It should come as no surprise to anyone that the Mainstream Media has taken an absolutely one-sided stance on the war going on right now in the Ukraine. We cannot forget that most of the “news” that we get are just AP or Reuters newswires rewritten by some bachelor’s degree monkey in a cubicle or unaffordable New York apartment. News isn’t made by some philosopher kings, but by systemic people within their system and when the man says “jump” they say “how high”. This is a fact of life, big media outlets are financed to project an interpretation of reality to control public perception not to create an educated public. Probably, all who are reading this dislike that fact, but for now it is an unchangeable reality, so absolutely no one should have expected Fox, CNN, the BBC or any others to try to break down and understand the motivations behind Russia’s ongoing military intervention.

But all of this big media has to still present the facade that it is analyzing the situation and offering insight, so in a controlled way they have to pretend like they somehow are presenting to you the true motivations behind what the Russians are doing. Sometimes they at least repeat Russia’s official logic followed by smug condemnation of the absurdity that they could find a hostile Nazi regime that recently considered getting nukes as their neighbor a threat. But there is one talking point that does not appear anywhere, it is so forbidden that it cannot even be brought up into the conversation to be criticized or “debunked”.

So let’s open the Necronomicon for the Mainstream Media together and expose these dark words right now.

Within most major nations in any given region of the world there are plenty of ways that we can subdivide the dominant culture. Within China there are plenty of dialects and regional culinary differences between people, Germany and Italy really only forged into greater nations from many diverse regions in the 1800s and places like Nigeria have many tribes who all say they are Nigerian, but never forget to mention which tribe they come from. The United States, the current home of the Mainstream Media can also be subdivided by some regional tendencies. The whole Civil War thing really cemented the idea in American society that there are “northerners” and “southerners” who both have different accents, attitudes, cuisine and to this day have differing views on what this whole America thing is supposed to look like. If there is a third type of American it would probably be someone from the West Coast. Seattle, Portland, San Fran and LA, who are neither northern nor southern in their accent, views and general culture.

People love to overclassify things online and we could get into arguments that the “Rocky Mountain Way”, as Joe Walsh put it, is different enough from the West Coast to be its own sub-type of American or perhaps if a Northerner is poor enough, they magically transform into a Midwesterner. It isn’t important as to how many subdivisions for Americans we can make, by their accents, local culture, political views, geography and so on, but to acknowledge that these different types of Americans are real and that besides some basement dwellers online 99% of Americans see these other types as their countrymen and overall an inherent part of their society. Even if California’s inability to pronounce the word “button” is infuriating, along with their sense of “moral superiority”, these are not reasons to say they are no longer Americans.

Now, what if the United States were to lose a horrible war and evil foreign powers came in to break American society forever? They would take these American sub-types and try to turn them into different ethnicities. The new overlords would push some sort of Southern revisionism and tell them that it is time for the South to “rise again” and punish generations of “Northern Aggression”. The evil occupiers would of course feed into West Coast snobbism trying to convince Washington, Oregon and especially California that they’d be so much happier finally being separated from those casserole eating, truck driving, camouflage wearing troglodytes in the fly-over states that voted for Trump. Long story short, subdivisions within any society can be used by one’s enemies to create division and infighting.

Of course the enemies of America would not only pump an independent California full of hate but also make sure they had all the goodies and media cover to all sorts of destructive acts and most importantly cut any remaining cultural threads to American culture forever.

Now what if time passes in our fantasy scenario and a divided America gets back on its feet again. Futuristic Washington’s main mission would be to remove all the fake divisions created by the foreign occupiers. They would need to reintegrate the South and the West Coast especially if those regions were controlled by hostile regimes that serve only the interests of foreign powers.

So I would have to hope that the overwhelming majority of Americans reading this would agree that…

1. There are regional differences across America.
2. These differences could be exploited by foreign powers trying to convince them that they are not a type of American but a separate ethnicity.
3. If foreign powers succeeded in breaking up America, it would be critical for the remnants of the USA to pick up the pieces as fast as possible and reunite the country ASAP before time takes its toll and real separate cultures start developing.
   1. This is especially true if one of these broken off parts of the Continental 48 became hostile and systemically anti-American being used as a weapon against Washington’s interests.

This was a long preface but it is necessary in order to understand why the Russians are doing what they are doing. In his now famous hour-long explanation as to why the military was going to go in and save the Donbass, Putin explained that Lenin and the Communists in their Internationalist zeal irrationally subdivided regions of Russia into separate nations based on seemingly minor and often pointless differences. In the same way that we could sit down and roughly divide a map of America with markers into different subtypes of Americans, the Bolsheviks took it a step further and divided their nation into many fake sub-nations.

Ukraine is a fake nation made to serve a 1920’s Communist Agenda of Internationalism that now serve a Globalist/NeoCon agenda of keeping Russia as small and weak as possible. Kiev is the birthplace of Russian Civilization and the regions to the south and east of it are inherently Russian as Chicago, Atlanta and Las Vegas are inherently American despite their regional differences, accents and so on.

This is the key piece of logic that the Mainstream Media keeps hiding from every discussion about this issue. This is the Elephant in the room that never seems to make it on camera and it explains this odd invasion where the Russians will pound air bases with hypersonic missiles yet not cut off the internet or electricity to Kiev. It explains why half the mayors of the towns the Russians rolled through have happily put up Red, White and Blue flags on top of their offices carrying on with their official duties without the need to use fake Ukrainian terminology in their paperwork anymore. This also explains why the Russians will accept surrender from any of Kiev’s conscripts but have zero mercy for the private battalions. The truth is that the majority of the people, especially in the south and east of today’s Ukraine are Russian. These two-thirds of Ukraine, were, are and always will be Russia to Russians.

After 8 years of watching their own people be bombed and killed by Kiev and the Oligarchs’ private Neo-Nazi battalions, Russia has simply had enough. Before allowing a few people to be killed rather than launching an invasion in the hopes of negotiations and getting the Minsk Agreements to be followed seemed like the better option. Now Russians feel they have no choice but to sacrifice some to save all. These fake political divisions drawn by Lenin, and enforced by a triumphant Washington since 1991, have lead to an unnatural division in Russian Civilization and even created genocide in the Donbass.

Long ago Lincoln was faced with a choice: acknowledge that the South was a different culture and let them go, or remind them that they are American with musket and bayonet?
This is a similar sort of challenge faced by the Kremlin right now and this talking point is so easy to understand and so relevant and relatable to an American audience that it will never ever be hinted at on any Mainstream Media. These are the words that the Mainstream Media dare not speak – Ukraine is a fake country drawn up by the fantasies of Communist Revolutionaries to fit a hot narrative. Most of it is an inherent part of Russia and filled with Russians. #UkraineIsRussian, always has been, always will be. If you disagree then it is time for you to buy a white linen suit and recognize the Confederacy.

In my last essay, I made the case that a specifically Eurasian expression of Manifest Destiny has emerged in recent years sharing many important parallels with the original Manifest Destiny often associated with 19th century America, but with one big difference. Unlike the earlier U.S. variant, the current Eurasian version is not being used as a big stick to smash small nations and minority groups into obedience to an elitist master class.

Despite the many abuses committed by U.S. devotees of “Manifest Destiny”, one might be surprised to discover that it is not entirely evil. This better tradition has sadly been scrubbed out of history books which have been framed to present an over-simplified narrative that asserts either 1) “all American expansion was good”, or 2) “America is just shaped by evil white males destroying minorities, raping pristine nature and pushing slavery”.

If you are surprised by my proposition that something positive actually existed beyond these two wrong extremes, then I’m sorry to say, you’ve been fed a bad batch of either romanticism, or Critical Theory Kool Aid and this article is for you. By reading onward, I promise that you will be able to appreciate the historical forces active behind both China and Russia’s long term strategic thinking and maybe something good embedded within the USA itself that you didn’t realize existed.

The 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway: Master key to Universal History

Let us start with an 1890 map commissioned by an American statesman named William Gilpin (titled “Gilpin’s American Economic, Just and Correct Map of the World”) and featured in his 1890 Magnum Opus‘The Cosmopolitan Railway” (subtitle: compacting and fusing together all the world’s continents).

Several peculiar things pop out upon looking at this map:

1) It is among the earliest American-made maps featuring a Pacific-centric focus rather than the typical Atlantic perspective.

2) It features the growth of railways across every continent including the closing of the Darian Gap uniting North and South America, east-west rail from China to Europe and extensions across Southwest Asia and into Africa via Egypt.

3) It centers around a keystone extension rail connecting Eurasia with the USA via the Bering Strait.

This map, and associated book have been known by many for a long time. Many look at it, murmur “interesting idea” and then turn their brains off.

The inquiring mind should instead be provoked to ask: IS there a story here? Was this Gilpin guy some lone eccentric envisioning a fantasy world completely disconnected from reality? Or was there an international geopolitical process underway that he was an integral part of?

In order to address this question, let’s start by asking: Who was William Gilpin anyway?

William Gilpin: American Patriot and Sinophile

Born into a leading American political family in 1813, William Gilpin became known during his adult life as the “Prophet of Manifest Destiny” serving as state representative, spy, bodyguard to Lincoln, industrialist, and Governor of Colorado. America changed a lot during its early years growing from 13 states to 45 by 1900 (sometimes legitimately and sometimes illegitimacy).

Through out this period, there was a raging fight over what identity would shape the young republic? Would it devolve into racism, slavery and empire, or would it endure and develop according to the ideals laid out in its founding documents?

The USA that existed when Gilpin was born looks very different from the USA of today

As we will come to see, Gilpin’s life was dedicated to the latter. Starting in 1843, Gilpin devoted himself fully to building the world’s first trans continental railway uniting for the first time an entire continent by rail.

Having drafted a 1949 resolution in Missouri conference devoted to the Trans Continental Railway, Gilpin wrote: “Let it be resolved that, whereas the Almighty has placed the territories of the American Union in the center between Asia and Europe and the Route of the Asiatic and European Railway” through the heart of our national domain, it is our duty to the human family to prosecute, vigorously, through its new channel, that supreme commerce between the oriental nations and the nations of the Atlantic, which history proves to have existed in all ages, and to be necessary to keep alive comity, science and civilisation among mankind”.

Watching the decay of the minds and morals of the U.S. population and political establishment then firmly underway, Gilpin explained to German publisher Julius Frobel in 1852 why he believed it necessary to unite Chinese and American cultures into a new synthesis in order to save the nation:

“Salvation must come to America from China, and this consists in the introduction of the “Chinese constitution” viz. the “patriarchal democracy of the Celestial Empire”. The political life of the United States is “through European influences”, in a state of complete demoralization, and the Chinese Constitution alone contains elements of regeneration. For this reason, a railroad to the Pacific is of such vast importance, since by its means the Chinese trade will be conducted straight across the North American continent. This trade must bring in its train Chinese civilization. All that is usually alleged against China is mere calumny spread purposefully, just like those calumnies which are circulated in Europe about the United States”.

Speaking in 1856, Gilpin advanced this idea of a paradigm shift saying that America must: “disinfect ourselves of inane nepotism to Europe in other things as we have done in politics; to ponder boldly on ourselves and our mission, and develop an indigenous dignity- to appreciate Asiatic sciences, civilization, commerce and population- these are essential preparatory steps to which we must tune our minds.”

Gilpin and his World

Among the earliest of Gilpin’s childhood memories was an aging Marquis de Lafayette coming to his home to celebrate the anniversary of the Brandywine Battle victory during the Revolutionary War. During this decisive battle, the Gilpin home served as Lafayette’s headquarters, and Gilpin’s grandfather Thomas was a close collaborator of both Ben Franklin and the French General. Both Gilpin’s father and grandfather were members of Benjamin Franklin’s Philosophical Society and worked closely with the Hamiltonian National Bank where the Gilpins were in charge of constructing one of the largest infrastructure projects in U.S. history: The Chesapeake-Delaware Canal.

Before his 1804 murder at the hands of Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton (founder of the National Bank) had innovated a new form of political economy tied to large scale national credit generation via a nationally-directed banking system, internal improvements, and protective tariffs/bounties. This system of political economy was dubbed “The American System” by German Economist Friedrich List in 1827 and was used successfully to transform the republic from an underdeveloped bankrupt agrarian society in 1783 to an industrially advanced nation outperforming much of Great Britain within 40 years. Large scale projects like the Erie Canal, Chesapeake-Delaware Canal and a growing network of railways was instrumental in this process.

When Hamilton’s Bank was killed by Andrew Jackson (not coincidentally a leading figure in Aaron Burr’s political machine) in 1836, the most important instrument to direct national development was destroyed. National projects were cancelled, economic systems deregulated in favor of money worshipping British Free Trade, and unbounded speculation resulted in chaotic boom/bust cycles starting with the Bank Panic of 1837. Local banks were empowered to print their own currencies and soon over a thousand different notes sent the divided nation into chaos.

The 19th Century Deep State

Under Jackson, the Anglo-American deep state consolidated its power, genocidal programs were launched against natives, and influxes of black slavery grew from two million in 1830 to four million by 1860. With fertile southern soils cleansed of natives, the Slavocracy increased its cotton output becoming among the richest regions on earth with London purchasing over 80% of the south’s output.

By 1860, Britain had acquired a near monopoly on textile production, having destroyed India’s sovereign industries and forcing that once proud nation into producing opium as it’s primary export product. This soul-killing drug was then infused (via British free trade) into the heart of China which suffered crushing defeats when it tried to block the poisoning of its citizens in 1840 and again in 1859.

The Anglo American deep state grew immensely in power leading towards the near break up of the young republic into “free” vs “slave” confederacies… which had been the objective since 1800 when Aaron Burr first attempted it.

The Transformative Power of Rail Development

Despite having lost the national bank, a general orientation towards scientific and technological optimism still animated the American character. The first passenger and freight railway was built in 1827 (the Baltimore and Ohio Railway) and soon rail extensions began moving across the daunting Appalachian mountains. By 1840, over 2800 miles of rail had been laid, growing to 9021 miles in 1850. By 1860 that number had grown to 30,000 miles but a new quantum leap was effected by Lincoln’s decision to devote considerable resources during the height of the Civil War towards the construction of the Trans Continental Railway (built between 1863-1869). With the completion of this project, and the resolution of the Civil War (largely through the intervention of the Russians), rail growth and industrialization exploded. By 1880, over 93,000 miles of rail were laid and when Gilpin published his Cosmopolitan Railway in 1890, the USA had over 163,000 miles of railway while many other nations were experiencing parallel growth through the application of this same model of political economy.

It was in this context that Gilpin became a leading figure of the anti-slavery America, developing a reputation as an Anglophobe suspicious of British Imperial intrigue and working closely with patriots who wished to take back their nation from the clutches of the oligarchical slave power.

For decades, this grouping rallied primarily around the Whig Party of John Quincy Adams and even won two important victories in 1840 and 1850. The first 1840 victory of the nationalists saw President William Harrison take office on the basis of reviving Hamilton’s national bank and re-launching protective tariffs and internal improvements. This was followed by the 1848 victory of Zachary Taylor. Unfortunately, both Whig presidents were poisoned with Harrison only serving three months and dying under mysterious circumstances before the legislation for a Third National Bank (passed by both houses of Congress) could be signed into law. The official cause of Taylor’s 1851 death? Too many cherries and cold milk.

Gilpin soon became an early member of the republican party (founded in 1856 as the anti-slavery party of the USA), where he rose quickly to prominence as one of Lincoln’s team of 11 elite bodyguards who accompanied the newly elected president from Illinois to Washington (narrowly avoiding an assassination attempt along the way).

Lincoln, Carey and the Global Dynamics of the Civil War

Lincoln clearly understood that the USA would not survive as a house divided saying in an 1858 speech:

“Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”

Most importantly, Lincoln and his allies understood that this was much more than a domestic issue, but profoundly implicated the course of world civilization and touched upon the nature of empire itself as the basis of international law. In a debate with Judge Stephen Douglas, Lincoln stated:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

The terms and conditions of the clash of paradigms on a global level was iterated masterfully by a leading Whig economist who soon became a principal economic advisor to Lincoln named Henry C. Carey. In his 1852 Harmony of Interests, Carey stated:

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

Image: Left to right: Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Henry C. Carey

Gilpin and the Greenbacks

In order to do battle with the London-centered financier oligarchy, while simultaneously battling the slave power, Lincoln took control of credit emissions from the private banking cartels by establishing a government-issued “greenbacks”, and “5-20 bonds” starting in 1862. Through these new credit mechanisms directed by national priorities, and a nationally-regulated banking system, Lincoln was able to fund the war and also drive vast development projects like the trans-continental railway.

Before it was launched on a national level, Lincoln’s trusted bodyguard William Gilpin was the first to use this successfully on a state level.

How?

In March 1861, Lincoln appointed Gilpin first governor of the newly formed Colorado Territory on the southwest frontlines of the civil war. During his commission, Gilpin received word that Confederate plans were underway to open up a western front, and was confronted with the dismal fact that financial resources did not exist to organize, train or arm militias to stop this from happening. Before leaving to Colorado, Gilpin’s biographer records the following orders Lincoln gave his lieutenant:

“On finances we have not one cent. I have just negotiated a loan of $50 million from the banks of New York and have called a special session of Congress to meet on the 4th of July to know if they will hang me for this unconstitutional act. If you are driven to extremities, you must do as I have done- issue drafts on your own responsibility”

Gilpin used his authority to issue state-level funds to pay for the militia which made it possible to do battle with the invading confederacy culminating in the Battle of Glorietta Pass in New Mexico in March 1862 which became known as “The Gettysburg of the West”. After putting down this attack, no effort to open a western front was ever to be tried again. Speaking to the Colorado Legislative Assembly in September 1861, Gilpin described his understanding of the strategic importance of Colorado as a bridge not only between oceans but as a gateway to Asia:

“Our territory will be bisected East and West, by the grandest work of all time, constructed to fraternize the domestic relations of our people and to draw the travel and commerce of all the nations, and all the continents of the world.”

The U.S.-Russian Alliance That Changed the Course of History

In the ensuing years, Lincoln’s allies worked closely with their Russian counterparts who helped save the Union in 1863 when Czar Alexander II deployed his navy to Pacific and Atlantic Coasts. These same forces worked together in constructing railways in Russia (with the later Trans Siberian railway built with the help of American engineers and using rail cars made by Baldwin Locomotives from Philadelphia. These would be the same networks that effected the sale of Russian Alaska to the USA in 1867.

Defending the Alaska Purchase in the Congess, Senator Charles Sumner stated: “To unite the East of Asia with the West of America is the aspiration of commerce now as when the English navigator (Meares) recorded his voyage. Of course, whatever helps this result is an advantage. The Pacific railroad is such an advantage; for, though running westward, it will be, when completed, a new highway to the East.”

As the trans-continental railway was being completed, the Alaska purchase was initiated and everyone knew that the continuation of rail from California through British Canada, Alaska and Eurasia was an organic next step.

Gilpin described this program in his 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway saying: “From what has been stated, it is sufficiently apparent that the building of a railroad by way of Alaska, Bering Strait and Northeastern Siberia, connecting with the Canadian Pacific in British Columbia and in Siberia with the Russian line now being pushed forward to Vladivostok, is by no means an impracticable and perhaps not a very difficult undertaking.”

Although Lincoln’s Greenbacks had been destroyed with the 1875 Specie Resumption Act (shackling the U.S. dollars to gold availability), Gilpin fought to revive the American System traditions to fund this new age of global rail development saying “For every dollar that is laid out on railroads, it is estimated that at least ten dollars is added to the sum of human wealth; and that this ratio would be largely increased by completing the chain which needs but a few more links to encircle the globe, is beyond a shadow of a doubt. It would not be a difficult matter for the governments of the United States and Russia to issue say 4-40 bonds and thus settle at once the financial question”.

In both the USA and Russia, this Gilpin’s vision took concrete steps towards realization, first with Edward Harriman’s 1899 expedition to Alaska where plans for an extension of Union Pacific Rail to Russia were charted out. By 1905, as Sergei Witte served as Prime Minister to Czar Nicholas II, a team of American engineers was hired to conduct surveys for the Bering Strait tunnel connection with a March 23, 1906 New York Times headline reading: ‘For Bering Strait Tunnel- Czar Approves Recommendation for All-Rail Route to America’. Sadly, chaotic events of that era derailed this program from unfolding as it should have.

The Strategic Value of Hamiltonian Credit

Gilpin’s reference to “4-40” signified bonds issued with four to forty year maturation and tied directly to the construction of specific megaprojects. This type of productive bond/credit was the essential master key to the success of the Hamiltonian system from its earliest days in 1791 to its renewal under Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal. Every time this system has been applied, measurable bursts of progress, strengthening of sovereignty, uplifting of citizens and destruction of deep state controls have followed in its wake. Whenever it has been repealed, the opposite has occurred.

Gilpin was extremely direct about this tradition, writing: “No amount of Argument will make America adopt old world theories… To rely upon herself, to develop her own resources, to manufacture everything that can possibly be manufactured within her territory- this is and has been the policy of the United States from the time of Alexander Hamilton to that of Henry Clay and thence to our own days.”

Some might say that Gilpin only wished to advance his rail program in order to make money for investors, but that would be the furthest thing from the truth. A few pages later (in his Cosmopolitan Railway), he wrote: “Let the world but for a day stop its senseless wranglings over political clap-trap, stop its wars and preparations for further human butcheries and devote its intelligence and energy to this works and it is done. It is a small matter how the money is raised; or by whom, so that it is forthcoming; only as before remarked, the work, in my opinion is better in the hands of the nations than under the control of individuals; For all species of tyranny, that which emanates from individuals or corporate power, is the worst.”

Speaking of China, Gilpin stated: “The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life, and European Culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms.”

As Gilpin wrote these words, Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte, German Chancellor von Bismarck, French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux and leading industrialists in Japan were working hard to implement the American System in their respective nations as rail lines, productive credit, protectionism, technical education and industrial progress were expanded both within each nation and among themselves.

Despite the assassination of leading statesmen by British directed anarchists between 1865-1905, the orientation towards a new post-imperial society of win-win cooperation moved ever closer to realization.

Lincoln’s Spirit Revived in China

In China, a process was unleashed by a young revolutionary who had been given the opportunity to study in the United States due to the 1868 Seward-Burlingham Treaty that created a short lived ‘special relationship’ between the USA and China. This treaty gave China free emigration and travel in America, reciprocal access to education for citizens living in the others’ country, and favored nation status with the United States. (1)

That young man was recruited to republican networks in the USA and became a devotee of Lincoln’s system of government, which guided his every strategic insight culminating in the 1911 overthrow of the corrupt Qing Dynasty. When he received word of the success of the revolution, Dr. Sun Yat-sen was organizing funding for the Chinese republican cause in the USA (to be specific, in Denver, Colorado). Upon receiving the good news, he immediately returned home to lead the new nation, becoming China’s first President.

It is for this reason that a special 1942 stamp commemorating U.S.-China friendship was first issued in Colorado, featuring portraits of Presidents Sun Yat-sen and Lincoln with the motto “Of the People, By the People, For the People”. The Chinese rendition of this motto was written as “民族, 民權, 民生,” which was made the basis of Sun Yat-sen’s “Three Principles of the People”.

Although foreign intrigues forced him to abdicate the presidency, Dr. Sun Yat-sen remained the moral and strategic force of the Chinese patriots authoring an in-depth program for an industrial renaissance in China tied to a renewal of rail lines, development corridors, energy projects, ports and educational institutions.

Forecasting an interconnected Eurasian railway system and U.S.-Asia alliance, Sun Yat-sen echoed the spirit of Gilpin, famously stating in his 1920 treatise:

“The world has been greatly benefited by the development of America as an industrial and a commercial Nation. So a developed China with her four hundred millions of population, will be another New World in the economic sense. The nations which will take part in this development will reap immense advantages. Furthermore, international cooperation of this kind cannot but help to strengthen the Brotherhood of Man.”

Image: Sun Yat Sen’s rail plans for China published in his 1917 International Development of China called for 10 000 km of rail, 100 000 km of roads, ports, mines and industrial sovereignty. All this was finally accomplished with the advent of Xi Jinping’s age of the Belt and Road – Image EIR

This network of industrial corridors stretched across China, and into India, Southwest Asia, Mongolia, Russia and Europe. Anyone reviewing this grand design today would clearly see the germ seed of the Belt and Road Initiative which has sprung to life since 2013.

In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it known to the west his desire to open up the Siberian and Far Eastern zones of Eurasia to large scale development. As early as 2007, Putin began publicizing his desire to even extend rail through the Bering Strait itself connecting new and old worlds. Although rejected by Bush in 2007, it was renewed in 2011 and in 2014 China began showing significant support for the project. By 2018, China’s BRI took on an Arctic branch known as the Polar Silk Road and today, both nations have clearly picked up the torch dropped by the west after the murder of President Kennedy.

Image: The next phase of the evolving Belt and Road Initiative branching out across the world [image produced by the Schiller Institute]

It is clear that Russia and China have revived a new form of Manifest Destiny in Eurasia as both nations have integrated their destinies into a new garment of interconnected mutual interest bringing in over 135 other nations into agreements of cooperation.

If the west is able to discover the moral fitness to survive at this late stage of decay, it will be due to our rediscovery of this lost heritage and recognize its living expression in the Russian-Chinese alliance today.

The author delivered remarks on this topic viewable here.

(1) With the ouster of Lincoln’s allies from power after the assassination of President Garfield in 1880, however, the stage was set for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which overthrew Seward’s treaty and many of the efforts to create a new global system based upon US-China cooperation.

The American deep state is playing upon the public’s distaste of China towards its own ends, and just as with the present global mystery illness, they will blame China for a social credit system which in reality was made in the USA. We can deconstruct the anatomy of this scam through the handling of Covid and biological warfare in general.

This same deep state is trying to springboard or otherwise utilize the incessantly bad behaviour of its own rapacious oligarchy, who it must serve, an oligarchy trapped in a system of capital accumulation at all and any costs, even collective suicide, into some sort of controlled paradigm collapse. The incentive to destroy society is just too great compared to the costs of keeping it together. The super elites themselves, like some super virus, can always just vacate the premises and find some other host to infect. This is a pandemic of speculation, usury, and greed.

An interesting twist which Senator Rand Paul exposed in public hearings on the senate floor, was that the novel Corona virus was produced at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s discretion. This was a project of the U.S. corporate state, of a corrupted U.S. intelligence agency, we conclude from Senator Paul’s findings.

This much is also so well known by now, that it’s reached the level of common knowledge. But we say it again now not to preach about it, but to connect it to a broader problem with social credit and China.

Digging further, we see it was all based upon long-standing plans to upwards distribute wealth and strip away constitutional rights from citizens, further concentrate socio-economic power, and destroy medium and small businesses. By any definition of the term, this is open class warfare being waged by the ruling class against all other classes.

And so this same ruling class has used the politics of normalized class war to divide and conquer the citizenry along race and gender lines, using new-left tropes, to shift focus away from real economic issues over to abstract identity issues. A portion of the intelligentsia and student/youth are weaponised into a faux ‘progressive’ militancy against ‘Trumpism’, Antifa and BLM and the non-profit industrial complex all connected to Democracy Action and Sorosian wonderworks.

The non-event which was January 6^th is used as some sort of newfangled Oklahoma City bombing which only emboldens the parasitic proclivities of the prosecution and investigation power fetishists, which American authoritarianism has allowed to fester in its crevices. Well, a non-event except for the unjustified killing of Ashli Babbitt by Capitol Police. Four officers who died, actually died ‘by suicide’ within a week of the event. What did they know? Why were they ‘suicided’?

Meanwhile the real opponents of Trump are those behind the entire Great Reset and class war of ‘some against all’ underway right now in the U.S.

And that this is already a burgeoning civil war and inter-elite conflict is also openly known.

On December 20^th, CNN ran video under the heading, “How close is the U.S. to Civil War? Closer than you think, study says”.

The accuracy or motivations of the study itself are neither here nor there, we can develop a superior metric and method probably at random, because the situation is obvious. The real point of interest is that America’s flagship fake news outlet is openly pushing the story. What could the reason for it be?

What was said is of particular interest:

Host: “The rigid refusal of lawmakers of compromise underscore the disturbing findings of one study on democracy in the U.S. According to a Washington Post editorial, data from the Center for Systemic Peace finds that the U.S. no longer qualifies as a democracy. After the Trump administration years, it’s somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.

Barbara Walter is a professor of International Relation at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California at San Diego, she joins me now, I’m delighted. When we look at the research it’s frankly frightening, and you conclude that the U.S. is closer to civil war than any of us would like to Believe. How close?”

Barbara Walter: “Well I’ve been studying civil wars for the last thirty years across the globe, and in fact the last four years I’ve been on a task force run by the CIA that tries to predict where outside the U.S. a civil war, political violence, and instability is likely to break out. And we actually know now that the two best predictors of whether violence is likely to happen are whether a country is an Anocracy, and that’s a fancy term for partial democracy, and whether ethnic entrepreneurs have emerged in a country that are using racial, religious, or ethnic divisions to try to gain political power. And the amazing thing about the United States is that both of these factors currently exist, and they have emerged at a surprisingly fast rate.”

Naturally CNN twists words and reason, and makes implications at odds with the real dynamic now working. The ‘Trump administration years’ is thrown in to make us think the erosion of constitutional rights was his doing. It was the opposite: it was those opposed to Trump that eroded the republic.

It was the collusion of the Great Reset technocracy, the collusion of the IMF, the WEF and domestic players in the Transition Integrity Project (which we have written so much about), big media, big tech, big pharma, the too big to fail, that subverted a populist movement and their rightful electoral outcome.

They openly bragged about it and showed the receipts. It is not a conspiracy theory, but something already openly confessed.

In truth, a better study from Princeton concluded in 2014 that the U.S. was no longer a Democracy.

“A new study from Princeton spells bad news for American democracy—namely, that it no longer exists.

Asking “[w]ho really rules?” researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page argues that over the past few decades America’s political system has slowly transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where wealthy elites wield most power.

Using data drawn from over 1,800 different policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, the two conclude that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of or even against the will of the majority of voters.”

Of course Barbara Walter is either a liar or an idiot, probably a bit of both, because there is no correlation between a democracy index and stability. Well, there is a connection: once the U.S. targets a country or region for destabilization, they begin to point out features of its society that are less than the progressive idealist dream of a utopian democracy. An easy task and a useful trick, given that we are in reality and not a dream. Then they go on to lay a trade embargo and other punitive measures, thereby exacerbating the tensions within that society, tensions which all societies in reality actually have.

The intelligence agencies foster ‘gangs’, counter-gangs, and political violence in the targeted states, to create failed states. They do this across Africa. They did it in Yugoslavia, in Ukraine, etc.

The idea that democracy and stability are directly related works against the truth exposed in the fact of the general tendency of elites in struggling countries to tilt towards dictatorship, in order to bring stability to the instabilities which democratic institutions are subject to, once broader economic issues come to bear. The optimal situation of course are strong democratic institutions which are both justified by, and in turn support, economic prosperity.

Likewise, the U.S. tilts towards dictatorship not as the result of ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’, whatever that means, nor should their appearance (just now?) give us any pause. Rather, the developing system of internal passports, digital ID’s, Covid pass, forced vaccination and imprisonment under the pretext of ‘pandemic’, these are what ought to, and do, give us cause for great concern.

Which brings us back to China.

The pretext of the virus was certainly used in China towards its own ‘national security’ ends in the digital age. Russia has done the same. Neither country, however, has promoted vaccines which are experimental, opting instead to use this U.S. manufactured crisis towards its own security advantage. All while not using it to experiment upon the population with untested gene therapies.

But China will do China, and a country so far away and so far out of reach of the will and moral authority of American citizens to be concerned about, is hardly the proper focus of American citizen concerns.

The biggest problem that Americans face is certainly its own deep state and super elite, who seem to have a penchant for bizarre rituals, child abuse, elective warfare, and the fetishization of power dynamics observed under late capitalism.

The focus on China’s social credit system has a positive effect on western movements against the system insofar as westerners view the developments in Chinese society as negative.

But the blame placed on Chinese society has worked against understanding social credit. While the Chinese social credit system may utilize some of the same technologies as in the U.S., it is different in context, history, and meaning. Most understandable is that China’s social credit system preferences traditional and socially conservative values, whereas the emergent one in the U.S. imposes bourgeois-libertine values.

While Americans transform their justified fears over social credit, alongside the decline of meaningful work and living standards, into anti-China rhetoric, the focus on China serves as a distraction from what is entirely a domestic and technology-driven phenomenon.

If the lesson drawn is that ‘we must not become like Chinese society’, it is missing the mark. China sits in a markedly different position, where its automated industrial production techniques surpass those of the U.S. in many cases, while its large rural population lives in pre-industrial conditions.

China’s social credit system was initially aimed at big firms: imagine something like a ‘better business bureau’ and consumer reporting that actually had teeth. China’s system did not place profitability as the only determining factor for credit worthiness, and given its scale and anonymity, required a numerated system. Imagine if Pfizer, for example, had reduced access to capital because of its criminal activity. That’s exactly the sort of thing that has come about in the Chinese system, one of the few countries that is prone to execute a billionaire oligarch on occasion.

Chinese billionaire businessman, Liu Han was executed after being found guilty of murder and running a mafia-style criminal gang. Credit BBC, February 10, 2015

When China’s system was moved forward, its aim was to develop a non-monetary credit system for rural inhabitants who are still living in pre-industrial conditions. It’s also a massive country, really a civilizational sphere in its own right, with many regions and varying, even conflicting, credit and legal policies.

It is very difficult to implement the modern system of monetary credit when people live on barter, and their psychological motivations relate to not just pre-industrial but pre-modern and onymous social standing.

Bear in mind that China moved through three industrial revolutions within the span of about eighty years, whereas the 1^st Industrial Revolution in the U.S. began around 1750.

Big tech mirrors aspects of China’s social credit system, and there is no doubt that social credit is ‘growing’ in the U.S. if we compare it to the Chinese system. But that’s precisely where we will get it wrong.

In our work on Oriental Despotism and Hydraulic societies, we demonstrated the present push by western elites is to prepare for a transition away from a money-regulated (i.e. labor driven) society. This leads to their need for a social credit system that matches the post-labor age of the 4^th Industrial Revolution.

There are certainly Chinese people unhappy with the Chinese social credit system. The broader point is that that is their issue to solve. It’s a pattern for other countries’ elites to blame its internal woes on the U.S. Whatever truth value those claims have are muddied with the convenience it gives, relieving those political elites of their own responsibilities to govern fairly and justly.

Likewise, the focus on the ‘China virus’ disguises the fact that it was probably created on Dr. Fauci’s watch, coordinating with Bill Gates and other oligarchs invested in the vaccine mandate scheme.

Social credit works the same. It’s far too convenient to misplace both blame and understanding of social credit onto China. Chinese elites, the CCP, the PLA, all have absolutely nothing to do with the growth of social credit on American soil.

Social credit in the U.S. has distinctly American characteristics, based in new-left tropes, backed by American companies and none of the Chinese.

In the U.S., social instability has come about through the logic and process of its own machinations, the socio-economic disparity. The growth of authoritarianism in the U.S. and the implementation of social credit is, if anything, a mitigating force meant to manage the other crises of its own making.

What elites do love to do, however, is blame other countries for their own-goals. When empires collapse, they often like to engage in ‘great resets’, often total wars. Today’s war is a class war of the super elites, and this can be fought and won by the great masses of people against their own oligarchs. Introducing China as a responsible party for either the mystery virus or social credit, however, will only serve to embolden our own oligarchy in a great distraction from their own crimes and programs.

The author can be reached at FindMeFlores@gmail.com

How can we explain how Australia, Britain, Austria, Italy, and more have gone the path of arbitrary and capricious detention and exclusion from society? The Austrian government mobilized perhaps 500 people into the streets in support of lockdown and apartheid measures, colluding with media to inflate that number by a massive factor of sixty.

The reactions to this certainly represent an extreme polarization of society. Yet in politics, there are no coincidences. So while the ruling class would prefer little resistance by some metrics, the popularization of resistance and the potentials this arena holds are also promising in elite contingency planning. Such will be our primary focus in this review.

Whichever holds the most potential and handles resistance in the best way, while carrying out some form of the underlying plan, will be the version of the plan the managers attempt to deliver for the elites.

And this presents a great danger; those still capable of thinking being demoralized by the state of humanity, and drawing eugenicist conclusions parallel to those of the elites. After all, how can the great herd of humanity acquiesce in such a way? If there is a lesson to be learned from history, perhaps it is not ‘never again!’ so much as ‘it will always happen again’.

While the state and corporate sanctioned hatred espoused by media to the unvaxed has reached an alarming temperature, the counter-narrative of blaming the ‘sheeple’ for the new age of mass house-arrest and social apartheid is also growing.

While one is situated as an overt policy of the state apparatus, the other builds popular support and has all the trappings and bearings of authenticity, people power, life, and motion.

Roman Plagues, Inflation, and Great Awakening

In 168 AD the Greek physician Galen was summoned by the synarchy of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus then ruling the Roman Empire, to provide guidance on the management of the small-pox pandemic then affecting millions, now called the Antonine Plague.

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), French. The Plague of Ashdod, 1630. Oil on canvas, 148 × 198 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

Then as now, according to Sabbatani and Fiorino (Infez Med. 2009 Dec;17(4):261-75), the primary factors that led to the pandemic were underlying conditions: primarily poor sanitation and hygiene, and poor diet and access to food. A disproportionate number of Roman subjects lived in overcrowded cities, and lived at the hands of landlords, speculators, and the average life expectancy had dropped to around 25.

Then as now, all of these factors were socially constructed and were not merely ‘facts of life’ as if handed down by the gods, but rather were conditions imposed upon the great mass of humanity by an unhinged oligarchy.

Whether this plague was seen as beneficial by the oligarchy, for whom – then as now – maintenance of a declining population rate was subsidized by coordinated migration from the reaches of the empire – is a subject of debate. Did they see the unwashed rabble in the back alleys of the metropolis as useless eaters, then as they do now?

At any rate, history views the Antonine Plague as a turning point, after which came an age of inflation and division from which the Roman Empire is said to have never fully recovered. The response to the plague from Christians, with their care for the ill, is also a factor in the rapid growth of this monotheism in the empire.

Ultimately Lucius Verus would himself succumb to the mystery illness the following year in 169, and perhaps it is lessons as these which provide for us some insight into new methods of biological warfare when class war is the proscribed remedy for surplus population. If manufacturing such a contagion, it would make sense that it be no more lethal than the common cold, and that nevertheless the concentration of power and an economic regimen which also decreased lives and livelihoods could be obtained at a far smaller cost.

The Antonine and then Cyprian Plague in the 3rd century AD would together lead towards an increased mysticism, religiosity, and tended towards the rapid ascension of Christianity.

Then, as now, the scenario fuels the ‘Great Awakening’, and public embrace of conspiracy theories is at an all-time high, just as mysticism and superstitions also grew through the Roman Empire during these centuries.

Problem-Reaction-Solution, and other things unrelated to Hegel

It is said that history repeats or at the very least parallels, but rather than ascribe these to abstract and still mysterious iron laws of history or any providence directing these, perhaps instead these events return and return again because they are methods of control that work. As Marx said, when history does repeat, the first is tragedy, the second is farce.

The farce at hand today no doubt is that the plague is real and yet also nary more deadly than the flu.

As we previously discussed, it was Foucault who shows convincingly that it was the first the authorized response to the plagues, with its systems of quarantine and mass surveillance, etcetera, that gave initial impulse and inspiration towards the construction of the first modern prisons a century or so later, with its panopticon.

But in regards to the growth of mysticism, paranoia, and religiosity, we see this growing in all areas, both for and against the mandates. Common now is the paranoia around infection, when the common cold never produced this except among germophobes, or in the ritualized wearing of masks which in fact ‘do’ nothing, or rather do something other than what is being publicly explained.

And on the other side, the rapacious and gratuitous abuses by the elites whose evil knows no bounds, has led to a kind of spiritual or religious awakening against the mandate.

Naturally those managing for those in power at the very top, above and beyond mere elected politicians and public health ‘experts’, understand this ‘problem-reaction-solution’ pattern which has so far worked for them.

So in light of that fact, we are drawn to a particularly problematic notice of potential danger scribbled in Schwab’s Covid-19 book. Here we are instructed to infer from the pattern and logic of the text so far, that if the Black Mirror dystopian scenario obviously preferred by the ruling class, with its social credit system – if this does not work – then we have a fall-back plan for a sort of Handmaid’s Tale scenario.

As ridiculous at face value as such things may have sounded just a few short years ago, here we are today with open eyes and open minds, understanding precisely such scenarios and their potentials. Schwab, for his part, does anyhow.

It is there on page 167 that we find it laid out in the standard cryptic fashion, that a fundamentalist theocracy is also something that elites have thought through potential outcomes.

That’s an awfully specific outcome, to be mentioned. The social credit scenario in the Black Mirror seems much more obvious, in part because we are already now living it.

What sorts of problems would be presented so that the reaction could produce that, specifically that, as a solution?

Interestingly, we have numerous factors lining up. While we have noted previously that the population ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory popular in France and catching on in the U.S., is depicted in films like ‘Children of Men’, a common theme with that dystopia and the Handmaid’s Tale is a population and reproduction crisis.

The Geopolitics of Fiction

Perhaps it was Victoria ‘F*ck the EU’ Nuland who first truthfully articulated a shift in U.S. policy away from Trans-Atlanticism. Though, her faction still rests on this doctrine and Biden has struggled to make good on such a return to good EU relations after a stark departure during the Trump years.

But an isolated U.S. is a geopolitical factor in The Handmaid’s Tale. In the TV series version, a more thorough geopolitical situation is relayed to the audience. The premise of the story is that as the result of the overuse of GMOs with their terminator seeds, men’s sperm count rapidly declined. But because the broader crisis, it ushered in a neo-Puritan theocracy, and women were blamed for it. At the same time, the ‘war against boys and men’ theme was depicted as a problem in the U.S., the reaction to it being the formation of the ultra-conservative militant group with MRA beliefs infused with Christian fundamentalism that ultimately seizes power.

Undoubtedly, the elites prefer the Black Mirror scenario of a Trans-Atlanticist surveillance state, and indeed that it is not just a social credit state but a surveillance state is also mentioned on the same page 167 in the typical Schwabian manner. This is the method whereby the entire book can be understood, where certain kinds of ‘warnings’ are precisely the kinds of outcomes the ruling class wants. And we know this because they have actively, with tremendous gusto, pursued those outcomes for decades.

The surveillance state reference relates here to a disingenuous social-democratic nod to Shoshana Zuboff’s tome ‘Surveillance Capitalism’, mentioned also by Schwab on page 167 in connection to the dystopia warnings on the same page. Zuboff is a member of the establishment ‘temple’ in good standing, and also a member of the ‘state’.

Like Schwab, she explains the dangers of rapacious predatory capitalism while being a vociferous defender of its ethos. It may be hard for some to imagine how it’s possible to hold such positions while also selling one’s financial services to the very target of the same criticisms. But neuroticism and self-serving hypocrisy are par for the course in that world.

Schwab pretends to warn and lament that such an outcome like The Handmaid’s Tale is a possibility of certain societies like the U.S. , if they‘ mismanage’ the situation, by which we understand means ‘manage precisely as we want once the pushback forces us to’.

What do we mean here? While the Atlanticist model requires increased ideological harmony between the U.S. as Europe is instructed to ‘love’ a sort of strange cultural hybrid of intersectional ‘black struggle’ with something closer to home, cross-dressing, which a few decades ago we could simply call ‘RuPaul’.

And the U.S. is instructed to look at European ‘social democracy’ as an inspirational model, though in practice also it comes with less social and less democracy. But it is the ‘vibe’ of a state that provides welfare that matters, even as in the U.S. it doesn’t. It feels like it does when Democrats are in office.

So together there is some hegemonic ideological construct that conjoins Western Europe to the U.S., despite that spatially and economically Europe is more dependent on Eastern Europe, China and MENA.

A Swift Conclusion

There are also big pushes by some dissenting voices within the elites, who got behind Trump and may well still be behind him, that want to collapse Atlanticism all together, meaning the end of NATO but also the IMF, and so naturally those elite forces nevertheless bent on population reduction and their own preservation are looking at ways to manage the blowback as well.

For reasons beyond our scope here, Biden’s foreign policy and his attitude to the EU seems to be a clone of Trump’s. Which oddly and incredibly, lends more to the Handmaid scenario than it does Black Mirror.

Conclusively, while legal and constitutional pushes for election reform and a robust curtailment of the covid restrictions is in order, on our radar screen should be the manipulation of this resistance towards Christian theocratic aims – not because they challenge the status quo, but because they would be controlled by it.

The author can be reached at FindMeFlores@gmail.com

From its earliest years the United States has found ways to deny the rights of a free press when it was politically expedient to do so.

One of the latest ways was to arrest WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange two years ago today and to indict him — the first time a publisher and journalist has ever been charged under the 1917 Espionage Act for possessing and publishing state secrets.

Though several U.S. administrations had come close to punishing journalists for revealing defense information, they all pulled back, until Assange. They were restrained because of a conflict with the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from passing any law, including the Espionage Act, that abridges press freedom.

Until that legal conflict is resolved in court, resulting in parts of the Espionage Act being found unconstitutional, the language of the Act threatening press freedom remains. Bolstered by 1950 amendments to the Act, the Donald Trump administration crossed a redline to arrest a journalist. A 1961 amendment made it possible to indict a non-U.S. citizen, acting outside U.S. territory.

The Trump administration’s first indictment of a publisher opened an alarming precedent for the future of journalism.

Assange’s arrest, April 11, 2019. (YouTube)

President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has not reversed Trump’s move to continue to seek Assange’s extradition from Britain though it could have. Instead it decided on Feb. 13 to pursue the appeal of Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s decision not to extradite Assange to the U.S. on health grounds. If the U.S. should win on appeal, Assange will be brought to the Eastern District of Virginia to face 17 Espionage Act counts, amounting to 175 years in prison, as Baraitser challenged none of those counts in her judgement.

Threats to press freedom are an integral part of U.S. history. Assange’s arrest and indictment comes within a long line of government repression of a free press, first by the British against American colonists, and then by the U.S. government, which based the Espionage Act on the British Official Secrets Act.  

Possession and Dissemination

Assange did not pass state secrets to an enemy of the United States, as in a classic espionage case, but rather to the public, which both the U.S. and British governments might well consider the enemy.

Assange revealed crimes and corruption by the state. Punishing such legitimate criticism of government historically amounted to a charge of sedition, but two sedition acts were repealed in the U.S. shortly after they were made law and are no longer on the books.

Other journalists and publishers in the past have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act, but mostly for criticizing and trying to curtail the military draft during the First World War.

Assange became the first journalist prosecuted under sections of the Act that make it a crime to have (or even attempt to have) unauthorized possession of defense material, and separately, to communicate it, since technically neither he nor anyone working for WikiLeaks were authorized to do so.

The language used in his indictment based on the Espionage Act is so broad that theoretically anyone who has shared a classified WikiLeaks publication on social media could also be liable to prosecution, not to mention the many mainstream media organizations that routinely report on and quote from classified material, including from WikiLeaks.

The overly broad language means the government does not generally have to prove that the intent was to harm the U.S., only that a defendant, in this case Assange, knew it could.

Neither does the possession and publication of classified information have to cause any actual harm to the U.S. The government does not need to prove that publication actually threatened national security.

Intent, Retention, Communication & Person

The main issues involving Assange’s Espionage Act indictment and the history of Anglo-American espionage legislation are: a) intent: whether motive is relevant to prosecution and whether a public interest defense is possible; b) person: who is liable for prosecution, whether only government officials, normally the source of leaked secrets, or anyone, including journalists who publish them; c) retention: whether mere unauthorized possession is a crime; and d) communication: the laws as they have regarded unauthorized communication of defense information.

These four aspects of espionage laws on both sides of the Atlantic evolved in numerous complex ways over the century between 1889 and 1989, in particular how they have affected journalism. But earlier governments also found ways to choke off press freedom.

A History of Prosecuting Speech

Andrew Hamilton defending John Peter Zenger, 1734-5 (1877) (Wood engraving/Library of Congress)

While Assange is the first journalist indicted for possessing and disseminating classified information there is a long history of prosecuting speech in America.

The classic case of a publisher being prosecuted for publishing material critical of a government authority, on the territory of what would become the United States, took place in 1735 in the British colony of New York.

William Cosby, the governor of the colony, put John Peter Zenger, publisher of The New York Weekly Journal on trial for printing an article accusing Cosby of rigging elections and other corruption.

Though the judge ordered that Zenger be found guilty based on the libel law at the time (which criminalized criticism of the government even if true) the jury acquitted Zenger, arguing that the law was unjust. This historic case of jury nullification paved the way for the First Amendment after the American Revolution.

“Morris called Zenger’s case ‘the germ of American freedom … which subsequently revolutionized America.’”

If Assange were to be extradited and go on trial in Alexandria, Virginia, a jury ignoring the Espionage Act’s repressive restrictions on press freedom could be Assange’s best hope for freedom. Such an event could also pave the way for a successful constitutional challenge of the law on First Amendment grounds.

Genesis of First Amendment

The Zenger case was referred to 52 years later in the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention by Gouverneur Morris, a New York signer of the Declaration of Independence. Morris called Zenger’s case “the germ of American freedom, the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America.” One of the many parts of British common law American rebels opposed was that truth was no defense in a libel case.

Though the Virginia colonial legislature had passed a Declaration of Rights in 1776 that included the line, “The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic Governments,” and though eight of the other 12 colonies passed similar language, there was resistance to this and other parts of a declaration of rights being adopted at the Constitutional Convention.

After more than three years of debate, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in December 1791. The first of these rights says:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

1798 Sedition Act

Just eight years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, press freedom had become a threat to John Adams, the second president, whose Federalist Party pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Laws. They criminalized criticism of the federal government: 

“To write, print, utter or publish, or cause it to be done, or assist in it, any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government of the United States, or either House of Congress, or the President, with intent to defame, or bring either into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against either the hatred of the people of the United States, or to stir up sedition, or to excite unlawful combinations against the government, or to resist it, or to aid or encourage hostile designs of foreign nations.”

Congress did not renew the Act in 1801 and President Thomas Jefferson pardoned prisoners serving sentences for sedition and refunded their fines.

Prosecuting the Press in the US Civil War

Freedom of the press next came significantly under attack in the lead up  to the 1860-65 U.S. Civil War.  Newspaper editors who campaigned for the abolition of slavery were attacked by mobs, sometimes directed by elected officials.  More than 100 mobs attacked abolitionist newspapers. In 1837 an editor was killed  by a mob, one of whose organizers was the Illinois attorney general.

During the war numerous editors and journalists were arrested in the North. “Throughout the war, newspaper reporters and editors were arrested without due process for opposing the draft, discouraging enlistments in the Union army, or even criticizing the income tax,” according to the First Amendment Encyclopedia.

Grand juries in New York and New Jersey presented a list of newspapers condemned for calling the conflict an “unholy war.”  The Post Office was ordered to stop delivering those newspapers and “U.S. marshals in Philadelphia seized copies of the listed newspapers as they arrived by train.”

The encyclopedia says,

“In the vast majority of instances, the government restrained the free press without any legal process. The military routinely arrested newspaper editors and closed their presses; military tribunals banished some of them to the Confederacy for encouraging resistance.”

Secretary of State William Seward ordered the arrest of an editor from the Freeman’s Journal for allegedly treasonous statements and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton “authorized a military governor to destroy the office of the Sunday Chronicle in Washington.”

Allan Pinkerton, Lincoln and Gen. John McClendand. (Mathew Brady Photographs of Civil War-Era Personalities and Scenes, 1921 – 1940 Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860 – 1985)

President Abraham Lincoln was faced with a dilemma, which he posed in a July 1861 speech:  “Must a government of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”  In trying to strike a balance, Lincoln reversed an order by Gen. Ambrose Burnside to suspend the Chicago Times and criticized Gen. John Schofield for arresting the editors of the Missouri Democrat.

The greater concern was that Confederate generals read Northern newspapers to learn of Union troop movements, an issue that would appear 50 years later in the Espionage Act.  In 1862 Lincoln set up military trials for people agitating against the military draft, an issue that would also be later codified into the Act.

1889 Official Secrets Act & the Provenance of the Espionage Act

The 1917 U.S. Espionage Act under which Assange is charged is descended from the 1889 British Official Secrets Act. The Espionage Act replaced the 1911 U.S. Defense Secrets Act, which was based on Section 1 of Britain’s legislation, the  Official Secrets Act of 1889.

The language of this section of the Defense Secrets Act is in places nearly identical with the Official Secrets Act. Some of that language has survived in the Espionage Act to ensnare Assange.

The 1889 British Official Secrets Act says:

While the 1911 U.S. Defense Secrets Act says:

1889 Official Secrets Act

The 1889 Official Secrets Act was enacted in the midst of continuing unrest in Ireland and British tension with Russia over Afghanistan, hyped by exaggerated press reports of Russian designs on British India.  It was also an era of freelance British spies abroad in the empire. The Act came 16 years after the establishment of the Intelligence Branch at the British War Office.  Prior to 1889, larceny was the only law against obtaining and disclosing government secrets.

One of the cases that may have led directly to the Act was that of Charles Marvin, a clerk at the Foreign Office, who supplemented his income by freelancing articles to a newspaper. In one 1878 piece he reproduced from memory a secret British treaty with Russia, but the case against him was dismissed because he never physically removed the document from the Foreign Office.  If Marvin were indeed the catalyst for the Official Secrets Act, it can be said that it came about to stop a journalist in the future from illegally obtaining and publishing state secrets.

The 1889 Act “is a classic piece of Victorian legislation, clear in some ways, vague in others, but significantly more liberal than what followed,” said Consortium News legal analyst Alexander Mercouris. “Section 1 of the 1889 Act is clearly concerned with spying, though the language is sufficiently vague that in theory it could be stretched to include other forms of disclosure. However I doubt that Victorian judges would have allowed it to be used for purposes other than prosecuting genuine acts of spying.”

Significantly, the 1889 Act included an explicit public interest defense, but only for government employees.

“Where a person, by means of his holding or having held an office under Her Majesty the Queen, has lawfully or unlawfully either obtained possession of or control over any document … at any time corruptly or contrary to his official duty communicates or attempts to communicate that document … to any person to whom the same ought not, in the interest of the State, or otherwise in the public interest, to be communicated at that time, he shall be guilty of a breach of official trust.” (Emphasis added.)

The public interest defense was added to the bill after objections were made in Parliament that the Act might penalize disclosures of government corruption and misconduct.

Section 1 of the Act criminalized any person for mere unauthorized possession and even unauthorized “knowledge” of any secret information (this clearly to prevent memorization of secrets, as Marvin had done). It also made it a crime to communicate such information to an unauthorized person.  Even an attempt to do these things was a crime. Assange would have technically been liable under this part of the Act without a public interest defense, as he is not a government employee.

Charles Marvin. (From his 1883 book The region of the eternal fire; an account of a journey to the petroleum region of the Caspian. London, W.H. Allen & Co. University of California Libraries, digitalized by MSN Books.)

Anyone “inciting” or “counseling” another person to commit an offense under the Act could also be prosecuted. First introduced here, the offense of “incitement” has survived in the current U.S. Espionage Act and was part of the charge against Assange, who is accused of having “knowingly and unlawfully obtained and aided, abetted, counseled, induced, procured and willfully caused [Chelsea] Manning to obtain documents…”Section 2 related only to government officials, who would be guilty of a breach of trust if that official “corruptly or contrary to his official duty communicates or attempts to communicate that document, sketch, plan, model, or information to any person to whom the same ought not to be communicated at that time.”

Jurisdiction of the 1889 Act was limited to “Her Majesty’s dominions,” though government officials could be prosecuted for violations anywhere in the world. Mere possession and communication were misdemeanors, while passing state secrets to a foreign nation was a felony.

This first espionage law, which formed the basis of all such laws that would follow in the U.S., Britain and the Commonwealth (including the espionage law in Assange’s native Australia) made it a crime (even for the press) to possess state secrets without authority and to communicate those secrets.  Subsequent versions in Britain and the U.S. refined and reinforced this basic theme, with some important changes.

1911 U.S. Defense Secrets Act

Before the 1911 U.S. Defense Secrets Act, the only U.S. laws against espionage were those relating to treason, theft of government property and unlawful entry onto a U.S. military base.

Just three paragraphs long, the language contained in the Defense Secrets Act is closely aligned with the Official Secrets Act.  Section 1 of the DSA covers any person “obtaining” defense information “to which he is not lawfully entitled.”  Anyone who “receives or obtains” such information “without proper authority” also broke this law.

Alpheus Morton (UK National Portrait Galley/Wikipedia)

A person who “willfully” and without authority “communicates or attempts to communicate” such information to “any person not entitled to receive it” was in breach of the Act. Section 2 spells out a ten year prison sentence if secrets were passed to a foreign government.

1911 Official Secrets Act

In October 1909 the Secret Service Bureau was created by the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Admiralty to deal primarily with “an extensive system of German espionage.” The bureau was split into the domestic service, MI-5, and foreign, MI-6.  Both agencies today acknowledge that the German espionage scare that led to their creation was mostly media hype. The MI-5 website says:

“‘Refuse to be served by a German waiter’, the Daily Mail advised its readers. ‘If your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport.’ Such alarmism reflected the tensions caused by the Anglo-German naval arms race and the approach of the First World War. Most of the ‘spies’ who persuaded Whitehall that it was faced with ‘an extensive system of German espionage’ in Britain were figments of the media and popular imaginations.”

Nonetheless, just two years after the bureau’s creation, and six months after the passage of the U.S. Defense Secrets Act, the British parliament reenacted in a single day after one hour of Commons debate its revised Official Secrets Act on Aug. 22, 1911.  MP Sir Alpheus Morton said it was “very unusual and a very extraordinary thing to pass such a Bill without an opportunity of discussing it. Although I do not wish to insist upon the point, I submit that all the stages of a Bill ought not to be dealt with in this House without a proper opportunity of discussing every Clause.”

Removed from the 1889 Act was the explicit mention of a public interest defense.

The 1911 Official Secrets Act also added an alarming Section 2, which was not discussed at all in Parliament or the press before passage, saying it was no longer necessary to prove one’s guilt — the appearance of a crime was enough.

“(2) On a prosecution under this section, it shall not be necessary to show that the accused person was guilty of any particular act tending to show a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State, and, notwithstanding that no such act is proved against him, he may be convicted if, from the circumstances of the case, or his conduct, or his known character as proved, it appears that his purpose was a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State…”

Section 1 of 1911 OSA applies to “any person” who “obtains or communicates” a state secret “calculated to be,” “might be” or is “intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy.”  This extraordinarily broad language criminalized any person who merely “approaches or is in the neighbourhood of, or enters any prohibited place within the meaning of this Act” for any “purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State.”

The burden of proof shifted to defendants from prosecutors who no longer had to prove the 1889 requirement that the defendant’s motive was prejudicial to the state. Any official document that was obtained was deemed “prejudicial to the interests of the state … unless otherwise proved.” This went beyond anything in the Defense Secrets Act.

Reception of a secret was a crime by any person “unless he proves that the communication to him of the sketch, plan, model, article, note, document or information was contrary to his desire.” A 1920 amendment to the Act made “wrongful communication or retention of official documents” an offense — the first time “retention” was mentioned and made a crime in a U.S. or British espionage law. This led Viscount Burnham to warn during the amendment’s House of Lord’s debate:

“I do not know a single editor of a national paper who from time to time has not been in possession of official documents which have been brought into his office, very often not at his own request, and which it may be inconvenient to the Minister of the responsible Department should have gone out.”

Sir Donald Maclean MP argued in the House that the amendments threatened a free press. “I find it difficult to confine my language in regard to this Bill within the range of Parliamentary propriety. It is another attempt to clamp the powers of war on to the liberties of the citizen in peace,” he said.

Though the main intention of the Act was geared towards foreign espionage, the term “any person” in these two British and one American Act in no way excluded the prosecution of a journalist, the subject of a 1938 London conference on the “Freedom of the Press and the Challenge of the Official Secrets Acts.”

In a speech to the conference, Dingle Foot, who would later become a member of Parliament and solicitor general, said: “These Acts now constitute a sort of statutory monstrosity abrogating nearly all the usual rules for the protection of accused persons and there is nothing to compare with them anywhere else in our criminal law.”

Although Assange was the first indicted under the U.S. law, British journalists had already been indicted for publishing state secrets. In 1971 reporters and editors at The Sunday Telegraph were prosecuted under the 1911 Official Secrets Act for publishing Foreign Office documents about British policy in the civil war in Nigeria. The government lost at trial as the material was shown to have been merely embarrassing to the government.

In 1978 two British journalists were indicted under the 1911 Official Secrets Act in the so-called ABC Trial for publishing an article in the magazine Time Out about wiretapping by the signals intelligence agency GCHQ.  Section 1 charges were dropped by the judge at trial for being  “oppressive in the circumstances,” but the two journalists, John Berry and Duncan Campbell, were convicted in the Old Bailey under section 2, though they received minimal sentences.

The anti-German mania, which was the backdrop to both the U.S. Defense Secrets and British Official Secrets Acts — passed within six months of each other in 1911 — helped set the stage for the Great War, which broke out three years later.

The Espionage Act

Wilson asking Congress to declare war on Germany, April 2, 1917. (Colorized  Wikimedia Commons)

In his 1915 State of the Union address, in the midst of the First World War, but before the U.S. entered it, President Woodrow Wilson made a strident and authoritarian argument for the Espionage Act. He said:

“There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue…

I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment and feel that in doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than save the honor and self-respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out. They are not many, but they are infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over them at once. They have formed plots to destroy property, they have entered into conspiracies against the neutrality of the Government, they have sought to pry into every confidential transaction of the Government in order to serve interests alien to our own. It is possible to deal with these things very effectually. I need not suggest the terms in which they may be dealt with.”

On the very day Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, Sen. Charles Allen Culberson, a Texas Democrat, introduced the Espionage Act bill to the Senate.

Formal Censorship Rejected

While the Espionage Act does not impose formal government censorship, its use against Assange is having a chilling effect on the press and the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment. While the Pentagon Papers case, as we’ll see, showed that the government cannot exercise “prior restraint” — that is, ordering a publisher beforehand not to publish classified material — it can prosecute a publisher or journalist after publication.

Sen. Charles Spalding Thomas (Public Domain)

If Wilson had had his way, however, prior restraint — or formal government censorship — would have become legal. He sent Congress a version of the Espionage Act that explicitly called for it.

There was a furious reaction against it in the press.

A June 1919 article in the Michigan Law Review reported:

“Said The MILWAUKEE NEWS … The Censorship bill . . . has aroused such a storm of dis- approval that the President seeks to allay popular indignation at this glaring attempt to void Constitutional rights. . . . The whole program to muzzle the press seems to smack of unconstitutionality, tyranny, and deceit.’

“The NEW YORK TIMES, too, was greatly alarmed, and devoted a considerable part of its editorial space throughout several days to criticism of the measure and especially of its alleged unconstitutionality.”

After just one week of debate, the Senate was sufficiently alarmed that it voted 39 to 38 to remove the section on censorship. A single Senate vote stopped formal U.S. censorship.

The Espionage Act bill was passed by the House on May 4, 1917, by 261 votes to 109 and by the Senate on May 14 by a vote of 80-8. Passage in the Senate came with a warning from Democratic Sen. Charles Spalding Thomas of Colorado, who said: “I very much fear that with the best of intention we may place upon the statute books something that will rise to plague us in the immediate future.” He added:

“Of all times in time of war the press should be free. That of all occasions in human affairs calls for a press vigilant and bold, independent and uncensored. Better to lose a battle than to lose the vast advantage of a free press.”

“‘The whole program to muzzle the press seems to smack of unconstitutionality, tyranny, and deceit.’”

Sen. James Watson of Indiana raised the issue of criminalizing mere possession of defense information by a journalist:

“Suppose a newspaper correspondent were to go into the office of the Secretary of War and talk to him about the number of troops that were in a certain division or under a certain command, or about the movement of those troops, whether that information is ever used or not, whether it is ever published or not, under the terms of this provision that in and of itself makes him guilty of a violation of the statute.”

Wilson signed the final version of the Espionage Act on June 15, 1917. But in a signing statement he nevertheless insisted that: “Authority to exercise censorship over the press … is absolutely necessary to the public safety.”

Though formal censorship was rejected, the conflict with the First Amendment was not resolved. The adopted language was broad enough to make “whoever” liable to prosecution. That could include any journalist who obtains defense information with “intent or reason to believe” that it would injure the U.S. and who “willfully communicates or transmits or attempts to communicate or transmit the same to any person not entitled to receive it.”  It also makes liable anyone who “willfully retains” defense information and fails to deliver it “on demand” of a government officer. The penalty was a fine of no more than $10,000, two years in prison, or both.

The phrase “with intent or reason to believe” is broader than the 1911 OSA’s “intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy.” The Defense Secrets Act says nothing about intent.

In his indictment, Assange is charged with obtaining, retaining and disclosing defense information.

The foundation of the offenses Assange has been accused of committing — unauthorized possession and disclosure — are present in the Acts so far considered.

1918 Sedition Act

Not satisfied that censorship was excluded, Wilson pushed for an amendment to the Act that was passed by Congress (48-26 in the Senate and 293-1 in the House). The Alien and Sedition Act was enacted on May 16, 1918, just months before U.S. troops arrived on the Western Front in the First World War. Though it was called an act, it never stood alone as one, but became part of the Espionage Act.

Wilson had the backing of influential congressmen and newspaper publishers who wanted to shut down certain speech. The Sedition Act curtailed speech especially of Americans who opposed U.S. participation in the war and particularly the draft. More than 4 million Americans fought and 110,000 died in the war. (The act may have influenced U.S. newspapers to suppress news of the 1918 flu pandemic in deference to the war effort.)

The Sedition Act’s two-paragraph amendment to the Espionage Act was specifically aimed at Americans who insulted the U.S. government, military or flag and tried to criticize the draft, military industry or sale of war bonds. It said:

“…whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute, or shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any language intended to incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of its enemies, or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully by utterance, writing, printing, publication, or language spoken, urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things, product or products, necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war in which the United States may be engaged, with intent by such curtailment to cripple or hinder the United States in the prosecution of war, and whoever shall willfully advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated, and whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or the imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both…”

It also empowered the postmaster general to intercept and return mail to its sender stamped with the words “Mail to this address undeliverable under Espionage Act.”

This law distilled the essence of enforced loyalty of the population to the symbols and military power of the state. It demolished the idea that America is exceptional as it showed the U.S. enforcing the same state-worship as most nations in history.

Though he is not an American and the Sedition Act is no longer on the books, it is this disloyalty to the dictates of the American state that Assange is being punished for as his extradition hearing prosecutors failed to demonstrate his work caused harm. (Today’s sedition law relates to two or more people who conspire to overthrow the U.S. government.)

Espionage and Sedition Act Prosecutions

Debs at a 1918 rally, shortly before being arrested for sedition for opposing the draft. (Wikimedia Commons)

The act, with similar federal laws, was used to convict at least 877 people in 1919 and 1920, according to a report by the attorney general. In 1919, the Supreme Court heard several important free speech cases — including Debs v. United States and Abrams v. United States — involving the constitutionality of the law. In both cases, the Court upheld the convictions as well as the law.

The best-known Sedition Act prosecution was the socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.  A month after the 1918 Sedition Act was passed was passed on May 16, 1918, Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for publicly opposing the military draft. In a June 1918 speech he had said: “If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace.”

While in jail Debs received one million votes for president in the 1920 election.  Assange’s defiance of the U.S. government went well beyond Debs’ anti-war speech by uncovering war crimes and corruption.

For being seditious, Debs and Assange are the most prominent political prisoners in U.S. history.

The Schenck Case

Before the Sedition Act, Charles Schenck, the general secretary of the U.S. Socialist Party, was arrested in 1917, and convicted under the Espionage Act for mailing fliers to draft-age men opposing the First World War conscription.

He was charged with language from Section 3 of the Espionage Act that made it illegal to “make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States” and to “cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces … or … willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States.”

First Amendment Challenge

Schenck’s appeal on First Amendment grounds went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in March 1919 that his conviction did not violate free speech.

It was a significant decision, rolled back somewhat in 1969 by the First Amendment case  Brandenburg v. Ohio, in which the Supreme Court ruled the government could only punish inflammatory speech if it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” The Espionage Act indictment against Assange doesn’t allege that, other than a very weak and fraught U.S. claim Assange “intentionally” risked the lives of U.S. informants.

The ruling in Schenck’s case was a significant defeat for the First Amendment against the Espionage Act. But it did not deal with the possession and publication of classified material that Assange has been charged with. Since no journalist had ever been charged with this before, Assange’s appeal on First Amendment grounds, if it goes that far, would also be a first.

The Masses

A magazine called The Masses was prosecuted in 1918 for interfering with the military draft.  The magazine published some of the leading left-wing writers of the day, including Max Eastman, John Reed and Dorothy Day.

Distribution of The Masses was barred in the New York subway system, by United News Co. of Philadelphia, Magazine Distributing Co. of Boston, in university libraries, bookshops and by the Canadian postal system.  Then the Associated Press sued the magazine in 1913 because it critiqued AP’s reporting of the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, a suit that was eventually dropped.

In 1917, The Masses was charged under the Espionage Act with “unlawfully and willfully” obstructing the recruiting and enlistment of U.S. soldiers to fight in World War I, which the magazine opposed. Louis Untermeyer, a writer for the magazine, said, “As the trial went on it was evident that the indictment was a legal subterfuge and that what was really on trial was the issue of a free press.”

The judge instructed the jury: “I do not have to remind you that every man has the right to have such economic, philosophic or religious opinions as seem to him best, whether they be socialist, anarchistic or atheistic.”  The first trial ended in a mistrial when one juror was discovered to be a socialist and the other jurors demanded the prosecutors indict him too. The second trial also ended in a mistrial.

The Sedition Act was repealed by Congress in March 1921 and Debs’ sentence was commuted by President Warren Harding.

Prior Restraint in War

General Douglas MacArthur signs as supreme allied commander during formal surrender ceremonies on the USS MISSOURI in Tokyo Bay, Sept. 2, 1945 (US Navy)

With few exceptions, American newspapers voluntarily censored themselves in the Second World War before the government dictated it. In the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said he didn’t “desire to reestablish wartime censorship” and instead asked the press for self-censorship. He largely got it until the papers began reporting American battlefield losses.

On July 25, 1950, “the army ordered that reporters were not allowed to publish ‘unwarranted’ criticism of command decisions, and that the army would be ‘the sole judge and jury’ on what ‘unwarranted’ criticism entailed,” according to a Yale University study on military censorship.

After excellent on-the-ground reporting from Vietnam brought the war home to America and spurred popular anti-war protests, the military reacted by blaming the news media for its defeat. It then instituted, initially in the First Gulf War, serious control of the press by “embedding” reporters from private media companies, which accepted the arrangement, much as World War II newspapers censored themselves.

June 7, 1942 front page. (Chicago Tribune)

FDR Targets Newspaper

When The Chicago Tribune defied World War II censorship in 1942 by reporting that the U.S. Navy knew Japan’s strategy for the Battle of Midway — evidently by decoding Japanese communications — President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to use the Espionage Act to prosecute a reporter for the first time for publishing defense information. His Justice Department had a grand jury empaneled in Chicago, which, unlike in the Assange case, refused to return an indictment.

Three years later the FBI raided the offices of Amerasia, a pro-communist publication, which had obtained classified information, including up to “Top Secret,” and published articles based on it. It seemed a clear, technical violation of the Espionage Act for possessing and communicating state secrets, but a grand jury again refused to indict under the Act because the publication did not pass secrets to a foreign power, as Assange has not.

Right-wingers in Congress were incensed and, helping to launch the McCarthyist era, mobilized to pass in 1950 amendments to the Espionage Act, including section 798 and sub-sections 793(e) and (g), which has directly affected Assange.

While the U.S. prosecution in his extradition case at first argued that he was not a journalist and its case was not about journalism, it later changed tack — after defense witnesses strongly indicated that it was — and argued instead that Assange had violated sub-section 793(e) for possession and publication of defense information.

In a sense it can be said that Assange is at least an indirect victim of McCarthyism.

McCarran Internal Security Act

The McCarthyist scare was just underway in 1950 when an amendment to the Espionage Act added Section 793 (e) and (g) and Section 798. The Act that contained the amendments was named after its sponsor, Democratic Sen. Pat McCarran of Nevada.

While the act was being debated in 1949, West Virginia Sen. Harley Kilgore wrote to McCarran, warning that the amendment “might make practically every newspaper in the United States and all the publishers, editors, and reporters into criminals without their doing any wrongful act.”

Pat McCarran. (Wikipedia)

The U.S. attorney general wrote at the time,  falsely it turned out, “that nobody other than a spy, saboteur, or other person who would weaken the internal security of the Nation need have any fear of prosecution under either existing law or the provisions of this bill.”

The language in the British and U.S. espionage laws that have been considered is exceedingly broad, giving governments on both sides of the Atlantic wide berth to bring prosecutions on anyone. The 1950 amendments to the Espionage Act made that language broader still.

The most significant 1950 change to the Espionage Act was to remove intent and make mere retention of defense information illegal. According to Harold Edgar and Ben Schmidt Jr. in the May 1973 edition of Columbia Law Review:

“The basic provisions of sections 793 and 794 have been changed importantly only once since 1917. As a little-noted aspect of the massive Internal Security Act of 1950, section 793 was extended by the addition of subsection (e). This provision departed from the established pattern of the 1917 Act by imposing a prohibition applicable to everyone, not conditioned on any special intent requirement, on communication of information relating to the national defense to persons not entitled to receive it. Mere retention of defense information was also made a crime.”

Subsection (e) removed the requirement that anyone who had unauthorized possession of state secrets return it to proper authorities on their “demand.” It now has to be returned without any such demands.  So a journalist like Assange who received defense information without authority, did not immediately return it, and communicated it could more easily be prosecuted with the government not having to prove any intent on his part.

Edgar and Schmidt add:

“The sweep of these provisions seems incredible when measured against the congressional antipathy, manifested both in the 1917 debates and in subsequent confrontations with the problem of secrecy, to broad prohibitions that would hinder public speech on defense matters. No special culpability requirement explicitly restricts their reach. Barring the possible effect of limiting constructions, any ‘communicating’ of defense material or information to anyone not authorized to hear about it is a serious criminal offense. Even retaining possession of such material is unlawful for those who lack special authorization.

If these statutes mean what they seem to say and are constitutional, public speech in this country since World War II has been rife with criminality. The source who leaks defense information to the press commits an offense; the reporter who holds onto defense material commits an offense; and the retired official who uses defense material in his memoirs commits an offense.”

The McCarran Act’s adoption of 793 (g) added conspiracy to the Espionage Act. It says: “If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.” Assange was also charged under this section for allegedly conspiring with his source, Chelsea Manning, in what is otherwise seen as a routine relationship between a reporter and a source.

The Internal Security Act also went as far as creating a Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate someone merely suspected of engaging in subversive activities. It created an emergency detention statute giving the president authority to arrest “each person as to whom there is a reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage.” (The Board was defunded in 1974.)

President Harry Truman vetoed the McCarran Act. Without addressing the changes to the Espionage Act, Truman said McCarran threatened “the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798;” made a “mockery of the Bill of Rights” and was a “long step toward totalitarianism.”

But a McCarthyist Congress overrode Truman’s veto. Had it not, it may have been harder to indict Assange.

The Act’s Territorial Reach — The Amendment That Imperils Assange

If the original 1917 Espionage Act were still in force, the U.S. government could not have charged Assange under it because the 1917 language restricted the territory where it could be applied:

“The provisions of this title shall extend to all Territories, possessions, and places subject to the jurisdiction of the United States whether or not contiguous thereto, and offenses under this title when committed upon the high seas or elsewhere within the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction of the United States …”

 

WikiLeaks publishing operations have never occurred in any of these places. But in 1961 Virginia Congressman Richard Poff, after several tries, was able to get the Senate t0 repeal Section 791 that restricted the Act to “within the jurisdiction of the United States, on the high seas, and within the United States.”

Richard Poff. (Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives)

Poff was motivated by the case of Irvin Chambers Scarbeck, a State Department official who was convicted of passing classified information to the Polish government during the first Cold War.

Polish security agents had burst into a bedroom to photograph Scarbeck in bed with a woman who was not his wife. Showing him the photos, the Polish agents blackmailed Scarbeck:  turn over classified documents from the U.S. embassy or the photos would be published and his life ruined. Adultery was seen differently in that era.

Scarbeck then removed the documents from the embassy, which is U.S. territory covered by the Espionage Act, and turned them over to the agents on Polish territory, which at the time was not.

Scarbeck was found out and fired, but could not be prosecuted because of the territorial limitations of the Act. That set Poff off on a one-man campaign to extend the reach of the Espionage Act to the entire globe.

The Espionage Act thus became global, ensnaring anyone anywhere in the world into the web of U.S. jurisdiction.

“Justice Hugo Black: ‘The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.’” 

Pentagon Papers Case

The 1971 decision of the Supreme Court against the Nixon administration’s “prior restraint” injunction of The New York Times, allowing the press to continue publishing the Pentagon Papers, is well known.

Less known is that the Nixon Justice Department empaneled a grand jury in Boston with the intention of indicting reporters from the Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe under the Espionage Act for publishing articles based on the classified Papers.

The Senator Mike Gravel edition. (Beacon Press)

It was the second attempt, after FDR, by an administration to charge reporters with espionage for possessing and publishing state secrets.

Nixon was able to set up the grand jury because the Supreme Court made clear in the Times case that though the government could not stop a newspaper from publishing classified matter in advance, it could pursue prosecutions after publication for violating the Espionage Act.

This is highly relevant to the Assange case as his prosecutor, James Lewis QC, brought it up during the September extradition hearing in London. At first Lewis stressed to the court the U.S. view that Assange was not a journalist. After a succession of defense experts dismantled that view, Lewis essentially conceded that Assange was a journalist, but that the Espionage Act gave the government the authority to prosecute journalists after publishing defense information.

Justice Byron White in the Papers case said newspapers were “not immune from criminal action” for publishing classified information.  “Failure by the Gov. to justify prior restraints does not measure its constitutional entitlement to a conviction for criminal publication. That the Gov. mistakenly chose to proceed by injunction does not mean that it could not successfully proceed in another way.”

The question of prior restraint versus no restraint after publication was debated at the founding of the United States.  James Madison believed it a “mockery to say that no law should be passed preventing publications from being made, but that laws might be passed for punishing them in case they should be made.”  Had Madison’s view prevailed, the Espionage Act could not have been used against a journalist like Assange post publication.

But instead the Espionage Act adopted the logic of Adam’s pernicious 1798 Sedition Act, which was based on a 1769 commentary by William Blackstone, an English jurist, judge and Tory politician, who wrote, “liberty of the press … consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published.”

In the Papers’ case, the Boston grand jury was disbanded only after prosecutorial misconduct in the trial of the Times’ source, Daniel Ellsberg, led to his case being dismissed.  Ellsberg was the first newspaper source to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. When the Times’ reporters under grand jury scrutiny, Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, learned that Ellsberg’s phone had been tapped, they asked the government whether they had been tapped as well in their conversations with their source.  Shortly after that, their case was dropped, Ellsberg told me in an interview.

The Nixon Justice Department was in a position to bring Espionage Act charges against then U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska.  After being turned down by several senators, including Sen. George McGovern who was planning a run for president, Ellsberg found Gravel willing to read the Papers out loud into the congressional record during a Senate subcommittee meeting.

On June 29, 1971, the night before the Supreme Court decision, Gravel legally revealed the classified Pentagon Papers on Capitol Hill because of the U.S. Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause, which says that, “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” members of Congress “shall not be questioned in any other Place.”  That means any senator or representative can in effect declassify any material without penalty if done during a legislative act.

But when Gravel arranged with Beacon Press in Boston to publish the Papers as a five-volume book, he lost this legal protection.  Gravel told me for the book we co-authored, A Political Odyssey, that he did this because after the Supreme Court judgement the newspapers nonetheless stopped writing stories based on the Papers. Gravel feared Nixon would indict him. While the government could not stop Beacon from publishing, it could prosecute afterward.  Nixon left Gravel alone, however, and instead went after the publisher, the way Trump went after Assange.

Gobin Stair, executive director of Beacon Press, told a conference in Boston in October 2002 that he decided to publish the Papers after Nixon picked up the phone to threaten him: “I recognized his voice, and he said, ‘Gobin, we have been investigating you around Boston. I hear you are going to do that set of papers by that guy Gravel.’ It was obvious he was going to ask me not to publish it. The result was that as the guy in charge at Beacon, I was in real trouble. To be told by Nixon not to [publish this book], convinced me that it was a book to do.”

On Sept. 17, 1971, two Pentagon goons replete with fedoras, trench coats, and cigarettes showed up at Beacon’s offices on the hill overlooking Boston Common. They tried to intimidate Stair. They demanded the Papers for military analysts to study. They checked the photocopy machine to see if Ellsberg had used it. But the tough-guy act failed. Stair stalled by agreeing to a follow-up meeting. Then the Pentagon suddenly dropped the matter.

Twelve days before Beacon Press’ publication date the Pentagon published its own paperback edition of the Pentagon Papers. So much for harming national security. It was Nixonian vindictiveness to take the wind out of Beacon’s sails and sales. What he considered stolen property he put on sale at $50 for a 12-volume set.

Secrecy and the Press’ Role

Supreme Court justices in the Pentagon Papers case underscored the role the press plays to reign in authoritarian leaders who over-classify information to protect their interests in the name of “national security.” In retrospect, the justices’ opinions amount to a defense from the highest levels of U.S. government of the work of Assange and WikiLeaks.

Justice Hugo Black. (Library of Congress)

Justice Hugo Black challenged the “national security” mantra as a subterfuge to justify secrecy and repression.  In his Pentagon Papers opinion, he wrote: “The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.”

He went on:

“In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.

The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the Government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the founders hoped and trusted they would do.” [Emphasis added.]

Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his Pentagon Papers opinion that:

“In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry— in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free most vitally serves the basic purpose of the First Amendment. For without an informed and free press there cannot be an enlightened people.”

Justice William Douglas went even further, questioning whether the Espionage Act related to the press at all, and whether journalists and publishers can be prosecuted after publication, as Assange has been.  Douglas wrote:

Prior Restraint in Britain

The Pentagon Papers case revealed one difference between U.S. and British law in regard to prior restraint. While the Supreme Court would not allow publication of the Papers to be enjoined, the absence of a First Amendment in Britain has freed the government to halt publication on occasion. A most celebrated case was that of the book Spycatcher, a memoir by Peter Wright, a former assistant director of MI5. The British government got an injunction in 1985 to ban its release.

The Margaret Thatcher government then went to court in Australia to ban the book there, but lost the case, defended by future Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The book was released in Australia and in the U.S. on July 31, 1987.  English newspapers tried to publish excerpts but were served gag orders and later were charged with  contempt of court.  The ban on English papers was then partially lifted by three High Court judges a week before U.S. and Australian publication, but three weeks later senior Law Lords reinstated the ban on appeal. Lord Ackner for the 3-2 majority said if the ban were not reimposed, the Attorney General would be “prematurely and permanently” denied court protection. He said:

“It would be established, without trial and for all time, that by the simple expedient of going abroad, and arranging publication in the press in a country such as the United States — where there is no remedy by way of injunction — the courts in this country would become incapable of exercising their well-established jurisdiction. Your Lordships would have established a charter for traitors to publish on the most massive scale in England whatever they had managed to publish abroad. …

If the publication of this book in America is to have, for all practical purposes, the effect of nullifying the jurisdiction of the English courts to enforce compliance with the duty of confidence, . . . then, . . . the English law would have surrendered to the American Constitution. There the courts, by virtue of the First Amendment, are, I understand, powerless to control the press. Fortunately, the press in this country is, as yet, not above the law.”

Labour MP Tony Benn defied the ban by reading aloud from the book in Hyde Park’s Speakers Corner. British newspapers reacted with disdain. The Daily Mail pictured the three Law Lords upside down on its front cover with the headline: “YOU FOOLS.” The Economist ran a blank page with the explanation that in only one country were excerpts banned. “For our 420,000 readers there, this page is blank — and the law is an ass.”

In October 1988 the Law Lords reversed themselves, allowing publication because, as the BBC reported, “any damage to national security has already been done by its publication abroad.”

The British government’s actions were not based on statutory authorization for prior restraint but rather on common law. Because there is no formal censorship clause in the Official Secrets Act of a kind that President Wilson had sought, instances of British prior restraint cannot be laid on the Act, but rather on no First Amendment-type legislation and Britain’s lack of adherence to Article 10 of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees free speech.

The 1989 Official Secrets Act

The General Belgrano in 1896. (Archivio di Stato di Livorno)

The most significant change in the Official Secrets Act of 1989 is that it largely brought it into line with the McCarran-amended Espionage Act: intent was removed, thereby eliminating the public interest defense.  A 1988 government White Paper considering changes to the OSA, stated:

“Suggestions have been made that the law should provide a general defence that disclosure was in the public interest. The object would be to enable the courts to consider the benefit of the unauthorised disclosure of particular information, and the motives of the person disclosing it, as well as the harm which it was likely to cause. It is suggested, in particular, that such a defence is necessary in order to enable suggestions of misconduct or malpractice to be properly investigated or brought to public attention.

The Government recognises that some people who make unauthorised disclosures do so for what they themselves see as altruistic reasons and without desire for personal gain. But that is equally true of some people who commit other criminal offences. The general principle which the law follows is that the criminality of what people do ought not to depend on their ultimate motives – though these may be a factor to be taken into account in sentencing – but on the nature and degree of the harm which their acts may cause. …

It cannot be acceptable that a person can lawfully disclose information which he knows may, for example, lead to loss of life simply because he conceives that he has a general reason of a public character for doing so. So far as the criminal law relating to the protection of official information is concerned, therefore, the Government is of the mind that there should be no general public interest defence and that any argument as to the effect of disclosure on the public interest should take place within the context of the proposed damage tests where applicable.”

In other words, strict liability would be imposed: either one broke the law, or one didn’t, no matter the reason.

The changes were spurred by the fallout from a case involving the 1982 British sinking of the Argentine warship General Belgrano during the Falklands/Malvinas war, which killed 360 people.  Clive Ponting, a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence at the time, leaked a document to a Labour MP exposing the government lie that it had acted in self-defense.

In fact the document showed the Belgrano was sailing out of a British-declared, 200-mile exclusion zone around the Falklands. Ponting was put on trial in 1985 for violating the Official Secrets Act and mounted a public interest defense.

Though the judge indicated to the jury that it should find Ponting guilty, infamously saying “The ‘public interest’ is what the government of the day says it is,”  the jury acquitted Ponting on the grounds that what he had done was indeed in the public interest.

It was a great embarrassment for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had staked her re-election on the war. So her government set about amending the Act to remove the public interest defense altogether. It also explicitly made it a crime for anyone, including a journalist, to commit the offenses of possession and disseminating classified information.

The implications for Assange of these changes are stark.  In her judgement in Assange’s extradition hearing, Baraitser upheld the Espionage Act charges against him because she said they met the criteria of his alleged activities being a crime in both the U.S. and Britain — a requirement in an extradition case. Before the 1989 removal of the public interest defense, which does not exist in the Espionage Act, that would have less likely been the case.

Being unable to explain that the intent of one’s actions was in the public interest is fatal to a case like Assange’s. Ellsberg has many times told the story that when he was on the witness stand in his Espionage Act case the judge prevented him from explaining why he had leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The 1989 Act repealed Section 2 of the 1911 act, which criminalized the mere character of a defendant and took the burden of proof from the prosecution. It also added a Section 5 that explicitly makes members of the public, which would include journalists, liable to prosecution.

According to a House of Commons study “if a member of the public (or any person who is not a Crown Servant or government contractor) has in their possession official information in any of the six categories, and this information has:

• been disclosed to them by a Crown Servant without lawful authority; or

• was entrusted to them by a Crown Servant in confidence, then it is an offence to disclose this information without lawful authority.”

Among the six categories of unauthorized disclosure include “• Security and intelligence • Defence • International Relations • Information which might lead to the commission of crime and • Foreign confidences.”  This clearly jeopardizes any reporter who is given “official information” by a whistleblowing source.

There may be worse to come. Proposed changes to the 1989 Act by the Boris Johnson government, which would give intelligence agencies “the tools they need to disrupt hostile state activity,” have alarmed journalists even further. A National Union of Journalists spokesman, referring to the proposals by the Law Commission in 2017 to make gathering secret information a crime, told The Guardian: “The union expressed opposition at the time because the proposals included making it easier to prosecute journalists and increased the likelihood of conviction.”

Obama’s ‘NYT Problem’

After the Pentagon Papers case, the Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan administrations threatened, but did not follow through, with Espionage Act indictments against the press.  The Ford administration in 1975 discussed indicting journalist Seymour Hersh after he reported in The New York Times that U.S. submarines were spying on Soviet communications. In 1981 the Reagan Justice Department threatened but backed down on indicting author James Bamford for his groundbreaking book on the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace.

A reason the Espionage Act was not used against journalists until Assange, even though it could have been, is because of the Act’s inherent contradiction with the First Amendment. The Barack Obama administration aggressively used the Act against press sources, indicting more than any administration before.

When WikiLeaks published the Iraq and Afghanistan war diaries and the State Department cables in 2010, an incensed Obama Justice Department empaneled a grand jury with the intention of indicting Assange under the Espionage Act.

Then Vice President Joe Biden said if Assange conspired to get the classified material then his case was closer to the actions of a “high-tech terrorist” than to the Pentagon Papers.

Though prosecutors tried to construct a case that Assange was complicit with his source Chelsea Manning in illegally obtaining defense material, they ultimately concluded that Assange was working as a journalist and his prosecution was complicated by the First Amendment.

As The Washington Post put it in 2013 when it explained the Obama DOJ’s decision not to prosecute Assange:

“Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a ‘New York Times problem.’ If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.”

In fact, the documents that Assange has been indicted for releasing on Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo were the exact ones reported on by The New York Times, The Guardian and WikiLeaks’ other media partners, but only Assange has been prosecuted.

The Political and Class Nature of These Acts

While the overt intentions of legislators in Britain and the U.S. in enacting these laws may have been to combat foreign espionage, the broadness and complexity of the language left open its use, intentionally or not, against the press and the interests of the public. Instead, these Acts protect the interests of a class of people who have accrued vast power and are responding to the crisis of their rule with increasing aggression against anyone who threatens it.

Two U.S. presidents came close to prosecuting journalists and a third has indicted Assange for publishing defense information. Wilson intended the Espionage Act to censor the press. Though Congress defeated that effort it left an Act that has been used after publication to punish the press on the grounds of “national security” defined by the government of the day.

The British legal scholar David Glyndwr Tudor Williams warned back in 1965:

“It is surely desirable that the operation of the Official Secrets Acts should be severely confined. They should not be wielded as an all-purpose weapon, whatever the literal wording of their provisions. They should not be invoked unnecessarily – where other appropriate laws are available – or for trivial considerations. Their only admissible purpose in a democracy should be to restrain and punish espionage, gross breaches of trust and gross carelessness in respect of State secrets. They should not be used to intimidate the Press and to encourage a timidity in the handling of official information which in the end deprives an administration of the scrutiny and criticism necessary for efficiency and responsibility. If they are used too readily to stifle exposures of governmental inefficiency and corruption they could become as oppressive as the law of sedition once was.”

But indeed that is how they have now been used. And for a political purpose: to protect the interest of people in power.

In a 1990 academic paper, Australian scholar Barbara Hocking quoted journalist Tony Bunyan in his 1977 book The Political Police in Britain:

“In an analysis of the political uses of the criminal law in the United Kingdom, Bunyan turns this theoretical myth around: the fundamental purpose of the criminal law is the maintenance of a political order acceptable to the British ruling class; this was the primary purpose of the secrets legislation: ‘The British state has available to it the whole of criminal law for use against political opposition: the laws used against political activists embrace those normally used against the criminal and those for maintaining public order.’”

A Shattered Notion

Both British and U.S. espionage legislation throughout their histories have been as much political as legal instruments, allowing punishment not only for foreign spies, but for government officials who leak embarrassing information and for journalists who publish it.

Until now a difference between the Espionage and Official Secrets Acts has been the First Amendment. Without one, Britain has been more easily able to prosecute journalists. That led to the notion that the U.S. is better off because it does not have an “Official Secrets Act.” But the indictment of the journalist Assange, despite the First Amendment, has shattered that notion, giving the U.S. in effect an Official Secrets Act of its own.

At the time of the Pentagon Papers case, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson called for a “severe official secrets act” to go after journalists, not acknowledging that the U.S. already had one in the Espionage Act, which has now been proven with the indictment of Assange.

The political and class nature of these British and U.S. laws that go beyond classic foreign espionage to endanger journalists has  never been clearer than in the Assange case, a man clearly seen as a class enemy for exposing rulers’ crimes and corruption.

Assange in the Dock

 Joseph Farrell, (second from left), Kristinn Hrafnsson, Craig Murray and Stella Moris during break outside Old Bailey, Sept. 24, 2020. (Mohamed Elmaazi)

After three previous presidents came close to prosecuting journalists for possessing and publishing defense information — FDR in 1942, Nixon in 1971 and Obama in 2011 — the Trump administration unveiled an Espionage Act indictment shortly after Assange’s arrest in April 2019. Trump’s secretary of state tried to justify it by saying the U.S. had universal jurisdiction to prosecute but the First Amendment wouldn’t apply to Assange.

On the first day of Assange’s extradition hearing, prosecutor James Lewis QC directly addressed the press box. He said the prosecution was not about the press, because Assange was not a journalist. This was a tacit acknowledgement that the Espionage Act charges are in conflict with the First Amendment.

After numerous defense witnesses testified that Assange had engaged in journalistic activity (as the Espionage Act indictment against him itself describes), the U.S. changed its approach.  The prosecution essentially admitted that Assange was indeed acting as a journalist, but that 793 (e) of the Espionage Act made no exceptions for journalists:  Assange had unauthorized possession of defense information and had disseminated it to unauthorized persons.  (There is a bill in Congress that would amend the Espionage Act to make such an exception for the press.)

Assange’s judge, Vanessa Baraitser, ultimately denied the U.S. extradition request on Jan. 4, on health grounds. But her 134-page judgement agreed with the U.S. on every other point that criminalizes journalism.

If the U.S. wins the appeal it filed on Feb. 13 in the London High Court it can try Assange in the U.S. on the Espionage Act charges that went unchallenged by Baraitser.

Baraitser’s decision underscored the close alignment of the Espionage and Official Secrets Acts. Since in an extradition case an act must be a crime in both countries, what Assange is accused of must be prohibited under both Acts. In her judgement, Baraitser pointed out how Assange would be just as liable under the Official Secrets Act:

“Section 5 of the OSA 1989 imposes criminal liability on a third party who comes into possession of information which has been disclosed to them by a Crown servant without lawful authority and who further discloses it in the circumstances prescribed by section 5. It applies to any individual, including a journalist, who is not a Crown servant, a contractor or a notified person, and it applies when protected information is published which caused damage to the work of the security and intelligence services.”

The damage Assange has done to these services is to their reputations, which is why they have come down so hard on him.  The government has been unable to prove harm to any U.S. informants or service members as a result of any WikiLeaks publication. This became clear during Assange’s extradition hearing.

Assange’s treatment is not unusual, seen in the context of the long U.S. history of repression of a free press despite the First Amendment. Part of that repression has been the 1917 Espionage Act and its amendments, which helped set the stage for the Trump administration to trigger the first indictment of a journalist on an espionage charge.

Should Assange be extradited and face those charges in U.S. federal court it would fulfill the lust of reactionaries from the founding of the country to punish journalists for uncovering their secret crimes and corruption.

consortiumnews.com

By TJ COLES

The World Food Program recently reported that 7 million Ethiopians across three northern states—Afar, Amhara, and Tigray—risk starvation: more than 5 million of whom are in Tigray; a region that borders Eritrea and consists of seven million Ethiopians. The governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea are united against the potentially secessionist Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. As usual in war, ordinary civilians pay the price.

But over the years, the Pentagon has armed and trained the Ethiopian military. While feigning concern for human rights, Washington appears to be taking a “wait-and-see” approach, especially as the current Ethiopian government has fallen out of favor with the US. History shows that successive US governments have had an ambivalent relationship with Ethiopia, but over the last three decades have modernized the nation’s military and expanded their footprint under the guise of peacekeeper training programs and the blurring of civil-military infrastructure and aid projects.

Ethiopia: a “centerpiece of US policy” after WWII

Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous country and seventh largest economy in terms of GDP, with the top one percent owning as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent. The average annual income of its over 110 million people is $850, with 26 million Ethiopians mired in absolute poverty. 

Its people include ethnic Oromo (around 35 percent of the population), Amhara (28 percent), Tigray (7 percent), Sidama (4 percent), and Welayta (3 percent), with dozens of other groups including Somali making up the remaining percentages.

The CIA described post-WWII Ethiopia as “the centerpiece of US policy in the Horn of Africa.” It borders Britain’s former colonies Kenya, Sudan and oil-rich South Sudan, and Somalia, which has a coastline on the strategic chokepoint, the Gulf of Aden. It also borders and used to control the former Italian and British colony, Eritrea, which has a coastline on another chokepoint, the Red Sea, and borders the former French colony, Djibouti, which sits on both the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Djibouti hosts a US military base, as well as China’s sole foreign military base.

From the outset of the post-WWII, US-led world order, the US foreign policy establishment sought to balance its relationships with Ethiopia, then ruled by Emperor Haile Selassie, and Eritrea, which Selassie annexed. At the United Nations, Washington suggested that Ethiopia be granted access to Eritrea’s ports but that occupied Eritrea gradually become a “federated” region of Ethiopia.

The main US military interest in Eritrea at the time was the Kagnew Station in the capital, Asmara. Kagnew afforded the Pentagon communications and interception capabilities across the continent and parts of the oil-rich Middle East, including spying on Soviet moves. Selassie sent over a thousand troops to back the Americans during the Korean War (1950-53) and later in Congo.

In 1953, Ethiopia signed a Mutual Defense Agreement with the US, receiving millions of dollars-worth of arms and training for 23,000 troops under a Military Assistance Advisory Group designed, in large part, to keep the country out of the Soviet sphere.

Because Ethiopia was not considered to be vitally important to the US, quantities of military aid were considerably smaller than Selassie would have preferred. Selassie feared a lack of American support in the event of an Eritrean or Somali invasion. Nevertheless, US Lt. Col. W.H. Crosson worked with Selassie loyalists to crush an internal coup against the Emperor in December 1960. Fearing that Selassie’s regime could fall, planners suggested that the US “seek to establish effective relations with the emerging group of middle-level, educated, reform-minded government and military officials who are the presumptive heirs to power.”

As we shall see, the current Washington policy towards potential allies also appears to be one of stepping back and waiting to see who wins.

The US manages “an embarrassing but reliable client”

Foreign “aid” may have the unintended consequence of helping poor people, but the underlying objective is propaganda. “Aid” has become a psychological weapon designed to present a positive image of what amounts to an occupation force. The second objective is to lay the infrastructural and cultural groundwork for private companies to take over public utilities and services.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) began operations in Ethiopia in 1962. A report two years’ later explained that “US objectives in Ethiopia” include maintaining access to Kagnew, nudging Selassie to adopt “reforms” so that the impoverished do no overthrow him, all the while preventing “civil disorder,” denying the Soviets access to Ethiopia, and ensuring the “[a]doption by the Ethiopia Government of positions favorable to U.S. interests.”

“Aid” in the form of water, sanitation, education, and medical assistance designed to foster “a pro-Western orientation” continued to flow.

In 1974, the young Marxist Colonel, Mengistu Haile Mariam, an ethnic Oromo, led the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police and Territorial Army (Derg) and overthrew Selassie. The events triggered the so-called Ethiopian Civil War, which actually involved rival Eritrean independence groups who battled until the ephemeral peace of 1991. Two academics from the period note: “the U.S. supports the Ethiopian military government by sending munitions to prolong the war. It is certain that Eritreans will neither forget nor forgive.”

A US Army publication notes that Derg soldiers, “a number of whom were trained by the U.S. military either in Ethiopia or in the US, … touched off a bloody purge in which thousands of Ethiopians were killed or tortured.” The “purge” included attacks on fellow Marxists of a different faction who were ethnic Tigray, leading them to form the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

In the words of the Library of Congress’ Federal Research Division, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger expressed “uneasiness with Ethiopia’s violations of human rights and growing leftist tendencies.” Their strategy consisted of waiting and seeing how Mengistu’s regime played out, whether it would spout socialism while bending to Washington’s will or whether it would move closer to the USSR.

Until the Revolution of 1977, the CIA regarded Mengistu as “a difficult, occasionally embarrassing, but relatively reliable client of the US.” After the Revolution, Mengistu turned to China, Cuba, and the Soviets. The CIA saw Ethiopia as a lost cause. “The elimination of Mengistu … would probably be followed by a military government with generally similar objectives.”

Between 1981 and ‘82, US “aid” to Ethiopia was terminated.

US schools peacekeepers in Ethiopia with an “absence of peace-enforcement training”

In 1991, an umbrella of ethnic political groups calling itself the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, led by the ethnic Tigrayan, Meles Zenawi, overthrew Mengistu. In 1993, US “aid” resumed on the condition of massive privatization to advance business interests like the pesticide industry.

Following the Rwanda genocide and the new doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” recently tested in Somalia through the US military’s “Operation Restore Hope,” American military training resumed, but this time under the PR-friendly banner of “peacekeeping.” It turned out that peacekeeping meant subsidizing weapons contractors.

In 1996, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher launched ACRI: the African Crisis Response Initiative, which “offers training and equipment to African nations who seek to enhance their peacekeeping capabilities.” In 1998, 70 US trainers began instructing Ethiopian battalions and brigades. The Bill Clinton White House noted at the time: “Non-governmental and private organizations are invited to participate in the training.”

The weapons company Northrop Grumman boasted that that it “has supported the African Crisis Response Initiative/African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program since its inception in 1998 and designed the initial training and materials as well as conducted computer assisted peacekeeping exercises.” Marine Captain Emmanuel T. Carper said of the PR: “In order to make ACRI more palatable and assuage fears of U.S military occupation of Africa, the decision was made to put ACRI under the management of the State Department,” instead of the Pentagon.

The program was delayed because in 1998, Eritrea fought what became a two-year border war with Ethiopia. In the end, the US was forced to cancel its ACRI program because “peacekeeper” training would look like what it actually was: warfighter training.

However, the US and Ethiopia initiated an annual exercise called Natural Fire the same year that ACRI fell apart. Now, under the auspices of “Justified Accord,” various African nations host annual joint exercises that include the militaries of non-African states, such as the UK and the Netherlands. In addition to training for “peacekeeping,” such as contributing to the African Union’s Somalia Mission, academic classes also refine military doctrine.

US Air Force Colonel, Russell J. Handy, cites ACRI’s “absence of peace-enforcement training,” which suggests that “peacekeeping” was a PR façade.

Under George W. Bush (2001-09), ACRI became ACOTA: Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance. In 2004, Marine Captain Carper, was assigned to ACOTA.

“I was the only active duty Marine on a team of 11 people. Nine were contractors from Northrop Grumman Technical Services,” Carper reflected.

Peacekeeping, he said, turned out to be training for “crowd control” at a base on the Bilate River in Ethiopia’s central-southwest region. Carper concluded: “ACOTA was not an effective allocation of resources for a long term capacity building program, because it does not combat the root causes of insecurity in Africa which are poverty, illiteracy, and disease.”

Political warfare masked as humanitarian aid

Donovan C. Chau is an Associate Professor of Political Science at California University, and former Subject Matter Expert at the Army Medical Research and Development Command. In 2007, he wrote for the US Army War College’s Institute for Strategic Studies.

Chau explained that US military personnel had been digging water-wells and rescuing cheetah cubs from cruelty. At the same time, China was digging boreholes in Nigeria. Chau defines both powers’ acts as “political warfare”: “Both the United States and the [People’s Republic of China (PRC)] were using nonviolent means in a coordinated (or semi-coordinated) manner to directly affect the targeted population. They were using political warfare to achieve their national objectives.”

Under the “political warfare” concept, troops on the ground are repackaged as providers of humanitarian relief in zones prone to drought, famine, viruses, and underinvestment. This occupation-by-assistance doctrine is a form of psychological warfare that cements bonds between local populations and foreign (in this case US) soldiers, who blend civilian infrastructure and logistics programs with quasi-occupation. Other units call it WHAM: Winning Hearts and Minds.

In addition to WHAM/political warfare, the US Army Africa’s Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) launched a “train the trainer” program.

The US Army said that with 200,000 personnel, the Ethiopian National Defense Forces are, “in the eyes of U.S. policymakers, a force for stability,” meaning a potential proxy for US wars in Africa. In Guam, America’s Micronesian island territory, the 1^st Infantry Division 1^st Battalion, 16^th Infantry Regiment, and the Guam National Guard trained Ethiopian soldiers “in basic infantry tactics, non-commissioned officer skills and officer logistics.” The US Army specifically cited “Muslim militants in Somalia, and the ongoing threat of war with its breakaway rival, Eritrea,” as justifications for military involvement in Ethiopia.

In June 2009, following requests from the Ethiopian government, the CJTF-HOA authorized non-commissioned officers (NCOs) to “mentor” their Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) counterparts. NCOs from the 2^nd Battalion’s 18^th Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Still, Oklahoma, participated in a “train the trainer” program, teaching students about the roles of sergeant majors; a new rank in the ENDF. AFRICOM sergeants also assisted, teaching “operations, communication and logistics.”

In August, the program was expanded to include the Ethiopian Defense Command and Staff College. Initiated by US Army Central, four Army Reserve lieutenant colonels and a US Air Force lt. col. trained their would-be counterparts in “strategy, leadership, joint operations, military communication, research methods and English.” In October 2009, AFRICOM assumed command of “train the trainer.”

AFRICOM takes charge

The Stuttgart, Germany-based AFRICOM assists the African Union’s Peace Support Operations Division through its C4 doctrine: Command, Control, Communications and Computers. These communications are coordinated through Addis Ababa’s Peace Support Operations Center.

The transition to a whole-of-government approach included exercises broadcasting information about viral outbreaks. In such scenarios, the militarization of everything — from public health messaging to literal bridge building to famine relief — is normalized. In 2010, 36 states met in Ghana for Africa Endeavor, an AFRICOM-led military coordination exercise with the African Union’s Standby Force. Endeavor used Ethiopia as a base from which to facilitate the Union’s first successful satellite link-up.

As the modernization of the military continued into 2011, international “aid” programs, including those of the World Bank and UK Department for International Development, supported Ethiopia’s so-called Protection of Basic Services (PBS) project: a scheme to push 1.5 million farmers and pastoralists off their lands into villages, supposedly for their own health. In Gambella in the west, PBS was “accompanied by violence, including beatings and arbitrary arrests, and insufficient consultation and compensation,” in the words of Human Rights Watch.

In Negele, a town in southeastern Ethiopia, the US Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (“Seabees”) led a bridge building project to connect two villages. Under this propaganda-in-action model, residents “welcom[ed] the Civil Affairs team and the Navy Seabee team to their community and expressed that the Negele community is now their home.” Civil Affairs Team chief, Major Antonio Gonzalez, noted that in addition to the bridge, US-led teams have distributed mosquito nets and founded a Veterinary Civic Action Program.

In August 2012, Specialist Anthony Serna of the 345^th Tactical Psychological Operations Company (Airborne), said: “One of the biggest things I want to accomplish … is to get the local media involved; where traditionally I would put out a mission directly. (I want to) bring the reports to the local [Medical Civic Action and Veterinary Civic Action Programs] so they can tell their people in their own words with their own feelings.”

In other words: Set the scene and let the “natives” tell the Pentagon’s story so it doesn’t seem like propaganda.

In an example of merged military roles, Serna met with Civil Affairs Team Specialist Alissa Anderson and Seabee Petty Officer Kasey Dotson. Anderson said: “I feel that now I’m getting the full spectrum of what the military can do.”

The cynicism of “political warfare” knows no bounds. In September 2012, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa soldiers were sent to deliver “care packages to a local orphanage” in Dire Dawa in the northeast.  US Army Captain and 3-124^th Cavalry Chaplain, Brett Anderson, said of US forces and the orphanage: “we spend a lot of time there.” Lt. Jose Muñoz revealed that the Seabees had “installed showerheads and electrics for a water pump.”

A schoolboy saw the US forces and was asked what he wanted to be when he matured. “Construction,” he said.

The US watches the blood flow in the Tigray war

The 28-year rule of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the ethnic umbrella party, ended in 2019. The Tigray PM, Meles Zenawi, died in 2012. With US military support, his successor, PM Hailemariam Desalegn, an ethnic Wolayta, oversaw what Human Rights Watch describes as “crackdowns on opposition political party members, journalists, and peaceful protesters, many of whom experienced harassment, arbitrary arrest, and politically motivated prosecutions.” Victims included Muslims who were abused under “anti-terror” legislation and ethnic Oromo, whose Liberation Front threatened the power of the central authorities.

The young ethnic Oromo, Abiy Ahmed Ali, took office in 2018, winning the Nobel Peace for negotiating a settlement with Eritrea, whose government had been supporting Oromo independence movements in a strategic move against the central Ethiopian regime. Abiy dissolved the EPRDF and formed a new coalition, the Prosperity Party. Refusing to join, the once-dominant Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) saw Prosperity as an effort to destroy the ethnic federal model and an attempt to centralize power.

In November 2020, Tigray forces were held responsible for attacking a military base. President Abiy, the Nobel Peace Laureate, sent troops to the Tigray region. Failing to mention the years of US training, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) acknowledges that “[a]buses against civilians in Tigray by government-aligned forces have reportedly fueled insurgent recruitment.” Politically, many ethnic Afar and Amhara were aligned with the neighboring Tigray. Abiy has de facto embargoed the three regions, leading the Tigray Defense Force to try to break the blockade. In May 2021, Abiy designated the TPLF a terrorist group.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently alleged “human rights violations, abuses, and atrocities” carried out against the Tigray people by the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea while emphasizing the importance of “the sovereignty, national unity, and territorial integrity of Ethiopia.”

Trying to balance all sides is a common theme. “[F]or the first time years,” says the CRS, the US “aid” program in Ethiopia does not include the International Military Education and Training program, implying that the atrocities against Afar, Amhara, and Tigray are being conducting in part thanks to previous US training.

But why would Washington care about the atrocities it spent decades indirectly helping to facilitate? The answer probably lies in Ethiopia’s shifting allegiances.

Noted above is long-standing concern over China’s alleged “political warfare” in Africa. In September 2019, Fort Leavenworth’s Lewis and Clark Center hosted a panel discussion on Russian and Chinese “soft power” in Africa. In an effort to heighten concern among US foreign policy elites about alleged Chinese influence, the panel’s “target audience” included Army schools, Regionally Aligned Forces, universities, think tanks, and interagency partners.

Ethiopia’s friction with the US has been compounded by President Abiy’s recent military contracts with Turkey, which in recent years has drifted from Washington’s orbit, as well as growing alliances with Iran, a long-term US target. Tensions manifested when Ethiopia recently snubbed Samantha Power, the hyper-interventionist head of the US Agency for International Development.

Although Ethiopia is located in a strategically important region, Washington has traditionally taken an ambivalent attitude because the country itself is less relevant to the US domination of Africa. Ignoring its own role in enabling the ongoing wave of human rights abuses, Washington appears to be sitting back and watching the war unfold.

If the historical precedent is anything to go by, the current approach is to forge an alliance with the victor after the bloodletting finally ends.

thegrayzone.com

The timing of historical events can give us context as to what the distant powers in the nation’s capital are thinking. Despite it being discussed for around a year or so, arguably the grandest statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee has been torn down in Richmond, Virginia. This coming right after the sloppy retreat from Kabul and Biden’s soon-to-be historic speech about “Nation-Building” seems to almost be like a message that the fronts have shifted and now all the Soft Power muskets will be redirected inwards.

We cannot forget that the flawed concept of Nation-Building did not just come from out of nowhere. Directly after WWII, from an American perspective, the remaking of German and Japanese culture went flawlessly. Japan despite its completely different history and long periods of isolation has become vastly more Western in cultural, economic and strategic ways, than any of the Visegrad nations. These islands that attacked America for dominance of the Pacific have voluntarily and gleefully chosen never-ending vassalhood as their path with almost zero resistance. The same thing could be said of Germany (initially West Germany), their first, second and especially third Reichs were in direct contrast to the Anglo-American values that are at the core of politics in today’s Berlin. Later on South Korea proved to be yet another nation building success.

Image: Japanese people protesting their nation having some level of military strength and autonomy. Cold War era Nation-Building seems to have worked.

This Marshall Plan, or Early Cold War era, proved to certain people in fancy suits that Nation-Building was a viable plan. It seemed to be a proven fact that a militarily occupied foreign land could be restructured into a mini America. And, it also seemed that this was in line with the subconscious will of the locals as the German and Japanese (temporarily barring East Germany) enemies quite readily jumped on the Democracy and Capitalism bandwagon. This is one of many reasons that all Liberals are sure that deep down, being freed from propaganda, their enemies would become Liberal too.

But then came the Russians. After losing the Cold War, Russia should have followed suit with Japan and Germany but it hasn’t. Even during the humiliating Yeltsin period, the Russians wanted to be a Democratic teammate with America rather than the waterboy for them. But then again the smaller Russian Federation of today was never occupied militarily. Perhaps that is why Soft Power Nation-Building in Russia failed. But it is no excuse for Iraq and Afghanistan, which despite billions in investment (aka bribes) and untold human and material efforts, remain un-Americanized.

Joe Biden is even more of a human suit placeholder than his former boss Obama, but “his” message “rejecting nation-building… but not our right to use force anywhere” as the Washington Post put it, sent a big signal from the elite that finally after decades this strategy has become considered non-viable. It would seem that at long last some have woken up to the fact that Germany and Japan were an exception and not the rule.

But beyond this, the core idea of this beaming beacon from the elite is that Soft Power aggression will continue, if not be ramped up to new levels to compensate. Biden said…

“And let me be clear: We will continue to support the Afghan people through diplomacy, international influence, and humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls, as we speak out for women and girls all around the globe. And I’ve been clear that human rights will be the center of our foreign policy.

But the way to do that is not through endless military deployments, but through diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying the rest of the world for support.“

Just like in the early Cold War where it seemed that Nation-Building “just worked”, now it probably seems equally obvious, that Soft Power tactics yield vastly more bang for the buck. The greatest thorn in the side of the Kremlin is the Ukrainian situation which cost a handful of billions to execute. The Maidan Revolution was cheap and effective unlike Afghanistan and the erosion of Russian culture via Hollywood/Social Media works out to be (from Washington’s stand point) even cheaper. This is just one example, but it is a key one. We cannot forget that a certain type of Western elite adores depopulation and mass migration to force a “melting pot” lifestyle onto its allies. This is also highly effective without the need of the military and trillions of dollars to directly break any potential enemy including “allies”.

Image: The era of respecting a defeated enemy for greater harmony is over.

And this is where we get back to the downing of Robert E. Lee’s massive monument. This sends a very strong message that the race-baiting hysteria that happened during Trump is only just beginning. Washington has just freed up a lot of resources to focus more sharply on “diplomatic” efforts to get everyone in line. We are probably in for more witch-hunts for racists and the continued attacks on everything that used to be considered American, from the Founding Fathers to the Bill of Rights. If Afghanistan is some sort of “beginning of the end” for the Global Hegemon then that means that there will surely be problems in the continental 48 and anyone rising up to challenge them will have to be dealt with.

The post-Trump quiet on the homefront is likely to be over, as it now may be time for a crumbling global empire to focus on Nation-Building at home where it is most viable, and for some, most desired.

A huge geo-political event has just occurred in Afghanistan: The implosion of a key western strategy for managing what Mackinder, in the 19^th century, called the Asian heartland. That it was accomplished, without fighting, and in few days, is almost unprecedented.

It has been a shock. Not just one of those ephemeral shocks that is soon forgotten, but a deeply traumatic one. Unlike the psychological impact of 9/11, the western world is treating the experience as mourning for the loss of ‘a loved one’. There have been ministerial tears, chest beating and an entry into the first three stages of grief simultaneously: Firstly, shock and denial (a state of disbelief and numbed feelings); then, pain and guilt (for those allies of ours huddled at Kabul airport), and finally, anger. The fourth stage is already in sight in the U.S.: Depression – as the polls show America already swinging towards deep pessimism about the pandemic, economic and prospects, as well as the course on which the American Republic is set.

Here we have a clear statement from the editors of The New York Times of who that ‘loved one’ was:

[The Afghan debacle is] “tragic because the American Dream of being the ‘indispensable nation’ in a world where the values of civil rights, women’s empowerment and religious tolerance rule – proved to be just a dream”.

Michael Rubin representing the hawkish AEI pronounced an eulogy over ‘the corpse’:

Biden, Blinken, and Jake Sullivan might craft statements about the mistakes of earlier NATO overreach, “and the need for Washington to focus on its core interests further West. And Pentagon officials and diplomats might contest any lessening of America’s commitment with indignation, yet the reality is NATO is a Dead Man Walking”.

An earlier piece, reflecting fury at Biden – and the sense of a strategic apocalypse having befallen Washington – is best caught in this agonised cry, again from Michael Rubin:

“By enabling China to advance its interests in Afghanistan, Biden also enables it to cut-off India and other American allies from Central Asia. Simply put … Biden’s incompetence now risks the entire post-World War II liberal order … God help the United States”.

Rubin says plainly what Afghanistan was always truly about: Disrupting Central Asia, to weaken Russia and China. Rubin at least spares us the hypocrisy about safeguarding girls’ education (others, who are close to the U.S. military industrial complex, continue the mantra of the need to re-deploy to Afghanistan and for continued war – and consequent weapons sales – in Afghanistan, in part ‘to protect’ women’s rights). Rubin concludes: “Rather than enhance America’s position against China however, Biden has hemorrhaged it”.

In Britain too, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Tom Tugenhadt, has lamented Biden’s strategic mistake, and the imperative to not give up – but to persevere: “This isn’t just about Afghanistan”, he writes, “It’s about us all. We are engaged in a challenge over the way the world works. We’re seeing autocratic powers like China and Russia challenge the rules and break the agreements we’ve made …”.

Tugenhadt believes that: “We can turn this around. We need to. This is a choice. So far we’re choosing to lose”. Many hawks in Washington acknowledge that this is, of course, impossible. That era is now gone – indeed, what the last days events in Afghanistan represent is a paradigm lost.

Many are deeply angry at Biden (albeit reflecting mixed agendas), and are bemused too, at how this could have occurred. The explanation however, may be even more disturbing. The writing had long been writ in blood on the wall for Afghanistan – there is a limit to how long a corrupt elite, severed from its roots in its own people, can be sustained by a waning alien culture.

The urgings from the British PM in a telecon with Biden however, that the latter must preserve “the gains” of the last twenty years in Afghanistan is literally to dream.

But the deeper story is the one of not just the transformation of the Taliban, but rather, of a seismic shift in geopolitics. Western intelligence agencies were so consumed with ‘counter-terrorism’ that they failed to see the new dynamics at play. Certainly, that might explain the Biden’s administration’s assessment of the long months it would take before the Ghani regime was at risk of falling.

The Taliban we see today is a far more complex, multi-ethnic, and sophisticated coalition, which is why they have been able, at such breath-taking speed, to topple the western-installed Afghanistan government. They talk Afghan political inclusion – and lookto Iran, Russia, China and Pakistan for mediation, and to facilitate their place in the ‘Great Game’. They aspire to play a regional role as a pluralist Sunni Islamist government. This is why they have given explicit assurances to these key external partners that their rise to power will bring neither a bloodbath of score-settling, nor civil war. They also promise that different religious sects will be respected, and girls and women can and will be educated.

Many years ago, before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1979, I was based in Peshawar, Pakistan, near Afghanistan. I was responsible for diplomatic reporting on the war and engagement with Afghan leaders during the Soviet era. I came to know the Taliban, which had recently been forged by Pakistani Intelligence, under Gen. Hamid Gul. They were then: intensely parochial, geographically and politically sectarian, xenophobic, tribal and unbendingly rigid.

As Pashtuns recidivists, and too, the biggest minority ethnic group in Afghanistan, they would kill other ethnicities wantonly: Shia Hazaras in particular, as apostates, were killed. They detested Ahmad Shah Masood, the ‘lion on Panshir’ and a hero of the resistance to the Soviets, because he was a Tajik. Some of their fundamentalism was fuelled by the radicalised strains of Islam, Deobandism and Wahhabism – exports of Saudi Arabia and Dar al-Islam Howzah in India. But mostly it was ancient tribal lore known as Pashtunwali.

The Taliban we see today, is a far more complex, multi-ethnic, and sophisticated coalition, which is why they have been able, at such breath-taking speed, to topple the western-installed Afghanistan government. They talk Afghan political inclusion – and lookto Iran, Russia, China and Pakistan for mediation, and to facilitate their place in the ‘Great Game’. They aspire to play a regional role as a pluralist Sunni Islamist government.

This is why they have given explicit assurances to these key external partners that their rise to power will bring neither a bloodbath of score-settling, nor civil war. They also promise that different religious sects will be respected, and girls and women can, and will, be educated.

The sweep of the Taliban to power however, has been years in the making, with key outside actors playing a crucial part in overseeing the metamorphosis. More concretely, as consensus with the Taliban on the future was reached, these external powers – China, Iran, Russia and Pakistan – have brought their Afghan allies (i.e. other Afghan minorities, who are almost as numerous) to the negotiating table alongside the Taliban. The latter’s links with China go back several years. Iran too, has been engaged with the Taliban and other Afghan components, in a similar vein, for at least two decades. Russia and Pakistan engaged jointly, in December 2016.

As a result of this concerted outreach, the Taliban leadership adjusted to the realpolitik of Central Asia: They see that the SCO represents the coming regional strategic paradigm, which can enable them to come out of their isolation as political ‘untouchables’ and pave a path for them to govern and rebuild Afghanistan, with economic assistance from SCO-member states.

Civil war remains a risk: We may expect that the CIA will try to stand-up an Afghan counter-insurgency to the new government – the path is not difficult to forecast: acts of violence and assassinations will (and are) being attributed to the “terrorist” Taliban. They will likely be false flag operations. And there is talk too, (mostly in the West) as to whether the Taliban can be ‘trusted’, or will stick to their undertakings.

It is not, however, just a simple question of ‘trust’. The difference today lies with the external geo-political architecture that has brought this event into being. These external regional partners will tell (and have told) the Taliban that, if they violate their assurances, they will regain their international pariah status: they will be classified as terrorists again, their borders will close, their economy will tank – and the country racked by civil war yet again. In short, the calculus is rooted in self-interest, rather than the presumption of trust.

China is more determined to shape the region than many analysts realise. It’ is often said that China is purely mercantile, interested only in advancing its economic agenda. Yet China’s Xinjiang province – its Islamist underbelly – shares a border with Afghanistan. This touches on state security, and China therefore will require stability in Afghanistan. It will not tolerate ethnic Turkic insurgents (spurred by the West) moving into or from Afghanistan into Turkmenistan or Xinjiang. The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic. We can expect China to be tough on this point.

Thus, not only have the U.S. and NATO been forced to exit from the ‘crossroads of Asia’ in desperate disarray, but these developments set the stage for a major evolution of Russia and China’s economic and trade regional corridor plans. They also transform the security of central Asia in respect to Chinese and Russian vulnerabilities there. (The U.S., so far, has been denied an alternative military base in Central Asia, relocating its forces instead to Jordan).

To be fair, Michael Rubin was ‘half right’ when he said that “Rather than enhance America’s position against China, Biden has hemorrhaged it”, but only half right. Because the missing ‘other half’ is that Washington was outplayed by Russia, China and Iran. Western Intelligence failed utterly to see the new domestic Afghan dynamics – the external actors underwriting the Taliban’s negotiations with the tribes.

And they still do not see all the external dominoes falling into place around an Afghan pivot, that changes the whole Central Asian calculus.

Additional pieces to this jigsaw picture of paradigm change have become visible in the wake of the Taliban’s sweep to power: One domino fell even before the ‘Kabul rout’: Iran’s new Administration has strategically re-positioned the country towards prioritising relations other Islamic states, but in partnership with Russia and China.

The Iranian National Security Council then declined to agree the draft Vienna agreement for a re-launch of JCPOA (the second domino to slip into place).

During the rout China and Russia (‘co-incidentally’) closed the airspace over northern Afghanistan on account of their joint military exercises taking place to the north of Afghanistan – and, for the first time the two powers exercised under joint military control. This represents the third (and very significant) domino, though one barely noticed by the West.

Finally, Pakistan strategically re-positioned too, by declining to host any U.S. military presence in its territory.

And then, yet one last domino: Iran was invited formally to join the SCO (which ultimately would imply Iran joining the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), thus giving the country a fresh economic and trade horizon – absent the lifting of the U.S. siege of its economy.

So not only have the U.S. and NATO been forced to exit from this new strategic locus, but these parallel developments set the stage for a major evolution of Russia and China’s economic and trade regional corridor plan.

China will play a key part in this. China and Russia have recognised the Taliban government, and China will likely build a pipeline along the ‘5-nation corridor’, bringing Iranian oil to China, via northern Afghanistan. It will likely then follow on with a north-south corridor, ultimately linking St Petersburg via Afghanistan to Iran’s Chabahar port lying across the strait from Oman.

For the west, this concatenation of falling dominoes has been near incomprehensible.

Today’s world is gripped between two possible futures: on the one hand, a multipolar alliance in defense of sovereign nation states has organized itself around a paradigm of long-term thinking, scientific optimism and win-win cooperation, while a unipolar paradigm of world government, depopulation and zero-sum thinking pushes a program of Great Resets, controlled pandemics and war.

Gaining insight into these two opposing paradigms is more important now than ever before, and one important place to start is the disturbing mind of Great Reset Architects who are today pushing society into a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” where it is believed that automation, and Artificial Intelligence will render most of humanity obsolete. As the World Economic Forum’s star philosopher Yuval Harari has repeatedly described this outlook: “Technology may disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of data colonialism and digital dictatorships”.

In the first article in this series, I reviewed the re-organization of the eugenics movement after WW2 as it followed Sir Julian Huxley’s demand that “the unthinkable be made, once again thinkable”.

In this second segment, we will leap back a little further in time to better understand what caused the rise of the perversion of science known as “eugenics” as a new scientific religion in the 19^th century, before continuing with part three (From Russell to Wiener: The Rise of Cybernetics and Transhumanism).

The Closed System Assumptions of Social Darwinism

There are a few fundamental things that should be understood about the science of eugenics, otherwise known as “the science of cleansing the human gene pool of undesirable pollution” which emerged at the end of the 19^th century.

This “science” grew out of the application of Darwin’s theories of natural selection and “survival of the fittest” to human society’s weeding out of the unfit and was premised on certain fundamental assumptions, not the least of which included: 1) that humanity is a system entirely shaped by material forces of environmental constraints and genetics, 2) that this system was fundamentally closed and hence entropic (subject to immutable laws of diminishing returns guided by an inevitable heat death), 3) that the creative force of genetic mutations guiding the appearance of new biological mechanisms was fundamentally random and 4) that this randomness could only be overcome by the rise of a new era of social engineers managing humanity on all levels-economic, psychological, cultural and even genetic.

Imagining the future age when the science of eugenics would replace world religions, the school’s founder Sir Francis Galton (cousin to Charles Darwin) mused in 1905: “It is easy to let the imagination run wild on the supposition of a whole-hearted acceptance of eugenics as a national religion”.

The Late 19^th Century: A Clash of Two Systems

The paradigm shifting breakthroughs made in science and statecraft by the end of the 19^th century resulted in a new petro-chemical/electronic age. New discoveries in atomic physics made by Beckerel, Roentgen, Curie, Rutherford, Planck and Einstein were additionally changing humanity’s idea of space, time, energy and matter. The practical application of these discoveries in the form of scientific and technological progress at the service of humanity was quickly destroying the foundations of Thomas Malthus’s supposed “laws of population” which assumed that human invention could never outpace nature’s limits always requiring a “scientific priesthood” to control population growth from above the control of nations.

Despite the fact that a genuine hope for a new age of discovery and progress was becoming realized, something darker was at play.

It was at this time that leading forces representing the British Empire were busy trying to resolve an existential challenge: National Sovereignty had proven itself much stronger than anticipated by the financier oligarchy centered in London and something new was emerging that could possibly undermine systems of Hobbesian “zero-sum” geopolitics forever.

The preservation of the union largely thanks to a strategic Russia-U.S. alliance resulted in a major defeat for British forces both in the City of London as well as Wall Street, the slaveocracy of the South and British Canada. A new global system was quickly emerging as Lincoln-admiring statesmen quickly adopted the “American System of Political Economy” to liberate their nations from the manipulation of the Empire. Where the American System was a fundamentally open system- premised as it was upon unbounded technological progress and the subservience of money to national sovereignty, the British system was fundamentally closed, premised on the worship and control of money by private financiers, debt slavery and speculation. Where one focused on production, the other only parasitically looted.

Henry C Carey (leading economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln) had made this dichotomy explicit as he foresaw the global nature of the oncoming U.S. Civil War elaborated in his 1852 Harmony of Interests:

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

In 1872, Carey was busy directing an international array of economists around the globe who were assisting dozens of governments in the implementation of this system when he wrote an anti-Malthusian economic treatise called Unity of Law. It was here that the great economist fully laid out his comprehensive theory of economic science as a non-zero sum system of cooperation and creative growth among great cultures:

“The great nations of the earth should each and all profit by development of the powers, mental, and physical, of each and every other; each and all growing in power for self-direction as each and every other more and more obtains power for controlling and directing the great natural forces; the harmony of all international interests being as perfect and complete as we know to be that of the individuals of which nations are composed.”

By 1890, Carey’s optimistic vision of a new epoch for civilization was beautifully expressed by Colorado’s first Governor, and Lincoln’s former bodyguard William Gilpin whose 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway featured in-depth studies of rail projects uniting all parts of the world together under a new culture of scientific and technological progress for all. Gilpin was explicit that this system would be funded by national banks generating long term productive credit, protectionism and universal education for the good of each and all.

Gilpin wrote of this future post-colonial world:

“The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events”

The Empire Strikes Back

Empires never disappear without a fight, and the British Empire was no exception. Before the British-orchestrated Civil War in the USA was finished, a new imperial grand strategy was reformulated in the ideological nerve center of Cambridge and the Royal Society.

Out of these networks came a new breed of imperial management under the form of Huxley’s X Club (c.1865) led by a young talented misanthrope named Thomas Huxley (aka: ‘Darwin’s Bull Dog”) who was tasked with formulating a new grand strategy for the preservation of the empire.

Knowing that the most important level of warfare is found in the scientific conceptions held by society (since our standard for political self-regulation is ultimately founded upon and informed by standards and laws found in nature), Huxley’s X Club aimed at uniting all major branches of physics, biology, economics and sociology under a singular coherent interpretation based on gradualist, descriptive, reductionist science. This would be a new unified, internally consistent science that would iron out the evidence of all creative leaps which shape all of living and non-living nature. This group realized that if nature could be modelled as a closed, decaying and random process then it would also be devoid of any actual notion of principle, justice, or morality. This would be a conception of nature which empires could forever justify the exploitation of their victims.

Although Malthus’s theories (and their economic corollaries in the works of Mill, Smith and Ricardo) had formerly done the job of “scientifically justifying” the empire, something more sophisticated was needed as the world was quickly seeing through the fraud as Carey demonstrated in his widely read “Unity of Law” (1872):

“Mr. Malthus was led to invent a law of population by means of which to relieve the rich and powerful from all responsibility for the existing state of things; giving them assurance that the poverty and wretchedness by which they were everywhere surrounded had resulted from the fact that the Creator had sent upon the earth large numbers of people for whom He had provided no table at which they might be allowed to eat, no materials by aid of which they might be clothed; thus furnishing the theory by aid of which subsequent writers have been enabled, as they supposed, to prove that, in the British Islands, man had become ‘a drug’ and ‘population a nuisance’.”

To put the new imperial grand strategy into motion, two new think tanks were soon brought online.

The first of the two was called the Fabian Society created in 1884 by a nest of eugenics-loving intellectuals led by Sidney and Beatrice Webb alongside “slaughter useless eaters” George Bernard Shaw. Soon the group attracted leading imperial luminaries to its fold including Thomas Huxley’s student H.G. Wells, Lord Halford Mackinder, John Maynard Keynes and Lord Bertrand Russell. The group soon established a school from which to indoctrinate talented young members of the global elite named the London School of Economics.

In 1902, a second think tank called the Round Table Group was established in Oxford under the control of “race patriots” George Parkin and Lord Alfred Milner. Soon branches of “Roundtables” across all Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth were created as outlined by Professor Carrol Quigley’s post-humously published Anglo-American Establishment. The funding for this group was paid for by the fortunes of racist diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes and its mandate was illustrated in Rhodes’ 1877 will:

“Let us form the same kind of society, a Church for the extension of the British Empire. A society which should have its members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea we should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every thousand would have the mind and feelings for such an object, he should be tried in every way, he should be tested whether he is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty details of life, and if found to be such, then elected and bound by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his Country. He should then be supported if without means by the Society and sent to that part of the Empire where it was felt he was needed.”

The Rhodes Trust set up shop in Oxford where young talent from across the commonwealth were soon brainwashed under Rhodes Scholarships becoming a new generation of imperial high priests guided by Rhodes’ edict that a new Church of the British Empire be established. These think tanks would coordinate British policy with a two-fold aim: 1) the destruction of all creative open system thought in political economy and science 2) the subjugation of the race to a new global feudal order managed by a master class.

In his manifesto entitled Imperial Federation (1892), the man who would become the co-founder and director of the Rhodes Trust (George Parkin), wrote of the inevitable collapse of the empire, unless the “disintegrating forces” of sovereign nation states could be destroyed:

“Has our capacity for political organization reached its utmost limit? For the British people this is the question of questions. In the whole range of possible political variations in the future there is no issue of such far reaching significance, not merely for our own people but for the world at large, as the question whether the British Empire shall remain a political unit… or yielding to disintegrating forces, shall allow the stream of the national life to be parted into many separate channels.”

These new think tanks wasted no time in putting a new grand strategy into action.

One of the primary forces who would guide the application of the anti-creative science of empire was Fabian Society leader and Cambridge Apostle, Lord Bertrand Russell and his cohort David Hilbert who launched a new project in 1900 that would attempt to shackle the entire universe into a very small mathematical box devoid of all creative vitality. This box would soon take on the name “cybernetics” and “information systems theory” by disciples of Russell and Hilbert. This system would later serve as the foundation for the growth of Transhumanism, Artificial Intelligence and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

The invasion of the Capitol on 6 January now stands alongside 9/11 as an act of war against American democracy. Unsurprisingly, news coverage of the incursion has come to resemble war propaganda. All facts, true or false, are pointed in the same direction with the aim of demonising the enemy and anybody who minimises its demonic nature.

The three-hour takeover of the Capitol building by a pro-Trump mob is portrayed as a “coup” or an “insurrection” egged on by President Trump. The five who died during the events are seen as evidence of a violent, pre-planned plot to overturn the result of the US presidential election. Film spliced together and shown by prosecutors during the impeachment proceedings gives the impression that what happened resembled a battle scene in Braveheart.

Does it matter what really did occur? Many people feel that anything damaging to Trump and his fascistic followers is all right by them. They may suspect privately that accounts of Trump’s plot against America are exaggerated, but the fabricator of 30,573 falsehoods over the last four years is scarcely in a position to criticise his opponents for departing from the strict truth. They argue that he is an unprecedented threat to American democracy, even as it becomes clear that what actually happened in the Capitol on that day was radically different from the way elements of the media reported it.

But what is reported matters and particularly so when it risks exaggerating violence or deepening fear and a sense of threat. If the US government really was the target of an armed insurrection, then this will be used to justify repression, as it was after 9/11, and not just against right wing conspiracy theorists. By becoming partisan instruments for spreading fake news, the media undermines its own credibility.

A problem with a giant news story like the Capitol invasion is that at first it is over-covered before we know the full facts, and then it is under-covered when those facts begin to emerge. This has been true of US media coverage. But even at the time it seemed to be a very peculiar armed insurrection. Only one shot appears to have been fired and that was by a police officer who killed Trump supporter Ashil Babbitt who was involved in the storming of the Capitol. In a country like the US awash with guns, this absence of gunfire is remarkable.

Five people died during the takeover of the Capitol building and this is the main proof of deadly intent by the rioters. But one of the dead was Babbitt, killed by the police, and three of the others were members of the pro-Trump mob, who died, respectively, from a stroke, a heart attack and from being accidentally crushed by the crowd.

This leaves just one person, Capitol policeman Brian Sicknick, as the sole victim of the Trump supporters who allegedly beat him to death with a fire extinguisher. On 8 January, the New York Times ran two stories about his death, quoting anonymous law officers as describing how pro-Trump rioters had struck him on the head with a fire extinguisher causing “a bloody gash on his head”. He is then reported to have been rushed to hospital, placed on life support but to have died the following day.

This graphic story went around the world and was widely picked up by other news outlets – including The Independent, the BBC and USA Today. It was also separately reported by the Associated Press. It gave credibility to the idea that the pro-Trump mob was willing to kill, even if they only killed one person. It also gave credibility to the idea that vice president Mike Pence, House speaker Nancy Pelosi and senator Mitt Romney had only escaped being lynched by seconds.

Yet over the last seven weeks – without the world paying any attention – the story of the murder of Officer Sicknick has progressively unravelled. Just how this happened is told in fascinating detail by Glenn Greenwald, the investigative journalist and constitutional lawyer, who concludes that “the problem with this story is that it is false in all respects”.

It was always strange that, though every event that took place during the riot was filmed, there is no video of the attack on Sicknick. He texted his brother later that day and sounded as if he was in good spirits. No autopsy report has been released that would confirm his alleged injuries. Conclusively, the New York Times quietly “updated” its original articles about the murder of Sicknick, admitting that new information had emerged that “questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police”.

Since these officials were the only source for the original story, this – though readers might not guess it – amounts to an admission that it is untrue.

The misreporting of the Capitol invasion also included: a man carrying zip ties – that were taken to be evidence of a possible organised plan to detain political leaders – were in fact, according to prosecutors, picked up from a table within the Capitol, likely to ensure police could not use them. It is significant because it is part of a decline in media reporting everywhere, but particularly in the US. Trump is both a symptom and cause of this decline since he is a past master of saying and doing things, however untruthful or absurd, which are usually entertaining and always attention-grabbing. He guarantees high ratings for himself and the television channels, Trump haters and Trump-lovers alike, to their mutual benefit.

This symbiotic relationship between Trump and the media means that they do less and less reporting, allowing Trump and his supporters to provide the action while they provide the talking heads who thrive on venomous confrontation. Even American reporters on the ground have turned themselves into talking heads, willing to waffle on endlessly to meet the needs of 24/7 newscasts.

Events on Capitol Hill provided damning evidence of this decline in American journalism when Robert Moore, ITV News’s Washington correspondent, was the only television correspondent to make his way into the Capitol in the middle of the turmoil. He later expressed astonishment that, given the vast resources of US television and the thousands of journalists in Washington, that it should be “a solitary TV crew from Britain that was the only one to capture this moment in history – it’s bizarre”.

Bizarre, but not surprising. As a news event, the Capitol invasion showed that when it comes to spreading “fake facts”, the traditional media can be even more effective than the social media that is usually blamed.

counterpunch.org