The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'Nuclear strike in a city.'
The other night I went to an event with @amberjyang at the Hook and Ladder Theater called 'The Power of Personal Courage in an Era of Mass Censorship.' The featured speaker was a former British ambassador named Craig Murray. He mainly talked about Julian Assange, but also got into his experience as a diplomat in Uzbekistan, his leak of British state secrets to the Financial Times in 2004, and the current situation in Ukraine.
Murray was one of the first people to make public the industrial-scale torture that underpinned intelligence reports in the War on Terror. According to the Guardian, "Mr Murray complained that MI6 was using information passed on to it by the CIA originally obtained through torture in Uzbekistan." Apparently, the government of Uzbekistan was rounding up large numbers of people and torturing them until they admitted to being al-Qaeda operatives. These torture victims would also be forced to name others as al-Qaeda operatives.
Information obtained by torture is unreliable, yet the War on Terror was partly built on such information. After Murray exposed this madness, he said former colleagues told him that they all knew something was wrong, but they were all too afraid of the consequences of speaking up. For Murray, these consequences were social, professional, and legal. He talked about the smear campaign he endured related to his disclosures. Though he joked about it, Murray clutched a whiskey glass the whole time he spoke.
On Assange, Murray added detail to circumstances we're all familiar with. And he made a point that should be repeated more. When Murray leaked information to the Financial Times, no one in government even mentioned prosecuting the editor of the Financial Times for anything. News outlets have long published secrets when disclosure of the secrets is in the public interest. That's just what they do. If US attempts to prosecute Assange are successful, that would set a precedent that's terrifying for press freedom.
Murry's response to the question of why Assange hadn't already been extradited to the US was interesting. He theorized that there were two power factions within the US government at odds with other. On one side are establishment politicians trying to put off the extradition until after the election. On the other side is the intelligence establishment, which is still upset about Vault 7 and wants immediate extradition and trial.
Considering Ukraine, Murray theorized that the war would go on for a few years and then be ended by a peace accord which could have been reached before the conflict began. He also brought up nuclear fears. These fears echoed conversations I'd heard during the reception before the speaking started.
The event was attended largely by seasoned antiwar activists, all acutely aware of how awful the military-industrial complex is. I heard a few people mention the concern that the Ukraine war could go nuclear. And while I do agree that that would be very bad, I'm not convinced that that would be the literal end of the world that everybody fears. Dirty bombs or small nukes might be used without an apocalyptic escalation that would make the world uninhabitable.
In 1986, following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, prevailing winds threatened to bring radioactive fallout to Moscow. Instead of allowing this to happen, the Russian military seeded clouds to force the fallout to rain down on the countryside. Here's a quote from a Telegraph article about it:
Russian military pilots have described how they created rain clouds to protect Moscow from radioactive fallout after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Major Aleksei Grushin repeatedly took to the skies above Chernobyl and Belarus and used artillery shells filled with silver iodide to make rain clouds that would "wash out" radioactive particles drifting towards densely populated cities. More than 4,000 square miles of Belarus were sacrificed to save the Russian capital from the toxic radioactive material.
A nuclear disaster in Ukraine or Russia would be a profound tragedy. And there are probably some insane policymakers pushing us in that direction. But my greatest fear here is some splinter group of Ukrainian hardliners with tacit CIA support setting off a dirty bomb in Russian territory. More than ICBMs in silos, I fear the small groups of zealots that operate within every government and military. They work in the shadows, but their impact on events can be significant.
One area that the event didn't really get into was the question of what to do about the mass censorship. I thought about bringing up Hive and crypto but the crowd didn't seem quite right for that. The crypto conversation is better with small groups or one on one. And even then, not everyone accepts the premise that technical censorship resistance is more important than laws and corporate policies.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
Nice recap of the event we went to the other night! And I always respect your analysis of complicated political topics. I especially was taken by the Vault 7 Wikileak link you included.
Maybe a written piece for the WTK inspiration center might be a great place to start the dialogue about what to do about mass censorship, and the solutions that already exist :)
Thanks! A piece about the new mass censorship and what to do about it would be great. Let's make it happen: )
For real?
So Murray predicted that the war in Ukraine may go on for years
That's quite sad. Only God knows how much I hate war
War destroys
It is bad!
Hopefully Murray's prediction is wrong and the war ends sooner. But I fear he may be right.
I think just a few years is optimistic.