By Dennis Loo
There is a scene in the 1997 film “The Devil’s Advocate” starring Keanu Reeves, Al Pacino and Charlize Theron based on the Andrew Neiderman novel that speaks to the war over Wikileaks now raging.
Mary Ann Lomax (Charlize Theron) goes clothes shopping with two wives of associates of her attorney husband Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves). For a split second the two very well heeled, fashionably attired, and beautiful wives she is with are revealed to Mary Ann in their true visages as despicable looking demons. Mary Ann tries to warn her husband that he’s getting involved with dark forces and that the law firm’s blandishments of riches are bait. Kevin chalks it up to Mary Ann’s mental instability and has her committed to a mental institution where she ends up killing herself. Kevin later discovers to his horror that Mary Ann was right: his boss John Milton (Al Pacino) turns out not only to be his biological father, but Satan himself.
Today the Empire is showing its true nature, while all of its fine representatives are dressed up in their finest garb, prominently displaying their American flag lapels, looking all so respectable, regal and deadly serious. The Empire’s face and hands, however, are dripping with blood and its voice demands vengeance.
Doctor:
What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands.
Gentlewoman:
It is an accustom’d action with her, to seem thus
washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of
an hour.
Lady Macbeth:
Yet here’s a spot.
Doctor:
Hark, she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to
satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
Lady Macbeth:
Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow’r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?
Macbeth Act 5, scene 1, 26–40
This malicious face and wringing, trembling, wrinkled, and gnarled hands we now see on our television screens and implicit in print in the U.S. is the one that the Empire shows daily in other parts of the world, especially where it is waging murderous and unjust war upon the people of some of the world’s poorest nations. The revelations that Wikileaks and Julian Assange are funneling from the heroic whistleblowers who are providing Wikileaks these documents has provoked the Empire to demand that all these glimpses of the true nature of the Empire’s actions and motives be erased: “Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!” The Empire demands more blood to wash away the blood that they continue to shed in rivers of red.
Can blood clean up blood? Can murder undo murder? Can silencing the victims and those who are awakening to the truth ensure that only the Empire’s voices are heard?
Oh but how innocent these defenders of the Empire are!
The over the top vilification and calls for prosecution and death of Julian Assange by our public officials of both parties and by web-scribes, variously calling Assange a “high tech terrorist,” someone who the CIA should hunt down like Al-Qaeda, someone who the CIA should have garroted long ago, a treasonous criminal (despite the fact that he’s not American but Australian), calls for changing the law so that they can smash him and his organization and anyone who even reads his dastardly revelations into bits… this is the public discourse of our time. These are the people in charge of our collective fates and of this planet.
It’s all right to advocate murder openly, as some of these leaders are doing, but it’s not all right to make public the ill deeds and crimes that our government wants to conceal? Making public affairs public is a capital offense, according to the people who run the Capitol.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, “First, kill the messenger.”
Even journalists and media critics are beside themselves. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer wants to make sure that the government doesn’t let out any of its secrets in the future, including to him as a journalist. As Glenn Greenwald described it:
"On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was beside himself with rage over the fact that the US government had failed to keep all these things secret from him… Then – like the Good Journalist he is – Blitzer demanded assurances that the Government has taken the necessary steps to prevent him, the media generally and the citizenry from finding out any more secrets: ‘Do we know yet if they’ve [done] that fix? In other words, somebody right now who has top secret or secret security clearance can no longer download information onto a CD or a thumb drive? Has that been fixed already?’ The central concern of Blitzer – one of our nation’s most honored ‘journalists’ – is making sure that nobody learns what the US Government is up to."
Todd Gitlin, the media’s favorite “authority” on the Sixties, scorns in the New Republic that Assange’s Wikileaks whistleblowing are just a data dump, signifying nothing. It’s interesting that the data dump has the Empire’s henchmen, front men and women in a fury. They don’t agree with Herr Doctor Professor Gitlin that this is all merely a data dump.
Why the open calls for assassination? Why the talk from the Attorney General about changing the law to allow them to go after anyone who the Empire can’t tolerate? Why this level of intolerance and retribution?
On August 11, 2009 during the early stages of the Health Care Town Hall Meetings I wrote:
“The intimidation and bullying, thuggish, atmosphere fueled by alarmist, fabricated, lying, and distorted propaganda from the organs of right wing extremists at Fox News, the Christian fascist movement and the motley crew of fascists working in collusion with the GOP leadership, are purposeful, engineered, and extremely dangerous…
“When a movement seeks to take power, they do so in steps. By this point all too many steps have already been taken to fascist norms. The transition from being afraid to speak up [for the health care plan] to being physically shut up is a short step indeed.”
In order to mobilize people to accept or even cheer on atrocities, a radical attack on reason itself must be waged. Thoughtful people armed with actual facts have an all-too difficult time accepting irrationalities as their guides. A movement to defend privileges based on stoking fear and stirring up resentment must whip people into an emotional, anti-rational frenzy in which facts, logic, morality, and sense are eclipsed.
The GOP takes the lead in this because they are the most aggressive, cutting edge proponents of US Uber Alles, but the Democrats accept the premise of US Uber Alles too, which is why both parties sing the same tunes in harmony together.
This is the logical continuation of what Bush and Cheney so famously spearheaded and that Obama – that man of the people, that man of Hope and Change – has taken even further. The rule of law be damned. The law is what we say it is. It’s not a criminal act if the president orders it. When your ambitions are world domination then no one may even raise a question, let alone challenge official lies as lies, let alone present opposition, let alone act on their dissent or opposition. You have to destroy anything that creates difficulties for your goal of complete and utter domination. You must nullify even the notion that there is such a thing as truth separate from the exercise of domination by the rich and powerful. No other criterion can be allowed to stand up against your might. All must be swept aside and opposition of any kind, even the mildest, must be condemned as traitorous, treasonous, terroristic and be utterly destroyed as a lesson to others who entertain the notion that they might not accept the Empire’s word as the gospel. When you engage in a radical attack on the very notion of truth and objectivity, then you can only then rely upon ruling by fear and intimidation and must use generous truckloads of violence.
The violent rhetoric that flies like bats from the mouths of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and the equally menacing, but more calmly stated words of Obama, who orders your assassination as an enemy of the state, holds you for what you might do, not what you have done, or jokes that he can sic his drones on his daughter’s escorts if they disappoint or offend in any way: this is our America, 2010. This is the land of the lovers of freedom. This is the land of liberty. The sons of liberty are so vulnerable that they must crush any evidence of liberty being exercised lest liberty be destroyed by those daring to exercise liberty.
This is where things are and this alarming trajectory will continue as long as this war of terror goes unchallenged at its foundations, as long as the immoral logic that anything done to allegedly protect American lives is permissible, no matter how atrocious, immoral and illegal, goes unchallenged, and as long as enough people do not speak up and rise up at this historic moment.
The battle over Assange and Wikileaks, over Bradley Manning, over anti-war protesters that have been pre-emptively arrested and charged as terrorists, and over the truth tellers of our times (including the media that have not yet utterly sold their souls lock stock and barrel) is a life and death battle.
We dare not misread the signs and shrink before the perils that we see. If you have been waiting until it got bad enough to act, this is it. Now is the time.
This intriguing confluence of events which are happening now have been brewing for the past forty years. Slowly, but surely, the American people are in a fighting mood, but the real challenge will be to make sure that the American people aren’t misled, misdirected and manipulated into fighting against each other, instead of keeping their focus on doing battle with an ugly government/corporate partnership
which seeks to suppress truth while oppressing and repressing the population who need to know the truth and who are ready, willing and able to act on that truth, no matter what it costs.
Where’s that DEM anti-septic MEMORY Hole when you really need it, Blitz?!
Thank you Stephie for the correction and for your comment.
We are seeing a discernible shift occurring – it’s long overdue – in the fighting mood of the people. It’s evident among some of the progressive community’s leaders, evident among many of the people who had previously been strong supporters of Obama, and evident more broadly. There is a confluence of events happening now, Obama’s carrying forward of the Bush program, his craven capitulation to the GOP on the Bush tax cuts, the vicious attacks on Wikileaks and Assange, and the 2010 election results that are causing people to stir.
It’s very easy to mobilize people to accept or even cheer on atrocities when ignorance, illiteracy, impoverishment and deprivation are allowed to have their way with the population, and they become extremely vulnerable to the kinds of political and psychological manipulation which those who seek to exercise ultimate control and dominance over a psychologically crumbling citizenry.
Of course, it also helps if the citizenry is so ignorant, impoverished, deprived and illiterate on the political, legal, economic and spiritual levels to the point where they are no longer capable of taking their name and their nation seriously enough to fight back. When a people refuse to defend their name and nation against those who use that name to commit atrocities and other evils, the nation is headed for a collapse which will echo down the halls for history.
Excellent article as always, Mr. Loo, but if I may, I’d like to make a slight correction to your first paragraph. The novel, “The Devil’s Advocate” was written by Andrew Neiderman, not John Grisham. I read the novel several years ago, and it’s a good read, but I liked the film version better.