More weapons are not the solution and Julian Assange

More weapons are not the solution
War against Ukraine
By Yves Wegelin
[This article published on 3/3/2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/2209/krieg-gegen-die-ukraine/mehr-waffen-sind-keine-loesung.]


It gives hope: to see millions of people around the world take to the streets against Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine; to see Europe immediately freeze the accounts of Putin's clique; to see countless volunteers at the Ukrainian border welcome the hundreds of thousands of refugees with food, clothing and shelter. In the face of a ruler obsessed with fantasies of great power, launching a war of aggression against 44 million people in the 21st century, the solidarity-based resistance is overwhelming.

However, the resistance also carries a danger to which we must not close our eyes: the danger that the mood in Europe will turn into euphoric nationalism. Us against them.

This thinking is most concretely reflected in the sanctions: At the beginning, it was said that these were intended to target Putin and his regime, for example by freezing accounts in the West. Now, however, the EU and the U.S. have crippled Russia's central bank by freezing its foreign exchange reserves held abroad. In doing so, they have decided to plunge 144 million Russ:iners, more than ten percent of whom are already living in poverty, into an economic crisis. This includes the many people who are taking to the streets in Moscow or St. Petersburg at the risk of their lives against Putin's war.

On Monday, the ruble crashed, queues of people formed in front of banks trying to save their savings. At the same time, Europe is not ready to give up Russian gas - billions of dollars of which end up in Putin's pockets.

In Switzerland, too, yellow-blue Ukrainian national flags are hoisted on government buildings instead of peace flags. In newspapers, tweets and political speeches, "Putin" quickly becomes "Russia" or even "the Russians," who must be beaten back. The more collective punishments and the louder the nationalist tones from Europe, the easier it will be for Putin to unite the Russians behind his war.

Added to this is the ever louder saber rattling. The fact that Ukrainians are taking up arms and standing in the way of Russian tanks with homemade Molotov cocktails to defend their freedom is admirable - and legitimate. There are even arguments for Western arms deliveries to Ukraine in the face of Putin's military superiority. Once there is war, one searches in vain for the one right answer. What is insane, however, is the belief that peace can be secured for the future with even more weapons. SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced that he wants to invest an additional hundred billion euros in Germany's army; and in Switzerland, too, armament fantasies are being voiced.

With the ludicrous sum of over a thousand billion U.S. dollars annually, the NATO countries already spend almost twenty times as much on their armies as Russia. But that hasn't stopped Putin from invading Ukraine, which is flanked by NATO. Faced with a megalomaniac autocrat threatening the atomic bomb, the militarily gigantic NATO is almost powerless.

If this war could have been prevented, it would not have been through even more armament. Rather, after the fall of the Iron Curtain thirty years ago, East and West failed to create a common peace alliance, to advance disarmament and to strengthen international law, among other things through the International Criminal Court, which neither the U.S. nor Russia have joined. Most importantly, Europe's decades-long purchase of Russian gas, from whose billions in proceeds Swiss banks and trading centers like Zug benefit, made Putin's rise possible in the first place. Shamefully, it took the Federal Council almost a week to wangle its way into freezing oligarch:ing accounts.

What is needed for the future is not more rearmament, but an expansion of international law, an end to hypocritical Western deals with Putin and his entourage - and disarmament.

Of course, given the rage Putin's war inspires, it is difficult not to join in a euphoric, bellicose nationalism. And of course it will hardly be possible to impose financial sanctions against Putin's regime without also hitting the Russian population, at least on the margins. But it must be tried: otherwise there is a danger of becoming more and more like Putin.

Perhaps one should put a piece of paper with a little reminder on the bedside table to read it anew every morning: What we are witnessing is not a war of Russia against Ukraine. It is a war of Putin's regime against all those worldwide who want peace. This includes the Russ:ins who are currently disappearing into prisons by the thousands.

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The freedom of the press of the others

by Serge Halimi and Pierre Rimbert
[This article published on 11/11/2021 is translated from the German on the Internet, Die Pressefreiheit der anderen.]

In March 2017, Wikileaks began its revelations about the methods used by the CIA to spy on electronic devices. The "Vault 7" documents were, according to the U.S. intelligence agency, the largest data leak in its history to date.

At the time, Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange had already been staying in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for five years to avoid extradition. At that time, the leadership of the CIA was determined to take him into its custody and even thought about assassination plans. Initially, they considered kidnapping him. However, violating the immunity of the Ecuadorian embassy to kidnap an Australian citizen in the middle of London would have been diplomatically delicate.

So they convinced themselves that Assange was preparing his escape to Russia with the secret collaboration of Ecuador and the Kremlin. Adventurous scenarios were then played out: exchanging gunfire with Kremlin agents in London's streets; ramming a Russian diplomatic vehicle to get Assange's hands on it; or shooting out the tires of a Russian plane to prevent it from taking off for Moscow. One hypothesis was that Assange might try to escape in a laundry container. Ultimately, the White House's no to legally windy operations deprived such plans of their basis.

All of these plans are described in detail in an article that a team of journalists from YahooNews posted online on September 26 after interviewing some 30 employees of U.S. security agencies.1 On April 13, 2017, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo had loudly declared, "Wikileaks is, in the view of the United States, a hostile intelligence service, often supported by Russia."

No longer should we stand by "as Assange's colleagues do us grave harm by stealing classified information, invoking freedom of expression," Pompeo had threatened: "We're going to become a much tougher intelligence agency and send our fiercest agents to the most dangerous places to deal with them."

If Assange were Nawalny

As expected, YahooNews' research made high media waves: Outraged editorialists invoked the right to freedom of information and warned that democracy was in danger, that "illiberalism" was on the rise. The Yahoo report is particularly credible if only because lead investigative journalist Michael Isikoff is wholly unsuspected of anti-Americanism and sympathies for Moscow: In March 2018, he published a book titled "Russian Roulette: An Insider's Account of Putin's Attack on the United States and the Election of Donald Trump."

The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or the New York Times nevertheless did not give a line of coverage to Yahoo's revelations for two weeks.2 The same was true for Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération, Les Échos, and Agence France Presse. The Guardian and Der Spiegel carried online reports, but did not go into detail about them for the time being. The Bloomberg agency devoted just 28 words to them.

This lack of attention stands in stark contrast to the international outcry following the attempted murder of lawyer Alexei Navalny.3 He, too, is a man who fearlessly stands up to power; he, too, is a whistleblower threatened and persecuted by the state.

Navalny, however, is in a Russian dungeon, not a London prison. The media's different treatment of these two heroes shows very clearly how pliable are the concepts of "human rights" and "freedom of the press" that the Western media like to pose as defenders of. It seems that Nawalny's opposition to President Putin makes him more "human" than Assange, who is also a dissident - but a dissident in the "free world".

In their 1988 classic "Manufacturing Consent, "4 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky showed that "propaganda systems portray casualties caused by the enemy" differently than those caused by "one's own government or a friendly state." As an example, they cited the glaringly different treatment of two murders of clergymen that occurred around the same time and were perpetrated by police officers and paramilitaries, respectively: the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero in March 1980 and the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popiełuszko in October 1984.

Both clergymen were known for their stance of opposition to the powerful. Herman and Chomsky took a close look at the coverage of the major U.S. press organs and concluded that "a victim like Popiełuszko was 137 to 179 times the victim of a state friendly to the United States." As is well known, Poland at that time belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence and thus to the "evil empire."

In the case of Assange and Navalny, the discrepancy is not so pronounced: since Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy on June 19, 2012, he has been mentioned in 225 articles in Le Monde, according to the newspaper's own archive. Navalny appeared in 419 articles during the same period. But the two not only perform differently statistically, they are also judged according to different evaluation grids.

In connection with the "hacker" Assange, there is talk of an "ambivalent career" (Le Monde, April 15, 2019); the "anti-American activist" has "willingly stolen the secrets of democratic states," while he has been "not so eager to help authoritarian countries" (Le Monde, February 26, 2020).

Navalny, on the other hand, has received unreserved support. Le Monde has so far devoted five editorials to him, and in none of them is he reproached for his "ambivalent career." Amnesty International had temporarily decided to stop calling him a "prisoner of conscience" because of his involvement in a nationalist organization, his participation in the xenophobic "Russian Marches," and his racist comments about migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Amnesty based its decision at the time on the fact that Navalny had "made discriminatory statements in 2007 and 2008 that could potentially be considered hate speech." In May 2021, however, the organization reinstated his status after Russian authorities cynically misused the revocation for their own purposes.

When reporting on Navalny, the "blogger and lawyer who stands against the corruption of the state," there is no sign of the severity with which Assange is treated. Pavalny is hailed as a modern master of social media and even a professional: "The investigative journalism he has practiced is extremely effective in pillorying the universe of corruption and reaches a great many people thanks to online videos" (Le Monde, August 22, 2020).

"The tragedy of Julian Assange," summed up journalist Jack Dion in 2019, is "that he is Australian, not Russian. If he were persecuted by the Kremlin, governments would fight over who gets to grant him asylum first. His likeness would hang on the facade of Paris City Hall, and Anne Hidalgo would turn off the lights of the Eiffel Tower until he was at large again. "5

Once upon a time, the Australian, who was named "Person of the Year" by U.S. Time magazine in 2010, was highly regarded by Western journalists. He provided them with numerous scoops in a geopolitical climate that was far more relaxed than it is today.

But ever since Wikileaks published Democratic Party emails in 2016 and the CIA suspected a Russian hacking attack behind them, Assange has come under fierce attack from Western media. "When Assange Speaks, Are We Really Hearing Putin Speak?" ran the headline in the September 2, 2016, international edition of The New York Times, for example.

Unless the Biden administration withdraws its extradition request on espionage charges, Assange will remain in custody. In the event that he is denied, at least we now already know some of the assassination plans that are in the drawer at the CIA.

Last month, Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with his Filipino colleague Maria Ressa, for defending the endangered right to free speech. And Alexei Navalny was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament shortly after. I wonder if next year Julian Assange will receive one of these prizes? After all, the German PEN Center has since made him an honorary member.

1 Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor, and Michael Isikoff, "Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks," YahooNews, September 26, 2021. See also, "Nothing is off limits," taz, October 1, 2021.

2 See John McEvoy, "Deathly Silence: Journalists Who Mocked Assange Have Nothing to Say About CIA Plans to Kill Him," Fairness & accuracy in reporting (Fair), New York, October 8, 2021.

3 See Hélène Richard, "Shining Light with Small Spots," LMd, March 2021.

4 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, "Manufacturing Consent," New York (Pantheon Books) 1988.

5 "Ah! Si Julian Assange avait été russe ...," Marianne, April 19, 2019.