Editor’s Note: To this day most American fail to understand that the cynical use of the “humanitarian intervention” pretext for imperial meddling was first rolled out in recent times by Bill Clinton’s team, with the former Yugoslavia as the chosen target for the grand experiment. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia, or, more precisely, the crippling of Serbia, was the real strategic objective of the exercise, a goal eagerly shared by other European partners, especially Germany. Indeed, the assault on Serbia by America and NATO constituted the first major use of NATO in a manner inconsistent with the rationales for its creation (now obsolete), something which in the intervening years has become, after Libya, Syria and soon perhaps Iran, the new criminal “normal.”

In First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, David Gibbs analyzes the war in the Balkans and sorts out the players with the kind of honesty and erudition most Western media figures shamefully lack and in fact seem proud not to possess. He asks uncomfortable questions. Why didn’t the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR’s sudden implosion not trigger a grand debate in the United States about the possibility—at last—of reordering our domestic and international agenda? Fact is, US militarism has increased after the demise of the Soviet Union instead of the opposite, but this required the manufacturing of a new state of chronic war and the expansion of the Orwellian apparatus of misinformation besotting the American mind, a machinery already gargantuan by any standard.

FIRST DO NO HARM: HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION AND THE DESTRUCTION OF YUGOSLAVIA
By David N. Gibbs
Vanderbilt University Press, $27.95, 327 pages
REVIEWED BY DOUG BANDOW, Washington Times

Even as they criticized the George W. Bush administration for invading Iraq, leading liberals defended Clinton administration war-making in the Balkans. Sharply challenging this positive assessment is David Gibbs of the University of Arizona. A man of the left, Mr. Gibbs nonetheless disputes the nostrums of so-called humanitarian intervention. His assertions are contentious but well-supported. Attacking Serbia turned out to be neither humanitarian nor prudent.

Perhaps Mr. Gibbs’ most controversial assertion is that “the containment of allies remained a major US objective” behind Washington’s Balkan policy. Mr. Gibbs too quickly dismisses the professed humanitarian objectives of allied officials — Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright may really have seen Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as Hitler reincarnated. Nevertheless, Mr. Gibbs offers an important antidote to the self-serving propaganda emanating from Washington and allied capitals.

Mr. Gibbs’ most important success is demonstrating the enormous complexity of the multiple Balkan conflicts. The bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia involved a catastrophic mix of murderous local factions, brutal regional players and foolish Western decisions. Shamefully and tragically, U.S. policy consistently delayed peace and intensified conflict.

“First Do No Harm” highlights the many inconvenient truths of the Balkan imbroglio. For instance, Berlin lit the fuse for the Yugoslav explosion by backing Croatian and Slovenian independence without insisting upon protections for ethnic minorities — most importantly Croatian Serbs. Writes Mr. Gibbs: “In retrospect, Germany’s actions contained a heavy element of miscalculation and showed a tendency to underestimate the destructive consequences that the intervention might have.”

Even more shocking was Washington’s coldblooded and counterproductive Realpolitik strategy of targeting only the Serbs. Notes Mr. Gibbs: “Franjo Tudjman was just as racist and aggressive as Milosevic; the persecution of ethnic Serbs in Croatia was just as morally objectionable as the Serb-perpetrated atrocities in Kosovo.” Little better were the Bosnian Muslims. Mr. Gibbs explains: “It is true that the Muslim soldiers engaged in significantly fewer atrocities than did their Serb counterparts, but this was because the Muslims had inferior weapons, not because of any basic moral difference between the two sides.”

Whether operating from a cynical desire to ensure America’s dominant role or a naive hope to forge a better settlement, Washington torpedoed proposed settlements. In early-1992, European mediation led to the Lisbon agreement, an untidy compromise among Croats, Muslims and Serbs in Bosnia. At Washington’s instigation, the Croats and Muslims reneged “and full-scale war commenced within two weeks,” Mr. Gibbs writes. Peaceful implementation was never assured, but had the agreement held, years of conflict — and tens of thousands of deaths — would have been avoided.

The Clinton administration followed suit when it blocked the so-called Vance-Owen plan. Notes Mr. Gibbs: “The US role was especially unfortunate, since a full peace accord might have been feasible at this point.”

Clinton officials also encouraged Operation Storm, Croatia’s brutal assault on the Krajina Serbs. Promoting ethnic cleansing made a mockery of the Clinton administration’s humanitarian pretensions. Notes Mr. Gibbs: “The Croatian atrocities embarrassed the United States, and some figures sought to distance themselves from the whole operation, at least in public.” Others, however, rationalized Croatian atrocities.

Mr. Gibbs never sugarcoats Serbian misbehavior. But here, too, there was “an element of moral complexity,” he explains. Regarding Kosovo, the tendency was to emphasize Serbian brutality, but “such perspectives ignore the history of Albanian provocations against Serbs that preceded the repression of 1989. The imposition of martial law followed years of oppression orchestrated primarily by the Albanians, with Serbs as victims,” he explains.

Moreover, the Kosovo Liberation Army engaged in brutal attacks designed to provoke Serbian retaliation. U.S. and European officials even termed the KLA a “terrorist organization” — until the Clinton administration decided to dismember Serbia. As part of its strategy, Washington attempted to impose an agreement at the conference in Rambouillet, France, which would have treated all of Serbia as a conquered nation. Europeans admitted that the agreement was designed for failure; Henry Kissinger called it “a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form.”

Did Rambouillet result from incompetence or the desire to create a pretext for war? Mr. Gibbs leans toward the latter. In either case, Washington again hindered the peaceful resolution of a Balkan conflict.

The Clinton administration assumed that a short bombing campaign would force Serbian acquiescence. The Milosevic government instead responded by expelling hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians — a war crime, but one for which the administration shared responsibility. Once the fighting concluded, allied forces did little to stop ethnic Albanian brutality, which resulted in hundreds of deaths and the expulsion of a quarter million Serbs and other religious and ethnic minorities.
Mr. Gibbs’ conclusions undoubtedly will provoke sharp disagreement, but “First Do No Harm” is a tour de force. He convincingly debunks Washington’s claim of humanitarian intervention:

“It ignores the fact that the Western states helped provoke the war in 1991. And the US role in repeatedly blocking peace agreements that might have ended atrocities without military intervention seems inconsistent with any humanitarian motivation. These actions were certainly helpful in affirming the hegemonic role of the United States, and thus in advancing US interests. But they cannot be defended on moral grounds.”

Mr. Gibbs concludes his invaluable book with a pessimistic assessment of humanitarian intervention more broadly. Look at Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Somalia and the Balkans. “On what grounds should we assume that intervention will improve humanitarian conditions in the target country, rather than exacerbate them?” he asks. Washington needs to answer that question before undertaking another war allegedly on humanitarian grounds.

• Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Reagan, he is the author of several books, including “Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire” (Xulon Press).

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Burning Every Bridge
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

Jeff Connaughton was a lobbyist, a Senate aide and a White House lawyer. He says he came to Washington, D.C. as a Democrat and left as a Plutocrat.  Now he’s written a book – The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins (Prospecta Press, August 20, 2012.)

This book is about corporate crime – although that phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in its 288 pages.  It is in fact one of the best books on how corporate criminals manipulate the system to get away with their crimes. One way is to enforce silence among the elites who know how the system works.

“Party cohesion and the desire to make a munificent living in DC go a long way to enforce silence,” Connaughton writes.

But Connaughton is silent no more.

“I’m willing to burn every bridge,” he writes. “Now that I’ve mutinied and fled to a remote place, I want to set flame to the ship that would take me back there.”

Connaughton says there have been no Wall Street prosecutions because the Obama Justice Department failed “to take a timely, targeted, all-in approach to the problem.”

“The truth is, the Justice Department never made investigating these actions a high priority,” he writes. “It never formed strike forces of investigators and lawyers that had sufficient resources and backing to doggedly pursue the obvious potential wrongdoers as long as it took to bring a fraud case.”

Prosecutors never used provisions in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which put in place tough criminal sanctions in the wake of Enron and other cases of massive corporate frauds, to indict those executives responsible for misleading financial reports.

“If Obama had appointed aggressive trial lawyers – and (Vice President Joe) Biden knew plenty of them – to these Justice Department positions and backed their efforts, there’s a good chance they would’ve hunted the worst Wall Street fraudsters relentlessly.”

“If the explanation for the inadequate effort is corruption (the administration could not afford to anger Wall Street contributors), the revolving door, or a belief that the health of the financial industry is more important than legal accountability, then we have an actual double standard. I don’t know the explanation, but in terms of faith in our institutions, it may not matter whether the double standard is real or apparent. That double standard has torn the social and moral fabric of our country in a way I find to be unforgivable.”

Connaughton says that two sources were telling him that Christine Varney, the assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, “was complaining to friends that Rahm Emanuel, then White House chief of staff, had sent her a message – in effect, throttle back on antitrust enforcement, because the top priority is economic recovery.”

“I was concerned that Attorney General Holder had gotten the same message about investigating Wall Street crime,” he writes.

Connaughton quotes Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner as saying – “The stuff that seemed appealing in terms of…Old Testament justice…penalize the venal, would have been dramatically damaging to the basic strategy of putting out the panic, getting growth back, making people feel more confident in the future.”

“Geithner’s statement would seem to indicate that he believes utilitarian outcomes justify overlooking potentially criminal behavior by banks,” Connaughton writes.

Connaughton worked as chief of staff for Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware.) Kaufman was appointed as Biden’s replacement and dedicated his two years in office to demanding accountability for Wall Street’s crimes.

During one meeting with Justice Department Criminal Division Chief Lanny Breuer, Breuer said the department was dependent on the “pipeline” to bring forward cases against Wall Street banks and their executives.

“That’s when I lost my temper,” Connaughton writes. “‘Lanny, you need to go down into your pipeline and make sure the FBI and U.S. attorney’s offices are making this a top priority. Organize and shake your pipeline hard and get it to bring you cases. Don’t just sit back and wait.’”

“I also couldn’t resist invoking our mutual history in the White House Counsel’s office and even exhorting him to emulate the tactics of our former antagonist,” he writes. “‘You need to be like Ken Starr. You need to target some of these guys like they were drug kingpins, just like Starr targeted Clinton, and squeeze every junior person around them until you can get one to flip and give evidence against the senior people.”

The scene at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was not much better.

SEC Enforcement Division Director Robert Khuzami, when asked about federal judges rebuking the SEC for paltry fines, said to Kaufman: “I’m not losing any sleep over them.”

And SEC chair Mary Schapiro wasn’t much more responsive.

“Near the end of the [October 2009] meeting [Kaufman] told [SEC Chairman Mary] Schapiro, ‘I don’t believe you’re going to do anything about high-frequency trading.’ Looking him straight in the eye, she replied, ‘You just watch.’”

“We watched for nearly three years,” Connaughton writes. “It wasn’t until July 2011 and June 2012 that the SEC approved minimalist rules that would force market participates to collect the data that would enable the SEC to begin – begin – the process of understanding HFT’s impact on markets. In effect, Ted and I and America are still watching and waiting for the SEC to take meaningful action.”

“If my tenure as Ted’s chief of staff taught me anything, it’s that the C in SEC doesn’t stand for the speed of light.”

Kaufman introduced legislation with Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to break up the big banks.

But Brown-Kaufman could muster only 33 votes in the Senate.

“Senator Diane Feinstein – one of the most liberal members of the Senate – asked [Senator Dick] Durbin, the majority whip, ‘What’s this amendment?’ [referring to the Brown-Kaufman amendment to break up the mega-banks]. According to Durbin, he replied: ‘To break up the banks.’ Giving the thumbs-down sign, Feinstein said bemusedly: ‘This is still America, isn’t it?’

Connaughton and Senator Kaufman tried to get enforcement authorities to move aggressively against Wall Street criminality. They tried to break up the big banks. To no avail.

They were up against The Blob.

And The Blob won.

“The Blob – its really called that – refers to the government entities that regulate the finance industry – like the Banking Committee, Treasury Department, and SEC – and the army of Wall Street representatives and lobbyists that continuously surrounds and permeates them,” Connaughton writes. “The Blob moves together. Its members are in constant contact by e-mail and phone. They dine, drink, and take vacations together. Not surprisingly, they frequently intermarry. No lobbying restrictions yet promulgated can prevent pillow talk between Blob spouses.”

Connaughton holds out hope for reform – but not until there is another Wall Street crisis.

In the meantime, he says it’s time to “stop voting for the lesser of two evils” – and stand on principle.

He has burned his bridges.

And he wants you to burn yours, too.

Russell Mokhiber edits the Corporate Crime Reporter.

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Authoritarian Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism

By HENRY GIROUX

The United States has entered a new historical era marked by a growing disinvestment in the social state, public goods, and civic morality. Matters of politics, power, ideology, governance, economics, and policy now translate unapologetically into a systemic disinvestment in institutions and policies that further the breakdown of those public spheres which traditionally provided the minimal conditions for social justice, dissent, and democratic expression. Neoliberalism, or what might be called casino capitalism, has become the new normal. Unabashed in its claim to financial power, self-regulation, and its survival of the fittest value system, neoliberalism not only undercuts the formative culture necessary for producing critical citizens and the public spheres that nourish them, it also facilitates the conditions for producing a bloated defense budget, the prison-industrial complex, environmental degradation, and the emergence of “finance as a criminalized, rogue industry.”[i] It is clear that an emergent authoritarianism haunts a defanged democracy now shaped and structured largely by corporations.  Money dominates politics, the gap between the rich and poor is ballooning, urban spaces are becoming armed camps, militarism is creeping into every facet of public life, and civil liberties are being shredded.  Neoliberalism’s policy of competition now dominates policies that define public spheres such as schools, allowing them to stripped of a civic and democratic project and handed over to the logic of the market.  Regrettably, it is not democracy, but authoritarianism, that remains on the rise in the United States as we move further into the 21st century.

The 2012 U.S. Presidential Election exists at a pivotal moment in this transformation away from democracy, a moment in which formative cultural and political realms and forces – including the rhetoric used by election candidates – appear saturated with celebrations of war and Social Darwinism. Accordingly, the possibility of an even more authoritarian and ethically dysfunctional leadership in the White House in 2013 has certainly caught the attention of a number of liberals and other progressives in the United States. American politics in general and the 2012  election in particular present a challenge to progressives, whose voices in recent years have been increasingly excluded from both the mainstream media and the corridors of political power. Instead, the media have played up the apocalyptic view of the Republican Party’s fundamentalist warriors, who seem fixated on translating issues previously seen as non-religious—such as sexual orientation, education, identity, and participation in public life—into the language of a religious revival and militant crusade against evil.

How else to explain Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s claim that the struggle for the future is a “fight of individualism versus collectivism,” with its nod to the McCarthyism and cold war rhetoric of the 1950s.  Or Rick Santorum’s assertion that “President Obama is getting America hooked on ‘The narcotic of government dependency,’” promoting the view that government has no responsibility to provide safety nets for the poor, disabled, sick, and elderly.   There is more at work here than simply a ramped up version of social Darwinism with its savagely cruel ethic of  “reward the rich, penalize the poor, [and] let everyone fend for themselves,” [ii]  there is also a full scale attack on the social contract, the welfare state,  economic equality, and any viable vestige of moral and social responsibility. The Romney-Ryan appropriation of Ayn Rand’s ode to selfishness and self-interest is of particular importance because it offers a glimpse of a ruthless form of extreme capitalism in which the poor are considered “moochers,” viewed with contempt, and singled out to be punished.  But this theocratic economic fundamentalist ideology does more. It destroys any viable notion of the and civic virtue in which the social contract and common good provide the basis for creating meaningful social bonds and instilling in citizens a sense of social and civic responsibility.  The idea of public service is viewed with disdain just as the work of individuals, social groups, and institutions that benefit the citizenry at large are held in contempt. As George Lakoff and Glenn W. Smith point out, casino capitalism creates a culture of cruelty: “its horrific effects on individuals-death, illness, suffering, greater poverty, and loss of opportunity, productive lives, and money.”[iii] But it does more by crushing any viable notion of the common good and public life by destroying “the bonds that hold us together.”[iv]  Under casino capitalism, the spaces, institutions, and values that constitute the public are now surrendered to powerful financial forces and viewed simply as another market to be commodified, privatized and surrendered to the demands of capital.  With religious and market-driven zealots in charge, politics becomes an extension of war; greed and self-interest trump any concern for the well-being of others; reason is trumped by emotions rooted in absolutist certainty and militaristic aggression; and skepticism and dissent are viewed as the work of Satan.

If the Republican candidacy race of 2012 is any indication, then political discourse in the United States has not only moved to the right—it has been introducing totalitarian values and ideals into the mainstream of public life.  Religious fanaticism, consumer culture, and the warfare state work in tandem with neoliberal economic forces to encourage privatization, corporate tax breaks, growing income and wealth inequality, and the further merging of the financial and military spheres in ways that diminish the authority and power of democratic governance.[v] Neoliberal interests in freeing markets from social constraints, fueling competitiveness, destroying education systems, producing atomized subjects, and loosening individuals from any sense of social responsibility prepare the populace for a slow embrace of social Darwinism, state terrorism, and the mentality of war—not least of all by destroying communal bonds, dehumanizing the other, and pitting individuals against the communities they inhabit.

Totalitarian temptations now saturate the media and larger culture in the language of austerity as political and economic orthodoxy. What we are witnessing in the United States is the normalization of a politics that exterminates not only the welfare state, and the truth, but all those others who bear the sins of the Enlightenment—that is, those who refuse a life free from doubt. Reason and freedom have become enemies not merely to be mocked, but to be destroyed. And this is a war whose totalitarian tendencies are evident in the assault on science, immigrants, women, the elderly, the poor, people of color, and youth. What too often goes unsaid, particularly with the media’s focus on inflammatory rhetoric, is that those who dominate politics and policymaking, whether Democrats or Republicans, do so largely because of their disproportionate control of the nation’s income and wealth. Increasingly, it appears these political elite choose to act in ways that sustain their dominance through the systemic reproduction of an iniquitous social order. In other words, big money and corporate power rule while electoral politics are rigged. The secrecy of the voting booth becomes the ultimate expression of democracy, reducing politics to an individualized purchase—a crude form of economic action. Any form of politics willing to invest in such ritualistic pageantry only adds to the current dysfunctional nature of our social order, while reinforcing a profound failure of political imagination. The issue should no longer be how to work within the current electoral system, but how to dismantle it and construct a new political landscape that is capable of making a claim on equity, justice, and democracy for all of its inhabitants. Obama’s once inspiring call for hope has degenerated into a flight from responsibility.  The Obama administration has worked to extend the policies of the George W. Bush administration by legitimating a range of foreign and domestic policies that have shredded civil liberties, expanded the permanent warfare state, and increased the domestic reach of the punitive surveillance state. And if Romney and his ideological cohorts, now viewed as the most extremists faction of the Republican Party,  come to power, surely the existing totalitarian and anti-democratic tendencies at work in the United States will be dangerously intensified.

A catalogue of indicting evidence reveals the depth and breadth of the war being waged against the social state, and particularly against young people. Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a nation that fails to protect its young, such a war speaks to nothing less than a perverse death-wish, a barely masked desire for self-annihilation—as the wilful destruction of an entire generation not only transforms U.S. politics into pathology, but is sure to signal the death-knell for America’s future.  How much longer will the American public have to wait before the nightmare comes to an end?

An awareness of the material and cultural elements that have produced these deeply anti-democratic conditions is important; however it is simply not enough. The collective response here must include a refusal  to enter the current political discourse of compromise and accommodation—to think well beyond the discourse of facile concessions and to conduct struggles on the mutually informed terrains of civic literacy, education, and power. A rejection of traditional forms of political mobilization must be accompanied by a new political discourse, one that uncovers the hidden practices of neoliberal domination while developing rigorous models for critical reflection and fresh forms of intellectual and social engagement.

Yet, the current historical moment seems at an utter loss to create a massive social movement capable of addressing the totalitarian nature and social costs of a religious and political fundamentalism that is merging with an extreme market-fundamentalism. In this case, a fundamentalism whose idea of freedom extends no further than personal financial gain and endless consumption. Under such circumstances, progressives should focus their energies on working with the Occupy movement and other social movements to develop a new language of radical reform and to create new public spheres that will make possible the modes of critical thought and engaged agency that are the very foundations of a truly participatory and radical democracy. Such a project must work to develop vigorous educational programs, modes of public communication, and communities that promote a culture of deliberation, public debate, and critical exchange across a wide variety of cultural and institutional sites. Ultimately, it must focus on the end goal of generating those formative cultures and public spheres that are the preconditions for political engagement and vital for energizing democratic movements for social change—movements willing to think beyond the limits of a savage global capitalism. Pedagogy in this sense becomes central to any substantive notion of politics and must be viewed as a crucial element of organized resistance and collective struggles. The deep regressive elements of neoliberalism constitute both a pedagogical practice and a legitimating function for a deeply oppressive social order. Pedagogical relations that make the power relations of casino capitalism disappear must be uncovered and challenged.  Under such circumstances, politics becomes transformative rather than accommodating and aims at abolishing a capitalist system marked by massive economic, social, and cultural inequalities.  A politics that uncovers the harsh realities imposed by casino capitalism should also work towards establishing a society in which matters of justice, equality, and freedom are understood as the crucial foundation of a substantive democracy.

Rather than invest in electoral politics, it would be more worthwhile for progressives to develop formative conditions that make a real democracy possible.  As Angela Davis has suggested, this means engaging “in difficult coalition-building processes, negotiating the recognition for which communities and issues inevitably strive [and coming] together in a unity that is not simplistic and oppressive, but complex and emancipatory, recognising, in June Jordan’s words that ‘we are the ones we have been waiting for.’”[vi] Developing a broad-based social movement means finding a common ground upon which challenging diverse forms of oppression, exploitation, and exclusion can become part of a wider effort to create a radical democracy.

In part, this means reclaiming a discourse of ethics and morality, elaborating a new model of democratic politics, and developing fresh analytical concepts for understanding and engaging the concept of the social.  One avenue for developing a critical and transformative politics  might take a cue from youth protesters the world over and develop new ways to challenge the corporate values that shape American, and increasingly global, politics. It is especially crucial to provide alternative values that challenge market-driven ideologies that equate freedom with radical individualism, self-interest, hyper-competitiveness, privatization, and deregulation, while undermining democratic social bonds, the public good, and the welfare state. Such actions can be further addressed by recruiting young people, teachers, labor activists, religious leaders, and other engaged citizens to become public intellectuals who are willing to use their skills and knowledge to make visible how power works and to address important social and political issues. Of course, the American public needs to do more than talk. It also needs to bring together educators, students, workers, and anyone else interested in real democracy in order to create a social movement–a well-organized movement capable of changing the power relations and vast economic inequalities that have created the conditions for symbolic and systemic violence in American society.

Addressing such challenges suggests that progressives will invariably need to take on the role of educational activists. One option would be to create micro-spheres of public education that further modes of critical learning and civic agency, and thus enable young people and others to learn how to govern rather than be governed. This could be accomplished through a network of free educational spaces developed among diverse faith communities and public schools, as well as in secular and religious organizations affiliated with higher educational institutions. These new educational spaces focused on cultivating both dialogue and action in the public interest can look to past models in those institutions developed by socialists, labor unions, and civil rights activists in the early twentieth century and later in the 1950s and 60s. Such schools represented oppositional public spheres and functioned a democratic public spheres in the best educational sense and ranged from the early networks of radical Sunday schools to the later Brookwood Labor College and Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Stanley Aronowitz rightly insists that the current “system survives on the eclipse of the radical imagination, the absence of a viable political opposition with roots in the general population, and the conformity of its intellectuals who, to a large extent, are subjugated by their secure berths in the academy; less secure private sector corporate jobs, and centrist and center-left media institutions.”[vii] At a time when critical thought has been flattened, it becomes imperative to develop a discourse of critique and possibility—one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and dynamic social movements, hope for a viable democratic future will slip out of reach.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: “Take Back Higher Education” (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), “The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (2007) and “Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed” (2008). His latest book is Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability,” (Paradigm.)

Notes.

[ii] Robert Reich, “Romney-Ryan Will Bring Back Social Darwinism,” The Kansas City Star (August 14, 2012). Online: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/14/3762436/robert-b-reich-romney-ryan-will.html

[iii] George Lakoff and glenn W. Smith, “Romney, Ryan and the Devil’s Budget,” Huffington Post (August 22, 2012). Online:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/romney-ryan-and-the-devil_b_1819652.html

[iv] Ibid.

[v] See Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Henry A. Giroux, Sophia A. McClennen, and Kenneth J. Saltman, Neoliberalism, Education, Terrorism,: Contemporary Dialogues (Boulder: Paradigm, 2012).

[vi] Angela Davis, “The 99%: a community of resistance,” The Guardian, (November 15, 2011)

[vii] Stanley Aronowitz, “The Winter of Our Discontent,” Situations,  IV, no.2, (Spring 2012). p. 68.

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The son, the saviour, the fugitive, the friend, the man. He also has an odd craving for Vegemite

Photograph: Jamie Turner for GNM Imaging/EPA
As presented in the Guardian (UK)

__________________________
Christine Assange, mother

Julian was brought up to try to put himself in other people’s shoes. There were very strong values: you didn’t lie. You treated other people with compassion. If we saw a drunk on the street, we stopped to see if he was OK. If Julian got into a dispute with another child, I would never take his side just because he was my son.

Jules has always been extremely interested in finding the truth, no matter what the subject – medicine, environment, nature, physics. One thing you might not know about him is that as a child he used to play a mean blues harp. He was also extremely physically adventurous. Someone asked the other day if he’d like going to live in Ecuador, and I said one of the things he’d love about it is the climbing. When he was a little boy, he used to make rafts on the river. He was always exploring in the bush. At one point, when he was about 24, he took off into the Tasmanian wilderness with just a knife and pitted himself against nature to see if he could survive out there. The idea of Julian being this nerd behind a computer is completely wrong.

James Ball, former WikiLeaks staffer

Virtually everyone has a Julian they want to see – either a visionary hero of the free speech movement, or a paranoid, narcissistic creep who’s a danger to civilised society. The reality would satisfy neither side.

He’s an incredibly driven man, with an impressively keen intellect. He also has, on rare occasions, a disarming sense of humour, sometimes even self-deprecating.

Of course, here comes the inevitable “but”. The bad sides of Julian’s personality are as exaggerated as the good. His self-certainty and drive break through to the point of arrogance. His behaviour can be erratic, and he’s not particularly considerate of those around him. As his online nickname “Mendax” suggests, he is quite happy to lie in the interest of what he sees as the greater good.

But the worst qualities Assange displays are not really his fault. Even before the huge storm caused by the embassy cables, he tended towards the paranoid. Imagine seeing senators, commentators and more discussing your every move, calling you a terrorist, threatening you, with that predisposition. The result is a heady mix of paranoia, a predisposition to self-interest. A willingness to manipulate the truth and a belief that what you’re doing is right is a potent and dangerous mix – and it’s what’s been driving Assange, and the chaos that follows in his wake, for almost two years now.

Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

I first met Julian when he invited the Bureau to scrutinise the Iraq War Logs. From the start, he made an impression. He gave perhaps the most wooden statement I’ve ever seen to CNN and then, as the camera turned off, transformed into a warm, personable man.

A man who put himself in danger by exposing the US’s secrets would also take delight in attempts to protect himself. Whether it was casually taking off his bulletproof vest in a restaurant, or appearing at the Bureau’s offices with dyed hair, you never knew if he actually believed these safety measures worked or were just a bit of showmanship.

Despite being an expert in secrecy, he talks unguardedly and freely when you are alone with him. And he can show an often sensitive and playful manner. Other times – like when debating what names should be redacted from the Wikileaks data – he could be judgmental and reluctant to hear the alternative view.

Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor

In his unapproved and ghosted autobiography, Assange gives a colourful account of a marathon eight-hour meeting we had in the run-up to the publication of the State Department cables. Some of it was accurate – though I can’t personally testify as to whether my eyes were, as he describes, “rolling around the room like marbles on a pogo stick”. They may have been.

The meeting took place in tense circumstances. The massive cache of cables, into which we had put months of work, had leaked from a former Wikileaks associate to a freelance journalist. It looked as if all our time and effort might come to nothing. And Assange was refusing to have any more dealings with the New York Times unless the paper’s then editor, Bill Keller, promised to publish a front-page apology for having published a not wholly flattering profile of the WikiLeaks founder. We’d been told that Assange had begun, behind our backs, to talk to other American publishers.

The eight hours began angrily. Assange, who had brought two lawyers with him, did a lot of shouting and accusing. The louder the shouting, the more mannered and Dickensian his language became. He repeatedly accused us of not being “gentlemen”. My eyes may well have been rolling. I did my best to lower the temperature. He gradually went off the boil.

We took a break and reconvened. Shouty Assange was now Strategic Assange. We would cooperate, after all. The snowy-haired Australian spoke deliberately. I remember thinking that, in a different life, he could have been a CEO or COO. He was intelligent, calm and incisive.

All was going so well. We broke for a meal, during which he was witty and did his best – it felt as if was difficult for him – to make conversation. He was almost charming.

And then, just as suddenly, he switched back to Shouty Assange. There was no deal. Keller must apologise. He would have nothing to do with us. It was now 1am. I rang Keller, knowing in advance what his answer would be. Assange ranted at his refusal to apologise. On his way out into the night an hour later – still no deal – he muttered a veiled threat at the Guardian’s reporter who had worked most closely with him, David Leigh.

The next morning there was a deal. I didn’t have many more personal dealings with him. He disappeared from view (we later learned, to Norfolk) and communicated only sporadically through encrypted messaging until he fell silent altogether. But in that eight hours there was a microcosm of the man – in all his brilliance, paranoia, obstinacy and dysfunctional fury.

Peter Graham, school friend

He was a blond kid, shoulder-length hair, brought up with an alternative lifestyle. At the time, Goolmangar school was made up of a lot of kids from dairy families and Jules was, to a degree, the odd one out. There weren’t too many broken families back in the early 80s. He was not an outgoing sort of child. Didn’t go out of his way to make trouble. I would say that he was always the sort of kid who stood behind. We used to play Red Rover and British Bulldog, and Jules was always one of the last to run.

Daniel Matthews, university friend

Julian and I studied mathematics at the University of Melbourne. We were both in the maths student group. It was fun, nerdy stuff. I’ve always found him witty, intelligent and eclectically knowledgeable. He is passionately committed to justice and the free flow of information and ideas. He has suffered great personal costs as a result.

I’ve often heard it remarked in the press that Julian has some idiosyncrasies. The people who make such remarks tend not to have hung around mathematics departments very much.

Vaughan Smith, housed Assange for more than a year when he was on bail

Julian is somebody who will give you a surprising amount of time if he gets into a conversation. But other times you could walk past him and he wouldn’t even know you were there because he was so transfixed with his computer. He would work late into the night. I get up early and go to bed early, but he’s the opposite. A lot of people from a lot of different countries came through the hall to visit him. A couple of Australians brought rather a lot of Vegemite. He and his guests used to enjoy trying alcohol from different parts of the world. Julian would enjoy the occasional cigar, but it was difficult for him to smoke them because he had to stay in the house for fear of breaking his bail conditions.

It wasn’t always easy having him there, but I’m not attributing the difficulty to him, rather to having someone in the house all that time. And most of the complaints weren’t really about Julian, they were about the people who’d come through the house to see him. There was an of average five to seven people staying at one time – people who wanted to see Julian. By giving him bail, I was therefore opening my door to a lot of other people. But we adjusted to that and we had a really good housekeeper who made it all happen. Julian did do some chores. He used to collect wood and eggs sometimes.

I have four daughters and a son, who got to know Julian. He got on particularly well with my five-year-old. He used to give her sweets and things like that. I’ve got a photo of him cutting up a pumpkin with the girls all dressed up for Halloween. He fitted in with a family, although I wouldn’t describe him as a family man.

You can tease Julian, but he usually falls out with people who are themselves very strong characters. They will blame him and he will blame them.

Heather Brooke, journalist

The first time I met Assange, he was convinced a sniper was targeting him through the windows of a conference centre. A few hours later, he was happily typing in front of the same windows. I asked why he believed he was a target. “I can’t tell you,” he said. Then, five minutes later, he did. He told me I should come to Washington DC for a press conference. Why? I can’t tell you. Again, five minutes later, he told me about the Collateral Murder video.

Assange attributed his drive to his first experience with power as a young man (hacking into the email of a Pentagon general). I said maybe I liked investigating politicians’ expenses because that had been my first big investigation as a student. “No, it’s different when you’re a young man.” Can’t women be driven the same way? “No, they’re not.” It was a definitive statement, no supporting evidence needed.

I followed up with requests to interview him for my book. I received florid emails such as, “I will have you, Heather, of course I will. But let us be messiahs to generation WHY, not a bunch of ageing hacks looking for a pension… regards from intrigue hotel… I have more interesting adventures for you…”

When he suddenly turned up in London, he wanted me to put him up and act as some sort of mother surrogate. “I have a fever. I’m not sure yet if it’s going up or down,” he told me. “I need some mothering. Someone to make me chicken noodle soup and bring me cookies in bed.”

I later heard from two other women who said Assange pulled the same “poor little lost boy” trick on them in an attempt to finagle his way into their homes. I said that was not how I conducted interviews. He complained that I didn’t have a maternal instinct, adding in drama-queen fashion: “I have two wars to stop.”

I replied: “Yeah, it’s a tough life being a messiah.” His response left me speechless: “Will you be my Mary Magdalene, Heather? And bathe my feet at the cross.”

Jérémie Zimmermann, friend and founder of La Quadrature du Net, a group defending freedoms online

When we first met in 2009, Julian struck me as one of the brightest minds I had ever encountered. He has a deep understanding of technology and its importance for building better societies, where citizens are empowered rather than controlled. He has certain characteristics that you find only in very technical people and some people with Asperger’s syndrome. He is very focused, and when he’s in front of a computer screen it can be difficult to get his attention. He is very self-confident, which is a good quality most of the time, but is why he needs his friends sometimes to introduce some doubt into his mind. You have to learn how to argue with him and push your opinions through by being very persuasive. People criticise him for having a great ego. Of course he has – he wouldn’t be doing such crazy things without a great ego – but I believe that his sense of the general interest is far greater than his ego.

Julian is quite a nomadic person. He is used to travelling a lot, and having no physical attachments. For that reason, I imagine being in the Ecuadorian embassy will be hard for him. But in other ways he will cope fine. He has a sharp sense of humour, which can be very cynical and dark. I’ve seen him sleep on couches and under tables, and unless the people around him force him into the shower, he might not change his clothes for days. I do the same when I’m immersed in work that I think is more important than the smell of my armpits.

When the Sweden story first broke, I told Julian, “If you’ve done something wrong, you’ll pay for what you did, but for me it won’t change who you are and what you have achieved.” With WikiLeaks he has brought global attention to whistleblowing. He has shown that digital technologies can empower people by exposing the wrongdoings of institutions. People who criticise him based on personality traits should take a better look at what he has achieved.

John Pilger, journalist and friend

I’ve known Julian Assange from the beginning of his extraordinary struggle in London. What struck me straight away was his fearlessness, though courage is a better word. By standing up to the most rapacious forces in the world today, and telling people in many countries what the powerful say and do behind their backs, he’s made enemies of a kind journalists should wear as a badge of honour, but rarely do. The jealousy and envy he attracts often come from those aware of their own collusion with power and unforgiving of one who refuses to join their incestuous club. Personally, I find him the best of company: visiting him at the Ecuadorean embassy or in long phone conversations, often in the early hours of the morning, we share a similar black humour. The other night, we mined Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I took him over the movie, along with Dr Strangelove and Borat. Given his restless energy, his spirits are remarkable in the circumstances; and he’s fortunate to have the support of a group of unflagging, thoroughly impressive people, not least his mother, Christine. All power to him.

Sarah Saunders, friend, who put up the majority of his bail

Julian stayed at my house from Christmas of last year until he left for the embassy. If I had to choose one attribute of his, it would be that Julian is very inquisitive. His ability to ask incisive and interesting questions is compelling, and it’s why he has been effective in his work.

Julian likes food and wants to know all about what he’s eating (as a chef and lifetime foodie, I like this about him, too), even if he appears to be distracted by his computer or playing with my Jack Russell when he should be at the table to eat! He is very scientific about his cooking. He made a very good poached egg, which not everyone can achieve.

I’m a bit of a night bird, so it was no problem for me that he liked to work at odd hours. We’d chat across the dining room table doing work at 2am.

Bill Keller, former editor, New York Times

I’ve never actually met Julian Assange. All of our conversations have been telephonic – including one where he hovered like the Great and Powerful Oz, via Skype, over a stage in Berkeley where yet another panel was pondering the meaning of WikiLeaks. All of our conversations, including that one, consisted mainly of Julian scolding The New York Times and me personally for not playing by his rules, for failing to recognise the supreme righteousness of his cause, and for portraying him in our pages as a complicated and controversial figure. “Where’s the respect?” he demanded plaintively in one call. “Where’s the respect?”

Short of practicing Freud without a licence, I can’t pretend to reconcile the many contradictions of Julian. He is indignant at the long delays in due process afforded Bradley Manning, but unwilling to submit himself to the due process of Sweden – or the United States, should it come to that. (If it does, I firmly believe he should enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment.) A champion of free press (during his Evita moment on the balcony of Ecuador’s embassy, he deplored Russia’s hamhanded punishment of Pussy Riot), he accepted a TV gig sponsored by Putin’s Kremlin, and has become soulmates with the press-gagging Ecuadoran president. He is the leader of an organisation that wants to be regarded as a beacon of truth, but boasts of fabricating juvenile hoaxes.

Perhaps the ultimate and irreconcilable contradiction, though, was his yearning – “Where’s the respect?” – to possess both the adulation of the angry disaffected and the serious regard of the established.

Mark Stephens, former Assange lawyer

He has an encyclopedic knowledge – and I mean that in the true sense of the word – of current affairs. He can talk to you about any particular country of the world with as much detail and knowledge and insight into the nuances of politics and current affairs as you and I can speak about British politics. He really does get a mixed reaction from people. He a person about whom myths grow easily and perhaps over readily. There are a lot of apocryphal stories – stories like he doesn’t flush the toilet or doesn’t wash – all of which don’t ring true to anyone who has been in close proximity.

Ken Loach, film-maker who put up bail

I was contacted by a mutual friend when the court case arose and he was going to be arrested. I met him a couple of times and again in the embassy. He was very keen for some human contact, some conversation that wasn’t about Julian Assange. We chatted about politics generally and current affairs. He’s a very interesting thoughtful lad. He’d gone from house arrest to another confinement. As we went in, you could see the massed ranks of police and people watching nearby. That wasn’t a figment of his imagination. He was good company. We laughed about things, shared our feelings of dismay at the way certain people you’d have expected to have stood up for him have behaved. I took him some films, one or two of mine, and some others as well. He was quite low key, relaxed and friendly.

Dr Suelette Dreyfus, author and journalist

Julian and I worked on the book Underground, which was about a group of computer hackers in the 1980s and 90s. He’d go off to research something and would dig and dig until he had unearthed even the most obscure source. I’ve met very few journalists who are as driven. He’d ring at midnight or 1am. He didn’t own a watch. He’s always been about content, not constraints. That’s rare. When I was in the midst of writing a chapter, he’d call up and say: “Don’t self-censor when you write!” It was his catch-cry. Even then, his philosophy was to get the facts out there and let the reader decide.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, worked for WikiLeaks until 2010

I met Julian online in 2007. We started working together, and it went from really good to really bad over three years. We didn’t agree about where we wanted to go with WikiLeaks. It was developing from an organisation supporting whistleblowers to one that has an entire secrecy agenda. But it’s Julian’s project – it’s his idea. And he is not really good with criticism. He takes a no compromise position.

We haven’t spoken since I quit. We had a tight relationship for more than three years – I would have called it a friendship. I’m not sure if I would any more, because I’m quite disillusioned. But he stayed with me a couple of times, the longest was for two months or so.

Julian’s more than just intelligent – he’s streetwise, witty. He’s good at thinking about and analysing systems. And he is really dedicated. Here was someone equally willing to do whatever was necessary. But if you’re really good at something, it usually means you’re terrible at something else.

We basically had to decide if a mutiny was what we needed – in order to readjust the way that WikiLeaks was developing. Or if we should quit and try to find another way to approach it. And we decided on the latter. The name of WikiLeaks is tainted now. I’ll never be involved with Wikileaks again. I can’t even imagine he would excuse himself. He wouldn’t be in this mess if he had the capacity for saying sorry.

Julian has been dealing with this level of attention for more than a year now. And the attention is crucial, in respect to his potential affairs with the US. Whatever happens will set a precedent for the freedom of the press and the internet. I’m torn, because I fully agree that he should never be extradited to the US. But the court of law is there to establish what is right and wrong, and if you have violated a law, and we’re ignoring it because we’re sacrificing that for a higher goal, you’re opening up a Pandora’s box.

Ian Katz, deputy editor, the Guardian

Referring to a heterosexual male reporter who had fallen out with him particularly badly, Julian once claimed to me that the journalist had been “in love with me”. It was, like so many things Assange says, preposterous, but it also contained a germ of truth. Assange is one of a tiny number of people I have met – Peter Mandelson is another – whose approval it is hard not to crave.

The first time I met him, he was deathly pale and racked by a tubercular cough. We spent an hour or so talking about the best ways to communicate outside the earshot of the CIA. He told me about encrypted phones and taught me how to create a number code. It was like being inducted into a mildly glamorous, if slightly malodorous, secret club.

Over the following weeks we communicated mostly by encrypted internet chat. In these late-night exchanges – Julian never rose before lunchtime – he lurched between stentorian admonishments for the latest perceived failure of his journalistic collaborators (“We are very disappointed…”) and knowing matiness. I remember him once, rather over-familiarly, referring to me as “Katzy”, and wondering if he was really telling me that he’d done his research and knew that is what my oldest friends called me.

My last face-to-face encounter with Julian was a rather surreal four-hour conversation in the Norfolk pile that became his virtual prison while he awaited extradition hearings. By now, for reasons too complicated to recount, Julian had taken against the Guardian and declared that he regarded it as a greater threat to him than the Pentagon.

Seated under the severe gaze of several generations of previous inhabitants of Ellingham Hall, Julian delivered a rambling disquisition that displayed many of the frequently contradictory aspects of his personality. There was a thoughtful discussion of the ephemeral nature of the internet and a fiendishly complicated plan he had to fix it, a hard-headed and acute assessment of how the publication of thousands of secret diplomatic cables had gone, a few flashes of menace (one former colleague suspected of leaking had now been “sat on”) and some eye-wateringly unsavoury references to sex.

We parted with a peace agreement of sorts, which Julian summarised in his curiously mannered, other-worldly vernacular: “I’m a gentleman. I won’t throw the first punch.”

• Interviews by Alison Rourke, Merope Mills, Liese Spencer, Charlotte Northedge and Becky Barnicoat

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By Stephen Lendman