September 23, 2020
You can measure the effectiveness of resistance by the fury of the response
by ruling elites.
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
Two of the rebels I admire most, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher,
and Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, are in jail in
Britain. That should not be surprising. You can measure the effectiveness of
resistance by the fury of the response.
Julian courageously exposed the lies, deceit, war crimes and corruption of
the ruling imperial elites. Roger has helped organized the largest acts of
mass civil disobedience in British history, shutting down parts of London
for weeks, in a bid to wrest power from a ruling class that has done
nothing, and will do nothing, to halt the climate emergency and our death
march to mass extinction.
The governing elites, when truly threatened, turn the rule of law into
farce. Dissent becomes treason. They use the state mechanisms of control
intelligence agencies, police, courts, black propaganda and a compliant
press that acts as their echo chamber, along with the jails and prisons, not
only to marginalize and isolate rebels, but to psychologically and
physically destroy them.
The list of rebels silenced or killed by ruling elites runs in a direct line
from Socrates to the Haitian resistance leader Toussaint LOuverture, who
led the only successful slave revolt in human history and died in a frigid
French prison cell of malnutrition and exhaustion, to the imprisonment of
the socialist Eugene V. Debs, whose health was also broken in a federal
prison.
Detroit, 2009. (CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Rebel leaders from the 1960s, including Mumia Abu Jamal, Sundiata Acoli,
Kojo Bomani Sababu, Mutulu Shakur and Leonard Peltier, remain, decades
later, in U.S. prisons. Muslim activists, including those who led the
charity The Holy Land Foundation and Syed Fahad Hashmi, were arrested, often
at the request of Israel, after the hysteria following 9/11, and given
tawdry show trials. They also remain incarcerated.
Resistance, genuine resistance, exacts a very, very high price. Those in
power drop even the pretense of justice when they face an existential
threat. Most rebels, like Ernesto Che Guevara, and the tens of thousands
of rebels the U.S. has had kidnapped, disappeared and brutally tortured and
killed throughout American history end up as martyrs.
Once a rebel is caged the state uses its absolute control and array of dark
arts to break them.
Julian Assange in dated photo. (Twitter)
Julian, whose extradition hearing is underway in London, and who spent seven
years trapped as a political prisoner in the Ecuadorian embassy in London,
is taken from his cell in the high security Belmarsh Prison at 5:00 am. He
is handcuffed, put in holding cells, stripped naked and X-rayed. He is
transported an hour and a half each way to court in a police van that
resembles a dog cage on wheels. He is held in a glass box at the back of
court during the proceedings, often unable to consult with his lawyers. He
has difficulty hearing the proceedings. He is routinely denied access to the
documents in his case and is openly taunted in court by the judge.
It does not matter that Julian, being prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage
Act, is not a U.S. citizen. It does not matter that WikiLeaks, which he
founded and publishes, is not a U.S.-based publication.
The ominous message the U.S. government is sending is clear: No matter who
or where you are, if you expose the inner workings of empire you will be
hunted down, kidnapped and brought to the U.S. to be tried as a spy and
imprisoned for life. The empire intends to be unaccountable, untouchable and
unexamined.
(Illustration by Mr. Fish for Scheerpost)
The U.S. created in the so-called war on terror parallel legal and penal
codes to railroad dissidents and rebels into prison.
These rebels are held in prolonged solitary confinement, creating deep
psychological distress. They are prosecuted under special administrative
measures, known as SAMs, to prevent or severely restrict communication with
other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail.
They are denied access to the news and other reading material. They are
barred from participating in educational and religious activities in the
prison. They are subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour
lockdown. They must shower and go to the bathroom on camera. They are
permitted to write one letter a week to a single member of their family, but
cannot use more than three pieces of paper. They often have no access to
fresh air and must take the one hour of recreation in a cage that looks like
a giant hamster wheel.
Communications Management
The U.S. has set up a segregated facility, the Communication Management
Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Nearly all the inmates
transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at
Marion, Illinois, where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include
a sprinkling of animal-rights and environmental activists. Their sentences
are arbitrarily lengthened by terrorism enhancements under the Patriot
Act.
Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility inhumane. All
calls and mail although communication customarily is off-limits to prison
officials are monitored in these two Communication Management Units.
Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. The
highest-level terrorists are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative
Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colorado, where prisoners
have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation.
It is Guantánamo-like conditions in colder weather.
Assange in Distress
Julian is already very fragile. His psychological and physical distress
include dramatic weight loss, severe respiratory problems, joint problems,
dental decay, chronic anxiety, intense, constant stress resulting in an
inability to relax or focus, and episodes of mental confusion.
Jeremy Hammond
(FreeJeremy.net / CC BY-SA 3.0)
These symptoms indicate, as Nils Melzer, the United Nations special
rapporteur on torture who met and examined Julian in prison has stated, that
he is suffering from prolonged psychological torture.
If Julian is extradited to the U.S. to face 17 charges under the Espionage
Act, each carrying a potential 10 years, which appears likely, he will
continue to be psychologically and physically abused to break him.
He will be tried in the burlesque of a kangaroo court with secret
evidence, familiar to Black and Muslim radicals as well as rebels such as
Jeremy Hammond, sentenced to 10 years in prison for hacking into the
computers and making public the emails of a private security firm that works
on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security,
and corporations such as Dow Chemical.
Roger is being held in Pentonville Prison in London which was built in 1842
and is in disrepair. He is charged with breaking bail conditions over an
action that saw activists throw paint on the walls of the four major
political parties, as well as conspiracy to cause criminal damage. A Green
Party member leaked to the British police a recorded Zoom discussion Roger
was having with three other members of Burning Pink, an anti-political party
organized to create citizen assemblies to replace ruling governing bodies,
as they discussed upcoming actions.
The homes of the four activists on the Zoom meeting Roger Hallam, Blyth
Brentnall, Diana Warner, Ferhat Ulusu and Anglican priest Steven Nunn were
raided on Aug. 25. Their electronic devises were confiscated by police and
they were arrested.
Roger Hallam in July 2020. (Jamie L. Lowe, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Roger is housed in a dirty, vermin-infested cell and denied books and
visitors. A vegan, he is forced to live on a diet of cold cereal and bread.
On many days there is no hot food served in the prison. Violent altercations
within the prison are commonplace. The overcrowded cells often lack lighting
and heat. He has no change of clothes and has been unable to wash the
clothes he is wearing for weeks. He stuffs bed sheets and paper in the
cracks of the door to block mice and cockroaches. The toilet in his cell has
no seat, is covered in excrement and does not flush properly. He goes days
without access to the outside. His reading glasses are broken. He is waiting
on a request for tape to fix them. The Covid-19 pandemic is in the prison.
Two of the staff have died from the virus. Roger could be imprisoned in
these conditions until February if he is denied bail in a hearing scheduled
for Tuesday.
Rogers arrest came as Extinction Rebellion was planning the blockade of the
printing presses of News Corps Printworks, which prints the newspapers The
Times, Sun on Sunday, Sunday Times, The Daily Mail and The London Evening
Standard. The blockade took place on Sept. 4 to protest the failure of the
news outlets to accurately report on the climate and ecological emergency.
The blockade delayed distribution of the papers by several hours.
The days of standing up to tyranny have long faded, Roger writes from
prison. The life-and-death struggle against Hitler and fascism is consigned
to the history books. Todays liberal classes believe only in one thing:
maintaining their privilege. Their one priority is power. The number one
rule is: preserve our careers, our institutions at all cost. The historical
rule number one of fighting evil is the willingness to lose your career and
to risk the closing down of your institution.
The prospect of death and destruction is lost in a postmodernist haze.
Leadership has decayed into sitting behind a desk, following public
relations protocols (otherwise known as lying). Leading from the front, the
first to go to prison Martin Luther King-style died with the passing of the
World War II generation.
The game is up, Roger continued.
The old alliance with the liberal classes is dead. New forms of
revolutionary initiative and leadership are rising up. Members of the new
political party Burning Pink have thrown paint at the doors of the NGOs and
political parties calling for open dialogue and public debate. The response,
true to form, has been a lethal and deafening silence. We are now in prison
from where I write this article after a Green Party member recorded a Zoom
call and passed it to the police. We have not been let out for exercise for
the first five days. We have no kettle, no pillows, no visits. But we dont
give a shit. We are doing something about Evil.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist who was a foreign
correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the
Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He
previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian
Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT
America show On Contact.
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular
column twice a month.
