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    Re: For John Monro: the Guardian's unremitting nastiness to and about Julian Assange Archived Message

    Posted by dovetailjoint on April 22, 2019, 7:12 am, in reply to "Re: For John Monro: the Guardian's unremitting nastiness to and about Julian Assange"

    Sue's right about a lot of this, though I'd argue that it's far worse.

    The Guardian's US adventure has been an unmitiaged economic and commercial disaster of massive proportions. They have lost hundreds of millions of pounds attempting to establish the Guardian in the United States and they have failed miserably, which is why they were forced to cut it all back drastically. The American adventure threatened to bring the entire British card house crashing down too. How long can the Gaurdian's failing economic model continure before the loans dry up?

    If one looks at the Assange Affair, one can see that many of the 'big beasts' at the Guardian hated Assange from day one. He was charismatic, young, famous, a rebel, a bit of a 'rockstar' and the young women flocked around him, fighting to sit closest to him and generally excited and 'throwing themselves' at him. There's nothing unusual about this kind of behaviour, only it really, really, annoyed the established male journalists at the Guardian, who didn't like the competition and felt their own importance and status challenged and undermined by this Australian non-journalist.

    This is even before we get to Assange's competative 'business model' that had the potential, and still does, to compete and take-over from the old print media. Another reason to dislike him.

    Then there's his politics, which are complex and far closer to libertarianism and anarchism than the 'liberal' political line at the Guardian. Assange challenged the old media who's job is to cover-up our warcrimes and imperial onslaughts and sell them to a sceptical public, smoothing the roughest edges of genocide for the average Oxbridge type and the educated middle-class. Assange, in contrast, wanted to reveal far, far, more of what the Guardian and the BBC have spent decades glossing over and hiding from public scrutiny.

    Where are we now? There's so much. So the Guardian's hatred of Assange is commercial, personal and political. At first they believed, in true liberal style, that they'ed be able to absorb bim and smoother him with kisses whilst they sharpened their knives to stab him in the back. Bribe and absorb, and if that doesn't work, there's always assassination, which is the typical ruling class British way.

    This is before we even get into the close links between parts of the state apparatus and the media, specifically the way journalists rely on politicians for stories and the traditional links between the British security services and important journalists, especially those working in foreign affairs and defence areas. Assange was quickly identified as a 'loos cannon' and someone who was undermining the national security interests of the UK and the United States. Also, as an aside, Assange didn't publically express his love and respect for Israel and its interests, which also made him suspect.

    That's, surely, enough to be going one with?

    Oh, and the fake allegations in Sweden didn't exactly endear him to the bourgeois 'feminists' at the Guardian who have their own 'gender agenda', that makes him an easy symbolic target.

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