Julian Assange on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2017. Photo: Jack Taylor/Getty Images.
By Oleg Yasinsky – May 20, 2024
It is understandable that, with the news of the last few years, the most serious and significant ones of the previous times went into the background, almost to the point of oblivion. Oblivion is definitely the best accomplice of the system. When power has no arguments and has lost the media war, it turns to the press, which erects walls of silence, isolating everything that does not suit it.
The massive marches of just a few years ago in defense of Julian Assange, seen as the last solitary hero of our times, are behind us. The brutal accusations against him, by all accounts arbitrary and unjust, constitute a clear exemplary punishment to anyone who dares to challenge the empire, materialized into the worst nightmare: to spend the rest of his years in one of the worst British prisons, with the only prospect of moving to an American prison with another pile of sentences for many more lives, getting sick and going mad. Today, when his procedural future was decided, only about 200 activists were raising the old “Free Assange” banners in front of the High Court in London, amid this global oblivion.
The same is happening with almost everything. The great campaigns of international solidarity with the most just causes in the world last as long as the mass media allow it, as long as it suits the media, and accompany them until power chooses to apply to them the recipe of oblivion. The same is happening with the current extermination of the Palestinians by the Israeli army with total and absolute impunity until those who are outraged get tired or find a new cause. Power creates its own myth about the strength of “civil society” to take advantage of it at every opportunity, demonstrating to real civil society its utter ridiculousness and impotence.
Humanity is like a raped child who at first screamed, kicked, cried, and after adults made him shut up, and explained to him that he was a liar, he calmed down, swallowing his own pain, rage, and loneliness.
On May 20, 2024, when the whole world was dismayed by the crashing of the Iranian presidential helicopter and distracted by the application for an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court against Netanyahu, the court in London was deciding the extradition of Assange to the United States, something almost invisible on the media next to the great sensations of the day.
UK High Court Rules Assange Can Appeal US Extradition Request
The last two requirements for extraditing Julian Assange seemed like a mockery: that the US guarantee Assange would not face the death penalty if extradited and that he would have the same free speech protections as any US citizen. To the great surprise of many, today Assange’s lawyers won. The court dismissed free speech guarantees for the defendant on 18 counts of espionage and hacking, which could earn him a 175-year sentence in the US.
Today’s victory, in concrete terms, means the following: if the accuser, i.e., the US government, does not withdraw its accusation, the founder of WikiLeaks will remain locked up for another year in the Belmarsh maximum security prison until a new appeal process is finalized. He has been imprisoned since April 11, 2019, after he was arrested at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London by Scotland Yard and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for circumventing the bail regime. After the sentence ended, he remained in prison for an extradition request that was already prepared well in advance by the US government. Before that, Assange spent seven years of confinement in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London until then-President Lenin Moreno took away his Ecuadorian nationality and political asylum.
It is important to remember that WikiLeaks never “specialized” in crimes exclusively committed by the US government. It did disseminate more than 250,000 secret cables of US diplomacy, but Assange’s team also published confidential documents from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tükiye, Kenya, and other countries. In total, more than 10 million materials were published between 2006 and 2019. But here the important thing is that, among the multiple sins, inconsistencies, and incoherencies of the vast majority of the world’s governments, the state crimes of the US and its NATO allies and their hypocritical discourse on freedom and democracy are of another level. They are truly unparalleled and unthinkable, as befits a true enemy of humanity. All Assange and his WikiLeaks team did was to expose it to the world in its true dimension and proportion.
Washington has argued that WikiLeaks publications leaked information that put the lives of its agents in the field at risk. Precisely from this logic, the accusations against Assange for the violation of laws against espionage are born. But Julian Assange was never an agent of the US State and is not even a citizen of that country. His only rebellion was against criminals disguised as officials or military leaders of the largest military superpower on the planet. By unmasking those crimes, he saved thousands or perhaps millions of lives, among them surely several US military personnel. I have no proof, but I am convinced that the WikiLeaks revelations saved humanity from more than one war and surely also postponed some others. I wonder, too, if in recent years Assange’s team had been active and its leader was free, what other tragedies would we have been spared? Perhaps, precisely for that reason, before the strange global pandemic and the tragic events in Ukraine, Assange had to be isolated, and his team disbanded? In order, after all, to be able to build this wall of oblivion that is no longer prison for him alone, but for all of us.
On the other side of London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison, another prison has been under construction all these years, separating people with multiple walls of fear and ignorance. The bricks of this prison are the screens of millions of televisions, cell phones, and other devices that kill the human imagination and transmit the most deadly of viruses: that of oblivion.
Today, 200 people, or maybe a little more than that, in front of the High Court in London reminded the world that we still exist, that the fight goes on, that he is not alone. Although I do not believe that going out in the streets with the “Free Assange” banner can achieve anything, today we see that the empire is still as afraid of him as before, because otherwise, there would be no reason to keep him imprisoned until the world forgets his example.
(RT)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/SF
Oleg Yasinsky
Oleg Yasinsky is a Chilean-Ukrainian journalist, who collaborates with several Latin American independent media, and researches on indigenous and social movements in Latin America. He has produced political documentaries in Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico and Chile, authored several publications, and translates texts by Eduardo Galeano, Luis Sepulveda, Jose Saramago, Subcomandante Marcos and others into Russian.