By John Pilger
An abridged version of a speech John
Pilger gave in Sydney on March 10
March 20, 2023:
Information Clearing House
-- I have known Julian
Assange since I first interviewed him in London
in 2010. I immediately liked his dry, dark sense
of humor, often dispensed with an infectious
giggle. He is a proud outsider: sharp and
thoughtful. We have become friends, and I have
sat in many courtrooms listening to the tribunes
of the state try to silence him and his moral
revolution in journalism.
My own high point was when a judge in the
Royal Courts of Justice leaned across his bench
and growled at me: “You are just a peripatetic
Australian like Assange.” My name was on a list
of volunteers to stand bail for Julian, and this
judge spotted me as the one who had reported his
role in the notorious case of the expelled
Chagos Islanders. Unintentionally, he delivered
me a compliment.
I saw Julian in Belmarsh not long ago. We
talked about books and the oppressive idiocy of
the prison: the happy-clappy slogans on the
walls, the petty punishments; they still won’t
let him use the gym. He must exercise alone in a
cage-like area where there is a sign that warns
about keeping off the grass. But there is no
grass. We laughed; for a brief moment, some
things didn’t seem too bad.
The laughter is a shield, of course. When the
prison guards began to jangle their keys, as
they like to do, indicating our time was up, he
fell quiet. As I left the room he held his fist
high and clenched as he always does. He is the
embodiment of courage.
Those who are the antithesis of Julian: in
whom courage is unheard of, along with principle
and honour, stand between him and freedom. I am
not referring to the Mafia regime in Washington
whose pursuit of a good man is meant as a
warning to us all, but rather to those who still
claim to run a just democracy in Australia.
Anthony Albanese was mouthing his favourite
platitude, “enough is enough,” long before he
was elected prime minister of Australia last
year. He gave many of us precious hope,
including Julian’s family. As prime minister he
added weasel words about “not sympathising” with
what Julian had done. Apparently we had to
understand his need to cover his appropriated
posteria in case Washington called him to order.
We knew it would take exceptional
political if not moral courage for Albanese
to stand up in the Australian Parliament—the
same Parliament that will disport itself before
Joe Biden in May—and say:
“As prime minister, it is my government’s
responsibility to bring home an Australian
citizen who is clearly the victim of a great,
vindictive injustice: a man who has been
persecuted for the kind of journalism that is a
true public service, a man who has not lied, or
deceived—like so many of his counterfeit in the
media, but has told people the truth about how
the world is run.”
“I call on the United States,” a courageous
and moral Prime Minister Albanese might say,
a’to withdraw its extradition application: to
end the malign farce that has stained Britain’s
once admired courts of justice and to allow the
release of Julian Assange unconditionally to his
family. For Julian to remain in his cell at
Belmarsh is an act of torture, as the United
Nations Raporteur has called it. It is how a
dictatorship behaves.”
Alas, my daydream about Australia doing right
by Julian has reached its limits. The teasing of
hope by Albanese is now close to a betrayal for
which the historical memory will not forget him,
and many will not forgive him. What, then, is he
waiting for?
Remember that Julian was granted political
asylum by the Ecuadorean government in 2013
largely because his own government had abandoned
him. That alone ought to bring shame on those
responsible: namely the Labor government of
Julia Gillard.
So eager was Gillard to collude with the
Americans in shutting down WikiLeaks for its
truth-telling that she wanted the Australian
Federal Police to arrest Assange and take away
his passport for what she called his “illegal”
publishing. The AFP pointed out that they had no
such powers: Assange had committed no crime.
It is as if you can measure Australia’s
extraordinary surrender of sovereignty by the
way it treats Julian Assange. Gillard’s
pantomime grovelling to both houses of the US
Congress is cringing theatre on YouTube.
Australia, she repeated, was America’s “great
mate.” Or was it “little mate”?
Her foreign minister was Bob Carr, another
Labor machine politician whom WikiLeaks exposed
as an American informant, one of Washington’s
useful boys in Australia. In his published
diaries, Carr boasted knowing Henry Kissinger;
indeed the Great Warmonger invited the foreign
minister to go camping in the California woods,
we learn.
Australian governments have repeatedly
claimed that Julian has received full consular
support, which is his right. When his lawyer
Gareth Peirce and I met the Australian consul
general in London, Ken Pascoe, I asked him,
“What do you know of the Assange case.”
“Just what I read in the papers,” he replied
with a laugh.
Today, Prime Minister Albanese is preparing
this country for a ridiculous American-led war
with China. Billions of dollars are to be spent
on a war machine of submarines, fighter jets and
missiles that can reach China. Salivating
warmongering by “experts”on the country’s oldest
newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald,
and the Melbourne Age is a national
embarrassment, or ought to be. Australia is a
country with no enemies and China is its biggest
trading partner.
This deranged servility to aggression is laid
out in an extraordinary document called the
US-Australia Force Posture Agreement. This
states that American troops have “exclusive
control over the access to [and] use of”
armaments and material that can be used in
Australia in an aggressive war.
This almost certainly includes nuclear
weapons. Albanese’s foreign minister, Penny
Wong, “respects” America on this, but clearly
has no respect for Australians’ right to know.
Such obsequiousness was always there—not
untypical of a settler nation that still has not
made peace with the Indigenous origins and
owners of where they live—but now it is
dangerous.
China as the Yellow Peril fits Australia's
history of racism like a glove. However, there
is another enemy they don’t talk about. It is
us, the public. It is our right to know. And our
right to say no.
Since 2001, some 82 laws have been enacted in
Australia to take away tenuous rights of
expression and dissent and protect the cold war
paranoia of an increasingly secret state, in
which the head of the main intelligence agency,
ASIO, lectures on the disciplines of “Australian
values.” There are secret courts and secret
evidence, and secret miscarriages of justice.
Australia is said to be an inspiration for the
master across the Pacific.
Bernard Collaery, David McBride and Julian
Assange—deeply moral men who told the truth—are
the enemies and victims of this paranoia. They,
not Edwardian soldiers who marched for the King,
are our true national heroes.
On Julian Assange, the Prime Minister has two
faces. One face teases us with hope of his
intervention with Biden that will lead to
Julian's freedom. The other face ingratiates
itself with “POTUS” and allows the Americans to
do what they want with its vassal: to lay down
targets that could result in catastrophe for all
of us.
Will Albanese back Australia or Washington on
Julian Assange? If he is “sincere,” as the more
doe-eyed Labor Party supporters say, what is he
waiting for? If he fails to secure Julian’s
release, Australia will cease to be sovereign.
We will be little Americans. Official.
This is not about the survival of a free
press. There is no longer a free press. There
are refuges in the samizdat, such as
this site. The paramount issue is justice and
our most precious human right: to be free.
John Pilger is an award-winning
Australian investigative reporter and
documentary filmmaker. He has made over 60
documentaries since 1970, including
Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War
on Terror (2003), The War You
Don’t See (2010), Utopia
(2013) and The Coming War on China
(2016).
https://johnpilger.com/
Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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