John Shipton, founder of the WikiLeaksParty and father of Julian Assange. Photo: Indy100.
WikiLeaks Party founder and father of Julian Assange, John Shipton, as well as BRICS Journalists Association Co-Chair Mira Terada, spoke with Sputnik about free speech in the West, Biden’s crackdown on dissent, and US efforts to dominate other nations.
During an interview with Sputnik, Shipton stressed that Russian President Vladimir Putin became “the first head of state to defend Julian’s interests as a publisher and a citizen” in 2012, just as Assange “was receiving every smearing lie and calumny that the institutions of state and those hangers-on in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia could deliver upon his head.”
❗️FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND US PROPAGANDA: ASSANGE’S FATHER AND MIRA TERADA INTERVIEW BY SPUTNIK
WikiLeaks Party founder and Julian Assange’s father John Shipton and BRICS Journalists Association co-chair Mira Terada sat down for an exclusive interview with Sputnik to discuss… pic.twitter.com/l7EC7z6s0O
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) October 20, 2024
“Putin defended his interests as a publisher and journalist. For that, I extend my affection to your president. And my thanks,” Shipton said.
On Julian Assange’s release
Shipton says he was “elated” to finally be able to hug his son when the latter was finally released, after a lengthy incarceration in a British prison.
Julian Assange is in good health now and is “repairing himself,” with his children “teaching him how to be a parent, as all children do,” Shipton said.
He noted, however, that United Nations rapporteur on torture and unusual punishment, Professor Nils Melzer and two other doctors specializing in psychological torture, who together attended to Assange while the latter was incarcerated in Belmarsh prison, concluded that Julian “was showing all the effects of prolonged psychological torture.”
“We have the diagnostic views of two experts accompanying Professor Melzer to the prison, who did a diagnostic review of Julian and wrote it up and presented it to the United Nations General Assembly, where it was accepted,” Shipton stated.
Regarding the way Assange’s release was secured, Shipton suggested that it was the “understanding of how power flows between states and between the institutions of states” that helped free Julian.
He also agreed with the assessment of former US independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, who criticized the plea deal Assange had to take, with Kennedy branding it a “big blow to freedom of the press.”
As per the deal, Assange pled guilty to one charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, and was sentenced to time already served.
“It now has become a worldwide concern of the capacity of ordinary people within the West to access the frank and revealing articles,” Shipton observed. “We, particularly in Australia, have certain legislation which specifically aims to restrict our access to information and information that will become knowledge within the society specifically aims to restrict.”
Importance of Assange’s and Manning’s disclosures
The facts revealed through the efforts of Assange and US whistleblower Chelsea Manning gave people “an understanding of how the United States empire institutes itself into the states that it wishes to have as vassals or goes about destroying those states,” Shipton said.
⚡️ASSANGE’S FATHER: COLOR REVOLUTIONS AND INFORMATION CONTROL THREATEN GLOBAL STABILITY
John Shipton, the father of Julian Assange, warned about the dangers of information control and the role of “color revolutions” in destabilizing nations during a discussion on the… https://t.co/yJJt0soRKk pic.twitter.com/ty0zPgAr3z
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) October 20, 2024
“One of the current understandings is the phrase ‘color revolutions.’ This is brought about by NGOs and news agencies, news publishers and journalists being suborned to undermine the cohesion of a state,” he explained. “So we can see clearly what can be done to a state by controlling the information that people get through a series of color revolutions, which happens next door to Russia in Ukraine and almost happened in Belarus, almost happened in Kazakhstan, almost happened in Georgia and so on.”
Very few people realize the “density of propaganda” in the United States, Shipton added.
“The density of propaganda and the willingness of government and its institutions to delude the people and mislead the people is completely ruthless,” he told Sputnik.
The US government, Shipton explains, actively resists efforts by the American people to express their opinions via social media, with Washington insisting on a “unity of policy.”
As the option of ensuring the populace’s obedience by siccing the military on them is unavailable to a democratic government, Washington employs media to convince people to follow its policies, Shipton said.
“This is a really important understanding to understand how a government or in a contemporary state institutes its policies,” he suggested.
What does Washington do to its prospective vassals?
Shipton also remarked that “the US government as an empire” understands that “the state is the highest form of human organization” and thus “makes every effort to demoralize institutions of state in those countries that it wants to vassalize.”
“So you can see in the EU is now a contention between the declarations of the EU and those states within the EU,” he said.
While people such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban or Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico strive to maintain the “quality” of their respective states, Brussels attempts to keep them in line by threatening to withhold their own money.
“The centralized distribution of money for the European Bank, the European Community Bank (ECB) it is all of the state’s money [that] goes into the ECB and then it’s redistributed to those states,” Shipton pointed out. “This gives the ECB and the EU enormous power and removes a fundamental power from those states so involved: the ability to raise your own money. If you can’t raise your own money, you cannot improve the quality of your people by directing funds to those areas that will improve those qualities.”
Scott Ritter knows how to ‘manage relations between nuclear superpowers’
Former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and ex-UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter is a man whose understanding “of the power flows between states” and of “what is necessary to reduce tensions between nuclear armed states is second to none,” Shipton said.
“He brings that before the people who attend to his broadcasts, of which there are many and continuous. This is really important. This supersedes in many ways the discomfort of Scott being banned from, or warned off, Sputnik,” Shipton remarked.
“It is really important to have a voice as an experienced, knowledgeable and fair as Scott speaking about how to reduce the tensions and how to manage the relationships between nuclear superpowers,” he added. “It’s profound.”
The current state of the West
Much of the so-called West, Shipton noted, is currently in a state he describes as “inert,” with people there showing no apparent inclination to reproduce.
“What is happening in the West is a decline that might have started 80 or 90 years ago. And that decline manifests itself in the anxiety of states to control what the populace understands and what information the populace may take and may be converted into social knowledge so that we can act upon it,” he remarked. “This is not good news for those institutions of state that have to govern those societies in the West. Inertia and decline are never comfortable.”
The state of freedom of speech in the West
While a certain form of freedom of speech does exist in the West, it is a “very limited form,” said international human rights activist and BRICS Journalists Association Co-Chair Mira Terada.
According to her, “alternative media and journalists and opinion leaders” who dare to challenge the narrative pushed by the West are being persecuted by countries such as the United States.
“It is a terrible trend and it does affect journalism. It does affect the way how information spreads around the world and what kind of information spreads around the world,” Terada lamented. “But there are still people who stand up for the truth and their idea to put their life for it.”
What is the Biden administration afraid of?
The Biden administration, Terada claimed, fears the truth that media outlets such as Sputnik bring out.
“They are afraid of the influence that this media has around the world. They are afraid that Western propaganda is not working well enough. They are afraid that they are going to lose those minds and hearts that they filled up with their lies, to Sputnik and to RT. They’re afraid that they will lose complete control over the people that they need to control in order to get the results that they are looking for,” she said.
Thus, the Biden administration seeks to “suppress the truth” along with any opinions and narratives dissenting from theirs, “because they believe that the only right narrative and the narrative that has the right to exist is theirs, and no others.”
She also urged people to use critical thinking when absorbing information and to listen to their hearts.
(Sputnik)
