Clutched in his cuffed hands as WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange was carried down the steps of London’s Ecuadorian embassy and into a police van was a book, its cover facing cameras on the street.

Looking frail after seven years in his cramped embassy quarters, Assange emerged and pointedly held out a copy of ‘Gore Vidal: History of The National Security State (Includes Vidal on America)’.

Later, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court for his first hearing, he sat reading Vidal while waiting for his lawyers to arrive.

The book immediately drew attention given Assange’s long-running battles with those who wield power and seek to protect powerful interests, and Vidal’s musings on the same topics. The U.S. Justice Department accuses Assange of conspiring with Chelsea Manning to break into a classified government computer at the Pentagon; his defenders, including whistleblower Edward Snowden, called Assange’s arrest a grave blow to press freedom.

History of The National Security State was edited by Paul Jay of the Real News Network and contains Vidal’s opinions, in recorded interviews, on the origins and reach of modern-day state power.

In a blurb for the 2014 book on Amazon, its publishers say Jay and Vidal “discuss the historical events that led to the establishment of the massive military-industrial-security complex and the political culture that gave us the Imperial Presidency.”

After Assange’s copy of the book was spotted, the Real News Network posted a series of Jay’s interviews with Vidal from 2007. They cover power, public information, politics and more, and include Vidal’s assertion that President Harry Truman decided, after the Second World War, to make a ready-made enemy out of Joseph Stalin and use the ensuing fear to “militarize the economy.”

“The people have no voice because they have no information …” Vidal says, railing against the state of the modern media. “It could be useful to tell them, actually, what happens around the world.”

Founded by Assange in 2006, Wikileaks is an information firehose. The group publicizes large dumps of sensitive documents that would otherwise, in many cases, never reach the public eye via the conventional media. The group has published more than 10 million items to date.

“You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled. And the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque,” Vidal says.

When asked by Jay about the “fundamental belief” that U.S. foreign policy since the Second World War has been “a fight for freedom,” Vidal says:

“It never was. And to believe that we’re a democracy, that means you know nothing about the Constitution. The people that made the Constitution hated democracy. … We’re an oligarchy of the well-to-do. We were at the very beginning, when the Constitution was made, and we’re even more so now.”

“I’ve been around the ruling class all my life and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country,” he adds.

Expanding on what he says is an inept media that covers the tracks of its corporate overlords, he says:

“Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living. And that is an absolute truth. Those who want to examine life don’t go in for journalism, because they’re not allowed to.”

He goes on to say that though the U.S. presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were “stolen,” the media remained largely silent.

“They’re saying ‘we don’t give a goddamn about the United States. Just stew in your own juice. Leave us alone. We have corporate figures to add up now.’”

“Everybody is on to the con act of our media; they are obeying bigger, richer interests than informing the public, which is the last thing that corporate America has ever been interested in doing.”

The renowned author, playwright, essayist and pundit Vidal died in L.A. in 2012 at the age of 86, having lived for many years on Italy’s Amalfi coast. A leftist who ran for office for the Democratic Party, he was celebrated for his 1968 TV debates with the conservative heavyweight William F. Buckley.

Known for his withering critiques of the George W. Bush presidency, Vidal’s books include Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (2002) and Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta (2007). In an interview with Democracy Now in 2004, discussing the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, he remarked:

“The United States is not a normal country. We are under — we’re a homeland now, under military surveillance and military control.“

Referring in his 2007 interviews with Jay to his most recent fundraising for the Democratic Party, he says he did so because it’s, “not that I like the Democratic Party, but we have to have the semblance of a second party to get rid of these others.”

“I’ve never heard cries of rage so loud,” he says when asked what he was hearing, at that stage, from the American people.

In its obituary for Vidal in August 2012, the New York Times called him “the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization.”

“Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. (He) sometimes claimed to be a populist — in theory, anyway — but he was not convincing as one. Both by temperament and by birth he was an aristocrat.”

“Perhaps more than any other American writer except Norman Mailer or Truman Capote, Mr. Vidal took great pleasure in being a public figure,” the Times added.

In London on Thursday, District Judge Michael Snow found Assange guilty of breaching his U.K. bail conditions at the time he sought refuge, in 2012, at the embassy. Assange had been facing extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations, but feared the end goal was his extradition to the U.S.

“Mr. Assange’s behaviour is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests,” Snow said.

— With files from the Associated Press

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