by Dr. Lissa Johnson
You Call It Torture; We Call It Upholding the US Constitution
[continued from 9-16-19] So how did the four states [the US, the UK, Sweden and Ecuador ] respond to this historic test [i.e., to step forward and protect Julian Asssange from further persecution or hold back and allow the attacks against him to continue]? How did they answer the charges that their governments, judiciaries and media have joined forces to psychologically torture a publisher for journalism? How did they square this with their stated commitment to human rights? What about democracy and rule of law?
They thumbed their noses.
Ecuador and the UK didn’t even bother to reply to the UN Rapporteur.
Human rights? What human rights? Talk to the hand.
The US and Sweden issued what appeared to be stock-standard perception-management sound-bytes, cut-and-pasted into document form.
As refutation to Nils Melzer’s concerns, both Sweden and the US opted to simply prime and exploit the same psychological vulnerabilities that have been primed and exploited throughout the long smear campaign against Julian Assange, and against victims of war crimes such as Namir and Saeed. Ultimately, their responses sought to turn reality on its head such that war crimes are virtuous, reporting war crimes is reprobate, truth is dangerous, censorship will set you free, and persecuting a publisher for journalism is “free speech”.
But what perception-management sound-bytes? What psychological vulnerabilities? Exploited how?
Paradoxically, when populations are confronted with ugly realities about their social and political worlds, such as corrupt elites rigging primaries, vainglorious celebrities who threaten and vilify minorities becoming president of the United States, civilian slaughter in illegal wars, and so-called democratic states torturing a publisher for journalism, it is the perfect time, psychologically, to glorify the status quo.
A robust program of psychological research indicates that many people are motivated to perceive the systems on which they depend as being right, good, fair and just, even in the face of powerful reasons not to, and even when suffering at the system’s hands. Psychologists call this tendency system justification.
A counterintuitive finding of system justification research is that flaws in a person’s social and political worlds typically exacerbate rather than quell system-justifying reactions. When presented with systemic failures such as corruption, injustice or abuse, many people are inclined to double down on the status quo and defend the system’s legitimacy, so as restore their sense of stability, security and wellbeing.
System-justifying reactions can include just-world beliefs, which entail victim-blaming and otherwise subconsciously distorting reality-perception to preserve the illusion that life is fair, along with all manner of other self-deceptive biases and blind spots that serve to rationalise the status quo.
Examples are double standards, moral justification, dogged patriotism and exceptionalism, or just plain mouthing empty, self-aggrandising platitudes.
All of which pervaded the replies to Professor Melzer from Sweden and the United States.
“firm commitment to freedom of expression, including for members of the media, consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the United States’ obligations under international human rights law”.
Without irony, this statement was issued in the same breath as defending the arbitrary detention and Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange for exercising his freedom of speech, in violation of international human rights law, two UN Working Group rulings, and the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The letter continued,
“U.S. law protects individuals in the U.S. justice system from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including through protections under the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
Tell that to Chelsea Manning and the scores of innocent people detained indefinitely without trial by US authorities, while being tortured, horrifically and mercilessly, as detailed here.
The Swedish letter waxed lyrical in a similar vein.
As Voltaire said,
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
In short, at this crossroads, our leaders have signalled their intention to ignore the warnings of the world’s designated authority on torture, operating under the mandate of the world’s designated authority on human rights. The states named as persecutors of Julian Assange have similarly made it clear that they intend to continue down the path of censorship-by-torture, with all the anti-democratic tyranny that that entails.
Which is to be expected, given that governments can only be relied upon to uphold human rights when their citizens demand it of them, as Human Rights 101, from the Science of Human Rights Coalition, cautions.
The question going forward from Nils Melzer’s final report, then, is not whether our governments will respond by upholding the principles of democracy, human rights and rule of law. The question is whether we, as citizens, will demand it of them.
If we fail to do this now, while we still can, it will be lights out for democracy and rule of law, as Hrafnsson, Hedges, numerous eminent speakers, leading authorities on human rights and international law, along with the leading political philosophers of our time, and history warn.
Which is why the psychology profession teaches that atrocity and collective violence, like human rights, live and die on bystanders. Just as human rights depend on active citizenship, so collective violence, such as torturing a publisher for journalism, depends on citizens standing quietly and idly by.
Accordingly, it is crucially important for perpetrators of atrocity, such as the UK, the US, Sweden and Ecuador, to ensure that publics are psychologically primed for compliant, passive bystanding to torture of publishers and war crimes.
But how is that achieved? How can populations be subdued?
Bystanding, Moral Disengagement and the Media
When states seek to get away with murder and other forms of state-sanctioned abuse, in addition to issuing empty system-justifying platitudes, perpetrators must incite what psychologists call moral disengagement.
Moral disengagement is a psychological process by which a specific event, such as torturing a publisher for journalism, is placed outside the boundaries of one’s usual morality. Most people, for instance, would find the notion of torturing a publisher for journalism wrong. Yet many are morally unperturbed as that very thing unfolds in real time.
Similarly, most people deem murder to be morally repugnant, yet are capable of placing the murder of a tender-eyed Iraqi photo-journalist outside that moral frame, letting not only the killers off the hook, but letting themselves off the moral hook to care.
But what causes people to morally disengage? How can otherwise good people, and kind people, look away?
Fortunately for state-sanctioned abusers, psychological literatures offer well-researched insights on how to incite people to morally disengage. Those literatures, of course, are intended as preventative offerings, by way of self-awareness and insight. They can, however, equally serve as instruction manuals.
According to psychological research, moral disengagement is stoked by dehumanising and demonising targets among other things. Which is where the establishment media comes in.
Along with perpetrators and bystanders, psychological understandings of atrocity and collective violence point to instigators as playing a critical role. Instigators are those who control the flow of information. In other words, those who control the media.
(IMAGE: Ash Kyd, Flickr)
Controlling the flow of information gives instigators the power not only to cover perpetrators’ tracks, but to dehumanise and blame the victims, thereby bringing bystanders passively into line. Controlling the flow of information in corporate-states, moreover, such as the US and the UK, means exerting state-corporate control of media. Which is precisely what has been taking place for decades.
Under the guise of a “free press” throughout the Western world, legacy media is now not only owned by a small handful of corporate interests, it relies on corporate advertising dollars, including from arms manufacturers, along with government money, and a military-intelligence-corporate-PR machine that funnels press releases through just three gatekeepers, to journalists who are too overworked and underpaid to investigate what they are fed.
In other words, a military-industrial-media empire feeds newsrooms their narratives, such that most news is “managed by governments, corporations, and PRP (public relations and propaganda) firms” writes Professor of Sociology and former director of Project Censored, Peter Phillips. Cut and paste-journalism, in which reporters recycle one another’s material, takes care of the rest.
There are, of course, exceptions. However, according to scholarly analyses, upwards of 80 per cent of mainstream news now fits this model.
In such an environment, persecuting states, such as those named by the UN Rapporteur on Torture, are perfectly poised to incite what psychologists call an atrocity generating situation. All that is required is to feed newsrooms narratives that normalise, sanitise, trivialise and rationalise atrocity, while dehumanising victims, thereby inciting publics to morally disengage. In this equation, what is omitted is just as important as what is woven in.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Four Corners program, for instance, recently showcased a range of such tactics in its two-part ‘investigation’ of Julian Assange. From overt and covert dehumanisation and demonising, to narratives woven from omitted facts, along with baseless and discredited claims asserted as gospel, it was a case study in inciting moral disengagement from collective violence. The program deployed all the psychological tricks in the book to recycle the very vilifying, manufactured media narratives that Nils Melzer has denounced as abusive, while posing as a balanced report.
But how did the program reconcile this with Professor Melzer’s damning findings, which had been available in summary form for 60 days at the time of broadcast? How did it fend off the obvious charge that the program embodied the very “fabrication and manipulation” Melzer described, in which “many media outlets and individual journalists have shown a remarkable lack of critical independence and have contributed significantly to spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives about Mr Assange”?
Simple. It didn’t. It didn’t even try.
Instead, the Four Corners program buried Nils Melzer’s report. Over an hour and a half of discussion of Julian Assange, not one mention was made of the fact that the world’s designated authority on torture has found the states at the centre of the Four Corners program responsible for mobbing, judicially harassing, defaming and psychologically torturing Julian Assange.
Not only is this complicit in the torture that Nils Melzer describes, both by inciting passive bystanding and perpetrating the psychologically abusive smears, it is complicit in the suppression of dissent, by suppressing the UN Rapporteur’s report. Suppressing dissent and political opposition, moreover, is the whole totalitarian point of persecuting Julian Assange.
If nothing else, the Four Corners program illustrates the establishment media’s contentment to follow their leaders down the anti-democratic path of censorship-by-torture, while taking us all along for the ride.
At this democratic crossroads, although establishment media have signalled their reluctance to support Espionage Act charges, in the knowledge they could be next, many nevertheless appear willing to act as instigators of torture, inciting publics to morally disengage, so that states can continue persecuting Julian Asssange.
Every act of ‘journalism’ that buries crucial information, and every utterance that vilifies or dehumanises Julian Assange, or sanitises his abuse, is complicit.
Nils Melzer warns,
“As you watch [Julian Assange] pay for the audacity of exposing corruption and crime, please ponder what this means for you, your country, and your family. Ponder deep and ponder hard, and then use your democratic rights to hold your Government to account. For once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, then your own rights may well be next in line.”
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Dr Lissa Johnson is a clinical psychologist in private practice. Prior to becoming a psychologist she qualified in Media Studies, with a major in Sociology. She has a longstanding interest in the psychology of social issues and the impact of social issues on psychology, and is a former member of the Australian Psychological Society Public Interest Advisory Group.
