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Indicting the journalists, raising the citizens: Assange on war lies and cause for optimism

Happy Birthday Julian!

28 Feb.—The following excerpt of Julian Assange’s speech at a Stop the War Coalition rally in London on 8 October 2011, is a powerful reminder of why he is currently being tortured and slowly killed in a London jail, possibly soon to be transported to an even worse arrangement in the USA. The speech can be watched on YouTube at the Films for Change channel.

Assange
Julian Assange addressing the 2011 rally. Photo: Screenshot

Assange’s message, slamming journalists for being as responsible for the body count of recent wars as the world leaders making the decisions, and the soldiers on the battlefield doing the killing, is especially important today as support for war against the “strategic competitors” of the Anglo- American imperium, Russia and China, is drummed up by the mainstream media’s blatant propagandising. The names of some of the countries may have changed, but the agenda and the methodology remain the same. And the latest war drive already has us teetering on the edge of world war.

Margaret Thatcher had it right. There is no society anymore. What there is, is a transnational security elite that is busy carving up the world using your tax money. [Applause]

To combat that elite, we must not petition, we must take it over. [Applause]

We must form our own networks of strength and mutual value which can challenge those strengths and self-interested values of the war mongers in this country, and in others, that have formed hand in hand an alliance to take money from the United States, every NATO country, from Australia, and launder it through Afghanistan, launder it through Iraq, launder it through Somalia, launder it through Yemen, launder it through Pakistan, and wash that money in people’s blood.

I don’t need to tell you the depravity of war—you are all too familiar with its images, with the refugees of war, with information that we have revealed showing the everyday spoiler and barbarity of war. Information such as the individual deaths of over 130,000 people in Iraq, individual deaths that were kept secret by the US military who denied that they ever counted the deaths of civilians.

Instead, I want to tell you what I think is the way that wars come to be and that wars can be undone, in democracies or the pseudo-democracies that we are evolving into.

Wars are a result of lies. The Vietnam war, and the push for US involvement, was the result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident— a lie. The Iraq war famously is a result of lies. Wars in Somalia are a result of lies. The Second World War and the German invasion of Poland was a result of carefully constructed lies. That is war by media. Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, which is the majority of the mainstream press, what is the average death count attributed to each journalist, when we understand that wars come about as a result of lies peddled to the British public and the American public and the publics all over Europe and other countries? Then who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists. Journalists are war criminals. [Applause]

And while one might think that that should lead us to a state of despair—that the reality that is constructed around us is constructed by liars, is constructed by people who are close to those that they are meant to be policing—it should lead us also to an optimistic understanding, because if wars can be started by lies, truth can be started, peace can be started by truth. So that is our task and it is your task. Go and get the truth, get into the ballpark and get the ball and give it to us and we’ll spread it all over the world!

Australian Alert Service, 28 Feb. 2024

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Page last updated on 03 July 2024