They saved Julian Assange – Canadian Dimension

The dark machinery of the empire, whose deceit and cruelty Julian Assange exposed to the world, tried to destroy him for 14 years. They cut off all his financial resources, blocked his bank accounts and credit cards. They invented false accusations of sexual assault in order to have him extradited to Sweden, from where he would then be shipped to the USA.

They held him captive in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years after he was granted political asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship by denying him safe passage to Heathrow Airport. They staged a change of government in Ecuador that resulted in his asylum being withdrawn and him being harassed and humiliated by compliant embassy staff. They hired the Spanish security firm UC Global at the embassy to record all of his conversations, including those with his lawyers.

The CIA considered kidnapping or assassinating him. They arranged for London’s Metropolitan Police to raid the embassy – sovereign territory of Ecuador – and arrest him. They held him for five years in the maximum security prison HM Prison Belmarsh, often in solitary confinement.

And all the while they performed a legal farce in the British courts, ignoring due process, so that an Australian citizen, whose publication was not based in the US and who, like all journalists, received documents from whistleblowers, could be held under the Espionage Act.

They tried over and over again to destroy him. They failed. But Julian was not released because the courts defended the rule of law and acquitted a man who had committed no crime. He was not released because the Biden White House and the intelligence community have a conscience. He was not released because the news organizations that published his revelations and then smeared him and waged a vicious smear campaign put pressure on the U.S. government.

Despite these institutions, he was released – according to court documents, he was granted a deal with the US Department of Justice. He was released because day after day, week after week, year after year, hundreds of thousands of people around the world joined together to denounce the imprisonment of the most important journalist of our generation. Without this mobilization, Julian would not be free.

Mass protests are not always successful. The genocide in Gaza continues to claim horrific victims among Palestinians. Mumia Abu-Jamal is still in a Pennsylvania prison. The fossil fuel industry is devastating the planet. But it is the most effective weapon we have to defend ourselves against tyranny.

This sustained pressure – during a London hearing in 2020, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Old Bailey Court, who is presiding over Julian’s case, complained, to my delight, about the noise protesters were making in the street outside – shines a perpetual light on injustice and exposes the amorality of the ruling class. It is why space in the UK courts was so limited, and why blurry-eyed activists queued outside as early as 4am to secure a seat for journalists who respected them. My seat was secured by Franco Manzi, a retired police officer.

These people are unsung and often unknown. But they are heroes. They moved mountains. They surrounded Parliament. They stood outside the courtrooms in the pouring rain. They were persistent and steadfast. They made their collective voice heard. They saved Julian. And as this terrible saga comes to an end and Julian and his family find, I hope, peace and healing in Australia, we must honour them. They shamed the politicians in Australia by standing up for Julian, an Australian citizen, and ultimately the UK and the US had to give up. I am not saying do the right thing. This was a surrender. We should be proud of it.

I met Julian when I accompanied his lawyer, Michael Ratner, to meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Michael, one of the greatest civil rights lawyers of our time, stressed that popular protest was an essential part of any case he brought against the state. Without it, the state could persecute dissidents, flout the law and commit crimes in secret.

People like Michael, Jennifer Robinson, Stella Assange, WikiLeaks Editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson, Nils Melzer, Craig Murray, Roger Waters, Ai WeiWei, John Pilger and Julian’s father John Shipton and brother Gabriel were instrumental in this fight. But they couldn’t have done it alone.

We urgently need mass movements. The climate crisis is deepening. The world, with the exception of Yemen, stands passively watching a live-streamed genocide. The mindless greed of limitless capitalist expansion has turned everything from people to nature into commodities to be exploited to the point of exhaustion or collapse. The decimation of civil liberties has, as Julian warned, shackled us to a networked security and surveillance apparatus that stretches across the globe.

The global ruling class has revealed its cards. It intends to build climate fortresses in the global North and to use its industrial weapons in the global South to lock out and slaughter the desperate, just as it is slaughtering the Palestinians.

State surveillance is far more intrusive than the surveillance of previous totalitarian regimes. Critics and dissidents are easily marginalized or silenced on digital platforms. This totalitarian structure—political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it “reverse totalitarianism”—is being gradually enforced. Julian warned us. As the power structure feels threatened by a restive population that rejects its corruption, accumulation of obscene wealth, endless wars, ineptitude, and increasing oppression, we will soon feel the fangs it showed Julian.

The goal of comprehensive surveillance, as Hannah Arendt in The origins of totalitarianismis not, ultimately, to detect crimes, “but to be there when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because our emails, phone calls, web searches, and geographic movements are recorded and stored forever in government databases, because we are the most photographed and tracked population in human history, there will be more than enough “evidence” to arrest us should the state deem it necessary. This constant surveillance and personal data is like a deadly virus in government vaults, waiting to be used against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocuous this information is. In totalitarian states, justice and truth are irrelevant.

The goal of all totalitarian systems is to create a climate of fear to paralyze the captive population. Citizens seek safety in the structures that oppress them. Prison, torture, and murder are reserved for uncontrollable renegades like Julian. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by suppressing human spontaneity and, by extension, human freedom. The population is immobilized by trauma. The courts and legislatures legalize state crimes. We saw all of this in the persecution of Julian. It is an ominous harbinger of things to come.

The corporate state must be destroyed if we are to restore our open society and save our planet. Its security apparatus must be dismantled. The mandarins who control corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, simple-minded academics, pundits and a bankrupt media landscape, must be driven from the temples of power.

Our only hope is mass protests in the streets and sustained civil disobedience. If we don’t rise up – and that’s what the corporate state is counting on – we will be enslaved and the Earth’s ecosystem will become uninhabitable for humans. Let’s take a page from the brave men and women who took to the streets for 14 years to save Julian. They showed us how it’s done.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times bestselling author, a professor in Rutgers University’s College of Inmates program, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 12 books, including the New York Times bestseller Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), which he co-authored with cartoonist Joe Sacco. His other books include Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt (2015), Death of the Liberal Class (2010), Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), I Don’t Believe in Atheists (2008), and the bestseller American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2008). His most recent book is America: The Farewell Tour (2018). His book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and has sold over 400,000 copies. He writes a weekly column for the website ScheerPost.

This article originally appeared on ScheerPost.com.