Saturday 16 February 2013

assange and the end of 'justice'




802 Days and Counting

Julian Assange and the Tilted Scales of Justice

by NOZOMI HAYASE
Justice is one of the most important virtues of a healthy society. The basic idea is that when a wrong is committed, there is a system to help right that wrong in a way that is equitably applied. Marcus Tullius Cicero, orator and statesman of Ancient Rome once said, “Justice commands us to have mercy upon all men, to consult the interests of the whole human race, to give to every one his due.” Justice is a scale that does not give favor to one side or the other, but stays in balance equally for everyone.





In a way, Assange has become a symbol of the tilted scale of justice, triggering vitriol and vilification by the controllers of the levers of power. The full force of corporate media outlets, governments and individuals worldwide have carried out unprecedented and prolonged attacks on Assange using all the classic tools of character assassination. As of mid February, he has been detained without charge for 802 days, 240 days at the Ecuadorian Embassy, due to England’s unwillingness to offer safe passage. Kevin McCabe in the conversation with his actor friend John Cusack and law school professor Jonathan Turley noted: “… what happens to [Assange] happens to the First Amendment.” Assange’s destiny is tied to the oppression of the world in the sense of him being a kind of canary in a coal mine.




George Orwell once said, “political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. The official rhetoric and the corporate media discourse now veils the crimes of the powerful and maintains the appearance of legitimacy. When the scale weighs one side over the other with obvious bias time and again, this skews the court of public opinion and the broken scale of justice is normalized. 20 years ago, no President could openly claim the right to assassinate anyone without widespread outrage. Now this is happening and there is hardly a whimper.





Established media has become a blatant mouthpiece for power with monopolized airwaves and manipulation of content. Now people are stepping up to crowd-source information through social media and have begun to counter the drastically tilted scale so weighted toward entrenched power. One might call it cultish devotion or see it as supporting a move toward a more just society.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/15/julian-assange-and-the-tilted-scales-of-justice/

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