by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
March 12, 2012
Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr
Totalitarian systems disempower an unsuspecting population by gradually making legal what was once illegal. They incrementally corrupt and distort law to exclusively serve the goals of the inner sanctums of power and strip protection from the citizen. Law soon becomes the primary tool to advance the crimes of the elite and punish those who tell the truth. The state saturates the airwaves with official propaganda to replace news. Fear, and finally terror, creates an intellectual and moral void.
We have very little space left to maneuver. The iron doors of the corporate state are slamming shut. And a conviction of Bradley Manning, or any of the five others charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917 with passing on government secrets to the press, would effectively terminate public knowledge of the internal workings of the corporate state. What we live under cannot be called democracy. What we will live under if the Supreme Court upholds the use of the Espionage Act to punish those who expose war crimes and state lies will be a species of corporate fascism. And this closed society is, perhaps, only a few weeks or months away.
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via Truthdig
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Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His latest books are Death of the Liberal Class, and The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
see
The Saga of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks by William Blum
Transformational Politics: Awakening an American Society and the Global Community by Clive Hambidge
The Assange case means we are all suspects now by John Pilger
John Pilger: The Reason for WikiLeaks – Justice
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The Espionage Act of 1917 was used many times in the early days, unfortunately, being upheld nearly every time. For example, in those days, Schneck was convicted of publishing a pamphlet encouraging disobedience of the draft. Also, Abrams was convicted for issuing pamphlet aginast US intervention in the Russian Revollution. These convictions were upheld, both in 1919.