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History repeats, while media relent. John Pilger weighs in on the disgraceful arrest of Julian Assange.

The glimpse ofJulian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblemof the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage.Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first naturallight in almost seven years.

That this outragehappened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame andanger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protectedby international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britainis a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its WorkingParty on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell withthat. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quas-fascists in Trump’s Washington,in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking todisguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth:that of fairness and justice.

Imagine Tony Blairdragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London,in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg,Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime isjournalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empoweringpeople all over the world with truth.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sow the seeds of discontent [without which]there would be no advance towards civilisation”. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

Assange’s principalmedia tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed itsnervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardianhas exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called“the greatest scoop of the last 30 years”. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelationsand claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hypedGuardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Hardingand David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret passwordAssange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digitalfile containing leaked US embassy cables.

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding joinedthe police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the lastlaugh”. The Guardian has since published a series of falsehoods about Assange, notleast a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort,had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.

But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangledweb,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that shouldnot be published…. But he has always shone a light on things that should neverhave been hidden.”

These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conductsits colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rightsto vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the expose of Hillary Clintonas a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed descriptionby American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown,and much more. It’s all available on the WikiLeaks site.

The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have alreadyvisited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive.On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leakedBritish Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons wouldarrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.

When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editorgoing to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed,prosecuted and served six months.

If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what the Guardiancalls truthful “things”, what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, followinghim, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist LukeHarding?

What is to stop the editors of the New York Times and the WashingtonPost, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, andthe editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and the Sydney MorningHerald in Australia. The list is long.

David McCraw, lead lawyer of the New York Times, wrote: “I thinkthe prosecution [of Assange]would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers…from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the lawwould have a very hard time distinguishing between the New York Times and WikiLeaks.”

Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summonedby an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manningwill be enough. Real journalism is being criminalised by thugs in plain sight. Dissenthas become an indulgence.

In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecutingtwo whistleblowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetingsof the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny,impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in theTimor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret.

The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for hispart in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauruand Manus, where children self-harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed massdetention camps for 30,000 people.

Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, theMinistry of Defence in London produced a secret document which described the “principalthreats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigativejournalists. The latter was designated the major threat.

The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “Wehad no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to knowand a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”

What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake – if there areothers – are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is takenaway?

In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler,whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.

She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependentnot on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.

“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?”I asked her.

“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia…. When peopleno longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything canhappen.”

And did.

The rest, she might have added, is history.

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