An Australian citizen was chased out of Sweden, and sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He was spied on in there, eventually dragged out, and jailed in the UK. Now he’s being extradited to the United States. His crime? Reporting on the war crimes of the United States, the heirs to White Empire. Assange’s biggest expose of that empire’s existence and malevolence was not his reporting. It is the ruin they have made of his life. His human sacrifice.

As his predecessor, the Vietnam War whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said to an incredulous Politico:

Ellsberg contended America still runs a “covert empire” around the world, embodied in the U.S. domination of NATO. He believes Washington deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine by pushing its seat of power eastward toward Russia’s borders; that the mainstream media is “complicit” in allowing the government to keep secrets it has no right to withhold; and that any notion Americans are ever the “good guys” abroad “has always been false.”

Why does Politico (sponsored by Lockheed Martin) put “covert empire” in scare quotes? What do they think the CIA is doing? Why does America have 750 military bases? Why are they always at war in multiple countries? How do they assassinate people wherever they want? Why are they sanctioning (besieging) much of the world? How is an Australian citizen being hounded from Sweden to Ecuador to the UK for crimes against the American state? We’re supposed to believe these are all coincidences and not what they obviously are — a violent empire with tentacles across the whole world. As George Orwell said in 1984,

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

American freedom is the freedom to say that 750 military bases equals zero. That there’s nothing there at all. It’s the freedom to say that all the invasions and coups equal zero. That each one is an isolated incident, no military coercion to see at all. And to say that sanctioning nearly half the world’s population is ‘targeted’, and not in fact siege warfare on a scale that would make a Khan blush in shame. It is a magnificent work of propaganda that the burden of proof is on people calling this an empire, and not the other way around.

All the subtle arguments from ‘party’ intellectuals like Politico dance around these simple facts. 750=750+, the countries attacked are in the dozens, and the countries besieged are all over. For all the freedom these ‘free media’ frauds have to say exactly what they’re supposed to, anyone that exposes the naked truth of Empire gets snatched off the street and tortured in solitary confinement. That’s what Assange is the most prominent example of. He exposed the mass crimes of empire and became its most public victim.

The persecution of Assange has just blended into the background because it's been so constant. But think back on what he did. He released information of the US gunning down journalists, their own ‘diplomats’ words about overthrowing countries, and tangible evidence of their military crime. These real crimes are buried in all the bullshit about ‘classified information’ (another word for thought crime). As Chris Hedges further details:

Julian, as I noted in a column filed from London last year, is targeted because of the Iraq War Logs, released in Oct. 2010, which document numerous U.S. war crimes, including images seen in the Collateral Murder video, of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injuring two children.

He is targeted because he made public the killing of nearly 700 civilians who had approached too closely to U.S. convoys and checkpoints, including pregnant women, the blind and deaf, and at least 30 children

He is targeted because he exposed more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians and the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 to 89, at Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

He is targeted because he showed us that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia, and the U.K., spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords, all part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included eavesdropping on U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

He is targeted because he exposed that Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA backed the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing him with a murderous and corrupt military regime.

He is targeted because he released documents that revealed the United States secretly launched missile, bomb and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians.

He is targeted because he made public the off-the-record talks Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs, talks for which she was paid $657,000, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, as well as her private assurances to Wall Street that she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform.

For revealing these truths alone he is guilty.

Read these horrors and tell me that the crime is exposing them. And yet that’s what America is charging Assange with, and the rest of the empire just offers him up. Australia makes nary a peep about their own citizen, the UK perverts its justice process completely, and even Ecuador caves after some token independence. This shows the real contours of the White Empire, and how all the borders and flags and supposed independence are lies.

The persecution of Assange also exposes the bald like of ‘free speech’ the Empire prides itself on. Its citizens mindlessly repeat that ‘at least we have free speech’, unlike the other guys who our empire is coincidentally attacking and trying to dehumanize. What Americans call freedom of speech is simply a vigorous debate about who and how to crucify. The American population is, sadly, a bunch of people in a Cable-TV Colosseum, debating whether they should be seeing Russians or migrants killed next time. Liberals are honestly the worst here. Conservatives like the cruelty, but liberals actually think they’re the ‘good guys’.

Anyone who pulls back the curtain on the two-ring circus is persecuted mercilessly — from Julian Assange, to Edward Snowden, to Reality Winner, to all the Black Panthers and Ferguson protestors jailed or murdered, and of course any foreigners who resist American meddling in their countries (but they don’t count at all). What America really has Freedom Of Speech™, a marketing tagline on something sugary and without nutrition, which actually kills them slowly. What America has is a Rules-Based-Order™ which is really just rule by the latest incarnation of globe-scamming White Empire. What are these rules? No one can tell you, it’s whatever the Empire decides, and you get beaten if you don’t comply. Assange tried to expose these lies with words but now he is tragically showing it with his own body, as a human sacrifice that’s slowly happening in front of our eyes.

I write a lot about the facts of the White Empire, but that is fundamentally math, which is boring. Assange exposed facts as well, but his most powerful expose seems (sadly) to be the sacrifice of his frail and very human life. He was a journalist making news, but now the Empire has made it very personal, by chasing him across their false flags and dragging him back to a country he’s not a citizen of, because he is nonetheless a subject of this overt Empire. Most of the world lives, one way or another, under the White Empire, and he is being made an example of to keep us all in line.

Just look at what they’re doing to this man and weep. How is an Australian being persecuted for espionage against the United States? It shows that the very idea of Australia is bullshit, as Caitlin Johnstone says, that ‘country’ is just an aircraft carrier with kangaroos. The UK became occupied and taken over after World War II, and you can visibly see America twisting its legal system to whatever it wants. As Hedges writes:

The hearings, some of which I attended in London and others of which I sat through online, mocked basic legal protocols. They included the decision to ignore the CIA’s surveillance and recording of meetings between Julian and his attorneys during his time as a political refugee in the embassy, eviscerating attorney-client-privilege. This alone should have seen the case thrown out of court. They included validating the decision to charge Julian, although he is not a U.S. citizen, under the Espionage Act. They included Kafkaesque contortions to convince the courts that Julian is not a journalist. They ignored Article 4 of the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses. I watched as the prosecutor James Lewis, representing the U.S., gave legal directives to Judge Baraitser, who promptly adopted them as her legal decision.

Even distant Ecuador comes within the Empire. They briefly showed some balls by naturalizing him, but under pressure (and with an IMF loan in the offing) they let the London police drag him out in broad daylight. They gave up a political refugee to the evil country hounding him. We can talk about all these issues in abstraction — how these systems oppress millions — but in Assange’s case we can see it all personified in one man. We can see that none of these countries and rights are real, they’re all fictions indulged as long as they don’t bother the ‘covert’ White Empire that actually runs the place. That’s what Assange showed through his leaks and now through his life. That is the ultimate price he pays to teach us a lesson we mostly ignore. But give it a while. Martyrs are usually scorned in the moment, and so it is this time.

Julian Assange is being persecuted for his journalism, but in the end his lived persecution is his most powerful exposé he could make. Him being dragged from state to state, embassy to embassy, shows how all these ‘independent’ nations are merely vassals of a globe-spanning White Empire, the inheritor of the colonial mantle of Europe, now headquartered in the genocidal colony of America. When the chips are down, most of the countries in the world won’t do shit for you. They don’t exist. It’s all one malevolent White Empire, and most of us are in it with him, or we’re with the ‘enemy’ and constantly under attack. As Daniel Ellsberg said in some of his last words:

I think very few Americans are aware of what our actual influence in the former colonial world has been, and that is to keep it colonial,” Ellsberg says. “King Charles III [of Britain] is no longer an emperor, as I understand it, but for all practical purposes Joe Biden is … Here’s a point I haven’t made to anyone but would like to in my last days here. Very simply, how many Americans would know any one of the following cases, let alone three or four of them?” Ellsberg then rattles off a series of U.S. orchestrated coups, most of them fairly well documented, starting with Iran in 1953, and then in Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Chile.

Of course, you can rattle off this destruction of millions of lives and they’re just statistics, but the destruction of Julian Assange’s is an obvious tragedy. After the mass crimes he exposed, this is his most personal exposé. The human sacrifice of his life. May the gods end it, but if they must accept it, let it mean something. Let us learn something. Let us name the wretched empire that rules us, let us see the obvious truth they call ‘covert’, and break out both Julian Assange and our own minds.