TOKYO MASTER BANNER

MINISTRY OF TOKYO
US-ANGLO CAPITALISMEU-NATO IMPERIALISM
Illegitimate Transfer of Inalienable European Rights via Convention(s) & Supranational Bodies
Establishment of Sovereignty-Usurping Supranational Body Dictatorships
Enduring Program of DEMOGRAPHICS WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of European Displacement, Dismemberment, Dispossession, & Dissolution
No wars or conditions abroad (& no domestic or global economic pretexts) justify government policy facilitating the invasion of ancestral European homelands, the rape of European women, the destruction of European societies, & the genocide of Europeans.
U.S. RULING OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR TO SALVAGE HEGEMONY
[LINK | Article]

*U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR*

Who's preaching world democracy, democracy, democracy? —Who wants to make free people free?
[info from Craig Murray video appearance, follows]  US-Anglo Alliance DELIBERATELY STOKING ANTI-RUSSIAN FEELING & RAMPING UP TENSION BETWEEN EASTERN EUROPE & RUSSIA.  British military/government feeding media PROPAGANDA.  Media choosing to PUBLISH government PROPAGANDA.  US naval aggression against Russia:  Baltic Sea — US naval aggression against China:  South China Sea.  Continued NATO pressure on Russia:  US missile systems moving into Eastern Europe.     [info from John Pilger interview follows]  War Hawk:  Hillary Clinton — embodiment of seamless aggressive American imperialist post-WWII system.  USA in frenzy of preparation for a conflict.  Greatest US-led build-up of forces since WWII gathered in Eastern Europe and in Baltic states.  US expansion & military preparation HAS NOT BEEN REPORTED IN THE WEST.  Since US paid for & controlled US coup, UKRAINE has become an American preserve and CIA Theme Park, on Russia's borderland, through which Germans invaded in the 1940s, costing 27 million Russian lives.  Imagine equivalent occurring on US borders in Canada or Mexico.  US military preparations against RUSSIA and against CHINA have NOT been reported by MEDIA.  US has sent guided missile ships to diputed zone in South China Sea.  DANGER OF US PRE-EMPTIVE NUCLEAR STRIKES.  China is on HIGH NUCLEAR ALERT.  US spy plane intercepted by Chinese fighter jets.  Public is primed to accept so-called 'aggressive' moves by China, when these are in fact defensive moves:  US 400 major bases encircling China; Okinawa has 32 American military installations; Japan has 130 American military bases in all.  WARNING PENTAGON MILITARY THINKING DOMINATES WASHINGTON. ⟴  

August 04, 2015

JULIAN ASSANGE - WikiLeaks - Oslo Freedom Forum 2010





 WIKILEAKS




JULIAN ASSANGE

Oslo Freedom Forum 2010



April 27, 2010







TRANSCRIPT
[Check audio prior to quoting] 


JULIAN ASSANGE

Oslo Freedom Forum 2010
April 27, 2010



I am very pleased to be amongst so many people I can respect. I don't think I have ever been in a room with so many people that I think hold to my values. That is really an extraordinary honour and I am very grateful to the organisers for inviting everyone and me. And I see in the front row we have Anwar Ibrahim, who I met in Malaysia last year at a by-election for the opposition. Just after speaking to Anwar – a few hours later that night – I was detained by the secret police in Malaysia. So when you speak to him, be careful.

So we've heard a lot here about the problems in the developing world and in the work that I have done, certainly, I have covered many of those, and we are censored in all the rogues' gallery states: China, Iran, Israel.

I don't want to talk however, today, too much about that, because censorship in the West is also a problem and censorship in the West is used to legitimise censorship in other countries, and abuses in the West of Enlightenment ideals – which we should all hold dear – and the corrosion of those ideals, not only impoverishes Western countries, it is also used as an excuse for terrible abuses in other countries. In particular, the countries that follow the common law that was set up by the British Empire. For example, abuses of libel law that are in Africa are used to imprison some fine journalists, in severe conditions, based upon precedents that are set in UK.

So I'm not sure how many people here are familiar with the basics of my work, and I'll try and go very briefly through that, so you can understand where I'm coming from.

As a journalist and as a programmer, and as someone who was involved in embryonic internet, in bringing the internet to the people and bringing that great tool of information and publishing freedom to people, I saw that we could achieve a lot of reform with a little bit of work. And you, of course, all know this. And you should remember Solzhenitsyn's words that “in the right moment one word of truth outweighs the world.” Solzhenitsyn was referring to a world of lies. But this still is true, for information across the world, and it’s also true of the information in the West, that, in some cases, one classified video can possibly stop a war, and maybe fifty definitely can. So we tried to pull together a system to automate that process, to get as much new material, sensitive material, restricted material - material that we thought would achieve political reform - into the historic record and keep it there. 

We have, in the process, become the publisher of last resort. We, in the past three years, have been attacked over 100 times legally, and have succeeded against all those defences by building an international, multi-jurisdictional network. By using every trick in the book that multinational companies use to route money through tax havens, instead, we route information through different countries to take advantage of their laws, both for publishing and for the protection of sources.  And that endeavour has been successful in putting over a million restricted documents into the historical record that weren’t there before. That’s more pages of information than is in Wikipedia, we have gotten into the intellectual record that had been restricted

So, you may be ... well, you won’t, but I’m sure Lech will -

In 1953, after Stalin died, Beria, the NKVD chief (the chief of the secret police), fell out of favour and was executed. And the great encyclopedia of the Soviet Union had an entry on Beria, three pages, and the publisher sent out a replacement to say that this must be removed, and be replaced by an expanded version of the Bering Strait, that body of water between Vladivostok and Alaska. And into every library that bit of paper passed, and it was pasted in some cases by some librarians - not in others - into the Soviet encyclopedia - ripped out in other cases, but always the glue still visible. 

But that's not true anymore in the West, because archives of information have been centralised on computers. The Guardian’s archives are only in one place. They're not in libraries all across the nation that people look for; they're only looked for on the Internet. And because of copyright legislation, they're not copied elsewhere to other places on the Internet. So when something disappears from the archives - the electronic archives of the West to which all information is moving in to - it is gone forever. It is not only ceased to have existed; it is ceased to have ever existed. And when you go to those web pages that have been removed from Western papers, you won’t see the tear-lines - you will just see “page not found” - you won’t see anything in the index at all. We are now approaching the state of Orwell’s dictum - perfect dictum - that “he who controls the present controls the past”. He who controls the internet servers, controls the intellectual record of mankind, and by controlling that, controls our perception of who we are; and by controlling that, controls what laws and regulations we make in society. 

So the specific example that I'd like to give - and there are many, many hundreds of these (and, no doubt, most of you are not aware of them) - is a litigious billionaire by the name of Nadhmi Auchi, the fifth richest man in the UK at one stage, whose birthday painting was signed by 146 members of the House of Commons. A very well-connected man: connected politically, connected in business, and connected in the social establishment of the UK. He attempted to remove, through legal threats, articles about his conviction for corruption in France in 2003, in the Elf Aquitaine scandal. And he just sent legal threats; he never went to court. And The Guardian removed four articles about that case from its records, that were over five years old, and it never told its readers. They were removed from their index - when you follow links to them, you’ll just see “page not found.” And so did The Times, and so did The London Independent, and so did major internet companies in the United States. But that’s just one example of a litigious billionaire, and there are hundreds. 

In the UK right now, there are 300 secret gag orders. Those are gag orders that not only prevent the press from reporting corruption and abuse; they prevent the press from reporting that the press has been gagged. This is not the liberal democracy that we had all dreamed of. This is an encroaching, privatised censorship regime. And just like everything else in the West that becomes privatised and fiscalised, censorship also is not only a mechanism that is implied by the state. It is something that can be hijacked by wealthy plutocrats, by big companies, to use the coercive mechanisms of the State through the judicial system - through unequal access to the judicial system, through patronage networks - to have material removed permanently from the historical record. 

So, in the West - and we are, after all, in Norway - we should not be too proud about our sense that there is no state censorship, because we have privatised state censorship. We have made it more complex and not as obvious. It is not a brute hammer anymore. It is a sophisticated device, like money laundering through Caribbean tax shelters is a sophisticated device, where the brutality is hidden in its complexity. 

Similarly, when we see the path that countries like the United States - which once had a proud tradition of freedom of the press - is going down, we have to question whether it is really holding those values anymore, and what we should do about it. Because, if we don’t have Western countries as a beacon on the hill for Enlightenment values, what countries are left to hold that value?  You may - those of you who are familiar here with World War II - may remember the statement that was put by the Nazis on front of concentration camps that “work brings freedom,” an idea that Himmler had when he himself was in prison. 

But, in my investigations of exposing documents - which include many abuses by the United States military, which include the main manuals for prison camps like Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo - I have seen pictures on the front of those camps of their slogans. So, guess which camp has, “Honor Bound To Defend Freedom” on the front of it? The defence of freedom as a value is on the front of Guantanamo Bay. And I say, as a perversion of the truth, that that slogan is worse than “work brings freedom.” And we in the West should be aware of that perversion, and understand that the alliance that once existed between liberals and libertarians, and the military-industrial complex, in opposing Soviet abuses in the Cold War, is gone. That once-upon-a-time people who stood up for Enlightenment values, domestically, in Western countries, that stood up for human rights and freedom of the press, domestically, in Western countries - libertarians, liberals, and the press itself - were in a tacit alliance with war hawks. They were in a tacit alliance with those people who opposed the Soviet Union merely for geopolitical reasons, and that alliance was to pick up a moral stick and to beat the abuses - the terrible abuses - of the Soviet Union in relation to censorship. But as of 1991, that artificial alliance - that temporary alliance - has dissipated; and, so, now we see a split and a reversion back to a different standard where the natural interests of authority, the natural interests of intelligence agencies, the natural interests of the military is in stifling press reportage of abuse, and it has been reasserted in Western countries. 

(How am I going with time? Right there? Excellent, OK.) 

So, in as broad a framework of what we do, it is to try and build an historical record - an intellectual record - of how civilisation actually works in practice - now, from the inside, everywhere, in every country around the World. Because all our decisions, individual decisions, our political decisions, are based upon what we know. Humanity is nothing but what we know and what we have. And what we have can be replaced, and degrades quickly. And what we know is everything, and it is our limit of what we can be. So before we embark on any particular political stratagem, we first have to know where we are; because, if we do not know where we are, it is impossible for us to know where we're going. Likewise, it is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they are going on. I ask you to think about the words of Machiavelli; think about them in their negative, when he said: 

Thus it happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off (which it is only given to a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow untl that everyone can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be followed." [Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince. 1537]

So secret planning, is secret usually for a reason: because, if it's abusive, it is opposed. So it is our task to find secret abusive plans and expose them where they can be opposed before they are implemented. Because if they're exposed by their implementation, by people suffering from that abuse, then the abuse has already occurred and it's too late. 

[End - 17:51 – APPLAUSE ] 

*Note
 also adapted from following transcript: 

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Anwar Ibrahim - here

Enlightenment - here

Sir Nadhmi Auchi, British-Iraqi billionaire - here

Elf Aquitaine (French oil company) Scandal - here

 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - here & here

Abu Ghraib torture & prisoner abuse - here

 Bagram torture & prisoner abuse - here

Guantanamo CIA torture & prisoner sexual abuse  - here

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria - here 

Narodnyĭ Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del

(People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs - NKVD) - here

Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian diplomat and author

of The Prince, a handbook for unscrupulous politicians  - here

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NOTE:  Wikipedia links should not be solely relied on, as entries are shaped to suit political views and/or aims of whoever is editing given entries.

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COMMENT
Came across this online.  Decided to transcribe.  Only got to just over a paragraph through, when I decided to check online to see if this was already done.  Was.

Found a link to a Google doc and sort of married up what I'd started with the rest of what had been done, listened to the audio & tweaked a tiny bit to my satisfaction.

The 'check audio before quoting' strategy is a good one, so I've whacked a note in here to that effect ... just in case.  Although I'm pretty sure this is accurate.

Thought it was funny that Machiavelli has made an 'appearance' again in the last 24 hours or so.  First, in the Chinese newspaper, which was perhaps hinting at American Machiavellianism regarding US spying on Japan.  And now Mach's made another 'appearance' by way of a quote regarding the value of early action to ward of 'evils that are brewing'. 

The values thing had me thinking about mine.  Uh-oh.  Mine are all over the place.  Mine are also more local than universal.  The humanitarian mould doesn't fit me.  I'm more about me, me, me, and ... ummm, me
The part about censorship in the West being used to legitimise censorship elsewhere was good.

In my opinion, the US (and the West, really) has never cared at all about freedom, democracy, human rights etc.  It is just politic to make out like one does - to create that impression - in order to keep the rabble in check while the monied masters, by and large, continue to rule absolutely.  And it's definitely useful to feign care for those ideals, when attacking foreign governments one wishes to depose, for entirely selfish, commercial, military and political gains.  It has always been nothing but smoke & mirrors.




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