A parable written shortly after the end of the Second World War by a German Lutheran pastor (and wrongly attributed to Bertolt Brecht) underlined what is the most important ally of those who are enemies of democracy and our freedom; indifference – our indifference. It recounts how one can always find good excuses for not concerning oneself with the fate of the those who are the first targets of extremisms and authoritarian regimes.
The parable, referring to Germany in the 1930s, relates how, when communists were arrested, “I did not speak out because I was not communist”, how the same happened again when trades unionists were detained, and again when Jews were rounded up. “Then they came for me, and there was no-one left to speak for me,” it reads.
There are many legitimate reasons to be indifferent to what has happened to Julian Assange, who was arrested on April 11th by British police after he was seized inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London where he had found refuge for almost seven years. Those reasons may include the accusations of sexual assault levelled against him in Sweden; his egocentric adventurism in the management of WikiLeaks, which has disowned him; his disregard for deontology by publishing information in dumps of unverified or contextualised data; his obscure complacency, at the very least, towards the Russian government and its geopolitical manoeuvrings, and his wild imaginings about atheism, feminism and immigration published on social media.
But it remains that none of these reasons stand up against the persecution, driven by reasons of State, he has endured for almost ten years. If the United States want hold of the WikiLeaks founder, it is to try, sentence and punish him with imprisonment for having revealed evidence, thanks to the technology of the digital revolution, the country’s repeated numerous violations of human rights around the world. There is everything to fear from the machinations that were put in place to hunt down Assange with the intention of criminalising the research and revelation of information of public interest.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
That “conspiring to commit unlawful computer intrusion” is the only argument, for the moment, for his possible extradition to the US, an offence that carries a possible five-year jail term, is not reassuring. The aim is to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks for releasing classified information, which was published with the collaboration of numerous reliable and prestigious media partners. That attempt to discredit Assange is an attempt to remove the protection allowed in the US to the press and its journalists, since 1791, under the constitution’s First Amendment.
The WikiLeaks revelations, notably about the dark events of the US invasion of Iraq and the war in the country, was based on information from whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a source who has already paid a heavy price. Manning, far from being considered as someone serving the right to know, was treated as a spy and a danger for national security. Arrested in 2010 and charged with 22 counts of espionage and collusion with the enemy, detained for two months in a cage in Kuwait and subsequently kept in isolation for seven months in a tiny cell where she was forced to sleep naked, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison after she was found guilty of 20 of the charges. After two suicide attempts, she was pardoned by Barack Obama at the end of his presidency in 2017. But Manning was last month back in prison after refusing to testify about her links with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange to a secret grand jury investigation.
If he is extradited to the US, nothing guarantees that Assange will not face further charges, which have not been ruled out. As for the Trump administration, the cynical use of Assange during the 2016 presidential election campaign, notably regarding the leaks he provided over the manipulations during the Democrat primaries, would hardly prevent it from turning on the Australian. “You look at WikiLeaks, I mean, in China, if this would’ve happened the people would get a bullet through the head within 24 hours,” declared Donald Trump in a December 2010 interview with broadcaster Fox News. “As far as I'm concerned it's spying, it's espionage," he said. "You know, in the old days if you were a spy, and that's what he is, you'd get the death penalty."
The US administration, supported by Republican camp and numerous Democrats, intends making a definitive example of WikiLeaks in order to prevent any future non-violent attack on its power with the release of such massive leaks. In short, it wants ‘Goliath’ to crush the fragile hopes of digital ‘Davids’. What is at stake in the case of Assange is not, therefore, his personal fate, but that of the future form – whether that be democratic or authoritarian – of the digital revolution.
No technology, by its nature alone, is automatically liberating. It is its social, political and economic uses that will determine its path ahead. It is within this context that what awaits Assange, just like with the cases of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, is a symbolic battlefield; one that pits the democratic appropriation of digital tools by the people against the authoritarian confiscation of them by an alliance of State powers and economic monopolies.
There is no need to be in admiration for the personalities of the three individuals, let alone blind support for them, to understand that, with all the risk-taking audacity of the young, they will remain emblematic, courageous (and defeated) figures of the democratic hopes fuelled by the third industrial revolution of our modern times. Just like the arrival of steam-powered machines, then of the advent of electrical power, the digital revolution opens up the horizon to a “new democratic age” as a 2016 French parliamentary report on the subject put it, and whose prophetic boldness was swiftly buried. It is driven by fundamental rights through which peoples can regain mastery of their future, with the freedom of expression and the right to know.
Our Renaissance
Before he was 30-years-old, hacker Julian Assange was one of the first theoreticians of this, inventing online information leaks as a weapon of the weak against the strong. Bradley Manning, as Chelsea was then still called, a US soldier barely turned 20-years-old, responded to the call from a US base in Iraq where she had witnessed criminal acts committed by the military. Edward Snowden, an IT analyst contracted to the CIA, took the relay when he was 29, after methodically collecting the proof of generalised global surveillance carried out by the NSA. He organised the revelations of this, helped by lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentary maker Laura Poitras.
Manning was denounced and immediately arrested in 2010. Assange was granted refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 (something of a voluntary prisoner given the unenviable house-bound situation this left him in). Snowden has been stuck in Moscow since 2013, a hostage of the Kremlin and, one never knows, of possible bargaining value for a future exchange. These heroes for the cause of the right to know have respectively lost nine, seven and six years out of their free lives. Whatever their weaknesses and errors, we owe them recognition and solidarity. They fought a battle to bring documents about the fate of peoples and societies to the knowledge of the public, so that the issues in question could be judged and opinions formed, to influence policy-making and world affairs.
“Publicity is the safeguard of the people,” said Jean Sylvain Bailly, 1st president of the National Constituent Assembly created in the early months of the French revolution, speaking in the summer of 1789, when he was elected as the first mayor of Paris. All that is of public interest should be made public. With the multiplication of its effects, the technological revolution, of which digitalisation is the motor, increases the emancipating dimension of this radically democratic pledge. That is what the powers that be, whether political or economic, cannot tolerate.
They would like democracy to be the preserve of specialists, at the service of their interests and ambitions, who should be left to get on with things in secret. It is the thinking of oligarchs, mixing ownership and power, both political and financial, whereby through riches, diplomas and birthrights, a small minority believes itself to be more legitimate than the ordinary people, in whose name it speaks and acts.
By demonstrating that access to information can be reached through a keyboard, WikiLeaks offered to overthrow this domination through knowledge, a non-violent opposition to the violent, humiliating and even murderous weapons of States. By making an example of Julian Assange, the keepers of established order, joined in a coalition where only power, rather than principals, count, hope to smother this democratic audacity, if only momentarily.
In a recent essay entitled Culture numérique (Digital culture), French sociologist Dominique Cardon, the author also of an optimistic appraisal of the democratic role of the internet (La Démocratie internet , published in 2010), draws a parallel between the eruption of digital technology in daily life and the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, what he describes as, “A rupture in the manner in which our societies produce, share and use knowledge”, and of greater importance in this respect than the industrial revolutions of modern times. The printing press announced the end of a monopoly of knowledge by the few and the beginning of its democratisation, along with the following Renaissance and its great discoveries, its artistic effervescence and its free thinkers. In short, it was the beginning of the long path to the moment of the proclamation that we are all born free and equal, with no distinction between one’s origins, conditions, appearances, religion or gender.
A long path indeed, along which so many who strove for such emancipation were martyrized for the cause, before being recognised and celebrated. Let us not forget Thomas More, the inventor of Utopia, the imaginary island of an ideal of hope, who was executed by decapitation in 1535. Let us also remember Giordano Bruno, regarded as an early champion of free thought and the emerging sciences, burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for heresy.
Neither should we forget Michael Servetus, theologist, physician and humanist, burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553 because of his opposition to the authoritarianism and sectarianism of Protestant dissidence under Jean Calvin. Finally, in this far from exhaustive list, tribute must also be given to Étienne Dolet, a printer and humanist who in 1546 was executed by strangulation and whose body was burned along with his books in the Paris square place Maubert. His crime was the defence of the right to free and pluralist access to knowledge.
The pioneers of the right to know are not today burned at the stake in public squares. But it does happen that some, to take the case of our colleague Jamal Khashoggi, are tortured in secret, murdered, their bodies dissected and dissolved, to the indifference of our supposedly democratic governments.
It was a fate horribly similar to those free thinkers cited above, and if the digital revolution might be compared to the Protestant Reformation that erupted as a challenge to the corruption and impostures of Christianism at the time, then we now see a Counter-Reformation of which the case of Julian Assange is the symbol. It is a drive against digital freedom, and the demonization of those who use it. It is an attempt to keep ownership of the truth, to guard, and with contempt, against a surge of questions and proposed solutions from a democratic movement to which the digital revolution offers fulfilment.
In our uncertain and fragile times, we collectively have only one protection, namely that contained in four fundamental rights; the right to expression, to know, to meet and to demonstrate. The commitment to defend these is today a priority, which why the case of Julian Assange concerns us all. Europe, which has bee unable to uphold its self-proclaimed values by offering asylum to the pioneers of our digital freedom, must not tolerate the extradition to the US of the WikiLeaks founder.
The digital culture, with its utopias and opportunities, is now confronted by an offensive from political and commercial powers, which are united against public disobedience. A digital winter approaches, with laws of surveillance and control, the refusal of participative action, the demonization of social networks, and the turning of digital freedom pioneers into scapegoats. A certain disenchantment with the internet, the subject of a study by Romain Badouard, a lecturer in information and communication sciences with Paris II university, is also a retreat for democracy, encompassing a loss of faith, a crisis of confidence and a certain temptation for authoritarianism.
“Worse than the sound of marching boots, is the silence of comfy slippers.” The lucid words (loosely translated here) of Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch are an echo to the warning which this article began with; we will inevitably become the next victims if we remain indifferent to the fate of the pioneers of digital freedom.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this op-ed aricle can be found here.