I was gonna write something else. I can't make it matter, though.
I'm listening to Susan Sarandon talking on some podcast. Following the Assange Defense livestream.
That at this moment has 16 people on. It's been going for about an hour now. Sixteen people. And I keep switching back to it, wondering what's more important right now?. People gotta do shit, obviously. I gotta work. I'm supposed to meet a friend. Both things I'm normally excited about, but now, I just deflate thinking about them -- isn't it all so fickle? Meaningless? How can you write about paper eggs or enjoy a nice little overpriced cuppa when this man, this most important journalist of our time, is running the very real risk of dying in prison?
Not much is heard about Julian Assange in my native Romania. I've never heard of a single protest being held here. I remember attending a protest a few years ago in London. Couldn't have been more than a few dozen people. If that. It was heartbreaking to watch, and that's in the heart of the UK, where Assange is held. If you can barely get a couple dozen people out there, what hope do you have for protests around the world?
Though they are happening over the next couple of days, as the final hearing in Assange's extradition case commences.
I was going to say "as Julian faces", but it's incorrect. Though obviously, Julian Assange is the man standing before the very real threat of extradition, our whole world should be facing this, and it's astounding and infuriating that it's not. That even now, there's 15 people watching that livestream. That tomorrow, much as hope, I doubt there'll be more than a few hundred people protesting across the world.
I can't understand. Why does nobody care?
I mean, I don't delude myself. I've seen enough public protests to understand that a few hundred (or even a few thousand people) in the street won't truly make a difference. But at least with so many other matters, people talked about it. For years now, there's been little more than radio silence in the Assange case.
And our world, as a whole, seems to have adopted this "oh well" attitude about the whole thing. Oh well?!
It's not free press you should be worrying about
The whole story has been unfolding across many many years. The Collateral Murder video was publicized by WikiLeaks in 2010, so 14 years ago now. And I remember hearing , in the earlier and mid-2010s, a big deal was made about the "future of the press" and the freedom of speech of journalists and what Assange's case (and naturally, the Manning and Snowden cases) meant for the future of journalism.
An astonishing and deeply depressing thing seems to have happened, though. So many people seem to have lost their faith in journalism and the press, following the years of pandemic and the many political debacles in the US, as well as here in Europe.
Free press, sadly, is a joke. Which, obviously, was more or less true before this time, but as Joe Rogan points out, the pandemic woke up or at least shook a lot of people. Arguably, a lot more of us are "conspiracy theorists" and skeptical about the press and the government than there were before the pandemic.
In other words, the press is fucked. Where does that leave the Assange case, though?
People used to say, if Assange is extradited, it will be a death-blow to journalism. I agree. But it seems journalism, for the most part, has gone and killed itself already.
I think the outcome of tomorrow's hearing could be more than a death-blow to journalism. It could be a death-blow against humankind.
And much of me thinks we're fucked, anyway. The Assange case is essentially saying look, they're gonna put this man in the scariest prison on earth for telling the truth. For pointing out how men hired by the US government massacred citizens and journalists on a fucking whim.
Yeah, that's atrocious. But look where we are now. They're sending police to people's homes for saying shit others don't like on Twitter. During the pandemic, people got arrested for going out of their own houses.
It seems to me, irrespective of tomorrow's outcome, the death-blow has already been struck. I'm not the praying kind, yet I'm calling on all our gods to save Julian tomorrow. But much as I'm invested in this, I keep thinking tomorrow isn't really about the future of journalism, free press, or freedom of speech. Not anymore. We lost those, maybe in the 14 years of disinterest and passivity that have gone by since WikiLeaks first broke. In the 12 years since Julian Assange first entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For those boys, for Stella, and indeed for our world (because it's still important to our world), I hope against hope they don't fucking extradite him tomorrow.
Alas, I think we're fucked, anyway. And we fucked ourselves. By not caring when we should have. That is how they win. Not in passing sentence, but in making you not care when you really fucking should.
