The interview: Slavoj Žižek

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16 April 2019

https://newint.org/features/2019/02/11/interview-Slavoj-Zizek

The Slovenian philosopher, sociologist and cultural critic speaks to Graeme Green about losing control, Twitter, Trump and a new approach.

Interviewer: You have said that ‘seeing stupid people happy’ makes you depressed. Looking around at global politics, are you currently feeling pretty down?

Slavoj: Absolutely. I think a new world order is emerging. A rule that is ideologically and politically ‘America First’, ‘Russia First’, ‘China First’, ‘Turkey First’ … We have to move beyond this level. It’s literally becoming a matter of survival.

This is why I’m attached, maybe naively, to the idea of the European Union. It’s clear that in view of the threats we are facing, including ecological threats, certain things cannot be done at the level of nation-states. We will need to invent large-scale international co-operation. I don’t care if it’s Europe or Pacific or whoever – we need strong transnational co-operation and organizations. Naive as it may sound, we need a new internationalism. Without this, we are lost.

The same is true with biogenetics – it needs some level of international co-ordination.

The same is also true with refugees and migrants – the problem is economic, geopolitical. If you want to help migrants, do something in Yemen [and] Syria – where millions of new refugees are coming from.

Interviewer: In your recent book, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, you argue that control of our lives is being drained away from us – especially by new digital systems. Do you think we have allowed this to happen?

Slavoj: I don’t think we were even asked to allow it or not. Global processes are to a large extent determining our fate, but not only can we not influence them, they are also more and more abstract, in the sense that we’re not fully aware of them. They’re impenetrable to us.

The paradox I see is that we’re treated more and more like free subjects: free choice, everything depends on us… But at the same time, we are more and more determined by economic and even military processes that are impenetrable. Agency is taken from us.

All I know is that the first step is that people should become aware to what extent they are controlled. Don’t tell me this is easy to do. I don’t think the majority of people really want to know how they are controlled. Most people want a peaceful life. You remember all those Guantánamo and waterboarding debates? I spoke to US sociologists who told me something very sad: the reaction of the majority of people was not ‘Oh my god, we shouldn’t be torturing suspected terrorists’, or even the opposite, ‘We should do it, they’re a threat’. People thought that the state’s secret agencies should do it discreetly but they didn’t want to know about it.

In some sense, the news of how we are controlled will also not be welcomed by the people. Don’t overestimate them – there are things they don’t want to know.

Interviewer: Digital technologies that dominate our lives are currently owned by companies and corporations, not governments. Do you think that will change over time and the lines will get blurrier?

Slavoj: Of course. If we learn anything from all the Cambridge Analytica and NSA stuff, it’s that, even if they are owned by big corporations, we shouldn’t underestimate the incredible extent of their discreet co-operation.

I don’t believe in this idea that in today’s new liberal era, big corporations – out of the control of the state – are the threat. The reality is a new link between state apparatus and the economy and big corporations.

Interviewer: British comedian Stewart Lee described Twitter as the ‘Stasi for the Angry Birds generation’. Do you agree with the idea that we’re all giving away too much private information on social media?

Slavoj: I basically agree with this ‘Stasi’ idea. This is why I’m tempted to defend Julian Assange when people ask why he only ‘attacks’ the US and not Russia or China. People in Russia and China don’t have the illusion that they live in a truly free society. They all know there are limits and that they live in authoritarian states.

The truly dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom of which you are not even aware, which you experience as your own freedom. Isn’t Twitter the ultimate form of subjective freedom? The idea that ‘I sit in front of my computer, I surf around, I do whatever I want, I communicate at will’. What can be freer than that? But then, people are also directed and manipulated in different ways.

On the other hand, I don’t follow the idea that Twitter and Facebook are the media of new manipulation and we should dispense with them. Can you even imagine modern forms of protest without digital social media? There would have been no Arab Spring.

Interviewer: How is change possible if people don’t know what information to trust, especially online?

Slavoj: There are no easy solutions. The ruling ideology like to invoke the line that we’re manipulated, but we can’t do anything, so just enjoy your life. But when people are aware in their bodies and minds of issues like global warming, migration, the economic crisis and so on, this can gradually give them the force to do something.

Don’t underestimate people. I believe in miracles. By ‘miracles’ I mean how things can happen unexpectedly, something explodes. Who could have predicted Syria, even if it then went into fiasco? Who could have predicted someone like Bernie Sanders in the US?

I’m a pessimistic optimist. That cost me dearly in my popularity when I said I’d have voted for Trump. I’m not crazy. Trump is a nightmare. But I claim that there would be no #MeToo and no Bernie Sanders without Trump. There’s the idea that sometimes a more radical enemy opens up more space for us and something new might emerge from that. It’s a desperate optimism.

Interviewer: The political Right is gaining ground. Why is the Left failing? Too ineffective? Too divided? Too slow? Too much debate, while the Right just charges forward?

Slavoj: It’s all of that. It’s easy to criticize liberal social democracy as not radical enough, or to criticize neo-fascist tendencies. But does the more radical Left really have an alternative model? What do they want? How do they plan to reorganize society?

The ultimate result of where we are is that change is needed for political and ecological reasons but I don’t think the Left has a workable answer.

Interviewer: Do philosophy and social theory feel like a powerful voice in the world today? Do you feel it has an impact?

Slavoj: I don’t know how powerful it is. But I have one, perhaps naive, professional legitimization: when we get into debates about Artificial Intelligence, mind control, biogenetics, ecology and so on, we are raising questions that are ultimately philosophical questions: do we have a free will? What does it mean to have free will? On what is our human dignity based? With the radical changes today in our status as humans, philosophy will be needed more than ever.

That’s why I like to say we should perhaps turn around Marx’s Thesis 11. Maybe in the 20th century we wanted to change the world too quickly. Now, instead of only changing the world, we should also learn to step back and interpret it again in a better way.

This article is from the March-April 2019 issue of New Internationalist.

Julian Assange’s Nightmarish Future

April 15, 2019 • 74 Comments

The WikiLeaks publisher is in a maximum-security prison that has been called the UK’s Guantanamo Bay, Elizabeth Vos reports.

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/15/julian-assanges-nightmarish-future/

By Elizabeth Vos

Special to Consortium News

While Julian Assange waits for what comes next — sentencing on skipping bail in England and a U.S. extradition request — he is being held in a maximum-security prison in London that has been called the “UK’s Guantanamo Bay” and has been used to detain alleged terrorists, sometimes indefinitely. 

The reputation of HM Prison Belmarsh raises natural concerns about the wellbeing of the WikiLeakspublisher there.

“While many prisoners at Belmarsh say it’s difficult to see a doctor or a nurse, these services are available at the facility,” reports Bloomberg News, regarding the possibility of Assange receiving overdue medical attention. 

Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh had been used to detain high-profile national security prisoners indefinitely without charge under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001, passed six weeks after 9/11, until the House of Lords ruled it violated the British Human Rights Act.

Assange was found guilty on Thursday of skipping bail. On May 2 he is scheduled to participate in a court hearing via video link on the U.S. extradition request.

Assange’s name now tops the alphabetical roster of notables who have done time at Belmarsh or who are still there. The list includes notorious gangsters, serial killers and drug traffickers. Ronnie Biggs of the 1963 Great Train Robbery was imprisoned there.  Others are subjects of high-profile scandal, such as Richard Tomlinson, imprisoned for six months in 1997 after he gave a synopsis of a proposed book detailing his career with MI6 to an Australian publisher. Andy Coulson, a former press secretary to Prime Minister David Cameron, was imprisoned for a few months for the phone hacking scandal that engulfed News of the World while he was editor there. 

One mainstay of the inmate population are convicted terrorists. Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian cleric, was at Belmarsh until his  extradition to the United States where he is serving life in prison on 11 counts of terrorism. Rams Mohammed, Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yasin Hassan Omar were were all incarcerated there for their roles in the 2005 attempted bombings of the London underground. Anjou Choudhry completed his sentence at Belmarsh for promoting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale are identified as Islamic terrorists convicted of the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in London.  

There is legitimate concern about how Assange will fare inside Belmarsh. A 2018 survey by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons found that “91 percent of men said they had problems when they arrived at Belmarsh, which was higher than at other local prisons and more than at our last inspection,” Business Insider reported.

In 2009, the same prison authority had found “extremely high” amount of force used to control inmates at the prison.

Detainees were “unable to see the intelligence evidence against them and are confined to their cells for up to 22 hours a day. Their solicitors say they have been ‘entombed in concrete,’ BBC reported in 2004. 

The 2018 chief inspector’s report said the prison contains a “High Security Unit (HSU) within the already-high-security premises, which the report described as a ‘prison within a prison.’” The report went on to state that:

“The role of the high security unit (HSU) remained unclear. We were told it was for high risk category A prisoners, but such men are held in main locations in other high security prisons and we did not understand why the approach was different at Belmarsh. We noted that two of the men held were only standard risk category A prisoners and that in December 2017 two men from the main prison had been held in the HSU segregation unit. The conditions and the regime in the HSU provided prisoners with an intense custodial experience in which they could exercise little self-determination, and we were concerned that prisoners could be located there without any oversight process or redress.”

Describing the use of solitary confinement, the chief inspector’s report found: “Conditions in the unit were reasonable, but some prisoners could not have a shower or exercise every day. Those who could only be unlocked in the presence of several officers were most affected.” The report repeatedly described concerns that arose due to staff shortages, and added in a separate section: “We remained concerned about this use of designated cells, where men were held in prolonged solitary confinement on an impoverished regime.”

Individual accounts from former Belmarsh inmates published by CAGE, an advocacy group against human rights abuses that occurred as a result of the “war on Terror,” described their experiences. An anonymous prisoner who was later acquitted said: “The prison system is run in such a way as to humiliate and degrade the inmate as much as possible. The process of dehumanisation starts immediately.” In the wake of Assange’s imprisonment, CAGE published a statement, saying in part: “The UK is doing the U.S.’s dirty work by persecuting a man who exposed war crimes.”

Vigils and protests in support of Assange were held outside the prison on April 14 and April 15.

The last time Assange was held in a British prison, in 2010, he says that he was given food containing metal objects that severely damaged a tooth. This was at London’s HM Prison Wandsworth. The incident caused serious injury and he did not receive proper medical treatment during the six and a half years of  his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy. A medical report published by WikiLeaks in 2015 describes Assange’s version of the event:

‘This is Unlawful, I’m Not Leaving’

Uniformed British police officers, aided by what appeared to be plain-clothes secret police, had entered the embassy on Thursday morning when the Ecuadorian ambassador “indicated he was preparing to serve upon Mr Assange documentation revoking his asylum,” attorney James Hines, Queens Counsel, who represented the U.S. government, told the court during Assange’s bail-skipping hearing.  The Guardian quoted Hines as later telling the court that day: 

 “Officers tried to introduce themselves to him in order to execute the arrest warrant before he barged past them, attempting to return to his private room.

“He was eventually arrested at 10.15 am. He resisted that arrest, claiming ‘this is unlawful’ and he had to be restrained.

“Officers were struggling to handcuff him. They received assistance from other officers outside and he was handcuffed saying, ‘this is unlawful, I’m not leaving’.

“He was in fact lifted into the police van outside the embassy and taken to West End Central police station.”

Assange was likely referring to the 1951 Convention on Refugees that forbids a nation that has granted someone asylum from returning that person to a country where the asylee is likely to be persecuted.

Police were then filmed forcibly dragging the handcuffed, physically ill Assange from the steps of the embassy. During the arrest, Assange was seen holding a copy of Gore Vidal’s “The History of the National Security State,” as he shouted: “The UK must resist this….the UK must resist.”

Fears of U.S. Mistreatment 

In view of then CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s comparison of WikiLeaks (46:00 minutes into the above video) with Al Qaeda, while calling it a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” concerns are mounting in Assange’s camp about the harsh treatment he may face by British, and if he’s extradited, U.S.  authorities.

In the hours following the arrest, Reuters reported: “Lawyers for Assange said he may risk torture and his life would be in danger if he were to be extradited to the United States.”

On the same day, human-rights organizations and press-freedom advocates argued against the prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder. These groups included the ACLU, The Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Center for Investigative Journalism, Amnesty Ireland, Committee To Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Union of Journalists, the The Knight First Amendment Institute and Digital Rights Watch.

The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald was quick to note the widespread mischaracterization of the charge against Assange as one of “hacking,” writing that the charging document and related materials indicate Assange may have attempted to help Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army whistleblower then known as Bradley Manning, use a different username to access classified material she was legally allowed to access at the time. In other words, Greenwald says Assange is charged with helping a source preserve anonymity, a common practice by investigative reporters.

Greenwald also points out that this action has been on public record since 2011, but that U.S. authorities under the Obama administration refused to use it as a basis of prosecution due to the chill it could put on press freedom.

UN Visitor

The UN independent expert on the right to privacy, Joe Cannataci, issued a statement following Assange’s arrest.  “This will not stop my efforts to assess Mr. Assange’s claims that his privacy has been violated,” he was quoted by the United Nations’ news service.  “All it means is that, instead of visiting Mr. Assange and speaking to him at the Embassy. I intend to visit him and speak to him wherever he may be detained.” 

Shortly before Assange’s expulsion, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer expressed alarm at reports that an arrest was imminent. If extradited, Melzer said Assange could be exposed to “a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial, and the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Assange’s supporters likewise fear for his treatment in Belmarsh. 

Matthew Hoh, a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy and a former Marine, visited Assange at the embassy. He worries about the mistreatment Assange might face in custody. He believes, “When they get their hands on him, they will do things that will be criminal, it will be immoral, it will be torture,” he said during an online Unity4J vigil held days before Assange’s expulsion. 

The online Assange vigils are co-hosted by Consortium News and have been held for over a year, to maintain public awareness about Assange after Ecuador withdrew his internet access.  

Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, during a Unity4J panel,  offered his fear of what he believes will happen to Assange if he is extradited to the United States :

“He will have a hood over his head, he will be shackled and chained, he’ll be put on a black flight, he will be taken to the U.S., put into solitary confinement — which is a form of torture, it is how people break, and often break very quickly. He will be relentlessly interrogated, there will be all sorts of psychological techniques — it will be very hot in his cell and then very cold. They will constantly wake him every few hours so he will be sleep deprived. They will maybe even put him into a dry cell, where there is no water, so he will have to ask for water to go to the bathroom or wash his hands.”

Hedges continued:

“Everyone has a breaking point, and they will attempt to psychologically destroy him, and we have seen with Guantanamo that several of these detainees, most of whom were just sold to the U.S. by warlords in Afghanistan or Pakistan, are emotionally crippled for life. It will be scientific torture. I used to cover the Stasi state in East Germany, and the joke in the Stasi state was that the Gestapo broke bones and the Stasi break minds, and that’s what they’ll do. That’s what will happen. I’ve seen it with Muslims who have been entrapped in the U.S. in so-called terrorism plots, and by the time they shuffle into court, they are a zombie.”

Hedges added: “There will be a veneer of legality:  it will be the figment of law. But he will be treated like all of the people who have been disappeared into that system from around the world.”

Micol Savia, representative of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers at the United Nations, drew on Chelsea Manning’s experience of torture in U.S. custody when raising concern that Assange may be likewise abused, writing via Twitter: 

“#Assange’s eventual extradition to the US would expose him to a substantive risk of human rights violations. The likely treatment he would receive can easily be inferred from the unjust trial and detention of [Chelsea Manning] @xychelsea, who faced life in prison and was subjected to torture.”

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter and regular contributor to Consortium News. She co-hosts the #Unity4J online vigil.

Medicare for All Divides Democrats but Might Unite the Nation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3q3WG0ekX8

"Stunning and Revealing" - DCCC Demands Loyalty Oath From Political Consultants

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q2aZyTBx6w

Ecuadorian President's Motives for Surrendering Assange: Vengeance & IMF Loan?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=7p0zUkTloGg

Slavoj Žižek: Battle for the Democratic Party is the MOST Important Struggle Today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfSxOBJ9LA8



Published on Mar 16, 2019

Assange arrest final step in character assassination campaign

Published time: 11 Apr, 2019 12:21Edited time: 12 Apr, 2019 08:09

https://www.rt.com/news/456237-julian-assange-arrest-slavoj-zizek/

Julian Assange’s arrest was not a sudden development, cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek told RT. Instead it was well planned and the final step in a long and ugly smear campaign against the WikiLeaks founder.

After sheltering in London’s Ecuadorian embassy for six years, Assange was dragged out of the building by British police on Thursday morning. The arrest comes after Ecuador’s new pro-US president withdrew Assange’s asylum claim, and after WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson claimed that an extensive spying campaign was conducted against Assange, designed to get him out.

“I was not surprised,” Zizek told RT. “The problem for me is how people will simply accept this as the result of the long, systematic, character assassination campaign.”

The first step in the campaign, Zizek said, was to connect WikiLeaks – an independent journalistic outlet known for leaking classified materials, which also prides itself on having never published false information – with Russia and Vladimir Putin. The next step was “character assassination.” Assange, Zizek said, was painted as “arrogant,” “paranoid,” and even a rapist, despite Swedish authorities dropping all charges against him in 2017.

Then the gossip against Assange sank to an “incredibly dirty personal level, that he doesn’t clean his toilet, that he smells bad and so on. Can we imagine anything lower?” WikiLeaks has argued the same, calling Assange the victim of “a sophisticated effort to dehumanize, delegitimize and imprison him.”

This man is a son, a father, a brother. He has won dozens of journalism awards. He's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year since 2010. Powerful actors, including CIA, are engaged in a sophisticated effort to dehumanise, delegitimize and imprison him. #ProtectJulian

49.9K

5:13 AM - Apr 11, 2019

Assange’s arrest, Zizek continued, has “nothing to do with vengeance.” Rather, the WikiLeaks head was made an example of in the ongoing fight to clamp down on the free flow of information. Just like the European Union’s new copyright directive threatens to censor almost all free expression online, neutering organizations like Wikileaks is a step towards controlling what information we can and cannot access.

“All our lives today are somehow regulated through digital media,” he said. “So it’s absolutely crucial who controls this digital media. This is the greatest threat to our freedom.”

“We are not even aware of it as we don’t experience it as unfreedom. It’s not like the old days of the police state, where you look over your shoulder and see a man following you. You feel totally free, but your every move is registered and you’re subtly manipulated.”

“Wikileaks embodied resistance to this,” Zizek added.

Assange’s lawyer Jen Robinson confirmed on Thursday that Assange’s arrest was made in relation to a US extradition request. Assange is accused of conspiring with US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning – herself currently behind bars in Virginia for refusing to testify against WikiLeaks – to leak classified footage of US military war crimes in 2010. This footage showed a US Apache helicopter gunship opening fire on and killing 12 people, including two Reuters staff.

Jen Robinson@suigenerisjen

Just confirmed: #Assange has been arrested not just for breach of bail conditions but also in relation to a US extradition request. @wikileaks @khrafnsson

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5:44 AM - Apr 11, 2019

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“I wouldn’t blame Ecuador too much,” Zizek concluded. “Ecuador was under terrible pressure from the United States. Forget about these B-level countries. This is all about the United States.”