“Orwell and Huxley were always arguing about who had the closest view of what dystopia might look like in the future,” said Waters, adding “I think we got a lot of both.”
“We have the ‘Big Brother’ Orwellian dystopian nightmare, it happened two days ago in that magistrate’s court,” he explained, referring to a UK judge’s decision on Monday to deny the WikiLeaks founder a delay in US extradition proceedings. Assange’s lawyers have argued that they need more time to prepare a defense, and some of Assange’s supporters have made the case that British law forbids extradition in the first place, if the charges can be seen as political.
“You only have to look out in the street and see the people, the walking dead going by… and taking absolutely no notice of the fact that this journalist is being murdered by our government,” Waters said, referring to the treatment of Assange in Belmarsh Prison, said by the UN to amount to torture.The world described by George Orwell in ‘1984’ was one of mass surveillance and paranoia, where anyone could be snatched off the street by the state and made disappear for ‘wrongthink’. In ‘Brave New World’ Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, described a future where mass entertainment and the easy availability of pleasure-giving drugs made dissent virtually impossible.
On this episode of Going Underground, legendary former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters discusses WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s latest extradition hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court and why it makes him ashamed to be English, why he believes the UK and US are attempting to kill Julian, why the extradition case shouldn’t even be happening and is a mockery of British justice, the mass protests in Chile against the neoliberal US-backed President Sebastián Piñera, and how the military crackdown is reminiscent of the Pinochet era. Finally, we speak to Priscillia Ludosky, one of the founders of France’s Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement on the French police’s use of flash-ball riot control guns against protesters, the massive amount of injuries recorded among the protesters, the European Commission’s role in fomenting the anger in France, and more!
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The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)
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