At long last Julian Assange has been taken down from his cross
Hell is empty and all the devils are here. William Shakespeare
The release of Julian Assange from Belmarsh Prison in London, after 5 years, is testament to the power of the human spirit when engaged in the struggle or a just cause.
The transparent face-saving stunt of the US Justice System notwithstanding — involving a plea deal that will see Assange plead guilty to one charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose US National Defence documents under the US Espionage Act at a special hearing in Saipan, before being allowed to leave for his home in Australia — this turn of events constitutes at least a small victory for justice in a time when huge injustice reigns.
Over the 12 long years of his incarceration — seven of them spent within the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy in central London, thereafter a further five years as an inmate at Belmarsh maximum security prison on the city’s outskirts — we have been delivered a hard lesson when it comes to extent of the brutality and barbarity of those who rule over us, both here in the UK and across the other side of the Atlantic in the US.
“When one man says ‘No’ Rome begins to fear.”
From the classic 1960 Hollywood movie, Spartacus, this line from Kirk Douglas — in the role of leader of the legendary and most consequential slave revolt in antiquity — perfectly encapsulates why Assange was nailed to the cross. But not only did Assange say ‘No’ himself. In exposing the high crimes and war crimes of the Rome of our time, he invited us all to say no to thus make him an existential threat to a status quo forged in an ocean of blood of the innocents.
None other than Albert Camus, it was, who instructed humanity that “It is the job of thinking people not be on the side of the executioners.” If Julian Assange’s legacy is anything it is that of a man who did precisely that and who has paid the most heavy price possible to imagine as a result.
In Franz Kafka’s classic dystopian novel, The Trial, Josef K., a hitherto anonymous bank cashier, is arrested for a crime he knows not what and thereafter prosecuted by a remote and impenetrable authority. As the story unfolds, K.’s repeated attempts to get to the bottom of his predicament meet with failure at the hands of a bureaucratic machine intent on crushing him.
Towards the end of the novel, prior to his execution, K. happens to look up and see a human figure appear at the window of the top floor of the residential block located next to the quarry into which he is about to be thrown dead by his executioners. “Who was it?” he asks himself in desperation. ‘“A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathised? Someone who wanted to help? Was it one person only? Or was it mankind? Was help at hand? Were there arguments in his favour that had been overlooked?”
Julian Assange has since 2012 been treated as the living embodiment of Kafka’s K., plunged into something approaching purgatory, tormented and tortured in a prolonged process of retribution and revenge that you would associate with a totalitarian state rather than a civilised society and liberal democracy — all the while looking around in desperation for support and salvation in a world that had seemingly turned in on him.
As to those responsible for overseeing Assange’s purgatory, we have in our midst a cast of expensively educated establishment thugs. Dredged up from the swamp of privilege, with relish in their eyes and malice in their hearts they engaged in the slow motion execution of a man whose very existence became a j’accuse of the lie that underpins their own.
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Tony Blair in gold cufflinks and Julian Assange in steel handcuffs. This is the world in which we currently live, one that we, all of us, need to revolt against. Until we do, we shall continue to exist as spiritually broken slaves rather than engaged citizens.
American novelist Thomas Wolfe coined the term “God’s Lonely Man.” It first appeared as the title of an 1991 essay in which he argued that loneliness is the universal yet unspoken fate of all in society.
Wolfe:
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
The theme of the isolation and the loneliness of the individual in a society defined by alienation is one that has been mined repeatedly in the worlds of literature and philosophy. Albert Camus’ seminal 1942 work The Stranger — also titled The Outsider — describes the plight of the novel’s protagonist Meursault before, during and after he kills a man in self defence.
In first person narrative, the reader is introduced to Meursault being notified of his mother’s death. He attends the wake but refuses to view the body when offered the chance. Later he attends the funeral, but does so absent of any of the conventional emotions associated with bereavement. When standing trial for killing the man in self-defence, he likewise betrays no emotion, as if passively accepting his fate.
Meursault’s crime in the eyes of society isn’t so much that he killed a man, it is that he demonstrated no emotion either in the aftermath or before when attending to his mother’s death. This lack of emotion bespeaks a refusal to conform, an abnormality, thus marking him out as a threat to the system and its moral verities.
Taken in context then, Julian Assange’s real crime lay in providing us with a glimpse into the workings of an America Empire whose crimes would shame all the devils in hell.
The man is a hero not a criminal, one deserving of the eternal gratitude of us all.
End.
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