The Revolutionary Act Of Telling The Truth
John Pilger
John Pilger, speaking at the launch in London of The WikiLeaks Files, with an introduction by Julian Assignee.
September 30, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatised and illusion legitimised. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.
Edward Bernays, who invented the term, “public relations” as a euphemism for “propaganda”, predicted this more than 80 years ago. He called it, “the invisible government”.
This is insane, of course, and the big lie justifying this insanity is that it is in support of Syrians who rose against Bashar al-Assad in the Arab Spring. As The WikiLeaks Files reveals, the destruction of Syria has long been a cynical imperial project that pre-dates the Arab Spring uprising against Assad.
To the rulers of the world in Washington and Europe, Syria’s true crime is not the oppressive nature of its government but its independence from American and Israeli power – just as Iran’s true crime is its independence, and Russia’s true crime is its independence, and China’s true crime is its independence. In an American-owned world, independence is intolerable.
This book reveals these truths, one after the other. The truth about a war on terror that was always a war of terror; the truth about Guantanamo, the truth about Iraq, Afghanistan, Latin America.
Reading The WikiLeaks Files, I remembered the words of the late Howard Zinn, who often referred to “a power that governments can’t suppress”. That describes WikiLeaks, and it describes true whistleblowers who share their courage.
Sarah Harrison’s chapter, ‘Indexing the Empire’, describes how she and her comrades set up an entire Public Library of US Diplomacy. There are more than two million documents, now available to all. “Our work,” she writes, “is dedicated to making sure history belongs to everyone.” How thrilling it is to read those words, which also stand as a tribute to her own courage.
From the confinement of a room in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, the courage of Julian Assange is an eloquent response to the cowards who have smeared him and the rogue power seeking revenge on him and waging a war on democracy.
None of this has deterred Julian and his comrades at WikiLeaks: not one bit. Isn’t that something?
The WikiLeaks Files: the World According to the US Empire is published by Verso
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43008.htm