Whistleblower Chelsea Manning
is now being slammed
with $500 fines for every single day that she remains imprisoned in
contempt of court for refusing to testify in a secret grand jury against Julian
Assange. Next month it will increase to $1,000 a day.
Again, this is while Manning
is also locked up in jail. It’s not enough to re-imprison a whistleblower who
already served years of prison time, including nearly
a year in solitary confinement, for taking a principled stand against
an opaque and unjust grand jury system; they’re going to potentially ruin her
life with crippling debt as well. The only way to make it more cruel and
unusual would be to start waterboarding her or threatening her family members.
All for refusing to
participate in a corrupt and unaccountable legal performance designed to
imprison a publisher to whom she leaked evidence of US war crimes in 2010.
People see this. People watch
this and learn from this, as sure as people watched and learned from the public
town square executions of those who spoke ill of their medieval lords. And just
like those medieval executions, many of the onlookers have been trained to
cheer and celebrate at the fate of the accused; have a look at the
power-worshipping, government-bootlicking comments under my recent tweet about
Manning’s persecution for a perfect example of this. People have been taught
what happens to those who blow the whistle on the powerful, and they have been taught
to become quite comfortable with it.
And, of course, that is the
whole idea.
Chelsea Manning is paying
$500/day fines for not testifying, scheduled to double next month. Slamming
someone with crippling debt for taking a principled stand against warmongering
tyrants is in some ways just as draconian as imprisoning them.https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/15/chelsea-manning-wikileaks-source-faces-deadline-te/ …
Who is going to blow the
whistle on US government malfeasance after watching what’s being done to
Chelsea Manning? Seriously, who? Would you? Would anyone you know?
I think most people, the
overwhelming majority of people, would opt out of the chance to give the empire
a truth smack in exchange for years in prison, financial ruin, and seeing their
name slandered and smeared around the world. Most people have too much to lose
and too little to gain to take that risk already, and the war on whistleblowers
and investigative journalists is
only escalating.
And that’s just the general
population. What percentage of people who’d be willing to suffer the draconian
consequences of telling the truth about the powerful are actually in a position
to do so? Most of the people who are in a position to expose significant
government malfeasance are individuals who’ve already been selected and
appointed to their positions because they’ve exhibited certain qualities that
indicate loyalty and obedience. The bigger the secrets you have access to, the
higher up the chain of command you must therefore be, and the more loyalty and
obedience hoops you’ll therefore have had to have jumped through.
What percentage of this
population, the population who has gained access to sensitive information by
demonstrating loyalty and obedience, would be willing to face the harsh
punishments which are inflicted on anyone who exposes the evil deeds of the
powerful? Almost none. And the higher up the chain of command you go, i.e. the
more significant information someone might have access to, the lower the
probability of their blowing the whistle on any depravity they discover.
It’s a really slick double
bind they’ve got us all in, if you think about it. Try to expose government
malfeasance from the inside and you’re a traitor; you’re guilty of
transgressing the rules of the position you’ve been entrusted with. You go to
jail. Try to expose government malfeasance from the outside and that’s hacking,
that’s espionage. You go to jail.
Either way, you go to jail.
Directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
When is it possible to expose
government malfeasance without going to jail? Why, when the government says so,
of course.
And this has all been a
long-winded preamble for me to get to what I really want to say here, which is
this: think about how many government insiders aren’t whistleblowing.
Seriously, just pause and
really think about that for a minute. Let it sink all the way in. We know about
just a teeny, tiny fraction of the evils that our governments have been up to
behind the scenes, because the people who are in a position to expose those
evils and who are willing to do so are exceedingly rare. And, because of the
public flagellations of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, we may be certain
that they are becoming much rarer. We appear to be moving rapidly toward a
world with no Chelsea Mannings at all.
The celebrated author,
journalist and historian William Blum once said that “No matter how paranoid or
conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than
you imagine.” I have no idea how much the late Mr Blum knew or whether he was
exaggerating to make a point, but if you look at what I’m pointing to here it
becomes self-evident that at the very least what we know about government
malfeasance is dwarfed by what we don’t know about government malfeasance.
There are so very, very many disincentives for people to blow the whistle on
the powerful, and so very, very many incentives for them not to, that it is a
certain bet that there is exponentially more wickedness going on behind the
veil of government secrecy than we realize.
More Police Raids as War on
Journalism Escalates Worldwide https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/05/more-police-raids-as-war-on-journalism-escalates-worldwide/ …
If you looked through a tiny
crack in the door and saw a thousand people just in that narrow sliver of your
field of vision, it would be very silly of you to assume that there are merely
one thousand people standing outside. If you can see that many people based
just on a very small slice of the information you’d have access to if you were,
say, standing on the roof, it would be safe to assume that there are a great
many thousands more that you can’t see from your current perspective. How many
thousands? You can’t see that either.
Pause and reflect on how much
you know about the evils that your government has been guilty of. Maybe you’re
just learning about this stuff, maybe you think you’re a hot shit conspiracy
know-it-all, it doesn’t matter, because get this: however much you know, that’s
just what you can see through the tiny crack in the door. Through the very
small number of gaps in government secrecy where truth was able to shine
through. No matter how much you think you know about the depravity of your
government, it is necessarily dwarfed by what you don’t know.
This is why the US-centralized
empire fights so hard to maintain government secrecy and shut down anything
that is a threat to that secrecy. It’s because if we could see what’s really
going on back there behind that veil of government opacity, it would blow our minds.
And then they would never again be able to get us back under control.
Does grasping this
self-evident truth mean harboring an intense suspicion of everything your
government says and does? Most certainly. But the alternative is to live in a
fantasy world. And an uncomfortable truth is always superior to a comfortable
fantasy.
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