Arhanghelul libertăţii presei, Julian Assange
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14 aprilie 2019
„Orişicare înger e înspăimântător.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
„Tăcerea asupra tratamentului aplicat lui Assange nu este numai o trădare în ceea ce-l priveşte, ci şi o trădare a însăşi libertăţii presei. Vom plăti scump această complicitate” (Chris Hedges). Julian Assange a fost arestat în Ambasada Ecuadorului de la Londra şi târât într-o dubă a poliţiei. Un patriarh cu păr alb şi barbă albă, cu ochi încă vii – are doar 47 de ani –, bruscat de patru sau cinci poliţişti, făcea semne ciudate şi încerca să transmită întregii lumi ceva foarte important. Va fi această imagine „ultimul articol” al editorului Julian Assange ?
Ecuadorul a fost prea mic pentru un război atât de mare. Rafael Correa, preşedintele ecuadorian care l-a adăpostit, curajos şi generos, în ambasada ţării sale de la Londra – Correa este cel care a dus un război just, total împotriva datoriei odioase ecuadoriene –, la capătul celor două mandate ale sale (2007-2017), a fost obligat el însuşi să se refugieze în ţara de origine a soţiei sale, în Belgia. Noul preşedinte al Ecuadorului, Lenin Moreno (ce prenume !), are doar o dimensiune proporţională cu puterea ţării pe care o reprezintă azi. A cedat până la urmă la presiunile prea mari ale Imperiului American. Asta după ce l-a chinuit un an pe Assange, degradându-i din ce în ce mai mult statutul şi condiţiile de azilant politic şi cetăţean ecuadorian. Rafael Correa a calificat viaţa lui Assange din ultimul an în interiorul ambasadei drept „tortură”. Fostul preşedinte ecuadorian l-a caracterizat pe succesorul său, pe care, de altfel, l-a ajutat să obţină preşedinţia, drept „cel mai mare trădător” : „Cel mai mare trădător din istoria ecuadoriană şi a Americii Latine, Lenin Moreno […]. Moreno este un om corupt, dar el a comis o crimă pe care umanitatea n-o va uita niciodată” (contul de Facebook pe care se exprima Rafael Correa a fost blocat între timp).
Chris Hedges (Premiul Pulitzer, 2002), John Pilger, Paul Craig Roberts, Noam Chomsky, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald şi atâtea alte nume de cronicari, de mari conştiinţe au intervenit în ultimii ani în favoarea, în apărarea lui Assange. Cei citaţi mai sus fac parte dintre puţinii care mai merită citiţi ca oameni liberi, şi nu ca detestabili mercenari. Marea presă occidentală s-a deteriorat recent într-o asemenea măsură, încât Paul Craig Roberts o numeşte sistematic „presstitute” (o contracţie între „presă” şi „prostituţie”). Odată cu căderea generală a presei, ideea democratică însăşi a suferit o lovitură gravă, probabil mortală. Cine mai e capabil să susţină că Regatul Unit al Theresei May, SUA lui Donald Trump sau Franţa lui Emmanuel Macron mai sunt democraţii care merită urmate ?
Asasinarea lui Julian Assange, lentă până mai ieri, accelerată prin arestarea sa din Ambasada Ecuadoriană, a fost pusă în operă de Marea Britanie, care l-a arestat mai întâi la domiciliu în urmă cu mai bine de opt ani, ca răspuns la cererile de extrădare ale Suediei (între timp, Suedia şi-a retras cererea) şi SUA, care l-a şi condamnat în secret (din greşeală, probele condamnării au ieşit la lumină). Ţara de origine a lui Assange, Australia, n-a mişcat nici un deget, deşi opinia publică australiană e de partea editorului. Singura soluţie care le mai rămâne Marii Britanii şi SUA pentru a ieşi cât de cât basma curată ar putea fi aceea ca „perfidul Albion” să-l expulzeze pe Assange către ţara al cărei cetăţean este, către Australia. Vor avea atâta capacitate de previziune cei care trebuie să ia o decizie, vor fi liberi să ia o asemenea hotărâre ?
„WikiLeaks şi Assange au făcut mai mult pentru a denunţa sumbrele maşinaţii şi crimele Imperiului American decât oricare altă organizaţie de presă. Assange, pe lângă denunţarea atrocităţilor şi crimelor comise de armata americană în războiaele noastre fără sfârşit şi scoaterea la lumină a mecanismelor interne ale campaniei lui Hillary Clinton, a făcut publice uneltele de piratare folosite de CIA şi de NSA, programele lor de supraveghere şi amestecul lor în alegerile din alte ţări, printre altele, şi în alegerile din Franţa […]. Ceea ce i se întâmplă lui Assange ar trebui să îngrozească presa. Şi totuşi, soarta sa se loveşte de indiferenţă şi dispreţ sarcastic. Odată expulzat din ambasadă, va fi judecat în Statele Unite pentru ceea ce a publicat. Aceasta va crea un precedent juridic nou şi periculos, pe care Administraţia Trump şi viitoarele administraţii îl vor utiliza împotriva altor editori, inclusiv împotriva celor care fac parte din mafia care încearcă acum să-l linşeze pe Assange” (Chris Hedges, pe blogul său, truthdig.com, 13 noiembrie 2018).
Răstignirea care i se pregăteşte lui Assange dacă va fi extrădat în SUA are într-adevăr nişte dimensiuni rar întâlnite în epoca noastră minoră şi mercantilă. Odată cu Assange va fi crucificat şi omul liber modern, cu democraţia sa cu tot. (Petru Romoşan)
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JOHN PILGER: Assange Arrest a Warning from History
April 12, 2019 • 72 Comments
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Real journalism is being criminalized by thugs in plain sight, says John Pilger. Dissent has become an indulgence. And the British elite has abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.
By John Pilger
The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.
That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.
But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.
Moreno: A Latin American Judas.
Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.
The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sow the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization.” The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.
Assange’s principal media tormentor, The Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years.” The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.
Revealing Homicidal Colonial Wars
When Assange was still trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, Harding joined police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.” The Guardian then published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.
But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.”
These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.
The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.
When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.
If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what The Guardian calls truthful “things,” what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?
Even the propagandist Harding could be at risk.
What is to stop the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is long.
David McCraw, lead lawyer of The New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”
Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalized by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.
In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.
Journalism: a Major Threat
Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defense in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.
The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”
What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?
In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.
She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.
“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”
And did. The rest, she might have added, is history.
John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: http://www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20thcentury. Some of his previous contributions to Consortium News can be found here.
Suntem o lume in descompunere.
Julian Assange (spre Cornel Nistorescu): Hey sailor, are you happy to see me, or is that a gun in your pocket?
George Rîpă – 31 ianuarie 20110
English version: For Julian Assange, the honour prize „Dacia Libera”
Comunicatul e o mostra de umor involuntar oferit cu generozitate
„As the planet rotates from 2010 and 2011, we turn our minds to the gesture of professional conscience and human dignity of WikiLeaks, the organization which published authentic documents exposing the duplicitous behavior of some democratic countries to the world”
As the planet rotates, lumina vine de la Rasarit, `r-ati ai draq de imperialişti duplicitari care una ziceţi şi alta fumaţi. Free de planet!
„Cotidianul.ro agrees with the French newspaper and other publications who praise Julian Assange’s professional performance considering it a noble gesture”.
Ne alăturăm şi noi fiţuicilor din întreaga lume, daca ei e proşti, e musai să fie şi noi. Free french chips!
„To underscore the enormous service to freedom of expression and democratic values, we have created the „Free Dacia.” diploma of honour.We have not called it „Free Romania” because this is the name of a newspaper that bows and scrapes before the Romanian government in Bucharest”
Cand eram mici, ne plăcea ce ne spunea tov Ilie Ceauşescu la televizor, iar când ne-am făcut mari ne-am cultivat cu Napoleon Slăvescu şi Pavel Coruţ. Free Dacia!.
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