The Lifeboat News: Monbiot suddenly wakes up

** Sweden

extract

The US extradition request has become considerably nastier and even more difficult for ostensibly anti-imperialist British left-liberals to leave unopposed.
This leaves a possible Swedish sex-crime extradition request as the only remaining crutch for those who want to appear less complicit with the U.S. attack on Assange than they actually are.

Nothing epitomizes this more disgracefully than the Guardian’s editorial of 24 May, under the sub-head: “The founder of WikiLeaks faces charges of espionage in the US and rape in Sweden. He should stand trial for rape.”

[...]

Somehow, the Guardian thinks that conjuring up an extradition request from Sweden that still does not exist trumps and solves all concerns about extraditing Assange to the US. The editors never consider the possibility that there may be no extradition request. (Perhaps they know something, but it’s not a sure thing.)

Or what happens if Assange goes to Sweden and either is not charged with a crime (He is not, and never has been.), or is tried and found not guilty. In other words, they completely ignore the obvious: That the United States will demand extradition from Sweden just as it is doing from the UK, and that Sweden will comply. Sending Julian Assange to Sweden does not “defend” him from US extradition at all. It’s a liberal media version of “Don’t think of the elephant!”

Does the Guardian not see, or care, about this glaring logical and consequential fault in its position?

Of course it does. The Guardian knows exactly what it’s doing. The purpose of this editorial as written is not and cannot be to “defend…against this [US] extradition”; it is to support that extradition by ignoring it. The Guardian here is carefully crafting a discourse in which the threat of the US indictment and extradition disappears behind the evocation of a rape allegation.

The intended effect is to encourage its British readers to support the capitulation to that threat as it will inevitably reappear in Sweden, while thinking they are not—while thinking that all they are doing is assuring their own virtuous adherence to “the seriousness with which such [sex] allegations are viewed.”

The Guardian isn’t asking the British government to honor an extradition request that doesn’t exist, it is suggesting a set-up by which Britain passes Assange through Sweden to the US.

This use of a sexual allegation against Assange to divert attention from, and effectively support, the American extradition demand is pernicious and phony. It’s an obvious attempt to give virtue-signaling identity-politics liberals a reason not to protest Assange’s extradition or imprisonment. It’s already the dominant ruse for such purposes in England, and it’s going to become more prominent everywhere now that the indictment can no longer be portrayed as a relatively minor matter.
[...]

In my article, Avoiding Assange, a month ago, right after the first US indictment was issued, I addressed two diversionary arguments that I knew would be used by those who want to hide their complicity with American imperialism under leftish cover—that is, those who don’t want to be seen as endorsing the United States government’s prosecution of Assange for, and intimidation of every journalist in the world from, reporting the embarrassing truth about American war crimes, but who also don’t really want to stand in the way of Assange’s extradition to the United States
Article at Counterpunch LINK https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/31/swedish-sex-pistol-aimed-at-assange/