The U.S. empire hunts not like a tiger, killing its prey with a fatal bite to the jugular; but more like a python: slowly suffocating the life out of it until it perishes, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
Indian Rock Python molurus. (Dr. Raju Kasambe/Wikimedia Commons)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
The High Court of England and Wales has ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may potentially get a final appeal against extradition to the United States, but only within a very limited scope and only if specific conditions are met.
The court ruled that Assange may appeal only on the grounds that his freedom of speech might be restricted in the U.S., and that there is a possibility he could receive the death penalty.
If the U.S. provides “assurances” that neither of these things will happen, then the trial moves to another phase where Assange’s legal team may debate the merits of those assurances. If the U.S. does not provide those assurances, then the limited appeal will move forward.
Absurdly, the court determined that Assange’s lawyers may not argue against extradition on matters as self-evidently critical as the fact that the C.I.A. plotted to assassinate him, or on the basis that he is being politically persecuted for the crime of inconvenient journalism.
The mass media are calling this a “reprieve”, even “wonderful news”, but as Jonathan Cook explains in his latest article “Assange’s ‘reprieve’ is another lie, hiding the real goal of keeping him endlessly locked up,” that’s all a bunch of crap.
“The word ‘reprieve’ is there — just as the judges’ headline ruling that some of the grounds of his appeal have been ‘granted’ — to conceal the fact that he is prisoner to an endless legal charade every bit as much as he is a prisoner in a Belmarsh cell,” writes Cook. “In fact, today’s ruling is yet further evidence that Assange is being denied due process and his most basic legal rights — as he has been for a decade or more.”
Cook writes:
“The case has always been about buying time. To disappear Assange from public view. To vilify him. To smash the revolutionary publishing platform he founded to help whistleblowers expose state crimes. To send a message to other journalists that the U.S. can reach them wherever they live should they try to hold Washington to account for its criminality.
And worst of all, to provide a final solution for the nuisance Assange had become for the global superpower by trapping him in an endless process of incarceration and trial that, if it is allowed to drag on long enough, will most likely kill him.”
This kind of slow motion strangulation is how the empire operates all the time these days, across all spheres.
Helping Israel starve Gaza while slowly pretending to work toward solutions.
Drawing out a proxy war in Ukraine for as long as possible to bleed Russia.
Slowly killing Assange in prison without trial under the pretense of judicial proceedings.
The U.S. empire hunts not like a tiger, killing its prey with a fatal bite to the jugular; but more like a python: slowly suffocating the life out of it until it perishes.
It favors the long, drawn-out, confusing strangulation of inconvenient populations and individuals, carried out under the cover of bureaucracy and propaganda spin. In today’s world it prefers sanctions, blockades and long proxy conflicts over the big Hulk-smash ground invasions we saw it carry out in places like Iraq and Vietnam.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
These slow suffocations can take more time, but what they lack in efficiency they make up for in the quality of perception management. It’s bad PR to just openly invade countries and murder people, which is why the leaders of the western empire have been able to wag their fingers at Putin despite their being quantifiably far more murderous than Russia.
People start snapping out of the propaganda matrix you spent so much time building for them and begin organizing against the political status quo your power is premised on.
So they opt for slow strangulation strategies where they can confuse the public about what’s happening and who’s responsible, outsourcing the blame to other parties while posing as the good guy who’s trying to bring peace and stability. It takes time, but the empire has time to burn.
That’s what happens when you’re the most powerful empire in the history of civilization; you have the luxury of biding your time while orchestrating large-scale, long-term operations to advance your power agendas.
Meanwhile Gaza starves, Ukraine bleeds, and Assange languishes in prison, each needing this to end with more urgency every day.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The snake has been controlling this earthly empire of suffering and lies ever since he reportedly hoodwinked our supposed ancestors in the Garden of Eden.
Only a handful of entranced herpetologists can find any redeeming value in their beloved vipers. And how are they rewarded? With a surreptitious bite conveying just enough neurotoxin or hemolytic enzyme to ensure their demise from the ill-considered object of their affection. Read about it as three lines of text in the daily obits.
A very apt choice you’ve made for America’s “mascot” or “spirit animal,” Caitlin.
The USA as an empire was actually constructed after WW1 by an internationalist group of war profiteers. This can be understood by the favorable terms and furtherance of the prosperity of a variety of European and American arms and war merchants whose families and fortunes from war were allowed to be legally domiciled in a number of western countries, and most importantly the US.
Surely the German industrialists who built Hitler’s war machinery enjoyed easy resumption where US officials were concerned.
These war mongers are the entity behind the charade of US democracy, they are the unimaginably wealthy bondholders that all western countries rely on to prop up there sovereign currencies. They dictate everything from interest rates, capital allocations and major development in every western nation and via their international finance cartel, all of human affairs. They are the silent partner who the G7 / NATO political leaders answer to. All of these countries are the property of the cartel.
They cannot compromise China’s and Russia’s financial and military sectors. China and Russia are insisting on equal trade relations and respect for sovereign borders.
The cartel’s enforcement branch is the CIA. China and Russia must be compromised for the cartel to succeed. If the global south’s trade and business with the West continues to decline, and trade and cooperation continues to grow among the global south lead by China in partnership with Russia, this dooms the globalist financial and war cartel, who only practice predatory forms of wealth extraction, utilizing their mainstream media entities to ensure your agreement to subsidize their crimes.
Whatever the CIA is doing, they are doing it on behalf of this cartel, who employs the position of the USA as its main instrument of destruction and proceed.
They’re not making you do anything!
The deep passion of your conscience is livid.
Don’t try to weaponize the act of suicide as euthanasia.
Unless you are terminally ill, you’d be unconsciously using Julian Assange’s unconscionable daily exposure to unmitigating torture as an excuse, for personal reasons.
Committing suicide as a form of political protest in support of Julian Assange’s bravery, is a whole other issue.
Suicide is a one-shot deal; there’s no coming back from it!
Caitlin- Please do keep on educating on the wily ways of the anti life anti democracy contingent. Add to that with reflections on the dynamics of individual and collective awakening. For example: one way is that of the ditch experience as often typifies the pivotal moment in the experience of the alcoholic who has hit bottom. What collection of experiences, thoughts, feelings, sensations provides the conditions where awakening “seeing” real-izes. What empowers personal/individual agency and collective agency?Thank you for your perseverance and fecund creativity. Abrazos.
Death by strangulation is a good analogy. Speaking of more strangulation:
With so much injustice, tyranny, atrocities, genocide etc. going on, it is easy to forget that the US has imposed illegal siege warfare on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. This has resulted in millions of people displaced or dead due to lack of medical supplies food etc. These crises can be solved very quickly: stop the siege warfare (so-called sanctions) As we see in Gaza, siege warfare can be more effective tool of genocide than simply bombing the place. “Sanctions” is an Orwellian euphemism.
That python met the Russia mongoose.
They’re now making me consider euthanasia. As leftist child who grew up in Belgium, suffering atrocities nobody believes.
Nah. Stick around and piss them off.
Well said Caitlin as usual.
The last sentence says it all really. But unfortunately we are living in a clown world at the moment, with no end in sight.
Elections on the horizon for the UK and US, but will anything really change?
It’s horrific that Julian Assange is treated this way for TRUTH TELLING! A BIG FU to Biden for his lies and his insanity over caring more about Israel than anything, even caring so little about Americans. Biden wants to murder and erase one of the few truth tellers in the world. Julian Assange and Truth Telling is what is missing from most of the planet. Drop Dead, Biden, and we hope that Kamala will prove to be an improvement!!!
And the only force able to stop the Gaza genocide, the war in Ukraine, and free Assange, the global working class, is being slowly strangled right along with them. Until they educate themselves to their power to overthrow the capitalist system of extreme exploitation and the antiquated nation states, that needs empires like the US to function, for one of a socialism of human need the strangulation will continue.
As a political Science college graduate
from the early seventies, I actively procure & participate in the US super contro led process, also remain aware of the who, the what & how CORRUPTION & ILL
WILL permeates every aspect of all sorts of People’s Lives….
A MILLION times THANKS & CONGRATULATIONS for all you do to inform readers, who like me Just Now, by mere coincidence found your article,
Please KEEP on Writing & Informing the UNSUSPECTING & non-aware about
the infra-human conditions that those who DARE to defy the powers that be are Subjected to endure for times until VINDICATION or Death is perpetrated on them!!!
We should all be very, very afraid right now. If the so-called “judicial system”, supposedly “created to provide a separation of powers and to protect individual’s rights” is completely failing to do so in the higher profile case of the innocent Julian Assange – what does that tell you about what will happen to the rest of us? In truth, there is no separation of powers – Western “governments” are all working together to consume the world and the rest of us be damned…
Another brilliantly illuminating essay by Caitlin Johnstone.