My Steemit series of "Being Julian Assange" continues, with additional new content and insights. Enjoy!
Hi everyone!
It has been 10 days now since I posted Part 1 of this series. I'm so sorry that I have been so long between updates. I had intended to get this out much faster but was understandably sidetracked by efforts to #ReconnectJulian and the resulting 10-hour Online Vigil that we launched in response.
As in Part One, my comments and annotations appear in italics and brackets, in the below text. Without further adieu, here is Part Two:
Being Julian Assange: Part Two
Includes Sub-sections:
- Talking A Man To Death
- Stripping The Target
Linguistics:
Talking A Man To Death
Stripping The Target
Talking A Man To Death
There is something morbidly voyeuristic about the vast majority of the conversations about Julian Assange that are occurring in the activism and journalism worlds of late.
While many of their harshest critics hypocritically profess ideological support for the world's foremost publisher, too few of us are meaningfully acting to free him. More are tricked, provoked or incentivised into endlessly debating among our social circles what I can only describe as relative frivolities - what Assange said about such and such, or to who; what Assange thinks about this or that, what Assange did or didn't do - while his body slowly decays in front of the entire world.
By design, these debates create social fissures and fracture points. They amount to both a distraction from the obvious urgency of addressing the larger circumstance of his seemingly inevitable decline and a delaying tactic, creating a pretext that prevents us from acting, and serves to justify our inaction.
Because doing nothing is a tantalisingly easy option. Taking action, requires guts. Blood, sweat and tears.
The lack of cohesive effort to pressure the great powers persecuting Julian coalesce with the absence of meaningful movement-building to achieve it. The lack of unity of purpose to save the life of someone who has himself saved the lives of many others, including some we hold most dear, has us all staring into the abyss of the greatest moral failure of this generation.
What we are collectively playing out is the personification of Bob Marley's "how long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?" Except even more perversely, we aren't just looking. We are, as a community and a society, already dissecting Assange like a cadaver. We are picking over his bones like vultures, while he is still clinging to life.
It is despicable and disgusting to witness.
[Author's note: So much of the public conversation about Assange is diversionary. In the above section, I was trying to make the point that I did again in recent interviews with HA Goodman, and on Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp, that what Julian does or doesn't think, or doesn't or doesn't say, have no bearing on his fundamental legal human rights. He deserves those whether or not people like him. So often, our opinion of Assange (and this is true of other public figures) is based on a manufactured picture presented to us by media, rather than on the merits of the individual, which can be easily obscured by the powers that be. The 'dissecting Assange like a cadaver/while he is still clinging to life' metaphor was a vibrant image that came to me one day and stuck with me throughout the writing of this article. It very much does feel like corporate media, and the sectors of the public who are egged on by them to do so, have been 'picking over [Assange's] bones like vultures' for a number of years now and to me, it is indeed 'despicable and disgusting to witness'. I don't want to be any part of such malignant behaviour. Thus I felt morally compelled to counteract the false narratives with the truth-telling evident throughout 'Being Julian Assange'.]
Stripping The Target
Assange's story has gone beyond the stuff of books, movies or legend: one man altering the course of media, politics, technology, society, forever.
As if being the target of a Pentagon manhunt in 2010 didn't put Assange far enough up the deep state shitlist, in 2017 WikiLeaks was declared a priority target for the CIA.
Yes, the agency infamous for destroying the lives of millions of people by engaging in every kind of malignant behaviour evidenced in human history, including countless assassinations and the active destabilisation of dozens of countries, now uses its press conferences to announce that the target they are after is not a despot, not an arms dealer, a war criminal or a drug trafficker - but a publisher.
A journalist.
While the sanctity of the Embassy in which Julian resides remains intact, this is only due to the thin hanging threads of the few remaining respected international laws that govern its existence. In a geopolitical climate in which almost every international covenant has been violated, even this sanctuary provided by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the Ecuadorian people, cannot be taken for granted.
Unable to directly abscond with his physical body in the near term, the powers that have been, for years, overtly threatening Assange's life have instead turned their attentions to undermining other aspects of his existence: his relationships, his finances, his organisational affiliations, his achievements, his reputation, his ability to communicate and even the internal affairs of the country which has granted him refuge.
Part of the Divide and Conquer playbook is to fracture natural allies. We see this in the determination to sever the relationships between our most significant whistleblowers so that they can never become a united force.
Manning, encouraged to distance herself from Snowden because Snowden didn't stick around to face charges and/or torture and/or death. Brown, egged on to hate on Assange. On and on it goes.
[Author's Note: The scale of Julian Assange's achievements is so vast and self-evident, yet those who oppose him relentlessly attempt to strip him of his import and significance. Even with intelligence agencies openly proclaiming Assange and WikiLeaks to be a priority target, the realisation that the targeting of Assange/WikiLeaks and the constant smearing of Assange/WikiLeaks are connected, seems to escape the notice of many. Likewise, if you have not been subjected to the (understatement) unpleasantries of being a target, it is difficult to understand the holistic nature of the targeting. They really do come at every single aspect of your life, simultaneously. It is a deliberate attempt to overwhelm the target, to render them impotent, to send them reeling into a spiral of despair. These agencies are not joking when they say that they seek to destroy their targets, and in practice, no morality, legality or oversight limits their methods of doing so. It is no-holds barred blatant assault, through all the avenues of the state, judicial and extrajudicial means. While the agencies operate under a pretext of public mandate, no public good is evidenced in the outcomes of their immoral deeds. The planet we inhabit is falling apart around us, environmentally, economically, socially and politically and the actions of this unelected 'Deep State' are only serving to exacerbate, not prevent, that devastation. Those few defenders of the public interest who remain, are all that stands in their way. Which is precisely why we must defend our last heroes standing, such as Julian Assange.]
Part Three of Being Julian Assange will follow some time in the next few days! I hope you enjoyed this second taste.
Love,
Suzie
By Suzie Dawson
Twitter: @Suzi3D
Official Website: Suzi3d.com
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