How to react to the rendition of Julian Assange

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Did you fail the Assange test ?

Caitlin Johnstone :

"Julian Assange's arrest is a moment of mortal danger for true journalism - of the kind that holds power to account. Now is the time to judge those who profess to be journalists. Are they ready to defend the right to tell uncomfortable truths, or are they simply empire loyalists?

This is no time for journalists to equivocate about Assange or hold their counsel. If you believe in a free press and the right to make the powerful uncomfortable, you have to speak up. If you don't, don't expect anyone to take you seriously as a journalist ever again.

[...] If we can’t pass this test, the oligarchs and the opaque government agencies which are allied with them will march us into extinction or Orwellian dystopia, and there’ll be no tool in our toolbox to stop them."

The United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, Nils Melzer :

regardless of one’s personal view of Assange, “from a human rights perspective, he was basically doing the same thing that investigative journalists do all over the world,” by publishing information that states try to conceal. The national security implications of the charges, combined with the fact that the US practices the death penalty, is “obviously a very serious concern.”

Maria Zakharova, April 11 at 11:53 AM :

The hand of "democracy" squeezes the throat of freedom.

Margarita Simonian, April 11 at 2:34 PM:

"The most obvious verdict to the shame that the world's media have turned into is that we are the only ones who have lifted Assange's arrest today. Although everybody's been waiting for him to be expelled for days. And now they have to show us our footage.

CNN and The Guardian still have the shamelessness to call us and ask, and how it happened to be just us.

Because you're a shameless, hypocritical servant to your establishment, not a journalist. That's why it happened."

Bloomberg :

"The dramatic moment when on Thursday the police dragged Julian Assange in handcuffs from the Ecuadorian embassy in central London, was captured on camera by only one film crew - the Russian one.

The footage on which the founder of WikiLeaks is dragged to the police car seven years after the start of the confrontation with the British authorities, belongs to the news agency Ruptly. The head office of the agency is located in Berlin, but this organization is a subsidiary of the RT TV channel, which is funded by the Russian authorities.

None of the leading British channels - neither the BBC, nor ITV, nor Channel 4, nor Sky News - have been able to capture what happened just a few steps away from Hyde Park.

Now the media around the world are forced to pay Ruptly for the right to show these images."

The only printed newspaper I found in Paris with Assange on its frontpage :

And much before them :

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." 

– F.A.W. Bailey, 'Frederick Douglass' (1818 - 1895).

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice." 

– A.I. Solzhenitsyn, (1918 – 2008) ; Letter to three students, October 1967.

"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." 

– A.I. Solzhenitsyn, (1918 – 2008) ; The Gulag Archipelago, 1958-68.

"The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme -- only not through me. But it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph! Visibly, irrefutably for all! Lies can prevail against much in this world, but never against art." 

– A.I. Solzhenitsyn, (1918 – 2008) ; Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1970.

"If you can't eliminate injustice, at least tell everyone about it."
– A. Shariati, (1933 - 1977).