RESPECTS paid to Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are worthless if they do not translate into action to defend today’s foremost exposer of US war crimes — Julian Assange.
Nor can we ignore either the lesson from his leak of the Pentagon Papers — that our governments lie systematically about war — or the concerns he raised in the last months of his life, that Nato powers are hurtling towards nuclear conflict with Russia and China.
Ellsberg was turned against the Vietnam war by direct experience of it — of the brutality and dishonesty of US commanders and strategists, who hid their real reasons for prosecuting the war and their private understanding that it was practically unwinnable but would continue to swallow resources and human lives indefinitely.
Vietnam saw the US kill more than two million people in a doomed attempt to crush communist revolution. But it was also a proxy war, a battleground seen in Washington as part of the global struggle for supremacy with the Soviet Union.
Today’s proxy war rages in Ukraine, where the US and Britain have worked to scupper peace talks — according to testimony from even US allies like Israel — while flooding in weapons in a bid to weaken a strategic rival, Russia.
Again we are being lied to, as leaked documents revealed earlier this year. We learned that the US had no faith whatsoever in the success of Ukraine’s counter-offensive. We learned that Nato states had put boots on the ground — Britain the highest number of all — bringing us dangerously close to direct war with a nuclear-armed adversary.
Such dishonesty is par for the course for the British government; it took the wounding of five special forces troops in Yemen in 2019 to reveal we were fighting that war, too.
None of this has prompted increased scepticism by our media when it comes to government claims. Off-the-record briefings by state agents are daily relayed as trustworthy sources, as regularly detailed by independent website MediaLens.
Alternative narratives are mocked or ignored, as happened to legendary journalist Seymour Hersh — who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam — and his account of how the US planned the Nord Stream explosions. The internet is more heavily censored than ever, with material questioning the Nato line shut down as “disinformation.”
There is little difference between the genocidal United States Ellsberg exposed — one which meditated unprovoked nuclear war against China in 1958, for example — and today’s. We should not be so naive as to think our rulers — who after all treat declared willingness to press the “nuclear button” as a test of machismo — will not be as reckless with our fates and that of the planet.
Like him, we should ignore the opprobrium, accusations of treachery and of siding with the enemy that are always flung at campaigners for peace and disarmament — notably today at the Stop the War Coalition that Keir Starmer seeks to hound out of the labour movement.
And we should fight for the freedom of others who have done the public a service by exposing state crimes. Just over a week ago Assange’s latest appeal was dismissed; he languishes in a British prison, at imminent risk of deportation to face a sentence even longer than Ellsberg was threatened with.
The latter’s trial collapsed when it emerged the state had spied on his lawyer. Yet the CIA’s spying on conversations between Assange and his lawyer — even evidence the US government considered assassinating him — have not induced Britain’s courts to dismiss his outrageous, political extradition, one which would chill investigative journalism across the entire world.
Many in the labour movement express solidarity with Assange, but too few place this press freedom case where it belongs — at the very heart of the fight to preserve democratic freedoms that are under sustained attack. Ellsberg’s death is a moment to commit to the battle to see him freed.
