Capitalist Press Excoriates WikiLeaks, Assange – While Making Millions off WikiLeaks’ Revelations

Socialists understand that the news media in a capitalist society like the United States, though it pretends to aspire to the unattainable and undesirable goal of utopian, complete “objectivity”, is, in fact, the all-encompassing voice of the economic class that dominates in every capitalist society – the capitalist class, or the corporate elites that rule under capitalism.   Michael Moore has posited (accurately according to the bourgeois press itself) that a mere 400 U.S. citizens control or own outright 50% of the total wealth of the United States of America.  It comes as no surprise to a socialist, then, that the news media – wholly owned by billionaire and multi-millionaire investors, with every employee of the bourgeois press answerable to bosses who answer to the tiny minority of incredibly wealthy owners of newspapers, radio and television stations – espouses almost exclusively and at all times that philosophy which states that the capitalist world is “the best of all possible worlds”.  And, of course, anyone who opposes the rule of the capitalist class must be attacked, vilified, slandered and set up for prosecution and perhaps even execution or assassination.  First, the capitalist press commits character assassination – then the police, secret agents or paid shills of the capitalist class commit the actual assassination.

This has certainly been the case with WikiLeaks, led by a cadre of people who oppose only capitalism’s excesses, and seek to reform the capitalist system to be “more humane”.  This rather mundane and, to most people, acceptable goal is too much for the tiny minority who actually run the United States of America.  They understand that even the tiniest crack in their armor can be exploited to bring down their “house of cards”-like system, based as it is on the exploitation of billions of workers all over the world by far less than 1% of the world’s population.

So it came to pass that when WikiLeaks began its campaign to expose as much of the endemic, extensive criminality of the “World’s Sole Superpower ™”, the bourgeois press almost immediately swung into action attacking the personal character of the most prominent leader of the WikiLeaks group, Julian Assange.  But, quite characteristically for the bourgeoisie and its servants, they made sure to make arrangements to have complete and as unfettered access to the WikiLeaks revelations as possible before they began their campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and its’ founder.

This campaign continues to this day.  Julian Assange remains, essentially, under house arrest in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, unable to freely continue his and his organization’s work of exposing the crimes of the capitalists internationally, while the capitalist news media that has done everything in its power to place him in the position he is in today continues to make millions off the revelations made possible by WikiLeaks and the courageous whistleblowers who provide the group with caches of damning documentation of the crimes of US imperialism and its allies.

We are continually seeing news articles these days whose entire underlying “newsworthiness” is based on one of the major revelations brought to light by WikiLeaks over the past year or two.

The bourgeois press, while initially pretending – loudly – that the US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks were a ho-hum collection of boring, unimportant and perhaps (they hinted darkly) even forged documents, are proving to be the primary source material of choice for capitalist news media journalists looking for the underlying secret international diplomacy behind many of today’s headlines.  We have seen at least 3 or 4 such articles in just the past week in several major capitalist news media outlets, from Reuters to the Wall St. Journal.  These capitalist media outlets are making millions off WikiLeaks while ignoring the plight of Julian Assange and making absolutely no effort to defend him or his organization from the attacks being made on this important source of classified material that is providing an uncensored view into the inner workings of the United States Government.  In this way the US bourgeois press, particularly, is “having it’s cake and eating it, too”.  It can distance itself from WikiLeaks and alleged whitsleblower Bradley Manning, even to the extent of branding them as “traitors” while simultaneously making big profits thanks to the extreme risks that these “amateur” news gatherers have provided by exposing US government secrets which the “loyal”, pro-US government US news media outlets would never dream of allowing their own reporters to expose.

In today’s Chicago Tribune, for example, there is an interesting and important article by Reuters’ Michael Georgy about a gang of criminals operating in Pakistan under the cover of being a religious organization: the Lakshar-e-Jangvi.  The “LeJ” – as it is popularly known – is an extremist Sunni Muslim terrorist gang that goes around murdering Shiite Muslims because the Shiites believe in a form of Islam slightly different from theirs. Apparently, according to the leader of LeJ, one Malik Ishaq, the Shiites are “guilty” of being somehow disrespectful towards – not the prophet Muhammad himself – but his friends and fellow-travelers! “Whoever insults the companions of the holy prophet should be given a death sentence”, says this “holy man”.

Of course, these criminal murderers want the world to believe that their campaign of assassination of innocent people is demanded of them by their god.  They are just not sufficiently reverent for Muhammad unless they are killing those people who they believe are not sufficiently reverent for Muhammad.  It’s an old story that never gets better for the retelling, no many how many centuries pass between episodes of religious extremism, no matter under what religion’s banner the terrorists operate.  Christianity passed through this phase over a period of centuries, leaving tens of millions of victims in its’ wake, too.

It’s as if the Catholics ware going around killing Protestants because they believed that Protestants had expressed insufficient boundless love for the apostle Timothy.  Absurd, right?  But in Punjab state in Pakistan, these criminals – heavily supported by the Sunni Muslim government of U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, and protected by “friends of the CIA” in the the Pakistani CIA – the ISI – are no joke.  They are a force to be reckoned with, terrorizing citizens and government forces alike with their widespread campaign of murder and intimidation.

Of course, as with all the Muslim extremist groups in Pakistan, the LeJ is composed of elements of the Islamist extremist armies that the US and its ally Pakistan used to wage the capitalists’ “holy war” against Communism in the form of the Soviet Union.  These religious fundamentalist bigots, who were, in the 1970s, languishing on the extreme otlying margins of modernizing Muslim societies, were given a major influx of cash and terrorist training by the United States and its “intelligence agencies” in order to “roll back Communism” that had appeared in the guise of a widely popular indigenous movement to bring Afghanistan out of the Dark Ages and into the modern world in the late 1970s.  Educated Afghanis, looking to Western Europe and the Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union as models, were seeking to modernize Afghanistan along socialist lines, ending such barbaric traditions as the “bride price” or selling of young women in arranged marriages, as well as building a nationwide educational system that would make the education of girls an equal priority with the education of boys.

Of course, to the United States, this was a golden opportunity to “stick it to the USSR” – by financing a terrorist network of Muslim fundamentalists to create a guerrilla movement to destroy the development of a modern, westernized Afghanistan.

Today, the US bemoans the lack of sufficiently educated, western-idealizing human beings in Afghanistan with which to develop “democracy” there.  Unfortunately, the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan successfully either murdered them all via their Islamic fundamentalist proxy armies in the first Afghan War in the late 1970s and early eighties – or they have emigrated to the West already.  This great “success” of the US’ “War Against Communism” left as its residue, such glorious organizations as Al Qaeda and… LeJ!

So, today’s Reuters article on the burgeoning religious war being brought on by the offspring of the US’ “War on Communism” describes today’s US State Department – run by Democrat Hillary Clinton – wrings its hands hypocritically as the monster it created wreaks havoc in the state of Punjab in Pakistan.  And the central revelation of the Reuters article – who is financing the growth of the LeJ – is based on the State Department Cables allegedly delivered to WikiLeaks by US military intelligence analyst Bradley Manning!

“…Saudi Arabia’s alleged financing of Sunni militant groups has been a sore point in Washington.

“U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in a December 2009 classified diplomatic cable that charities and donors in Saudi Arabia were the ‘most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide’.

“In the cable, released by WikiLeaks [our emphasis – read the full cable here ( at WikiLeaks’ ‘Cablegate’ website) – FoWL], Clinton said it was “an ongoing challenge” to persuade Saudi officials to treat such activity as a strategic priority.  She said the groups funded included al-Qaida, the Taliban and Lakshar-e-Taiba, the group blamed for the deadly 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India.”  [Source: Reuters, “Special Report: Pakistan’s Threat Within – the Sunni-Shia Divide”

by Michael Georgy, 28 November, 2012 (in the Chicago Tribune)]

[NOTE by FoWL:  It is indeed strange that Mr. Georgy singled out Saudi Arabia as if it was the only nation-state mentioned in the State Department cable he apparently cites.  Our review of this cable reveals that US Secretary of State Clinton was instructing US Embassy employees in 5 countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Qatar) to hold talks with their diplomatic counterparts in these nations in order to express the US’ dissatisfaction with the extent (or lack thereof) of their efforts to reduce or contain terrorist funding emanating from these countries.  The cable makes it clear that the US was aware of the fact that all five nations were consistently allowing millions of dollars of donations to flow annually to the Taliban and “LeT” – the earlier version of LeJ.]

Today, of course, it is the United States that provides billions of dollars worth of modern weapons including jet fighters to Saudi Arabia so its disgusting “House of Saud” monarchy can remain in power as one of the two cats’ paws US imperialism keeps afloat in the Middle East in order to keep the region containing one of the world’s most lucrative oil reserves in a constant state of emergency (the other “paw” of course, being Israel.)
Why doesn’t the United States cut off all aid to Saudi Arabia if it is the world’s biggest financial backer of Islamic terrorist groups in the world?

“Divide and conquer” has long been the mantra of the worst militarist regimes on the planet – and the United States embraces this doctrine no less completely than did the Roman Empire.  The US government supports the Saudis who support the Sunni terrorists in order to “contain” Iran!  It is precisely the same nearsighted strategy that caused the United States to create al-Qaida in order to fight the USSR.  The workers of the world – and particularly our sisters and brothers in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan – will suffer the consequences of the continued existence of the bourgeois capitalist regime in the United States and its greed-based foreign policy for decades to come.

Friends of WikiLeaks – Chicago