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.”
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).
– A. Shariati, (1933 - 1977).
