By LUIS VARESE*
The battle for Assange's freedom is the battle for our own freedom to think, to express opinions, to criticize, to publicize, to disagree
A judge at the Westminster Magistracy Court sent, to be signed by the British Home Secretary, the extradition order against Julian Assange. They have approximately two months to decide and their defense, led by Baltazar Garzon, to appeal. Assange faces up to 175 years in US prisons for the "crime" of denouncing war crimes, assassinations, clandestine arrests, torture and infidels of US ambassadors against their closest allies or "friendly" countries. Wikileaks, Assange's news agency, collected this information from contributors, some anonymous, some public, and sold it to prestigious newspapers around the world, such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, magazine Der Spiegel, and many others around the world.
Julian Assange was arrested and tortured in London, where he committed no crime. He is on remand for extradition and has been in a high security prison for three years. We have already seen what the judiciary means at the service of the powerful, the cases of Lula, Correa, Glass, Cristina.
Assange was handed over to British authorities by Lenin Moreno, whose actions are already condemned on all fronts on which he intervened. In this specific case, he ordered the intervention in Ecuadorian territory, opening the door of the Embassy and violating the sovereign right of Asylum, granted by the Government of President Rafael Correa.
“When the door of the Embassy in London was opened and the police entered to receive Julian Assange, at the hands of Ecuadorian officials, one of the saddest and most tragic episodes of the Right of Asylum and of the most terrible events against International Law and Freedom of Freedom began. Press…". (Luis Varese, Alai, 2020)
Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel have in their hands the extradition and conviction of Assange, but not only that, they have in their hands the decision to generate jurisprudence on freedom of the press, the backbone of democracy, of which they are so proud.
The European Union has already demonstrated that it does not respect this universal right by preventing the reading, in its territory, of today's Russia and the portal Sputnik, as well as other channels or means connected with information from the point of view of the Russian government. In fact, it was thanks to RT that we could see Assange's surrender to the British police.
Continuing to think that it doesn't concern us, that it's something far away, or that Julian Assange is going to prison for being a hacker, is to put ourselves in the shackles of fascist obscurantism that big capital wants to impose on us. We are very far from understanding what is happening and the level of control that the world's powerful want to have over our minds. The thousand billionaires.
The battle for Julian Assange's freedom is the battle for our own freedom to think, to express our opinions, to criticize, to divulge, to disagree. It is a collective banner of women and men, young and old, who believe in the rights of the people.
These days, Julian Assange is facing freedom or death. It's not a slogan. It's a fact. We are confronting, nowadays, Liberty and life against obscurantism and death. Everything is intimately and violently connected. From disinformation against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which are presented as our enemies, to making us believe that giving arms to the Ukrainian government is fighting for peace. Those who were and are presented as the champions of democracy, Europe and the United States, today their rulers, want to move towards fascism and even Nazism. There is no need to fear, but there is no need to hesitate to organize in defense of the freedoms won over decades of struggle.
Our lives are in danger, not only because of war and confrontation over the new world order and geopolitical reordering, “the counter-hegemonic response”, launched by Russia, which causes so much tragedy, but also because of the destruction of life on the Planet and the systematic restriction of the freedoms we conquered.
In Nossamérica, we are making progress in the reconquest of popular democracies, let's not allow the cavernous right to once again take the reins that lead to hunger and the annihilation of our peoples.
* Luis Varese is a journalist and anthropologist.
