Reflections on Singing for Wikileaks

My takeaway from the recent welcome news of Julian Assange's release from prison is that collective action works.

When the news broke that Julian Assange was going to be released from confinement after fourteen years of it altogether, after I got done not believing it was true, I was relieved that his long years of imprisonment would finally be over, that he'd get to be with his beautiful family, and that a social movement could at least cautiously claim some form of a victory.  We could at least make the case that we eventually accomplished what we set out to do.

I basically have nothing to add to the many wise words that have come from so many of Julian's friends and supporters over the past few days.  

I agree with them that the fact that Assange ever had to seek asylum in the first place, and certainly the fact that he was ever sent to prison for any time at all -- let alone that he had to be tortured for years in a maximum security prison by the British authorities -- these are defeats.  They are devastating facts that are and will continue to have a devastating impact on real journalism around the world, and Assange eventually being released from prison doesn't change that.

And I agree with what everyone is saying about the US government imposing this plea deal, with Julian having to plea guilty to violating the post-Russian Revolution hysteria law that's still on the books but never used, the Espionage Act.  This sets a terrible precedent for the future of investigative journalism and for whistle-blowing.  And I agree with what the same people are saying about how mad it would be to expect Assange to not take the plea deal -- stay in prison forever or take this plea deal is not a real choice.  Especially when the future of investigative journalism and whistle-blowing have already been impacted so severely by Julian's years of imprisonment in the first place.

I happen to be in Australia, having landed here a day or so before it was announced that Julian Assange was going to be released.  I'm on a tour of Australia, planned many months ago, in part here to sing songs about this continent's native son and his persecution.  Sometimes timing is like that.

I didn't think I had anything to add to what other folks have been saying about the news, but having just attended a talk here in Perth at the Ecosocialism conference that's been taking place this weekend about "being the media" -- an old Indymedia slogan -- it occurred to me that perhaps I do have some reflections worth sharing on this subject.

In many discussions about doing media, creating media, getting the word out in one form or another, there is a perfectly sensible emphasis on things like how to take good pictures, how to write effectively, and how to effectively promote content so people might see it.

This is all crucial stuff.  To which I would add, remember to consider the power of culture, and artistic forms of communication, like telling powerful stories through mediums like music and video.  And remember that a hallmark of just about any kind of media, alternative or otherwise, that goes viral, is that it is probably the result of a successful collective effort.

From my experience, certainly, and also by my observation of what happens out there more broadly, the stuff that a lot of people see, the stuff that gets shared on a very large scale and picked up by various other media -- the stuff that goes viral -- is almost always the product of intense collective effort.  It is the product of multiple levels of collaboration between lots of groups and individuals.

There is an image, etched in the collective imagination by the way things play out in movies like V for Vendetta, of masses of people participating in collective actions -- but organized, it seems, as a mass of otherwise isolated individuals.

This, from my experience, is mostly not how it works, though there are some parallels.  Like there are certainly a lot of supporters of Assange and Wikileaks who might just repost anything they see that Wikileaks or Stella share on X, and they're not necessarily organized to any extent beyond following Stella and Wikileaks on social media platforms and maybe showing up at a demo somewhere, especially if they live near cities like London or Rome.

But my personal experience working with people associated with this iconic network that comes out of a milieu where so many people have been so dedicated to the idea of not only exposing corruption and war crimes, but to getting the truth out there to the eyes and ears of the public, has been all about coordinated, collective effort.

This seems especially important to mention because of the way so much of society has been atomized by the social media phenomenon.  We've learned to just do things on our own, essentially.  But it seems abundantly clear to me that strength comes from working together.

At this stage, writing in 2024, it would be impossible to guess at how many people out there in the world might not recognize my name, but they have heard certain songs -- "Behind These Prison Walls," "When Julian Met Stella," and maybe "Behind the Barricades."  

I'll make no claims about how these songs had any kind of decisive impact -- or any impact at all -- on bringing about the release of any prisoners.  What I can say is that I wrote and recorded other songs about the imprisonment of Julian Assange, but those are not the ones people have heard.  The reason why at this point millions of people have heard the songs I mentioned is mainly due to collective effort.

Just because I prefer to hear about things in the form of a good story, I'll tell the story of these collective efforts that involved me chronologically, and hope someone might get anything useful from it.

When Chelsea Manning was arrested I wrote a song about her arrest, and about the war crimes she exposed, which she had released via Wikileaks.  It was a song celebrating her contributions to humanity, and condemning her persecution by the US government, when they should have been giving her a medal instead.

At the risk of getting overly granular here, it seems worth mentioning that what happened next, after I wrote that song, is I recorded it.  Not just that, but I recorded it in a studio with a producer, engineer, and band, as part of a fairly expensive recording project.  The final product sounded great.  The recording project was a collective effort, as was the crowdfunding campaign for it to happen in the first place.

Somehow or other folks at Wikileaks heard the song, and emailed me about using it for a Wikileaks album project with other musical artists.

Around the time the album was being released, Julian Assange was on duty, calling each of the artists who contributed to the project on the phone to thank us.  When he called me, we talked about how heroic Chelsea Manning's actions were, and how good it was for her actions to be celebrated in songs like mine.  I told him how heroic his own actions were.

A few weeks after that conversation was when he first checked in to the Ecuadorian embassy.

The world is a small place, it seems, and Ciaron O'Reilly, an Australian activist I had first met a few years earlier, when it looked like he and eight other folks in Ireland were going to go to prison for smashing up some US war planes at Shannon Airport, was now living in London, spending a lot of time outside of the Ecuadorian embassy, organizing various vigils and other actions trying to support the embassy's infamous Australian occupant.

Over the years Julian was in the embassy, visits to London would sometimes include some kind of action Ciaron was organizing there.

On one such occasion, filmmaker Niels Ladefoged was there, filming me singing "Behind the Barricades" at the entrance of the embassy.  This was later edited and presented on various platforms by various prominent accounts in support of Assange.

You'll find the work of Niels Ladefoged in so many corners of the tale, facilitating anything I've done as part of this campaign, and whatever so many others have done as well.  If it's not brilliantly captured on video, it didn't happen.  And there's generally one guy with the camera present.  

When you see video footage of Stella Assange giving a speech where everything looks and sounds so professional, it's not an accident, it's often not footage being taken by a corporate media outlet that you're seeing, and it's certainly not from somebody's cell phone.  It's Niels, right there up close to her, but invisible to the viewers, getting that great audio and video.

After seeing how Niels' video of me singing at the embassy was so well done and got so widely circulated, the next time I was coming to London after Julian had been abducted and imprisoned at Belmarsh, I contacted Niels and asked if he wanted to do a video of some kind in front of the prison.  He readily agreed, and rounded up another person to operate another camera for the day.

I then wrote the song, "Behind These Prison Walls," imagining singing with the prison behind me.  We spent the next day with Niels and his accomplice filming me singing that song over and over again in a multitude of different situations, mostly with the prison in the background.  After many days of editing, Niels had finished making what was essentially a very professional music video.

The next step was timing the release of the video and lining up prominent accounts who would share it -- Wikileaks, Stella, the Don't Extradite Assange campaign, Tom Morello, and whoever else.  Once the song is out there like that, it then gets used as a song to play through the sound system at protests and to be used for various sorts of informational videos -- which would never have happened to nearly the same extent without the high-quality music video or the initial, coordinated promotional effort, from my experience with having written a lot of other good songs that never received this kind of treatment. 

On another visit to London a couple years later, visiting various members of the Assange family, I was playing music on the porch with Stella and Julian's children.  Niels was filming, as he is doing much of the time.  Later he would use this footage, and days of more footage he'd film with me in various parts of London, including once again in front of Belmarsh, to make another music video, for the song, "When Julian Met Stella," which would be promoted through the same sorts of channels and with the same methods as the last song was.

In writing these songs, as with so much of the other media that has been disseminated by supporters of Julian, a big part of the effort has been to counter the "lies and slander" narrative with tales of Julian's immensely important accomplishments, an awareness of his fragile humanity, and the urgent need for him to be out of prison and with his family.  The way Niels made the music videos for the songs was clearly intended to serve these purposes as well, working in sync.

A few months ago, Stella was in Oslo, Norway to accept an award on behalf of her imprisoned husband, and it happened to be that Kamala and I were singing that night at a local venue called Mir.  After the award ceremony, Stella came to our gig with friends and colleagues, including Niels, camera in hand as usual.

While Niels filmed, Stella approached the stage, phone in hand, to let us know that Julian was on the line.  

We sang "When Julian Met Stella" while Niels alternated between filming us, Stella, and the phone.  This video got shared and broadcast more than anything else I've ever been involved with, probably.  The combination of the song, with Stella, and Julian represented starkly by the disembodied phone on a table, was moving, and clearly many people found it to be so.

We could accurately say that it was not a staged event, but when you're being followed around most of the time by a filmmaker who is actively filming, everything will be caught on film, whether it happened organically or not.

A few days ago I saw on Al-Jazeera, from Brisbane, watching as Julian and his legal team were getting off the plane and greeting Stella in Canberra.  There was Niels, camera in hand, following Julian.  

A rare moment of seeing the man who is usually the one off-screen, making the movie -- which clearly continues, now with a much more uplifting segment.

The Progressive Embrace of the McCarthyite Left

Since when did we all become Nazis?

My upcoming album, I Heard A Rumor, has a theme running through many of the songs.  All the songs were written in the past couple years, mostly in the past few weeks.  "Cancel Culture Commander" was written a couple years ago.  I never put it on an album at that time because I'm just too nice, or I hoped this ongoing bizarre episode would somehow blow over, but that was wishful thinking.  And certainly the overall theme of the album demands the inclusion of this song anyway.

Between the title track and songs like "Cancel Culture Commander" and "My Techno-Fascist God," the theme is the deadly toxic rumor mill and what makes it function.  The false rumors that become the whispered allegations and the shouted accusations -- who makes them and why?  To what end?

Whatever gets the mill moving, social media algorithms, in the modern era, will make sure it spins like a perpetual motion machine.

There are two main categories of people who engage in this kind of practice, of vilifying and sowing seeds of doubt about people that might otherwise be assumed to be part of your end of the political spectrum.  There might be quite a bit of cross-over between the two groups, but we could generally say we're either dealing with nefarious actors of one kind or another, or earnest sectarians.

Why players like undercover police agents of the sort that commonly used to be called the Red Squad would want to sow division on the left or among those involved with a social movement is obvious.  That's what they do, it's their reason for existing, all this time, like since the FBI was formed over a century ago.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume some of those who habitually go around making false accusations and otherwise gratuitously attacking fellow leftists in an apparent effort to divide and deflate resistance groups are not agents of the state, but are doing what they believe to be right.  How did they develop this toxic, destructive, self-destructive orientation?  Why are some of them given credibility by progressive publications?  And why are some of them habitually adopted and promoted by mainstream media outlets?

"Cancel Culture Commander" focuses on my chief nemesis, that is, the man who chose to make me his chief nemesis, for whatever reason, author, journalist, and cult guru of Rose City Antifa, Shane Burley.  Why has Shane Burley dedicated so much of his time to writing blog posts and participating in social media campaigns to paint me as an antisemite?  What motivates him and his followers?

Along with his regular, badly-written and somewhat incoherent rants about yours truly, Shane has apparently got a new book out, on his very favorite subject, antisemitism.  Shane has made a career out of positioning himself as a self-appointed expert on antisemitism -- especially the "creeping" variety, that involves people of Jewish extraction like me and Norman Finkelstein and others, who have a very different outlook on geopolitics and history than Shane does, and are therefore antisemites.

In my lifetime I have witnessed the ongoing occupation and slaughter of the Palestinian people, I have seen widespread poverty and famine continue to characterize life in so many countries on planet Earth, I have seen climate chaos, I've seen a massive housing crisis sweep the USA, I've seen widespread police brutality targeted against certain groups in this country that generally do not include Jews, but I haven't seen any big rise in antisemitism.  Yes, there was a massacre at a synagogue, but there have been a whole bunch of massacres at churches, schools, country music festivals, and shopping malls across the USA as well, there's literally a massacre every day in recent years.  I'm seeing a society that's falling apart in all kinds of ways, but not a particular pattern of antisemitism with regards to the gun violence either.

In fact, very different from a rise in antisemitism, what I have witnessed and experienced in my 57 years growing up as the very direct descendant of lots of European Jews, such as my Yiddish-speaking grandmother, is that we have long now had an educational system and a media ecosystem in the US and in many other countries that works hard, year in and year out, to teach everyone about the horrors of fascism and the Nazi genocide of European Jewry in particular.  This theme has been so widely and deeply emphasized for so many people, in fact, that at this point, in countries like the US, the UK, and Germany, Jews who commit atrocities are much more likely to get a free pass rather than to be condemned for them -- as evidenced by the lack of much opposition to the constant atrocities committed by the self-proclaimed Jewish state for the past 76 years or so, in those key countries that make Israel as we know it today, and its atrocities, possible.

There is, of course, the rise of the far right in lots of countries, and with it all kinds of antisemitic notions along with racism, xenophobia, and nationalism.  But the central focus of this phenomenon is not the existence of Jews or the idea that Jews run the world.  There are lots of other clear reasons for the rise of the far right, and they're mostly material in nature, just like they were a century ago.

So then how would it be that someone with an ostensibly left orientation in life can turn into a person who, if genuine, believes I'm some kind of Jewish antisemite who should be regularly mocked and misrepresented in various forums?  How would someone coming out of the left come to think that one of the biggest problems we face today is this supposed rise in antisemitism, and that in order to combat it we should dedicate our time to making sure anyone who is fascist or fascist-adjacent (like me) is deplatformed, including through the use of violence to shut down events involving people you don't like?

When it comes to what is widely known as "antifascism," or "antifa," it's very important to note that there are many different kinds of people in many different countries doing all kinds of organizing under the banner of antifascism, and there are very big differences between them.  In Germany there are different camps, though sometimes not very clearly-defined, that are often identified as "anti-imperialist" vs. "anti-German."  To oversimplify the differences, some groups specifically oppose actual fascists by various means including physical confrontation.  Other groups oppose anyone who doesn't agree with them on certain subjects, and targets them as they would target a fascist.

Going back to the origins of the movement, wherever there were communists in the 1930's, but as I understand it, especially in Germany, there were those practicing what was for a time the Moscow-approved tactic of punching Nazis -- physically assaulting Nazis in the streets wherever you saw them manifesting in some form.

There are very different interpretations of the consequences of this widespread practice in Germany -- of the social and political impact of the chaos on the streets involving something like gang warfare between communists and fascists.  But one interpretation, which is the one that makes the most sense to me, is that this atmosphere on the streets contributed to the popularity of fascism, and also directly led to Hitler being invited to join the government.

Some people -- including me when I was younger, and a lot of my friends and comrades then and now -- have a different take on that history, or for whatever other set of reasons they believe the tactic of deplatforming fascists wherever they're trying to hold an event, including by physically attacking them, is the way we're going to keep the rise of fascism at bay.  I would say now that they hold this belief despite all the evidence to the contrary.  They would say we're just not trying hard enough.

One of the problems with the "attack the fascists whenever you see one" tactic, aside from it tending to backfire and cause the opposite of the results intended, is that it's also perfectly designed for manipulation by ill-intentioned forces, such as Cointelpro operatives on a mission to misdirect and debilitate networks and organizations they're assigned to disrupt.

The tendency to denounce everyone you don't like as being some kind of Nazi is not new.  Pretty much as soon as there was an organized antifascist movement, there were those within it pushing for wider definitions of what constitutes fascism.  

With the rise of the Anti-German tendency on the German left, as has been widely documented as well as experienced by me very directly, anyone who opposes Israeli policies is an antisemite, regardless of whether they're Jewish, survivors of the Nazi holocaust, or whatever else, it's totally irrelevant, when you apply the completely black-and-white analysis of this wildly sectarian and confused political tendency.

With the rise of the tendency represented by Shane Burley and his little following of true believers, anyone who disagrees with his particular antifascist doctrine is a heretic.  In my case, the "black line" I crossed was to believe that having public conversations with rightwingers is potentially a useful thing, for finding common ground, and understanding each other, and the ways we're being used by the powers-that-be in their efforts to divide and rule the population.

Seeking dialogue and believing in communication is the direct reason for my vilification by Mr. Burley, for this notion is heretical.

If Shane is an honest actor and genuinely believes that communication between the left and the right will somehow inevitably result in fascism -- rather than, as I believe, work towards preventing it -- then it follows that I'm a fascist, or as good as one.  

If I'm a fascist, according to Shane's analysis, I should be held accountable -- that is, vilified at every opportunity, prevented from playing gigs or appearing at events, lied about, and perhaps worse.  That he believes this in principle is abundantly in evidence from his antifascist writings.  That he believes it in reference to me specifically is abundantly in evidence from his record of essays and social media posts dedicated to yours truly.

In these times, the liberal media and the Democratic Party has use for people like Shane, and others who are, or who are at least pretending to be, researchers on the far right, and on the history of fascism.  Presumably, the far right researchers are not all intentionally trying to aid the electoral strategies of the Democratic Party -- though most of them probably believe that if they are inadvertently helping Democrats get elected, that's better than the alternative, which they, along with many Democrats, believe will likely be the end of democracy as we know it.

With self-proclaimed antifascists doing antifascist research and supposedly educating us all about the dangers of fascism getting prominent play within the liberal media ecosystem, the consequences of these self-appointed gatekeepers of antifascist thought deciding someone is actually a fascist or an antisemite -- "they're just pretending not to be, trust me, I'm an expert" -- can be devastating.

With the widespread embrace of what is inherently a sectarian approach that is fundamentally opposed to principles of freedom of expression and open discourse, society goes down a dangerous road.  What were fringe tactics embraced by antifascist militants are now being actively promoted by major liberal media networks and book publishers, because they hope the fear will get their candidates elected.

When these pundits, authors, professors, podcasters, etc. from the more paranoid, Anti-German/Rose City Antifa end of the antifascist camp decide to vastly expand their definitions of who is a fascist and what constitutes antisemitism, they'll get their message broadcast on NPR and I Heart Radio, literally.  And of course their message will be amplified by the conflict algorithms on major social media platforms -- which in some cases they will systematically seek to manipulate through that particular form of collective online action known as a troll farm.

Whose interests Shane and his political tendency are serving with their divisive accusations, calling everyone and their grandmother an antisemite, is a matter of open question.  But whether they believe in what they're doing or not, the most important thing is understanding how the sectarian, puritanical mindset they represent is so destructive and counter-productive, and completely McCarthyite in nature.