THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING IN THE WORLD

DIARY, 25/06/2024.

Julian & Stella, reunited in freedom at last.

“It took millions of people. It took people working behind the scenes; people protesting on the streets; for days, and weeks, and months, and years... And we achieved it.” This Stella would declare in the wake of her husband’s returning home to her, through teary eyes, visibly, audibly choking up in awe at the reality of the words as they left her mouth.

It was only a month ago that, having experienced some success in predicting Julian’s freedom, or nearing thereto, that I would try my hand again — “I am going to make another: Julian will be free before the year is over. I don’t know how exactly or under what conditions, but he will be free. That’s my prediction. Here’s hoping I’m right twice.” I never had any doubts as to Julian coming home within the year; but I could never have imagined those four weeks ago, on Mayday, that I would be writing about Julian again so soon — and about his actually being free!

Suffice to say, I am overcome with joy. Seeing him boarding a plane, and to somewhere as far away from Belmarsh as physically possible, was quite a triumphant moment. And him walking out of that court in Saipan a free man, having signed his plea, likewise. But those moments, as triumphant as they are, shrink when compared with the sight of Julian being reunited in the arms of his love, the mother of his children, and his greatest champion — Stella.

Liberty is beautiful; but witnessing a man having his liberty returned to him really does have a unique hold over the human soul, moving it so, like nothing else seems able to — an emotional cocktail of the most intense sadness at the sight of evil being done to the innocent and the good, but simultaneously the most exquisite ecstasy of happiness at its evil being overcome by an equally formidable goodness and love. There’s nothing quite like it emotionally — at least for me. It simply strikes a chord that’s so deeply engrained in oneself, so deep that it yearns, and restlessly so, not only for one’s own freedom, but for that of every man, woman, and child the world over.

And I’m not embarrassed to confess that I balled my eyes out through a smile when I saw it. Liberty really is the most beautiful thing in the world. For liberty and love (and truth and beauty and peace and goodness) are interlocked, inseparable (as Stella and Julian have proven to be). And at the thought of his being with his children, for the first time outside of that dreadful place — such a hell that no one should be subjected to, regardless of what they’ve done — I might start all over again. (I read that all Stella told their sons as they were travelling to Australia to receive him was “that there was a big surprise” in store for them when they got there…)

But inevitably, in the aftermath of his freedom, there will be those who will ask, and they have been many, what will Julian do next? Lies persist. Therefore war persists. And evil with it. Perhaps more now than then, when Assange was active. As Julian would put it himself, “Wars are a result of lies.” (And “If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.”) And men who are “deeply principled,” “will always defend victims,” as Stella proclaimed of her husband, are in short supply. It’s only natural to look to another to be that which they so desperately seek, see as scarce in the world around them. And there have been still others disappointed in Assange for having taken a plea, amounting to a compromise on principles in their view, an admission of guilt when one was innocent, in fact good, in the right.

(A saving of face deal was always going to be the case. There was no conceivable way around it, given the power imbalance between Assange’s legal defence and his persecutors. And I am aware that as a condition of his plea deal things like the infamous DNC emails, along with any other currently unpublished materials, have had to be destroyed in exchange for his freedom — although I would remind one of that important twenty-first century adage regarding the internet: once something is on there, it can never truly be taken down; someone, somewhere, will have backed up the emails to a hard drive; not to mention the fact that the damage of these publications for the perpetrators has long since been dealt, and so their including as a condition of his freedom the destruction of these materials is merely symbolic of their defeat, an embittered, superficial gesture characteristic of what the plea deal is: saving face — and they have failed miserably in this endeavour in the eyes of anyone who’s been paying attention: no one thinks any less of him for having done so, or that this undoes his work in anyway. But irrespective of my musings, and returning to the point: to this question of whether the plea was a victory or if the concession was too heavy to bear, I say, if this means a man’s life, a father, a husband, a brother, a son, will be saved — so be it. For what can compare to this? What can there exist of a higher importance? When one sees the joyous expression on the face of the mother of his children, her tears overflowing from disbelief, her voice trembling, so overwhelmed with love and gratitude that she can hardly utter the words that acknowledge the reality she suddenly finds herself in — the one she perhaps never thought would come; the one she fought for over ten years for; the one in which her husband, the father of her sons, comes home to her and them, alive — the answer is surely felt within oneself, the question answered by this feeling. Beauty — love — delivers clarity. As Huxley would put it, “It’s indifference and hatred that are blind, not love.”)

But how much does one man have to sacrifice? And how much should one man be expected to sacrifice? As Matt Odell, Bitcoiner and Nostrich, would write in the wake of the news: “Stop asking what Julian will do next. He has done more for freedom than most of us will ever accomplish. Now we must make him proud and push the movement forward ourselves” — suggesting that “The next WikiLeaks will publish directly to Nostr” as a possible example of his legacy continuing in his absence (one that I too believe will inevitably be true; and one that is obvious once one understands Nostr, compares the more centralised WikiLeaks model, as revolutionary as it was and is, to the innately decentralised model of the Nostr protocol, and all the security advantages therein — greater anonymity, virtually complete indestructibility, incorruptibility of materials published — that a centralised model cannot hope to offer). And I would have these exact thoughts myself many times before his freedom had been restored, when I first caught wind of the possibility of a plea. And I maintain what I thought then, to echo Odell: I, for one, would say that the man who had missed the first ten years of his children’s childhood; the man who had missed all the while the adventures of life, the treasured memories that could have been made with them and his wife; the man who could have all this time been rekindling his relationship with his distant father; the man who missed out on all the highs and the lows of everyday life (the death of his close friend and fellow journalist John Pilger, for example); and everything in between, including the monotonous things; meanwhile being slowly murdered, made an example of, by the Soviet Union of our time, truly a totalitarian abomination that spreads its tentacles into every aspect of the lives of every single man, woman, and even child, not just domestically, but the world over (as Assange’s case has been made the indisputable demonstration of); one which, like the Soviet Union, can touch even those on the farthest reaches of the Earth, no matter the jurisdiction (as Snowden’s case has been the demonstration of); such that Stalin — and all the other evil men of the past — could only have dreamed of having at his disposal (the consequences, the left overs, of war preparations, constructing a “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” à la Buckley); and for doing more in the name of principle in a single, relatively brief, chapter of his life, than most men accomplish in a long series of lifetimes — I say to this man: you’ve done enough; rest easy; live in peace; don’t risk this second chance at life you’ve been given (such that likely will never come again); make up for all that time you’ll never get back, those memories you’ll never get to make, by making as many now as you can; hug your children; kiss your wife; it’s up to us now (and we are far more numerous now than then); we have the tools (and far more than you had); we have the example that you set to follow (and many others since yours); we’ll take it from here (and we are far more capable of doing so now than you were then).

(Having said all this, I do believe Julian will return, in some capacity. But I wouldn’t want him to. Him walking off into the sunset, linking arms with his wife and children — that’s good enough for me. Furthermore, I would say to the people who put the future of human freedom entirely on Julian’s shoulders: if you who show so much concern for your liberty defer all responsibility for its defence to another man or group of men, then how much can you really care for your liberty, when forgoing all personal responsibility — the cornerstone of all liberty — is precisely how it is lost or endangered in the first place? So to return to the question of how much should one man be expected to sacrifice, in reference to Julian, the answer to this question, and consequently of how one should behave into the future, should surely reveal itself by asking the more urgent and essential question every man should necessarily ask himself first and foremost: how much am I willing to sacrifice? or better put, rather than asking what Julian is doing for your liberty, by asking what are you doing for your liberty? And if the answer is in the negative, then naturally the other question would be: how much do you care for your liberty really, this being the case? and so why should anyone else, including Julian, care for your liberty more than you do yourself, and subsequently be expected to defend it on your behalf when you show so pitiful an initiative, so flimsy a conviction? And in answering this question of oneself, before asking it of another man, in this case Julian, and subsequently demanding his return as compensation for one’s own inertia, one would, if they do indeed care deeply for their liberty, and the liberty of their fellow men as a consequence, or at least wish to, feel it incumbent on oneself, in the pursuit of being personally responsible, or at least more so, to redirect this energy toward caring even more deeply, and then ultimately acting on this concern — as Julian did. In short: to emulate Julian, rather than worship him; or, to look not outward for change, as has become so customary, but inward; for this is the only proper method by which to honour him, if that is one’s chief aspiration. As Andrei Tarkovsky, famed Soviet film director, is attributed to having said: “Any attempt to restore harmony in the world can only rest on the renewal of personal responsibility.” Indeed, the moral of the entire Assange saga has been so, and the efficacy of this philosophy has been proven through Julian’s freedom; but don’t retire these principles because he is free; don’t let the momentum fade, and personal responsibility — which equals freedom — with it; else there will be far more cases like Julian’s to come. Assange is just the beginning; there’s much more work to be done; and if everyone would only continue to live through this philosophy — ironically for his critics, who would prefer he didn’t exist — there would be no need for singular, exceptional figures like Assange — he, as a revolutionary idea, a rebellious symbol to rally behind, would not exist, for he wouldn’t need to exist: for Assange would be the rule. As Aurelius put it in brief: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one;” or — since I quoted him last time — as Gandhi said: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”)

And I wouldn’t waste time on the naysayers and detractors. Those who still repeat decade old pieces of propaganda. All this serves to demonstrate to one is that they haven’t read into the case nor interacted with its contents critically whatsoever (I would refer such people to a crash course on the case, from Stella herself; or better yet, to read The Trial of Julian Assange for a complete breakdown of the case, authored by the former UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer). As well as that they believe they are too infantile to consume and determine the hazards — if any — of such knowledge for themselves. Indeed, that a criminal gang that picks their pockets at gun point, commits evil all around the world, and in their name as they do so, and such evil that excites reciprocation, endangering themselves and their family, should in fact keep secrets from them — else their safety would be put in jeopardy. People, what’s more, that show more passion and conviction for punishing the man who informed them of evil than to punish and prevent those who committed, and are committing, the evil. And yet more, people who commonly support the proliferation and escalation of war around the world, even if it threatens the end of all human life, recklessly dismissing any possibility that warring will or indeed even could lead to such an outcome, such people who will also accuse Julian of recklessly endangering human life and causing hypothetical death and destruction by informing them of the actual, provable death and destruction as a direct outcome of their warring and support for warring.

These people are such that are lost to not only basic reason but human emotion. For if seeing a man be tortured to death for half a decade in spite of his wife’s pleading with them to stop, and the symphony of cries from the many millions who found themselves similarly horrified at the sight of his persecution, least of all those of his own children, regardless of what he’s accused of doing, doesn’t strike an empathetic chord at the core of one’s soul, then I’m afraid such a chord isn’t there, perhaps was never there to begin with, nor is or was any semblance of a human soul present to appeal to. Ultimately, their perceiving the truth as an existential threat informs one of all they need to know of them; for those who lie, omit, suppress, and destroy information, and those who support lies, omission, suppression, and destruction — and not only of information but of human beings, those who deviate from this cause that can only be permeated into the future by these malevolent means — are never and have never been on the side of good but evil. Albert Camus wrote, “All I maintain is that on this earth there are plagues and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the plagues;” and as that old saying goes, “sunlight is the best disinfectant;” and if one finds themselves feeling more threatened by the sunlight — the truth — than the plagues — the darkness, and inside it, lies — then that, I would posit, informs one far more about themselves than it does the sun. And so as that other saying goes, “If the truth shall kill them, let them die;” or perhaps more simply, “That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be” — “[For] ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

But love drives hate into irrelevance; overshadows all ill will with goodness. (As author and Bitcoiner Jeff Booth would explain, redirect anger and cynicism and the desire for destruction, which often drives one to demoralisation, thus apathy, and thus inaction, into love and hope and the desire for creation, which alternatively drives one to humility, thus self-transformation, and thus action, and the objects of one’s destruction will fade into irrelevance and obsolescence anyway: except in the right way, the only way there is, that way in which there is something to naturally supplant that object of all of one’s nihilism and thus self-defeat, self-destruction, rather than just its derelict remains — through love — driving hate further and further into irrecovery as the product of one’s deep and passionate love nears closer and closer to perfection — but never reaches it, therefore never ceasing to try to reach it, and consequently never ceasing to drive the products of hate further and further into impotency; or in short, as Booth puts it, “It’s a strategy to make that [i.e. evil] irrelevant.”) And this is a fitting way to reflect on this whole story. It was a love story. It was always a love story. Between a man and his wife for certain, but also between mankind and the truth, that which Julian, and Stella in her fight for him, is symbolic of. And that scene of Julian being wrapped in Stella’s arms, and she in his, is such a beautiful ending to this most tragic of love stories. I couldn’t have imagined a better one myself.

And despite it’s finale taking place so far away from me, it all feels so intimate, so personal, owing to my having met Stella, and his father, his brother, even his sons, on a few occasions. It’s a deeply human story regardless, but it is amplified tenfold within me by this feeling of closeness I hold toward them, a feeling I’m sure everyone who stood beside them shares, no matter for how long or how often, against the malevolent forces that would have never allowed this reality to come to fruition had they had their way. And as a consequence I feel incredibly proud to have played my part, however small that might have been; and reinvigoratingly so; for it serves as a first-hand demonstration to me of the power ordinary people have at their disposal — which I’ve always known is there, beneath the surface, but it’s quite a different thing to see manifest before one’s eyes — and yet are often completely unaware of, and more often actively doubtful and conspiring against.

I am not a believer in political action — deferring responsibility to someone else to do something, or asking their permission to do oneself — but I believe this was no such case. I believe it was instead local, individual, personal action that made this happen. In a similar manner as taking something out of existence by declining to do something, like one would when boycotting a product or company, in an effort to compel, not through violence but stigma, good behaviour, so too can people bring things into existence by accepting to do that something (“voting with your wallet,” as it is popularly called, which is synonymous with individual action — the only kind of “voting” I advocate; as Ayn Rand would elaborate further: “Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, ‘democratic’ vote — by the sales and the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country. Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs; no one has the power to appoint himself ‘the voice of the public’ and to leave the public voiceless and disfranchised.”): which was in this case by accepting to insist, persistently and in all arenas (writing books, making films, creating art, delivering speeches, communicating in private, funding activities to this effect, and so on; changing hearts and minds, intensifying this stigma exponentially with each heart and mind won over), that what constitutes good and bad behaviour, and what should be met with praise and what should be met with stigma, not be inverted — in other words, that Julian be freed from stigma and the punishments thereof, and that he and his captors trade places.

Of course, the latter did not happen, owing to the imbalance of physical power (as previously mentioned). But Julian’s freedom — the former — is an example of one such a case of local, individual, personal, or direct action (and direct action, as anarchist thinker — and author of that fantastic short essay, Are You An Anarchist? — David Graeber would explain, is: “the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free. One does not solicit the state. One does not even necessarily make a grand gesture of defiance. Insofar as one is capable, one proceeds as if the state does not exist.”), an application of that principle (the principle that direct action always precedes political action: meaning political action doesn’t happen, and has never happened, in spite of direct action, or lack thereof, but expressly because of it; and all else follows; books, films, art, speeches, discussions, donations, etc., all this inspires further direct action that precipitates political action: until which day political action is non-existent, personal responsibility having been restored, and harmony with it, direct action then being the unambiguous and unquestionable de facto modus operandi of all change, and indeed all life). And while my contribution, financially, in time, in energy, is relatively insignificant, if enough people are equally determined to do the same, as they have proved to have done, to have been — well, that can culminate in a man being delivered as such, home to his family, to freedom, as he was, as he has been.

(This power that the ordinary person — the individual — has should never be forgotten or underestimated again; although it always proves to be. There are many reminders of this throughout history as to why it should never be misplaced; or more often, misdirected. But take Julian’s freedom as one’s example, in the absence of drawing upon any other for inspiration.)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world,” I would quote from Margaret Mead in my last entry; and this small group of people were many, as Stella would take the time to note; so many that they cannot begin to be counted or individually recognised for their contributions; and yet I shall attempt to do so anyway, by summoning another quote — one expressly for such unsung heroes — one which counts and recognises them each for their achievements whether or not I can physically count or recognise them each personally and in their entirety for the immense good that they’ve done; this time from George Eliot (although I am familiar with it through a film I am particularly fond of, and one that bears much relevance to Julian’s story, and indeed Stella’s — A Hidden Life): “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” I’ve written this entry in honour of those who have lived, and indeed continue to live, such hidden lives, marking the day in the calendar of the culmination of their individual efforts.

God bless Julian. God bless Stella. God bless their sons, Max and Gabriel. God bless his father, John, his brother, Gabriel. And most of all — God bless every single one of you who brought a good man home (I’ll always remember each and every one of you I had the good fortune to know, however briefly: God bless you and yours, once more): you’re all heroes — unsung, yes, but you should all swell with the utmost pride in thought of what you’ve achieved against insurmountable odds: to have righten this wrong. Know that you’re all sung heroes to me. (But, above even they, above even Julian, Stella, his father, his brother, and everyone, and indeed everything, else, “The hero of [this] tale,” as Tolstoy would put it, and indeed the hero of every tale, “whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I have tried to set forth in all his beauty, and who has always been, is, and always will be most beautiful, is — the truth.”)