Assange: Closer to the U.S. than to Freedom

If a well-deserved and honest imponderable reason doesn’t come in the middle, Britain has already set the conditions to finish the dirty work started by Lenín Moreno - with a multimillion dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund - of handing to the United States the coveted prey of Julian Assange, whom is sentenced to 125 years in prison or more (the death penalty was even suggested), for revealing the crimes carried out by imperialism in its attacks and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, including torture.

A just and necessary “miracle” might still happen to our pleasant surprise, but history shows that honesty in journalism has not been consistently rewarded, on the contrary it has been punished with slander, misrepresentations, and demonization of those who practice it or try to do it.

Like the Spanish singer La Massiel sang, it’s easier to find roses in the sea than a truly independent journalism in the nations where children of the Empire govern.

Therefore, to help break this Empire, it’s necessary for progressive forces to unite and, in this context, one of the key factors required is to have a system of communication media that makes possible the circulation of " subversives" ideas of a social order that must be eliminated, because it condemns humanity to its extinction.

And although we have never mentioned it in our comments, we must give a leading place to Telesur, whose creation a bit more than 15 years ago meant a valuable contribution to the process of growth and democratic consolidation in the Latin America and the Caribbean countries.

It’s also for that reason that Telesur is persecuted or silenced in countries governed by the right wing, which don’t want the contents of this news channel to make a dent in the ideological shield with which they protect their populations. Telesur can’t be watched in Colombia, Chile, Brazil, except via Internet. And this is not accident or due to technical issues, but purely, and exclusively by a political choice interested in preventing - or in any case hindering - the debate of ideas and feeding all the variants of conservative thoughts, keeping those countries in ignorance of what happens in neighboring nations.

What the Empire Wants

For the Empire it’s good that chauvinism and xenophobia spread, the raise of consumerism and depoliticization, the imitation of the "American way of life", demonizing the leaders and emancipatory political processes and exalting capitalism as the only possible system and rational to organize the economic life of nations.

Hence the centrality of fighting at the level of ideas by turning to the instruments of our time, ranging from television to social networks. This need had been early detected by Simón Bolívar, when he conceived “public opinion as the first of all political forces”, which is why he asked Fernando Peñalver, one of his collaborators, to send him “in a way or another a printing press which is as useful as supplies."

As it has been said before, José Martí shared this vision when he said that “trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stones”. Fidel, true heir of the Apostle, called for the “battle of ideas” to be waged, verifying that the economic and political failure of neoliberalism did not translate into the shaping of a new post-neoliberal common sense.

Unfortunately, the left took a long time to take note of all this. But the empire, on the other hand, always had a keen ear to the need to control the conscience of its subjects and vassals, both inside and outside the United States.

There’s no other way, highlights the colleague Habana Radio, one can understand the importance assigned to studies of public opinion and consumer behavior by North American sociology since the 1930’s onwards. Studies oriented to very concrete practical ends: modeling the consciousness, desires, and values ​​of the population, in an endless escalation that began with motivational research to elucidate the psychosocial mechanisms set in motion in the strategies of consumers in mass society until reaching today the focus groups to find out what the electorate wants to hear and who they want to say it to, and how, hence guarantee that the "correct" and acceptable characters triumph in the elections, manufacturing candidates with the exact profile of what the amorphous majority want.