Chris Hedges: You saved Julian Assange

After 14 years of persecution WikiLeaks Publisher is free. We must honor the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who made this possible.

From Chris Hedges
ScheerPost

TThe dark machinery of empire, whose mendacity and cruelty Julian Assange exposed to the world, spent 14 years trying to destroy 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 They staged a change of government in Ecuador that resulted in his asylum being withdrawn and him being harassed and humiliated by compliant embassy staff.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 discussed kidnappings or assassination him. They arranged for London’s Metropolitan Police to raid the embassy – the sovereign territory of Ecuador – and arrested him. They held him in the maximum security prison 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.

(See: How the American Official Secrets Act trapped Julian Assange)

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.

He was released – and received a deal from the US Department of Justice. Court documents – despite these institutions. 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.

Assange supporters march to the British Parliament in London in February 2020. (Joe Lauria)

Mass protests are not always successful. The genocide in the Gaza Strip continues to claim cruel victims among the Palestinians. Mumia Abu Jamal is still in a Pennsylvania prison. The fossil fuel industry is devastating the planet. But it is the most powerful 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 by giving 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.

Assange supporters in front of the Ecuadorian embassy in London on June 16, 2013. (Xavier Granja Cedeño, Ministry of Exterior Relations, Wikimedia Commons)

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.

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson speaks to the press in London on January 24, 2022; Stella Assange is to his right. (Alisdare Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

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 waiting in government vaults to be used against us. It doesn’t matter how trivial or innocuous this information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

The traveling art installation “Anything to Say?” by Davide Dormino with bronze sculptures of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning on chairs in Berlin on May 1, 2015. The fourth, empty chair calls on people to “stand up instead of sitting like the others.” (Davide Dormino, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

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 who spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, where he served as the newspaper’s Middle East and Balkans bureau chief. He previously worked abroad for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of “The Chris Hedges Report.”

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