Above Photo: Courthouselover/Flickr
More clearly than ever, addressing Western liberal imperialism in its several varieties as a rationality than can be persuaded or changed by challenging its contradictions is a fundamental error. Those contradictions are essential to ensure the various imperial needs of the Western ruling elites, especially submission to their phony moral authority, are met. Claiming to promote justice, freedom and prosperity, they and their political servants inflict savage injustice and brutal repression, systematically immiserate their victims and loot their wealth. They forcibly legitimize their imperialism by means of an omnipresent but unacknowledged Inquisition, entrenched in structures of national and international governance.
People who effectively report this reality are rare exceptions. In practice, all faithful reporting on imperialist military or economic aggression ends up expressing solidarity with that aggression’s victims. People producing such genuine reports who refuse to assimilate are shoved to the margins and excluded and if they successfully overcome that exclusion they are ruthlessly repressed. The imperialist Inquisition authorities stigmatize successful exponents of genuine reporting as accursed individuals they can legitimately persecute, torture or kill. The notorious continuing torture of Julian Assange or the recent intimidation of Max Blumenthal recall the ordeal of Gary Webb who exposed US government involvement in narcotics related to the Iran-Contra scandal.
The relatively high profile cases of Assange and Blumenthal serve to emphasize the daily routine savagery endured by the innumerable nameless victims of imperialism and what that barbarism means in terms of domestic politics. In a recent example from Europe, the Spanish authorities’ declined to prosecute police officers who fired plastic bullets at African migrants trying to swim ashore to Spanish territory, causing 15 of the migrants to drown. The incident confirms that migrants to Europe or North America are regarded as just so many accursed individuals whose lives are effectively forfeit. In relation to that crime, Agustín Velloso recently pointed out, “Fascism changed its name under democracy and lives on as neofascism… the difference between fascism and neofascism is resignation to it, its acceptance or even its celebration among the population, depending on their political opinion.”
This reality clearly applies to both the European Union countries and to the US and Canada. Nor is it by accident that right wing Latin American politicians have facilitated the sadistic persecution of Julian Assange and the thuggish harassment of Max Blumenthal. The Western imperialist elites and their local allies face widespread mass resistance in Latin America, challenging precisely the kind of neofascist policies, marrying corporate and political power, now regarded as normal in North America and Europe. Penitent Inquisition collaborator, center-right Ecuadoran President Lenin Moreno, betrayed Julian Assange to the British authorities currently torturing Assange to death. Venezuela’s neofascist opposition facilitated the Inquisition’s attack on free speech targeting Max Blumenthal.
Blumenthal and his Gray Zone colleagues have successfully exposed Venezuela’s political opposition as larcenous paid stooges of the US government. Like Blumenthal, solidarity activists Ben Rubinstein, Margaret Flowers, David Paul, Adrienne Pine and Kevin Zeese are all targeted by lawfare abuse of the US legal system for their role in defending the integrity of Venezuela’s embassy in Washington earlier this year. Zeese and Flowers produce the highly regarded Popular Resistance web site and related media, consistently challenging the crimes of US and allied imperialism around the world. But apart from their challenge to imperialism, Assange, Blumenthal and the others are also targets of the imperialist Inquisition because they expose the falsity of the Inquisition’s news media and NGOs
Western NGOs or news media in no way at all set out to report foreign affairs truthfully. That is not their role. Rather their role is to serve as the Inquisition’s clerks. They set down and lay out the charges against the recalcitrant accused. They justify the exonerations, pardons and waivers for penitents, collaborators and supergrass witnesses. With a straight face, they duly present the scandalously unfair bogus evidence against the accused which transmogrifies almost instantly into the imperialist Inquisition’s sentence. Finally, they report the punishments, generally extolling the Inquisition’s just, beneficent intentions with occasional admonitions about some occasional excess of genocidal zealotry or the need to tweak some minor injustice within the overall horror.
Writers like Assange and Blumenthal have exposed this sinister media theater for what it is, namely a neofascist system fusing political and corporate power to impose anti-democratic disinformation and downright lies. They and other writers, like Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on Syria, have demonstrated the mendacity of reports by, for example, the Organization of American States or by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights or the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and by related, self-serving NGOs. They have shown how the US and its allies induce compromised, dishonest reports from those organizations so as to affirm the judgments, sentences and punishments prescribed by their imperialist Inquisition.
Clear examples of this reality have been the Inquisition’s treatment of October’s uprisings in the streets of Chile and Ecuador against neoliberal austerity and the electoral defeat of the Western elites’ local allies in Bolivia and Argentina. These categorical setbacks for Western imperialism throw into relief and to some extent explain the desperation of the failed right wing coup attempts by US proxies in Nicaragua in 2018 and in Venezuela earlier this year. In both Nicaragua and Venezuela, US payrolled right-wing stooges tried to seize power seeking to impose the very same neoliberal policies that have provoked widespread protests recently against US allied governments throughout Latin America.
The Inquisition’s institutions and media played down, attacked or deprecated the genuine popular uprisings in Ecuador and Chile and their electoral equivalents in Bolivia and Argentina. By contrast, they openly supported and encouraged the failed right-wing coup attempts in Nicaragua and Venezuela. Genuine reporting by the Gray Zone team and Max Blumenthal and by other determined reporters like Dick and Miriam Emanuelsson have used first-hand interviews and on-the-scene reporting to expose this double standard. Their work shows up practically all mainstream and much alternative media reporting as sinister false propaganda.
In both Nicaragua and Venezuela the main false accusation propagated by the Inquisition, as also in 2011 in Libya and Syria, is the cynical lie that these countries’ governments used murderous repression against peaceful opposition demonstrators. To support this lie, Inquisition institutions like the OAS and the UNOHCHR and auxiliaries like Amnesty International, accept false witness testimony from the murderous opposition and exclude the testimony of their victims. They feign cross-checking and verification, only among sources that confirm the version they want to hear. Inquisition stenographers in the Western news media then recycle the false testimony comprising the prosecution case which doubles as a guilty verdict justifying punitive sanctions.
In the case of genuine murderous repression by right wing governments in Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras Paraguay, Peru, for example, the process is reversed. In these cases, the Inquisition avails of the Pinter principle, the crimes of US allies never happened even as they were happening, or if they happened, they don’t matter. Only a very few authentic independent reporters have dared to expose this insidious process. That is why Max Blumenthal and his colleagues are under attack. That is why the Inquisition authorities in Britain are putting Julian Assange to death.
