Wikileaks - Assange & Philosopher Slavoj Žižek- Full video
Debate · Marcos Villa ·
published 2011-08-03 · 2:07:28 · 16,525 words
with Julian Assange
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
ideologydemocracygeopolitics-wartechnology-ai-cyberspacecinema-art-culturerevolution-violenceliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismhistoryethicsphilosophy-general
A public conversation at the Frontline Club/Troxy in London (2011) between Slavoj Žižek, Julian Assange, and Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman, centered on the ideological significance of WikiLeaks beyond investigative journalism. Žižek argues that WikiLeaks does not merely reveal new facts but performs a crucial ideological operation: shifting society from cynical private knowledge to undeniable public confrontation, illustrated by the Collateral Murder video and the Ninotchka 'coffee without cream' joke. The discussion also covers Bradley Manning's detention and moral heroism, the Arab Spring and Western hypocrisy about Egypt's secular uprising, the normalization of torture and extra-legal spaces, university privatization as an attack on the Kantian public use of reason, and the enclosure of the digital public sphere through media consolidation and 'clouds.'
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Implicit in Žižek's point that everyone abstractly 'knows' war is dirty but this abstract knowledge is tolerable and changeable only when made concrete, the video ruptures the smooth functioning of the real abstraction.
Žižek uses it to name the structural necessity of what power must quietly permit and obscure in order to function; what ideology manages by ensuring you know obliquely but cannot confront directly.
as “ideology through implication”
Ideology functions not by outright lying but by controlling what is implied and left unsaid; the unsaid is the lie.
Formal electoral democracy reduced to a solitary, isolated act stripped of genuine public space for debate and communication.
The ideology-sanctioned form of transgression, investigative journalism, whistleblowing within limits, that WikiLeaks exceeds by changing the rules of what transgression itself may look like.
Each ideology controls not only what you may say but how you are permitted to violate what you say; WikiLeaks is radical because it changes those second-order rules, not merely breaks them.
The process by which journalists inside mainstream media organizations become radicalized by working through WikiLeaks material, constituting an internal subversion of the ideological filter.
as “uplifting Hollywood Marxism”
Liberal Hollywood thrillers (All the President's Men, The Pelican Brief) that appear critical but leave audiences euphoric, reinforcing the ideology 'what a great country we are.'
A legal-political category Žižek critiques as the normalization of extra-legal space; he notes with alarm that it is becoming an accepted legal category rather than remaining an admitted exception.
Dick Cheney's term, approvingly analyzed by Žižek, for the extra-legal space constructed by power to do what cannot be officially admitted; the structural precondition for 'unlawful combatants.'
The institutionalization of torture through legal categories (Dershowitz's 'torture warrants') is worse than torture as such, because it transforms a desperate transgression into a systemic norm.
The phenomenon of an ordinary, non-saintly person who suddenly, as if miraculously, does the right thing in defiance of systemic cynicism, exemplified for Žižek by Bradley Manning.
as “private use of reason”
Kant's counterintuitive term for reason deployed within and in service of established power structures, theological, legal, or political, not personal/private in the ordinary sense.
Žižek names the situation of being subject to extradition to a country where one has not been charged as a Kafkaesque paradox, the legal form consuming its own substantive basis.
as “cynical ideology”
The contemporary mode of ideology in which people are aware they are being manipulated but continue to act as if they are not; Žižek insists this does not exhaust human moral possibility.
The condition WikiLeaks produces: not new knowledge but the elimination of the possibility of pretending not to know, forcing the implicit into the explicitly undeniable.
The process by which political society is gradually replaced by contractual and banking relationships, extinguishing the political dimension of collective life.
Stories he reaches for 5
In Lubitsch's Ninotchka, a customer asks for coffee with cream; the waiter says they are out of cream but can serve coffee without milk. The substitution reveals that the absence of something can stand in for a presence, you can only offer 'without milk' if cream was never on the table.
“can i get some coffee with cream please — sorry we ran out of cream we only have milk so can i serve you with coffee without milk”
The Chinese government passed a law prohibiting time travel and alternate-reality narratives in public media, officially to protect the seriousness of history, but really, Žižek argues, because even imagining alternate realities threatens the ideological closure of the present.
“what they really are afraid of for people to even imagine alternate realities other possibilities”
Gandhi was a 'terrorist' in the precise sense that he interrupted the normal functioning of the British imperial state in India; WikiLeaks similarly interrupts normal information circulation, making the accusation of terrorism a philosophical compliment.
“yes in a way you are terrorist in the sense in which as i like to repeat Gandhi was a terrorist”
Groucho Marx, playing a lawyer, says of his client: 'he looks like an idiot and acts like an idiot, this shouldn't deceive you, he IS an idiot.' Žižek applies this to Rumsfeld's cynical defense of lying ('I was lying but truthfully'): we must not let him sell his lies as a deeper truth.
“this guy looks as an idiot and acts as an idiot this shouldn't deceive you this guy is an idiot”
In Truffaut's Day for Night a man spends a long time trying to seduce a woman; alone with her at last, when she agrees and begins undressing, he freezes, 'just like that?' The West demanded secular democracy from Arab countries, then when Egypt delivered it, reacted with the same paralysis.
“the Egyptians said okay i put down my trousers here you have your stupid secular democracy and you cannot get it just like that”
Works invoked 10
Ninotchka film
Ernst Lubitsch's 1939 film; the 'coffee without cream' joke is deployed as Žižek's primary model for how ideology functions through implication.
Psycho film
Norman Bates' line 'you wouldn't hurt even a fly' is briefly quoted in the context of Manning not being a saint.
Žižek's own book, mentioned by Amy Goodman as his latest at the time of the event.
The Pelican Brief film
Grouped with All the President's Men as an example of liberal Hollywood pseudo-criticism that is itself ideological.
Exemplar of 'uplifting Hollywood Marxism', appears critical of power but ultimately affirms the system ('what a great country we are, an ordinary guy can topple the mightiest man').
24 tv
Last season analyzed at length: Jack Bauer's collapse and President Taylor's resignation deliver a pessimistic but honest message, within existing ethico-political coordinates there is no way out. More critically valuable than uplifting Hollywood Marxism.
Day for Night film
Truffaut's 1973 film; the seduction scene where the man panics when the woman agrees is used to illustrate the hypocrisy of Western reaction to Egypt's secular democratic uprising.
Andersen fairy tale invoked as a model for WikiLeaks' ideological function: the value of publicly declaring what everyone already privately knows.
There Will Be Blood film
Briefly mentioned by Žižek as a joke ('unfortunately there will not be a lot of blood between the two of us') when noting his agreement with Assange.
Threepenny Opera play
Cited (as 'Brecht's Beggar's Opera') for the line 'what is robbing a bank compared to founding a new bank', used to frame WikiLeaks' alleged terrorism against systemic violence.
People invoked 24
Bill Keller negative
New York Times editor; quoted calling Assange 'arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial'; Žižek and Assange mock the characterization.
Dick Cheney negative
Referenced for the term 'gray zone', Žižek uses it to name the structural extra-legal space power constructs for what cannot be officially admitted.
Rupert Murdoch negative
Cited negatively for Apple's exclusive news deal with Murdoch's corporation, exemplifying the privatization of public digital space.
Mahatma Gandhi positive
Cited as the paradigm of a 'terrorist' in the philosophical sense, one who interrupts the normal (unjust) functioning of a state system; used to defend Assange from the terrorism label.
Groucho Marx positive
Cited for the lawyer joke ('this guy looks like an idiot and acts like an idiot, this shouldn't deceive you, this guy is an idiot'), deployed against Rumsfeld's cynical self-defense.
Judith Miller negative
Cited as the New York Times journalist who wrote WMD front-page stories without named sources, now criticizing Assange's journalism, the irony is noted.
Rudolf Elmer positive
Swiss banker imprisoned for allegedly leaking secret bank information; cited by Assange as another source figure receiving little recognition.
Newt Gingrich negative
Called 'kind of a scum of the earth', attacked for making moralistic anti-Clinton speeches while forcing his cancer-dying wife to sign divorce papers in the hospital; used as an example of hypocritical moral conservatism.
Alan Dershowitz negative
Criticized in a New York Times polemic for his proposal to legalize torture via 'torture warrants' with medical supervision; Žižek calls this normalization an obscenity worse than torture itself.
Donald Rumsfeld negative
Described as a 'stupid bad manager' whose business genius is a myth; his cynical self-defense ('I was lying but in a truthful way') is attacked as the most effective ideological trick of a liar.
Amy Goodman positive
Present interlocutor; Žižek repeatedly agrees with her framing and thanks her.
Chelsea Manning positive
Described as 'the hero' and an exemplary 'ethical miracle', an ordinary person who let simple morality prevail over legal considerations; Žižek proposes him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Julian Assange positive
Present interlocutor; Žižek defends him as doing something more radical than investigative journalism, compares him favorably to Gandhi, and repeatedly endorses his analysis.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Cited for the Threepenny Opera line 'what is robbing a bank compared to founding a new bank', used to reframe WikiLeaks' alleged terrorism against systemic violence.
Daniel Ellsberg positive
Referenced positively as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers; Assange mentions speaking with him.
Sarah Palin negative
Quoted calling Assange 'an anti-American operative with blood on your hands'; Assange jokes that correcting his grammar on Twitter was a bigger insult than calling for a drone attack.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Cited for the Ninotchka 'coffee without cream' joke as a model for how ideology works through implication.
François Truffaut positive
Cited for the seduction scene in Day for Night, used to illustrate Western hypocrisy about Egypt's secular democratic uprising.
Olof Palme positive
Cited approvingly to contrast the progressive Sweden of the 1970s with the present Sweden that has sent troops to Libya and is pursuing Assange's extradition.
Hans Christian Andersen positive
Referenced for 'The Emperor's New Clothes' as the model for WikiLeaks' function: publicly declaring what everyone already knows.
Barack Obama negative
Žižek says he has 'certain respect' for Obama but calls his handling of the 1967 borders statement 'cynicism at its purest', repeating official U.S. policy while maintaining an unwritten agreement to ignore it.
Noam Chomsky negative
Described as 'a friend' but explicitly disagreed with: Chomsky's position (attributed via a mutual friend) that 'today all the obscenities are so clear that we don't need any critique of ideology, we just need to tell people the truth' is rejected as insufficient.
Karl Marx positive
Cited ('I'm no fetishist of Marx but nonetheless') for the insight that honest conservatives often teach more than liberals; invoked approvingly.
Immanuel Kant positive
Invoked for the distinction between private and public use of reason; Žižek uses this to frame WikiLeaks and university autonomy as part of one political struggle for the public use of reason.
What it argues
WikiLeaks as ideological critique beyond investigative journalismideology operates through implication and the unsaid, not only outright liesundeniability — forcing public acknowledgment of what everyone privately knowsprivatization and enclosure of the digital public spherenormalization of torture and the institutionalization of the state of exceptionuniversity reform (Bologna Process) as attack on the Kantian public use of reasonethical miracles — ordinary people defying systemic cynicism
Dialectical moves 8
“you are not just violating the rules you are changing the very rules how we were allowed to violate the rules”
WikiLeaks is not merely transgressive within the existing ideological frame but meta-transgressive: it restructures the permitted modes of transgression itself.
“even if we learned nothing new the form matters — the Emperor is naked; the moment somebody publicly says the Emperor is naked everything changes”
The form of public declaration transforms identical content: privately known facts and publicly undeniable facts produce entirely different ideological effects.
“what is robbing a bank compared to founding a new bank — your terrorism is strictly a reaction to a much stronger terrorism which has to go on day by day so that just things remain the way they are”
The violence called terrorism is a secondary response to the primary, invisible systemic violence that maintains normality; the real question is which violence counts as original.
“you are a terrorist in the sense in which Gandhi was a terrorist”
Redefines terrorism not as random violence but as deliberate interruption of the normal (unjust) functioning of a system, which Gandhi also did, making the charge paradoxically a compliment.
“for Kant private use of reason is not gathering with friends in a pub — private use of reason is theological faculty, legal faculty, political sciences — and we here at a distance from this power structure are the public use of reason”
Kant's counterintuitive reversal: institutional/professional thought is 'private,' while free independent inquiry is 'public', Žižek uses this to recast WikiLeaks as the highest expression of Kantian public reason.
“who are you to even speak about Judeo-Christian legacy — this university reform today is the greatest threat to Judeo-Christian legacy, and anti-immigrant politicians are the nightmare”
The right-wing defenders of Judeo-Christian civilization are in fact its destroyers; the real heir of that tradition is the WikiLeaks-style defense of independent public reason.
“Fox News showed more of the truth about Collateral Murder than CNN — the formally right-wing outlet was less constrained by liberal ideological responsibility”
The ostensibly conservative/reactionary media outlet proved more truthful than the liberal one because it was not bound by the implicit deal liberal media makes with power.
“this is cynicism at its purest — although the 1967 borders were officially U.S. policy, part of the unwritten deal was not to talk about it; WikiLeaks pushes you to the point where you cannot pretend not to know”
Official policy and the unwritten agreement to ignore it produce a cynical split that WikiLeaks-style undeniability collapses.
Claims 17
asserts
WikiLeaks does not primarily tell us new facts; its main achievement is making the implicit undeniable — forcing everyone past the point where cynical pretense of ignorance is possible.the ideological function of WikiLeaks
asserts
Ideology functions not through explicit lies but through what it implies and leaves unsaid; the unsaid is the lie.the mechanism of ideology
asserts
WikiLeaks is not merely violating the rules of the bourgeois press but changing the very rules of how transgression is permitted — making it more radical than investigative journalism.WikiLeaks vs. investigative journalism
asserts
The abstract/tolerable knowledge that power does bad things is transformed into a national shock only when made concrete (photographic, visual) — hence the importance of the Collateral Murder video.abstract vs. concrete knowledge in ideology
asserts
In the long term, capitalism will enter crisis over intellectual property because its logic of enclosure is fundamentally incompatible with the free flow of information.capitalism and intellectual property
asserts
The privatization of public space through 'clouds,' media consolidation, and Apple-Murdoch exclusive deals is the primary digital danger today, not a lack of information as such.digital enclosure and public space
asserts
The legalization and normalization of torture (Dershowitz's torture warrants with medical supervision) is more obscene than torture itself because it strips away the illegitimacy that makes it a desperate exception.torture and the law
reframes
WikiLeaks' 'terrorism' is strictly a reaction to the much stronger systemic terrorism required to keep things functioning as they are; the question is what counts as the first violence.terrorism and systemic violence
asserts
The Bologna Process university reform is an attack on the Kantian public use of reason, reducing academics to technical experts who solve problems formulated by others.university privatization and intellectual freedom
reframes
The genuine content of the Judeo-Christian legacy — the independent space of public reason — is better defended by WikiLeaks than by the anti-immigrant politicians who claim to speak in its name.Judeo-Christian legacy and public reason
asserts
The left should rehabilitate simple moral seriousness — the category of the ethical miracle — rather than ceding it to institutions like the Catholic Church.ethics and the left
asserts
One can often learn more from honest conservatives than from liberals, because conservatives confront deadlocks without selling uplifting solutions.conservatives vs. liberals
rejects
Truth must be contextualized and confronted with its ideological presuppositions; merely telling the truth is not enough, as shown by the Israeli historian whose honest account became an argument for more ethnic cleansing.Chomsky's position that truth alone suffices without ideology critique
asserts
The Western reaction to Egypt's secular uprising — discomfort and paralysis when the Arabs actually delivered the secular democracy demanded of them — exposes the hypocrisy of liberal demands.Western hypocrisy and the Arab Spring
asserts
Bradley Manning deserves the Nobel Peace Prize as the exemplary ethical miracle of our time.Bradley Manning and moral courage
reframes
Censorship is a positive symptom: a society that censors still treats beliefs and words as politically consequential, unlike a fully fiscalized society where nothing one says matters.censorship and political vitality · Julian Assange
asserts
Fox News gave more of the truth about Collateral Murder than CNN did, because it was not constrained by the liberal ideology of moral responsibility to power.Fox News vs. CNN and ideological filtering
Quotes 12
“it doesn't only matter what you say it matters what you imply to say”Slavoj Žižek · ideology operates through implication
“you are not just violating the rules you are changing the very rules how we were allowed to violate the rules — this is maybe the most important thing you can do”Slavoj Žižek · WikiLeaks as meta-transgression
“the Emperor is naked we may all know that the Emperor is naked but the moment somebody publicly says the Emperor is naked everything changes”Slavoj Žižek · undeniability and the power of public declaration
“what is robbing a bank compared to founding a new bank”Slavoj Žižek · systemic violence dwarfs reactive transgression
“what i absolutely oppose to is to legalize this — if out of despair i do something like this it should remain something unacceptable”Slavoj Žižek · against the normalization of torture
“there are ethical miracles there are people who still care — this is very important because let's not leave this domain of care for simple dignified ethical acts to agencies like the Catholic Church”Slavoj Žižek · ethical miracles and the left
“democracy not only as this masturbatory right to cast a vote totally isolated but as public space of debate communication”Slavoj Žižek · genuine vs. formal democracy
“for Kant private use of reason is not gathering with friends in a pub — private use of reason is theological faculty legal faculty political sciences serving a goal set up by a power structure”Slavoj Žižek · Kant's counterintuitive public/private distinction
“we can often learn more from honest conservatives than from liberals because what honest conservatives do is they don't try to sell you at the end some uplifting bullshit they are ready to confront a deadlock”Slavoj Žižek · honest conservatives vs. liberal ideology
“truth must be contextualized — what does it justify what does it say what does it deny”Slavoj Žižek · truth requires ideological contextualization
“WikiLeaks is an event not only because of what it says in itself but because nobody can ignore it — the point is not to allow it to be renormalized”Slavoj Žižek · WikiLeaks as irreversible ideological event
“you are that's why it aroused such an explosion of resentment — you are not only violating the rules disclosing secrets but changing the very rules of how we were allowed to violate the rules”Slavoj Žižek · WikiLeaks' meta-transgressive radicalism
Transcript 62 turns
unknown
Good afternoon my name is Vaughan Smith I'm the founder of the Frontline Club co-founder actually co-founder with my wife Pranvera who is hidden amongst you somewhere um we're very excited to be doing this today this is the largest event we've done at the Frontline Club and I'd like to thank Will at the Troxy Center and all his team I'd like to thank you for coming to this fantastic place I'd like to thank Dan our branding man because I'm standing in front of a hundred logos which are all new so thanks Dan our new look we're not shy of our new look um I'd like to thank the Frontline Club staff who've worked extremely hard to put this on particularly Flora and Milly and so thank you all I'm extremely proud of you all the Frontline Club exists to promote what's best in journalism and to put on debates and discussions like this we're a social enterprise and if you wish to support us come to Paddington if you haven't already been where we can feed and entertain you we do events a year as a social enterprise the money you spend tonight and any money you spend at the Frontline Club helps us do this work so we're very grateful for it if you want to help Julian or Slavoj or Democracy Now! you can buy some books or put donations at the end and that facility will be there now it's Julian's 40th birthday tomorrow so if you want to help him with those exorbitant legal fees then you know give generously at the end um so all that remains is for me to welcome Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Amy is a multiple award-winning journalist um has and and is the main presenter for Democracy Now! and has flown all the way from America to be here and um she she's a pretty fine person and I'm extremely glad to hand over to her now thank you very much
Good afternoon my name is Vaughan Smith I'm the founder of the Frontline Club co-founder actually co-founder with my wife Pranvera who is hidden amongst you somewhere um we're very excited to be doing this today this is the largest event we've done at the Frontline Club and I'd like to thank Will at the Troxy Center and all his team I'd like to thank you for coming to this fantastic place I'd like to thank Dan our branding man because I'm standing in front of a hundred logos which are all new so thanks Dan our new look we're not shy of our new look um I'd like to thank the Frontline Club staff who've worked extremely hard to put this on particularly Flora and Milly and so thank you all I'm extremely proud of you all the Frontline Club exists to promote what's best in journalism and to put on debates and discussions like this we're a social enterprise and if you wish to support us come to Paddington if you haven't already been where we can feed and entertain you we do events a year as a social enterprise the money you spend tonight and any money you spend at the Frontline Club helps us do this work so we're very grateful for it if you want to help Julian or Slavoj or Democracy Now! you can buy some books or put donations at the end and that facility will be there now it's Julian's 40th birthday tomorrow so if you want to help him with those exorbitant legal fees then you know give generously at the end um so all that remains is for me to welcome Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Amy is a multiple award-winning journalist um has and and is the main presenter for Democracy Now! and has flown all the way from America to be here and um she she's a pretty fine person and I'm extremely glad to hand over to her now thank you very much
unknown
good afternoon it is a great honor to be with you this afternoon and a shout-out to all of the people who are watching this broadcast all over the world we are livestreaming this at democracynow.org by the way how many of you watch or listen to or read Democracy Now! we have we've given out about a thousand flyers of where we broadcast in Britain uh and also um where you can watch read and listen to the broadcast we're also livestreaming we've offered the embed for anyone to take to put on their website The Nation is livestreaming us michaelmoore.com is livestreaming us Free Speech TV is broadcasting Democracy Now! across the United States and there are many others i hope people tweet in Facebook in let us know what you're doing with this broadcast it's extremely important because information is power information is a matter of life and death we've learned that through these remarkable trove of documents that have been released in the last year the Iraq War Logs the Afghanistan War Logs and what's been called Cablegate the U.S. State Department documents that are continuing to be released why does it matter so much well we'll talk about that this afternoon but let's just take one example that came out in the Iraq War Logs February of the war log showed that two men were standing Iraqis under an Apache helicopter the men have their hands up they clearly are attempting to surrender the Apache helicopter can see this
good afternoon it is a great honor to be with you this afternoon and a shout-out to all of the people who are watching this broadcast all over the world we are livestreaming this at democracynow.org by the way how many of you watch or listen to or read Democracy Now! we have we've given out about a thousand flyers of where we broadcast in Britain uh and also um where you can watch read and listen to the broadcast we're also livestreaming we've offered the embed for anyone to take to put on their website The Nation is livestreaming us michaelmoore.com is livestreaming us Free Speech TV is broadcasting Democracy Now! across the United States and there are many others i hope people tweet in Facebook in let us know what you're doing with this broadcast it's extremely important because information is power information is a matter of life and death we've learned that through these remarkable trove of documents that have been released in the last year the Iraq War Logs the Afghanistan War Logs and what's been called Cablegate the U.S. State Department documents that are continuing to be released why does it matter so much well we'll talk about that this afternoon but let's just take one example that came out in the Iraq War Logs February of the war log showed that two men were standing Iraqis under an Apache helicopter the men have their hands up they clearly are attempting to surrender the Apache helicopter can see this
unknown
so they're not rogue the soldiers call back to the base and they say what would should we do these men have their hands up the lawyer on the base says you cannot surrender to a helicopter and they blow the men attempting to surrender away that was February now we will fast forward to July 12th and video that has been released by WikiLeaks this devastating video of an area of Baghdad called New Baghdad where a group of men were showing around two Reuters journalists well one was a videographer an a young up-and-coming videographer named Namir Noor-Eldeen and one was his driver Saeed Chmagh he was years old he was the father of four and they were showing them around the area the same Apache helicopter unit is hovering above they open fire the video is chilling i am sure many of you have seen it if you watch or listen to Democracy Now! we played it repeatedly discussing it with various people from Julian Assange to soldiers who were there on the ground over time we dissected this the soldiers open fire you have the video of the target and you have the audio of the sounds of the soldiers cursing laughing but not rogue always going up the chain of command asking for permission to open fire in the first explosion Namir Noor-Eldeen and the other men on the ground are killed Saeed Chmagh you can see him attempting to crawl away and then a van pulls up from the neighborhood and they're attempting to pick up the wounded there are children in the van and the Apache helicopter opens fire again and Saeed Chmagh others in the van are killed two little children are critically injured inside now i dare say that if we had seen what came out in the Iraq War Logs in February of if we had learned the story at the time after it happened of the men with their hands up trying to surrender there would have been an outcry people are good people care people are compassionate they would have called for an investigation perhaps one would have been what would have begun but it might well have saved the lives of so many certainly months later perhaps that same Apache helicopter unit under investigation would not have done what it did and maybe Namir Noor-Eldeen the young Reuters videographer and his driver Saeed Chmagh not to mention the other men who were killed and the kids critically injured none of that would have happened to them that's why information matters it is important we know what is done in our name and today we're going to talk about this new age of information we're joined by two people many of you know well earlier i asked a young man who had come to the gathering why he had traveled so far he said are you kidding to be with two of the most dangerous people well the National Review calls Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek the most dangerous political philosopher in the West and the New York Times says he's the Elvis of cultural theory Slavoj Žižek has written over books on philosophy psychoanalysis theology history and political theory his latest book Living in the End Times and we'll talk about what he thinks and talks about around the world now we're joined by another man who has published perhaps more than anyone in the world um in fact he wrote a book uh on the
so they're not rogue the soldiers call back to the base and they say what would should we do these men have their hands up the lawyer on the base says you cannot surrender to a helicopter and they blow the men attempting to surrender away that was February now we will fast forward to July 12th and video that has been released by WikiLeaks this devastating video of an area of Baghdad called New Baghdad where a group of men were showing around two Reuters journalists well one was a videographer an a young up-and-coming videographer named Namir Noor-Eldeen and one was his driver Saeed Chmagh he was years old he was the father of four and they were showing them around the area the same Apache helicopter unit is hovering above they open fire the video is chilling i am sure many of you have seen it if you watch or listen to Democracy Now! we played it repeatedly discussing it with various people from Julian Assange to soldiers who were there on the ground over time we dissected this the soldiers open fire you have the video of the target and you have the audio of the sounds of the soldiers cursing laughing but not rogue always going up the chain of command asking for permission to open fire in the first explosion Namir Noor-Eldeen and the other men on the ground are killed Saeed Chmagh you can see him attempting to crawl away and then a van pulls up from the neighborhood and they're attempting to pick up the wounded there are children in the van and the Apache helicopter opens fire again and Saeed Chmagh others in the van are killed two little children are critically injured inside now i dare say that if we had seen what came out in the Iraq War Logs in February of if we had learned the story at the time after it happened of the men with their hands up trying to surrender there would have been an outcry people are good people care people are compassionate they would have called for an investigation perhaps one would have been what would have begun but it might well have saved the lives of so many certainly months later perhaps that same Apache helicopter unit under investigation would not have done what it did and maybe Namir Noor-Eldeen the young Reuters videographer and his driver Saeed Chmagh not to mention the other men who were killed and the kids critically injured none of that would have happened to them that's why information matters it is important we know what is done in our name and today we're going to talk about this new age of information we're joined by two people many of you know well earlier i asked a young man who had come to the gathering why he had traveled so far he said are you kidding to be with two of the most dangerous people well the National Review calls Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek the most dangerous political philosopher in the West and the New York Times says he's the Elvis of cultural theory Slavoj Žižek has written over books on philosophy psychoanalysis theology history and political theory his latest book Living in the End Times and we'll talk about what he thinks and talks about around the world now we're joined by another man who has published perhaps more than anyone in the world um in fact he wrote a book uh on the
unknown
underground computer information age called Underground The International Computer Underground but with the Iraq War Logs the Afghanistan War Logs now the U.S. government cables that have yet to be fully released i would say that Julian Assange is perhaps the most widely published person on earth um today we're going to have a conversation about information and i'd like to ask Julian to begin by going back to that moment in as we talk about the Iraq War Logs and talk about the significance of them for you and why you've chosen to release this information well Amy
underground computer information age called Underground The International Computer Underground but with the Iraq War Logs the Afghanistan War Logs now the U.S. government cables that have yet to be fully released i would say that Julian Assange is perhaps the most widely published person on earth um today we're going to have a conversation about information and i'd like to ask Julian to begin by going back to that moment in as we talk about the Iraq War Logs and talk about the significance of them for you and why you've chosen to release this information well Amy
Julian Assange
um i suspect under that criteria perhaps Rupert Murdoch is the most widely published uh person uh on earth um something why people say that Australia has given um two people to the world Rupert Murdoch and me that are fairly big in in publishing um well in some ways things are very easy for us and very easy for me in that we make a promise to sources that if they give us material that is of a certain type that is of significant um of diplomatic political ethical or historical significance not published and under some sort of threat uh we will publish it and that actually is enough of course we have a goal with publishing material in general but um it has been my long-term belief that what advances us as a civilization is the entirety of our intellectual record and the entirety of our understanding
um i suspect under that criteria perhaps Rupert Murdoch is the most widely published uh person uh on earth um something why people say that Australia has given um two people to the world Rupert Murdoch and me that are fairly big in in publishing um well in some ways things are very easy for us and very easy for me in that we make a promise to sources that if they give us material that is of a certain type that is of significant um of diplomatic political ethical or historical significance not published and under some sort of threat uh we will publish it and that actually is enough of course we have a goal with publishing material in general but um it has been my long-term belief that what advances us as a civilization is the entirety of our intellectual record and the entirety of our understanding
unknown
about what we are
about what we are
Julian Assange
going through what human institutions are actually like and how they actually behave and if we are to make rational policy decisions in so far as any decision can be rational uh then we have to have information that is drawn from the real world and a description of the real world and at the moment we are severely lacking in the information from the interior of big secretive organizations that have such a role in shaping how civilization evolves and how we all live so getting down into Iraq so that was uh documents each one written in military speak on the other hand each one having a geographic coordinate down often to meters a death count of civilians U.S. military troops Iraqi troops uh and uh suspected insurgents so it was the the first um the rather the largest because we also did the Afghan War Logs the the largest history of a war the most detailed significant history of a war to have ever been published probably at all uh but definitely during the course uh of a war and so it it provided a a picture of the everyday squalor of war from children being killed at roadside blocks to over a thousand people being handed over uh to the Iraqi police for torture um to the reality um of uh um close air support and and how modern military uh combat is done linking linking up with other information such as this video uh that we discovered of the men surrendering uh being attacked so it as a as an archive of human history um this is um a beautiful and horrifying thing both both at the same time it is the history of the nation of Iraq in most significant recording uh during um its most significant development uh in the past um years and while we always see um newspaper stories revealing and personalizing some individual if we're lucky some individual event or some individual family dying this provides the broad scope of the entire war and all the individual events over the details of over deaths and we worked together to statistically analyze this and with uh various groups uh around the world such as Iraq Body Count uh who became the specialists specialists in this area and and lawyers here in the UK who represented Iraqi refugees to pull out the stories of Iraqi civilians labeled as civilians by the U.S. military who were killed who were never before reported in the Iraqi press never before reported in the in the U.S. press or in the world press even in aggregate even saying today a thousand people died not reported in any manner whatsoever and you just think about that um people um whose deaths were recorded by the U.S. military but were completely unknown um to the rest of the world that's a a very significant thing and compare that to the people who died in and imagine the significance uh for Iraqis so that is something that um that we specialize in and that i like to do and i've always tried to do is to go from the small to the large not just by um abstraction or by analogy but actually by encompassing all of it together and then trying to look at it and abstract uh through mathematics or statistics um and so to try try and push both of these things at the same time the individual relationship uh plus the state relationship plus the relationship that has to do with civilization as a whole Slavoj Žižek the importance of WikiLeaks today in the world well uh to answer properly this question it's just you can withdraw and give me two hours no but i'll try to condense it first let me say also how proud i am to be here and let me mention something which maybe most of you don't know that how difficult even it was to organize this event like it had to be moved two times out and more out from central London and so on so again what i want to say is let me begin with uh the significance of what you Amy started with this uh shots i mean uh not shooting but uh video shots of of those Apache helicopters shooting on you know why this is important because the way ideology functions today it's not so much that let's not be naive that people didn't know about it but i think the way those in power manipulate it yes we all know dirty things are being done but you are being informed about this obliquely in such a way that basically you are able to ignore it and the can i make a terrible uh maybe sexual offensive but not dirty don't be afraid uh remark you know like uh a husband sorry for male chauvinist uh uh twist a husband may know abstractly my wife's is cheating on me or and you can accept okay i'm a modern tolerant husband but you know when you get the photo of your wife doing things it's quite a different thing and it's i would say with all respect something similar it's very important because the same no no i'm not dreaming here the same thing i remembered happened i think about two years ago in Serbia you know people rationally accepted we did horrible things in Srebrenica and so on but you know it was just abstract knowledge then by chance all the honor to Serb media who published this they got hold of a video effectively showing a group of Serbs pushing to an edge and shooting a couple of Bosnian
going through what human institutions are actually like and how they actually behave and if we are to make rational policy decisions in so far as any decision can be rational uh then we have to have information that is drawn from the real world and a description of the real world and at the moment we are severely lacking in the information from the interior of big secretive organizations that have such a role in shaping how civilization evolves and how we all live so getting down into Iraq so that was uh documents each one written in military speak on the other hand each one having a geographic coordinate down often to meters a death count of civilians U.S. military troops Iraqi troops uh and uh suspected insurgents so it was the the first um the rather the largest because we also did the Afghan War Logs the the largest history of a war the most detailed significant history of a war to have ever been published probably at all uh but definitely during the course uh of a war and so it it provided a a picture of the everyday squalor of war from children being killed at roadside blocks to over a thousand people being handed over uh to the Iraqi police for torture um to the reality um of uh um close air support and and how modern military uh combat is done linking linking up with other information such as this video uh that we discovered of the men surrendering uh being attacked so it as a as an archive of human history um this is um a beautiful and horrifying thing both both at the same time it is the history of the nation of Iraq in most significant recording uh during um its most significant development uh in the past um years and while we always see um newspaper stories revealing and personalizing some individual if we're lucky some individual event or some individual family dying this provides the broad scope of the entire war and all the individual events over the details of over deaths and we worked together to statistically analyze this and with uh various groups uh around the world such as Iraq Body Count uh who became the specialists specialists in this area and and lawyers here in the UK who represented Iraqi refugees to pull out the stories of Iraqi civilians labeled as civilians by the U.S. military who were killed who were never before reported in the Iraqi press never before reported in the in the U.S. press or in the world press even in aggregate even saying today a thousand people died not reported in any manner whatsoever and you just think about that um people um whose deaths were recorded by the U.S. military but were completely unknown um to the rest of the world that's a a very significant thing and compare that to the people who died in and imagine the significance uh for Iraqis so that is something that um that we specialize in and that i like to do and i've always tried to do is to go from the small to the large not just by um abstraction or by analogy but actually by encompassing all of it together and then trying to look at it and abstract uh through mathematics or statistics um and so to try try and push both of these things at the same time the individual relationship uh plus the state relationship plus the relationship that has to do with civilization as a whole Slavoj Žižek the importance of WikiLeaks today in the world well uh to answer properly this question it's just you can withdraw and give me two hours no but i'll try to condense it first let me say also how proud i am to be here and let me mention something which maybe most of you don't know that how difficult even it was to organize this event like it had to be moved two times out and more out from central London and so on so again what i want to say is let me begin with uh the significance of what you Amy started with this uh shots i mean uh not shooting but uh video shots of of those Apache helicopters shooting on you know why this is important because the way ideology functions today it's not so much that let's not be naive that people didn't know about it but i think the way those in power manipulate it yes we all know dirty things are being done but you are being informed about this obliquely in such a way that basically you are able to ignore it and the can i make a terrible uh maybe sexual offensive but not dirty don't be afraid uh remark you know like uh a husband sorry for male chauvinist uh uh twist a husband may know abstractly my wife's is cheating on me or and you can accept okay i'm a modern tolerant husband but you know when you get the photo of your wife doing things it's quite a different thing and it's i would say with all respect something similar it's very important because the same no no i'm not dreaming here the same thing i remembered happened i think about two years ago in Serbia you know people rationally accepted we did horrible things in Srebrenica and so on but you know it was just abstract knowledge then by chance all the honor to Serb media who published this they got hold of a video effectively showing a group of Serbs pushing to an edge and shooting a couple of Bosnian
unknown
prisoners and the
prisoners and the
Slavoj Žižek
effect was a total shock national shock although again strictly seeing nobody learned anything new so here so that i don't get lost if you allow me just a little bit more here we should see the significance of WikiLeaks many of of my friends who are skeptical about it are telling me so what did we really learn isn't it clear that every power in order to function you have to have collateral damage you have to have a certain discretion what you say what you don't say but to conclude i will propose a formula of what WikiLeaks is doing and it's extremely important of course i'm not a utopian neither me nor Julian believes in this kind of a pseudo-radical openness everything should be clear and so on but what are we dealing with here another example from cinema very short Ernst Lubitsch Ninotchka you find there a wonderful joke where i think towards the beginning of the film the hero enters a cafeteria and says uh can i get some uh coffee with cream please and the waiter answers him sorry we ran out of cream we only have milk so can we give you can i serve you with coffee without milk that's the trick here like when we learn something from the media like if i may repeat the metaphor they behave as if they are serving uh coffee with cream that is to say of course we all know they are not telling the entire truth but you know that's the trick of ideology even if they don lie directly the implications the unsaid is a lie and you bring this out you are not so much putting them uh catching them as they put it with their pants down lying on behalf of what they explicitly say but precisely on behalf of what they are implying and i think this is an absolutely crucial mechanism in ideology it doesn't only matter what you say it matters what you uh what you uh what you imply to say and so on so just to make the last point i think that are we aware at what an important moment we are living today on the one hand as you said information is crucial and so on like we all know that it's crucial even economically i claim that one of maybe the main reasons capitalism will get into crisis is intellectual property in the long term it simply cannot deal with it but what i'm saying is just take the phenomenon that media are trying to get us enthusiastic for clouds like you know computer getting smaller and smaller and all is done for you up there in a cloud okay but the problem is that clouds are not up there in clouds they are controlled and so on for example you rely on maybe you have an iPhone but you mentioned Murdoch no was mentioned here do you know it's good to know if you rely on your news through iPhone or whatever that Apple signed an exclusive agreement with Murdoch Murdoch's corporation as again the exclusive provider of entire news and so on and so on this is the danger today it's no longer this clear distinction private space public space the public space itself gets as it were privatized in a whole series of invisible ways like the model of it being clouds which is why and again this involves new modes of censorship i repeat this that's why you shouldn't be tricked when you say but what really did we learn new maybe we learned nothing new but you know it's the same as in that beautiful old uh Andersen's fairy tale the Emperor is naked the Emperor is naked we may all know that the Emperor is naked but the moment somebody publicly says the Emperor is naked everything changes this is why even if we learned nothing new but we did learn many new things but even if nothing learned the form matters so don't confuse Julian and his gang in a good sense not the way they accuse you don't don't confuse them with this usual bourgeois heroism fight investigative journalism free flow and so on you are doing something much more radical you are that's why it aroused such an explosion of resentment you are not only violating the rules disclosing secrets and so on let me call it in the old Marxist way the bourgeois press today has its own way to be transgressive each ideology not only controls what you say but even how you can violate what you are allowed to say you are not just violating the rules you are changing the very rules how we were allowed to violate the rules this is maybe the most important thing you can do and yet Julian even as you were releasing information in all different ways you then turned to the very gatekeepers who in some cases had kept back this information and you worked with the mainstream media throughout the world in releasing uh various documents talk about that experience and that level of cooperation and what has happened after that well we're an organiza- [shouting from balcony Turn the volume up please from the balcony It's very quiet Volume please] Volume for the balcony now that you said this they will again idiots accuse you you see he is the authoritarian leader who gives commands and so i'm not saying this is not true i think this is the only way to really keep things going so if if you want to have an impact and you promise an impact and you're an organization which is very small well actually you have to co-opt um or leverage the rest of the mainstream press um so under our model of of how you make an impact and how you get people to do things that you wouldn't have been otherwise able to do unless you have an army that can physically go some place and Panzer divisions that can roll over um the only way that you can easily make an impact um is push information about the world uh to many many people across the world and so the mainstream press uh has developed expertise in how to do that and it is competition also for people's attention uh so if if we had had several billion dollars to spend on advertising across the world uh even if we could get our uh ads placed uh we wouldn't um easily be able to have made the same impact that we did and we don't have that kind of money so instead if you like we entered into relationships with now over um media organizations across the world including some very good ones that i wouldn't want to uh disparage to increase the impact and translate and and push our material uh into now over different countries uh endemically and that that has been yes um subverting the filters of the mainstream press but an interesting phenomenon has developed amongst the journalists who work in these very large organizations that um are close to power and negotiate with power at the highest levels which is the journalists having read our
effect was a total shock national shock although again strictly seeing nobody learned anything new so here so that i don't get lost if you allow me just a little bit more here we should see the significance of WikiLeaks many of of my friends who are skeptical about it are telling me so what did we really learn isn't it clear that every power in order to function you have to have collateral damage you have to have a certain discretion what you say what you don't say but to conclude i will propose a formula of what WikiLeaks is doing and it's extremely important of course i'm not a utopian neither me nor Julian believes in this kind of a pseudo-radical openness everything should be clear and so on but what are we dealing with here another example from cinema very short Ernst Lubitsch Ninotchka you find there a wonderful joke where i think towards the beginning of the film the hero enters a cafeteria and says uh can i get some uh coffee with cream please and the waiter answers him sorry we ran out of cream we only have milk so can we give you can i serve you with coffee without milk that's the trick here like when we learn something from the media like if i may repeat the metaphor they behave as if they are serving uh coffee with cream that is to say of course we all know they are not telling the entire truth but you know that's the trick of ideology even if they don lie directly the implications the unsaid is a lie and you bring this out you are not so much putting them uh catching them as they put it with their pants down lying on behalf of what they explicitly say but precisely on behalf of what they are implying and i think this is an absolutely crucial mechanism in ideology it doesn't only matter what you say it matters what you uh what you uh what you imply to say and so on so just to make the last point i think that are we aware at what an important moment we are living today on the one hand as you said information is crucial and so on like we all know that it's crucial even economically i claim that one of maybe the main reasons capitalism will get into crisis is intellectual property in the long term it simply cannot deal with it but what i'm saying is just take the phenomenon that media are trying to get us enthusiastic for clouds like you know computer getting smaller and smaller and all is done for you up there in a cloud okay but the problem is that clouds are not up there in clouds they are controlled and so on for example you rely on maybe you have an iPhone but you mentioned Murdoch no was mentioned here do you know it's good to know if you rely on your news through iPhone or whatever that Apple signed an exclusive agreement with Murdoch Murdoch's corporation as again the exclusive provider of entire news and so on and so on this is the danger today it's no longer this clear distinction private space public space the public space itself gets as it were privatized in a whole series of invisible ways like the model of it being clouds which is why and again this involves new modes of censorship i repeat this that's why you shouldn't be tricked when you say but what really did we learn new maybe we learned nothing new but you know it's the same as in that beautiful old uh Andersen's fairy tale the Emperor is naked the Emperor is naked we may all know that the Emperor is naked but the moment somebody publicly says the Emperor is naked everything changes this is why even if we learned nothing new but we did learn many new things but even if nothing learned the form matters so don't confuse Julian and his gang in a good sense not the way they accuse you don't don't confuse them with this usual bourgeois heroism fight investigative journalism free flow and so on you are doing something much more radical you are that's why it aroused such an explosion of resentment you are not only violating the rules disclosing secrets and so on let me call it in the old Marxist way the bourgeois press today has its own way to be transgressive each ideology not only controls what you say but even how you can violate what you are allowed to say you are not just violating the rules you are changing the very rules how we were allowed to violate the rules this is maybe the most important thing you can do and yet Julian even as you were releasing information in all different ways you then turned to the very gatekeepers who in some cases had kept back this information and you worked with the mainstream media throughout the world in releasing uh various documents talk about that experience and that level of cooperation and what has happened after that well we're an organiza- [shouting from balcony Turn the volume up please from the balcony It's very quiet Volume please] Volume for the balcony now that you said this they will again idiots accuse you you see he is the authoritarian leader who gives commands and so i'm not saying this is not true i think this is the only way to really keep things going so if if you want to have an impact and you promise an impact and you're an organization which is very small well actually you have to co-opt um or leverage the rest of the mainstream press um so under our model of of how you make an impact and how you get people to do things that you wouldn't have been otherwise able to do unless you have an army that can physically go some place and Panzer divisions that can roll over um the only way that you can easily make an impact um is push information about the world uh to many many people across the world and so the mainstream press uh has developed expertise in how to do that and it is competition also for people's attention uh so if if we had had several billion dollars to spend on advertising across the world uh even if we could get our uh ads placed uh we wouldn't um easily be able to have made the same impact that we did and we don't have that kind of money so instead if you like we entered into relationships with now over um media organizations across the world including some very good ones that i wouldn't want to uh disparage to increase the impact and translate and and push our material uh into now over different countries uh endemically and that that has been yes um subverting the filters of the mainstream press but an interesting phenomenon has developed amongst the journalists who work in these very large organizations that um are close to power and negotiate with power at the highest levels which is the journalists having read our
unknown
material and having been forced to go through it to pull out stories uh have themselves become
material and having been forced to go through it to pull out stories uh have themselves become
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educated and radicalized and that is an ideological penetration of the truth into all these mainstream media organizations and that to some degree may be one of the lasting legacies uh over the past year also by you know even um Fox News which is much disparaged
educated and radicalized and that is an ideological penetration of the truth into all these mainstream media organizations and that to some degree may be one of the lasting legacies uh over the past year also by you know even um Fox News which is much disparaged
Julian Assange
is an organization that wants viewers it cannot do
is an organization that wants viewers it cannot do
Slavoj Žižek
anything else without viewers so it will try to push news content so for example with Collateral Murder the CNN showed only the first few seconds and they blanked out uh all the bullets going
anything else without viewers so it will try to push news content so for example with Collateral Murder the CNN showed only the first few seconds and they blanked out uh all the bullets going
Julian Assange
into the street completely blanked it out and said that they did so out of respect uh for the families of the people who were killed well there was no blood there was no there was no gore and then they cut out all the the most politically salient points and the families had come forward um and said it was very important for us to know that they had already seen it but Fox actually displayed um the first killing scene in full quite interesting so Fox not perceiving itself to be amenable to the threat of it not acting in a moral way actually gave people more of the truth than CNN did um and so Fox also motivated to grab in a hungry way as great audience share as possible took this content and gave it to more people now afterwards of course they put in their commentators uh to to talk against it but i think the truth that we got out of Fox um was often stronger than the truth that we got out of CNN and similarly for many institutions in the media that we think of as liberal and perhaps Slavoj would like to speak about that i cannot emphasize enough like first i treated you not as an idiot out of politeness but then i'm more and more forced to admit that you really are not an idiot sorry for this you know it happens no because seriously i mean what you said now is extremely important with all the respect i have for and i don't mean this in any way ironically honest liberals who really believe people should be informed and so on but there are limits in their very mode how they function so we should ruthlessly not in an unethical way but nonetheless ruthlessly use as you pointed out in this difference between CNN and Fox every every window of opportunity here and let me add another example from a totally different domain but from fiction cinema TV series which i think reproduces the same duality we have the usual Hollywood left all this uh all this uh for to raise our spirit left liberal pseudo-Hollywood Marxism thrillers like Pelican's Brief All the President's Men which may appear very critical you know like oh my god uh the President himself is corrupted connected to certain uh corporation and so on but nonetheless this is ideology why because why do you exit the movie theater in such high spirits after seeing i don't know All the President's [unintelligible] and so on because the message is nonetheless look what a great country we are an ordinary guy can topple the mightiest man in the world and so on and so on on the other hand let me take an equivalent in TV program of Fox News which would have been please don't take me for being crazy uh yeah yeah Jack Bauer and all that the last season of i watched it with pleasure is for me my god again as you approach it the way you approach those shots it's for me much more crucially much more consequentially in criticism you get Jack Bauer who is in total despair his whole world crumbles down he has to admit this way what he tried to do in previous seasons of playing this role of somebody should do the dirty job torture the prisoners i will do it he says no i cannot live with it it has to come public his liberal counterpart called Allison Taylor the President also steps down you know what's the true message of it the message is simply within the existing ethico-political coordinates you are just stuck into a deadlock there is no way it's a very pessimistic message much more honest than on that all that uplifting Hollywood Marxism what a great country we are and so on and so on so yes at all levels even not
into the street completely blanked it out and said that they did so out of respect uh for the families of the people who were killed well there was no blood there was no there was no gore and then they cut out all the the most politically salient points and the families had come forward um and said it was very important for us to know that they had already seen it but Fox actually displayed um the first killing scene in full quite interesting so Fox not perceiving itself to be amenable to the threat of it not acting in a moral way actually gave people more of the truth than CNN did um and so Fox also motivated to grab in a hungry way as great audience share as possible took this content and gave it to more people now afterwards of course they put in their commentators uh to to talk against it but i think the truth that we got out of Fox um was often stronger than the truth that we got out of CNN and similarly for many institutions in the media that we think of as liberal and perhaps Slavoj would like to speak about that i cannot emphasize enough like first i treated you not as an idiot out of politeness but then i'm more and more forced to admit that you really are not an idiot sorry for this you know it happens no because seriously i mean what you said now is extremely important with all the respect i have for and i don't mean this in any way ironically honest liberals who really believe people should be informed and so on but there are limits in their very mode how they function so we should ruthlessly not in an unethical way but nonetheless ruthlessly use as you pointed out in this difference between CNN and Fox every every window of opportunity here and let me add another example from a totally different domain but from fiction cinema TV series which i think reproduces the same duality we have the usual Hollywood left all this uh all this uh for to raise our spirit left liberal pseudo-Hollywood Marxism thrillers like Pelican's Brief All the President's Men which may appear very critical you know like oh my god uh the President himself is corrupted connected to certain uh corporation and so on but nonetheless this is ideology why because why do you exit the movie theater in such high spirits after seeing i don't know All the President's [unintelligible] and so on because the message is nonetheless look what a great country we are an ordinary guy can topple the mightiest man in the world and so on and so on on the other hand let me take an equivalent in TV program of Fox News which would have been please don't take me for being crazy uh yeah yeah Jack Bauer and all that the last season of i watched it with pleasure is for me my god again as you approach it the way you approach those shots it's for me much more crucially much more consequentially in criticism you get Jack Bauer who is in total despair his whole world crumbles down he has to admit this way what he tried to do in previous seasons of playing this role of somebody should do the dirty job torture the prisoners i will do it he says no i cannot live with it it has to come public his liberal counterpart called Allison Taylor the President also steps down you know what's the true message of it the message is simply within the existing ethico-political coordinates you are just stuck into a deadlock there is no way it's a very pessimistic message much more honest than on that all that uplifting Hollywood Marxism what a great country we are and so on and so on so yes at all levels even not
Slavoj Žižek
only at in journalism as such i agree with you and i would even say that all leftist tradition knows this for example already Marx said i'm no fetishist of Marx but nonetheless he said that we can often learn more from honest conservatives than from liberals because what honest conservatives do is that they don't try to sell you at the end some uplifting bullshit they are ready to confront a deadlock and that's what's important today i don't want to look distracted looking down but i wanted to get these quotes accurate so i have them on my phone nothing threatening i just heard it yes um Newt Gingrich the former Speaker of the House in the United States said Julian Assange is engaged in warfare information terrorism which leads to people getting killed uh is terrorism and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism he should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively um Bill Keller of the New York Times said arrogant thin-skinned conspiratorial uh Judith Miller who together um who often wrote or co-wrote articles that appeared on the front page of the New York Times alleging weapons of mass destruction uh without named sources said Julian Assange isn't a good journalist didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone Joe Biden the Vice President of the United States said Julian Assange is a high-tech terrorist uh Congressman Peter King of New York called for Assange to be charged under the Espionage Act and asked whether WikiLeaks can be designated a terrorist organization uh not to just focus on the U.S. Tom Flanagan a former aide to the Canadian Prime Minister has called for Assange's assassination and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin uh which an interesting person i first heard about her called you uh Julian an anti-American operative with blood on your hands can you respond to these charges well you know after after Bill Keller said that i was thin-skinned it doesn't really leave much ground to reply does it um Sarah Palin also once on Twitter complained about my grammar which is really the biggest insult for me i mean calling for a drone attack um is perfectly understandable but correcting my grammar from Sarah Palin that's a real insult that event in the United States was very interesting obviously the the calls uh are wrong and outrageous and so on but the social and political event in which they occurred was was fascinating so within a few months we saw a new McCarthyist hysteria arise within the United States in December and January January this year December last year and that is quite worrying that a new McCarthyism can come up so quickly on the other hand yes there are a lot of opportunistic politicians playing to their base playing to their pals in the military-industrial complex on the other hand you know power that is completely unaccountable is silent so when when you walk past a group of ants on the street and you accidentally crush a few you do not turn to the others uh and say stop complaining or i'll put a drone strike on your head
only at in journalism as such i agree with you and i would even say that all leftist tradition knows this for example already Marx said i'm no fetishist of Marx but nonetheless he said that we can often learn more from honest conservatives than from liberals because what honest conservatives do is that they don't try to sell you at the end some uplifting bullshit they are ready to confront a deadlock and that's what's important today i don't want to look distracted looking down but i wanted to get these quotes accurate so i have them on my phone nothing threatening i just heard it yes um Newt Gingrich the former Speaker of the House in the United States said Julian Assange is engaged in warfare information terrorism which leads to people getting killed uh is terrorism and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism he should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively um Bill Keller of the New York Times said arrogant thin-skinned conspiratorial uh Judith Miller who together um who often wrote or co-wrote articles that appeared on the front page of the New York Times alleging weapons of mass destruction uh without named sources said Julian Assange isn't a good journalist didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone Joe Biden the Vice President of the United States said Julian Assange is a high-tech terrorist uh Congressman Peter King of New York called for Assange to be charged under the Espionage Act and asked whether WikiLeaks can be designated a terrorist organization uh not to just focus on the U.S. Tom Flanagan a former aide to the Canadian Prime Minister has called for Assange's assassination and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin uh which an interesting person i first heard about her called you uh Julian an anti-American operative with blood on your hands can you respond to these charges well you know after after Bill Keller said that i was thin-skinned it doesn't really leave much ground to reply does it um Sarah Palin also once on Twitter complained about my grammar which is really the biggest insult for me i mean calling for a drone attack um is perfectly understandable but correcting my grammar from Sarah Palin that's a real insult that event in the United States was very interesting obviously the the calls uh are wrong and outrageous and so on but the social and political event in which they occurred was was fascinating so within a few months we saw a new McCarthyist hysteria arise within the United States in December and January January this year December last year and that is quite worrying that a new McCarthyism can come up so quickly on the other hand yes there are a lot of opportunistic politicians playing to their base playing to their pals in the military-industrial complex on the other hand you know power that is completely unaccountable is silent so when when you walk past a group of ants on the street and you accidentally crush a few you do not turn to the others uh and say stop complaining or i'll put a drone strike on your head
unknown
um you completely ignore them and that is what happens to power that's in a very dominant position
um you completely ignore them and that is what happens to power that's in a very dominant position
Slavoj Žižek
it does not even bother uh to
it does not even bother uh to
unknown
respond it doesn't flinch for an instant
respond it doesn't flinch for an instant
Julian Assange
and yet we saw all these figures in the United States
and yet we saw all these figures in the United States
unknown
coming out and speaking very aggressively Bill Keller um in a recent talk um as a way of sort of perhaps legitimizing why he was speaking about me uh said that if you have a dealing with Julian Assange you are fated to sit on panels for the rest of your life explaining what you did but actually no that's a choice by Bill Keller a choice to go around and try and twist history and whitewash history and adjust history on a constant basis why why expend the energy doing doing that why not just knock off another front page of the New York Times because actually these people are frightened of the true part of history coming up and coming forth so i so i see this as a very positive sign and i've stated before that we should always see censorship actually as a very positive sign and the attempts towards censorship as a sign that the society is not yet completely sewn up not yet completely fiscalized but still has some political dimension to it i.e. what people believe and think and feel and the words that they listen to actually matters because in some areas it doesn't matter and in the United States actually most of the time it doesn't matter what you say we managed to to speak and give information at such volume uh and
coming out and speaking very aggressively Bill Keller um in a recent talk um as a way of sort of perhaps legitimizing why he was speaking about me uh said that if you have a dealing with Julian Assange you are fated to sit on panels for the rest of your life explaining what you did but actually no that's a choice by Bill Keller a choice to go around and try and twist history and whitewash history and adjust history on a constant basis why why expend the energy doing doing that why not just knock off another front page of the New York Times because actually these people are frightened of the true part of history coming up and coming forth so i so i see this as a very positive sign and i've stated before that we should always see censorship actually as a very positive sign and the attempts towards censorship as a sign that the society is not yet completely sewn up not yet completely fiscalized but still has some political dimension to it i.e. what people believe and think and feel and the words that they listen to actually matters because in some areas it doesn't matter and in the United States actually most of the time it doesn't matter what you say we managed to to speak and give information at such volume uh and
Slavoj Žižek
of such
of such
unknown
intensity that people actually were forced to respond it is rare that
intensity that people actually were forced to respond it is rare that
Julian Assange
they are forced to respond so i think this is a the one of the first positive symptoms i've seen from the United States in a while that actually that actually if you speak at this level um the cage can be rattled a bit and people can be forced to respond in China the censorship is much more aggressive which to me is a very hopeful symptom for China that it is still a political society even though it is fiscalizing even though everything has been sewn up in contractual relationships and banking relationships as time has gone by at the moment the Chinese government and Public Security Bureau are actually scared of what people think can i just add something again i i hate myself because i wanted what is that movie called There Will Be Blood no but unfortunately there will not be a lot of blood between the two of us because i again agree speaking about China let me tell you maybe you know it a wonderful it's not an anecdote which perfectly makes confirms your point do you know that about two or three months ago a Chinese government i don't know which agency passed a law which formally prohibits in public media they mean press uh books comics uh TV movies all stories which deal with time travel or alternate realities literally i checked it up with my friends in China the official uh justification was that history is a great matter it shouldn't be left to such trifling games and so on but of course it's clear what they uh really are afraid of for people to even imagine alternate realities other possibilities now again to repeat your point i think this is a good sign they at least need the prohibition with us we don need a prohibition most of the time if somebody proposes a radical change we simply accept this spontaneous everyday ideology but we all know what are economic realities like you propose uh to raise for healthcare spending no it would mean it would mean loss of competition and so on and so on so again i totally agree with you here and just a final comment on the persons that you Amy mentioned listen Newt Gingrich is for me sorry to use this strong word kind of a scum of the earth i don't have any great sympathy for Bill Clinton but i remember when there was this campaign Monica Lewinsky campaign uh Newt Gingrich was making all these moralistic attacks and then it was confirmed in media i listened to interview with him where he confirmed it that when his wife was dying in cancer two or three years before Newt Gingrich visited her in a hospital forcing her to not even having the decency for letting her die forcing her to sign a divorce agreement so that he could have married another woman and he was at the exact time of uh of Lewinsky affair already cheating her with the secretary of him there and so on and so on listen these are people who simply my god i become here a kind of a moral conservative there should be some kind of ethical committee which simply claims people like this are a threat to our youth they should be prohibited from appearing in public whatever now i will make a more important point as to this terrorism stuff let me make it clear but i'm not crazy i mean this in a positive sense yes in a way you are terrorist in the sense in which as i like to repeat Gandhi was a terrorist what you are doing let's face the facts it's not just something that can be swallowed oh oh look all the
they are forced to respond so i think this is a the one of the first positive symptoms i've seen from the United States in a while that actually that actually if you speak at this level um the cage can be rattled a bit and people can be forced to respond in China the censorship is much more aggressive which to me is a very hopeful symptom for China that it is still a political society even though it is fiscalizing even though everything has been sewn up in contractual relationships and banking relationships as time has gone by at the moment the Chinese government and Public Security Bureau are actually scared of what people think can i just add something again i i hate myself because i wanted what is that movie called There Will Be Blood no but unfortunately there will not be a lot of blood between the two of us because i again agree speaking about China let me tell you maybe you know it a wonderful it's not an anecdote which perfectly makes confirms your point do you know that about two or three months ago a Chinese government i don't know which agency passed a law which formally prohibits in public media they mean press uh books comics uh TV movies all stories which deal with time travel or alternate realities literally i checked it up with my friends in China the official uh justification was that history is a great matter it shouldn't be left to such trifling games and so on but of course it's clear what they uh really are afraid of for people to even imagine alternate realities other possibilities now again to repeat your point i think this is a good sign they at least need the prohibition with us we don need a prohibition most of the time if somebody proposes a radical change we simply accept this spontaneous everyday ideology but we all know what are economic realities like you propose uh to raise for healthcare spending no it would mean it would mean loss of competition and so on and so on so again i totally agree with you here and just a final comment on the persons that you Amy mentioned listen Newt Gingrich is for me sorry to use this strong word kind of a scum of the earth i don't have any great sympathy for Bill Clinton but i remember when there was this campaign Monica Lewinsky campaign uh Newt Gingrich was making all these moralistic attacks and then it was confirmed in media i listened to interview with him where he confirmed it that when his wife was dying in cancer two or three years before Newt Gingrich visited her in a hospital forcing her to not even having the decency for letting her die forcing her to sign a divorce agreement so that he could have married another woman and he was at the exact time of uh of Lewinsky affair already cheating her with the secretary of him there and so on and so on listen these are people who simply my god i become here a kind of a moral conservative there should be some kind of ethical committee which simply claims people like this are a threat to our youth they should be prohibited from appearing in public whatever now i will make a more important point as to this terrorism stuff let me make it clear but i'm not crazy i mean this in a positive sense yes in a way you are terrorist in the sense in which as i like to repeat Gandhi was a terrorist what you are doing let's face the facts it's not just something that can be swallowed oh oh look all the
Slavoj Žižek
interesting
interesting
Julian Assange
news in
news in
Slavoj Žižek
the newspapers here this is happening there Slavoj Žižek is dating Lady Gaga and here effectively you have in a good sense sorry do we have a denial there on that one we have a denial an official denial on the Lady Gaga one absolute denial on everything i mean i'm very absolute everything i didn't even listen to not even one of her songs and so on i mean my god i listen to Schubert and Schumann songs i'm sorry i'm a conservative i don't know her representative was not that defiant they just said no comment my friends were telling me the same you stupid you should have said no comment and then you will enjoy much more glory and so on okay let's go on no no sorry i have a more serious point to make about but what does this mean of course you are in the which sense was Gandhi a terrorist he effectively tried to stop interrupt the normal functioning of the British state in India and of course you are trying to interrupt the normal which is very oppressive functioning of the information circulation and so on but the way we should answer to this point i claim is simply by another i repeat myself here i know endless paraphrase of that wonderful uh line from Brecht's Beggar's Opera what is robbing a bank compared to founding a new bank what is your under quotation marks terrorism compared to the terrorism which we simply accept which has to go on day by day so that just things remain the way they are that's where ideology holds us when we talk about violence terrorism we always think about acts which interrupt the normal run of things but what about violence which has to be here in order for things to function the way they are so i think if i'm very skeptical about it we should use in my provocative spirit i'm tempted to the term terrorism it's strictly a reaction to a much stronger terrorism which is here so again instead of engaging in this moralistic game oh no he is a good guy like Stalinist said about Lenin you like small children you play with cats you wouldn't as Norman Bates says in Psycho you wouldn't hurt even a fly no you know no you are in this formal sense a terrorist but if you are a terrorist my god what are then they who accuse you of terrorism to finish with another nasty joke you know what they try to give us the good news like all the news you are giving us are these obscure falsifications good news but you know what are these good news that they those in power are promising us let me give you another wonderful Jewish-American joke that was told to me by a friend recently a guy has his wife at an operation and then talks after the operation with the doctor and the doctor tells him listen first the good news your wife will survive she will even live longer than you and then what's the bad news the doctor says the bad news is you know there are some problems like as the result of the operation she will no longer be able to control her anal muscles so excrement will be dripping all the time then there will be some strange fluid all the time escaping from her vagina no sex then she will not be able to blah blah blah and of course the
the newspapers here this is happening there Slavoj Žižek is dating Lady Gaga and here effectively you have in a good sense sorry do we have a denial there on that one we have a denial an official denial on the Lady Gaga one absolute denial on everything i mean i'm very absolute everything i didn't even listen to not even one of her songs and so on i mean my god i listen to Schubert and Schumann songs i'm sorry i'm a conservative i don't know her representative was not that defiant they just said no comment my friends were telling me the same you stupid you should have said no comment and then you will enjoy much more glory and so on okay let's go on no no sorry i have a more serious point to make about but what does this mean of course you are in the which sense was Gandhi a terrorist he effectively tried to stop interrupt the normal functioning of the British state in India and of course you are trying to interrupt the normal which is very oppressive functioning of the information circulation and so on but the way we should answer to this point i claim is simply by another i repeat myself here i know endless paraphrase of that wonderful uh line from Brecht's Beggar's Opera what is robbing a bank compared to founding a new bank what is your under quotation marks terrorism compared to the terrorism which we simply accept which has to go on day by day so that just things remain the way they are that's where ideology holds us when we talk about violence terrorism we always think about acts which interrupt the normal run of things but what about violence which has to be here in order for things to function the way they are so i think if i'm very skeptical about it we should use in my provocative spirit i'm tempted to the term terrorism it's strictly a reaction to a much stronger terrorism which is here so again instead of engaging in this moralistic game oh no he is a good guy like Stalinist said about Lenin you like small children you play with cats you wouldn't as Norman Bates says in Psycho you wouldn't hurt even a fly no you know no you are in this formal sense a terrorist but if you are a terrorist my god what are then they who accuse you of terrorism to finish with another nasty joke you know what they try to give us the good news like all the news you are giving us are these obscure falsifications good news but you know what are these good news that they those in power are promising us let me give you another wonderful Jewish-American joke that was told to me by a friend recently a guy has his wife at an operation and then talks after the operation with the doctor and the doctor tells him listen first the good news your wife will survive she will even live longer than you and then what's the bad news the doctor says the bad news is you know there are some problems like as the result of the operation she will no longer be able to control her anal muscles so excrement will be dripping all the time then there will be some strange fluid all the time escaping from her vagina no sex then she will not be able to blah blah blah and of course the
unknown
guy gets more and more into a panic no my god
guy gets more and more into a panic no my god
Slavoj Žižek
and then you know what the doctor does then he taps the guy on the shoulder says no no don't worry
and then you know what the doctor does then he taps the guy on the shoulder says no no don't worry
unknown
this was just a joke
this was just a joke
Slavoj Žižek
everything is okay she died during the operation that's the good news that they are giving us at the end you know no dirty words you noticed it no dirty words because Amy is always telling me when she was kind enough to receive me in New York Slavoj not even the s-word S H I T no dirty words so i've controlled myself for that we can be taken off the air but i wanted to ask you Julian about Bradley Manning uh Mike Huckabee who also was a presidential candidate the Governor of Arkansas said that the person who leaked the information to Julian Assange should be tried for treason and executed he said whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason and i think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty um Bradley Manning is a young U.S. soldier who was in Iraq um has been held for more than a year much of that time in solitary confinement in Quantico in Virginia um it was exposed that his treatment was tantamount to torture P.J. Crowley the white house the State Department spokesperson um spoke to a group of bloggers at MIT and said his treatment is stupid for that he was forced out of the State Department Bradley Manning was then moved to Fort Leavenworth uh because of the outcry but he remains uh in prison he remains um not tried what are your comments on him well first of all Amy it's thanks for answering this question but it it is difficult uh for me uh to speak in detail about that case and but i can speak about why it is difficult for me to speak about it so Bradley Manning is an alleged source of WikiLeaks um who was detained in Baghdad and then although there was very little uh known mainstream press publicity at the time shipped off to Kuwait where he was if you like um held in an extra-judicial circumstance in Kuwait uh in a similar manner to which detainees are held in Guantanamo Bay eventually through some legal creative legal methods he was brought back to the United States and he's been in prison now for over a year he was being kept in Quantico um for eight months under extremely adverse conditions the average Quantico is not meant for long-term prisoners other prisoners the maximum duration uh over the past year um has been three months and people that have been visiting Bradley Manning uh say um and we have other sources who say that they were applying those conditions to him because they wanted him to confess that he was involved in a conspiracy to commit espionage against the United States with me that pressure on Manning appears to have backfired so by all reports this is a young man of of high moral character and when people of high moral character are pressured in a way that is illegitimate uh they become stronger and not weaker
everything is okay she died during the operation that's the good news that they are giving us at the end you know no dirty words you noticed it no dirty words because Amy is always telling me when she was kind enough to receive me in New York Slavoj not even the s-word S H I T no dirty words so i've controlled myself for that we can be taken off the air but i wanted to ask you Julian about Bradley Manning uh Mike Huckabee who also was a presidential candidate the Governor of Arkansas said that the person who leaked the information to Julian Assange should be tried for treason and executed he said whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason and i think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty um Bradley Manning is a young U.S. soldier who was in Iraq um has been held for more than a year much of that time in solitary confinement in Quantico in Virginia um it was exposed that his treatment was tantamount to torture P.J. Crowley the white house the State Department spokesperson um spoke to a group of bloggers at MIT and said his treatment is stupid for that he was forced out of the State Department Bradley Manning was then moved to Fort Leavenworth uh because of the outcry but he remains uh in prison he remains um not tried what are your comments on him well first of all Amy it's thanks for answering this question but it it is difficult uh for me uh to speak in detail about that case and but i can speak about why it is difficult for me to speak about it so Bradley Manning is an alleged source of WikiLeaks um who was detained in Baghdad and then although there was very little uh known mainstream press publicity at the time shipped off to Kuwait where he was if you like um held in an extra-judicial circumstance in Kuwait uh in a similar manner to which detainees are held in Guantanamo Bay eventually through some legal creative legal methods he was brought back to the United States and he's been in prison now for over a year he was being kept in Quantico um for eight months under extremely adverse conditions the average Quantico is not meant for long-term prisoners other prisoners the maximum duration uh over the past year um has been three months and people that have been visiting Bradley Manning uh say um and we have other sources who say that they were applying those conditions to him because they wanted him to confess that he was involved in a conspiracy to commit espionage against the United States with me that pressure on Manning appears to have backfired so by all reports this is a young man of of high moral character and when people of high moral character are pressured in a way that is illegitimate uh they become stronger and not weaker
unknown
and
and
Slavoj Žižek
that seems to have been the case with Bradley Manning uh and he has told uh U.S. authorities as far as we know nothing about uh his involvement now there has concurrently been a secret grand jury taking place kilometers
that seems to have been the case with Bradley Manning uh and he has told uh U.S. authorities as far as we know nothing about uh his involvement now there has concurrently been a secret grand jury taking place kilometers
unknown
from the center of
from the center of
Slavoj Žižek
Washington
Washington
unknown
that grand jury involves to people selected from that area now why was it in Alexandria Virginia kilometers center of Washington that that grand jury was placed and those people drawn well it has the highest density of government employees anywhere in the United States the U.S. government was free to select the place and they selected this place in order to bias the jury from the very beginning this is in fact wrong to call a jury this is a type of medieval star chamber there are these to individuals from the population that are sworn to secrecy they
that grand jury involves to people selected from that area now why was it in Alexandria Virginia kilometers center of Washington that that grand jury was placed and those people drawn well it has the highest density of government employees anywhere in the United States the U.S. government was free to select the place and they selected this place in order to bias the jury from the very beginning this is in fact wrong to call a jury this is a type of medieval star chamber there are these to individuals from the population that are sworn to secrecy they
unknown
cannot consult with anyone else there is no judge there is no defense counsel and there are four prosecutors so that is why people that are familiar with grand jury inquiries in the United States say that a grand jury would not only indict a ham sandwich it would indict the ham and the sandwich and that's a real threat to us
cannot consult with anyone else there is no judge there is no defense counsel and there are four prosecutors so that is why people that are familiar with grand jury inquiries in the United States say that a grand jury would not only indict a ham sandwich it would indict the ham and the sandwich and that's a real threat to us
Julian Assange
it a grand jury which was removed from UK jurisprudence because of abuses combines the executive and the judiciary so this old common law notion of the separation of these branches of power is removed in the grand jury U.S. government argues that these captive to individuals are the branch of the judiciary that they perform a judicial function where of course actually they are just captive patsies for the Department of Justice in the United States and the FBI so they have been going out and they have coercive powers they can force people to testify and they have been pulling in all sorts of people that are connected to WikiLeaks and people that are not they have recently a number of individuals that have been pulled to the grand jury understand uh what is going on and they have refused uh to testify and have pleaded the First Amendment Third Amendment and the Fifth Amendment uh protection against self-incrimination to um well i'm not sure the purpose i don't have direct communication but from the outside it appears to uh nullify that political witch hunt in the United States against us now in response the grand jury has been instructed to send out immunity certificates so these are certificates that go to subpoenaed individuals that say that if you come to the grand jury to testify your testimony cannot be used against you and therefore you have no right to plead the Fifth what this means in practice is coerced compulsive um interrogation in secret with no defense counsel there's not not even lawyers for uh for the subpoenaed witnesses are permitted uh into the grand jury it is just the prosecutors uh and these people from kilometers away from center of Washington that's something that should be opposed there's another grand jury that has sprung up uh in the United States and is investigating anti-war activists engaged in the same sort of witch hunt so these are um a really a a classical device that was uh looked at very critically in the UK years ago and the result in the UK is this concept that there uh if justice is to be done it must be done publicly and that has been a concept that has waylaid it's it's interesting why or how it has been waylaid so that on the surface this device of well you want the police to have an investigation executive says it wants to conduct investigation into some group of people well we get people from the community to people from the community and they monitor the investigation and they make sure it's not overstepping and so on but actually this has been turned on its head uh and used as a way to completely subvert the judicial system in the United States first again i would like to say that crucial are the terms that i think you both mentioned all this extra-legal space unlawful combatants and so on and so on the paradox is that i think we should uh read these terms as strictly connected to universal human rights to what i have nothing against universal human rights what i'm opposed to is how the reference to universal human rights is de facto used in today's ideological struggles that in order to sustain support within the space of ruling ideology universal human rights you have to construct a space which is no no longer the space of the enemy in this sense enemy to whom the rules apply either Geneva Convention and so on but you have to create to what the great American thinker and politician Dick Cheney referred to as the gray zone once you know like we have to do something discreetly don't ask us around a about it and so on and so on here i would say things are even uh more complex than it may appear because what i find really terrifying is that concepts like unlawful combatants are becoming legal categories now i'm not a utopian here let me be bru- and i will maybe shock some of you brutally open i can well imagine a situation where well i cannot promise you in advance that i wouldn't torture someone let's imagine this ridiculous situations where a bad guy has my young daughter and then i have in my hands a guy and i know that that guy knows where my daughter is well maybe out of despair i would have tortured her him whatever what i absolutely oppose to is to legalize this i think if out of despair i do something like this it should remain something unacceptable you know that i did out of despair i'm what i'm afraid of is that this system gets institutionalized as it were where all this will be you know because we know what is at the end of the road i had a polemic just an exchange in New York Times with uh Alan Dershowitz who wants legalization of torture and i read one of his proposals it's an obscenity you will have doctors let's say just a friendly to scare you a little bit example Amy and me are the torturers you somebody has to play this role will be tortured no he he so let's say we call a doctor who it's an obscenity who speak for yourself Slavoj sorry yeah okay no but you know what i'm saying who who investigates you and determines we can you can torture him to that degree if and so on and so on for me what's horrible is not of course it is torture as such but it's even more obscene this normalization of torture which is why yes more than you i mean this respectively Manning is for me the hero because you have a certain moment of glory and so on and so on that poor guy who for me is did something extraordinary you know how difficult are these decisions that simple elementary morality prevails over legal considerations and so on i think that i hope i am not a utopian i even pro- like don't you have any of these organs who propose candidates for Nobel Peace Prize that would be a nice crazy movement if there is a person who deserves Nobel Peace Prize today it's Manning or
it a grand jury which was removed from UK jurisprudence because of abuses combines the executive and the judiciary so this old common law notion of the separation of these branches of power is removed in the grand jury U.S. government argues that these captive to individuals are the branch of the judiciary that they perform a judicial function where of course actually they are just captive patsies for the Department of Justice in the United States and the FBI so they have been going out and they have coercive powers they can force people to testify and they have been pulling in all sorts of people that are connected to WikiLeaks and people that are not they have recently a number of individuals that have been pulled to the grand jury understand uh what is going on and they have refused uh to testify and have pleaded the First Amendment Third Amendment and the Fifth Amendment uh protection against self-incrimination to um well i'm not sure the purpose i don't have direct communication but from the outside it appears to uh nullify that political witch hunt in the United States against us now in response the grand jury has been instructed to send out immunity certificates so these are certificates that go to subpoenaed individuals that say that if you come to the grand jury to testify your testimony cannot be used against you and therefore you have no right to plead the Fifth what this means in practice is coerced compulsive um interrogation in secret with no defense counsel there's not not even lawyers for uh for the subpoenaed witnesses are permitted uh into the grand jury it is just the prosecutors uh and these people from kilometers away from center of Washington that's something that should be opposed there's another grand jury that has sprung up uh in the United States and is investigating anti-war activists engaged in the same sort of witch hunt so these are um a really a a classical device that was uh looked at very critically in the UK years ago and the result in the UK is this concept that there uh if justice is to be done it must be done publicly and that has been a concept that has waylaid it's it's interesting why or how it has been waylaid so that on the surface this device of well you want the police to have an investigation executive says it wants to conduct investigation into some group of people well we get people from the community to people from the community and they monitor the investigation and they make sure it's not overstepping and so on but actually this has been turned on its head uh and used as a way to completely subvert the judicial system in the United States first again i would like to say that crucial are the terms that i think you both mentioned all this extra-legal space unlawful combatants and so on and so on the paradox is that i think we should uh read these terms as strictly connected to universal human rights to what i have nothing against universal human rights what i'm opposed to is how the reference to universal human rights is de facto used in today's ideological struggles that in order to sustain support within the space of ruling ideology universal human rights you have to construct a space which is no no longer the space of the enemy in this sense enemy to whom the rules apply either Geneva Convention and so on but you have to create to what the great American thinker and politician Dick Cheney referred to as the gray zone once you know like we have to do something discreetly don't ask us around a about it and so on and so on here i would say things are even uh more complex than it may appear because what i find really terrifying is that concepts like unlawful combatants are becoming legal categories now i'm not a utopian here let me be bru- and i will maybe shock some of you brutally open i can well imagine a situation where well i cannot promise you in advance that i wouldn't torture someone let's imagine this ridiculous situations where a bad guy has my young daughter and then i have in my hands a guy and i know that that guy knows where my daughter is well maybe out of despair i would have tortured her him whatever what i absolutely oppose to is to legalize this i think if out of despair i do something like this it should remain something unacceptable you know that i did out of despair i'm what i'm afraid of is that this system gets institutionalized as it were where all this will be you know because we know what is at the end of the road i had a polemic just an exchange in New York Times with uh Alan Dershowitz who wants legalization of torture and i read one of his proposals it's an obscenity you will have doctors let's say just a friendly to scare you a little bit example Amy and me are the torturers you somebody has to play this role will be tortured no he he so let's say we call a doctor who it's an obscenity who speak for yourself Slavoj sorry yeah okay no but you know what i'm saying who who investigates you and determines we can you can torture him to that degree if and so on and so on for me what's horrible is not of course it is torture as such but it's even more obscene this normalization of torture which is why yes more than you i mean this respectively Manning is for me the hero because you have a certain moment of glory and so on and so on that poor guy who for me is did something extraordinary you know how difficult are these decisions that simple elementary morality prevails over legal considerations and so on i think that i hope i am not a utopian i even pro- like don't you have any of these organs who propose candidates for Nobel Peace Prize that would be a nice crazy movement if there is a person who deserves Nobel Peace Prize today it's Manning or
Slavoj Žižek
people like that simple ordinary people and i'm not even idealizing him there are many examples that i know of ordinary people who were not anything special they are not saints but all of a sudden they see something like probably he if he is the one uh saw all these documents and something told him sorry i will not be pushed more i have to do something here this is so precious today because it also goes against a note which is in a way true but it's exploited by our enemies this idea ideology today is cynical people are totally duped and so on no they are not i'm prefer i prefer here to play a little bit of simple moralism from time to time there are ethical mira- ethical ethical miracles there are people who still care and so on and so on this is very important because you know like let's not leave this domain of a care for simple dignified ethical acts to agencies like Catholic Church and so on who are they to talk about who are they to talk about it we the left should rehabilitate this i know it doesn't sound very postmodern or cynical this idea that there are out there quite ordinary guys nothing special but who all of a sudden as if in a miracle do something wonderful that's almost i would say our only hope today speaking on that uh one of the difficulties for alleged sources uh and actually we have another one in prison which um has received very little recognition which is the case of Rudolf Elmer yeah who's in prison in Switzerland for allegedly revealing uh secret bank information um there's no trace to us but that is the allegation that is being investigated um is that if they put up their hands and say yes yes it was me uh it makes it very easy to defend them in a moral way and it makes it very easy to shower them with awards uh but until they do that their their defense is that they didn't do it so um it is very hard for for us to um to start uh praising people because inherent in that praise is we would be alleging that they are guilty of the of the offense speaking of banks Julian um you mentioned a while ago that you had a good deal of documents on Bank of America but they haven't been released are you planning to release them there's a complication with those documents and another group of documents so we're we are under a type of blackmail in relation to those documents um that is very that will be dealt with over time but it is quite difficult uh to deal with it at the moment so i don't want to specify what type of blackmail that is because it might make it harder to address uh the situation but it is um it is perhaps something like people might guess uh you know there's a range of possibilities and it's probably the first or second possibility if you're if you're guessing at these things well let's talk about the beginning of WikiLeaks tell us about how you founded it named it and what your hopes were at the time and if at this point um you have been disappointed by what you've been able to accomplish or amazed by it WikiLeaks how it started i think i am amazed by it of course i mean who couldn't be um it's an extraordinary time that i have lived through and to see many of your dreams and ideals come into practice that said um i think we're only about a hundredth of the way there in terms of what we have to release and discover and collect and put into people's heads and uh solidify in the historical record uh we need a Cablegate uh for the CIA we need a Cablegate for the SVR we need a Cablegate of the New York Times actually um all the stories that have been suppressed and how they've been managed and once we start getting that sort of volume and concretize and protect um the rights of everyone to communicate with one another which to me is is the basic ingredient of civilized life it is um not the right to speak what does the right what does it mean to have the right to speak if you're on the moon and there's no one around it doesn't mean anything um rather the right to speak comes from our right to know and the two of us together someone's right to speak and someone's right to know produce a right to communicate and so that is the grounding uh structure uh for all that we treasure about civilized life and by civilized i don't mean industrialized i mean people collaborating to not do the the dumb
people like that simple ordinary people and i'm not even idealizing him there are many examples that i know of ordinary people who were not anything special they are not saints but all of a sudden they see something like probably he if he is the one uh saw all these documents and something told him sorry i will not be pushed more i have to do something here this is so precious today because it also goes against a note which is in a way true but it's exploited by our enemies this idea ideology today is cynical people are totally duped and so on no they are not i'm prefer i prefer here to play a little bit of simple moralism from time to time there are ethical mira- ethical ethical miracles there are people who still care and so on and so on this is very important because you know like let's not leave this domain of a care for simple dignified ethical acts to agencies like Catholic Church and so on who are they to talk about who are they to talk about it we the left should rehabilitate this i know it doesn't sound very postmodern or cynical this idea that there are out there quite ordinary guys nothing special but who all of a sudden as if in a miracle do something wonderful that's almost i would say our only hope today speaking on that uh one of the difficulties for alleged sources uh and actually we have another one in prison which um has received very little recognition which is the case of Rudolf Elmer yeah who's in prison in Switzerland for allegedly revealing uh secret bank information um there's no trace to us but that is the allegation that is being investigated um is that if they put up their hands and say yes yes it was me uh it makes it very easy to defend them in a moral way and it makes it very easy to shower them with awards uh but until they do that their their defense is that they didn't do it so um it is very hard for for us to um to start uh praising people because inherent in that praise is we would be alleging that they are guilty of the of the offense speaking of banks Julian um you mentioned a while ago that you had a good deal of documents on Bank of America but they haven't been released are you planning to release them there's a complication with those documents and another group of documents so we're we are under a type of blackmail in relation to those documents um that is very that will be dealt with over time but it is quite difficult uh to deal with it at the moment so i don't want to specify what type of blackmail that is because it might make it harder to address uh the situation but it is um it is perhaps something like people might guess uh you know there's a range of possibilities and it's probably the first or second possibility if you're if you're guessing at these things well let's talk about the beginning of WikiLeaks tell us about how you founded it named it and what your hopes were at the time and if at this point um you have been disappointed by what you've been able to accomplish or amazed by it WikiLeaks how it started i think i am amazed by it of course i mean who couldn't be um it's an extraordinary time that i have lived through and to see many of your dreams and ideals come into practice that said um i think we're only about a hundredth of the way there in terms of what we have to release and discover and collect and put into people's heads and uh solidify in the historical record uh we need a Cablegate uh for the CIA we need a Cablegate for the SVR we need a Cablegate of the New York Times actually um all the stories that have been suppressed and how they've been managed and once we start getting that sort of volume and concretize and protect um the rights of everyone to communicate with one another which to me is is the basic ingredient of civilized life it is um not the right to speak what does the right what does it mean to have the right to speak if you're on the moon and there's no one around it doesn't mean anything um rather the right to speak comes from our right to know and the two of us together someone's right to speak and someone's right to know produce a right to communicate and so that is the grounding uh structure uh for all that we treasure about civilized life and by civilized i don't mean industrialized i mean people collaborating to not do the the dumb
Julian Assange
thing to instead learn from previous experiences and learn from each other to pool each other pool with each other together in order to get through the life that we live in a in a less adverse way so that quest to protect the historical record and enable everyone to be a contributor to the historical record uh is something that i have been involved in uh for about years in one way or another so that means protecting people who contribute to our shared intellectual record and it also means protecting publishers and encouraging distribution of the historical record to everyone who needs to know about it after all a historical record that has something interesting in it that you can't find is no record
thing to instead learn from previous experiences and learn from each other to pool each other pool with each other together in order to get through the life that we live in a in a less adverse way so that quest to protect the historical record and enable everyone to be a contributor to the historical record uh is something that i have been involved in uh for about years in one way or another so that means protecting people who contribute to our shared intellectual record and it also means protecting publishers and encouraging distribution of the historical record to everyone who needs to know about it after all a historical record that has something interesting in it that you can't find is no record
Slavoj Žižek
at all so that long-term
at all so that long-term
unknown
vision is something that i developed in various ways and i saw in around that there was a way of achieving justice through this process uh that could be realized using the intellectual
vision is something that i developed in various ways and i saw in around that there was a way of achieving justice through this process uh that could be realized using the intellectual
Julian Assange
and social capital that i had available and so that's quite a complex plan you should perhaps read there's a couple of essays on WikiLeaks that go into this uh in more detail to to pull all this together was a difficult thing to do it's um and to plan it out and to marshal the resources and to build um not only an ideology that people could support and were encouraged by and the sources were encouraged by um but that people would defend and it's it's one of the i think it's extremely interesting that although twice this venue was cancelled not this venue sorry twice the venue that we had rented for this was cancelled
and social capital that i had available and so that's quite a complex plan you should perhaps read there's a couple of essays on WikiLeaks that go into this uh in more detail to to pull all this together was a difficult thing to do it's um and to plan it out and to marshal the resources and to build um not only an ideology that people could support and were encouraged by and the sources were encouraged by um but that people would defend and it's it's one of the i think it's extremely interesting that although twice this venue was cancelled not this venue sorry twice the venue that we had rented for this was cancelled
unknown
including
including
unknown
at the Institute uh for Education from the University of London under the basis it would be too controversial and so that's why we ended up at the Tro- at this at this venue that despite that that actually Slavoj Žižek myself and Amy Goodman have managed managed
at the Institute uh for Education from the University of London under the basis it would be too controversial and so that's why we ended up at the Tro- at this at this venue that despite that that actually Slavoj Žižek myself and Amy Goodman have managed managed
Julian Assange
to pack out nearly people in London on a Saturday um at pounds a seat so i see that is extremely encouraging on the one hand we have this sort of the everyday tawdry institutional censorship of saying that something is too controversial therefore you can't hold it in an institute of education um on the other hand uh all of you came and i'm not sure that that would have happened five years ago in fact i'm pretty sure that wouldn't have happened five years ago and that both of those things wouldn't have happened five years ago so that when i said before that censorship is always not an opportunity and censorship reveals something that is positive about a society and a society with no censorship is in a very bad state that the if you like the censorship of not uh giving us this venue so easily um is also related to why you're all here it is the other side of the coin that people are worried that change is that change is possible and you're here because you think that change is possible and you're probably right um so that's been a very interesting journey to see that uh and i thought i was pretty cynical uh and worldly uh five years ago um and of course i was uh simply a very young and naive fool uh in retrospect um and learning how low [unintelligible] from being inside the center of the storm i have learned no not just about the structure of government not just about how power flows in many governments around the world that we've dealt with but rather how history is shaped and distorted by the media and i think the distortion by the media of history of all the things that we should know so we can collaborate together in as as a civilization is is the worst thing it is our single greatest impediment to advancement but it's changing we are we are routing around um media that is close to power in all sorts of ways and but it's not a foregone conclusion which is what makes this time so interesting that we can wrest um the internet and we can wrest the various communications mechanisms we have with each other into the values of the new generation that has been educated by the internet has been educated outside of that mainstream media distortion and all those young people are becoming important within institutions so maybe this is something i'll speak about with you later Amy but um i do want to talk about what it means when institutions power the most powerful institutions uh from the CIA to News Corporation are all organized at the all organized using um computer programmers using system administrators using technical young people what does that mean when all those technical young people adopt a certain value system and that they are in an institution where they do not agree with the value system and yet actually their hands are on the machinery because there there has been moments in the past like that uh and those it is those technical young people who are the most internet-educated and have the greatest ability to receive the new values that are being spread and the new information and facts about reality that are being spread outside mainstream media distortions i feel now like that Stalinist commentator you know the leader has spoken i provide the deeper meaning and so on with pleasure no first i would really like to begin with what you said it's extremely important i have a philosophical term for it when you moved from right to speak right to know communication and so on i think that as many of you know in the history of modern thought the first one to formulate this was Immanuel Kant in his wonderful distinction between private and public use of reason this distinction is so wonderful because for Kant private use of reason is not i gather with my friends in the kitchen of my apartment or a pub no private use of reason is for Kant theological faculty legal faculty political sciences where what you are thinking debating developing serves a goal set up in advance by a power structure or ideological structure and so on for Kant we here at a distance from this hierarchic uh political estab- in the sense of establishment of course of establishing power structure space we are the public use of reason and why is this so important because what i see WikiLeaks as part of a global struggle which doesn't concern only in the narrow sense this domain of right to know in the sense of right to information and so on but even education you know you by you i mean UK citizens here what horrors are being made now in the UK university reform new privatizations and so on and so on this is all one concerted attack on the public use of reason it goes on all around Europe the name is so-called Bologna high education reform and the goal is very clear they say it it's to make universities more responsible to social life to social problems it sounds nice what it really means is that we should all become experts as a French guy later minister explained to me in a debate in Paris uh you uh for example cars are burning in Paris suburbs what we need is psychologists who will tell us how to control the crowd urbanists who will tell us how to restructure the streets so that the crowd is easy to break up or whatever like we should be here as a kind of uh ideological or specialist servicemen to resolve problems formulated by others i think this is the end of intellectual life as we know it and we should go here to the end you know when all those uh right-wing anti-immigrant bullshitters are talking about uh sorry i used the word i shouldn't yeah do it in a Stalinist way put some music of some heroic working class song there sorry but more seriously when we hear about oh immigrants Pakistanis Muslims a threat to Judeo-Christian civilization no sorry the greatest asset of Judeo-Christian civilization which you can even detect it in notions of Holy Spirit as a community of believers outside established structures it's precisely this independent space of public reason so i'm saying that if there is something really to defend of the so-called i hate the word also Judeo-Christian legacy this idea of democracy not only as this masturbatory right to cast a vote totally isolated but as you said public space of debate communication and so on then that should be our answer to all those uh populist anti-immigrant and so anti-immigrant politicians and so on not this white liberal guilt oh you are you are defending Judeo-Christian
to pack out nearly people in London on a Saturday um at pounds a seat so i see that is extremely encouraging on the one hand we have this sort of the everyday tawdry institutional censorship of saying that something is too controversial therefore you can't hold it in an institute of education um on the other hand uh all of you came and i'm not sure that that would have happened five years ago in fact i'm pretty sure that wouldn't have happened five years ago and that both of those things wouldn't have happened five years ago so that when i said before that censorship is always not an opportunity and censorship reveals something that is positive about a society and a society with no censorship is in a very bad state that the if you like the censorship of not uh giving us this venue so easily um is also related to why you're all here it is the other side of the coin that people are worried that change is that change is possible and you're here because you think that change is possible and you're probably right um so that's been a very interesting journey to see that uh and i thought i was pretty cynical uh and worldly uh five years ago um and of course i was uh simply a very young and naive fool uh in retrospect um and learning how low [unintelligible] from being inside the center of the storm i have learned no not just about the structure of government not just about how power flows in many governments around the world that we've dealt with but rather how history is shaped and distorted by the media and i think the distortion by the media of history of all the things that we should know so we can collaborate together in as as a civilization is is the worst thing it is our single greatest impediment to advancement but it's changing we are we are routing around um media that is close to power in all sorts of ways and but it's not a foregone conclusion which is what makes this time so interesting that we can wrest um the internet and we can wrest the various communications mechanisms we have with each other into the values of the new generation that has been educated by the internet has been educated outside of that mainstream media distortion and all those young people are becoming important within institutions so maybe this is something i'll speak about with you later Amy but um i do want to talk about what it means when institutions power the most powerful institutions uh from the CIA to News Corporation are all organized at the all organized using um computer programmers using system administrators using technical young people what does that mean when all those technical young people adopt a certain value system and that they are in an institution where they do not agree with the value system and yet actually their hands are on the machinery because there there has been moments in the past like that uh and those it is those technical young people who are the most internet-educated and have the greatest ability to receive the new values that are being spread and the new information and facts about reality that are being spread outside mainstream media distortions i feel now like that Stalinist commentator you know the leader has spoken i provide the deeper meaning and so on with pleasure no first i would really like to begin with what you said it's extremely important i have a philosophical term for it when you moved from right to speak right to know communication and so on i think that as many of you know in the history of modern thought the first one to formulate this was Immanuel Kant in his wonderful distinction between private and public use of reason this distinction is so wonderful because for Kant private use of reason is not i gather with my friends in the kitchen of my apartment or a pub no private use of reason is for Kant theological faculty legal faculty political sciences where what you are thinking debating developing serves a goal set up in advance by a power structure or ideological structure and so on for Kant we here at a distance from this hierarchic uh political estab- in the sense of establishment of course of establishing power structure space we are the public use of reason and why is this so important because what i see WikiLeaks as part of a global struggle which doesn't concern only in the narrow sense this domain of right to know in the sense of right to information and so on but even education you know you by you i mean UK citizens here what horrors are being made now in the UK university reform new privatizations and so on and so on this is all one concerted attack on the public use of reason it goes on all around Europe the name is so-called Bologna high education reform and the goal is very clear they say it it's to make universities more responsible to social life to social problems it sounds nice what it really means is that we should all become experts as a French guy later minister explained to me in a debate in Paris uh you uh for example cars are burning in Paris suburbs what we need is psychologists who will tell us how to control the crowd urbanists who will tell us how to restructure the streets so that the crowd is easy to break up or whatever like we should be here as a kind of uh ideological or specialist servicemen to resolve problems formulated by others i think this is the end of intellectual life as we know it and we should go here to the end you know when all those uh right-wing anti-immigrant bullshitters are talking about uh sorry i used the word i shouldn't yeah do it in a Stalinist way put some music of some heroic working class song there sorry but more seriously when we hear about oh immigrants Pakistanis Muslims a threat to Judeo-Christian civilization no sorry the greatest asset of Judeo-Christian civilization which you can even detect it in notions of Holy Spirit as a community of believers outside established structures it's precisely this independent space of public reason so i'm saying that if there is something really to defend of the so-called i hate the word also Judeo-Christian legacy this idea of democracy not only as this masturbatory right to cast a vote totally isolated but as you said public space of debate communication and so on then that should be our answer to all those uh populist anti-immigrant and so anti-immigrant politicians and so on not this white liberal guilt oh you are you are defending Judeo-Christian
Slavoj Žižek
legacy and no we we feel guilty my god how many bad things we did all the bad things in the world are the result of European imperialism okay maybe but what we should say to them is who are you to even speak about Judeo-Christian legacy this university reform today in UK this is the greatest threat to to Judeo-Christian legacy and so on anti-immigrants they are the nightmare imagine Le Pen in power in France and so on that's the end of Europe for me in the sense of what is uh progressive in Europe so again this is for me part of a much larger struggle which especially with the problems today ecological problems for example it is so crucial let me give you an example which i think it's so beautifully clear recently and that's why i would also like to ask you if i may through you you and China not you you you WikiLeaks and China because Chinese people will pay such a price for precisely the oppression of public space of reason where my Chinese friends told me this in uh China now a month or two ago even the government admitted the catastrophic ecological consequences of those Three Gorges Dam you know it's the greatest artificial lake in the world for miles kilometers long now they the government admitted that the problem is this one that lake is just above some subterranean faults where which they move when there is an earthquake so they admitted that the big you remember three years ago or when the big Sichuan or where earthquake was if not triggered definitely rendered much stronger because of this and this is not along the lines of what you must have some proverb like you know after the battle everyone can be the wise general no friends when i visited Beijing four-five years ago my friends there told me majority of geologists were already warning the government about these dangers second thing because of this collection of water there the effect of drought are now much stronger felt point two because the water is too low the whole uh you know that the Yellow River is the main uh the main transportation line venue in China and the traffic there is practically stopped and so on and so on all this is the end of public reason so now uh just to just to conclude just one more thing nonetheless this is not a critical point towards you but a point to clarify what WikiLeaks can do we should not fetishize truth as such we live in times of incredible ideological investments of times when ideology is very strong precisely because it's not even experienced as ideology and what can happen let me tell you a story from Israel my friends told me there some five-six years ago one of their historians uh wrote a more truthful account you know of how also in the independence war the Israeli army did burn some Palestinian villages and so on and so on a more balanced view and first all the leftist critics uh had a kind of intellectual orgasm oh wonderful and so on and then they got a shock of lifetime when this guy said no no no but i meant that was necessary to do we should have done it even more the line of this guy was we should have thrown all the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza we wouldn't have any problems today so you know what i'm trying to say that i disagree not with you but for example with another person for whom i have respect Noam Chomsky a friend of mine told me that Chomsky told him recently at a lunch they had together in New York that today all the obscenities are so clear that we don need any critique of ideology we just need to tell to people the truth no truth must be contextualized in the sense of what does it justify what does it say what does it deny and so on and so on so to really conclude this would have been uh my my point about WikiLeaks that you are not just simply telling the truth you are telling the truth in a very precise way of confronting explicit line of justification rationalization or whatever the public discourse with its implicit presuppositions it's not just about telling the truth and this is very important why now i conclude don't be afraid because you know this wonderful Marx Brothers joke which i think serves perfectly as a model of today's ideology why because like if you listen to if you have listened to someone like you know that failed businessman who then ruined the American army as a defense minister Donald Rumsfeld called no no i read a biography of him they prove it conclusively that my god he was even a very stupid bad manager when he was a it's a total myth that he was a business genius but okay to the point when uh how uh basically his cynical line about Iraq when it was discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction and so on was that uh okay we were lying but we were lying in a truthful way with a good intention we manipulated you but this was part of a larger strategy and so on this is maybe the most okay intelligent tricky and effective cynical defense of a liar when he says okay i'm lying but so what i openly confess that i was lying so in a way i'm truthful here we should repeat that Marx Brothers saying and this is what you de facto are doing i claim you know that wonderful phrase from Groucho Marx i think when he is playing a lawyer defending his client and he says this guy looks as an idiot and acts as an idiot this shouldn't deceive you this guy is an idiot we should say to Donald Rumsfeld okay you admit you act as a liar you are a cheater and a liar but this will not deceive us you effectively are a cheater and a liar we should not allow them this space of selling their lies themselves in a cynical way as a deeper truth this is how ideology today functions Julian Assange i wanted to ask you about the Arab Spring and about what you see as WikiLeaks' role in what started in Tunisia unto Egypt we're seeing in Bahrain Yemen Syria Libya what role did WikiLeaks play it's hard to disentangle but the the story that we have back from people who were in Egypt uh and from the uh newspaper Al-Akbar one one of the great newspapers publishing in the Middle East out of Lebanon [Amy You lived in Egypt for a time.] i i lived in Egypt uh during so i i am familiar with the Mubarak regime um and the the tensions uh within the Egyptian environment actually i i was staying at that time in rather unusual circumstance uh where um i was staying in Miss Egypt's house and Miss Miss Egypt's house other than having paintings of Miss Egypt all throughout um was clustered right between the U.S. embassy and the British High Commission uh with a van outside filled with soldiers in front of my front door and so for the sort of work we were doing this seemed to be the sort of the ultimate um cover if you like to be right nested amongst this but you know Egypt's a very interesting place um at that time you didn't feel in most areas areas of Cairo the the presence of a dictatorship in fact if you look out on the street men go to work they go to uh the cafes to have shisha in the afternoon the pigeon boys come out uh onto the roof and there's weddings on a Saturday and a Sunday and in fact the economic basis and the technological basis to Cairo seemed pretty much the same as London if you compare it to Australian Aborigines so to my mind actually if if we say that it is democracy that rules and manages the United States or it is democracy electoral democracy that manages and rules London this this is completely ridiculous because when we look at countries that are dictatorships or soft dictatorships as in case of of Egypt the day-to-day life and the technological activities and the patterns of behavior for most people are exactly the same but it's when you when you stray into those areas uh of Egypt and areas of Cairo uh where the interior ministry is or where the foreign ministry is uh that the the level of paranoia and fear and the the number of people um guarding with submachine guns and so on is increased increases at that time there was around uh political prisoners of different types in Egypt so but remember Egypt has a population of around million so this has always something that i am aware of when you have an intelligentsia that writes and writes about its problems because this is the mirror image of the problem we now have with the mainstream press which is writers always write to their own favor and their own
legacy and no we we feel guilty my god how many bad things we did all the bad things in the world are the result of European imperialism okay maybe but what we should say to them is who are you to even speak about Judeo-Christian legacy this university reform today in UK this is the greatest threat to to Judeo-Christian legacy and so on anti-immigrants they are the nightmare imagine Le Pen in power in France and so on that's the end of Europe for me in the sense of what is uh progressive in Europe so again this is for me part of a much larger struggle which especially with the problems today ecological problems for example it is so crucial let me give you an example which i think it's so beautifully clear recently and that's why i would also like to ask you if i may through you you and China not you you you WikiLeaks and China because Chinese people will pay such a price for precisely the oppression of public space of reason where my Chinese friends told me this in uh China now a month or two ago even the government admitted the catastrophic ecological consequences of those Three Gorges Dam you know it's the greatest artificial lake in the world for miles kilometers long now they the government admitted that the problem is this one that lake is just above some subterranean faults where which they move when there is an earthquake so they admitted that the big you remember three years ago or when the big Sichuan or where earthquake was if not triggered definitely rendered much stronger because of this and this is not along the lines of what you must have some proverb like you know after the battle everyone can be the wise general no friends when i visited Beijing four-five years ago my friends there told me majority of geologists were already warning the government about these dangers second thing because of this collection of water there the effect of drought are now much stronger felt point two because the water is too low the whole uh you know that the Yellow River is the main uh the main transportation line venue in China and the traffic there is practically stopped and so on and so on all this is the end of public reason so now uh just to just to conclude just one more thing nonetheless this is not a critical point towards you but a point to clarify what WikiLeaks can do we should not fetishize truth as such we live in times of incredible ideological investments of times when ideology is very strong precisely because it's not even experienced as ideology and what can happen let me tell you a story from Israel my friends told me there some five-six years ago one of their historians uh wrote a more truthful account you know of how also in the independence war the Israeli army did burn some Palestinian villages and so on and so on a more balanced view and first all the leftist critics uh had a kind of intellectual orgasm oh wonderful and so on and then they got a shock of lifetime when this guy said no no no but i meant that was necessary to do we should have done it even more the line of this guy was we should have thrown all the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza we wouldn't have any problems today so you know what i'm trying to say that i disagree not with you but for example with another person for whom i have respect Noam Chomsky a friend of mine told me that Chomsky told him recently at a lunch they had together in New York that today all the obscenities are so clear that we don need any critique of ideology we just need to tell to people the truth no truth must be contextualized in the sense of what does it justify what does it say what does it deny and so on and so on so to really conclude this would have been uh my my point about WikiLeaks that you are not just simply telling the truth you are telling the truth in a very precise way of confronting explicit line of justification rationalization or whatever the public discourse with its implicit presuppositions it's not just about telling the truth and this is very important why now i conclude don't be afraid because you know this wonderful Marx Brothers joke which i think serves perfectly as a model of today's ideology why because like if you listen to if you have listened to someone like you know that failed businessman who then ruined the American army as a defense minister Donald Rumsfeld called no no i read a biography of him they prove it conclusively that my god he was even a very stupid bad manager when he was a it's a total myth that he was a business genius but okay to the point when uh how uh basically his cynical line about Iraq when it was discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction and so on was that uh okay we were lying but we were lying in a truthful way with a good intention we manipulated you but this was part of a larger strategy and so on this is maybe the most okay intelligent tricky and effective cynical defense of a liar when he says okay i'm lying but so what i openly confess that i was lying so in a way i'm truthful here we should repeat that Marx Brothers saying and this is what you de facto are doing i claim you know that wonderful phrase from Groucho Marx i think when he is playing a lawyer defending his client and he says this guy looks as an idiot and acts as an idiot this shouldn't deceive you this guy is an idiot we should say to Donald Rumsfeld okay you admit you act as a liar you are a cheater and a liar but this will not deceive us you effectively are a cheater and a liar we should not allow them this space of selling their lies themselves in a cynical way as a deeper truth this is how ideology today functions Julian Assange i wanted to ask you about the Arab Spring and about what you see as WikiLeaks' role in what started in Tunisia unto Egypt we're seeing in Bahrain Yemen Syria Libya what role did WikiLeaks play it's hard to disentangle but the the story that we have back from people who were in Egypt uh and from the uh newspaper Al-Akbar one one of the great newspapers publishing in the Middle East out of Lebanon [Amy You lived in Egypt for a time.] i i lived in Egypt uh during so i i am familiar with the Mubarak regime um and the the tensions uh within the Egyptian environment actually i i was staying at that time in rather unusual circumstance uh where um i was staying in Miss Egypt's house and Miss Miss Egypt's house other than having paintings of Miss Egypt all throughout um was clustered right between the U.S. embassy and the British High Commission uh with a van outside filled with soldiers in front of my front door and so for the sort of work we were doing this seemed to be the sort of the ultimate um cover if you like to be right nested amongst this but you know Egypt's a very interesting place um at that time you didn't feel in most areas areas of Cairo the the presence of a dictatorship in fact if you look out on the street men go to work they go to uh the cafes to have shisha in the afternoon the pigeon boys come out uh onto the roof and there's weddings on a Saturday and a Sunday and in fact the economic basis and the technological basis to Cairo seemed pretty much the same as London if you compare it to Australian Aborigines so to my mind actually if if we say that it is democracy that rules and manages the United States or it is democracy electoral democracy that manages and rules London this this is completely ridiculous because when we look at countries that are dictatorships or soft dictatorships as in case of of Egypt the day-to-day life and the technological activities and the patterns of behavior for most people are exactly the same but it's when you when you stray into those areas uh of Egypt and areas of Cairo uh where the interior ministry is or where the foreign ministry is uh that the the level of paranoia and fear and the the number of people um guarding with submachine guns and so on is increased increases at that time there was around uh political prisoners of different types in Egypt so but remember Egypt has a population of around million so this has always something that i am aware of when you have an intelligentsia that writes and writes about its problems because this is the mirror image of the problem we now have with the mainstream press which is writers always write to their own favor and their own
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considerations and their own self-interest so a country which goes from a position of can go from a position of not treating writers well to treating writers well and not treating everyone else well by writers i mean people who
considerations and their own self-interest so a country which goes from a position of can go from a position of not treating writers well to treating writers well and not treating everyone else well by writers i mean people who
Julian Assange
have ability to project their voice so for those political prisoners in Egypt they could gain no traction in the Western press and yet others such as in Iran we hear about all the time it's very interesting that Egypt was perceived to be a strong ally of Israel and strong ally of the
have ability to project their voice so for those political prisoners in Egypt they could gain no traction in the Western press and yet others such as in Iran we hear about all the time it's very interesting that Egypt was perceived to be a strong ally of Israel and strong ally of the
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United
United
Julian Assange
States in that region and so all the human rights abuses and political abuses that were occurring every day in Egypt uh simply did not get traction and there was one moment um rather actually unusual for Egypt but but perhaps a sign of the cleverness that came to be represented in the Arab Spring where these prisoners started a strike demanding conjugal rights demanding that their wives be permitted to visit them in prison for sex and then got some prominent muftis to come out and say look it's bad enough that these people are political agitators let alone homosexual political agitators and that is then something that was picked up um by uh the Western press because it had this this extra salacious flavor and so that was my some of my experiences with Egypt um when i lived there later on when we worked on Cablegate we selected uh French partner Le Monde in order to get the cables into into French because we knew that they would have an effect in Francophone Africa also cables were published in early December by Al-Akbar in Arabic from Lebanon and also Al-Masry Al-Youm uh in Egypt although the material that was published in Egypt back in December under Mubarak was pretty soft uh because of the threats that that newspaper was under but Al-Akbar pushed hard um and there was a number of critical cables came out about the Tunisian regime and about Ben Ali now of course the the argument that has often been used including for example uh in the electoral result that we were involved in in Kenya in is you just tell the people uh what's going on and then they'll be angry about it and they'll oppose it but actually the real situation is much more rich and interesting than that rather yes the the demos knows the population starts to know and they start to know in a way that's undeniable and they also start to know that the United States knows and the United States can't deny what was going on uh inside uh um Tunisia and then the elites within the country and without the country also know what is going on and know they can't deny so a situation developed where it was not possible for the United States to support the Ben Ali regime and intervene in a revolution in Tunisia in the way that it might have similarly it was not possible for France to support Ben Ali or other partners in the same way that they might have been able to also in our in our strategy in dealing with this region uh and uh our survival strategy for Cablegate was to overwhelm that is we have Saudi Arabia for example propping up a number of states in the Middle East um in fact invading Bahrain even to do this um but when these states have problems of their own to deal with and political crisis of their own to deal with they turn inward and they can't be involved in this propping up so Cablegate as a whole caused these elites that prop each other up interregion within the Arabic-speaking countries and within between Europe and these countries and between United States and these countries to have to deal with their own political crisis and not spend time giving intelligence briefings on activists or sending in um the SAS or or other um support and activists within Tunisia saw this very quickly i think they started to see an opportunity um and that information outside our site a number of WikiLeaks sites were then immediately um banned by the Tunisian government Al-Akbar was banned by the Tunisian government a hacker attack uh was launched on Al-Akbar many were launched on us but we'd come to defend against them Al-Akbar was taken down their whole um newspaper was redirected uh to a Saudi sex site believe it or not there is such a thing as a Saudi sex site and they wrested it back through involvement of the foreign military foreign ministry in Lebanon and then what i believe to be state-based computer hackers because of the degree of the sophistication of the attack came in and wiped out all of Al-Akbar's cable publishing efforts the cables about Tunisia were then spread around um online um in other in other forms uh translated by a little internet group called TuniLeaks and so presented a number of different facets um a sort of that everyone could see and no one could deny that the Ben Ali regime was fundamentally corrupt um not that the people there didn't know it before but it became undeniable to everyone including the United States and that the United States at least the State Department could be read that if it came down to supporting the army or Ben Ali they would probably support the army the military class rather than the political class so that gave activists and the army uh a belief that they could possibly pull it off but this wasn't enough so all that was intellectual and and was making a difference and was stirring things up in Tunisia uh and then you had this action by a 26-year-old uh computer technician who set um a fire his self-immolation uh on in December um 16th uh last year and died on [Amy and was hospitalized and died on January 4th.] yes and that taking a sort of intellectual frustration and irritation and hunger for change and undeniability to an emotional physical act on the street is then what changed the equation but there's other things of sort of a a more sys- systemic issue that was gradually breeding up which is you had aging rulers in the Middle East that whose regimes to that extent were becoming weaker and that the intellectual management of them was decreasing um you also had the rise of satellite TV and the decision by Al Jazeera staff to film and broadcast protest scenes in the street so most revolutions kick off in a crowd situation like this one where everyone can you know all the time the regime is saying um this voice is an outcast voice this is a minority this is not popular opinion and what the media does is censor those voices and prevent people from understanding that actually that what the state is saying is in the minority is in the majority and once people realize that their view is in the majority then they understand they have physically have the numbers and there's there's no better way to do that than in some kind of public square which is why Tahrir Square in Egypt was so important because everyone could see that they had the numbers um and that's you know this is i often perceive that there are moments like that politically um yes the Middle East was one that we might be going through you know you saw just before the Berlin Wall fell everyone thought that it was impossible why i mean if a a large majority of people had the same belief that they had then people became sure of that uh and then you have a sudden switch a sudden state change and then you then you have a revolution so i often feel that we're on the edge of that and that alternative ways of people becoming aware of what their beliefs are what each other's beliefs are uh is something that introduces that truly democratic shift i've often lambasted bloggers as people who just want to demonstrate peer-value conformity and who don't actually do any original news don't do any original work uh when we release original documentation on many things um although the situation is very interestingly improving uh often we find that that all these left-wing bloggers do not descend on a fresh cable from Panama revealing as it did um today uh that the United States has declared the right to board one-third of all ships in the world without any justification they do not descend on that rather they read the front page of the New York Times and go i disagree or i agree or i agree in my categories and that is something that sort of that hypocrisy of saying that you care about a situation um but not actually doing the work is something that has angered me but it it does serve an important function the function that it serves is the function of the square it is to show the number of voices that are lining up on one side or another Amy before you respond i just want to ask since you talked about what you released today you also have just sued MasterCard and Visa can you explain this weekend why you did that well you know when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers actually i spoke to Daniel Ellsberg last night told me an incredible story about that but did you know the New York Times had a thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers one month before Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to New York Times fresh news amazing stuff um yeah i'll leave that aside um so what was the question ah yes the MasterCard so when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers did they suddenly change things actually Nixon was re-elected after Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers the Vietnam War didn't stop the information was very important in all sorts of ways and its importance over time is very important the most important thing to come out of the Pentagon Papers was the reaction to the Pentagon Papers because the Pentagon Papers described a situation in the past what the past was like but the reaction to the Pentagon Papers described what was going on right now and it it showed a tremendous overreach by the Nixon administration various attempts to cover things up um and actually the New York Times really probably wouldn't have published the Pentagon Papers unless they thought it was going to be published anyway which they which they did it was scheduled to be published in four months' time in a book um very very interesting so on December 6th last year Visa MasterCard PayPal the Bank of America Western Union all ganged up together to engage in an economic blockade against WikiLeaks and that economic blockade has continued since that point so over six months now we have been suffering from an extra-judicial economic blockade that has occurred without any process whatsoever in fact the only two formal investigations into this one was on January last year by Timothy C. Geithner the Secretary of the Treasury who found that there was no lawful excuse to
States in that region and so all the human rights abuses and political abuses that were occurring every day in Egypt uh simply did not get traction and there was one moment um rather actually unusual for Egypt but but perhaps a sign of the cleverness that came to be represented in the Arab Spring where these prisoners started a strike demanding conjugal rights demanding that their wives be permitted to visit them in prison for sex and then got some prominent muftis to come out and say look it's bad enough that these people are political agitators let alone homosexual political agitators and that is then something that was picked up um by uh the Western press because it had this this extra salacious flavor and so that was my some of my experiences with Egypt um when i lived there later on when we worked on Cablegate we selected uh French partner Le Monde in order to get the cables into into French because we knew that they would have an effect in Francophone Africa also cables were published in early December by Al-Akbar in Arabic from Lebanon and also Al-Masry Al-Youm uh in Egypt although the material that was published in Egypt back in December under Mubarak was pretty soft uh because of the threats that that newspaper was under but Al-Akbar pushed hard um and there was a number of critical cables came out about the Tunisian regime and about Ben Ali now of course the the argument that has often been used including for example uh in the electoral result that we were involved in in Kenya in is you just tell the people uh what's going on and then they'll be angry about it and they'll oppose it but actually the real situation is much more rich and interesting than that rather yes the the demos knows the population starts to know and they start to know in a way that's undeniable and they also start to know that the United States knows and the United States can't deny what was going on uh inside uh um Tunisia and then the elites within the country and without the country also know what is going on and know they can't deny so a situation developed where it was not possible for the United States to support the Ben Ali regime and intervene in a revolution in Tunisia in the way that it might have similarly it was not possible for France to support Ben Ali or other partners in the same way that they might have been able to also in our in our strategy in dealing with this region uh and uh our survival strategy for Cablegate was to overwhelm that is we have Saudi Arabia for example propping up a number of states in the Middle East um in fact invading Bahrain even to do this um but when these states have problems of their own to deal with and political crisis of their own to deal with they turn inward and they can't be involved in this propping up so Cablegate as a whole caused these elites that prop each other up interregion within the Arabic-speaking countries and within between Europe and these countries and between United States and these countries to have to deal with their own political crisis and not spend time giving intelligence briefings on activists or sending in um the SAS or or other um support and activists within Tunisia saw this very quickly i think they started to see an opportunity um and that information outside our site a number of WikiLeaks sites were then immediately um banned by the Tunisian government Al-Akbar was banned by the Tunisian government a hacker attack uh was launched on Al-Akbar many were launched on us but we'd come to defend against them Al-Akbar was taken down their whole um newspaper was redirected uh to a Saudi sex site believe it or not there is such a thing as a Saudi sex site and they wrested it back through involvement of the foreign military foreign ministry in Lebanon and then what i believe to be state-based computer hackers because of the degree of the sophistication of the attack came in and wiped out all of Al-Akbar's cable publishing efforts the cables about Tunisia were then spread around um online um in other in other forms uh translated by a little internet group called TuniLeaks and so presented a number of different facets um a sort of that everyone could see and no one could deny that the Ben Ali regime was fundamentally corrupt um not that the people there didn't know it before but it became undeniable to everyone including the United States and that the United States at least the State Department could be read that if it came down to supporting the army or Ben Ali they would probably support the army the military class rather than the political class so that gave activists and the army uh a belief that they could possibly pull it off but this wasn't enough so all that was intellectual and and was making a difference and was stirring things up in Tunisia uh and then you had this action by a 26-year-old uh computer technician who set um a fire his self-immolation uh on in December um 16th uh last year and died on [Amy and was hospitalized and died on January 4th.] yes and that taking a sort of intellectual frustration and irritation and hunger for change and undeniability to an emotional physical act on the street is then what changed the equation but there's other things of sort of a a more sys- systemic issue that was gradually breeding up which is you had aging rulers in the Middle East that whose regimes to that extent were becoming weaker and that the intellectual management of them was decreasing um you also had the rise of satellite TV and the decision by Al Jazeera staff to film and broadcast protest scenes in the street so most revolutions kick off in a crowd situation like this one where everyone can you know all the time the regime is saying um this voice is an outcast voice this is a minority this is not popular opinion and what the media does is censor those voices and prevent people from understanding that actually that what the state is saying is in the minority is in the majority and once people realize that their view is in the majority then they understand they have physically have the numbers and there's there's no better way to do that than in some kind of public square which is why Tahrir Square in Egypt was so important because everyone could see that they had the numbers um and that's you know this is i often perceive that there are moments like that politically um yes the Middle East was one that we might be going through you know you saw just before the Berlin Wall fell everyone thought that it was impossible why i mean if a a large majority of people had the same belief that they had then people became sure of that uh and then you have a sudden switch a sudden state change and then you then you have a revolution so i often feel that we're on the edge of that and that alternative ways of people becoming aware of what their beliefs are what each other's beliefs are uh is something that introduces that truly democratic shift i've often lambasted bloggers as people who just want to demonstrate peer-value conformity and who don't actually do any original news don't do any original work uh when we release original documentation on many things um although the situation is very interestingly improving uh often we find that that all these left-wing bloggers do not descend on a fresh cable from Panama revealing as it did um today uh that the United States has declared the right to board one-third of all ships in the world without any justification they do not descend on that rather they read the front page of the New York Times and go i disagree or i agree or i agree in my categories and that is something that sort of that hypocrisy of saying that you care about a situation um but not actually doing the work is something that has angered me but it it does serve an important function the function that it serves is the function of the square it is to show the number of voices that are lining up on one side or another Amy before you respond i just want to ask since you talked about what you released today you also have just sued MasterCard and Visa can you explain this weekend why you did that well you know when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers actually i spoke to Daniel Ellsberg last night told me an incredible story about that but did you know the New York Times had a thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers one month before Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to New York Times fresh news amazing stuff um yeah i'll leave that aside um so what was the question ah yes the MasterCard so when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers did they suddenly change things actually Nixon was re-elected after Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers the Vietnam War didn't stop the information was very important in all sorts of ways and its importance over time is very important the most important thing to come out of the Pentagon Papers was the reaction to the Pentagon Papers because the Pentagon Papers described a situation in the past what the past was like but the reaction to the Pentagon Papers described what was going on right now and it it showed a tremendous overreach by the Nixon administration various attempts to cover things up um and actually the New York Times really probably wouldn't have published the Pentagon Papers unless they thought it was going to be published anyway which they which they did it was scheduled to be published in four months' time in a book um very very interesting so on December 6th last year Visa MasterCard PayPal the Bank of America Western Union all ganged up together to engage in an economic blockade against WikiLeaks and that economic blockade has continued since that point so over six months now we have been suffering from an extra-judicial economic blockade that has occurred without any process whatsoever in fact the only two formal investigations into this one was on January last year by Timothy C. Geithner the Secretary of the Treasury who found that there was no lawful excuse to
unknown
conduct an economic blockade against WikiLeaks and the other was by a Visa subsidiary that was handling our European payments Teller who found that
conduct an economic blockade against WikiLeaks and the other was by a Visa subsidiary that was handling our European payments Teller who found that
Julian Assange
we were not in breach of any of Visa's bylaws or regulations those are the only two formal inquiries and yet the blockade continues it's an extraordinary thing that we have seen that Visa MasterCard Western Union and so on are instruments of U.S. foreign policy but instruments of not U.S. as in a state operating under laws' foreign policy but rather instruments of Washington's patronage network policy so there was no due process at all and so over the past few months you know we have a number of cases on so we've been a bit distracted but over the last few months we have built up a case against Visa um and MasterCard um under European law and Visa and MasterCard together have own about of the credit card payment industry in Europe and therefore they have a sort of market dominance and that means um under European law they cannot engage in certain actions that uh to unfairly remove people from the market speaking of other legal cases i just wanted to ask you about what you face next week the extradition case on uh July 12th the Nation magazine has done two pieces um uh one is forthcoming and they quote your new lawyer Gareth Peirce who is very well known for representing prisoners at Guantanamo a renowned human rights attorney and Tom Hayden who writes the piece uh interviewed many people in Sweden and the United States and sort of talks about a feeling in Sweden of an attack very much represented by your past lawyers on the Swedish justice system and on the integrity of the women in Sweden and he quotes Gareth Peirce saying [Julian Well our lawyers never attacked any integrity of women.] well he quotes Gareth Peirce saying the history of this case is as unfortunate as it is possible to imagine each of the human beings involved deserves respect and consideration and i just wanted to ask if you are seeing this as a change of approach with your legal team in dealing with your possible extradition to Sweden possibly i mean the situation Sweden what has happened to Europe and what has happened to Sweden is is fascinating i mean it's something that i have come to learn because i've been embroiled in it um but it is intellectually extraordinary so we see for example that the European Union introduced an arrest warrant system and that arrest warrant system to extradite from one state of the EU to another state of the EU was put in place in response to to extradite terrorists to have fast extradition of terrorists and it introduced this concept or rather recycled a European Union concept of mutual recognition this is sort of a very feel-good phrase that one
we were not in breach of any of Visa's bylaws or regulations those are the only two formal inquiries and yet the blockade continues it's an extraordinary thing that we have seen that Visa MasterCard Western Union and so on are instruments of U.S. foreign policy but instruments of not U.S. as in a state operating under laws' foreign policy but rather instruments of Washington's patronage network policy so there was no due process at all and so over the past few months you know we have a number of cases on so we've been a bit distracted but over the last few months we have built up a case against Visa um and MasterCard um under European law and Visa and MasterCard together have own about of the credit card payment industry in Europe and therefore they have a sort of market dominance and that means um under European law they cannot engage in certain actions that uh to unfairly remove people from the market speaking of other legal cases i just wanted to ask you about what you face next week the extradition case on uh July 12th the Nation magazine has done two pieces um uh one is forthcoming and they quote your new lawyer Gareth Peirce who is very well known for representing prisoners at Guantanamo a renowned human rights attorney and Tom Hayden who writes the piece uh interviewed many people in Sweden and the United States and sort of talks about a feeling in Sweden of an attack very much represented by your past lawyers on the Swedish justice system and on the integrity of the women in Sweden and he quotes Gareth Peirce saying [Julian Well our lawyers never attacked any integrity of women.] well he quotes Gareth Peirce saying the history of this case is as unfortunate as it is possible to imagine each of the human beings involved deserves respect and consideration and i just wanted to ask if you are seeing this as a change of approach with your legal team in dealing with your possible extradition to Sweden possibly i mean the situation Sweden what has happened to Europe and what has happened to Sweden is is fascinating i mean it's something that i have come to learn because i've been embroiled in it um but it is intellectually extraordinary so we see for example that the European Union introduced an arrest warrant system and that arrest warrant system to extradite from one state of the EU to another state of the EU was put in place in response to to extradite terrorists to have fast extradition of terrorists and it introduced this concept or rather recycled a European Union concept of mutual recognition this is sort of a very feel-good phrase that one
unknown
state in the EU mutually recognizes another state in the EU and that sunk down into mutual recognition between the one court in the EU to another court in the EU but actually what it it seems to be talking about given the reality that three people a day are extradited from this country to the rest of Europe is a mutual recognition of the elite in each country in the EU it is a a method of being at peace so the elite in each country in the EU has if you like made literally a treaty with each other to recognize each other um and to
state in the EU mutually recognizes another state in the EU and that sunk down into mutual recognition between the one court in the EU to another court in the EU but actually what it it seems to be talking about given the reality that three people a day are extradited from this country to the rest of Europe is a mutual recognition of the elite in each country in the EU it is a a method of being at peace so the elite in each country in the EU has if you like made literally a treaty with each other to recognize each other um and to
Julian Assange
not um complain about the behavior now you might say that well okay we have justice systems in the EU in various
not um complain about the behavior now you might say that well okay we have justice systems in the EU in various
unknown
countries yes they they vary in all sorts of ways some are better some are some are some are worse depending on your value system but we've sunk so low that it's not even like that anymore the European arrest warrant talks about the mutual recognition of judicial authorities so courts
countries yes they they vary in all sorts of ways some are better some are some are some are worse depending on your value system but we've sunk so low that it's not even like that anymore the European arrest warrant talks about the mutual recognition of judicial authorities so courts
Julian Assange
but it it is permitted each country to define what they call a judicial authority and Sweden has chosen to call policemen and prosecutors judicial authorities and the whole basis of this term being used uh in the original introduction of European arrest warrant was that you would keep the executive separated from the judicial system that it was meant to be a natural and neutral party um who would request extradition and and it's not um so there are many things like this that are going on in that case i haven't been charged so is it right to extradite someone to a state where they do not speak the language where they do not have family they do not know the lawyers they do not know the legal system if you don't even have enough evidence to charge them you won't even come over as we have offered many times to speak uh to the people concerned so previous complaints about these sort of problems um have led to some inquiries in Sweden for instance the biggest Swedish law magazine that goes out to all the lawyers had a survey on this and one-third of the lawyers responding um said that yes that these complaints about the Swedish judicial system they truly are a problem um on the other hand it has also engendered a situation where the the Swedish Prime Minister and the Swedish Justice Minister have personally attacked me um and said the Swedish Prime Minister uh said that i had been charged to the Swedish public when i hadn't been um so it is a delicate situation because Sweden the Sweden we have now is not the Sweden of Olof Palme in the 1970s Sweden recently sent troops recently passed a bill uh to send Marines into Libya it was the fifth country out to send fighter jets into Libya this is a different dynamic um that has happened now and we have to be careful dealing with it so it's one thing to sort of be considerate of differences in the way various justice systems are administered um but it is it is another to tolerate uh any difference and i don't think any difference should be tolerated in the EU um you know what is it that prevents the justice systems of EU states from fundamentally collapsing and decaying you say there's mutual recognition it's mutual recognition between the UK uh and Romania and what if the Romanian justice system collapses more and more and more who's going to account for that who's going to scrutinize it is it going to be some bureaucrats in the EC that are going to scrutinize the Romanian justice system no the the only sustainable approach to scrutinizing the justice systems of the EU is the extradition process so it is extradition lawyers and defendants who have the highest motivation to scrutinize the quality of justice in the state that they are being extradited to and that's a healthy system that permits outside scrutiny and and checks so can stop European states from decaying um but the European arrest warrant system removes that possibility it's it's not it's not open to us to look at any of the facts in the case in the extradition at all that is completely removed all we're arguing about is whether the two-page request that was filled out which literally has a box ticked rape is a valid document
but it it is permitted each country to define what they call a judicial authority and Sweden has chosen to call policemen and prosecutors judicial authorities and the whole basis of this term being used uh in the original introduction of European arrest warrant was that you would keep the executive separated from the judicial system that it was meant to be a natural and neutral party um who would request extradition and and it's not um so there are many things like this that are going on in that case i haven't been charged so is it right to extradite someone to a state where they do not speak the language where they do not have family they do not know the lawyers they do not know the legal system if you don't even have enough evidence to charge them you won't even come over as we have offered many times to speak uh to the people concerned so previous complaints about these sort of problems um have led to some inquiries in Sweden for instance the biggest Swedish law magazine that goes out to all the lawyers had a survey on this and one-third of the lawyers responding um said that yes that these complaints about the Swedish judicial system they truly are a problem um on the other hand it has also engendered a situation where the the Swedish Prime Minister and the Swedish Justice Minister have personally attacked me um and said the Swedish Prime Minister uh said that i had been charged to the Swedish public when i hadn't been um so it is a delicate situation because Sweden the Sweden we have now is not the Sweden of Olof Palme in the 1970s Sweden recently sent troops recently passed a bill uh to send Marines into Libya it was the fifth country out to send fighter jets into Libya this is a different dynamic um that has happened now and we have to be careful dealing with it so it's one thing to sort of be considerate of differences in the way various justice systems are administered um but it is it is another to tolerate uh any difference and i don't think any difference should be tolerated in the EU um you know what is it that prevents the justice systems of EU states from fundamentally collapsing and decaying you say there's mutual recognition it's mutual recognition between the UK uh and Romania and what if the Romanian justice system collapses more and more and more who's going to account for that who's going to scrutinize it is it going to be some bureaucrats in the EC that are going to scrutinize the Romanian justice system no the the only sustainable approach to scrutinizing the justice systems of the EU is the extradition process so it is extradition lawyers and defendants who have the highest motivation to scrutinize the quality of justice in the state that they are being extradited to and that's a healthy system that permits outside scrutiny and and checks so can stop European states from decaying um but the European arrest warrant system removes that possibility it's it's not it's not open to us to look at any of the facts in the case in the extradition at all that is completely removed all we're arguing about is whether the two-page request that was filled out which literally has a box ticked rape is a valid document
Slavoj Žižek
first i'm so sad we don't have time to go into it because i found this again yet another this mutual recognition and this absolutely think about it what you've heard this properly Kafkaesque paradox of being extradited without even being charged i mean are we aware where we are but let's not take that path first i cannot but restrain from making an obscene loving obscene remark of how when you said you were staying with that Miss of Egypt no i hope there will be some American fundamentalist who will say ah now everything is clear there you were seduced by that Miss who was really Al-Qaeda agent and then you were turned into a terrorist agent through her to do your terrorist activity now things are clear now okay so let's go on with more serious [Amy We have one minute to go] okay yeah yeah but one minute in this broader Christian sense where time is eternity and so on very briefly first al- those Palestinian papers that kind of uh you triggered the movement i wonder if you agree i read i've read them what made me so depressed is that my liberal Israeli friends were telling me all the time listen we admit we are doing bad thing of the West on the West Bank but you cannot negotiate if they bomb you like let's just and if you of course exempt Gaza on the West Bank there was practically total peace the last five-six even more years the image you get from these papers is that there was an incredible compromising spirit from the Palestinian side offering them practically entire Jerusalem and so on and it was absolutely clear that it's Israel which is not interested in peace um second point i think it's so important the exact words you used which confirm my point namely how undeniable they could no longer deny it and so on that's important you know again we are in this situation where i know you know i you that you know you know that i know but we can still play this cynical game let's act as if we don't know the function of WikiLeaks even more important i claim in concrete ideological-political situation than learning us than learning through WikiLeaks something new is to push us to this point where you cannot pretend not to know which is why let me give you another example again i'm not a total fan of Obama although i still have certain respect for him but this is cynicism at its purest you remember this outcry in Zionist circles where Obama made the simple point that not even exact frontiers that the basis of peace should be the borders the '67 borders my god the critical reaction was as if Obama said something i don't know following orders from Al-Qaeda or what but this was the official U.S. policy accepted only the obscenity of the situation was that although this was officially the U.S. policy it was part of the unwritten deal not to talk about it to ignore it that's our situation here step further Egypt i know you know what's for me and you hinted here a lot the truth about Egypt we Western Europeans had this normal spontaneous racist attitude no we we would love to see a secular democratic movement in Arab countries unfortunately all they can do is some stupid anti-Semitic fundamentalist nationalist whatever outburst now officially we got exactly what we wanted a purely secular uprising and so on and you know how we behaved my last loving obscene example did you see Francois Truffaut's Day and Night where a guy wants to sleep with a girl tries to convince her for a long time then finally they are alone because of an accident by a lake and again he starts please let's do it quickly we are alone here and the girl says okay let's do it and starts to unbutton her trousers and the guy says okay but how do you mean my god just like that or whatever like he is shock we were a little bit like that officially we wanted secular democracy the Egyptians said okay i put down my trousers here you have your stupid secular democracy and uh uh you cannot get it just like that this was such a clear example of hypocrisy now really to to finish maybe the most important
first i'm so sad we don't have time to go into it because i found this again yet another this mutual recognition and this absolutely think about it what you've heard this properly Kafkaesque paradox of being extradited without even being charged i mean are we aware where we are but let's not take that path first i cannot but restrain from making an obscene loving obscene remark of how when you said you were staying with that Miss of Egypt no i hope there will be some American fundamentalist who will say ah now everything is clear there you were seduced by that Miss who was really Al-Qaeda agent and then you were turned into a terrorist agent through her to do your terrorist activity now things are clear now okay so let's go on with more serious [Amy We have one minute to go] okay yeah yeah but one minute in this broader Christian sense where time is eternity and so on very briefly first al- those Palestinian papers that kind of uh you triggered the movement i wonder if you agree i read i've read them what made me so depressed is that my liberal Israeli friends were telling me all the time listen we admit we are doing bad thing of the West on the West Bank but you cannot negotiate if they bomb you like let's just and if you of course exempt Gaza on the West Bank there was practically total peace the last five-six even more years the image you get from these papers is that there was an incredible compromising spirit from the Palestinian side offering them practically entire Jerusalem and so on and it was absolutely clear that it's Israel which is not interested in peace um second point i think it's so important the exact words you used which confirm my point namely how undeniable they could no longer deny it and so on that's important you know again we are in this situation where i know you know i you that you know you know that i know but we can still play this cynical game let's act as if we don't know the function of WikiLeaks even more important i claim in concrete ideological-political situation than learning us than learning through WikiLeaks something new is to push us to this point where you cannot pretend not to know which is why let me give you another example again i'm not a total fan of Obama although i still have certain respect for him but this is cynicism at its purest you remember this outcry in Zionist circles where Obama made the simple point that not even exact frontiers that the basis of peace should be the borders the '67 borders my god the critical reaction was as if Obama said something i don't know following orders from Al-Qaeda or what but this was the official U.S. policy accepted only the obscenity of the situation was that although this was officially the U.S. policy it was part of the unwritten deal not to talk about it to ignore it that's our situation here step further Egypt i know you know what's for me and you hinted here a lot the truth about Egypt we Western Europeans had this normal spontaneous racist attitude no we we would love to see a secular democratic movement in Arab countries unfortunately all they can do is some stupid anti-Semitic fundamentalist nationalist whatever outburst now officially we got exactly what we wanted a purely secular uprising and so on and you know how we behaved my last loving obscene example did you see Francois Truffaut's Day and Night where a guy wants to sleep with a girl tries to convince her for a long time then finally they are alone because of an accident by a lake and again he starts please let's do it quickly we are alone here and the girl says okay let's do it and starts to unbutton her trousers and the guy says okay but how do you mean my god just like that or whatever like he is shock we were a little bit like that officially we wanted secular democracy the Egyptians said okay i put down my trousers here you have your stupid secular democracy and uh uh you cannot get it just like that this was such a clear example of hypocrisy now really to to finish maybe the most important
unknown
thing uh what you already said i think Amy i think maybe this is one of the ways if we are approaching the end to conclude it even if you ignore WikiLeaks it changed the entire field
thing uh what you already said i think Amy i think maybe this is one of the ways if we are approaching the end to conclude it even if you ignore WikiLeaks it changed the entire field
Julian Assange
you it's again even at the level of of publishing spreading informations you pushed things in a very formal way to a point of undeniability nobody can pretend that WikiLeaks didn't happen and it would be very interesting to classify all reactions to WikiLeaks you know as different forms of in psychoanalytic terms repression denial whatever some people say formally yeah yeah but try to neutralize it like ooh another another chapter in freedom of
you it's again even at the level of of publishing spreading informations you pushed things in a very formal way to a point of undeniability nobody can pretend that WikiLeaks didn't happen and it would be very interesting to classify all reactions to WikiLeaks you know as different forms of in psychoanalytic terms repression denial whatever some people say formally yeah yeah but try to neutralize it like ooh another another chapter in freedom of
Slavoj Žižek
the press investigative journalism others say directly terrorism i wonder the approach i would have
the press investigative journalism others say directly terrorism i wonder the approach i would have
Julian Assange
followed if i
followed if i
Slavoj Žižek
were to be uh on the other side would have been something like it's basically a good thing it's just misused by some extremists you know and then you kind of precisely to save the safe core of good core of WikiLeaks so what i'm saying is that again to conclude don't worry this is the moment of truth WikiLeaks is an event not only because of what it says in itself but because nobody can ignore it it changed the entire field the point is not to allow to be renormalized to remain faithful to it um just a note Slavoj and i will be out signing books on the left in the lobby right afterwards and would love to talk to you um definitely pick up a flyer yes you do and i want to end with this question Julian tomorrow July 3rd you turn years old what are your hopes for the future well there's there's the big future there's the deep future um that one can long for uh so that that is a future where we are all able to freely communicate our hopes and dreams factual information about the world with each other and the historical record is an item that is completely sacrosanct that would never be changed never be modified never be deleted and that we will steer a course away uh from Orwell's dictum of he who controls the present controls the past so that that is something that is my lifelong quest to do and from all from that um justice flows because each most of us uh have an instinct uh for justice and most of us are reasonably intelligent and if we can communicate with each other organize uh not be oppressed and know what's going on then pretty much the rest falls out so that is my big hope in the short term um it is that my staff stop hassling me to tell me to go what i wish you all the best is another even more beautiful Miss Egypt happy birthday
were to be uh on the other side would have been something like it's basically a good thing it's just misused by some extremists you know and then you kind of precisely to save the safe core of good core of WikiLeaks so what i'm saying is that again to conclude don't worry this is the moment of truth WikiLeaks is an event not only because of what it says in itself but because nobody can ignore it it changed the entire field the point is not to allow to be renormalized to remain faithful to it um just a note Slavoj and i will be out signing books on the left in the lobby right afterwards and would love to talk to you um definitely pick up a flyer yes you do and i want to end with this question Julian tomorrow July 3rd you turn years old what are your hopes for the future well there's there's the big future there's the deep future um that one can long for uh so that that is a future where we are all able to freely communicate our hopes and dreams factual information about the world with each other and the historical record is an item that is completely sacrosanct that would never be changed never be modified never be deleted and that we will steer a course away uh from Orwell's dictum of he who controls the present controls the past so that that is something that is my lifelong quest to do and from all from that um justice flows because each most of us uh have an instinct uh for justice and most of us are reasonably intelligent and if we can communicate with each other organize uh not be oppressed and know what's going on then pretty much the rest falls out so that is my big hope in the short term um it is that my staff stop hassling me to tell me to go what i wish you all the best is another even more beautiful Miss Egypt happy birthday