They saved Julian Assange – ScheerPost

June 26, 2024

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

The dark machine of empire, whose mendacity and cruelty Julian Assange exposed to the world, spent 14 years destroying him. They cut off his funding, blocked his bank accounts and credit cards, and fabricated false sexual assault charges to secure his extradition to Sweden, from where he would then be shipped to the United States.

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 They staged a change of government in Ecuador that resulted in his asylum being withdrawn and him being harassed and humiliated by compliant embassy staff.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 – the sovereign territory of Ecuador – and arrest him. They held him in the maximum security HM Prison Belmarsh for five years, often in solitary confinement.

And at the same time, they staged a farce in the British courts, ignoring the legal framework so that an Australian citizen, whose publication was not based in the United States and who, like all journalists, received documents from whistleblowers, could be charged 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 – and according to court documents, he was awarded 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 mobilized 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, I hope, find peace and healing in Australia, we must honour them. They shamed politicians in Australia into standing up for Julian, an Australian citizen, and ultimately the UK and the US into surrendering. 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, Janet Robinson, Stella Assange, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristenn 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 used in 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, writes Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is ultimately not to detect crimes, but to be there when the government decides to arrest a particular population. And since our emails, phone calls, Internet searches, and geographic movements are recorded and stored forever in government databases, since 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 doesn’t matter how trivial or innocuous the information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is 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.

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Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as head of the newspaper’s Middle East and Balkans bureau. Before that, he worked abroad for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitorand NPR. He is the host of the show The Chris Hedges Report.

He was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for The New York Times’ coverage of global terrorism and received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for human rights journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestselling American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War Against America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of the Spectacle and was a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle for his book War is a force that gives us meaningHe writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.

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