Prominent Australian/British WikiLeaks activist Somerset Bean has launched a GoFundMe with the simple goal of circulating 1,000 giant posters throughout Australian cities in the lead-up to our May 18th elections calling for Julian Assange to be brought home. The posters urge Australians to contact their representatives and put political pressure on them to stand up for one of our nation’s best and brightest stars.
Bean writes the following:
The goal is to print and paste up a thousand of these #BringAssangeHome giant (A0 size) posters in prominent locations in Australian cities during May 2019.
With every $500 raised, another 100 posters can go up. We need to get printing and distributing right away to capitalise on the pre-election weeks.
Saving Julian Assange should be an election issue. Politicians need a push to wake up on this issue and #BringAssangeHome. Can you help use this opportunity to highlight Julian’s plight? Please share the Gofundme page with your networks on social media and by email and donate what you can. Use the hashtag #BringAssangeHome. Thanks for your support and please get in touch if you can help in any other way.
The GoFundMe, which has been endorsed by the Defend Assange Campaign on Twitter, is as of this writing more than halfway towards its goal of $5,000. Printing and posting is already well underway.
Help get these giant posters seen all across Australia: https://t.co/n3WOQf4iQq pic.twitter.com/k8yAYFTDv1
— Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) April 29, 2019
Bringing Assange home would indeed be one of the best things that could possibly happen to Australia, because it would necessarily mean coming together in the name of national sovereignty and standing opposed to the US-centralised imperial blob that is constantly sucking us into stupid foreign wars and preventing us from functioning as a real nation. The path toward bringing Assange home also happens to be the path toward ceasing to have our fate as a nation defined by our existence as a giant US military/intelligence asset.
A recent segment on 60 Minutes Australia interviewed attorney Greg Barns about his call for the Australian government to step in and stop Assange’s entirely illegitimate extradition to the United States.
“If he were for example detained in China for this period of time, and ill-treated, there would be a hue and cry, not only on the part of the government, but the Australian media,” Barnes told 60 Minutes. “Because it’s the United States, we seem to think there’s some form of exception.”
Assange’s father John Shipton gave a spirited defence of his son throughout the segment, accusing the Ecuadorian government of handing the WikiLeaks founder over to the clutches of the US empire in exchange for an IMF bank loan and rightly dismissing the absurd list of accusations leveled against him as “smears”. The segment concluded with a wish from Shipton for Assange to be able to live freely in his home country and spend time with his family.
“It would be really nice to sit there with the kids and the occasional person saying ‘Good on ya, mate’ or ‘Welcome home’. That would be tops,” Shipton said.
“Do you think it’s going to happen?” asked Tara Brown, who’d maintained an oppositional and antagonistic posture throughout the segment.
“I hope so, yes,” replied Shipton.
Despite loading the segment with obnoxious fact-free smears about feces on embassy walls and calling Assange a “self-proclaimed journalist”, as well as giving plenty of screen time to Australian war whore Senator Jim Molan to explain to the audience why Assange is a “villain”, a 60 Minutes Australia Twitter poll released after the segment aired maintained overwhelming support for bringing Assange home. A total of 11,539 votes responded 85 percent “Yes” and 15 percent “No” to the question “Julian Assange’s father is urging Australian authorities to step in and stop Assange’s extradition to the US, and ultimately, finally bring him home. But does he deserve our support?” These numbers remained consistent from the very beginning of the poll, with the same percentages revealed when I screenshotted it just two hours after it went up with only 616 votes.
Julian Assange’s father is urging Australian authorities to step in and stop Assange’s extradition to the US, and ultimately, finally bring him home. But does he deserve our support? #60Mins
— 60 Minutes Australia (@60Mins) April 28, 2019
A World Socialist Web Site article titled “Growing popular support for Julian Assange in Australia” describes some more reasons to feel hopeful that Australians are beginning to wake up to the importance of protecting Assange from the talons of the US war machine. My own conversations with Australians indicate that despite the virulent, war propaganda-like smear campaign that has been waged against Assange’s reputation across the entire political spectrum throughout the western world, when they are asked to think about it it remains an obvious, commonsense perspective among most of my countrymen that he is one of our sons and ought to be protected from hostile outsiders who wish to punish him for publishing truth. This is good, because it means we’ve still got the kind of inner compass necessary for navigating ourselves out of our abusive relationship with empire and into a solid sense of who we are as a nation.
We Australians do not have a very clear sense of ourselves; if we did we would never have stood for Assange’s persecution in the first place. We tend to form our national identity in terms of negatives, by the fact that we are not British and are not American, without any clear image about what we are. A bunch of white prisoners got thrown onto a gigantic island rich with ancient indigenous culture, we killed most of the continent’s inhabitants and degraded and exploited the survivors, and now we’re just kind of standing around drinking tea as the dust settles saying, “Hmm… well, we’re not stuck-up like the Brits, and we’re not entitled like the Yanks.”
I went to a community theater with my family a while back to see Spring Awakening, an English-language musical set in Germany. For no apparent reason, the actors on the stage spoke in American accents. They were Australians playing Germans, not Americans; there was no reason whatsoever for that to happen. But that sort of thing is so commonplace here the only person who pointed it out was my American husband. It seemed perfectly normal to me.
But it isn’t normal. It isn’t normal for a nation of people to be so neurotic and ashamed of their own nationality that they put on a foreign accent rather than their own for no reason. It isn’t normal that we have such a head-down, subservient society that most of our homegrown talent leaves Australia forever because we’ve got a weird slave-culture habit of cutting down the “tall poppies” whenever anyone is perceived to have risen above their station. It isn’t normal that we feel so ashamed of standing tall and shining bright in the world.
Nowadays the closest non-Aboriginal thing you ever see to a display of Australian identity typically involves Southern Cross tattoos, thuggishness, Islamophobia, and a desire to continue the cruel warehousing of human beings on Manus Island. That is plainly gross, and the Aboriginal people now hold their culture secret and close to their chests for completely understandable reasons, so what else is there? What else could there be that could begin to unite us as a people so we can begin to develop a little collective pride and cease allowing ourselves to be used as a tool of sociopathic imperialists?
Well, there’s Julian Assange. He’s something positive that we can all fight for, a clear force of good in the world that we can unify around as we begin a slow, sloppy, completely necessary divorce from the cancer of empire.
Every country has its flavor. In my country, we grew up valuing innovation. Most Australians my age can reel off a list of Australian inventions, from the Hills Hoist to the postage stamp to the bionic ear to wifi. I didn’t even have to go and google that just now, that’s how much a part of our national conversation and our education is our pride in our use of insight for practical problem-solving.
There are some fundamental values that myself and others of Assange’s generation grew up with as seventies children in Australia. There was the value of “do the right thing,” the value of “giving everyone a fair go”, and the value of “keeping the bastards honest.” These were key and oft-repeated phrases in my childhood during the seventies and eighties. I was a baby when there was a CIA/MI6 coup in our country and my parents were implored by the ousted Prime Minister Gough Whitlam to “maintain the rage” at the unforgivable attack on our democratic sovereignty. That’s in my living memory. When Julian and I were small, anti-establishment sentiment was at its loudest in Australia.
We have an inbuilt distrust of authority and a deep hatred of empire which probably stems from our convict roots, and then from the ongoing waves of refugees who were running from famine, wars and despotism. Aside from the indigenous population, we are a country full of people who were forced by empire to come here in one way or another. So we don’t like authority much and we instinctively cut people down before they get too powerful. This is why the unions are still relatively strong and social programs are such a natural fit for us. We like things to be fair. We like everyone to have a say.
Julian Assange’s work is an embodiment of all those values. The initial innovative use of technology to create WikiLeaks, the belief in openness and transparency, the desire to democratise information for the good of the whole, and the joy in keeping the bastards honest — all of that is very Australian. Very me. Very us.
His work is extraordinary. Never has a single innovation shaken existing power structures in such a short amount of time. In an inverted totalitarian system where the ability to suck resources from the people is hidden under a veil of propaganda, the ability to rip through the veil of spin and government opacity is a powerful tool indeed. In just a little over a decade he managed to make himself the most wanted man alive by the most powerful people on earth. That’s how effective WikiLeaks has been in bringing truth to power.
Australians Bring Assange Home! Help the campaign to #BringAssangeHome with 1000 of these giant posters in prominent locations in Australian cities. Julian Assange is an Aussie hero in danger. Donate ($5 per poster printed & pasted): https://t.co/zlTJCjTtdr #auspol #60mins
— Bean (@SomersetBean) April 28, 2019
Bringing Julian Assange home could be the first step to giving ourselves a bright, shining image of who we are and what we stand for. At the moment, Australia is a lifeless vassal state hooked up to the US power establishment with our every orifice and resource being used to feed the corporatist empire. Anesthetized to the eyeballs and in a state of total submission, the return of Julian might just be the little spark we need to get the old ticker pumping for itself again. Finally standing up for ourselves, for what’s right, and for the things that Julian stands for might just be the very thing we need as a nation to discover who we really are.
And of course it’s not a simple task. Of course it will require pushing back against deeply institutionalised capitulations at the core of Australian international relations. Of course it will ultimately require changing how we’ve been operating as a nation in the world. Nobody’s saying it’s a simple task. But it is what’s right, and it’s also the exact direction we need to move in order to begin a transformation into a healthy, sovereign nation.
Bring him home. It’s time.
_____________________
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28 responses to “Why Australians Should Fight To Bring Assange Home”
Julian Assange World Exclusive | 60 Minutes Australia
hi, have tried to share this article to fb 3 times now. maybe it’s something im doing wrong, or maybe it’s fb censoring you. ill keep trying.
It seems to me since the beginning of the trouble in Venezuela in January that it was a kind of diversion of what is happening in France with the Yellow Vests since november.
And that feeling is stronger now. The System is used to use diversion.
For the elites of the System, it is a good example for the people in the System’s countries to watch people in Venezuela protest against the government in Venezuela and a bad example to watch the Yellow vests in France protest a French government totally loyal and subservient to the System.
It must have been like that in the days of Noah, scheme after scheme. No wonder the prophecy of the popes is telling us pope Francis is the last pope before the Final Judgement.
We have to pray the Holy Rosary more than ever.
knew you would be back soon Caitlin. The world won’t take a break along with us from it’s madness. It just keeps calling us back to try to prevent it’s most recent atrocities. I expect you may have something to say about the latest move by the Empire of Evil in Venezuela……
“the US-centralised imperial blob that is constantly sucking us into stupid foreign wars and preventing us from functioning as a real nation.”
It is called the Anglo-Zionist empire. Euphemisms are tools of propagandist, i.e. ” Right to protect” , “Spreading democracy”, “Humanitarian intervention”.
And because the USA is Israel’s bitch.
Posters, yes, even more than planned if enough money can be raised. I’ve emailed one local and two federal MPs (all Labor) about Julian Assange, my local member more than once, and they don’t even reply. Posters around the country so they can’t keep avoiding it. 85% of MSM viewers in favour of bringing him home WOW (if he would want to set foot in this traitorous country that is).
I have just read a very good article that tells a lot about the degradation of the political world in the West:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/426042-france-de-gaulle-macron-1968/
There is no more general Charles de Gaulle in politics. Probably it is because we are living more and more in a world similar to the one in the days of Noah as it is written it will be in the last days.
Still keeping my Rosary close.
We Shall Not Be Moved
(The Seekers: At Home, Australia, 1966)
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf298S56k38
.
Well I’m on my way to heaven
We shall not be moved
On my way to heaven
We shall not be moved
Just like a tree that’s standing by the water side
We shall not be moved
.
On the road to freedom
We shall not be moved
On the road to freedom
We shall not be moved
Just like a tree that’s standing by the water side
We shall not be moved
.
We’re brothers together
We shall not be moved
We’re brothers together
We shall not be moved
Just like a tree that’s standing by the water side
We shall not be moved
I left Australia because I couldn’t bare the coma it was in, the passive submission to such an evil empire the US of A…holes, and it’s pandering to everyone in authority despite detesting it, so many have become righteously for it if it suits them. But regarding Assange I feel passionately and loyally that he should be brought home. Too many sit their listening to mainstream believing the smear campain which even the ex president of Ecuardor stressed it was just that. I investigated the rape charges, the Swedish government and it’s pandering to the US, the judge replacement, their Intelligence agencies and the accuser(s) and they are highly, highly, highly questionable. Could very well be a frame by the US and Swedish intelligence Agencies who are apparently quite closely connected. So I jump on people when their strong opinions pounce on this topic to denounce Assange. Because it appears part of the plan. I have to vote despite after leaving Australia, it’s policies have been cut throat, disloyal and dismissive once you leave. I dislike what Australia has become but if Australians fight for Julian well then I think there is hope. Great article Caitln. I so want him to be brought back to Australia where he belongs, and protected from that murderous empire who are destroying everything to do with what’s good, right and fair.
*May 1st & 2nd* Free Assange (all other days and nights also, and Free Manning too).
The Julian Assange scandal is a CLASS, not a NATIONAL issue. He will only be released from his US-enforced incarceration by a mass mobilisation of the working class around the world. The Australian Government, like the British, Swedish, and Ecuadorian Governments, is a poodle of the US behemoth. It is staffed with lackeys who are on the US pay-roll to buy their grovelling obedience and adherence to every US diktat. If the Australian working class, on its own, staged a week-long General Strike in support of Assange this would have more impact within Australia and around the world than millions of pious appeals to those in Government who simply are not listening, BECAUSE THEY ARE BRIBED NOT TO LISTEN. US imperialism and its client-States, like Australia, Britain, and many more, wants to “shoot the messenger” and deter others from following in Assange’s ground-breaking, historic, and courageous footsteps. He has exposed their war crimes; political intrigues and plots; secret, worldwide surveillance; and utter contempt for other countries’ “sovereignty” and democratic procedures. Their “world empire” project is to be imposed upon the world’s people whether they like it or not, and by clandestine or military means. It is all about maintaining the capitalist profit system and the rule of the plutocracy. Any person – like Assange – or any country – like Venezuela – that stands up to US imperialism is the target for a lying, CIA-orchestrated deluge of propaganda, accompanied by sanctions, embargoes, or all-out military action, as in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. The only way to stop this worldwide steam-roller, which is literally crushing milllions of people in its wake, and will crush milllions more if not stopped, is for a mass uprising of the world’s working class, along the lines of the Yellow Vests Rebellion in France. Such a mass uprising must be led by a Revolutionary Socialist Party that will put a Socialist transformation of society on the order of the day. Otherwise mass uprisings will simply be dissipated, fruitless, and exhausted for want of a political leadership determined to lead the struggle to victory over the capitalist class and its State machine. A successful Socialist Revolution in France, for example, would start a chain-reaction all over Europe and beyond. This the only way to rid the world of US imperialism and the world capitalist system it exists to defend and perpetuate, regardless of the consequences for mankind, up to an including a nuclear, Third World War.
You can do it Australia! Bring Assange home!
Very good, as always, but I especially appreciate this paragraph:
“Bringing Assange home would indeed be one of the best things that could possibly happen to Australia, because it would necessarily mean coming together in the name of national sovereignty and standing opposed to the US-centralised imperial blob that is constantly sucking us into stupid foreign wars and preventing us from functioning as a real nation. The path toward bringing Assange home also happens to be the path toward ceasing to have our fate as a nation defined by our existence as a giant US military/intelligence asset.”
It seems so unlike you Ozzies to let yourselves become handmaidens of US imperialists.
Hmmm. You know about the 1975 coup, but you think a poster campaign half way through an election and contacting your representative will pressure our politicians to change their minds. It won’t work, but I’m sure you already know that. You will have to do something that will scare them more than the US does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ybsEhlT2DA “The fight for oil: 100 Years in the Middle East (1/3)” shows you the level at which these empires operate. They don’t take any notice of peaceful street protests, poster campaigns, and “contact your representative”. These are all things people do when they are not very angry. They have already worked out how they will deal with violent street protests.
I find these “this one particular strategy you’re discussing on this one particular day will by itself be insufficient for stopping the might of the US empire” types of comments extremely tedious and purposeless. Obviously there are many other things which also need to be done.
You write an article where the only ACTIONS mentioned are a poster campaign and lobbying politicians during an election. This won’t work. Everybody here knows that. So some will be asking themselves “Well, what will work?” and I am trying to answer that. It will involve being non-peaceful, so many people will not want to do it. It’s OK for them to remain ineffectual, but SOME people want to succeed. You write like you want to succeed, but you stick to things that will always fail. I’m sorry if you feel that pointing this out is “extremely tedious and purposeless”, but it does actually have a purpose.
Obviously we can’t organise a revolution against the Australian Government and the US Empire here on a public website. That’s why I have suggested a website on the dark web, using encrypted messaging, and not using Google’s CAPTCHA system, (which records every poster’s IP address), and not using a Microsoft operating system (which is easily hacked into). If you want help with this, get GPG4USB, generate some encryption keys, and send me a message plus your public key.
“It will involve being non-peaceful”. well you probably just lost any of your potential support base and the cops are gonna just love you…
Anybody that thinks you can have a successful revolution by peaceful means is fooling themselves. It is better to not have them in the revolutionary group, as they will be constantly trying to do things that are guaranteed to fail.
Excellent Video! Thank you.
I mean John’s Video!
Thanks, and of course yw, NYLENE13. Their channel is great. Love following it (subscriber for sure) even though most of what they cover is not about my country. But the heart of what they cover is so universal.
The US has broken treaties, ignored international law, used military and monetary persuasion and illegal invasions ( covert as well as conventional ) to bring other nations down.
Those nation’s knees grow sore and I sense they are beginning to stand, before they become permanently crippled, knowing there may be allies that are feeling the same.
The way the US will implode is the devaluing of the USD.
When you see that on the horizon, start digging the grave.
Ms. Johnstone – for your own preservation and protection you might want to keep your husband’s identity under your hat. the spooks have a whole lot of weaponry.
Hmm, all this time I thought you were in the UK for some reason, but now I see you are in Australia yourself. Cool. You probably already know about thejuicemedia then.
Wow Caitlin, you call that taking a break? 🙂
Check out this genius short video produced out of Australia. Their “truth channel” is really great:
“Honest Government Ad | Julian Assange” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1efOs0BsE0g
Oh shit, I should have included that one in this essay. I’m putting it in.
LOL. I just came across your piece at Medium from the 14th here: https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-us-government-wont-care-about-your-definition-of-journalism-after-the-assange-precedent-is-set-66ae974d23fe. Spectacular, loved it, sharing away.
Yes I love their channel. We have some great “truth channels” here in the US, but we have none quite like that.
Speaking as an American myself, I hope that American husband of yours knows how fortunate he is. 🙂