Julian Assange and Wikileaks: How Responsible Are They for the ‘Satanic Elite Pedophiles’ Theme
by Bernie Najarian , Jul 5, 2018.
with assistance from Yalpaghan News Agency and many cups of NYC java.
UPDATED July 8 to acknowledge information recently leaked by Wikileaks insiders to reporter Emma Best (@NatSecGeek).
Perhaps the popularity of rightey-whitey heroes in today’s America, like President Trump, derives in part from the sad state many once-believed-in lefty heroes have gotten themselves into. Consider the Anonymous ‘hacker’ movement, once associated with anarchically liberating resources for the 99% (who now have less), but currently reduced to a zany masked movement of conspiracy theorists gibbering about the 13 Roman families of the Illuminati and the ominous horrors of jet trails.
Or, if that’s not quite familiar enough, consider Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. Originally approaching the classic Robin Hood stance of the noble outlaw, stealing state knowledge from avaricious spooks and giving it to the voters, Julian has now been downgraded to “senior leadership of a … non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors” – that is to say, a Putin shill – and is stuck living in the diplomatic equivalent of mom’s bedroom in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Edward Snowden has picked up the broadsword of information-liberation that Julian dropped on the field – but as a man dependent on Russia to keep him out of prison, he sure ain’t gonna be liberating any info written in the Cyrillic alphabet. For both men, the urge for transparency is directed much more toward the land that wants to imprison you than the one that feeds snitches polonium.
I often think of Julian in his bedroom/office/kitchen/country, up there at Flat 3b, 3 Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge, London SW1. What can he do there to free himself from the American apparatchiks who want to whisk him away to their beloved houses of legal bum-rape, and who seem to have convinced even the liberal women of Sweden to be triggered by his last gasp of Errol Flynn swagger?
I apologize for being so colorful about Julian Assange. I only wanted to describe his situation briefly, rather than recapping his biography, which is widely available. My three paragraphs of telegraphic irony bring us up the the topic I’d like to get serious about: Assange’s seldom-mentioned decades-long involvement with the topic of pedophilia, and his apparent use of this theme as revenge or as a faint hope that might engineer a prison break for himself. Assange, it’s little known, has a long history of relying on anti-pedophile vigilantism to bail himself out of trouble.
Starting as a 16-year-old using the codename ‘Mendax’ (a Latin word related to the English mendacious, meaning, given to lying), Assange developed a vivid teen hobby of breaking into state computer systems. He especially liked the challenge of high-level US systems like those of the Pentagon’s 8th Command Group and NASA. By the time an Australian Nortel Telecommunications administrator detected him in 1991 and sent the Australian Federal Police to his door, he was married, with a son. Under pressure to cooperate with police and reduce his potential prison sentence, he assisted in two investigations in 1993 of child pornography trading networks on the internet. He was not paid for the work, but rather, did it voluntarily. Ultimately, in 1996, his conviction on 25 counts of various cybercrimes resulted only in a demand to pay reparations of AUD $2,100. Rather than being imprisoned, Assange was released on a good behavior bond (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/julian-assange-i-am-ndash-like-all-hackers-ndash-a-little-bit-autistic-2358654.html; https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/assange-helped-our-police-catch-child-pornographers-20110211-1aqnl.html).
Although Assange then went on to various interests in online security and in the preservation of communications freedom and privacy, his 1993 porn-tracking exculpation surely sensitized him to the market value of pedophile-revulsion as an item of interest to state agencies.
One of the first documents ever published by Wikileaks, the famous leaks publication site that Assange kicked off in late 2006, was a list of symbols used by pedophiles on their legal but barely tolerated discussion websites (There were also separate illegal discussion websites, mostly on the dark web after 2004, but these were not of an activist nature and were not big on the use of activists’ rallying symbols). This illustrated list (https://wikileaks.org/wiki/FBI_pedophile_symbols) had been produced and briefly posted by the American FBI police service, but had been taken down from their websites. Assange and Wikileaks didn’t indicate why they found this information important enough to re-post. In retrospect, one wonders if they were suggesting that someone in high places might be trying to protect pedophiles by having the FBI remove the information. In the meantime, the symbols were hardly secret: the “boylover” blue spiral triangle, for example, was on the masthead of boychat.org, the completely open legal discussion board for people attracted to male minors. In the era before heavy ‘family’ web censorship, it was readily seen by anyone using ‘pedophile’ as a web search term.
Conspiracy theorists, who were fans of Wikileaks from the beginning, have had a field day finding these graphically simple symbols in products and logos ever since.
In 2010, Assange and Wikileaks engaged a new team member who would go on to be famous for interest in pedophile affairs: Heather Marsh.
Marsh was tasked with creating a news service called Wikileaks Central whose mission was to make the site’s leaks less vulnerable to interest-laden spin applied by commercial news agencies. Her first tweet ever, on 21 Aug, 2010, said “The spook media is dictating the debate @wikileaks. Let's start discussing the leak content.”
Here I must digress. When I say, “her first tweet ever,” I mean ‘her first tweet under the name Heather Marsh.’ Perhaps I simply don’t move in the right circles, but in five years of searching, I’ve never been able to convince myself that Heather Marsh is a confirmed real name. Her Wikipedia biography is an unorthodox hagiography giving no details about her origin or personal life. Until 2016, no photograph of her existed on the internet; she used a vague, black-and-white silhouette in all web postings. A spate of YouTube videos reproducing her speeches used only this static black-and-white image as visual content (http://heathermarsh.net/). Finally, a sidelong portrait photo was released in 2016 purporting to show her at a conference in Cuba; this now appears ubiquitously as her image. A video from that conference clearly showed her giving a talk, while the audio track simultaneously played a different talk in her recognizable voice. This was ostensibly because the talk shown included a Spanish translator, which might have been distracting – but, whatever was intended, the result was a very odd video disconnecting the person from the voice (
(Interestingly, Googling on ‘stigmergy,’ one of her favorite terms from her blogs https://georgiebc.wordpress.com and https://medium.com/@HeatherMarsh, immediately yields another British Columbian, researcher Leslie Marsh (pronoun: he) from the University of British Columbia Dept. of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Leslie has a pencil sketch as his sole online image, is short on conventional biographical background information [though not devoid: http://www.evergreen.edu/magazine/2011fall/classnotes], and theorizes about spontaneous, anarchic social organizing that could replace presidents and kings, also Heather’s favorite topic by far. ‘Stigmergy,’ an idea based on the seemingly anarchic but complex organizing done by social insects, is a key concept in both their theoretical worlds. One speculates there may be a personal connection there.)
Heather Marsh, while tweeting on behalf of Wikileaks Central, soon became engaged with the Anonymous movement, which provided a living laboratory for her theories about non-hierarchical societies. The Anons in turn provided a natural audience for her dry, Bakuninist-Maoist blog pieces about the anarchic ways of organizing hierarchies out of our lives. The implicit authoritarianism in these communications between Marsh as guru theorist and Anonymous as aggressive, but anarchic enforcers caused my sometime collaborator Kamil Beylant to brand the whole enterprise as ‘Anonymal Farm.’ That discussion, however, came well after Marsh’s initial collaboration with the Anons, which was an operation called #TwitterPedoRing. Twitter, as an unvetted, user-controlled image host, was very susceptible to having fly-by-night accounts posting child pornographic images; networks of hundreds of such posters could grow almost overnight. The #TwitterPedoRing op, first seen in Marsh’s Twitter content in mid-2012, was an attempt to report these posters to Twitter, as well as publicly identifying (‘d0xing’) and intimidating as many of them as possible. Marsh effectively became an Anonymous member while collaborating on these campaigns, though she did not take up the Fawkes mask or other group visual symbolism.
Marsh also undertook three other causes-célèbres that crossed her path as a Wikileaks newsperson. She became an avid advocate for Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who’d been apprehended at age 15 while fighting with Taliban forces in Afghanistan, and imprisoned indefinitely in the US’s Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba (https://wlcentral.org/node/1781). She also undertook the cause of Rohingya Muslims, who were being ethnically cleansed from parts of Myanmar/Burma in a campaign that, at that time, was receiving negligible attention in the world press. Finally, and most influentially in terms of subsequent events, she began campaigning against Ali Bongo, the filthy-rich, corrupt dictator of Gabon, the oil-producing African nation on the southeast side of the Gulf of Guinea. Bongo had caught her attention as a rumored practitioner or sponsor of ritual child sacrifices (http://gabonenervant.blogspot.com/2012/04/who-could-think-that-ali-bongo-is.html, https://www.bbc.com/afrique/region/2013/05/130511_gabon_demo_crimes_rituels.shtml, http://gabonlibre-freegabon.blogspot.com/2015/03/complaint-to-icc-for-ritual-crimes.html).
Gabon had been troubled since the 1970s, according to hard-to-verify stories, by repeated findings of children’s corpses where internal organs had been removed in ways suggestive of (supposedly) traditional shamanic practices. One unverified story from the late 1970s held that the secretary of a close associate of Omar Bongo, Ali’s equally dictatorial father, had been caught by security forces with children’s body parts in the trunk of her car. She was let go, according to the story, and the incident was hushed up. Bongo, despite having converted to Islam during an earlier trip to Libya, was suspected of using power-building shamanism, based on consumption of sacrificed child organs, as part of his obsessive quest for complete domination of his country. Citizens of this somewhat North-Korea-like family monarchy, passed on to son Ali shortly after Omar’s death, risked their lives in May 2013 by holding a demonstration in Libreville, the capital, protesting the dictatorship’s participation in ritual crimes.
To Marsh’s anarchist perspective, the juxtaposition of a power-hungry ruler and the eating of the vulnerable must have been tantalizing. Marsh, as an ideologue, had never been afraid to cobble new Orwellian concepts together. For example, in June 2012, in the midst of the #TwitterPedoRing campaign, she had decided that she disapproved of the Greek ‘phile’ word root, meaning ‘love,’ in 19th-century psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s coinage, ‘paedophile.’ She picked up a portmanteau word that had previously been used only a couple of times on Twitter, and stated “Pedosadists is the correct term, not pedophiles.” She reasoned that as all indwelling attraction to minors involved conceiving of sex with minors (not necessarily true, but she has no training in psychology), and since that must be harmful if enacted, all attraction to minors was therefore a fixed attempt to do harm, and could universally be called ‘sadism.’ The contrasting simple reality, which is that most pedophiles experience exactly the same impulses around sexual love that heterosexuals and gays do, but cannot realistically initiate reciprocal relationships, was to be set aside; the concept of minor-attraction had to be re-spun with terminology grafting prior ill intent onto all these unfulfillable amorous impulses. The “New Orwellian Dictionary” in Marsh’s wordpress blog (https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/category/new-orwellian-dictionary-nod/) spins the word ‘pedophile’ as “Establishment approved name for those who rape, torture, abduct, blackmail and sometimes murder and dismember children.” Of course, focusing purely on similar criminal acts, heterosexuals could equally be defined as ‘heterosadists,’ but confirmation bias was not one of Marsh’s ideological concerns.
In Nov., 2014, the lunar spin cycles all came together for Marsh. That month, an upstart news agency in Britain, Exaro News, publicized allegations, mostly arising from an informant named ‘Nick’ (known in his abundant online material as ‘Carl Survivor’), that up to 17 young boys might have been murdered by members of what was then called the “Westminster Paedophile Ring.” (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2842201/Notorious-paedophile-gang-covered-17-child-murders-linked-VIP-guest-house.html#ixzz3KCeRFBtn). The Westminster Paedophile Ring scandal had been perking along since October 2012, when Labour MP Tom Watson had told the House of Commons that he had evidence that there was a "powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and (the prime ministerial residence) Number 10." Over the next five years, these claims were all slowly but surely shown to be baseless, and ‘Nick/Carl’ was revealed as a flamboyant fabricator (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2173222/stepbrother-of-vip-paedo-fantasist-nick-reveals-serial-liar-has-torn-apart-their-family-with-constant-probing-from-police/). In Nov., 2014, though, the idea that top UK politicians in the 1980s could have been conspiring to rape and murder boys was one of the hottest news items in the world. Marsh on Nov. 21, 2014, tweeted about a trinket auctioned off by the estate of Jimmy Savile, whose ‘worst pedophile ever’ scandal was in full swing – the item was a glass eyeball held in a filigreed silver frame – saying “tell me the difference between this and other ritual killings” (https://twitter.com/GeorgieBC/status/535794833504628737). The Daily Mail had published an insensate story in June, 2014 showing the jocular ornament along with a photo captioned “Sick: New evidence revealed that Savile abused the dead and stole their glass eyes and turned them into rings like these (pictured on his left hand). His victims were aged between five and 75” (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2672395/Glass-eye-stolen-corpse-Savile-necklace-sold-charity-auction-75-wore-final-Top-Pops-groped-child.html). In reality, a former girlfriend of Savile’s emailed blogger ‘Anna Raccoon’ (the late Susanne Cameron-Blackie) to say she remembered Savile buying the item from a stall in London’s artsy-crafty-trashy Kensington neighborhood (https://annaraccoon.com/2014/06/27/mortuary-mendacity-the-yewtree-allegations-continued/).
At this point, to Marsh, everything was as transparent as a crystal eyeball. It wasn’t just Bongo. The elitist rulers everywhere were getting together to do ritual murders with children as the victims, and many if not all of them were ‘pedosadists,’ innately driven to create sexual horrorshows. That explained their love of hierarchy and their resistance to her anarchistic ideals – anarchy would mean no more privilege, no more secrecy for their child-rape-and-murder orgies. The causality behind the paradox of pushy elected governments had been decloaked. She went on the Anonymous warpath. Spinning these ghastardly pedosadist elites as “deatheaters,” after the e-vil followers of Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, she proclaimed her first Anonymous operation, #OpDeathEaters. “Lift the pedosadist/trafficking networks and the entire global oligarchy will be in the net,” she trumpeted on Nov. 21, 2014. Her inauguration of #OpDeathEaters had appeared the previous day as an explicit call to witch-hunting lynch mob action: “Global torch and pitchfork time #Deatheaters #CSAinquiry #ElmGuestHouse #DolphinSquare (the last two are addresses associated with the later-debunked Westminster scandal) … (new tweet) #OpDeathEaters.” She went on to call for the instituting of international peoples’ courts, Maoist-style, to haul up the elite members of the western world and try them for their pedosadist excesses. Several dozen members of Anonymous pitched in and began tweeting at high volume about their plans to bring the world’s rulers to their own anarchist tribunal. Almost immediately, a legion of conspiracy theorists and fundamentalist Christian Satan-finders from the U.K., the U.S., and elsewhere staked out their places in the #OpDeathEaters tweet-storm. Some ISIS accounts also bought into the idea, illustrative as it was of the degeneracy of the kaffirs.
Marsh had resigned from her official position at Wikileaks Central in March, 2012, but was still in communication with Assange, including an unexplained ‘emergency’ chat request from Marsh to Wikileaks that appeared in tweets on 19 May 2014 (above). Assange didn’t get involved in Marsh’s pedophile ventures, but had his own brush with pedophile conspiracy theory in Oct. 2012 when he posted an email quoting conspiracy theorist Tom Flocco as part of his upload of documents from the intelligence consulting company Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor). Assange was particularly interested in Stratfor because it was helping US government agencies to prepare an indictment against him for violations of the Espionage Act in publishing Iraq War documents leaked by U.S. Army private Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning. Tom Flocco, who was most active in the mid-2000s, appeared to be a great source of material damaging to the U.S. government. He had invented a fictional government insider called Thomas Heneghan, the parallel of today’s mystery rumor-dispenser #QAnon. Heneghan had ‘informed’ him, in 2006, that unreported “grand jury testimony … (revealed) that male and female heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, bisexual and child prostitutes provided sexual services to numerous congressmen, senators, national media hosts and other federal officials who were compromised and made susceptible to blackmail at three Washington hotels,” and that the entire prosecution had been suppressed by the Bush administration (https://voat.co/v/pizzagate/1726015). An email from Flocco sent on Mar. 27, 2007, to “undisclosed recipients,” clearly including someone with links to Stratfor, said “According to U.S. intelligence sources, President Bush obstructed justice last December when he had senior advisor Karl Rove and White House Counsel Harriet Miers instruct Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to fire eight U.S. attorneys who were among several others conducting ongoing public corruption and secret national security grand jury investigations connected to an espionage-linked prostitution / pedophile sex ring operating at the Washington Ritz-Carlton and other DC hotels…” Wikileaks’ posting of this email in its Stratfor file dump (https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/47/475107_agents-bush-firings-obstructed-sex-spy-probe-.html) gave it credibility with a new generation of conspiracy theorists, who had no way to know that Flocco’s ‘government insider’ Heneghan had also disclosed many other ludicrously false stories, such as a 2002 death for Osama bin Laden from kidney failure.
One of Julian Assange’s greatest points of pride is that nothing on Wikileaks has been discredited as fake. The leaks are all genuine documents. In this case, however, Assange had leaked a genuine document containing a fake story, and that clearly didn’t cross the line for him. Given his legal troubles with the U.S. government, the idea of tarring his foe with a pedophile scandal, reminiscent of the Franklin scandal of the late 1980s, may have seemed attractive. Or perhaps he didn’t notice.
He did, however, notice the Westminster scandal, though his first mention of it used it as an ironic counterpoint to a beef about ‘special renditions’ (government kidnappings) of deemed enemy agents. On Nov. 30, 2014, just when #OpDeathEaters was building up steam, the official Wikileaks account tweeted “Welcome to UK. A pedophile ring at the centre of power gagging media (- link to story in scandal tabloid Daily Star -) & spies bugging lawyers” (a reference to a quoted tweet saying “British spies ‘bugged Scotland Yard’ over renditions complicity” – with link to another news story) (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/539072466514362368). Suddenly, the ultra-factual Wikileaks official account – thus Assange himself – had sanctioned the notion that the UK had “a pedophile ring at the centre of power.” Later, on Mar. 9, 2015, Wikileaks made its support of the elite pedophile scenario official by tweeting, over a link to a dailybeast.com story, “How the UK used its secret police to cover up allegations of an elite child murdering pedophile ring (really)” (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/575074678689169409). There was also a spate of Wikileaks tweets on Feb. 5, 2015, about “UK establishment so riddled with pedophiles that probe had to go to New Zealand to find an untainted judge after 2 aborts.” This referred to the appointment of New Zealand High Court judge Dame Lowell Goddard, who had no ties to the UK establishment, in a desperate third attempt to find a chair for the government’s “Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).” It was difficult for the government to find a chair within the UK who wouldn’t be considered compromised by relationships with people in power. Goddard, in any case, resigned on 4 Aug. 2016 from the fractious inquiry, now known to have been salted with purported abuse victims who were later described in the press as fantasist fabricators, as well as purveyors of discredited, hypnosis-like recovered-memory techniques of eliciting abuse ‘recall.’ It was hard to discern if any genuine abuse sufferers could be heard among the clamor of unabused, pathological attention-seekers.
Classic elements of conspiracy theories had entered into both Marsh’s and Assange’s portrayals of their governmental child abuse ideas. Back in March, 2013, Marsh had taken pains to expose Ali Bongo’s position as designated Grand Master of the principal Masonic Lodge of Gabon. Masons, for centuries, have been second only to Jews as traditional conspiracy-theory targets in Europe. On May 26, 2015, the Wikileaks account cited a Daily Express story and tweeted “Only in glorious England can this headline be true: Paedophile Freemason ran GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters – BN) Masonic Lodge (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/603361602327445505).” In fact, royal clockwork artisan Keith Harding, who served as Grand Master of a lodge in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, that had members from the communications spy bureau GCHQ, had been convicted of sexual offenses against children decades earlier, and was on the membership list of the now long-defunct libertarian pedophile activist organization called Paedophile Information Exchange (http://www.digitalnewsnetwork.net/2017/03/22/britains-top-spy-station-links-to-bbc-jimmy-savile-case/). Assange’s implication that this signaled a Masonic elite pedophile conspiracy in the UK, however, wasn’t borne out by any facts known at the time or discovered later.
Assange even dipped queasily into Rothschild-paranoia, the wading pool at the edge of outright antisemitism for thousands of tweeters, in a set of 16th and 17th March, 2016, Wikileaks tweets about Hillary Clinton’s support from her ‘adoring pal’ (phrase from a leaked email), Lynn Forester de Rothschild, part-owner of the magazine Economist. The magazine had brazenly suggested that a man called Donald Trump, still just one of many possible Republican presidential candidates, represented a top-10 electoral threat to Clinton. This set of tweets didn’t suggest an elite pedophile link, but it was soon to come, as a 3 Nov., 2016 Wikileaks tweet connected Clinton to “child stealer Laura Silsby” (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/794247777756860417). Silsby was caught by Haitian authorities during the nation’s post-earthquake recovery, taking orphans and parentally-released children across the Dominican border without official permits. She was attempting to supply adoptees to a Baptist church organization based in Meridian, Idaho (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249280/Haiti-earthquake-Missionaries-led-Laura-Silsby-accused-stealing-orphans.html). In the heat of the fake-news-laden 2016 election campaign, however, the urge to spin that she had been abducting kids for the purposes of ‘elite pedophilia’ was irresistible. Clinton, who flew to Haiti and intervened to get Silsby released from prison and the country, was thus tarred as an accessory to pedo-ghoul child abduction, and the charitable Idaho Christians were omitted from the story. The always-factual Assange did nothing to correct any wrong impression that might have been given by his “child-stealer” tweet.
The stage was now set for the pièce de résistance.
Nov. 4, 2016, was the day Assange arguably set his own version of #OpDeathEaters into motion. He had released pilfered emails from the gmail account of Democratic party organizer and fundraiser John Podesta, and among them was a dinner invitation from a flamboyant New York performance artist, Marina Abramović. Actually, the invitation was to his brother, lobbyist Tony Podesta, but Tony told John that Maria hoped he and his wife Mary could come (“Are you in NYC Thursday July 9? Marina wants you to come to dinner. Mary?”). The invitation said “Dear Tony, I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina” (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15893). It was never clarified whether John attended or not.
In later interviews after this email became well known, Abramović insisted this was merely an invitation to an ordinary meal, even if she’d jokingly named the event after one of her performance art exhibitions.
To thousands of political busy-beavers eager to defeat Hillary Clinton, the phrase ‘spirit cooking,’ in combination with a gathering including a Democratic politician, was enough to suggest ritual murder. When they saw photos and videos of the art exhibit – described below – they were completely convinced, or at least, they made out that they were.
Assange, via the Wikileaks account, was at the forefront of this spin perception. “Tony Podesta. By day, mild mannered Foreign Agent for Saudi Arabia. By night, Spirit Cooker,” he tweeted on Nov. 4. (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/794455959133298688) The tweet, which got over 8,000 retweets, included a link to a video of an Abramović art exhibition in Italy (
[blockquote]
Abramović, 69, sometimes called ‘the grandmother of performance art,’ had a long history of gallery exhibits where she played with morbidity and mortality, doing things like jumping through a burning star sculpture (passing out from lack of oxygen en route) and laying around a gallery all day surrounded by sadomasochistic instruments, inviting gallery-goers to prod or smack her as they wished (there were a few takers). As for Spirit Cooking, her Wikipedia says (links removed):
[inset blockquote]
Abramović worked with Jacob Samuel to produce a cookbook of "aphrodisiac recipes" called Spirit Cooking in 1996. These "recipes" were meant to be "evocative instructions for actions or for thoughts." For example, one of the recipes calls for "13,000 grams of jealousy," while another says to "mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk." The work was inspired by the popular belief that ghosts feed off intangible things like light, sound, and emotions.
In 1997, Abramović created a multimedia Spirit Cooking installation. This was originally installed in the Zerynthia Associazione per l'Arte Contemporanea in Rome, Italy and included white gallery walls with "enigmatically violent recipe instructions" painted in pig's blood. According to Alexxa Gotthardt, the work is "a comment on humanity's reliance on ritual to organize and legitimize our lives and contain our bodies."
[inset /blockquote]
You can shock yourself to the core by seeing Marina online, spreading pig’s blood and liver bits around in a white room at the Zerynthia exhibit: https://vid.me/EPlE [no longer there; use
Marina comments in the Zerynthia video, after outlining the room in copious blood and pouring it over some figurines in the corners:
[inset blockquote]
This is the thing, the smell is stronger now. (She reads out one of the wall inscriptions) “With a sharp knife, cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand. Eat the pain.” There are four objects, four statements. That’s it completely, it’s really fantastic. It’s really like – alchemia.”
[inset /blockquote]
A statement of art materials then appears with “Four wax sculptures, gauze, mineral, pig’s blood and Dragon’s Head video projection” (the last showing an ancient Egyptian-hatted Marina with a python snaking slowly over her head).
Abramović, who is Serbian, deliberately plays with Serbian pre-Christian folk magic in her art. The website ‘dangerousminds.net’ has a piece on her saying, “In Marina Abramović‘s ‘Balkan Erotic Epic,’ the ‘grandmother of performance art’ beats Matthew Barney at his own game. In the piece, Abramović explores pagan Serbian fertility rituals and the use of sex magick to affect everyday life. One example is how a woman would keep a fish tucked into her vagina overnight and then make a powder of it to add to her man’s coffee. After he drinks it, he will never stray… or at least that’s the idea.”
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/sex_magick_marina_abramovics_balkan_erotic_epic_nsfw
American Christian fundamentalists have become somewhat diplomatic in recent times about attributing Satanism to native North American rituals, and a few fundamentalist-Christianized or Mormonized natives even combine shamanism practices and Christianity. Even so, when right-wing Protestants see ancient European shamanism or its updated spin-offs popping up, they are completely unrestrained about calling it Satan-worship. That’s even though the pagan rituals are often conducted by feminists, who detest the concept of Satan as an emblem of rampant male dominance.
[/blockquote]
Assange followed up with a second tweet, deliberately conflating the art installation with the dinner invitation: “The Podestas' "Spirit Cooking" dinner? It's not what you think. It's blood, sperm and breastmilk. But mostly blood (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/794450623404113920).” The tweet included a link to a vivid wearechange.org article describing Marina’s exhibit and concluding, “Hillary Clinton’s inner circle keeps getting stranger and stranger, but at this point, we really just want to know what Podesta had for dinner.” (https://wearechange.org/spirit-cooking-disturbing-podesta-email-yet-warning-graphic-content/; author, far-rightist Cassandra Fairbanks.)
Nothing in Abramović’s art bore the slightest relation to pedophilia or sexual exploitation of children. By now, however, as in previous social frissons where Jews were widely held to be sacrificing Christian babies, popular cultural patterns of dread irresistibly presumed that the sacrifice of children was associated with such visceral, ritualistic heterodoxies.
On Nov. 3 and 4, 2016, after the release of the batch of Podesta emails that had the dinner invitation in it, hundreds of internetters were working through the night to find any trace of dirt that could be used in the campaign against the Democrats. It wasn’t immediately clear if Assange was merely surfing on the wave and commenting on some of the findings, or if he was actively contributing to the surge. A query to another tweeter, however, made it clear that he was very much taking active part. He had noticed a now-suspended tweeter called @PaulTown_ quoting Abramović on the boundary between her art and ‘magick,’ and tweeted him to ask what the source was (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/794470889664483328). Another account, @blackseraphim2, provided a Reddit link. Assange’s query alone was retweeted over 200 times. This gave key publicity to the idea that occultish practices lay behind Abramović’s art. As one tweeter comments in response to the query, “Wikileaks is in tactical nuclear bomb mode.”
I’ve also written up the details of the Reddit discussion previously (https://justpaste.it/18t8f):
[blockquote]
Marina inadvertently helped the idea that her art was disturbing with a statement on reddit in response to a questioner asking “What place do you see the occult as having in contemporary art? Can magick be made (not simply appropriated / performed)?
She responded “Everything depends on which context you are doing what you are doing. If you are doing the occult magic in the context of art or a gallery, then it is the art. If you are doing it in a different context, in spiritual circles or private house or on TV shows, it is not art. The intention, the context for what is made, and where it is made defines what art is or not.”
Most of us from the modernist-ironic side of life have read a lot curatorial notes and artist quotes with this sort of commentary. The conclusion I and many friends have drawn is that they mostly illustrate that it’s a dubious idea to try to explain or define art in writing. Marina’s ‘spirit cooking’ is loosely based on some folk magic attributed to the Romanian diaspora community in Serbia, but she’s clearly practicing and making her name as an artist – no magical deeds have been attributed to her. MartyLeeds33 (a tweeter – BN) thinks Marina’s statement shows that she goes all-out into the occult when she’s doing a house party, the sort of showing she did for Tony Podesta. This leaves unexplained why a televised presentation, stated by Marina not to be ‘art,’ would be more séance-like than a public art gallery performance. I think Marina has actually diplomatically sidestepped the ‘magick’ person’s question and commented that her art was ‘art’ per se when it was contained in a context usually labelled art, but was something less formal when found outside of recognized art precincts, such as in a house or on television. Certainly, there’s no indication that anyone has attempted to invoke the satanic forces by showing Marina’s oeuvre on T.V.
Symbolizing nitty-gritty mortal reality with blood, in any case, is one of the most prominent artistic tropes of the late 20th century and the current day. In parallel, the attempt by post-feminists to supplant Christian rituals with neo-pagan symbolisms like healing crystals and solstice gatherings has also been a prominent running theme. Actual invocations of malevolent forces in such endeavors tend to be just as forbidden as they are in Christianity; these forces represent domination and power, which in turn represent male evil. Satan is the epitome of the male rapist woman-batterer. He has no devotees in this feminist-influenced blood-and-chanting milieu. Still less is there any affinity for the ultimate feminist symbol of abusive male power, the sexual exploitation of children.
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Assange isn’t known to be religious, and his fishing for occult links that could be highlighted by his celebrity attention was surely tactical. By the next day, Nov. 5, this was happening:
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(https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5bat1b/john_podesta_irrefutably_practices_satanic/),
SPREAD THIS TO YOUR LOCAL CHURCHES FOR SUNDAY: John Podesta irrefutably practices satanic rituals.
John Podesta is Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign manager and irrefutably practices satanic rituals. He is the recent point of interest in the latest Wikileaks emails released to the public.
[/blockquote]
In the busy days between Nov. 3 and Nov. 6, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, an all-American version of #OpDeathEaters, was energetically cobbled together by dozens of speculators and spin doctors inspired to find Satanic elements in everything said to and by John Podesta. Assange ostensibly had nothing to do with the child sex element, which mainly arose when habitués of the wild and often crazy 4chan website found several references to pizza in Podesta emails. This immediately made them think of their website’s own indigenous code term, ‘cheese pizza,’ as a euphemism for ‘cp,’ that is, child pornography (https://justpaste.it/18t8f). The Trump-supporting 4channers, redditors, facebookers and tweeters, often referred to by opponents as ‘trolls,’ served the same purpose for Assange as the Anonymous members were serving for Marsh in her now faltering #OpDeathEaters campaign (The #Op continues as a minor stream of conspiracy agitation to this day, but Marsh bailed from it and tweeted her last tweet on 9 Dec., 2015).
It is an interesting question, and one that may not seriously have been asked before, whether Assange had more to do with the composition of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory than meets the Twitter-reading eye. With his reputation being founded in the authenticity of each and every leaked message, he had little room to maneuver on his official Wikileaks and JulianAssange accounts with information that could help push an explosive fake-news story along. Pulling a few strands of blood and occultism together from existing sources was about as far as he could go. On the other hand, he had access to the Podesta mails well before they were published, and plenty of time on his hands, as well as, one speculates, a number of confidential collaborators. Could there be a parallel in his workings with those of criminal enterprises, where Wikileaks would show up as the ‘legitimate business’ front, while a scurrying warren of anonymous 4chan and Reddit trolls would show up as the organization’s real, clandestine business? Perhaps Marsh may win a point if the multi-part complexity of the Pizzagate caper (fake ‘pedophile food code,’ targeting of Comet Pizza and James Alefantis, horror at Tony Podesta’s taste in post-feminist art, etc.) all came together as a stigmergic three-day project in the troll hive – even if the anarcho-utopian result was an ant-hill of slanderous nonsense. On the other hand, at least some of it could have been prepared in advance and tactically unfolded, anonymously, on the teeming websites. Assange certainly showed cynicism by linking occultic horror directly to a dinner invitation with an artist, but whether he was cynical enough to organize a lot more Pizzagatery under names other than that of his flagship remains unknown.
It’s also unknown whether ‘state actors,’ like the Russian disinformation and bot farms that were later shown to be effusively active in Pizzagate propagandizing, could have been working directly with this highly influential loaner of legitimacy (https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevincollier/twitter-was-warned-repeatedly-about-this-fake-account-run). The best known account exposed as a Russian disinformation fake, @ten_gop, which simulated being a Tennessee Republican representative, was both an avid Pizzagate touter and an enthusiastic peruser of Wikileaks email leaks.
What is not in doubt is that Assange made at least one effort to keep Pizzagate alive. Conscientious websites cracked down on the tom-foolery after gunman Edgar Maddison Welch was apprehended in his Dec. 4, 2016, attempt to find kidnapped children on the premises of Comet Pizza. On 18 Jan., 2017, however, Wikileaks acted out against the shut-down and tweeted “CBS Reality Check covers Pizzagate,” linking to video on the Facebook page of newscaster Ben Swann (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/821595404500430848).
Swann’s place in the story is as I described in a previous article (https://justpaste.it/1eap0)
[blockquote]
Ben Swann was a presenter for the Russian-operated RT America news network who moved in Jun 2015 to being lead evening news anchor for CBS affiliate WGCL-TV in Atlanta, Georgia. He often dabbled in conspiracy theories in his independent program, ‘Reality Check,’ and, among other things, had speculated that the Sandy Hook mass school shooting involved two shooters, not just the disturbed Adam Lanza who was ascertained by law enforcement as the culprit. On Jan. 17, 2017, he produced a ‘Reality Check’ episode suggesting that earlier news reports dismissing Pizzagate as a fake news story had missed some tantalizing indications, and that further investigation on the veracity of the ideas should be carried out. This was widely seen as unwarranted further harassment of the people falsely accused of sexual crimes by the original Pizzagate outburst. The resulting uproar led to Swann’s removal from his prominent role by the WGCL; he closed his highly populated social media accounts and was reduced to doing local news stories (http://www.cbs46.com/story/35977779/cbs46-partners-with-atlanta-barbershop-through-books-to-kids-program). Pizzagate aficionados interpreted this bad-judgment slap as suppression by the conspiring ‘deep state.’
[/blockquote]
Note the link to the list of pedophile symbols in that tweet. Assange, knowing full well that this Wikileaks list had already been scurrilously used to turn most of the pizza-slice-shaped triangular logos in Washington into false indicators of child rape tunnels under buildings, as well as turning the crossed ping-pong paddles of Comet Ping Pong into a child-lover symbol (actually shaped like a butterfly - see https://justpaste.it/18t8f), was bucking openly for more of the same, using his website's information.
Assange’s pro-Pizzagate tweet got an immediate response from a BBC writer and prominent critic of the alt-right, Mike Wendling (@mwendling). He said “This is not a CBS report and there is no evidence to back up “pizzagate” conspiracy claims. Why are you peddling this?”
That, as New Yorkers would say, is damned good question.
It may be presumptuous, but my money says that even after years of near-solitary confinement, Assange can’t be that bonkers.
We do know that on Sept. 17, 2017, Assange, using his personal account, tweeted a link to an Anderson Cooper CNN interview with Hillary Clinton, and gave it his own summation: “Clinton: #Pizzagate cost me the election” (https://twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/908143188766072842).
That looks like the triumph of malice.
Between Assange’s cynicism and life-long hostility to the US government, and Marsh’s hot-tempered, Maoist-Orwellian conceptual muddles, the idea has now been firmly introduced into the pizza parlor basement of Western culture that prominent democratically elected politicians and supporters are sexually violating children and feasting on their remains. The Alex Jones Infowars Youtube channel has up to half a million viewers per episode for programs claiming that American politicians, Hollywood stars and Prince Charles (whom he describes as a Transylvanian vampire) are raping babies, sawing their heads open, and swishing through their brains to find and eat the pineal gland (https://justpaste.it/18t8f). (This gland is a magic organ full of significance for many conspiracy theorists; for example, they propose that fluoridating water causes it to atrophy). There are versions of the “elite pedophile ring” scenario that aren’t quite as mad as Alex’s fizzings, but that still depart entirely from reality.
Neither Assange nor Marsh has yet been called out for the full extent to which they contributed to this monstrous epic of fakery that they’ve sent out to undermine anyone who attempts to keep a grip on reality in public life.
Perhaps Assange illustrates the Nietzschean principle that those who fight against monsters need to be cautious that, in doing so, they don’t become monsters themselves. Would it be fair to say, at this point, that he’s let Nietzsche down?
What is certain is that, in flogging a Satanic fake-pedophile conspiracy theory for purposes of vengeful psy-ops, Assange is no innocent.
-- 30 --
Update: Initial publication of this story led to the discovery of a recent (Jun 28, 2018) tweet stream by a reporter called Emma Best who had briefly served as a 'partner' with ourwikileaks.org, a 'research Wiki' run by Wikileaks. Best documented that one of the few people with wiki editing privilege, an admin called 'William' and 'ThatWikiDude' had added a lot of material related to Pizzagate and the related 'Seth Rich conspiracy theory' to the Wiki after Nov. 4, 2016. (The Seth Rich campaign suggesting that a Washington, DC man was killed by mysterious agents after he'd sent leak material to Wikileaks - material that is believed by most official sources actually to have been sent by the Russian intelligence operatives called 'Fancy Bear.')
See the whole thread: https://twitter.com/NatSecGeek/status/1014095292340232192
Comment: Best appears not to have been aware of the prior track record of Assange/Wikileaks pumping elite pedophilia themes in connection with the Westminster scandal, and she is also very likely unaware of #OpDeathEaters. (She has been sent a copy of this article but has not commented.) Given the balance of evidence, I would suggest that there's no reason to put undue emphasis on Assange making a stray comment suggesting that the references to pizza, hot dogs and other campaign fare in the Podesta emails might be a code for drug interactions. All his official output consistently reinforced the elite pedophile phantasm.