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The Price of Being a Western Dissident

Julian Assange is doing humanity a favour by exposing through the US Embassy Cables that “Oil motivates U.S. policy more than fighting terrorists” and that the killing and torturing of tens of thousands of civilians by the US and NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan through the Iraq War Logs and Afghanistan War Logs is evidence of war crimes.

However, to Assange’s dismay, as a western dissident, he does not enjoy the soft-power of being a Chinese dissident. The “free” world politicians fail to acknowledge the nobility of his work in exposing human rights violations and war crimes committed by NATO and the US. President Obama described his act as a “deplorable documents dump”; former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich believed that he should be “ treated as an enemy combatant”; Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell called him a “high-tech terrorist”; while Sarah Palin wanted him to be “hunted down like al-Qaeda.” Other politicians including some mainstream media “pundits openly call for his death.”

As an instant response, WikiLeaks has been blocked from being accessed by federal employees of the US. It is the same in Germany.

Read the rest of the article on dissidentvoice.org

How do the Tories get away with it?

Nice bit in The Independent by Owen Jones on the working class and how Tories win elections.

“Just how do the Tories get away with it? Since they were founded as a modern political force in 1834, the Conservatives have acted as the parliamentary wing of the wealthy elite. When I was at university, a one-time very senior Tory figure put it succinctly at an off-the-record gathering: the Conservative Party, he explained, was a “coalition of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people”.”

Read the article and some interesting comments here

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Why Socialism VII: How are Decisions Made Within Capitalist Democracy

Read the latest instalment of Jim Schofield’s series on the Shape Blog.