prone Britannia
offers sacrifice of Assange
Freedom is easily lost but hard won. If we hope to keep it, we need to know what those we let govern do in our name. We have to protect our Fourth Estate and speak out, while we still can.
When I saw Assange arrested [1] I saw freedom dying, and felt afraid. Yet the next day's headlines were comforting, the news streams flattering with their usual voyeurism - it's our right to judge others, not theirs to judge us.
Elected rulers, encouraging the illusion that they're just servants and democracy is inalienable, tolerate complaining - while to protect our freedom they remove basic rights ! [2] We say it's dictatorships that lie, and deny human rights, yet it is our democracies practicing and supporting torture, cruel-imprisonment, show-trials and no-trials [3][4] And while journalists around the world celebrate Assange's journalism - with awards, and by using his sources - [6][7][8][9] its our leaders, ruling he is not a journalist, who imprison him, while continuing to mouth press freedom! [5]
However you might judge their characters, Julian Assange showed us what whistleblower Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning had seen, and it was shocking. They were the mirror in which we saw the hypocrisy of our civilisation, raw and unedited, [10] our deep systemic involvement in terror undeniable.
Those were, and are our soldiers, our boys and girls, active or complicit in torture and murder, under our command, obedient to the orders of leaders we elect [11] - of those Assange et al. has got seriously miffed. [12] Maybe it feels comforting being the bully, but as the president of Tunisia, who himself was tortured, said in a TV interview with Assange: 'Torture breaks the torturers too.' [13] And it is; it is breaking us, and our society.
Fleeing from bogeymen and terrorists [13] we're surrendering our rights. As corporations fuse with governments, Big data and the Internet of Things [16] allows them to co-opt every purchase we make, and builds a new, predictive policing [14][15] to make Orwell's dystopia a reality.
Freedom is easily lost but hard won. To have any hope of keeping it we have to know what those we let govern do in our name. Those journalists who our leaders sanction are not enough. We have to protect our Fourth Estate, [17] and speak out while we still can.
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me. - pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984)
references
1. Fox News, April 2019, 'WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrested after Ecuador withdraws asylum.' 2. UK Constitutional Law Association, 'Turning out the lights? The Justice and Security Act 2013.' - 'During the final debate on the measure in the House of Lords (26 Mar. 13 Col. 1032), Lord Brown, the recently retired Law Lord and former Intelligence Services Commissioner, warned that the "legislation involves so radical a departure from the cardinal principle of open justice in civil proceedings, so sensitive an aspect of the court's processes" '. 3. Liberty, 'Closed Courts and Secret Evidence.' 4. The New Yorker, April 2019, 'Guantanamo's Darkest Secret.' 5. H.M. Government UK, July 2019, 'UK and Canada lead global campaign to defend media freedom, to improve the safety of journalists who report across the world.' 6. Wikipedia, 'Julian_Assange, Honours and awards.' 7. Media, November 2018, 'Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism, removed.' 8. Courage Foundation, 'About - The Courage Foundation, and the WikiLeaks Defence Fund' 9. EUL/NGL, European Parliamentary Group,, April 2019, 'Winners of GUE/NGL Award for "Journalists, Whistleblowers and Defenders of the Right to Information"' 10. The Telegraph, '"Crazy-Horse" helicopter in string of fatal attacks in Iraq.' 11. Liberty, 'UK complicity in torture', and extraordinary rendition. 12. Independent, May 2016, 'CIA destroys 6700 page torture report.' 13. Digital Journal, 'The World Tomorrow - Episode 3' 14. Wired, April 2019, 'The grim reality of life under Gangs Matrix, London's controversial predictive policing tool' 15. Amnesty International, May 2018, 'Trapped in the Matrix' 16. ▲ Wikipedia, 'Big data' - "..Big data is being increasingly gathered by information sensing Internet of Things devices, such as mobile phones, personal computers, satellites, software loggers, cameras, microphones, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, and wireless sensor networks. Cyber-physical systems will transform the collected data into actionable information, and eventually interfere with the physical assets. In addition to its vital role in predictive maintenance, it will also be the interface between humans and the cyber world..." Wikipedia, 'The Internet of Things.'
17. Wikipedia, 'The networked Fourth Estate' - 'in the United States vs. PFC Bradley E. Manning trial: "the set of practices, organizing models, and technologies that are associated with the free press and provide a public check on the branches of government"' 18. Amnesty International, Annual Report, UK 2017/18.
elegy
Prone Britannia, Britannia is enslaved, while dreaming of sovereignty our rights were waived. [18]