Chris Hedges: Julian Assange — A Fight We Must Not Lose
The detention and persecution of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press.
The detention and persecution of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press.
"President Biden should seize the opportunity to change course by adopting a new directive on hunger strikes and addressing the underlying cause of so many hunger strikes: an abusive immigration detention system,”
The corpses of civilians, including children, piled up by Israel and Saudi Arabia, who do much of their killing in Gaza and Yemen with U.S. weapons, don’t come close to the hundreds of thousands of dead we have left behind in the two decades of warfare we have perpetrated in the Middle East.
"To declare that nuclear weapons can only "legally" be used in retaliation for a nuclear strike hardly leaves me feeling safe. Are we left with a world continually at war with itself, with our best hope being that all future wars will be waged legally and politely?"
"This is the end of the case against Julian Assange." -Edward Snowden
"Police brutality is endemic to American history." "Policing in the United States is a force of racist violence that is entangled at the core of the capitalist system."
"The whole process has really been a mockery of the rule of law. Julian is not a U.S. citizen; WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication."
Exoticized and fetishized Asian American women have borne a dual burden of both racism and sexism, viewed on one hand as submissive and sexually available “lotus blossoms” and on the other as manipulative and dangerous “dragon ladies.”
"Imagine if corporate media didn’t praise McConnell, Lindsey Graham or any other Republicans who propped up Trump’s dangerous lies for so long,"
The Biden administration and what it will mean for a country in crisis...
"President-elect Biden faces many nuclear weapons policy challenges as he takes office. Under the Trump administration, the United States withdrew from [several key treaties around nuclear weapons issues] and did not extend New START, all while urging other countries to not join, or even to withdraw their ratifications to, the TPNW. The United States has a chance to return to the table on multilateral nuclear negotiations and build back better."
"So do war crimes matter to the average American? In the short term, it appears that war crimes and their related pardons are simply new battlegrounds in the ever-expansive culture war between left and right, liberals and conservatives, that seems to have enveloped modern politics rather than becoming matters of human dignity in their own right. And that’s a damn shame."