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VAUGHAN SMITH: Good afternoon. My name is Vaughan Smith.
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I’m the founder of the Frontline Club,
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co-founder actually,
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co-founder with my wife Pranvera,
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who’s hidden amongst you somewhere.
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We’re very excited to be doing this today.
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This is the largest event we’ve done at the Frontline Club.
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And I’d like to thank Will of the Troxy Centre
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and all his team.
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I’d like to thank you for coming to this fantastic place.
-
I’d like to thank Dan, our branding man,
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because I’m standing in front of a hundred logos,
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which are all new.
-
So thanks, Dan. Our new look.
-
We’re not shy of our new look.
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I’d like to thank the Frontline Club staff,
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who have worked extremely hard to put this on,
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particularly Flora and Millie.
-
And so, thank you all.
-
I’m extremely proud of you all.
-
The Frontline Club exists
-
to promote what’s best in journalism
-
and to put on debates and discussions like this.
-
We’re a social enterprise, and if you wish to support us,
-
come to Paddington, if you haven’t already been,
-
where we can feed and entertain you.
-
We do 200 events a year. As a social enterprise,
-
the money you spend tonight
-
and any money you spend at the Frontline Club
-
helps us do this work, so we’re very grateful for it.
-
If you want to help Julian or Slavoj or Democracy Now!,
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you can buy some books or put donations at the end.
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That facility will be there.
-
Now, it’s Julian’s 40th birthday tomorrow,
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so if you want to help him
-
with those exorbitant legal fees, then,
-
you know, give generously at the end.
-
So, all that remains is for me
-
to welcome Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!
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Amy is a multiple-award-winning journalist
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and is the main presenter for Democracy Now!
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and has flown all the way from America to be here,
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and she’s a pretty fine person.
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And I’m extremely glad to hand over to her now.
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Thank you very much.
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AMY GOODMAN: Good afternoon.
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It is a great honor to be with you this afternoon,
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and a shout out to all of the people
-
who are watching this broadcast all over the world.
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We are live-streaming this at democracynow.org.
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By the way, how many of you
-
watch or listen to or read Democracy Now!?
-
We have given out about a thousand fliers
-
of where we broadcast in Britain and also
-
where you can watch, read and listen to the broadcast.
-
We’re also live-streaming.
-
We’ve offered the embed for anyone
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to take to put on their website.
-
The Nation is live-streaming us.
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MichaelMoore.com is live-streaming us.
-
Free Speech TV is broadcasting Democracy Now!
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across the United States.
-
And there are many others.
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I hope people tweet in,
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Facebook in, let us know
-
what you’re doing with this broadcast.
-
It’s extremely important,
-
because information is power.
-
Information is a matter of life and death.
-
We’ve learned that through these
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remarkable trove of documents
-
that have been released in the last year.
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The Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs,
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and what’s been called Cablegate,
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the U.S. State Department documents
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that are continuing to be released.
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Why does it matter so much?
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Well, we’ll talk about that this afternoon,
-
but let’s just take one example that came out
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in the Iraq War Logs, February of 2007.
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The war logs show that two men were standing, Iraqis,
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under an Apache helicopter.
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The men have their hands up.
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They clearly are attempting to surrender.
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The Apache helicopter can see this.
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So, they’re not rogue.
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The soldiers call back to the base, and they say,
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"What should we do?
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These men have their hands up."
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The lawyer on the base says
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you cannot surrender to a helicopter,
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and they blow the men attempting to surrender away.
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That was February 2007.
-
Now, we will fast-forward to July 12th, 2007,
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and video that has been released by WikiLeaks.
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This devastating video of an area of Baghdad
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called New Baghdad,
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where a group of men were showing around
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two Reuters journalists.
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Well, one was a videographer,
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a young up-and-coming videographer
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named Namir Noor-Eldeen,
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and one was his driver, Saeed Chmagh.
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He was 40 years old.
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He was the father of four.
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And they were showing them around the area.
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The same Apache helicopter unit is hovering above.
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They open fire.
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The video is chilling.
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I am sure many of you have seen it.
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If you watch or listen to Democracy Now!,
-
we played it repeatedly,
-
discussing it with various people,
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from Julian Assange to soldiers who were there on the ground.
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Over time, we dissected this.
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The soldiers opened fire.
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You have the video of the target,
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and you have the audio of the sounds of the soldiers cursing,
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laughing—but not rogue, always going up the chain of command,
-
asking for permission to open fire.
-
In the first explosion,
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Namir Noor-Eldeen and the other men on the ground are killed.
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Saeed Chmagh, you can see him attempting to crawl away.
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And then a van pulls up from the neighborhood,
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and they’re attempting to pick up the wounded.
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There are children in the van.
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And the Apache helicopter opens fire again, and Saeed Chmagh,
-
others in the van are killed.
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Two little children are critically injured inside.
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Now, I dare say that
-
if we had seen what came out in the Iraq War Logs
-
in February of 2007,
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if we had learned the story at the time,
-
after it happened,
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of the men with their hands up trying to surrender,
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there would have been an outcry.
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People are good.
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People care.
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People are compassionate.
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They would have called for an investigation.
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Perhaps one would have begun.
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But it might well have saved the lives of so many.
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Certainly, months later, perhaps
-
that same Apache helicopter unit under investigation
-
would not have done what it did.
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And maybe Namir Noor-Eldeen,
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the young Reuters videographer,
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and his driver Saeed Chmagh,
-
not to mention the other men who were killed
-
and the kids critically injured,
-
none of that would have happened to them.
-
That’s why information matters.
-
It is important we know what is done in our name.
-
And today we’re going to talk about
-
this new age of information.
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We’re joined by two people many of you know well.
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Earlier, I asked a young man who had come to the gathering
-
why he had traveled so far.
-
He said, "Are you kidding?
-
To be with two of the most dangerous people."
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Well, the National Review
-
calls Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek
-
"the most dangerous political philosopher in the West,"
-
and the New York Times says he’s
-
"the Elvis of cultural theory."
-
Slavoj Žižek has written over
-
50 books on philosophy,
-
psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory.
-
His latest book, Living in the End Times.
-
And we’ll talk about what he thinks and talks
-
about around the world.
-
Now, we’re joined by another man
-
who has published perhaps more than anyone in the world.
-
In fact, he wrote a book
-
on the underground computer information age called
-
Underground: The International Computer Underground
-
But with the Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs,
-
now the U.S. government cables
-
that have yet to be fully released,
-
I would say that Julian Assange is perhaps
-
the most widely published person on earth.
-
Today we’re going to have a conversation
-
about information,
-
and I’d like to ask Julian to begin
-
by going back to that moment in 2007,
-
as we talk about the Iraq War Logs,
-
and talk about the significance of them for you
-
and why you’ve chosen to release this information.
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, Amy, I suspect, under that criteria,
-
perhaps Rupert Murdoch is the most widely
-
published person on earth.
-
Something biased.
-
People say that Australia has given two people to the world,
-
Rupert Murdoch and me, fairly big in publishing.
-
Well, in some ways,
-
things are very easy for us and very easy for me,
-
In that we make a promise to sources that
-
if they give us material that is of a certain type,
-
that is significant,
-
of diplomatic, critical, ethical
-
or historical significance,
-
not published and under some sort of threat,
-
we will publish it.
-
And that actually is enough.
-
Of course, we have a goal with publishing material in general.
-
But it has been my long-term belief
-
that what advances us as a civilization
-
is the entirety of our intellectual record
-
and the entirety of our understanding
-
about what we are going through,
-
what human institutions are actually like
-
and how they actually behave.
-
And if we are to make rational policy decisions,
-
insofar as any decision can be rational,
-
then we have to have information
-
that is drawn from the real world,
-
in a description of the real world.
-
And at the moment,
-
we are severely lacking in the information
-
from the interior of big secretive organizations
-
that have such a role in shaping
-
how civilization evolves and how we all live.
-
So, getting down into Iraq,
-
so that was 400,000 documents,
-
each one written in military speak;
-
on the other hand,
-
each one having a geographic coordinate
-
down often to 10 meters,
-
a death count of civilians,
-
U.S. military troops, Iraqi troops
-
and suspected insurgents.
-
So, it was the first—rather, the largest,
-
because we also did the Afghan War Logs—
-
the largest history of a war,
-
the most detailed significant history of a war
-
to have ever been published,
-
probably at all,
-
but definitely during the course of a war.
-
And so, it provided a picture of the everyday squalor of war,
-
from children being killed at roadside blocks
-
to over a thousand people being handed over
-
to the Iraqi police for torture,
-
to the reality of close-air support
-
and how modern military combat is done,
-
linking up with other information
-
such as this video that we discovered
-
of the men surrendering, being attacked.
-
So, as an archive of human history,
-
this is a beautiful and horrifying thing,
-
both at the same time.
-
It is the history of the nation of Iraq,
-
in most significant recording,
-
during its most significant development
-
in the past 20 years.
-
And while we always see newspaper stories
-
revealing and personalizing some—if we’re lucky,
-
some individual event or some individual family dying,
-
this provides the broad scope of the entire war
-
and all the individual events,
-
the details of over 104,000 deaths.
-
And we worked together to statistically analyze this
-
with various groups around the world,
-
such as Iraq Body Count,
-
who became a specialist in this area,
-
and lawyers here in the U.K. who represented Iraqi refugees,
-
to pull out the stories of 15,000 Iraqi civilians,
-
labeled as civilians by the U.S. military, who were killed,
-
who were never before reported in the Iraqi press,
-
never before reported in the U.S. press
-
or in the world press, even in aggregate, even saying,
-
"Today a thousand people died"—
-
not reported in any manner whatsoever.
-
And you just think about that: 15,000 people whose deaths were
-
recorded by the U.S. military
-
but were completely unknown to the rest of the world.
-
That’s a very significant thing.
-
And compare that to the 3,000 people who died on 9/11.
-
Imagine the significance for Iraqis.
-
So, that is something that we specialize in
-
and that I like to do and I’ve always tried to do,
-
is to go from the small to the large,
-
not just by abstraction or by analogy,
-
but actually by encompassing all of it together,
-
and then trying to look at it and abstract,
-
through mathematics or statistics,
-
and so to try and push both of these things at the same time,
-
the individual relationship plus the state relationship
-
plus the relationship that has to do
-
with civilization as a whole.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Slavoj Žižek, the
-
importance of WikiLeaks today in the world?
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Well, to
-
understand properly this question,
-
it’s just—you can withdraw and give me two hours.
-
No, but I will try to condense it.
-
First, let me say also how proud I am to be here
-
and to let me mention something which maybe
-
most of you don’t know, that how difficult even it was
-
to organize this event, like it had to be moved two times,
-
out and more out from Central London and so on.
-
So, again, what I want to say is,
-
let me begin with the significance of what you, Amy,
-
started with, these shots.
-
I mean, not shooting, but video shots
-
of those Apache helicopters shooting on.
-
You know why this is important?
-
Because the way ideology functions today,
-
it’s not so much that— let’s not be naive—
-
that people didn’t know about it,
-
but I think the way those in power manipulate it.
-
Yes, we all know dirty things are being done,
-
but you are being informed about this obliquely,
-
in such a way that basically you are able to ignore it.
-
And can I make a terrible, maybe sexual offensive,
-
but not dirty—don’t be afraid—remark?
-
You know, like a husband— sorry for making
-
male chauvinist twist—a husband
-
may know abstractly "my wife is cheating on me."
-
And you can accept,
-
"OK, I’m modern, tolerant husband."
-
But, you know, when you get
-
the thought of your wife doing things,
-
it’s quite a different thing.
-
And it’s, I would say, with all respect, something similar.
-
It’s very important, because the same—
-
no, no, I’m not dreaming here.
-
The same thing I remembered happened I think
-
about two years ago in Serbia.
-
You know, people rationally accept
-
that we did horrible things in
-
Srebrenica and so on, but,
-
you know, it was just abstract knowledge.
-
Then, by chance, all the honor to Serb media
-
who published this, they got hold of a video
-
effectively showing a group of Serbs
-
pushing to an edge and shooting a couple of Bosnian prisoners.
-
And the effect was a total shock,
-
national shock, although, again,
-
strictly seeing, nobody learned anything new.
-
So here, so that I don't get lost,
-
if you allow me just a little bit more,
-
here we should see the significance of WikiLeaks.
-
Many of my friends who are skeptical about it
-
are telling me, "So, what did we really learn?
-
Isn’t it clear that every power, in order to function,
-
you have collateral damage?
-
You have to have a certain discretion—
-
what you say, what you don't say."
-
But to conclude,
-
I will propose a formula of what WikiLeaks is doing,
-
and it’s extremely important.
-
Of course, I’m not a utopian.
-
Neither me nor Julian believes in this kind of a
-
pseudo-radical openness—
-
everything should be clear and so on.
-
But, what are we dealing with here?
-
Another example from cinema, very short,
-
Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka.
-
You find there a wonderful joke, where,
-
I think towards the beginning of the film,
-
the hero enters a cafeteria and says,
-
"Can I get some coffee with cream, please?"
-
And the waiter answers him,
-
"Sorry, we ran out of cream. We only have milk.
-
So, can we give you—
-
can I serve you with coffee without milk?"
-
That’s the trick here.
-
Like, when we learn something from the media, like,
-
if I may repeat the metaphor,
-
they behave as if they are serving coffee with cream.
-
That is to say, of course we all know
-
they are not telling the entire truth, but, you know,
-
that is the trick of ideology.
-
Even if they don’t lie directly, the implications,
-
the unsaid, is a lie.
-
And you bring this out.
-
You are not so much putting them—catching them,
-
as they put it, with their pants down,
-
lying on behalf of what they explicitly say,
-
but precisely on behalf of what they are implying.
-
And I think this is an
-
absolutely crucial mechanism in ideology.
-
It doesn’t only matter what you say;
-
it matters what you imply to say, and so on.
-
So, just to make the last point,
-
I think that—are we aware
-
at what an important moment we are living today?
-
On the one hand, as you said, information is crucial and so on.
-
We all know that it’s crucial even economically.
-
I claim that one of maybe the main reasons
-
capitalism will get into crisis is intellectual property.
-
In the long term, it simply cannot deal with it.
-
But what I’m saying is just take the phenomenon
-
that media are trying to get us enthusiastic for clouds.
-
Like, you know, computers getting smaller and smaller,
-
and all is done for you up there in a cloud.
-
OK, but the problem is that clouds
-
are not up there in clouds.
-
They are controlled and so on.
-
For example, you rely on— maybe you have an iPhone.
-
But you mentioned Murdoch, name was mentioned here.
-
Do you know—it’s good to know—
-
if you rely on your news through iPhone or whatever,
-
that Apple signed an exclusive agreement with Murdoch?
-
Murdoch’s corporation is again the exclusive provider
-
of entire news, and so on and so on.
-
This is the danger today.
-
It’s no longer this clear distinction:
-
private space/public space.
-
The public space itself gets, as it were,
-
privatized in a whole series of invisible ways,
-
like the model of it being clouds, which is why—
-
and again, this involves new modes of censorship.
-
I repeat this.
-
That’s why you shouldn’t be tricked when you say,
-
"But what really did we learn new?"
-
Maybe we learned nothing new, but, you know, it’s the same
-
as in that beautiful old undersense fairytale,
-
"The Emperor is Naked."
-
The emperor is naked.
-
We may all know that the emperor is naked,
-
but the moment somebody publicly says,
-
"The emperor is naked,"
-
everything changes.
-
This is why, even if we learned nothing new—
-
but we did learn many new things—
-
but even if nothing learned, the forum matters.
-
So, don’t confuse Julian and his gang—in a good sense,
-
not the way they accuse you—
-
don’t confuse them with this usual bourgeois heroism,
-
fight for investigative journalism,
-
free flow and so on.
-
You are doing something much more radical.
-
You are—
-
that’s why it aroused such an explosion of resentment.
-
You are not only violating the rules,
-
disclosing secrets and so on.
-
Let me call it in the old Marxist way
-
the bourgeois press today has its own way
-
to be transgressive.
-
Its ideology not only controls what you say,
-
but even how you can violate what you are allowed to say.
-
You are not just violating the rules.
-
You are changing the very rules how we were allowed
-
to violate the rules.
-
This is maybe the most important thing you can do.
-
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, Julian,
-
even as you were releasing information
-
in all different ways,
-
you then turn to the very gatekeepers who, in some cases,
-
had kept back this information,
-
and you worked with the mainstream media
-
throughout the world in releasing various documents.
-
Talk about that experience and that level of cooperation
-
and what has happened after that.
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, an organizer—
-
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can you turn the volume up, please,
-
on the balcony? It's very quiet.
-
So, more volume, please?
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: Volume for the balcony.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Now that you said these devil again idiots accuse you,
-
you see he’s the authoritarian leader who gives commands.
-
I’m not saying this is not true.
-
I think this is the only way to really keep things going.
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: So, if you want to have an impact,
-
and you promise an impact,
-
and you’re an organization which is very small,
-
well, actually,
-
you have to co-opt or leverage
-
the rest of the mainstream press.
-
So, under our model of how you make an impact
-
and how you get people to do things
-
that you wouldn’t have been otherwise able to do,
-
unless you have an army that can physically go someplace
-
and panzer divisions that can roll over,
-
the only way that you can easily make an impact
-
is push information about the
-
world to many, many people across the world.
-
And so, the mainstream press
-
has developed expertise on how to do that.
-
And it is competition also for people’s attention.
-
So, if we had had several billion dollars to spend
-
on advertising across the world,
-
even if we can get our ads placed,
-
we wouldn’t easily be able
-
to have made the same impact that we did.
-
And we don’t have that kind of money.
-
So, instead, if you like,
-
we entered into relationships with now over
-
80 media organizations across the world,
-
including some very good ones
-
that I wouldn’t want to disparage,
-
to increase the impact and translate
-
and push our material into now over
-
50 different countries endemically.
-
And that has been, yes,
-
subverting the filters of the mainstream press.
-
But an interesting phenomena has developed
-
amongst the journalists
-
who work in these very large organizations
-
that are close to power
-
and negotiate with power at the highest levels,
-
which is the journalists, having read our material
-
and having been forced to go through it to pull out stories,
-
have themselves become educated and radicalized.
-
And that is an ideological penetration of the truth
-
into all these mainstream media organizations.
-
And that, to some degree,
-
may be one of the lasting legacies over the past year.
-
Also by—you know, even Fox News, which is much disparaged,
-
is an organization that wants viewers.
-
It cannot do anything else without viewers.
-
So, it will try and push news content.
-
So, for example, with Collateral Murder,
-
CNN showed only the first few seconds,
-
and they blanked out all the bullets going to the street,
-
completely blanked it out,
-
and said that they did so out of respect for the families
-
of the people who were killed.
-
Well, there was no blood, there was no gore.
-
And then they cut out
-
all the most politically salient points.
-
And the families had come forward
-
and said it was very important for us to know
-
that they had already seen it.
-
But Fox actually displayed the first killing scene in full.
-
It’s quite interesting.
-
So, Fox, not perceiving itself to be amenable
-
to the threat of it not acting in a moral way,
-
actually gave people more of the truth than CNN did.
-
And so, Fox, also motivated to grab in a hungry way
-
as great an audience share as possible,
-
took this content and gave it to more people.
-
Now, afterwards, of course,
-
they put in their commentators to talk against it,
-
but I think the truth that we got out of Fox
-
was often stronger than the truth that we got out of CNN,
-
and similarly for many institutions in the media
-
that we think of as liberal.
-
And perhaps Slavoj would like to speak about that.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: No, I cannot emphasize enough, like,
-
first I treated you not as an idiot out of politeness,
-
but then I’m more and more forced to admit that
-
you really are not an idiot.
-
Sorry for—it happens.
-
Now, because, seriously, I mean,
-
what you said now is extremely important.
-
With all the respect I have for—
-
and I don’t mean this in any way ironically—
-
honest liberals who really believe
-
people should be informed and so on,
-
but there are limits in their very mode how they function,
-
so we should ruthlessly, not in an unethical way,
-
but nonetheless ruthlessly, use,
-
as you pointed out in this difference between CNN and Fox,
-
every window of opportunity here.
-
And let me add another example
-
from a totally different domain,
-
but from fiction, cinema, TV series,
-
which I think reproduces the same duality.
-
We have the usual Hollywood left.
-
All this—all this for to raise our spirit,
-
left, liberal, pseudo-Hollywood Marxism thrillers
-
like Pelican’s Brief, All the President’s Men,
-
which may appear very critical, you know, like,
-
“Oh, my god, the president himself is corrupted,
-
connected to certain corporations and so on.”
-
But nonetheless, this is ideology. Why?
-
Because why do you exit the movie theater
-
in such high spirits after seeing, I don’t know,
-
All the President’s and so on,
-
because the message is nonetheless,
-
"Look what a great country we are!
-
An ordinary guy can topple the mightiest men in the world,
-
and so on and so on."
-
On the other hand, let me take an equivalent
-
in TV program of Fox News,
-
which would have been—please don’t take me for being crazy—
-
24 Hours.
-
Yeah, yeah, Jack Bauer and all that.
-
The last season of 24, I watched it with pleasure.
-
It’s, for me—my god, again,
-
as you approach it the way you approach those shots,
-
it’s, for me, much more consequential in criticism.
-
You get Jack Bauer, who is in total despair.
-
His whole world crumbles down. He has to admit this way,
-
what he tried do in previous seasons
-
of playing this role
-
of somebody should do the dirty job,
-
torture the prisoners, I will do it.
-
He says, "No, I cannot live with it.
-
It has to come public."
-
His liberal counterpart, called Allison Taylor,
-
the president, also steps down.
-
You know what’s the true message of it?
-
The message is simply, within the existing
-
ethico-political coordinates,
-
you are just stuck into a deadlock: there is no way.
-
It’s a very pessimistic message,
-
much more honest than all that uplifting Hollywood Marxism,
-
what a great country we are,
-
and so on and so on.
-
So, yes, at all levels, even not only in journalism as such,
-
I agree with you,
-
and I would even say that all leftist tradition knows this.
-
For example, already Marx said—
-
I’m no fetishist of Marx, but nonetheless—
-
he said that we can often learn more from honest conservatives
-
than from liberals, because what honest conservatives do
-
is that they don’t try to sell you at the end
-
some uplifting bullsh*t;
-
they are ready to confront a deadlock.
-
And that’s what’s important today.
-
AMY GOODMAN: I don’t want to look distracted looking down,
-
but I wanted to get these quotes accurate,
-
so I have them on my phone.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Nothing threatening.
-
I just hear it that way.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Newt Gingrich,
-
the former Speaker of the House in the United States, said,
-
“Julian Assange is engaged in warfare.
-
Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed,
-
is terrorism.
-
And Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism.
-
He should be treated as an enemy combatant,
-
and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently
-
and decisively."
-
Bill Keller of the New York Times said
-
"arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial."
-
Judith Miller, who together—
-
who often wrote or co-wrote articles
-
that appeared on the front page of the New York Times
-
alleging weapons of mass destruction
-
without named sources, said,
-
“Julian Assange isn't a good journalist,"
-
"didn’t care at all about attempting to verify
-
the information [that] he was putting out,
-
or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone."
-
Joe Biden, the Vice President of the United States, said,
-
“Julian Assange is a high-tech terrorist.”
-
Congress Member Peter King of New York
-
called for Assange to be charged under the Espionage Act
-
and asked whether WikiLeaks can be designated
-
a terrorist organization.
-
Not to just focus on the U.S., Tom Flanagan,
-
a former aide to the Canadian prime minister,
-
has called for Assange’s assassination.
-
And former Alaska governor Sarah Palin called—
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: He’s an interesting person.
-
I first heard about him.
-
AMY GOODMAN: —called you, Julian,
-
an "anti-American operative with blood on [your] hands."
-
Can you respond to these charges?
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, you know, after Bill Keller said
-
that I was thin-skinned,
-
it doesn’t really leave much ground to reply, does it?
-
Sarah Palin also, once on Twitter,
-
complained about my grammar,
-
which is really the biggest insult for me.
-
I mean, calling for a drone attack
-
is perfectly understandable,
-
but correcting my grammar,
-
from Sarah Palin, that's a real insult.
-
That event in the United States was very interesting to me.
-
Obviously, the calls are wrong and outrageous and so on.
-
But the social and political event
-
in which they occurred was fascinating.
-
So, within a few months,
-
we saw a new McCarthyist hysteria arise
-
within the United States in
-
December and January—
-
January this year, December last year.
-
And that is quite worrying that a new McCarthyism
-
can come up so quickly.
-
On the other hand, yes,
-
there are a lot of
-
opportunistic politicians playing to their base,
-
playing to their pals in the military-industrial complex.
-
On the other hand, you know,
-
power that is completely unaccountable is silent.
-
So, when you walk past a group of ants on the street
-
and you accidentally crush a few,
-
you do not turn to the others and say,
-
“Stop complaining, or I’ll put a drone strike on your head.”
-
You completely ignore them.
-
And that is what happens to power
-
that’s in a very dominant position.
-
It does not even bother to respond.
-
It doesn’t flinch for an instant.
-
And yet, we saw all these figures in the United States
-
coming out and speaking very aggressively.
-
Bill Keller, in a recent talk,
-
as a way of sort of perhaps legitimizing
-
why he was speaking about me, said that
-
“If you have a dealing with Julian Assange,
-
you’re fated to sit on panels for the rest of your life
-
explaining what you did.”
-
But actually, no, that’s a choice by Bill Keller,
-
a choice to go around and try and twist history
-
and whitewash history and adjust history
-
on a constant basis. Why?
-
Why expend the energy doing that?
-
Why not just knock off another front page
-
of the New York Times?
-
Because, actually, these people are frightened
-
of the true part of history
-
coming up and coming forth.
-
So I see this as a very positive sign.
-
And I’ve stated before that we should always see censorship,
-
actually, as a very positive sign,
-
and the attempts toward censorship
-
as a sign that the society is not yet completely sewn up,
-
not yet completely fiscalized,
-
but still has some political dimension to it—
-
i.e. what people believe and think and feel
-
and the words that they listen to actually matters.
-
Because in some areas, it doesn’t matter.
-
And in the United States, actually, most of the time,
-
it doesn’t matter what you say.
-
We managed to speak and give information
-
at such volume and of such intensity
-
that people actually were forced to respond.
-
It is rare that they are forced to respond.
-
So, I think this is one of the first positive symptoms
-
I’ve seen from the United States in a while,
-
that actually if you speak at this level,
-
the cage can be rattled a bit,
-
and people can be forced to respond.
-
In China, the censorship is much more aggressive,
-
which, to me, is a very hopeful symptom for China,
-
that it is still a political society,
-
even though it is fiscalizing,
-
even though everything is being sewn up
-
in contractual relationships and banking relationships
-
as time has gone by.
-
At the moment,
-
the Chinese government and public security bureau
-
are actually scared of what people think.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Can I just add something?
-
Again, I hate myself, because I wanted—
-
what is that movie called?
-
There Will Be Blood, no?
-
But unfortunately, there will not be a lot of blood
-
between the two of us, because I again agree.
-
Speaking about China, let me tell you—
-
maybe you know it—a wonderful—
-
it’s not an anecdote, which perfectly makes—
-
confirms your point.
-
Do you know that about two or three months ago,
-
a Chinese government—
-
I don’t know which—agency passed a law,
-
which formally prohibits in public media—
-
they mean press, books, comics, TV, movies—
-
all stories which deal with time travel
-
or alternate realities.
-
Literally. I checked it up with my friends in China.
-
The official justification was that history is a great matter.
-
It shouldn’t be left to such trifling games and so on.
-
But, of course, it’s clear what they really are afraid of:
-
for people to even imagine alternate realities,
-
other possibilities.
-
Now, again, to repeat your point,
-
I think this is a good sign.
-
They at least need the prohibition.
-
With us, we don’t need a prohibition, most of the time.
-
If somebody proposes a radical change,
-
we simply accept this spontaneous everyday ideology,
-
but we all know what our economic reality is like.
-
You propose to raise for one percent healthcare spending.
-
No, it would mean loss of competition
-
and so on and so on.
-
So, again, I totally agree with you here.
-
And just a final comment on the persons that you, Amy,
-
mentioned.
-
Listen, Newt Gingrich is, for me—
-
sorry to use this strong word— kind of a scum of the earth.
-
I don’t have any great—no, no, no, I will be very precise.
-
I don’t have any great sympathy for Bill Clinton,
-
but I remember when there was this campaign,
-
Monica Lewinsky campaign.
-
Newt Gingrich was making all these moralistic attacks.
-
And then it was confirmed in media—
-
I listened to interview with him where he confirmed it,
-
that when his wife was dying in cancer
-
two or three years before,
-
Newt Gingrich visited her in the hospital,
-
forcing her to sign—
-
not even having the decency for letting her die—
-
forcing her to sign a divorce agreement,
-
so that he could have married another woman.
-
And he was, at the exact time of Lewinsky affair,
-
already cheating her with the secretary of him there,
-
and so on and so on.
-
Listen, these are people who simply—my god,
-
I become here a kind of moral conservative.
-
There should be some kind of ethical committee
-
which simply claims people like this are a threat to our youth;
-
they should be prohibited from appearing in public, whatever.
-
Now, I will make a more important point
-
as to this terrorism stuff.
-
Let me make it clear—but I’m not crazy.
-
I mean this in a positive sense.
-
Yes, in a way, you are a terrorist.
-
In which sense?
-
In the sense in which, as I like to repeat,
-
Gandhi was a terrorist.
-
What you are doing, let's face the facts.
-
It’s not just something that can be swallowed—
-
"Oh, oh, look, all the interesting news
-
in the newspapers.
-
Here, this is happening.
-
There, Slavoj Žižek is dating Lady Gaga.
-
And here—totally not true.
-
And here, there’s WikiLeaks.
-
You effectively have, in a good sense—
-
AMY GOODMAN: Do we have a denial there on that one?
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Sorry?
-
AMY GOODMAN: Do we have a denial, an official denial,
-
on the Lady Gaga one?
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Absolute denial on everything.
-
I mean, everything.
-
I didn’t even listen to not even one of her songs,
-
and so on.
-
I mean, my god, I listen to Schubert and Schumann songs.
-
I’m sorry. I’m in a conservative.
-
AMY GOODMAN: I don’t know.
-
Her representative was not that defiant.
-
They just said, "No comment."
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: My friends were telling me the same:
-
“You stupid, you should have said ‘no comment,’
-
and then you will enjoy much more glory and so on.” OK.
-
AMY GOODMAN: OK.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Let’s go on.
-
No, no, no, I have a more serious point to make about—but
-
what does this mean?
-
Of course, you are—in which sense was Gandhi a terrorist?
-
He effectively tried to stop,
-
interrupt the normal functioning
-
of the British state in India.
-
And, of course, you are trying to interrupt the normal,
-
which is very oppressive,
-
functioning of the information circulation and so on.
-
But the way we should answer to this point, I claim,
-
is simply by another—I repeat myself here, I know—
-
endless paraphrase of that wonderful line
-
from Brecht’s Beggar’s Opera:
-
“What is robbing a bank
-
compared to founding a new bank?”
-
What is your, under quotation marks, “terrorism”
-
compared to the terrorism which we simply accept,
-
which has to go on day by day
-
so that just things remain the way they are?
-
That’s where ideology helps us.
-
When we talk about violent terrorism,
-
we always think about acts
-
which interrupt the normal run of things.
-
But what about violence which has to be here
-
in order for things to function the way they are?
-
So I think, if—
-
I’m very skeptical about it— we should use—
-
in my provocative spirit, I am tempted to—
-
the term “terrorism,” it’s strictly a reaction
-
to a much stronger terrorism which is here.
-
So, again, instead of engaging in this moralistic game—
-
“Oh, no, he’s a good guy,”
-
like Stalinists said about Lenin—
-
“You like small children. You play with cats.
-
You wouldn’t"—as Norman Bates says in Psycho,
-
“You wouldn’t hurt even a fly.”
-
Now you know.
-
No, you are, in this formal sense, a terrorist.
-
But if you are a terrorist, my god,
-
what are then they who accuse you of terrorism?
-
To finish with\Nanother nasty joke
-
You know what?\NThey try to give us the good news, like
-
all the news you are giving us are this\Nobscure, falsifications, good news
-
But you know what are these\Ngood news that they
-
those in power\Nare promising us?
-
Let me give you another wonderful\Njewish-american joke
-
that was told to me\Nby a friend recently
-
A guy has his wife\Nat an operation
-
and then talks\Nafther the operation with the doctor
-
and the doctor tells him,\N"Listen, first the good news
-
your wife will survive,\Nshe will even live longer than you"
-
And then ...\NWhat's the bad news?
-
The doctor says\N"The bad news is, you know, there are some problems, like
-
as the result of the operation\Nshe will no longer be able to control her anal muscles, so ...
-
excrements will be dripping all the time" then
-
"There will be some strange fluid all the time\Nescaping from her vagina, no sex" then
-
She will not\Nbe able to bla bla bla ...
-
And of course, the guy\Ngets more and more into a panic, no?
-
My God!?\NYou know what the doctor does, then?
-
He taps the guy\Non the shoulder and say
-
"No, don't worry\nthis is just a joke.
-
Everything is ok.\NShe died during the operation."
-
That's the good news\N that they are giving us at the end.
-
I surprised.
-
No dirty words, \Nyou know the script, no dirty words.
-
Because Amy is always\Ntelling me
-
when she was kind enough\Nto receive me in New York.
-
"Slavoj, not even the 'S' word,\NS-H-I-T
-
no dirty words"
-
For that\Nwe can be taken of the air.
-
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Julian,
-
about Bradley Manning.
-
Mike Huckabee, who also was a presidential candidate,
-
the governor of Arkansas,
-
said that the person who leaked the information
-
to Julian Assange should be tried for treason and executed.
-
He said, "Whoever in our government
-
leaked that information
-
is guilty of treason, and I think
-
anything less than execution is too kind a penalty."
-
Bradley Manning is a young U.S. soldier who was in Iraq,
-
has been held for more than a year,
-
much of that time in solitary confinement
-
in Quantico in Virginia.
-
It was exposed that his treatment
-
was tantamount to torture.
-
P.J. Crowley, the White House—
-
the State Department spokesperson,
-
spoke to a group of bloggers at MIT
-
and said his treatment is stupid.
-
For that, he was forced out of the State Department.
-
Bradley Manning was then moved to Fort Leavenworth
-
because of the outcry, but he remains in prison.
-
He remains not tried.
-
What are your comments on him?
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: First of all, Amy,
-
thanks for asking this question,
-
but it is difficult for me to speak in detail
-
about that case, and—
-
but I can speak about
-
why it is difficult for me to speak about it.
-
So, Bradley Manning
-
is an alleged source of WikiLeaks
-
who was detained in Baghdad, and then,
-
although there was very little—
-
no mainstream press publicity at the time,
-
shipped off to Kuwait, where he was, if you like,
-
held in an extrajudicial circumstance in Kuwait,
-
in a similar manner to which detainees are held
-
in Guantánamo Bay.
-
Eventually, through some legal— creative legal methods,
-
he was brought back to the United States,
-
and he’s been in prison now for over a year.
-
He was being kept in Quantico for eight months
-
under extremely adverse conditions.
-
Quantico is not meant for long-term prisoners.
-
Other prisoners,
-
the maximum duration over the past year
-
has been three months.
-
And people that have been visiting Bradley Manning say—
-
and we have other sources who say—
-
that they were applying those conditions to him
-
because they wanted him to confess
-
that he was involved in a conspiracy to commit espionage
-
against the United States with me.
-
That pressure on Manning appears to have backfired.
-
So, by all reports, this is a young man
-
of high moral character.
-
And when people of high moral character
-
are pressured in a way that is illegitimate,
-
they become stronger and not weaker.
-
And that seems to have been the case with Bradley Manning,
-
and he has told U.S. authorities,
-
as far as we know, nothing about his involvement.
-
Now, there has concurrently been a secret grand jury
-
taking place six kilometers from the center of Washington.
-
That grand jury involves 19 to 23 people
-
selected from that area.
-
Now, why was it in Alexandria, Virginia,
-
six kilometers to the center of Washington,
-
that that grand jury was placed and those people drawn?
-
Well, it has the highest density of government employees
-
anywhere in the United States.
-
The U.S. government was free to select the place,
-
and they selected this place
-
in order to bias the jury from the very beginning.
-
This is, in fact, wrong to call a jury.
-
This is a type of medieval star chamber.
-
There are these 19 to 23 individuals from the population
-
that are sworn to secrecy.
-
They cannot consult with anyone else.
-
There is no judge, there is no defense counsel,
-
and there are four prosecutors.
-
So, that is why people that are familiar
-
with grand jury inquiries in the United States say
-
that a grand jury would not only indict a ham sandwich,
-
it would indict the ham and the sandwich.
-
And that’s a real threat to us.
-
A grand jury, which was removed from U.K. jurisprudence
-
because of abuses, combines the executive and the judiciary.
-
So this old common law notion
-
of the separation of these branches of power
-
is removed in a grand jury.
-
U.S. government argues that these captive
-
19 to 23 individuals
-
are the branch of the judiciary,
-
if they perform a judicial function,
-
where of course actually they are just captive patsies
-
for the Department of Justice, the United States and FBI.
-
So they have been going out, and they have coercive powers.
-
They can force people to testify.
-
And they have been pulling in all sorts of people
-
that are connected to WikiLeaks and people that are not.
-
They have recently— a number of individuals
-
that have been pulled to the grand jury
-
understand what is going on,
-
and they have refused to testify
-
and have pleaded the First Amendment, Third Amendment‚
-
and the Fifth Amendment protection
-
against self-incrimination, to—well,
-
I’m not sure the purpose,
-
I don’t have direct communication,
-
but from the outside it appears to nullify that
-
political witch hunt in the United States against us.
-
Now, in response, the grand jury has been instructed
-
to send out immunity certificates.
-
So these are certificates that go to subpoenaed individuals
-
that say that if you come to the grand jury to testify,
-
your testimony cannot be used against you,
-
and therefore you have no right to plead the Fifth.
-
What this means in practice is coerced,
-
compulsive interrogation
-
in secret with no defense counsel.
-
There’s not—
-
not even lawyers for the subpoenaed witnesses
-
are permitted into the grand jury.
-
It is just the prosecutors and these people
-
from six kilometers away from the center of Washington.
-
That’s something that should be opposed.
-
There is another grand jury that has sprung up
-
in the United States and is investigating
-
antiwar activists, engaged in the same sort of witch hunt.
-
So these are really a classical device that was looked at
-
very critically in the U.K. 400 years ago,
-
and the result in the U.K. is this concept of the—
-
if justice is to be done, it must be done publicly.
-
And that has been a concept that is waylaid.
-
It’s interesting why or how it has been waylaid,
-
so that on the surface this device of—
-
well, you want the police to have an investigation.
-
The executive says it wants to conduct an investigation
-
into some group of people.
-
Well, we get people from the community,
-
19 to 23 people from the community,
-
and they monitor the investigation.
-
They make sure it’s not overstepping and so on.
-
But actually this has been turned on its head
-
and used as a way to completely subvert
-
the judicial system in the United States.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Your comments on Bradley Manning?
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yeah. Now, first, again,
-
I would like to say that crucial are the terms that
-
I think you both mentioned, all this extralegal space,
-
unlawful combatants, and so on and so on.
-
The paradox is that I think we should read these terms
-
as strictly connected to universal human rights.
-
To what—I have nothing against universal human rights.
-
What I’m opposed to is how the reference to
-
universal human rights is
-
de facto used in today’s ideological struggles,
-
that in order to sustain support
-
within the space of ruling ideology,
-
universal human rights,
-
you have to construct a space
-
which is no longer
-
the space of the enemy— in this sense,
-
enemy to whom the rules apply,
-
either Geneva Convention and so on—
-
but you have to create what the great American thinker
-
and politician Dick Cheney referred to
-
as the “grey zone” once.
-
You know, like, we have to do something discretely;
-
don’t ask us about it, and so on and on.
-
Here, I would say things are even more complex
-
than it may appear, because what I find really terrifying
-
is that concepts like unlawful combatants
-
are becoming legal categories.
-
Now, I’m not a utopian here.
-
Let me be—and I will maybe shock some of you—
-
brutally open.
-
I can well imagine a situation where, well,
-
I cannot promise you in advance
-
that I wouldn’t torture someone.
-
Let’s imagine this ridiculous situations where a bad guy
-
has my young daughter, and then I have in my hands a guy,
-
and I know that that guy knows where my daughter is.
-
Well, maybe, out of despair,
-
I would have tortured her or him, whatever.
-
What I absolutely opposed to is to legalize this.
-
I think if, out of despair, I do something like this,
-
it should remain something unacceptable, you know,
-
that I did out of despair.
-
What I’m afraid of is that this system gets institutionalized,
-
as it were, where all this will—
-
you know, because we know what is at the end of the road.
-
I had a polemic, just an exchange in New York Times
-
with Alan Dershowitz, who wants
-
legalization of torture.
-
And I read one of his proposals.
-
It’s an obscenity.
-
You will have doctors.
-
Let’s say, just a friendly,
-
to scare you a little bit, example.
-
Amy and me are the torturers.
-
You—somebody has to play this role—will be tortured.
-
So, let’s say we call a doctor who—it’s an obscenity, who—
-
AMY GOODMAN: Speak for yourself, Slavoj.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Sorry?
-
AMY GOODMAN: Speak for yourself.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Oh, sorry, yeah, yeah, OK.
-
AMY GOODMAN: You’re the sole torturer.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: No, but you know what I’m saying.
-
Who investigates you
-
and determines you can torture him to that degree if,
-
and so on and so on.
-
For me, what’s horrible is not—of course,
-
it is torture and such.
-
But it’s even more obscene, this normalization of torture,
-
which is why, yes, more than you—
-
I mean this respectively—Manning is,
-
for me, the hero, because you have a certain moment of glory
-
and so on and so on.
-
That poor guy, who, for me, is—did something extraordinary.
-
You know how difficult are these decisions, that simple,
-
elementary morality prevails
-
over legal considerations and so on.
-
I think that—I hope I’m not a utopian. I even, like—
-
don’t you have any of these organs who propose candidates
-
for Nobel Peace Prize?
-
That would be a nice, crazy movement.
-
If there is a person
-
who deserves Nobel Peace Prize today, it’s Manning,
-
or people like that.
-
Know why.
-
No, no, I’m not bluffing here.
-
Simple, ordinary people—and I’m not even idealizing him.
-
There are many examples that I
-
know of ordinary people who are not anything special,
-
they are not saints.
-
But all of a sudden, they see something, like probably he,
-
if he is the one, saw all these documents,
-
and something told him, “Sorry, I will not be pushed more.
-
I have to do something here.”
-
This is so precious today,
-
because it also goes
-
against a note which is in a way true,
-
but it’s exploited by our enemies,
-
this idea ideology today is cynical,
-
people are totally duped, and so on.
-
No, they are not.
-
I prefer her to play a little bit of simple moralism.
-
From time to time, there are ethical miracles.
-
There are people who still care, and so on and so on.
-
This is very important because, you know, like,
-
let’s not leave this domain of a care for simple, dignified,
-
ethical acts to agencies like Catholic Church and so on.
-
Who are they to talk about it?
-
We, the left, should rehabilitate this—
-
I know it doesn’t sound very postmodern or cynical—
-
this idea that there are out there quite ordinary guys,
-
nothing special, but who all of a sudden,
-
as if in a miracle, do something wonderful.
-
That’s almost, I would say, our only hope today.
-
Sorry for that. Sorry for that, you can’t do.
-
Don’t be too mad at me.
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: Speaking on that,
-
one of the difficulties for alleged sources—
-
and actually, we have another one in prison,
-
which has received very little recognition,
-
which is the case of Rudolf Elmer,
-
who’s in prison in Switzerland
-
for allegedly revealing secret banking information;
-
there’s no trace to us,
-
but that is the allegation that is being investigated—
-
is that if they put up their hands and say,
-
“Yes, yes, it was me,” it makes it very easy
-
to defend them in a moral way,
-
and it makes it very easy
-
to shower them with awards, but until they do that...
-
Their defense is that they didn’t do it,
-
so it is very hard for us to start praising people,
-
because inherent in that praise is we would be alleging that
-
they are guilty of the offense.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of banks, Julian,
-
you mentioned a while ago that you had
-
a good deal of documents on Bank of America,
-
but they haven’t been released.
-
Are you planning to release them?
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s a complication
-
with those documents
-
and another group of documents,
-
so we are under a type of blackmail
-
in relation to these documents,
-
that is very—
-
that will be dealt with over time,
-
but it is quite difficult to deal with at the moment.
-
So, I don’t want to specify what type of blackmail that is,
-
because it might make it harder to address the situation,
-
but it is—it is perhaps
-
something like people might guess.
-
You know, there’s a range of possibilities,
-
and it’s probably the first or second possibility,
-
if you’re guessing, at least.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about
-
the beginning of WikiLeaks.
-
Tell us about how you founded it, named it,
-
and what your hopes were at the time,
-
and if at this point you have
-
been disappointed
-
by what you’ve been able to
-
accomplish or amazed by it.
-
WikiLeaks, how it started.
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: I think I am amazed by it, of course.
-
I mean, who couldn’t be?
-
It’s an extraordinary time that I have lived through,
-
and to see many of your dreams and ideals come into practice.
-
That said,
-
I think we’re only about a hundredth of the way there,
-
in terms of what we have to release and discover
-
and collect and put into people’s heads
-
and solidify in the historical record.
-
We need a Cablebate for the CIA.
-
We need a Cablegate of the SVR.
-
We need a Cablegate of the New York Times, actually—
-
all the stories that have been suppressed
-
and how they’ve been managed.
-
And once we start getting that sort of volume
-
and concretize and protect the rights of everyone
-
to communicate with one another, which, to me,
-
is the basic ingredient of civilized life—
-
it is not the right to speak.
-
What does it mean to have the right to speak
-
if you’re on the moon and there’s no one around?
-
It doesn’t mean anything.
-
Rather, the right to speak comes from our rights to know.
-
And the two of us together,
-
someone’s right to speak and someone’s right to know,
-
produce a right to communicate,
-
and so that is the the grounding structure
-
for all that we treasure about civilized life.
-
And by "civilized," I don’t mean industrialized.
-
I mean people collaborating to not do the dumb thing,
-
to instead learn from previous experiences
-
and learn from each other to pull each other,
-
pull with each other together
-
in order to get through the life that we live
-
in a less adverse way.
-
So, that quest to protect the historical record
-
and enable everyone to be a contributor
-
to the historical record
-
is something that I have been involved in for about 20 years,
-
in one way or another.
-
So that means protecting people who contribute
-
to our shared intellectual record,
-
and it also means protecting publishers
-
and encouraging distribution of historical record
-
to everyone who needs to know about it.
-
After all, an historical record
-
that has something interesting in it
-
that you can’t find is no record at all.
-
So, that long-term vision is
-
something that I developed in various ways.
-
And I saw, in around 2006, that there was a way
-
of achieving justice through this process
-
that could be realized using the intellectual
-
and social capital that I had available.
-
And so, that’s quite a complex plan.
-
You should perhaps read—
-
there’s a couple of essays on WikiLeaks
-
that go into this in more detail.
-
So, to pull all this together was a difficult thing to do,
-
and to plan it out and to
-
marshal the resources
-
and to build not only an ideology
-
that people could support and were encouraged by,
-
and that sources were encouraged by,
-
but that people would defend.
-
And it’s one of the—
-
I think it’s extremely interesting that
-
although twice this venue was cancelled—
-
not this venue, sorry, twice this—
-
the venue that we had rented for this was cancelled,
-
including at the Institute for Education
-
from the University of London,
-
under the basis it would be too controversial.
-
And so, that’s why we ended up at the Troxy, at this venue.
-
That despite that, that actually,
-
Slavoj Žižek, myself and Amy Goodman
-
have managed to pack out nearly 2,000 people in London
-
on a Saturday at 25 pounds a seat.
-
So, I see that as extremely encouraging.
-
On the one hand, we have the sort of—
-
the everyday, tawdry institutional censorship
-
of saying that something is too controversial,
-
and therefore you can’t hold it in an institute of education.
-
On the other hand, all of you came.
-
And I’m not sure that that would have happened
-
five years ago.
-
In fact, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have happened
-
five years ago
-
and that both of those things wouldn’t have happened
-
five years ago.
-
So that when I said before
-
that censorship is always an opportunity,
-
and censorship reveals something
-
that is positive about a society,
-
and a society with no censorship
-
is in a very bad state, that, if you like,
-
the censorship of not giving us this venue so easily
-
is also related to why you're all here.
-
It is the other side of the coin,
-
that people are worried that change is possible.
-
And you’re here because you think that change is possible,
-
and you’re probably right.
-
So that’s been a very interesting journey
-
to see that.
-
And I thought I was pretty cynical and worldly
-
five years ago,
-
and of course I was simply a very young and naive fool,
-
in retrospect.
-
And learning how to—
-
from being with inside the center of the storm,
-
I’ve learned not just about the structure of government,
-
not just about how power flows in many countries
-
around the world that we’ve dealt with,
-
but rather how history is shaped and distorted
-
by the media.
-
And I think the distortion by the media of history,
-
of all the things that we should know
-
so we can collaborate together as a civilization,
-
is the worst thing.
-
It is our single greatest impediment to advancement.
-
But it’s changing.
-
We are routing around media that is close to power
-
in all sorts of ways, and—
-
but it’s not a forgone conclusion,
-
which is what makes this time so interesting,
-
that we can wrest the internet and we can wrest
-
the various communications
-
mechanisms we have
-
with each other into the values of the new generation,
-
that has been educated by the internet,
-
has been educated outside of that
-
mainstream media distortion.
-
And all those young people are becoming important
-
within institutions.
-
So, maybe this is something I’ll speak about with
-
you later, Amy,
-
but I do want to talk about what it means
-
when institutions—how the most powerful institutions,
-
from the CIA to News Corporation,
-
are all organized—all organized
-
using computer programmers, using system administrators,
-
using technical young people.
-
What does that mean when all those technical young people
-
adopt a certain value system,
-
and that they are in an institution where
-
they do not agree with the value system,
-
and yet actually their hands are on the machinery?
-
Because there has been moments in the past like that.
-
And it is those technical young people
-
who are the most internet-educated
-
and have the greatest ability to receive the new values
-
that are being spread and the new information and facts
-
about reality that are being spread
-
outside mainstream media distortions.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I feel now like
-
that Stalinist commentator, you know.
-
The leader has spoken; I provide the deeper meaning,
-
and so on, with pleasure.
-
No, first I would really like to begin with what you said.
-
It’s extremely important.
-
I have a philosophical term for it.
-
When you moved from right to speak, right to know,
-
communication and so on, I think that,
-
as many of you know, in the history of modern thought,
-
the first one to formulate this was Immanuel Kant
-
in his wonderful distinction between private
-
and public use of reason.
-
This distinction is so wonderful because, for Kant,
-
private use of reason is not I gather with my friends
-
in the kitchen of my apartment or a pub.
-
No, private use of reason is, for Kant, theological faculty,
-
legal faculty, political sciences,
-
where what you are thinking, debating, developing
-
serves a goal set up in advance
-
by a power structure or ideological structure
-
and so on.
-
For Kant, we here,
-
at a distance from this hierarchic political—
-
in the sense of establishment, of course,
-
of establishing power structure, space—
-
we are the public use of reason.
-
And why is this so important? Because what—
-
I see WikiLeaks as part of a global struggle
-
which doesn’t concern only in the narrow sense
-
this domain of right to know, in the sense of right to
-
information and so on, but even education.
-
You know, you—by "you," I mean U.K. citizens here—
-
what horrors are being made now in the U.K. university reform,
-
new privatizations and so on and so on.
-
This is all one concerted attack
-
on the public use of reason.
-
It goes on all around Europe.
-
The name is so-called Bologna high education reform,
-
and the goal is very clear.
-
They say it.
-
It’s to make universities more responsive to social life,
-
to social problems. It sounds nice.
-
What it really means is that we should all become experts.
-
As a French guy, later minister, explained to me
-
in a debate in Paris.
-
For example, cars are burning in Paris suburbs.
-
What we need is psychologists
-
who will tell us how to control the crowd,
-
urbanists who will tell us how to restructure the streets
-
so that the crowd is easy to break up or whatever.
-
Like, we should be here as a kind of a ideological
-
or specialist serviceman to resolve problems
-
formulated by others.
-
I think this is the end of intellectual life
-
as we know it.
-
And we should go here to the end, you know,
-
when all those right-wing, anti-immigrant, bullsh*tters
-
are talking about—sorry,
-
I used the word I shouldn’t, yeah.
-
Do it in a Stalinist way:
-
put some music of some heroic working-class song there.
-
Sorry, but more seriously, when we hear about
-
“Oh, immigrants, Pakistanis, Muslims,
-
a threat to Judeo-Christian civilization”—
-
no, sorry, the greatest asset
-
of Judeo-Christian Civilization,
-
which you can even detect it in notions of holy spirit
-
as the community of believers outside established structures,
-
it’s precisely this independent space of public reason.
-
So I’m saying that
-
If there is something really to defend of the so-called—
-
I hate the word also-
-
Judeo-Christian legacy,
-
this idea of democracy not only as this masturbatory right
-
to cast a vote totally
-
isolated, but, as you said,
-
public space of debate,
-
communication and so on.
-
Then that should be our answer to all those populist,
-
anti-immigrant, and so on,
-
anti-immigrant politicians and so on—
-
not this white liberal guilt.
-
"Oh, you are defending
-
Judeo-Christian legacy.
-
And no, we feel guilty. My god, how many bad things we did.
-
All the bad things in the world are the result
-
of European imperialism."
-
OK, maybe, but what we should say to them is
-
“Who are you to even speak about Judeo-Christian legacy?”
-
This university reform today in U.K.,
-
this is the greatest threat to Judeo-Christian legacy
-
and so on.
-
Anti-immigrants, they are the nightmare.
-
Imagine Le Pen in power in France and so on.
-
That’s the end of Europe for me,
-
in the sense of what is progressive in Europe.
-
So, again, this is, for me, part of a much larger struggle,
-
especially with the problems today, ecological problems,
-
for example.
-
It is so crucial.
-
Let me give you an example,
-
which I think is so beautifully clear.
-
Recently—and that’s why I would also like to ask you, if I may,
-
through you, right, actually.
-
You and China.
-
Not you you.
-
WikiLeaks and China, because Chinese people
-
will pay such a price for precisely the oppression
-
of public space of reason, where?
-
My Chinese friends told me this.
-
In China now, a month or two ago,
-
even the government admitted the catastrophic ecological
-
consequences of those Three Gorges Dam.
-
You know, it’s the greatest artificial lake in the world
-
for 250 miles, 400 kilometers long.
-
Now, they, the government,
-
admitted that the problem is this one:
-
that lake is just above some subterranean faults,
-
which they move when there is an earthquake.
-
So they admitted that the big—
-
you remember three years ago when the big Sichuan,
-
or where—earthquake was, if not triggered,
-
definitely rendered much stronger because of this.
-
And this is not along the lines of what—
-
you must have some proverb like, you know,
-
“After the battle, everyone can be the wise general.”
-
No, friends, when I visited Beijing four, five years ago,
-
my friends there told me majority of geologists
-
were already warning the government about these dangers.
-
Second thing, because of this collection of water there,
-
the effects of drought are now much stronger felt.
-
Point two, because the water is too low, the whole—you know,
-
the Yellow River is the main
-
transportation line venue in China.
-
And the traffic there is practically stopped
-
and so on and so on.
-
All this is the end of public reason.
-
So now, just to conclude, just one more thing.
-
Nonetheless, this is not a critical point toward you,
-
but a point to clarify what WikiLeaks can do.
-
We should not fetishize truth as such.
-
We live in times of incredible ideological investments,
-
of times when ideology is very strong
-
precisely because it’s not even experienced as ideology.
-
And what can happen?
-
Let me tell you a story from Israel,
-
my friends told me there.
-
Some five, six years ago,
-
one of their historians wrote a more truthful account,
-
you know, of how also in the independence, ’48, ’49 war,
-
the Israeli army did burn some Palestinian villages
-
and so on and so on—a more balanced view.
-
And first, all the leftist critics
-
had a kind of intellectual orgasm.
-
"Oh, wonderful," and so on.
-
And then they got a shock of lifetime, when this guy said,
-
“No, no, no. What I meant, that was necessary to do.
-
We should have done it even more.”
-
The line of this guy was
-
“We should have thrown all the Palestinians
-
from the West Bank,
-
and we wouldn’t have any problems today.”
-
So, you know what I’m trying to say,
-
that I disagree not with you, but, for example,
-
with another person for whom I have respect: Noam Chomsky.
-
A friend of mine told me that Chomsky told him
-
recently at a lunch they had together in New York
-
that today all the obscenities are so clear
-
that we don’t need any critique of ideology,
-
we just need to tell to people the truth.
-
No, truth must be contextualized
-
in the sense of what does it justify, what does it say,
-
what does it deny, and so on and so on.
-
So, to really conclude,
-
this would have been my point about WikiLeaks,
-
that you are not just simply telling the truth.
-
You are telling the truth in a very precise way
-
of confronting explicit line of justification,
-
rationalization or whatever—
-
the public discourse with its implicit presuppositions.
-
It’s not just about telling the truth.
-
And this is very important.
-
Why? Now I conclude, don’t be afraid.
-
Because you know this wonderful Marx Brothers joke,
-
which I think serves perfectly as a model of today’s ideology.
-
Why? Because, like, if you listen to—
-
if you have listened to someone like, you know,
-
that failed businessman who then ruined the American army
-
as the defense minister, Donald Rumsfeld, called, no?
-
I read a biography of him.
-
They prove it conclusively that, my god,
-
he was even a very stupid, bad manager when he was a—
-
it’s a total myth that he was a business genius.
-
But OK, to the point,
-
when—how—basically, his cynical line about Iraq,
-
when it was discovered that there were
-
no weapons of mass destruction and so on, was that,
-
“OK, we were lying, but we were lying in a truthful way
-
with a good intention.
-
We manipulated you, but this was part
-
of a larger strategy and so on.”
-
This is maybe the most, OK, intelligent, tricky
-
and effective, cynical defense of a liar, when he said,
-
“OK, I’m lying, but so what? I openly confess that
-
I was lying, so, in a way, I’m truthful.”
-
Here we should repeat that Marx Brothers saying,
-
and this is what you de facto are doing, I claim.
-
You know that wonderful phrase from Groucho Marx, I think,
-
when he’s playing a lawyer defending his client,
-
and he says, “This guy looks as an idiot and acts as an idiot.
-
This shouldn’t deceive you. This guy is an idiot.”
-
We should say to Donald Rumsfeld,
-
“OK, you admit you act as a liar.
-
You are a cheater and a liar.
-
But this will not deceive us.
-
You effectively are a cheater and a liar.”
-
We should not allow them this space
-
of selling their lies themselves
-
in a cynical way as a deeper truth.
-
This is how ideology today functions.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, I wanted to ask you
-
about the Arab Spring and about what you see as
-
WikiLeaks’ role in what started in Tunisia, on to Egypt,
-
we’re seeing in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Libya.
-
What role did WikiLeaks play?
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s hard to disentangle,
-
but the story that we have back from people who were in Egypt
-
and from the newspaper Al Akhbar,
-
one of the great newspapers
-
published in the Middle East out of Lebanon.
-
AMY GOODMAN: You lived in Egypt for a time.
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: I lived in Egypt during 2007,
-
so I’m familiar with the Mubarak regime
-
and the tensions within the Egyptian environment.
-
Actually, I was staying at that time,
-
a rather unusual circumstance,
-
where I was staying in Miss Egypt’s house.
-
And Miss Egypt’s house,
-
other than having paintings of Miss Egypt all throughout,
-
was clustered right between the U.S. embassy
-
and the British High Commission,
-
with a van outside fueled with 24 soldiers
-
in front of my front door.
-
And so, for the sort of work we were doing,
-
this seemed to be sort of the ultimate cover,
-
if you like, to be right nested amongst this.
-
But, you know, it’s an interesting—
-
Egypt is a very interesting place.
-
At that time, you didn’t feel, in most areas of Cairo,
-
the presence of the dictatorship.
-
In fact, if you look out on the streets, men go to work.
-
They go to the cafés to have shisha in the afternoon.
-
The pigeon boys come out onto the roof.
-
And there’s weddings on a Saturday and a Sunday.
-
And in fact,
-
the economic basis and the technological basis to Cairo
-
seemed pretty much the same as London,
-
if you compare it to Australian aboriginals.
-
So, to my mind, actually, if we say that it is democracy
-
that rules and manages the United States, or it is
-
democracy, electoral democracy, that manages and rules London,
-
this is completely ridiculous,
-
because when we look at countries
-
that are dictatorships, or soft dictatorships
-
as in the case of Egypt, the day-to-day life
-
and the technological activities
-
and the patterns of behavior for most people
-
are exactly the same.
-
But it’s when you stray into those areas of Egypt
-
and areas of Cairo, where the Interior Ministry is
-
or where the Foreign Ministry is,
-
that the level of paranoia and fear
-
and the number of people guarding with submachine guns,
-
and so on, increases.
-
At that time, there was around 20,000 political prisoners
-
of different types in Egypt.
-
But remember,
-
Egypt has a population of around 80 million.
-
So, this is always something that I am aware of,
-
when you have an intelligentsia that writes,
-
and writes about its problems,
-
because this is the mirror
-
image of the problem
-
we now have with the mainstream press, which is,
-
writers always write to their own favor
-
and their own considerations
-
and their own self-interests.
-
So, a country which goes from a position of—
-
can go from a position of not treating writers well
-
to treating writers well
-
and not treating everyone else well.
-
By writers,
-
I mean people who have ability to project a voice.
-
So, for those 20,000 political prisoners in Egypt,
-
they could gain no traction in the Western press.
-
And yet, others, such as in Iran,
-
we hear about all the time.
-
It’s very interesting that Egypt was perceived
-
to be a strong ally of Israel and strong ally
-
of the United States in that region,
-
and so all the human rights abuses and political abuses
-
that were occurring every day in Egypt simply
-
did not get traction.
-
And there was one moment where—
-
rather actually unusual for Egypt,
-
but perhaps a sign of the cleverness
-
that came to be represented in the Arab Spring,
-
where these 20,000 prisoners started a strike
-
demanding conjugal rights,
-
demanding that their wives be permitted
-
to visit them in prison for sex,
-
and then got some prominent muftis to come out and say,
-
"Look, it’s bad enough that these people
-
are political agitators,
-
let alone homosexual political agitators."
-
And that is then something that was picked up
-
by the Western press,
-
because it had this extra salacious flavor.
-
And so, that was my—
-
some of my experiences with Egypt when I lived there.
-
Later on, when we worked on Cablegate,
-
we selected a French partner, Le Monde,
-
in order to get the cables into French,
-
because we knew that they would have an effect
-
in Francophone Africa.
-
Also, cables were published in early December
-
by Al Akhbar in Arabic from Lebanon,
-
and also Al-Masry Al-Youm in Egypt,
-
although material that was published in Egypt
-
back in December, under Mubarak, was pretty soft,
-
because of the threats that that newspaper was under.
-
But Al-Masry Al-Youm pushed hard, and there was—
-
a number of critical cables came out
-
about the Tunisian regime and about Ben Ali.
-
Now, of course, the argument that has often been used,
-
including, for example, in the electoral result
-
that we were involved in in Kenya in 2007,
-
is you just tell the people what’s going on,
-
and then they’ll be angry about it, and they’ll oppose it.
-
But actually, the real situation is much more rich
-
and interesting than that.
-
Rather, yes, the demos knows, the population starts to know,
-
and they start to know in a way that’s undeniable,
-
and they also start to know that the United States knows,
-
and the United States can’t deny
-
what was going on inside Tunisia.
-
And then the elites within the country and without the country
-
also know what is going on and know they can’t deny it.
-
So, a situation developed where it was not possible
-
for the United States to support the Ben Ali regime
-
and intervene in a revolution in Tunisia
-
in the way that it might have.
-
Similarly, it was not possible for France
-
to support Ben Ali or other partners in the same way
-
that they might have been able to.
-
Also, in our strategy in dealing with this region,
-
and our survival strategy for Cablegate was to overwhelm.
-
That is, we have Saudi Arabia, for example,
-
propping up a number of states in the Middle East,
-
and in fact invading Bahrain even to do this.
-
But when these states
-
have problems of their own to deal with
-
and political crises of their own to deal with,
-
they turn inwards,
-
and they can’t be involved in this prop-up.
-
So, Cablegate, as a whole,
-
caused these elites that prop each other up in the region,
-
within the Arab-speaking countries,
-
and within—between Europe and these countries
-
and between the United States and these countries,
-
to have to deal with their own political crises
-
and not spend time
-
giving intelligence briefings on activists
-
or sending in the SAS or other support.
-
And activists within Tunisia saw this. Very quickly,
-
I think, they started to see an opportunity.
-
And that information, our site, a number of WikiLeaks sites,
-
were then immediately banned by the Tunisian government.
-
Al Akhbar was banned by the Tunisian government.
-
A hacker attack was launched on Al Akhbar.
-
Many were launched on us,
-
but we had come to defend against them.
-
Al Akhbar was taken down.
-
Their whole newspaper was redirected to a Saudi sex site.
-
Believe it or not,
-
there is such a thing as a Saudi sex site.
-
And they wrested it back through involvement of the
-
foreign ministry in Lebanon.
-
And then, what I believe to be state-based computer hackers
-
because of the degree of the sophistication of the attack,
-
came in and wiped out
-
all of Al Akhbar’s cable publishing efforts.
-
The cables about Tunisia were then spread around online,
-
in other forms, translated by a little internet group
-
called Tunileaks,
-
and so presented a number of different facets
-
that sort of—that everyone could see,
-
and no one could deny,
-
that the Ben Ali regime was fundamentally corrupt.
-
It’s not that the people there didn’t know it before,
-
but it became undeniable to everyone,
-
including the United States, and that the United States,
-
or at least the State Department, could be read,
-
that if it came down to supporting the army or Ben Ali,
-
they would probably support the army, the military class,
-
rather than the political class.
-
So that gave activists and the army
-
a belief that they could possibly pull it off.
-
But this wasn’t enough.
-
So, all that was intellectual and was making a difference
-
and was stirring things up in Tunisia.
-
And then you had this action by a 26-year-old computer
-
technician, who set—
-
who self-immolated on December 16 last year.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Mohamed Bouazizi.
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. And was hospitalized
-
and died on January 4th.
-
And that taking a sort of intellectual frustration
-
and irritation and hunger for change
-
and undeniability to an emotional,
-
physical act on the street is then what changed the equation.
-
But there’s other things that sort of—
-
a more systemic issue that was gradually breeding up,
-
which is you had aging rulers in the Middle East that—
-
whose regimes, to that extent, were becoming weaker,
-
and that the intellectual management of them
-
was decreasing.
-
You also had the rise of satellite TV
-
and the decision by Al Jazeera staff
-
to film and broadcast protest scenes in the street.
-
So, most revolutions kick off in a crowd situation
-
like this one,
-
where everyone can—you know,
-
all the time the regime is saying,
-
"This voice is an outcast voice. This a minority.
-
This is not popular opinion."
-
And what the media does is censor those voices
-
and prevents people from understanding that actually
-
that what the state is saying
-
is in the minority is in the majority.
-
And once people realize that their view is in the majority,
-
then they understand they physically have the numbers.
-
And there’s no better way to do that
-
then in some kind of public square,
-
which is why Tahrir Square in Egypt was so important,
-
because everyone could see that they had the numbers.
-
And that’s—you know,
-
I often perceive that there are moments
-
like that politically—yes, the Middle East was one—
-
that we might be going through.
-
You know, you saw, just before the Berlin Wall fell,
-
everyone thought that it was impossible.
-
Why? I mean, if—
-
it’s not that people suddenly received
-
a lot of new information.
-
Rather, what—
-
the information that they received is that everyone,
-
a large majority of people, had the same beliefs that they had,
-
and people became sure of that,
-
and then you have a sudden switch, a sudden state change,
-
and then you have a revolution. So,
-
I often feel that we’re on the edge
-
of that and that alternative ways of people
-
becoming aware of what their beliefs are,
-
what each other’s beliefs are,
-
is something that introduces that truly democratic shift.
-
I’ve often lambasted bloggers as people
-
who just want to demonstrate peer value conformity
-
and who don’t actually do any original news,
-
don’t do any original work,
-
when we release original documentation on many things,
-
although the situation is, very interestingly, improving.
-
Often we find that all these left-wing bloggers
-
do not descend on a fresh cable from Panama, revealing,
-
as it did today, that the United States has declared
-
the right to board one-third of all ships in the world
-
without any justification.
-
They do not descend on that.
-
Rather, they read the front
-
page of the New York Times and go,
-
“I disagree” or “I agree” or “I agree in my categories.”
-
And that is something that has sort of—
-
that hypocrisy of saying that you care about a situation,
-
but not actually doing the work,
-
is something that has angered me.
-
But it does serve an important function.
-
The function that it serves is the function of the square.
-
It is to show the number of voices that are lining up,
-
on one side or another.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Before you respond, I just wanted to ask,
-
since you talked about what you released today,
-
you also have just sued MasterCard and Visa.
-
Can you explain, this weekend, why you did that?
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: You know,
-
when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers—actually,
-
I spoke to Daniel Ellsberg last night.
-
He told me an incredible story about that.
-
But did you know the New York Times
-
had a thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers
-
one month before
-
Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers
-
to the New York Times?
-
Fresh news. Amazing stuff.
-
Yeah, I’ll leave that aside.
-
Sorry, what was the question?
-
Oh, yes, MasterCard.
-
So, when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers,
-
did they suddenly change things?
-
Actually, Nixon was reelected after Daniel Ellsberg
-
released the Pentagon Papers.
-
The Vietnam War didn’t stop.
-
The information was very important in all sorts of ways,
-
and its importance over time was very important.
-
The most important thing to come out of the Pentagon Papers
-
was the reaction to the Pentagon Papers,
-
because the Pentagon Papers
-
described a situation in the past,
-
what the past was like,
-
but the reaction to the Pentagon Papers described
-
what was going on right now,
-
and it showed a tremendous overreach
-
by the Nixon administration,
-
various attempts to cover things up.
-
And actually, the New York Times really probably
-
wouldn’t have published the Pentagon Papers
-
unless they thought it was going
-
to be published anyway, which they did.
-
It was scheduled to be published
-
in four months’ time in a book. Very, very interesting.
-
So, on December 6th last year, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal,
-
the Bank of America, Western Union
-
all ganged up together to engage
-
in an economic blockade against WikiLeaks,
-
and that economic blockade has continued since that point.
-
So, it’s over six months now we have been suffering
-
from an extrajudicial economic
-
blockade that has occurred without any process whatsoever.
-
In fact, the only two formal
-
investigations into this,
-
one was on January 13 last year
-
by Timothy C. Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury,
-
who found that there was no lawful excuse
-
to conduct an economic blockade against WikiLeaks,
-
and the other was by a Visa subsidiary,
-
who was handling our European payments,
-
Teller, who found that we were not
-
in breach of any of Visa’s bylines or regulations.
-
Those are the only two formal inquiries.
-
And yet, the blockade continues.
-
It’s an extraordinary thing, that we have seen that Visa,
-
MasterCard, Western Union, and so on,
-
are instruments of U.S. foreign policy,
-
but instruments of U.S.— of not U.S., as in a state
-
operating under laws foreign policy,
-
but rather instruments of Washington’s
-
patronage network policy.
-
So there was no due process at all.
-
And so, over the past few months—you know,
-
we have a number of cases on,
-
so we have been a bit distracted.
-
But over the last few months,
-
we have built up the case against Visa and MasterCard,
-
under European law.
-
And Visa and MasterCard together own about
-
95 percent of the credit card payment industry in Europe,
-
and therefore they have a sort of market dominance,
-
and that means, under European law,
-
they cannot engage in certain actions
-
to unfairly remove people from the market.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of other legal cases,
-
I just wanted to ask you about what you face next week,
-
the extradition case on July 12th.
-
The Nation magazine has done two pieces.
-
One is forthcoming.
-
And they quote your new lawyer, Gareth Peirce,
-
who is very well known
-
for representing prisoners at Guantánamo,
-
a renowned human rights attorney.
-
And Tom Hayden, who writes the piece,
-
interviewed many people in Sweden and the United States
-
and sort of talks about a feeling in Sweden of an attack,
-
very much represented by your past lawyers,
-
on the Swedish justice system
-
and on the integrity of the women in Sweden.
-
And he quotes Gareth Peirce saying, "The—
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, our lawyers never attacked
-
any integrity of women.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Well, he quotes Gareth Peirce saying,
-
“The history of this case is
-
as unfortunate as it is possible to imagine.
-
Each of the human beings involved
-
deserves respect and consideration.”
-
And I just wanted to ask
-
if you are seeing this as a change of approach
-
with your legal team
-
in dealing with your possible extradition to Sweden?
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: Possibly. I mean, the situation—
-
what has happened to Europe
-
and what has happened to Sweden is fascinating.
-
I mean, it’s something that I have come to learn
-
because I’ve been embroiled in it.
-
But it is intellectually extraordinary.
-
So, we see, for example, that the European Union
-
introduced an arrest warrant system.
-
And that arrest warrant system
-
to extradite from one state of the E.U.
-
to another state of the E.U.
-
was put in place in response to 9/11
-
to extradite terrorists,
-
to have fast extradition of terrorists.
-
And it introduced this concept,
-
or rather recycled a European Union concept
-
of mutual recognition.
-
This is sort of a very feel-good phrase,
-
that one state in the E.U.
-
mutually recognizes another state in the E.U.,
-
and that sunk down into mutual recognition
-
between one court in the E.U. to another court in the E.U.
-
But actually, what it seems to be talking about,
-
if you think about it,
-
given the reality that three people a day
-
are extradited from this country
-
to the rest of Europe,
-
is a mutual recognition
-
of the elite in each country in the E.U.
-
It is a method of being at peace.
-
So, the elite in each country in the E.U. has, if you like,
-
made literally a treaty with each other
-
to recognize each other and to not complain
-
about the behavior.
-
Now, you might say that, well, OK,
-
we have justice systems in the E.U. and various countries.
-
Yes, they vary in all sorts of ways.
-
Some are better, some are worse,
-
depending on your values system.
-
But we have sunk so low that
-
it’s not even like that anymore.
-
The European arrest warrant talks about
-
the mutual recognition of judicial authorities—
-
so, courts.
-
But it has permitted each country
-
to define what they call a judicial authority.
-
And Sweden has chosen to call
-
policemen and prosecutors judicial authorities.
-
And the whole basis of this term being used,
-
in the original introduction of the European arrest warrant,
-
was that you would keep the executive
-
separated from the judicial system,
-
that it was meant to be a natural and neutral party
-
who would request extradition.
-
And it’s not.
-
So, there are many things like this
-
that are going on in that case.
-
I haven’t been charged.
-
So, is it right to extradite someone to a state
-
where they do not speak the language,
-
where they do not have family,
-
they do not know the lawyers,
-
they do not know the legal system?
-
If you don’t even have enough evidence to charge them,
-
you won’t even come over, as we have offered many times,
-
to speak to the people concerned.
-
So, previous complaints about these sort of problems
-
have led to some inquires in Sweden.
-
For instance, the biggest Swedish law magazine,
-
that goes out to all the lawyers,
-
had a survey on this,
-
and one-third of the lawyers responding said that,
-
yes, that these complaints
-
about the Swedish judicial system,
-
they truly are a problem.
-
On the other hand, it has also engendered a situation
-
where the Swedish prime minister
-
and the Swedish justice minister
-
have personally attacked me and said—
-
the Swedish prime minister said that I had been charged,
-
to the Swedish public, when I hadn’t been.
-
So it is a delicate situation.
-
The Sweden—the Sweden we have now
-
is not the Sweden of Olof Palme in the 1970s.
-
Sweden recently sent troops—
-
recently passed a bill to send marines into Libya.
-
It was the fifth country out to send fighter jets into Libya.
-
This is a different dynamic that is happening now,
-
and we have to be careful dealing with it.
-
So it’s one thing to sort of be considerate
-
of differences in the way various justice systems
-
are administered,
-
but it is another to tolerate any difference.
-
And I don’t think any difference
-
should be tolerated in the E.U.
-
You know, what is it that prevents
-
the justice systems of E.U. states
-
from fundamentally collapsing and decaying?
-
We say there’s mutual recognition.
-
It’s mutual recognition between the U.K. and Romania.
-
And what if the Romanian justice system
-
collapses more and more and more?
-
Who’s going to account for that?
-
Who’s going to scrutinize it?
-
Is it going to be some bureaucrats in the EC
-
that are going to scrutinize the Romanian justice system?
-
No. The only sustainable approach
-
to scrutinizing the justice systems of the E.U.
-
is the extradition process.
-
So, it is extradition lawyers and defendants
-
who have the highest motivation to scrutinize
-
the quality of justice in the state
-
that they are being extradited to.
-
And that’s a healthy system that permits outside scrutiny,
-
and so it can stop European states from decaying.
-
But the European arrest warrant system
-
removes that possibility.
-
It’s not open to us
-
to look at any of the facts in the case
-
in the extradition at all.
-
That is completely removed.
-
All we’re arguing about is whether
-
the two-page request that was filled out,
-
which literally has a box ticked "rape,"
-
is a valid document.
-
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll end with Slavoj Žižek.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: OK, first, I’m so sad
-
we don’t have time to go into it,
-
because I found this, again, yet another this.
-
By "this," I mean this strange mutual recognition
-
and this absolutely—think about it, what you’ve heard—
-
this properly Kafkaesque paradox
-
of being extradited without even being charged.
-
I mean, are we aware where we are?
-
But let’s not take that path.
-
First, I cannot but restrain from making an obscene—
-
lovingly obscene—remark of how, when you said you were staying
-
with the Miss of Egypt,
-
no, I hope there will be some American fundamentalist
-
who will say, “Ah, now everything is clear.
-
There, you were seduced by that Miss
-
who was really al-Qaeda agent,
-
and then you were turned into a terrorist agent
-
through her to do your terrorist activity.
-
Now things are clear now." OK, so let’s go on with more—
-
AMY GOODMAN: We have one minute to go.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: OK, yeah, yeah, but one minute in this broader
-
Christian sense,
-
where time is eternity and so on.
-
Very briefly, first, I’ll—that also those Palestinian Papers,
-
that kind of you triggered the movement,
-
I wonder if you agree. I’ve read them.
-
What made me so depressive is that
-
my liberal Israeli friends were telling me all the time,
-
"Listen, we admit it.
-
We are doing bad thing on the West Bank.
-
But you cannot negotiate if they bomb you like."
-
Let’s just—and if you, of course, examine Gaza,
-
on the West Bank, there was practically total peace
-
the last five, six, even more years.
-
The image you get from these papers
-
is that there was an incredible compromising spirit
-
from the Palestinian side,
-
offering them practically entire Jerusalem and so on.
-
And it was absolutely clear that it’s Israel
-
which is not interested in peace.
-
Second—just a couple of points.
-
Second point, I think it’s so important
-
the exact words you use, which make my point,
-
which confirm my point—namely, how undeniable‚
-
they could no longer deny it, and so on.
-
That’s important. You know, again,
-
we are in this situation where
-
it’s I know you know.
-
I know that you know; you know, that I know.
-
But we can still play the cynical game,
-
"Let’s act as if we don’t know."
-
The function of WikiLeaks, even more important, I claim,
-
in concrete ideological, political situations,
-
then learning us—then learning through WikiLeaks something new
-
is to push us to this point
-
where you cannot pretend not to know.
-
Which is why—let me give you another example.
-
Again, I’m not a total fan of Obama,
-
although I still have certain respect for him.
-
But this is cynicism at its purist.
-
You remember this outcry in Zionist circles
-
where Obama made the simple point that—
-
not even exact frontiers—
-
that the basis of peace should be the borders,
-
the ’67 borders.
-
My god,
-
the critical reaction was as if Obama said something—
-
I don’t know—following orders from al-Qaeda or what.
-
But this was the official U.S. policy accepted.
-
Only the obscenity of the situation was that,
-
although this was officially the U.S. policy,
-
it was part of the unwritten deal not to talk about it,
-
to ignore it.
-
That’s our situation here.
-
Step further, Egypt. I know—you know what’s for me—
-
and you had here a lot—the truth about Egypt.
-
We, western Europeans,
-
had this normal spontaneous racist attitude:
-
no, we would love to see a secular democratic movement
-
in Arab countries;
-
unfortunately, all they can do is some stupid anti-Semitic,
-
fundamentalist, nationalist, whatever, outburst.
-
Now, officially, we got exactly what we wanted,
-
a purely secular uprising and so on,
-
and you know how we behaved?
-
My last loving, obscene example.
-
Did you see François Truffaut, Day and Night?
-
Where a guy wants to sleep with a girl,
-
tries to convince her for a long time,
-
then finally they are alone
-
because of an accident by a lake, and again he starts,
-
“Please, let’s do it quickly. We are alone here,”
-
and the girl says, “OK, let’s do it,”
-
and starts to unbutton her trousers.
-
And the guy says,
-
"OK, but how do you mean? My god, just like that?”
-
or whatever, like he is shocked.
-
We were a little bit like that.
-
Officially, we wanted secular democracy.
-
The Egyptians said, “OK, I pull down my trousers.
-
Here you have your stupid secular democracy."
-
And, "Uh-uh, you cannot get it just like that."
-
It was such a clear example of hypocrisy.
-
Now, really to finish, maybe the most important thing,
-
what you already said, I think, Amy.
-
I think maybe this is one of the ways,
-
if we are approaching the end, to conclude it.
-
Even if you ignore WikiLeaks, it’s changed the entire field.
-
It’s, again, even at the level of publishing,
-
spreading informations,
-
you pushed things in a very formal way,
-
to a point of undeniability.
-
Nobody can pretend that WikiLeaks didn’t happen.
-
And it would be very interesting
-
to classify all reactions to WikiLeaks.
-
You know, as different forms of, in psychoanalytic terms,
-
repression, denial, whatever, some people say formally,
-
“Yeah, yeah,” but try to neutralize it, like,
-
“Ooh, another chapter in
-
freedom of the press, investigative journalism."
-
Others says directly terrorism.
-
I wonder the approach I would have followed
-
if I were to be on the other side,
-
would have been something like, "It’s basically a good thing.
-
It’s just misused by some extremists, you know."
-
And then you kind of say,
-
precisely to save the safe core of—good core of WikiLeaks.
-
So, what I am saying is that, again, to conclude—
-
don’t worry—this is the moment of truth.
-
WikiLeaks is an event, not only because
-
of what exists as in itself,
-
but because nobody can ignore it,
-
it changed the entire field.
-
The point is not to allow to be renormalized,
-
to remain faithful to it.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Just a note:
-
Slavoj and I will be out
-
signing books on the left in the lobby
-
right afterwards and would love to talk to you.
-
Definitely pick up a flyer.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I don’t want to talk to people.
-
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, you do. And end on—
-
I wanted to end with this question.
-
Julian, tomorrow, July 3rd, you turn 40 years old.
-
What are you hopes for the future?
-
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, there’s the big future,
-
there’s the deep future, that one can long for.
-
So that is a future where we are all able
-
to freely communicate our hopes and dreams,
-
factual information about the world
-
with each other,
-
and the historical record is an item
-
that is completely sacrosanct,
-
that would never be changed, never be modified,
-
never be deleted,
-
and that we will steer a course away from Orwell’s dictum of
-
"he who controls the present controls the past."
-
So that is something that is my life-long quest to do.
-
And from all—from that, justice flows, because each—
-
most of us have an instinct for justice,
-
and most of us are reasonably intelligent,
-
and if we can communicate with each other, organize,
-
not be oppressed, and know what’s going on,
-
then pretty much the rest falls out.
-
So, that is my big hope.
-
In the short term, it is that my staff stop
-
hassling me to tell me to go.
-
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK What I wish you to, all the best,
-
is another, even more beautiful Miss Egypt.
