Assange.

         Our mock democracy is always spouting about our free press, and how fortunate we are in having such freedom as to publish facts, no matter come what may. However, if you ever get round to publishing the dark deeds and violent doings of the state, then your freedom to publish rapidly evaporates.  When you make public the brutality and lying of the state, the state apparatus moves into overdrive, and ignores the information and shoots the messenger. That is the shape of our so called Western freedom. The case of Julian Assange is living proof of this methodology. The state will not tolerate anyone who dares to reveal the nasty, brutal activities it indulges in to protect and further its power and wealth. The UK judicial system, which comprises mainly of wealthy, privileged pro-establishment figures, today has by granting U$A the right to extradite Julian Assange, more or less sentenced a journalist to a life in an American prison, for telling the truth. Those who claim we live in a democracy, are either blind and naive, or one of the privileged parasites that control our lives. Where is the uproar from all those journalist that spout about our free press? If they are honest reporters, they could be next.   

Image courtesy of David G. Silvers, Cancillería del Ecuador - Wikimedia.

 

The following from Wikipedia:

             Julian Paul Assange (/əˈsɑːnʒ/;[3] born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Armyintelligence analystChelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video (April 2010),[4][5] the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.[6]
            In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct.[7] Assange said the allegations were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States over his role in the publication of secret American documents.[8][9] After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden, he breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012.[10] He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012[11] on the grounds of political persecution, with the presumption that if he were extradited to Sweden, he would be eventually extradited to the US.[12] Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019, saying their evidence had "weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question."[13]
         During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.[14]
         On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities.[15] The police were invited into the embassy and he was arrested.[16] He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison.[17] The United States government unsealed an indictment against Assange, related to the leaks provided by Manning. On 23 May 2019, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Editors from newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as press freedom organisations, criticised the government's decision to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, characterising it as an attack on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press.[18][19] On 4 January 2021, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States' request to extradite him and stated that doing so would be "oppressive" given his mental health.[20] On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail, pending an appeal by the United States.[21] On 10 December 2021 Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled that Assange can be extradited to the USA to face the charges.[22][23]
         Assange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019.[24]

 

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The Mockery of Democracy, And The Illusion of Freedom.

        We are told we live in a free society, we are a democracy, but are surrounded by CCTV cameras, every city has its prisons, and today, in the UK a man voted in on the say so of around  160,000 members of a club, can be the dictator of the country. He may be called the "Prime Minister" but he can act as a dictator and be cheered on by mass sections of the media and the public. Our mainstream media spews out a narrative according to the powers that be. dissent is labelled extremism and will be persecuted, free society, democracy, my arse.

          A free society is open to dissent, radical change, is free from persecution for seeking and telling the truth, its institutions and workings are open to scrutiny at all levels and all times, no decisions taken behind closed doors, do you see our society in that description, just think Julian Assange.

      The following article by Caitlin Johnstone:

      A Society Is Only As Free As Its Most Troublesome Political Dissident.

       You wouldn’t know it from any western mass media reporting as of this writing, but musician Roger Waters is about to perform the iconic Pink Floyd song “Wish You Were Here” in front of the office of British Home Secretary Priti Patel in order to draw attention to the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
         Earlier this year, billionaire Richard Branson staged a “Live Aid”-stye concert in Colombia near the Venezuela border with the purported goal of helping the Venezuelan people. In reality the stunt was nothing other than a ploy to advance the entirely false narratives that President Maduro was blockading bridges and turning away all foreign aid, and the funds raised ended up being embezzled by the Trump-backed regime change opposition group led by US puppet Juan Guaido. The British mass media, however, went absolutely bananas over the story. Each word in this sentence is hyperlinked to a different story about the concert from mass media outlets in the UK alone. And that was a concert on the other side of the planet, while the Assange event is happening right in London, in front of the office of a prominent British official, featuring one of the greatest British rock musicians of all time.
          This discrepancy tells you everything you need to know about the so-called “free press” in western society, and indeed about western society itself.
         A society is only as free as its most troublesome political dissident, which today means that you are only as free as Julian Assange. As long as you live in a society which can give rise to a coordinated multi-governmental campaign to lock up a journalist for the rest of his life based on bogus charges because he exposed US war crimes, you are not free, and you should not agree to pretend that you are.

          The old saying “actions speak louder than words” resonates with people because words can lie while actions cannot. And while the millionaire pundits of the billionaire media continually assure us with their words that we live in a free society, the actions of the people who wield official and unofficial power over us tell us that we actually live in a society which tortures and imprisons dissident journalists for telling inconvenient truths.
          The persecution of Julian Assange tells us so much more about our society than the authorized narratives we’re sold:
          The persecution of Julian Assange tells us about the real function of the mass media. The discrepancy between the news media coverage of the Assange benefit event and Richard Branson’s regime change propaganda party are just one of many, many examples we could discuss about the way those outlets reliably slant their coverage in favor of agendas which just so happen to align with the interests of the CIA and the US State Department. Every time Assange’s plight makes headlines, social media lights up with ambitious blue-checkmarked media aspirants posting snarky quips about him in an attempt to show the operators of the billionaire media just how far they’ll go to defend the status quo. We are told with words that the mass media are here to tell us the truth about what’s going on in the world, but we are told with actions the exact opposite.
           The persecution of Julian Assange tells us about the mechanics of empire. Assange was pried out of the embassy and imprisoned by an extremely obvious collaboration between the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador, and Australia, yet they each pretended that they were acting as separate, sovereign nations completely independently of one another. Sweden pretended it was deeply concerned about rape allegations, the UK pretended it was deeply concerned about a bail violation, Ecuador pretended it was deeply concerned about skateboarding and embassy cat hygiene, the US pretended it was deeply concerned about the particulars of the way Assange helped Chelsea Manning cover her tracks, Australia pretended it was too deeply concerned about honoring the sovereign affairs of these other countries to intervene on behalf of its citizen, and it all converged in a way that just so happens to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts. You see this same dynamic constantly, whether it’s with military interventions, trade deals, or narrative-shaping campaigns against non-aligned governments.
           The persecution of Julian Assange tells us about the kind of society we actually live in. We are inundated from early childhood with feel-good slogans about freedom and democracy, which we are told must be spread to everyone on earth as forcefully as necessary even if we have to kill every last one of them. In reality we live in a society made of lies and led by liars, who violently persecute anyone who exposes the truth. These people are your oppressors. These people are your prison wardens. Their sneering faces tell you that you are free from behind prison bars, and that they’ll end you if you disagree.

This is going to have to change.

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