YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH…

Paul Edwards

Despite the imperial media efforts to slander his image and bury his judicial torture, Assange was fortunate to have a global network of dedicated followers who never wavered through the years.

Julian Assange is free.  After thirteen years of unrelenting and unwarranted persecution, nearly seven confined in an embassy by colluding, criminal governments, and five more in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in England, he is free.

In exchange for his freedom and the dropping of a laundry list of baseless, bogus charges against him by the U.S government, he was forced, for his freedom, to plead guilty to one: conspiring to acquire and disclose U.S. national defense documents.

In an era when the United States has committed a vast catalog of vile, unthinkable horrors, and amassed a catalog of the most flagrantly, damningly criminal humanitarian abuses of any empire in the history of the world, the sadistic persecution of Assange stands out as uniquely vicious and perverse.

Assange’s offense, the act that cost him fourteen years of his life, unimaginable mental suffering, and some physical damage, was to collect and release incontestable evidence that showed the world the moral putrescence of The American Empire in action.

The most visually shocking element was a video, taken by the perpetrators’ cameras, of what came to be called “the collateral murder” event in which American military helicopters machine-gunned unarmed civilians on the totally baseless supposition that they were enemies of the American occupation.  It is so clearly an irresponsible assassination that no defense of it is possible.  It is just one of the countless ghastly murders committed routinely by ignorant, indoctrinated, sub-human, American grunts.

This was included in a dump of horrific information, including the Afghanistan and Iraq “war logs”, acquired from Bradley, later Chelsea, Manning, a young Army intelligence operative whose conscience simply could not permit concealment of American brutality, and falsity in covering their crimes.  She was convicted by a military court and sentenced to 35 years in prison for her courageous part in exposing American war crimes, and later released by the Obama after seven years served.

Another major Wikileaks dump that stunned the rulers of the American National Security State was the “Vault 7” dump.  This detailed, comprehensively, the fact that the CIA was performing electronic surveillance and cyber warfare on its own citizens.  It exposed the vast array of intrusive, clandestine systems and tools the agency used to spy on citizens through their phones and other devices, and prompted porcine Secretary Pompeo to label Wikileaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service”.

A third source, among the many that threatened the American government and its political apparatus, was the dump of the emails of the Democratic National Committee that showed it had been run as organizational support for Hilary Clinton’s campaign, and to shut down the challenge of Bernie Sanders.  It was the reality exposed in this release that turned the entire Democrat Party into a vengeful and dishonest enemy of Assange.

The common characteristic of all Wikileaks’ efforts was to shine the light of truth on what the U.S. government was doing while concealing those activities from their own people.  In the corrupt and diseased view of the rulers of The Empire that America had long become, this was deeply criminal and could not be allowed.  The rulers, the Capitalist elite and its lackeys, are not wrong in fearing such exposure, because if the American people were ever to know how corrupt, dishonest, cruel and murderous their whole leadership caste has become, it would not last until sundown.

The release, or what might better be called the escape, of Julian Assange, by no means signals, or even begins to suggest, the prospect of some ethical new day in The Empire.  The Empire suffered a serious and humiliating defeat in being forced, against its will, to find a way to be rid of him, whom they had failed to “terminate with extreme prejudice”, as the old CIA phrase had it.  It could only tolerate this shameful loss of face because it saved it from the far greater one which would have buried them in guilt and infamy if they had brought him to trial.  Then the world would have seen the depth of their villainy and degradation paraded nakedly and hence made undeniable.  So no, there is no question of benign justice in allowing him to walk free.

Rather, the end of the long ordeal of Assange simply shows how fearful and hostile this stumbling, failing empire is of losing its strangle-hold on its citizens’ minds and loyalties, and how violent, devious, and unscrupulous it will be in order to continue to rape and destroy the world for the detestable Capitalist cell that controls it.

Assange’s great crime, in the bloodshot, clouded eyes of aging empire, was his courage, for which they hoped to kill him.  They planned to, if they couldn’t get prison and solitary to do it.  The comedy, insofar that the idea may be admitted, is that, like so much else that The Empire has plotted and gloated over lately, the sorry third-string minds of the morally stunted yo-yos that run it have buggered it up completely, and ended up tarred and feathered, pants down and shortcomings on display.

Assange’s freedom is a moral triumph for humanity.  Whatever else may come in the precipitous decline of The Empire and its noisy Lilliputians, whatever new and ignominious exercises in impotence it may perpetrate, we are entitled, indeed, compelled, to celebrate this one, brief, shining moment when, in the face of determined and dedicated malevolence and malign intent, a man of integrity and noble purpose was still able to confront and assault a monstrous engine of destruction and prevail.

Hail, Julian!  You, the Spartacus of your era, have fought for us all and won!