Start from Different Forests, Arrive at the Same Clearing
Things have been heating up with Julian Assange’s imprisonment in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Supporters hopes were recently raised when it came out that United Nations reps were meeting with the government and negotiating the return of his ability communicate, which was cut off months ago after pressure from Spain and the U.S. Those hopes were dashed when it turned out the Ecuadorian government had attached so many restrictions to the return of his communications to make the whole thing nearly meaningless.
All of these machinations brought to mind what’s gotten Assange to this limited milestone. And that’s activism. Maybe you’ve been following all of the online vigils for Julian Assange that have been happening these past several months, many of them organized by dissident activist journalist in exile, Suzie Dawson. Maybe you haven’t. It’s worth highlighting that, at this point, these #UNITY4J online vigils (available on YouTube) are drawing thousands of viewers at a whack. This is inspiring and, in an overall sense, it’s arguably true that the consistent outpouring of both physical and digital support for Assange made the new Ecuadorian government pause in what looked to be an imminent eviction of the imprisoned journalist mere months ago.
If you take some time to watch the various speakers who have joined the vigils, it’s also quite fascinating to see how so many of the vigil’s speakers, who articulate a variety of different political viewpoints, have coalesced around committed support for Assange and Wikileaks.
In the wake of an online vigil held back on August 26th, my Twitter feed alerted me to two things: one, a piece written by the organization “Class Conscious” which denigrated the inclusion of Unity4J supporters who identify loosely on the right, the other a reaction piece to Class Conscious (Critique of Class-Conscious Article on Unity4J) written by a denizen of what many would consider the dark Web, software developer, cloud computing expert, self-described hacktivist and anti-pedophile activist Kitty Hundal.
http://kittyhundal.blogspot.com/2018/08/critique-of-class-conscious-article-on.html
In her piece, she offers some framing that many commentators and analysts have been arriving at from different angles — and that is:
“The real battle isn’t between DEMS vs GOP, progressives vs reactionaries, left vs right, etc.
The real battle is between the Empire and it’s Loyalists…versus those who resist the Empire.
There are people in both the left and the right spectrums who resist the Empire, criticize it’s agenda and refuse to be it’s loyal servants.”
I could run down a quick list of folks who’ve been circling around a similar premise: Caitlin Johnstone (feminist-socialist left), Paul Craig Roberts (libertarian right), H.A. Goodman (libertarian right), Chris Hedges (decentralizing socialist), Cynthia McKinney (left libertarian), Assange himself (agnostic left?) and even more mainstream lefties like David Sirota who wrote a somewhat prescient book a few years ago called The Uprising about the convergence of grassroots left and right.
In the past couple of years, political thinkers who have attempted to foster the growth of this convergence have found themselves in the crosshairs of, not only Empire Loyalists and trolls, but also Empire Resistors who don’t see the same cross-ideological battle lines that Hundal expresses above. Hence, when a writer like Caitlin Johnstone advocated for left/right collaboration in opposing the agenda of the world’s power-mad elites, an established left journal like Counterpunch lost its shit, called her a fascist, and spent a good portion of last summer churning out hit pieces — leading to a predictable Streisand effect which brought Johnstone a whole new stream of sympathetic readers.
Now, to get a better sense of this framing of empire resistance transcending traditional ideas of left and right, you could read the commentators I mentioned above and many others to boot. But Hundal, with an endearing engineering-esque logic, sculpts a compelling argument and does so with great compassion and respect for the writer with whom she’s disagreeing.
Give her piece a shot and I believe you’ll be rewarded with clarified thinking and renewed commitment to building a world where there ain’t no more boots on no more necks. Here it is one more time:
http://kittyhundal.blogspot.com/2018/08/critique-of-class-conscious-article-on.html
Thanks for reading.
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