Wikileaks: World Infowar I

The article: WikiLeaks: Winning the Info War Despite Assange's Arrest (Time)

Since I posted last, Julian Assange has been arrested. Wikileaks' original sites, hosts, and funding sources have been ripped away from them by an enraged American imperial government. The government and the "lamestream" corporate media have lined up behind Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly in calling for Assange's head on a platter, preferably bloody, with his mangled corpse paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in a Roman-style military triumph.

The outcome is already clear to see. Wikileaks is already winning.

The hacker underground's anarchist statement of faith is: Information wants to be free. Sure enough, faced with an escalating worldwide US government crackdown, the Internet is striking back. Wikileaks may not have a host anymore, but it now has over 500 mirror sites, and the number will only grow. The guerrilla hacker group Anonymous are attacking the online operations of corporations complying with the crackdown using denial of service attacks just like the one the US government attacked Wikileaks itself with before the Cablegate release. It's no longer the American Empire against one pesky leaker of government secrets. It's now the American Empire against the entire hacker underground. To them, Julian Assange is a hero. And now he is also a martyr. His arrest may well be his "Martin Luther King in Birmingham Jail" moment.

If you're trying to defeat an enemy, the worst thing you can do is turn him into a martyr. The US did just this to a psychopath named Osama bin Laden by invading Iraq in order to steal its oil for America's oilman elite. Now they've done this to Assange, making him the David to America's Goliath.

When he was president, American revolutionary John Adams declared that America did not go out looking for monsters to fight. Today, America exists for no other reason than to fight monsters, and even mass produces them in order to fight them. Many vested interests and infinite profits depend on this. The war between the US and Wikileaks was not only necessary, it was inevitable.

For the first time, the decentralizing force of the Internet is beginning to show its full power. The ancient tradition of government, even "democratic", is military-based command and control, in which the people know their place and the rulers make sure they stay there. The Internet, on the other hand, was purposely designed to be decentralized; in the ultimate irony, the US military insisted on creating it that way, so that it could withstand a Soviet nuclear attack, during the Cold War. For security reasons, the Internet is structured to avoid what is called a single point of vulnerability. In a system with such a vulnerability, take out that single point and you take out the whole system with it. But if the system is completely decentralized, it becomes extremely difficult to destroy, if not impossible. Redundancy is security in cyberspace.

Now that Julian Assange is in jail and the original Wikileaks site is permanently down by American decree, the single point of vulnerability is now gone. 500+ hackers' mirror sites can't be taken down so easily. The Empire now faces a far more protean foe, one increasingly determined to bring the entire corporatist system down. The American rulers still think they can pull a Tiananmen and crush the revolt. The anarchists who saved Wikileaks are instead working to inflict on the ailing Empire the fate of another seemingly invincible Communist despotism: the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It's more than just a clash between an angry empire and an empowered rebel underground. For the first time, the traditional world system is facing its successor. America is now fighting the future. But now a growing international revolt is fighting for the future. And yes, believe it or not, I can even quote Ayn Rand on this:

"Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today."

Obama's Neocon Turn Makes A Peace Movement Possible Again

The article: Is a Peace Movement Finally Awakening? by Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation

We know what the New Right is all about: corporate socialism. They call it Big Government Conservatism, and it consists of corporate welfare at home, imperial expansion abroad, and a national security state powered by religious fanaticism worthy of Al-Qaeda. The liberal Left, however, was all but defanged by the election of a black president who talked the liberal talk. But now we know that he walks the neocon walk. Liberals are actually starting to come out of their closets and protest again.

Guess what this means? Now that the Great Black Hope has proved to be just another tyrannical Great White Father, a left-wing peace movement has become possible once again. We antiwar libertarians are starting to believe we won't be so lonely for long.

Where liberals and libertarians part, of course, is in their opinion of government. Liberals, descending from the social democrats of the 19th and 20th centuries, believe that government can be used as a force for good, a weapon against the oppression of the masses. Libertarians are far more cynical: expansion of government welfare leads inevitably to the supreme corporate welfare of war and empire, or the other way around if the empire wants to buy the masses' loyalty. The supreme statement of the libertarian position comes from early 20th century libertarian Randolph Bourne: "War is the health of the state."

But now Obama has shown his true colors. He is indeed bent on destroying America — but on behalf of his real owners: the banksters who lead the New Right and fund the TEA Party. He sold us a bill of goods, you see. The liberals are now a constituency without representation. Some of them are beginning to complain. As the war between the US and Wikileaks escalates, and as an increasingly frustrated US government threatens to abolish freedom of speech and unleash Soviet-style secret police tactics in order to defend the empire and its war policy, they may actually start to realize they may have to take to the streets again, perhaps all the way to the barricades.

But until then, antiwar libertarians and socialists will remain the proverbial prophets crying out in the wilderness...

Barack Obama Jumps the Shark

The article: Obama Channels Reagan, and Risks Becoming Carter

Remember when I said, before the election catastrophe, that Rand Paul was over? Well, allow me to eat my words: he's not. In fact, he won. There can be only one reason why Rand Paul is not over:

Barack Obama is.

This time, he's gone too far. He's extended Bush's disastrous tax cuts for the rich! And without spending cuts to compensate. You know, Big Government Conservatism. Remember voodoo economics, the religion of Wall Street? You know, the magical thinking that claims tax cuts for the rich without spending cuts will cut deficits? He's now its most ardent acolyte. He's now defending his support of the Republican agenda against the liberal base that elected him. The people who voted for hope and change in 2008 are now every bit as unrepresented as the British colonials who started the American Revolution.

Even earlier, not long after he rode the wave of hope and change into office, he betrayed the millions of actual liberals who voted him into the White House by going to West Poing to announce a George W. Bush surge in the Afghan war. This war, like any other colonial war against the Middle East, has never been for the purpose of preserving freedom. Its only purpose is profit for the corporate welfare kings, particularly the oil barons and war profiteers. That's when he strangled all his beautiful promises in the crib, promises he never had any intention of ever keeping.

Now the man the TEA Party thinks is a Kenyan-born agent of Osama bin Laden has completed his transformation into a neocon. Yes, he is determined to destroy America. But with enemies like Obama, do Al-Qaeda even need friends? His plan for the destruction of America was written by America's corporate owners on Wall Street and their agents in the Republican Party. This is the beginning of the end of Obama's one and only term as president, for he has now definitively jumped the shark. Only the neocons are left in government now. There is only one party left, the party of corporatism and empire. The US government does not belong to the people, and never has; it is democratic only in theory, but oligarchic in design. Today, America is not its people but its corporations.

Obama's failure is the failure of the Democratic Party. The Republicans may be at each other's throats to the point that it threatens to split in two; but it's the Democratic party that's collapsing. The Democrats are an echo of the Republicans. An echo, not a choice. If the GOP is the Evil Party in the 1 1/2-party system that H.L. Mencken described almost a century ago, then the Dems can only be the Stupid Party.

No wonder they got clobbered by the TEA Party reactionaries in the '10 election! But said rebels are also signalling their eagerness to sell out to our corporate slavemasters. They shouldn't expect to be immune from the populist backlash, either, when the reckoning comes in two years.

I tell you, it's going to get ugly come 2012. Watch the Democratic primary. And don't bet on the incumbent winning it.

Back to Take Nothing On Faith...

Wikileaks: The Pentagon Papers Escalating into Watergate -- and More

Remember the BP disaster, America's Chernobyl? It gets better! All this year, Wikileaks has been posting all kinds of classified US government material that was leaked by a single disgruntled Army private named Bradley Manning. I haven't been keeping track of the disaster that's been snowballing for the American Empire here, since in recent months I've been too busy retweeting the news. Thus, I missed the opportunity to comment on what I immediately recognized as the Iraq/Af-Pak War counterpart to the Pentagon Papers (which you can read here). Now that this new Pentagon Papers scandal is exploding into a full-blown Watergate, I have to say something. First: a quick rundown of the events:

• On April 5, Wikileaks released classified video of an American helicopter attack intended to massacre Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, and for no other reason. Wikileaks' name for the incident: Collateral Murder.
• On July 25, they released over 90,000 classified US military documents on the Afghan war, collectively known as the Afghan War Diary. This was what reminded me of the Pentagon Papers. Once again, the Empire got egg on its collective face.
• On October 22, they released nearly 400,000 secret US Army field reports in the biggest leak in American military history, known as the Iraq War Logs. This leak focused not just on American massacres of unarmed civilians, but the occupation authorities' tolerance of murders by the Iraqi police and military.
• November 28 was the first day of the most embarrassing leak yet, which Wikileaks has dubbed Cablegate and Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com calls simply The Big Dump. The first 291 of over 250,000 diplomatic cables from the US State Department were released. In an attempt to stop it and hopefully destroy Wikileaks, the US government had a cyberagent codenamed "Jester" pull a massive denial of service attack against the site. The attack failed; the site was back up within hours and began releasing the cables. Still, Obama and Clinton warned every single government leader in the world about the leak right before it started.

Al-Qaeda Is A Cult

The article: "Can Utilizing Knowledge of Cults Help Us with Terrorist Groups?" by Steven Hassan

Some of you will surely dispute me on this, the same way people disagree when I insist that there is no such thing as a split infinitive. Some will insist Al-Qaeda is strictly a "terror organization". As with the alleged split infinitive in English, this is really a semantic quibble. I look at it structurally. The Manson Family and Aum Supreme Truth committed some of history's most infamous acts of terrorism, but they have always been seen as what they are: doomsday cults. Structurally, in organization and doctrine, Al-Qaeda is clearly a cult.

The author of the linked article, Steven Hassan, is a former Moonie (Sun Myung Moon/Unification Church cultist) turned cult expert. His experience in a cult allows him to know a cult when he sees it. I decided to write this entry when I read his article and realized that he was saying publicly what I already believed but hadn't told anybody yet (except maybe my mother and brother). He begins: "When is it time to start recognizing that Al Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups are cults?"

American Chernobyl: The BP Disaster

You've heard all about the BP oil spill, on TV and online, in the business and environmental and political news. Well, guess what? The Republican Party and the TEA Party are loudly defending the sovereign right of BP's corporate raider owners to destroy whatever the hell they damn well feel like, in the name of the "free market". The problem with BP is that the "free market" is hardly free at all. The problem is corporatism.

Corporatism, a form of synarchism, is socialism for giant corporations and the financial elite. Its core policy consists of privatizing profit while socializing risk and harm. To that purpose, the government enacts protectionist laws to restrict competition. Private business is completely embedded in government and should be considered a branch of government.

Yes, free markets exist, even in America. But the oil industry is not one of them. It is controlled by a corporatist monopoly cartel, some of whose members (most notably ARAMCO) are owned by fundamentalist Islamic dictatorships and absolute monarchies.

Corporatism requires state socialism in order to prevent competition. But competition is the lifeblood of any true free market. No free competition means no free market. The oil cartel bought the US presidency for Enron executive George W. Bush with corporatist state socialism as its mandate to him. He corporatized the US government faithfully, going so far as to use the US armed forces as the cartel's mercenaries to pirate the oil from Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon (and this will be faithfully carried out by future corporate lawyer Barack Obama) Iran.

Chernobyl was the inevitable result of Russian state socialism under the Soviet Union. I've heard tweets that the BP disaster is Obama's Hurricane Katrina. It is not. It is American corporatism's Chernobyl. It is destroying the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea the same way that nuclear meltdown destroyed a corner of Ukraine. It's not just BP that's to blame. The entire oil cartel, the US government, the irresponsible financial elite, and the entire system of corporatism are to blame. The bad karma is theirs, and that of their "populist" apologists for corporate dictatorship.

Chernobyl was the omen of Communism's collapse. The BP oil disaster, the American Chernobyl, is the same thing. Soon American Corporatism will follow Russian Communism into the trash compactor of history.

Rand Paul Is Over: or, Why Conservative Libertarianism Is a Contradiction in Terms

The article: "Rachel Maddow Demolishes Rand Paul" by Joan Walsh, Salon

Yesterday, "fighting liberal" MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow interviewed Kentucky senatorial candidate and "TEA Party" favorite Rand Paul on her show after he crushed his establishment opponent, secretary of state Trey Grayson, in the Republican primary election. Joan Walsh insists Maddow won big. Ray Beckerman is not so sure. Me, I had to see for myself. So I read Walsh's article and watched the interview. When it was over, I realized that Walsh was spot on. Toward the end of the interview, I got the feeling that I was witnessing a fatal car wreck as it was happening and watching the driver die right in front of me: what I witnessed was the complete self-destruction of the New Right's rising superstar in the span of half a minute. In effect, even despite himself, Paul defended the nasty racial protectionism called Jim Crow, convicting himself of not just racism but statism. He outed himself as a conservative. He didn't sound libertarian to me: he extolled the economic freedom of corporations, pointedly including racist owners of lunch counters, while spitting on individual freedom in the form of consumer choice, which Jim Crow was designed to restrict. My verdict: Maddow crushed him, ending his political career in front of the whole world. Rand Paul is over.

Ayn Rand, Religion, and the Problem with the New Atheists

You've probably heard of the so-called "New Atheists": Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. Their books against religion are red-hot in a still religion-mad America. However, there's a shrillness about their tone that outrages even many atheists. That shrillness, especially in Harris, struck me immediately as very familiar. It's the same tone you find in a figure I discovered three years after her death (i.e., in 1985); one whose books have been remarkably consistent bestsellers ever since they were published in the mid-to-late 20th century; one whose heavy influence Harris openly acknowledges: Ayn Rand. Problem is, Rand is notorious as the guru of a cult.

Rand was one of the true founders of the New Atheism, one of its two twentieth-century godmothers. The other was Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of American Atheists, who dedicated her life to relentless struggle against religion. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris aren't fighting a new battle; they have simply picked up the swords left by the founding mothers of their movement.

I was once a closet believer in Rand's philosophy, unknown to anyone in the movement. (In my first decade on the Internet, roughly 1995-2005, I was strictly a lurker, keeping my presence hidden; I similarly didn't reveal myself to the online Objectivists.) I'm familiar with her writings, not just her three major novels but her many books of essays. I also studied the history of Rand, her philosophy which she named Objectivism, and the movement she founded on it. I'm as familiar with the philosophy as just about anybody in the movement. My entire realist worldview derives to a very large degree from Rand's. But there's something about how Rand led the movement, and in how she wrote, that is suspiciously religious. Many have gone so far as to call Objectivism a cult: Murray Rothbard (the free-market economist and a former Rand associate), Michael Shermer, Albert Ellis, and Jeff Walker, among others. Even no less a figure than Rand's one-time protégé, Nathaniel Branden, has made a detailed critique of Rand's philosophy, pointing out its weaknesses, which happen to be the most religious of her tenets.