{"id":168499,"date":"2020-09-14T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T11:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=168499"},"modified":"2020-09-10T07:40:59","modified_gmt":"2020-09-10T06:40:59","slug":"julian-assange-prometheus-bound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/09\/julian-assange-prometheus-bound\/","title":{"rendered":"Julian Assange, Prometheus Bound"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

He is being punished not for stealing fire \u2013 but for exposing power under the light of truth and provoking the god of Exceptionalism.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Police ejecting Julian Assange from Ecuadorian embassy in London, April 11, 2019. (YouTube)<\/p><\/div>\n

8 Sep 2020 – <\/em>This is the tale of an Ancient Greek tragedy reenacted in AngloAmerica.<\/p>\n

Amid thundering silence and nearly universal indifference, chained, immobile, invisible, a squalid Prometheus was transferred from the gallows for a show trial in a faux Gothic court built on the site of a medieval prison.<\/p>\n

Kratos, impersonating Strength, and Bia, impersonating Violence, had duly chained Prometheus, not to a mountain in the Caucasus, but to solitary confinement in a high-security prison, subject to relentless psychological torture. All along the Western watchtowers, no Hephaestus volunteered to forge in his smithy a degree of reluctance or even a sliver of pity.<\/p>\n

Prometheus is being punished not for stealing fire \u2013 but for exposing power under the light of truth, thus provoking the unbounded ire of\u00a0\u00a0Zeus The Exceptionalist, who\u2019s only able to stage his crimes under multiple veils of secrecy.<\/p>\n

Prometheus pierced the myth of secrecy \u2013 which envelops Zeus\u2019s ability to control the human spectrum. And that is anathema.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cPrometheus Being Chained by Vulcan,\u201d 1623 oil painting by Dirck van Baburen.<\/strong>
\n(Vulcan Rijksmuseum, Wikimedia Commons)<\/strong><\/p>\n

For years, debased, hack stenographers worked relentlessly to depict Prometheus as a lowly trickster and inconsequential forger.<\/p>\n

Abandoned, smeared, demonized, Prometheus was comforted by only a small chorus of Oceanids \u2013 Craig Murray, John Pilger, Daniel Ellsberg, Wiki warriors, Consortium<\/em><\/strong> writers. Prometheus was denied even the basic tools to organize a defense that might at least rattle Zeus\u2019s cognitive dissonant narrative.<\/p>\n

Oceanus, the Titan father of the Oceanids, could not possibly urge Prometheus to appease Zeus.<\/p>\n

Fleetingly, Prometheus might have revealed to the chorus that exposing secrecy was not what best suited his heart\u2019s content. His plight might also, in the long run, revive popular attachment to the civilizing arts.<\/p>\n

\"\"One day, Prometheus was visited by Io, a human maiden. He may have forecasted she would engage in no future travels, and she would bear him two offspring. And he may have foreseen that one of their descendants \u2013 an unnamed epigone of Heracles \u2013 many generations hence, would release him, figuratively, from his torment.<\/p>\n

Zeus and his prosecutorial minions don\u2019t have much of a case against Prometheus, apart from possession and dissemination of classified Exceptional information.<\/p>\n

Still it was eventually up to Hermes \u2014 the messenger of the Gods, and significantly, the conduit of News \u2014 to be sent down by Zeus in uncontrollable anger to demand that Prometheus admits he was guilty of trying to overthrow the rules-based order established by the Supreme Exceptional.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

CBC TV covering Assange expulsion from Ecuadorian embassy in London. (YouTube)<\/p><\/div>\n

This is what\u2019s being ritualized at the current show trial, which was never about Justice.<\/p>\n

Prometheus won\u2019t be tamed. In his mind, he will be relieving Tennyson\u2019s Ulysses: \u201cto strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Zeus may finally strike him with the thunderbolt of Exceptionalism, and Prometheus will be hurled into the abyss.<\/p>\n

Prometheus\u2019s theft of the secrecy of power, though, is irreversible. His fate will certainly prompt the late entrance of Pandora and her jar of evils \u2013 complete with unforeseen consequences.<\/p>\n

Whatever the verdict reached in that 17th<\/sup> century court, it\u2019s far from certain that Prometheus will enter History just as a mere object of blame for human folly.<\/p>\n

Because now the heart of the matter is that the mask of Zeus has fallen.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian independent geopolitical analyst. He is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for <\/em>Asia Times Online. He has been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9\/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of <\/em>Globalistan<\/a> (2007),<\/em> Red Zone Blues<\/a> (2007), <\/em>Obama Does Globalistan<\/a> (2009), <\/em>Empire of Chaos<\/a> (2014) and <\/em>2030<\/a> (2015), all by Nimble Books.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
Go to Original – consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 Sep 2020 – This is the tale of an Ancient Greek tragedy reenacted in AngloAmerica. Amid thundering silence and nearly universal indifference, chained, immobile, invisible, a squalid Prometheus was transferred from the gallows for a show trial in a faux Gothic court built on the site of a medieval prison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":168501,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[229,918,910,942,487,378,651,234,911,454,572,639,292,70,126,921,113],"class_list":["post-168499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance","tag-activism","tag-assange","tag-big-brother","tag-ecuador","tag-human-rights","tag-journalism","tag-justice","tag-media","tag-surveillance","tag-sweden","tag-torture","tag-uk","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-whistleblowing","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}