{"id":56262,"date":"2021-01-01T07:55:40","date_gmt":"2021-01-01T12:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56262"},"modified":"2021-01-01T08:21:32","modified_gmt":"2021-01-01T13:21:32","slug":"the-kafkaesque-imprisonment-of-julian-assange-exposes-u-s-myths-about-freedom-and-tyranny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56262","title":{"rendered":"The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes U.S. Myths About Freedom and Tyranny"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes U.S. Myths About Freedom and Tyranny<\/a><\/h3>\n

The real measure of how free is a society is not how its mainstream, well-behaved ruling class servants are treated, but the fate of its actual dissidents.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A billboard van calling for an end to extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange waits at traffic lights in Parliament Square in London, England, on September 14, 2020. (Photo by David Cliff\/NurPhoto via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Persecution is not typically doled out\u00a0<\/strong>to those who recite mainstream pieties, or refrain from posing meaningful threats to those who wield institutional power, or obediently stay within the lines of permissible speech and activism imposed by the ruling class.<\/p>\n

Those who render themselves acquiescent and harmless that way will \u2014 in every society, including the most repressive \u2014 usually be free of reprisals. They will not be censored or jailed. They will be permitted to live their lives largely unmolested by authorities, while many will be well-rewarded for this servitude. Such individuals will see themselves as free because, in a sense, they are: they are free to submit, conform and acquiesce. And if they do so, they will not even realize, or at least not care, and may even regard as justifiable, that those who refuse this Orwellian bargain they have embraced (\u201cfreedom\u201d in exchange for submission) are crushed with unlimited force.<\/p>\n

Those who do not seek to meaningfully dissent or subvert power will usually deny \u2014 because they do not perceive \u2014 that such dissent and subversion are, in fact, rigorously prohibited. They will continue to believe blissfully that the society in which they live guarantees core civic freedoms \u2014 of speech, of press, of assembly, of due process \u2014 because they have rendered their own speech and activism, if it exists at all, so innocuous that nobody with the capacity to do so would bother to try to curtail it…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes U.S. Myths About Freedom and Tyranny The real measure of how free is a society is not how its mainstream, well-behaved ruling class servants are treated, but the fate of its actual dissidents. A billboard van calling for an end to extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2322,5437,2001,827,3142],"class_list":["post-56262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-dissidents","tag-glenn-greenwald","tag-julian-assange","tag-united-states","tag-us-empire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56262"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56264,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56262\/revisions\/56264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}