Satire
Uncle Tom's Empire
By C.J. Hopkins
April 18, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
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I don’t
normally do this kind of thing, but,
given the arrest of Julian Assange last
week, and the awkward and cowardly
responses thereto, I felt it necessary
to abandon my customary literary
standards and spew out a spineless,
hypocritical “hot take” professing my
concern about the dangerous precedent
the U.S. government may be setting by
extraditing and prosecuting a publisher
for exposing American war crimes and
such, while at the same time making it
abundantly clear how much I personally
loathe Assange, and consider him an
enemy of America, and freedom, and want
the authorities to crush him like a
cockroach.
Now I want to be
absolutely clear. I totally defend
Assange and Wikileaks, and the principle
of freedom of the press, and whatever.
And I am all for exposing American war
crimes (as long as it doesn’t endanger
the lives of the Americans who committed
those war crimes, or inconvenience them
in any way). At the same time, while I
totally support all that, I feel
compelled to express my support together
with my personal loathing of Assange,
who, if all those important principles
weren’t involved, I would want to see
taken out and shot, or at least locked
up in Super-Max solitary … not for any
crime in particular, but just because I
personally loathe him so much.
I’m not quite
sure why I loathe Assange. I’ve never
actually met the man. I just have this
weird, amorphous feeling that he’s a
horrible, disgusting, extremist person
who is working for the Russians and is
probably a Nazi. It feels kind of like
that feeling I had, back in the Winter
of 2003, that Saddam Hussein had nuclear
weapons, which he was going to give to
those Al Qaeda terrorists who were
bayonetting little babies in their
incubators, or the feeling I still have,
despite all evidence to the contrary,
that Trump is a Russian intelligence
asset who peed on Barack Obama’s bed,
and who is going to set fire to the
Capitol building, declare himself
American Hitler, and start rounding up
and murdering the Jews.
I don’t know
where these feelings come from. If you
challenged me, I probably couldn’t
really support them with any, like,
actual facts or anything, at least not
in any kind of rational way. Being an
introspective sort of person, I do
sometimes wonder if maybe my feelings
are the result of all the propaganda and
relentless psychological and emotional
conditioning that the ruling classes and
the corporate media have subjected me to
since the day I was born, and that
influential people in my social circle
have repeated, over and over again, in
such a manner as to make it clear that
contradicting their views would be
extremely unwelcome, and might
negatively impact my social status, and
my prospects for professional
advancement.
Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
Take my loathing
of Assange, for example. I feel like I
can’t even write a column condemning his
arrest and extradition without
gratuitously mocking or insulting the
man. When I try to, I feel this sudden
fear of being denounced as a
“Trump-loving Putin-Nazi,” and a
“Kremlin-sponsored rape apologist,” and
unfriended by all my Facebook friends.
Worse, I get this sickening feeling that
unless I qualify my unqualified support
for freedom of press, and transparency,
and so on, with some sort of vicious,
vindictive remark about the state of
Assange’s body odor, and how he’s
probably got cooties, or has pooped his
pants, or some other childish and
sadistic taunt, I can kiss any chance I
might have had of getting published in a
respectable publication goodbye.
But I’m probably
just being paranoid, right?
Distinguished, highbrow newspapers and
magazines like
The Atlantic,
The Guardian,
The Washington Post,
The New York Times,
Vox,
Vice,
Daily Mail, and others of that
caliber, are not just propaganda organs
whose primary purpose is to reinforce
the official narratives of the ruling
classes. No, they publish a broad range
of opposing views. The Guardian, for
example, just got Owen Jones to write
a full-throated defense of Assange
on that grounds that he’s probably a
Nazi rapist who should be locked up in a
Swedish prison, not in an
American prison! The Guardian, remember,
is the same publication that printed
a completely fabricated story
accusing Assange of secretly meeting
with Paul Manafort and some alleged
“Russians,” among a deluge of other such
Russiagate nonsense, and that has been
demonizing Jeremy Corbyn as an
anti-Semite for several years.
Plus, according
to
NPR’s Bob Garfield (who is lustfully
“looking forward to Assange’s day in
court”), and other liberal
lexicologists, Julian Assange is not
even a real journalist, so we have no
choice but to mock and humiliate him,
and accuse him of rape and espionage …
oh, and speaking of which, did you hear
the one about how
his cat was spying on the Ecuadorean
diplomats?
But seriously
now, all joking aside, it’s always
instructive (if a bit sickening) to
watch as the mandarins of the corporate
media disseminate an official narrative
and millions of people robotically
repeat it as if it were their own
opinions. This process is particularly
nauseating to watch when the narrative
involves the stigmatization,
delegitimization, and humiliation of an
official enemy of the ruling classes.
Typically, this enemy is a foreign
enemy, like Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad,
Milošević, Osama bin Laden, Putin, or
whoever. But sometimes the enemy is one
of “us” … a traitor, a Judas, a
quisling, a snitch, like Trump, Corbyn,
or Julian Assange.
Logic, facts, and
actual evidence have little to nothing
to do with this process. The goal of the
media and other propagandists is not to
deceive or mislead the masses. Their
goal is to evoke the pent-up rage and
hatred simmering within the masses and
channel it toward the official enemy. It
is not necessary for the demonization of
the official enemy to be remotely
believable, or stand up to any kind of
serious scrutiny. No one sincerely
believes that Donald Trump is a Russian
Intelligence asset, or that Jeremy
Corbyn is an anti-Semite, or that Julian
Assange has been arrested for jumping
bail, or raping anyone, or for helping
Chelsea Manning “hack” a password.
The demonization
of the empire’s enemies is not a
deception … it is a loyalty test. It is
a ritual in which the masses (who, let’s
face it, are de facto slaves) are
ordered to display their fealty to their
masters, and their hatred of their
masters’ enemies. Cooperative slaves
have plenty of pent-up hatred to unleash
upon their masters’ enemies. They have
all the pent-up hatred of their masters
(which they do not dare direct at their
masters, except within the limits their
masters allow), and they have all the
hatred of themselves for being
cooperative, and … well, basically,
cowards.
Julian
Assange is being punished for defying
the global capitalist empire. This was
always going to happen, no matter who
was in the White House. Anyone who
defies the empire in such a flagrant
manner is going to be punished.
Cooperative slaves demand this of their
masters. Defiant slaves are actually
less of a threat to their masters than
they are to the other slaves who have
chosen to accept their slavery and
cooperate with their own oppression.
Their defiance shames these cooperative
slaves, and shines an unflattering light
on their cowardice.
This is why we
are witnessing so many liberals (and
liberals in leftist’s clothing)
rushing to express their loathing of
Assange in the same breath as they
pretend to support him, not because they
honestly believe the content of the
official Julian Assange narrative that
the ruling classes are disseminating,
but because (a) they fear the
consequences of not robotically
repeating this narrative, and (b)
Assange has committed the cardinal sin
of reminding them that actual
“resistance” to the global capitalist
empire is possible, but only if you’re
willing to pay the price.
Assange has been
paying it for the last seven years, and
is going to be paying it for the
foreseeable future. Chelsea Manning is
paying it again. The Gilets Jaunes
protestors have been paying it in
France. Malcolm X paid it. Sophie Scholl
paid it. Many others throughout history
have paid it. Cowards mocked them as
they did, as they are mocking Julian
Assange at the moment. That’s all right,
though, after he’s been safely dead for
ten or twenty years, they’ll name a few
streets and high schools after him.
Maybe they’ll even build him a monument.
C. J. Hopkins
is an award-winning American playwright,
novelist and political satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by
Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway
Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel,
ZONE 23, is published by
Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant
Paperbacks. He can be reached at
cjhopkins.com or
consentfactory.org.
This article was originally published by
"Unz
Review"
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