WHAT THE PAPERS SAY. THE FILTH-O-GRAPH, QUICK! SHOOT THE MESSENGER.

I like Mary Riddell,  the Filth-O-Graph's house leftie, she has a generosity of spirit which often misguides her into support of whatever group of shits is holding the Labour franchise - but it is the ideals to which she is wedded, of fraternity and equality and freedom and who can blame her for that, save the angry masturbating horde at the  Filth-O-Graph which can barely tolerate splitarses  having opinions at all, even the mad, old, rightwing loony, Janet Daly, who regularly uses Decency and language as a punchbag and would see our political institutions abrade us even more than they do at present - for our own good, of course,  the chaps are quick to poume on Janet, too, but not with the desperate, illiterate misogyny reserved for Mary.

Norman Tebbit, meaner, sourer, more skeletal than ever,  is popular, what with his racism and bigotry and the endless praise of his own larcenous career as one of Whisky Maggie's chief spivs, one of al Fayed's chief spivs, one of Telecom's chief spivs, one of,  apparently,  the only people ever to have been blown-up by Kneecaps McGuinness and his chums and now grubby, pinstripe purveror of slime for the Bizarro Twins, owners of the Filth-O-Graph and sworn enemies of Democracy, just like it's previous owner, the repulsive criminal, Conrad Black, pimping, still, a stable of right-wing nutters like the preposterously gobby Mark Steyn, bought and paid for, cheerleading graft and corruption for all he's worth, as though they were the founding principles of human progress.  Boris Johnson, the  dodgy - how does he get away with it, maybe it's becos 'e's a Landunner - cock-waving Bullingdon freak, unaccountably Mayor of London, is paid, quite openly, a quarter of a million pounds a year by the Bizarros for his juvenile Filth-O-Graph rants, just as though there were not, here, a blatant conflict of interest and dereliction of mayoral duty and the wider commentariat loves him, because even though, by Cameron's standards, Bo-Jo is slumming it, with this journalism rubbish - can't his family  afford a merchant bank? - the bottom feeders in the Street of A Thousand Arseholes feel an aristocrat has come amomg them, and that they are the better for it, touched by his bogus classicist's glory.  It's the same pretentious horseshit all across the paper,  columnists scribbling what they are told,  specifically or generally, to scribble;  front pages hot from Tory HQ, bits os pseudo science, celebrity news and as many pictures of nubile sixth formers as possible, page three on page one.


You know what your getting with the Sun,  you're getting skymadeupnewsandfilth, its illiterate bilge written by Murdochees in the States and printed  here under the pictures of grubby nobodies like Kelvin McKenzie and his poxed-up, scabby successors, pornsters, hatemongers, rabble rousers for hire. The Filth-O-Graph's crew, though a little more wordy and a good deal more sanctimonious,  also never pretends to journalism, not when tittle-tattle, teen porn, shopping and obituaries will do nicely, thank you, and they were  rejoicing, last night, as "the net tightened"  on proper journalist, Julian Assange;  gosh, can't have these cyber chappies publishing real scoops, now, real exposures, can't have him embarrassing or derailing  the Clinton-Obama political careers and potentially upsetting the workings of the GlobaCorp Slavery Foundation - or endangering the lives of innocent people, especially not when that's clearly Uncle Sam's number one business.

It really is nauseating, how the giants of the British press are happy to publish the WikiLeaks leaks whilst damning their editor-in-chief;  head-up-arse and cock-in-mouth, the contortions of  the well-heeled coward. Par for the course, really, especially the Telegraph;  how can we forget the undignified, prolonged  feasting of  Benny Brogan and Co.  over the Westminster expenses story,  handed to them on a plate by another whistle blower, when a cub reporter aged eighteen should have been able to flush it out, decades ago.

Time has o'ertaken us and Assange is now in custody awaiting Sweden's pleasure, and possibly, probably Uncle Sam's, too and while we hesitate to entirely endorse John Pilger's view of this situation we must, nevertheless, fear the worst,  the very worst.  But then that is just what Assange has been telling us to fear. Lock him up, quick.
|
--------------------------------------------

This, from the Asia Times Online,  is something different, and something we will never see in our own fourth estate;  these wogs, eh, they'll print anything.

 

THE ROVING EYE Cracks in the wilderness of mirrors By Pepe Escobar The temptation to see WikiLeaks as a neo-Baudelairean artificial paradise - the marriage of libertarian anarchism and cyber-knowledge - could not be more seductive. Now no more than 40 people are helping founder Julian Assange, plus 800 from the outside. All this with a 200,000 euro (US$264,000) annual budget - and a nomad home base. WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson maintains that this is still a "gateway for whistleblowers", where sources are unidentified and even unknown. You can get a whistleblower to show the emperor has no clothes with just 200,000 euros - just as someone, be him Osama bin Laden or   not, could usher the real "new world order" in on 9/11 with $500,000. Daniel Ellsberg, who broke the Pentagon Papers in 1971, sees Assange as a hero. For vast swathes of the United States establishment, he is now public enemy number one - an unlikely echo of bin Laden. He may be now in southeast England, contactable by Scotland Yard, and about to be arrested at any minute courtesy of an Interpol mandate based on his being wanted in Sweden. Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan may be doing the twist in his media tomb; if the media are the message, when you can't eliminate the message why not eliminate the media? The book of sand Let's examine Assange's crime. Here he is, in his own words, in "State and Terrorist Conspiracies": To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neo-corporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action. So Assange understands WikiLeaks as an anti-virus that should guide our navigation across the distortion of political language. If language is a virus from outer space, as William Naked Lunch Burroughs put it, WikiLeaks should be the antidote. Assange basically believes that the (cumulative) revelation of secrets will lead to the production of no future secrets. It's an anarchic/romantic/utopian vision. It's vital to remember that Assange configures the US essentially as a huge authoritarian conspiracy. American political activist Noam Chomsky would say the same thing (and they wouldn't want to arrest him for it). The difference is that Assange deploys a combat strategy: he aims to corrode the ability of the system to conspire. That's where the metaphor of the computer network fits in. Assange wants to fight the power of the system, treating it as a computer choking in the desert sands. Were he alive, it would be smashing to see the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges penning a short story about this. On top of writing his own "Book of Sand", Assange is also counter-attacking the Pentagon's counter-insurgency doctrine. He's not in "tracking-the-Taliban-and taking-them-out" mode. This is just a detail. If the conspiracy is an electronic network - let's say, the (foreign policy) Matrix - what he wants is to strike at its cognitive ability by debasing the quality of the information. Here intervenes another crucial element. The ability of the conspiracy to deceive everyone through massive propaganda is equivalent to the conspiracy's penchant for deceiving itself through its own propaganda. That's how we get to the Assange strategy of deploying a tsunami of leaks as a key actor/vector in the informational landscape. And that takes us to another crucial point: it doesn't matter whether these leaks are new, gossip or wishful thinking (as long as they are authentic). The - very ambitious - mother idea is to undermine the system of information and thus "force the computer to crash", making the conspiracy turn against itself in self-defense. WikiLeaks believes we can only destroy a conspiracy by rendering it hallucinatory and paranoid in relation to itself. All this also takes us farther into crucial territory. The bulk of the cablegate-inspired global-talk-show tsunami has totally missed the point. Once again, it doesn't matter that most cables are gossip - trashy tabloid stuff. See it as Assange's way of illustrating how the conspiracy works. He is not interested in journalistic scoops (as much as his media partners, from the Guardian to Der Spiegel may be); what he wants is to strangle the nodes that make the conspiracy possible - to render the system "dumb and dumber". No doubt cablegate shows how the US State Department seems to be in dumb-and-dumber territory - not even creative enough to do their own versions of "pimp my cable". This is already an extraordinary victory for an organization different from anything we have seen so far, which is doing things that journalists do or should be doing, and then some. And there will be more, on a major bank's secrets (probably Bank of America), on China's secrets, on Russia's secrets. Mirror, mirror on the net The US government and most of corporate media predictably rolled out their defense mechanism, as in "there's nothing new in these cables". Some might have suspected that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had ordered American diplomats to spy on their colleagues at the United Nations. Another thing entirely is to have an official cable confirmation. If UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was not such a wimp, he would be throwing a monumental diplomatic fit by now. And then, at the same time, the US government and virtually the whole establishment - from neo-conservatives to Obama-light practitioners - want to pull out all stops to delete WikiLeaks or, even take out Assange, as George W Bush wanted to do with bin Laden. Grizzly nutjob Sarah Palin says Assange is worse than al-Qaeda. Such hysteria lead an Atlanta radio station to ask listeners whether Assange should be executed or imprisoned (no third option; execution won). Redneck Baptist priest Mike Huckabee, who might have been the Republican contender for president in 2008 and is now a talk-show fixture, goes for execution as well. Who to believe? These freaks, or two frustrated US federal investigators who told the Los Angeles Times that if WikiLeaks had been active in 2001, it would have prevented 9/11? French philosophers avid to escape their own irrelevancy foment conspiracy theories, lamenting that WikiLeaks gives the media unprecedented powers; other blame the Internet ogre for gobbling up journalists. That's the beauty of the leaks - this is the stuff conspiracies are made of. Under this framework it is very enlightening to listen to what eminent Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski has to say. He told the US Public Broadcasting Service that cablegate is "seeded" with "surprisingly pointed" information, and that "seeding" is too easy to accomplish. Example: those cables saying that the Chinese are inclined to cooperate with the US in view of a possible Korean unification under the aegis of South Korea (I debunk this in my previous article, See TheNaked Emperor, Asia Times Online, December 1, 2010). Dr Zbig says that WikiLeaks may have been manipulated by intelligence services with "very specific objectives". They could be, as he hints, internal US elements who want to embarass the Barack Obama administration . But he also suspects "foreign elements". In this case, the first on the list would be none other than the state of Israel. As conspiracy theories go, this one is a cracker; could WikiLeaks be the head of a real invisible "snake" - a massive Israeli disinformation campaign? Evidence would include cables seriously compromising the US-Turkey relationship; the cumulative cables painting a picture of a Sunni Arab-wide consensus for attacking Iran; and the fact that the cables reveal nothing that demonstrates how Israel has jeopardized US interests in the Middle East over and over again. In an interview with American talk show host Larry King, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin went Dr Zbig and said this was in fact a manipulation - the cables as a deliberate plot to discredit Russia (this was before Russia clinched the 2018 World Cup; now everyone is drowning in torrents of Stoli and no one gives a damn about cables anymore). Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said virtually the same thing regarding Iran. And then there's the conspiracy that didn't happen: how come the Pentagon, for all its ultra-high-tech savvy ways, has not been willing, or able, to completely shut down WikiLeaks? There's thunderous chatter everywhere on WikiLeaks' "motives" for releasing these cables. We just need to go back to Assange's thinking to realize there's no "motive". The intellectual void and political autism of America's diplomats is self-evident; they can only "understand" the Other: the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. The great French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard is 80 this Friday. How fresh if he would shoot a remake of Made in USA, now featuring the perplexity of the system as it contemplates its reflection in a giant, digital mirror. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. (Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.