Julian Assange talking:
when we published the DNC leaks, The New York Times, which has picked its favorite candidate, as has Bloomberg, which is Hillary Clinton, said that I intended to harm Hillary Clinton. This is what we’ve been doing for 10 years. It was a completely fabricated story by Charlie Savage. OK.
But, yes, we are very interested in power and publishing the truth about power, so people can work out however they choose to reform power. And so, Google is a kind of new power on the block, so we are interested in it, and we’re also interested in Hillary Clinton, when she was secretary of state and now, I mean, the presidential candidacy. So, these two powers have merged at a kind of personal level and political level, and even, to a small extent, at the organizational level. So, that book, written three years ago, has been proved to be very prescient.
The chairman of Google, who was the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has started, about a year ago, a company to run Hillary Clinton’s digital campaign. Google has been to the White House, on average over the last four years, once per week—more than any other single company. It spends more money lobbying Washington, D.C., than any other single company. Hillary Clinton’s former staffer, Jared Cohen, was hired by Google in 2009 to head up Google’s internal think tank. There’s a lot of other interconnections between Google and the state. Eric Schmidt is now also, at the same time as being chairman of what is now Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is chairman of the Pentagon innovation board.
So you have a connection between Google, the Clinton campaign, which will be almost certainly the next White House, and the Pentagon. And this triangle is extremely worrying, because, as time goes by, Google is understanding that it does have an ability to influence election campaigns. It’s also bought more than 10 drone companies. It’s integrating its mapping data in order to better be able to fly and navigate drones around the world, is expanding into every country in the world.
And it has a very strange, quasi-religious vision of the future, of this vision of the singularity. It’s really a—I’ve done research that it’s very disturbing what they believe in Silicon Valley, that they believe they can create a massive artificial intelligence, more powerful than any human being or any society’s ability to think. And, of course, we all know what happens when such power is in limited hands.
And so, Google in the White House will be, essentially, an unregulatable company. It’s a question whether it’s already unregulatable, but you can—you can just completely forget about any kind of antitrust legislation being used on Google if there is a Hillary Clinton White House.
– Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator, said that fascism more appropriately should be called corporatism, because it merges the private power of corporations with the military might of the nation-state. And, of course, he thought that was a good thing. It occurs to me that you were describing our newer, kinder, gentler, smiling face of fascism, where all of the information that we receive is controlled by that same collusion between government and major transnational corporations.
there is a merger going on at a rapid pace between the largest American corporations and the traditional aspects of the U.S. state, the military intelligence aspects. I mean, that’s been there for a long time, frankly, with Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, General Electric, etc. But this is a new generation. And Eric Schmidt wrote in his book about Google and the world that what Lockheed Martin and other aerospace companies were to the 20th century, high-tech companies will be to the 21st century. And that’s very much their vision, to integrate with Washington, to prevent antitrust regulation and to be part of that family of traditional D.C.-mediated power.
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Google is very different, in an important way, from Lockheed Martin. Yes, Google is building drones. Yes, Lockheed Martin was and is building F-16s. But Google also controls how we communicate with each other. So, Google is, in a sense, like HIV. It doesn’t—it’s not just something that afflicts your arm; it afflicts your ability to understand and fight the infection. That’s true of all media, libraries, communication services, etc. They’re involved in that part of society that we use to understand ourselves, and that is the freedom of communication. So, the freedom of communication, in some sense, is the fundamental right, because it is the enabling right that allows us to speak to each other to understand the importance of all our other rights. And so, when the freedom of communication is degraded or maligned, when whistleblowers are prosecuted, when one organization starts to develop a monopoly on the internet and interfere with our communication, then all our rights suffer, because this fundamental enabling right is degraded.
As the editor of WikiLeaks, I have gone through a lot of battles. I have seen corrupt mainstream media outlets try to not report initially on some of our materials, spin them in other directions—that’s happened just recently. And I have also seen good journalists, embedded in those institutions, fighting to be accurate and truthful. There are good people even in bad institutions. Most of our sources are good people wanting to do good things, within the U.S. military or intelligence or political parties.
So, my strong advice is to understand, first of all, the necessity to be very skeptical of the traditional media apparatus, which is ultimately owned by some of the largest industrial conglomerates in the world, that’s firmly connected to other points of power; work around it; become your own media in practice, in small ways, in big ways; to keep—to keep your principles and sense of clarity on principles.
What the Clinton campaign is doing at the moment is trying to say, “Well, OK, yes, maybe we’re connected to arms dealers and to Saudi Arabia, and, yes, maybe we subverted the integrity of the Democratic primaries, etc., etc., but you will just have to swallow that. You will just have to swallow that, or else you will get Donald Trump.” That’s a form of extortion. It is a form of extortion.
it’s very important not to allow the political process to suffer from extortion, or even yourself to be susceptible to extortion. One says one has certain principles. If these principles are not followed, then there is a price to be paid. And that creates a standard and a general deterrent. And I think it is important for those people who feel that their principles have been violated, in the way that the Democratic primary process has been run, or how Chelsea Manning has been imprisoned for 35 years and tortured, or the Espionage Act crackdowns, or many other things, to go, “OK, well, there’s a cost to violating principles,” even if—even if there’s also a cost to yourself, even if you don’t like the risk, which seems to be getting very small, but the risk that Donald Trump becomes president, that one has to have a line somewhere. Otherwise, as each election cycle proceeds, you are pushed further and further into the corner.
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Julian Assange
founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.
— source democracynow.org