‘There are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where decades happen’ – Lenin
After all these years, what will Julian do now? Get well, if that is possible? You see how quickly they put him on a plane out of Britain, a release to minimum security to Micronesia, another US base in the Pacific. Britain with their righteous judges are rid of the Wikileakes co-founder. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
But is it? Assange has to plead guilty to ‘conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents’ in the US district court for the Northern Mariana Islands. This is how the US justice department dispenses with claims that the Wikileaks of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan were ‘journalism’.
Spare a thought for political prisoners everywhere … especially in Palestine 🇵🇸 itself, a former British colony now under Israeli occupation. How many years has Marwan Baghouti been tortured in Israeli prisons? And the thousands being tortured now? Or should I use the words of the Americans, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.
Every day, we hear of Israel’s programs of systematic torture of Palestinian prisoners in administrative detention (this term was an invention of the British during the mandate period pre the Nakba).
Think back over the many years of defending Julian Assange, is this all people get? No change in the system, whistleblowers in prison, in exile. Here in Brisbane, Magandjin, the campaign for Julian was nearly exhausted save for a few hardy souls who came out of the anti-war movement here in Queensland. And, in a way, Julian was born into the peace movement when his mother stayed at Emmanuel College at the University of Queensland just prior to his birth at a time of the anti-Vietnam war moratorium campaign.
Last Train to Mirabad
Julian Assange took on the US
Wikileak'd ten years war in Afghanistan
Julian roams downstairs in Woolwich Court
Thinking what would Pilger and Ellsberg do now?
Waiting to be taken through tunnel to Belmarsh Prison
Where ghosts of IRA meet
Ronnie Biggs in special secure unit
No Wikileaks today about Sapper Jamie Larcombe
No mention of his Afghan mate
Both dead in Mirabad
- Ian Curr, 2011
Listen to Last Train to Mirabad by 4PR – Voice of the People on #SoundCloud
https://on.soundcloud.com/VuSYQ
So Julian Assange is pursued and imprisoned his decency punished, his courage despised
Denounced as a traitor for drawing attention to the crimes that our governments have long authorised.
But the day it will dawn and his work is acknowledged by captains and kings as today by his friends
The day will come when the world will acknowledge the work of the value that Julian defends
And the day will dawn when the world will acknowledge the work of the value that Julian defends …. applause. – Dermot’s song for Julian.
Ian Curr
26 June 2024