Posted on 01/02/2021 6:06:12 AM PST by MtnClimber
The real measure of how free is a society is not how its mainstream, well-behaved ruling class servants are treated, but the fate of its actual dissidents.
Persecution is not typically doled out to those who recite mainstream pieties, or refrain from posing meaningful threats to those who wield institutional power, or obediently stay within the lines of permissible speech and activism imposed by the ruling class.
Those who render themselves acquiescent and harmless that way will — in every society, including the most repressive — usually be free of reprisals. They will not be censored or jailed. They will be permitted to live their lives largely unmolested by authorities, while many will be well-rewarded for this servitude. Such individuals will see themselves as free because, in a sense, they are: they are free to submit, conform and acquiesce. And if they do so, they will not even realize, or at least not care, and may even regard as justifiable, that those who refuse this Orwellian bargain they have embraced (“freedom” in exchange for submission) are crushed with unlimited force.
Those who do not seek to meaningfully dissent or subvert power will usually deny — because they do not perceive — that such dissent and subversion are, in fact, rigorously prohibited. They will continue to believe blissfully that the society in which they live guarantees core civic freedoms — of speech, of press, of assembly, of due process
SNIP
That is what makes the ongoing imprisonment of Julian Assange not only a grotesque injustice but also a vital, crystal-clear prism for seeing the fundamental fraud of U.S. narratives about who is free and who is not, about where tyranny reigns and where it does not.
Assange has been imprisoned for almost two years. He was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London by British police on April 11, 2019. That was possible only because the U.S., U.K. and Spanish governments coerced Ecuador’s meek President, Lenin Moreno, to withdraw the asylum extended to Assange seven years earlier by his staunch sovereignty-defending predecessor, Rafael Correa.
The U.S. and British governments hate Assange because of his revelations that exposed their lies and crimes, while Spain was enraged by WikiLeaks’ journalistic coverage of and activism against Madrid’s 2018 violent repression of the Catalan independence movement. So they bullied and bribed Moreno to throw Assange to the wolves — i.e., to them. And ever since, Assange has been held in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, a facility used for terrorist suspects that is so harsh that the BBC asked in 2004 whether it is “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay.”
Assange is not currently imprisoned because he was convicted of a crime. Two weeks after he was dragged out of the embassy, he was found guilty of the minor offense of “skipping bail” and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison, the maximum penalty allowed by law. He fully served that sentence as of April of this year, and was thus scheduled to be released, facing no more charges. But just weeks before his release date, the U.S. Justice Department unveiled an indictment of Assange arising out of WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables and war logs that revealed massive corruption by numerous governments, Bush and Obama officials, and various corporations around the world.
Exposing the corruption of powerful people will get you put in jail, or worse.
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But its gotta be done. The rocks themselves will cry out.
He is a political prisoner, he’s experiencing a crime against humanity.
Trump sure knows how to pick losers in his DOJ. He could have ended the Persecution of Assange with ten minutes and a pen.
Come Monday, we will see if the Co-onspirators in this travesty via Judge Baraitser prevail.
At some point, I fear I will be replacing the #FreeAssange decal on my rear windshield with a #MyCountryKilledAssange one.
He’s lucky he’s still alive given that he crossed Hillary.
If you remember she did suggest in a meeting that he be killed with a drone. Everyone thought she was joking and she corrected them and said she was being serious.
Greenwald is quickly becoming one of my favorite journalists/writers.
Total agree. If you fight Leviathan it will smash you. All good men need to realize that we are at war. We didn’t start it, but it is at your door.
Clear to me, there is no law is USA at all. Without lawful representation there is no government over We-The-People.
USA is being conquered by the tyrannical beast that lives in DC.
Trump should pardon Assange. He is a journalist who is guilty of getting a hold of information that embarrassed the government. That is not a crime.
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