Swedish Victims Unit
The other deliberately deceptive diversion, an especially alluring bait for liberals, is the infamous Swedish case. This is being resurrected in an oddly pernicious way in the UK, where the battle over what happens to Julian Assange and any possible independent media is being decided. There, a multi-party coterie of MPs and peers is leading a campaign, with an open letter to the present and shadow Home Secretaries, urging them to do everything you can "to ensure" that Assange be extradited to Sweden, "in the event Sweden makes an extradition request." This campaign has been a great success, and "extradition to Sweden" has become the main theme and demand of the British liberal commentariat regarding the Assange case.
It might strike one as a little odd that there should be a furious political campaign to pressure the British government to honor an extradition request that has not been made. The signatories of the letter express no concern--"we make no assessment"--about whether the UK should honor the extradition demand that has been made and is actually in process, that of the United States. But the signatories definitely assess, in its absence, that the non-existent Swedish extradition request is valid, and that, just in case it appears, the UK government must pledge in advance to "give every assistance to Sweden" in honoring it.
Why? Well, clearly the letter writers stand in a different relation, and assume their audience stands in a different relation, to the issues involved in the actual U.S. versus the hypothetical Swedish extradition request. Thus, they feel comfortable flatly expressing no interest at all in the inevitable and terrible consequences that would result from honoring the U.S. extradition, while insisting, regarding the presumptive issue of a Swedish extradition, that "We must send a strong message of the priority the UK has in tackling sexual violence and the seriousness with which such allegations are viewed." On a 1-10 scale of what issues are worth assessing, Sweden's imagined interrogation of Assange for sexual allegations gets a 10, the US's actual drive to imprison Assange for revealing war crimes is set at a firm 0. It's a discourse in which the concerns about US extradition disappear.
To be clear, about what's being done behind the "sex-crime allegation" smoke, they explicitly do not oppose extradition to the US, and do not urge anyone to do so. They are trying to replace "no extradition to the US" in the public discourse with "extradition to Sweden"--which ends up meaning extradition to the US anyway. The purpose of this rhetorical rigmarole is, by getting everyone to think or do nothing about it, to surreptitiously but effectively support extradition to the U.S. It permits politicians and the public to support it by allowing it, while thinking/telling themselves they are supporting something else.
Let's not think and talk and do something about Julian Assange being extradited to and imprisoned in the United States, which is actually about to happen. That would require us to make a fight we really don't want to wage against our government, based on our professed free-speech, free-press principles that we really don't want to protect for a guy we've been trained come to loathe.
Let's instead think and talk and do something about the imaginary alternative of Assange being extradited and questioned in Sweden. That will confirm our virtuous seriousness about sexual-assault allegations and wash our hands of the stains that would come--and we are implicitly admitting we know would come--from delivering him into the hands of the U.S. government/Trump administration's prison system. Let Sweden do that! We make no assessment about it.
As Jonathan Cook demonstrates, the British Guardian-liberal commentariat is now firmly committed to promoting that diversionary discourse: "In other words, the public conversation in the U.K. is going to be about who has first dibs on Assange." So, the concern is not that Assange is facing rendition to the U.S. It is that the U.S. claim might 'overshadow' an outstanding legal case in Sweden."
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