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[su_panel background=”#dcdfee” border=”2px solid #cccccc” radius=”7″]Editor’s Note: The label “Breitbart” connotes the worst aspects of the ascendant right in the US and the world today, including the rise in influence of modern Machiavellis like Steve Bannon, from whom little good can be expected, but today’s “progressives” as represented in mainstream liberalism —the extremists of the center—are no better, perhaps much worse in certain aspects, given their all enveloping complacent hypocrisy and sense of superiority, not to mention stubborn support for the global capitalist regime. That presents people of good will with a true Hobbesian choice, something that Americans have been long conditioned to accept as normal and inevitable, the choosing between two alternating evils. All of which has created a veritable Manichean dichotomy, and a huge fog of confusion, with the normal political categories losing their historical meaning and traditional cultural anchors. The bottom line is that these days we can find people making some sense on the “old right” —such as this author—as often as on the “liberal” front, probably more so, considering the liberal class’ complete moral implosion across the world, especially in the countries of the NATO bloc led by the American hegemon. One of the many downsides of this near universal toxification of political communication triggered by the betrayals of the liberal class, and particularly the disinformation regime that saturates the Anglo-American media, directly stemming from their shameless drift to the right, is that both sides, for their own reasons, now use terms normally associated with the malicious right, labels soaked in ignorance and a great deal of crudity for less than honest ends. In the “good old days” of Cold War anticommunism words like “tyrants,” “despots” and “dictators” were bandied about with abandon when applied to socialist/communist governments (they still are); while the “authoritarian” label, once used by reactionaries like Jeane Kirkpatrick to shield US sponsored tyrants like Guatemala’s genocidal Rios Montt from full opprobium, has been embraced by both sides of the great “liberal divide”. (1) The upshot is that in this new tower of Babel countries like Russia, China, Iran and, yes, even Venezuela, are cavalierly classified as “authoritarian”, meaning bad bad, but the denomination hides far more than it elucidates. Obviously, “authoritarian” is anything we wish it to mean, anything Westerners of any persuasion need to object to, no matter how misleading. It is, we think, in this context that Allum Bokhari, who is largely correct in what he says here, errs. While making an important and valid point, he reinforces a falsehood. For while China or Russia’s government, or Iran, can be perhaps defined as strong governments, they can also be defined as effective and in many important ways far more democratic governments (judging by results and procedure) than anything we see in the plutocrat-dominated unipolar imperialist West. We just wanted to make that clear. There are other things we find a bit off the rails in the author’s analysis, like more than just a whiff of islamophobia, hatred for Antifa, and so on, but that will necessitate a longer comment so we’ll leave that up to the reader to judge. Now, read on, McDuff. —PG [/su_panel]
OpEds
The only reason Assange is being targeted is that he tangled with the highest levels of the western establishment. He is far from alone.

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[bg_collapse view=”button-orange” color=”#4a4949″ expand_text=”Read about the Kirkpatrick Doctrine” collapse_text=”Show Less” ]
(1) The Kirkpatrick Doctrine was the doctrine expounded by United States Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrickin the early 1980s based on her 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards“.[1] The doctrine was used to justify the U.S. foreign policy of supporting Third World anti-communist dictatorships during the Cold War.[2]
Kirkpatrick claimed that states in the Soviet bloc and other Communist states were totalitarian regimes, while pro-Westerndictatorships were merely “authoritarian” ones. According to Kirkpatrick, totalitarian regimes were more stable and self-perpetuating than authoritarian regimes, and thus had a greater propensity to influence neighboring states.
The Kirkpatrick Doctrine was particularly influential during the administration of President Ronald Reagan. The Reagan administration gave varying degrees of support to several militaristic anti-Communist dictatorships, including those in Guatemala (to 1985), the Philippines (to 1986), and Argentina (to 1983), and armed the mujahideen in the Soviet–Afghan War, UNITA during the Angolan Civil War, and the Contras during the Nicaraguan Revolution as a means of toppling governments, or crushing revolutionary movements, in those countries that did not support the aims of the USA.[3]
Kirkpatrick’s tenet that totalitarian regimes are more stable than authoritarian regimes has come under criticism since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, particularly as Kirkpatrick predicted that the Soviet system would persist for decades.
According to Kirkpatrick, authoritarian regimes merely try to control and/or punish their subjects’ behaviors, while totalitarian regimes moved beyond that into attempting to control the thoughts of their subjects, using not only propaganda, but brainwashing, re-education, widespread domestic espionage, and mass political repression based on state ideology.
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[su_box title=”ABOUT THE AUTHOR” style=”bubbles” box_color=”#7978cc”] Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com. [/su_box]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License





5 comments
Can you provide some links for evidence that Russia kills its own journalists. Since learning about the unabashed crazy lying and Russia-bashing that’s going on with governments and the MSM, I’d like to see for myself that Russia kills journalists.
Putin Killed Michael Hastings and Gary Webb….oops..probably not Putin. Any time you see accusations made against Russia, they are probably things that are done by the PTB in the land of the free.
How about those Russian helicopter pilots that killed the Reuters reporters for carrying cameras in a war zone? And Putin overthrew the democratic government of Honduras making it the murder capital of the world for journalists.
The author has a strange idea that it is possible to have dissidents in a liberal democracy that have to flee for asylum because of dissenting from authority.
I also find it beyond cavalier that the author treats Julian Assange as if he is a Catch-22 curiosity rather than a super hero for uncovering government secrets that have no business being secret in a liberal democracy. The public at large and academic researchers owe their gratitude to Assange that they do not have to wait 75 years for the government to release documentation of its own criminal behavior.
In a liberal democracy the government would not keep secrets to protect itself.
Secret arrest warrants would not exist in a liberal democracy. Julian Assange should be able to walk out onto the streets of London without fear that the US has a secret warrant out for his arrest. Secret warrants only exist in a police state. Anyone that said he was being paranoid was either a secret agent trying to trap him into the spider’s web or a sadist.
Even an authoritarian government should have to obey international law. A liberal democracy would not flout it. Julian Assange was granted asylum in Ecuador which means under international law he is free to go there without being arrested by the UK and extradited to the US…that is called kidnapping.
BEAUTIFULLY PUT, DAVID PEAR. You summed up the situation perfectly. Obviously, you know and I know and we know (here at least) that the US acts like a rogue nation because it can get away with it, by its military muscle, a longstanding form of global blackmail, and by virtue of its whore media immunity from public reaction through complete obliteration of the truth. The old term brainwash applies 100% to the American situation.