Julian Assange is finally free. For anyone interested in the value of information, and even more so for journalists themselves, this is good news (please read the analysis titled “Humanity’s “Real Hero” Julian Assange Free“)
And a vindication of a long and arduous struggle to free a man whose only “crime” was helping to reveal the truth about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The truth about war crimes, about torture, about the deaths of civilians.
Today it seems self-evident that in US “imperial” wars, crimes were committed, there was a huge cost to civilians, and cynicism prevailed, brutally violating human rights.
However, we forget how much the revelations of Wikileaks, the platform that Julian Assange created precisely because he wanted the truth not to remain hidden, contributed to this awareness.
Because Julian Assange was not prosecuted either for misrepresenting the facts, nor for slandering or lying.
Julian Assange was persecuted and hunted for telling the truth.
No one disputed that the documents and information he brought to light were authentic and factual.
He was prosecuted because all this was supposed to be secret. That is why the legislative arsenal on “espionage” was activated against him.
In other words, the revelation of crimes against civilians and the hypocrisy of the “only superpower” was dubbed “espionage”.
In short, Julian Assange has been hounded and hounded over the years for doing the job journalists are supposed to do. That’s what their function is supposed to be. What their responsibility is: to seek and reveal the truth so that citizens know what is really going on, regardless of what the powers that be tell them.
And we may be happy that this man will finally be free, but it can only be sad that in order to regain his freedom, he had to plead guilty under the Espionage Act, so that he could be deemed to have already served the appropriate sentence.
However, no matter how you look at it, what he did was not espionage, but investigative journalism and a substantial contribution to objective information, which today is receiving serious blows with the freedom of the press being alarmingly limited in many countries and the conditions of practicing the journalistic profession to worsen.
And here is the problem. As the years go by, more and more information is classified as classified, and journalists who reveal it are threatened with heavy penalties.
That is, more and more states are limiting the information that reaches the citizen, with the obvious purpose of absolute control and ultimately the concealment of the truth. Entire areas of state action are, often arbitrarily, labeled “national security matters” and any information about them is considered classified. As a result, the citizen simply does not know what exactly is happening, what decisions are made, by whom and in what direction.
But a power whose action is not fully known to the citizens, is a power by definition uncontrolled, arbitrary and ultimately dangerous.
And a democracy where citizens only have “filtered” knowledge of what state actors are doing is not, after all, a real democracy.
And that means that at some point we have to admit that the fewer “state secrets” the better.
But because the state is not going to allow information to circulate freely, we need journalists with courage, with perseverance, with moral integrity and with a readiness to suffer the consequences.
That is, we need people like Julian Assange. That’s why Julian Assange is the Real Hero of Humanity.
