which protection predators is tribally defended — can stem the tide for a while.

But enter a new player, a "masked avenger" perhaps, and maybe all bets are off. What chaos will be released if American finds itself at war with a non-state cyber warrior — let's call it Anonymous, though I doubt this foe will have even the minimum organization of a mob — an actor that moves in  resonance with the bipartisan, done-with-it-all discontent already alive in our society?

The Bastille fell and Europe changed forever, bleeding many times in the process. Something tipped, then tipped over, and the only way out was forward. Will a war of revenge waged by Anonymous, and the eager and angry counter-war it provokes, unite Americans behind its increasingly militarized state, or more deeply and further divide them from what purports to rule them? If the latter, what does that next new world look like?

If Assange is tried and cyber warriors attack, will the nation respond cohesively, or will all hell break loose? 

No one knows, so my advice is this: Tread lightly, you who'd love to see Julian Assange in shackles, or chained to a wall in a country no one can spell. No one, including myself, wants to live in the world your hubris may provoke.

There are some structures that, once they break, stay broken. You may be looking, with over-eager eyes, at one of them.