3 Greatest Men This Decade

There is a theory coined in the 19th-century known as the ‘The Great Man theory’ it is an idea according to which historical or current world realities can be largely explained by the impact of "great men". These highly influential individuals who go above and beyond, due to either their personal conviction, charisma, intelligence, disdain of current world norms, wisdom, or apathy with political failures in the world, utilize their power, knowledge or skill in a way that had or has a decisive historical impact or affects the future. This ‘Great Man’ theory was popularized in the 1840s by Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle.

In this article I shall briefly detail three such men, the 3 greatest men in this decade 2005 to 2015, I think these men have had a huge impact on social, political, and economic realities that we experience today and history will mark as events driven by actions these men took which resulted in changing world outcomes in some way.

Julian Paul Assange an Australian citizen (no good having that citizenship as that has not helped him escape being locked up for no reason). By profession he is a computer programmer, publisher and journalist. He is better known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, this wonderful website was founded in 2006. WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010 when it published U.S. military blunders and diplomatic documents leaked by Chelsea Manning another great man at the time.

In order to hush-up Assange as the normal process goes with U.S, he has been under investigation in the United States since that time. In the same year, the Swedish Director of Public Prosecution opened an investigation into four sexual offences that Assange allegedly committed, this is another very useful technique used many times before by the powers to get control over individuals that speak out against the system. Facing extradition to Sweden in 2012, he sought refuge at the Embassy of Ecuador in London and was granted political asylum by Ecuador.

Interesting though that no one country which claims freedom, democracy and upholders of law and innocent till proven guilty principles helped him avoid the proxy extradition requests to Sweden. Even though Assange and his legal team were ready to attend any court in the UK or use conferencing to attend courts in Sweden to defend himself against these allegations, his request was never accepted.

But instead the UK government stationed Police officers outside the Ecuadorean embassy to arrest Assange if he tried to get out. Now the BBC report say’s Police will no longer be stationed outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sought refuge since 2012.

The Met said it had cost £12.6m (this is tax payers money being wasted to please the U.S) and was "no longer proportionate" - but it would still try to arrest him.

So in my view given the pain that Assange has gone through and is still subjected to for bringing you, me and the world the truth. I honour him as one of the greatest men in this decade.

The second of these greatest men is Edward Snowden, a former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, after being on the run from the US authorities he is now living in Russia after fleeing the United States big brother hand via Hong Kong, this great man revealed extensive internet and phone surveillance by US intelligence that was unconstitutional and illegal.

When asked why he decided to leave the US, he told the Guardian reporter "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded."

The US decided to charge Edward Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence. With a maximum 10-year prison sentence for each of the charges.

While working his way up the security chain in 2007, Snowden was given a CIA post with diplomatic cover in Geneva. Snowden told the Guardian newspaper "Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."

Edward Snowden was considering going public earlier, but waited to see if things would change when President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, that clearly did not happen.

The exact size of information Snowden disclosed is unknown, it is estimated that 15,000 or more Australian intelligence files and at least 58,000 British intelligence files. NSA director estimated that Snowden may have copied anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 NSA documents, this figure was later revised by U.S. officials to a staggering 1.7 million.

According to Edward Snowden, he did not indiscriminately turn over documents to journalists, he says in a report that "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over" and that "I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists ..."

Whatever the surveillance agencies and spy masters claim, Edward Snowden has done us all a favour by exposing the extremes that our own governments go to. The nature of mass surveillance in any community is akin to a totalitarian state and does not lend itself to a free democratic society that we want to be living in.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, what Snowden did for us all, none of it—the military drills, the surveillance, terrorists watch lists, the militarized police, the constant red, amber, green threat updates, the strip searches, the random pat downs, the stop-and-frisks, even the police-worn body cameras—is about fighting terrorism. It’s about controlling the populace.

Get the population so scared with all these tactics so that whatever the government and its masters propose the population will bow down and accept in the interest of security, even if it means walking out naked.

This is why I have selected Edward Snowden as one of the greatest men in this decade. It is because of his document releases that many people around the world have woken up to the extremes that our security and political agencies go to collecting data on everything that we do.

The next person I think deserves the title greatest man this decade is John Perkins, he is now an activist and author. Perkins says that he was working on behalf of the U.S political establishment as an "economic hit man" for 10 years, helping U.S. intelligence agencies and multinational corporations cajole where possible and where that did not work then blackmail foreign leaders into serving U.S. foreign policy and awarding lucrative contracts to American businesses. John Perkins “economic hit man” role was fronted by his work as a chief economist at Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main.

Perkins realised, after several years doing the dirty deeds on behalf of the U.S policy makers, his internal struggles over the role he was playing in crippling foreign economies, governments, businesses, he then quit his consulting job and founded and directed a successful independent energy company, which he subsequently sold. He has been heavily involved with non-profit organizations and in making the public aware of how the U.S conducts itself behind the vail – so much ‘hot-air’ for ethics, democracy, freedom etc. but the world outside see’s what happens if it does not agree with puppet masters in the U.S.

John Perkin wrote the first edition of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man which spent 73 weeks on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list and has been translated into 32 languages, an excellent record for a book that brings to public attention the lowest levels that our politicians and elite business leaders can go to. It, along with his other books, The Secret History of the American Empire – which is also a New York Times bestseller and his book Hoodwinked, were ground-breaking exposés of the extremely dirty and unethical clandestine operations that created the current global crises; these master pieces set the stage for the revelations and strategies detailed in his new book released as - The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, revealed to the public how respected international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, while publicly professing to "save" suffering countries and economies, instead pull a bait-and-switch on their governments at the detriment of the populations within those countries.

The IMF and World Bank tried that trick on Egypt’s first ever democratically elected president Morsi, he refused as a result you now see him behind bars and Egypt is back to status quo. These organisations approach their victims promising startling growth, gleaming new infrastructure projects, abundant wealth and a future of economic prosperity – the way to achieve all this would require those countries to borrow huge loans from those organizations. The usual result seen in many countries which fell for this bait was far from achieving runaway economic growth, increase in wealth and success in projects, these countries instead fall victim to mismanaged projects, allegations of corruptions and crippling, unsustainable debt burdens that only lead to worse outcomes for the populations of those countries.

The way in which "economic hit men" operate is that seemingly ordinary men, with normal backgrounds, who travel to these countries providing advice and guidance, they then impose the harsh austerity policies similar to what went on in Europe in 2014 and 2015, these harsh policies are prescribed by the IMF and World Bank as the best "solutions" to the economic hardship they are now experiencing. Don’t be fooled, it is just a way to make us all modern day slaves.

Economic hit men like John Perkins were trained to squeeze all and every last drop of wealth and resources from these poor economies, and these heartless thugs continue to do so to this day, just look at the poor countries in Africa, Asia and South America.

If it was not for John Perkins writing these good reads – Confessions of an economic hit man, Secret History of the American Empire and others, then many people would throw aside his revelations as conspiracy theories. This is why I consider him as one of the greatest man of this decade.

We are giving away our freedom and rights by agreeing to allow agencies and government departments to introduce solutions and policies that make it easy for the mass to be spied upon. You are increasingly becoming a number on an agencies database, the moment you disagree with them they will delete you... that's when you will wake up and realise it's too late.