What Assange’s Case Means for Global Journalism! With Stella Assange
Russell chats to Stella Assange to discuss her recent visit to see Julian Assange, joined by Roger Waters and Yanis Varoufakis. Together they talk about the pressing issues surrounding Julian's potential extradition to the US, where he faces a staggering 175-year sentence. Stella reflects on the international support Julian has garnered, from the likes of President Lula of Brazil. Plus, what are the implications of Julian's case on the future of journalism and press freedom. WATCH THE FULL SHOW ON RUMBLEFollow Stella Assange's CampaignGuided-Meditation: Stay Awake with Russell Brand Stay Free Foundation: https://www.russellbrand.com/stay-free-foundation/
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
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Joining me now is Stella Assange, human rights lawyer, activist, and of course, wife of Julian Assange.
Stella, thank you so much for joining us today.
Hi, Russell.
I'm happy to be here.
Yeah, it's lovely to see you, mate.
You went to see Julian pretty recently.
Tell me, how did that visit go and who was with you?
Well, on Saturday, I went to Belmarsh Prison to see Julian, like I do once or twice a week.
But this time it was with the kids and Roger Waters and Yanis Varoufakis.
So it was a really special visit.
What is it like?
What are the conditions of the visit like?
Well, we were able to go in without any issues and actually we were able to film outside Belmarsh.
I think they turned a blind eye because Roger was there and they didn't want to cause a scene.
So thankfully we were able to do a video outside with Janice and Roger and I think it's had 1.5 million views on Twitter already.
And it was lovely.
I mean, you know, we only get two visits a week, so we have to... That's all I get and the kids get with Julian.
Sometimes I'm traveling, so sometimes he's able to also see friends while I'm away or when I'm here.
And this time he was able to see Roger Waters, who of course has been an incredible advocate for Julian.
He has a free Julian Assange massive image as part of his show that he's been touring around the world with.
And of course also Yanis Varoufakis, who was the former minister of economy for Greece and a global commentator and an old friend of Julian's.
He would visit Julian in the embassy regularly, so it was really nice for Julian to see his old friend Yanis And his new friend, Roger, who he had never met in person, but of course knows all the advocacy and amazing support that Roger has been giving Julian over the past few years.
I understand that there is some more optimism around the campaign for Julian, in particular because of the 60 Australian MPs that have urged the US to release Julian.
Does this feel like Public opinion and even significant political support is beginning to increase?
Absolutely.
What Julian has is a global campaign the likes of which we have never seen before.
Every single day there is some action somewhere around the world, from Sri Lanka to the UN General Assembly.
The UN General Assembly, I bring it up because Lula, the president of Brazil, had his address to the General Assembly.
This is the meeting that takes place every year in September, where all the heads of state of the world come together to New York, to the UN building, and then they speak, they give an address, and Lula was one of the first ones to speak and he brought Julian up in his speech and what happened there was a completely rare for the UN General Assembly which was that there was a spontaneous
Applause in the hall and that's because Julian's case is so important and symbolic of our times of an abuse of the legal system and abuse a geopolitical kind of show of force in which the person who has exposed the most the the excesses of the global Superpowers in situations of war, interfering in the legal systems of not only their small states, but also their big allies like Germany and Italy and Spain.
So Julian has had such an important role in exposing the true kind of anatomy of power globally.
That this has become a reference point for our times and is of geopolitical importance.
So you have that kind of big picture political significance of the case, you have the legal significance of the case where you have all the major human rights groups, all the major press freedom groups who are saying this is an aberration, this case is the biggest threat to press freedom globally, not only because it's an attack on the First Amendment in the United States, It's the first time the Espionage Act is being used against a publisher.
It will be able to be used against the rest of the press, not just the press, you know, not just the ones with the press credentials, but anyone else, really, who dares publish true information about criminality, about the most powerful people in the country, in the United States.
But then you have a different dimension, which is that Julian is Australian.
And he wasn't even in the United States, right?
So the US is using its espionage laws extraterritorially to apply to the rest of the world, to basically muzzle the rest of the world, to restrict freedom of speech in the rest of the world, in other countries, in the UK where he was, in Europe where he was publishing from, and so on.
And then you have another aspect which has developed over the last 10, 12, 13 years, Which is the surveillance on the internet and the means through which they can actually censor speech.
And we've seen this, of course, in the last four or five years, where social media companies have been instrumental in interfering with people's ability to emit, transmit their voice online.
And so that has come about because the tools with which speech can be suppressed are proliferating.
There is not just a market for censorship, there's also a market for tools to censor.
And this is so tempting for the powerful.
If the tools exist, of course they will be deployed.
And at the same time, there's a weakening of the protections, of free speech protections, of human rights in general, of citizenship rights in general.
And so you have this, on the one hand, states and corporations having greater means of coercion, And at the same time, citizens becoming less and less able to resist, less and less able to speak out, less and less able to push back.
And this is a very terrible trend.
So Julian's case exists in this greater context.
And I think the whole world knows the significance and how Julian's case connects with all these issues.
One of the other shifts that appears to have taken place within the framework of Julian's incarceration is that authoritarianism has peculiarly drifted and acquired a new aesthetic Just prior to our conversation we were talking about events in Canada and their ability to imprison individuals on the basis of protest, their new online bills that of course as you've just outlined permit censorship.
We've been talking about how comparable bills have been introduced in the UK and indeed across the world and a significant part of Julian's revelations detailed where we were Gosh, 20 years ago or whenever it was that those revelations were made and of course as you've explained the situation has gotten worse and the power to censor control and the desire to legitimize authoritarian control has increased since then.
One of the things that I continue to be surprised by Stella is the posture of liberalism whilst endorsing and practicing tyranny.
Do you think that there was something pivotal in Julian's revelations around, for example, Hillary Clinton emails and other revelations about the Democrat party that have somehow contributed to this extraordinary shift where parties that present themselves as liberal, pro-minority, pro-protecting vulnerable people are oddly the most willing to shut down dissenting voices?
The most authoritarian?
Has it sort of been a case that has shown us the transition of liberalism into authoritarianism?
Well, I think, look, you have to look at this from a long perspective.
Liberalism was pretty well defined.
I think one could say during the Cold War, you had the virtue of liberalism kind of held against, one could say, the virtues of the other bloc.
So the other bloc was talking about social and economic rights.
It also had obviously a very dark side to it.
And then the West upheld civil liberties, freedom of speech, etc.
What has happened since is that freedom of speech over time, as the internet has become a generalized means of communications globally, freedom of speech has been recast as a danger.
Information has been cast as a threat.
It can be misused.
It's basically cast in a conflict and war framing.
And then at the same time, well, how can they do that?
How can they go from a...
self-definition that privileges civil liberties and this self-image of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech to where we are now.
Well, they've kind of instrumentalized this sense of protection, of safety, and of determining areas in which they, as the The paternal figure will come and look after us, the poor public that cannot discern what they should know or what they should say and so on, because you don't know what the consequences might be.
It's of course a very cynical shift.
This is all bullshit.
It is just the temptation of authoritarianism has been too strong.
The means through which they can exert authoritarianism have become so available that they keep on keeping up this rhetoric, this liberal rhetoric, But don't believe in it, and don't practice it, and don't set any expectation of practicing it, because the excessive force through which people
Governments have used their powers to shut down freedom of speech over the last five years have become really obvious to everyone.
And so, for example, you know, the people who donated to the Canadian truckers now understand that they are in a different world where even their what used to be protected expression of freedom of speech to support whatever cause they wish to support has been shut down and there are consequences for you personally as a result of that and you know who knows what kind of list they've been put on through the banks and the banks are now a
Yeah, it does seem to be happening.
It seems that while still maintaining the guise of the values that you rightly pointed out preceded, particularly in opposition to a sort of a Cold War opponent where the authoritarianism and the Stasi and the KGB and the Executions and the poisoned umbrellas were all sort of very lurid and vivid and Cold War and Ian LaFrennais.
Is it Ian LaFrennais?
I mean the guy that wrote James Bond.
It was all sort of very pronounced and clear and it appears now that we've drifted into a point sort of, in particular it seems to me Stella, I know you've been observing this more closely than I have, but in the last couple of years, five years, ten years, you're much more likely to get support for actual liberty, whether that's freedom of speech, freedom
to publish, freedom of press, and principles like judiciary and the assumption of innocence
until proven guilty. Those kind of principles are being discarded
curiously in the name of this parentalism that you've just described. And have you found that you're more likely to
get allies that are on what you might once have regarded as the
conservative right or Or do you think that part of what's happening is that those labels and models are starting to break down?
Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, publicly said he would free Julian, obviously.
And I wonder if you feel that There's now a shift where the authoritarian and more tyrannical and censorial and incarcerating and espionage act utilizing government are the ones that present themselves as like the friendly face of progress.
Well, I find that Julian has allies across the spectrum, and I think that's partly because the attack against him is so outrageous that the only people you really find defending his incarceration, his extradition, are somehow implicated in the crimes and corruption that he exposed.
You know, be it I study them on Twitter and so on.
You get this person who says something outrageous about him remaining in prison, and they're usually in Virginia or used to work in Guantanamo Bay as a prison guard.
And then it's like, of course.
But it's rare to find people nowadays saying that Julian's imprisonment is is okay.
And that's a good development and I think we've made fairly good progress in the mainstream for that to happen.
But I think there's something else going on here as well, which is that In the very center, you have a very constrained position.
There's no free thinking, it's more about associations, what is the right position to take.
That's why the major parties are virtually indistinguishable, because there is no expression within the system for for opposition.
And that is negative in a way, but it also means that outside of the center, there is a dynamic and interesting development where people from different sides of politics, you know, have different views on the role of the state and immigration and all sorts of things also come to agree about a few things.
And I think the central one there that I hope everyone can converge on is freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is really kind of the central pillar for a democracy.
And if you start undermining freedom of speech, then all the other rights you have basically melt away.
And so I think there is a growing awareness that freedom of speech is the one in which we need to agree in order to progress as a society.
And of course, Julian has been a freedom of speech advocate for decades, and the whole WikiLeaks project is about not just the integrity of the historical record and, you know, the ability to put evidence of wrongdoing onto the public record, but also of the ability to transmit information.
And if you look at the United Nations declaration, the UN declaration, sorry, If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was formulated in 1948, it's kind of the basic document to which the international order was formed after the Second World War, so there was a lot of
I find it to be a very virtuous document and article 19 talks about freedom of speech and it is the freedom to seek receive and transmit information regardless of means and across frontiers and this is such a revolutionary this is such a An amazing article when you think about it, if it were actually able to be preserved and enforced, which is obviously what we're trying to do through Julian's case.
This is something that everyone signed up to, to seek, receive and transmit information.
Across frontiers and through whichever means.
And that is what is being attacked right now.
Because if people are able to speak to each other, then a lot... If information is free, then power is challenged.
That is a natural dynamic.
Stella though, what I'm experiencing, and I don't know if this is because of the kind of cultural space that I'm occupying, I don't believe it is, because what I think is that I have consistently remained anti-authoritarian and once was associated with the left in a conventional way, in the way that, broadly speaking, any celebrity or public figure has that kind of champagne socialist veneer or air about them.
Although Personally and actually my background had always included activism and because of being a drug addict had always meant that I'd lived on the margins both economically and indeed criminally due to the sort of status of controlled substances.
What I feel is happening though now is that free speech has become a right-wing talking point.
That many, for example Canada, but also the United States and also Australia and also the United Kingdom, are introducing bills that control, limit, curb, dilute free speech under the auspices of misinformation and disinformation.
I don't see the same appetite to do that on the right.
I don't know why this point of difference has emerged or occurred, but there are times when I think that it is particular To Julian Assange, in fact, specifically because of revelations around the Clinton emails, because of the discrediting of the Democrat Party.
I feel that this issue is a sort of a centerpiece within that.
And I believe, and I'm obviously in the case of Julian Assange bears this out, that if Your free speech is a challenge to the establishment.
They will find a way to delegitimize your free speech by saying that you are a particular case where free speech shouldn't apply because of some egregious act or some crime or as in the case in Canada, oh well those truckers are Nazis and you can't give Nazis free speech so we're going to have to shut that down and close down their bank accounts.
So whilst I acknowledge that support for Julian Assange and the atrocity of his imprisonment can come from across the board, I have a sense that when it comes to significant movement you're more likely, and this is a question not a statement, do you think it's more likely that a Republican president would pardon Julian Assange than a Democrat president?
because I do think that's the case, even though of course Trump, who apparently considered releasing Julian,
ultimately did not.
Well, look, the support for free speech at the political level is basically absent.
And that's because, as I said, the means through which they can shut down, control, and control not only your speech, but the narrative is much more accessible now than it was years ago.
And that is tempting, especially, not just tempting, but is basically required Because they have defined the information sphere as a threat model and there is no significant pushback in that respect and of course you have this whole NGO economy and researchers and think tanks and so on that have suddenly seen the enormous pot of money that is being made available through public funds and so on to be able to fight
information that is dangerous.
And so there's a huge constituency that is keeping this illusion alive.
And then you have the people who just want to, who are not part of that.
And it's There are a lot of interests.
I mean, if right now maybe it's the right who is more sensitive to it, because they are being more censored, then it's just a matter of time before the others realize what kind of monster they have created.
And so I don't think we're there yet where there is a general realization that we all have to converge on the principle of freedom of speech.
But I hope that we can reach that point.
And in terms of Julian receiving a pardon, I certainly hope that whether it's a Democrat or a Republican, they will come to their senses.
Of course, the Obama administration decided not to even prosecute Julian because they said, he's a publisher, not a hacker.
And if we do, then we're going to set a precedent that can be used against everyone else.
So we're not going to do that.
And then Trump went ahead and initiated this unprecedented prosecution.
And now Biden has continued it.
Because it's convenient, isn't it?
It's convenient to have the most high-profile publisher who has exposed U.S.
war crimes, corruption, and wrongdoing in a prison cell in the U.K., and they can say, well, it's not even us, it's the U.K.
who is keeping him in prison.
And of course, the U.K.
also plays this game and says, well, we're just keeping him for the United States.
They want to extradite him.
We're not charging him with anything.
And so it's just a matter of of this.
It's comfortable for them right now to to keep Julian rotting in prison where he's been for four and a half years.
But of course, the case is now progressing to its final stage.
And Julian could be extradited within, you know, by Christmas.
Wow.
As well as, I think, providing us a lens for how political categorisation is altered, particularly the categories of left and right, exposing how what we have is centralist authoritarianism and ultimately different degrees of neoliberalism.
Another pivotal aspect of this case and the way that Julian is subsequently being handled, in my view, is the seismic change in the ability to communicate and
control information. In a way, what Julian did was the first time, most pronounced and evident time
that anybody demonstrated the ability to convey information differently and potentially
and specifically, and I assume this is why the response has been so draconian and
terrifying, show that enormous numbers of people could almost instantaneously deprive the
establishment of credibility, withdraw their support for existing systems of government and for
prevailing and previously unchallengeable modes of geopolitics, i.e. the ongoing military-industrial
complex, the necessity for wars, the requirement therefore for unjust wars because the wars are not
legitimate in the ways that are claimed, they are just economically necessary wars both for
resources, capital, unipolar objectives.
Because of the technological capacity as well as Julian's moral willingness to expose that
information, what I feel we've seen and in fact what the response to me demonstrates
is that this is about power.
This is about preventing what could potentially happen if enough people were willing to dissent and disobey and tell the truth and communicate and form new alliances.
It could be an end to these types of systems if people were well informed, If people understood that what lies behind clandestine documentation is not just information that would be harmful were it to fall into the hands of our enemies, but information that is harmful if it falls into the hands of the public.
And that's why I believe that we see this case endure.
And that is why, whether it's in the purported left or right, there are It's been very slow to have vocal, clear advocates come out.
I'm just speaking personally as well.
You know, I've been aware of Julian Assange.
I've visited Julian when he was in the Ecuadorian embassy.
I've been aware of this story for a long time.
I'm just too scared to talk about it.
Just like, oh no man, you can't talk about that because that's what happens.
That is what happens.
If you are willing to talk openly about systemic corruption, if you're willing to openly talk
about how the media now does not hold the government to account, they simply convey
the messaging of the state, you are going to get in some serious, serious trouble.
And obviously what Julian Assange did was unprecedented as a result of available technology
and his own personal moral position, as I've stated.
And since then, there's not been anything that significant.
And I think the reason is, is because the media works for the corporate state, both in terms of where they get their advertising dollars and ultimately where their interests converge.
So in a way, there can be no more significant victory than the release of Julian.
Well, that's right.
I think that's why the movement to free Julian is global and because it's tapped into a greater understanding of what his imprisonment actually means.
It's a show of force where the killers have put the truth teller in prison and You know, have enormous resources to try to complexify and obscure that that's what's actually going on.
But that's what it is.
It is putting him in the most kind of brutal and basic way of shutting him in a cell for years on end, silencing him and threatening to keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
And I think the average person, when they see Julian's situation, they realize that they have a sense of natural justice and they understand that really it is Julian's political speech that is the reason why he is in prison.
He is being silenced and censored because he made The world know about crimes and assassinations and torture that was not just committed but also impugned, ongoingly, to this day.
Nothing has been done to put anyone in prison for the literal war crimes, assassinations of children, you know, of toddlers that are recorded in these publications and nothing has happened.
There's always been a cover-up and as part of this cover-up they put Julian in prison so that he can no longer speak and so that he cannot continue to expose crimes and expose corruption.
So it's a show of force, it's a show of brutality To send a message to everyone else that the powerful are untouchable.
And if you try to do the right thing, you will be hounded.
And that just cannot stand.
That's why Julian's freedom is connected to everyone else's freedom.
Because his imprisonment started a trend.
His persecution started a trend.
Which is where we are, you know, 13 years down the line.
And I was just reading an interview that he gave a French magazine called Philosophie.
In 2013.
And the question was, what do you think will be your situation in 10 years time?
And he says, well, it really doesn't depend on me.
It depends on which way the world goes.
If the world continues to, or if the world realizes to uphold If the trend is that transparency and holding governments and exposing corruption is a good thing, then I will be free and WikiLeaks' legacy will be upheld as an example.
But if the world goes in the opposite direction, in a direction in which Control and surveillance and authoritarianism increases, then I will probably be in prison somewhere.
Those are his words from 2013.
And plainly that is the way that it's gone, obviously and demonstrably.
And to my earlier point, that is why the political parties that previously were organised, at least rhetorically, around the language of civil liberties and the rights of the individual and the significance of free speech have shifted So enormously to authoritarianism, censorship, surveillance, alliance with global corporatism, geopolitical unipolar goals, the depleting of the capacity of other superpowers like Russia and China legitimizing as humanitarian resource-based and politically motivated wars, finding ever more sophist ways
of legitimizing wars that are plainly about an agenda that's been present forever. One of Julian's
quotes that I refer to a lot is the function of government is to funnel public money into
private hands. Once you realize that the Afghanistan war is not about winning it,
but prolonging it, you will understand it differently. And I think that's something
you can apply almost beyond war and to almost every aspect of the relationship between the
government, the public, the state and corporations. It's an interesting equation for understanding
power.
And the way that power operates.
Stella, I understand you're making a documentary.
Can you tell me about this documentary?
I understand that you're publicly funding it and stuff, or at least it's being publicly funded.
Can you tell me a little more about that?
Well, there are a few documentaries.
The one that I was actively involved in that was produced by Julian's brother, Gabriel Shipton, is called Issica.
And it was just touring in Brazil and it's toured in the US and it's I think still on ITV in the UK.
And there's a new documentary called The Trust Fall and it is being crowdfunded.
I've seen I've seen parts of it and I think it's a very good explanation of Julian's case.
It has very good interviews, it has a very heartbreaking animation of Julian in court and the kind of difficulties that were The kind of difficulties that he faced when he was in court.
Of course, now he's not even allowed to go to court because he follows hearings from Belmarsh Prison.
Maybe that will be different in the next hearing.
But yes, it's called The Trust Fall and do watch the trailer for that and you get a good sense of what it's about.
And then Julian is, of course, nearing what could be the final hearing here in the UK.
It's really the end game for Julian, because the High Court just incredibly decided that it would not allow Julian permission to appeal.
I mean, think about it, when you have all the major human rights organizations, press freedom organizations in the world Saying that this case is of the highest importance.
It's a greatest threat to press freedom.
It's absolutely outrageous news about Mike Pompeo ordering the CIA to draw up plans to kidnap and assassinate Julian.
And then the High Court said, well, we are not going to grant him permission to.
appeal to even present his arguments before the High Court.
So that's where we're at.
He has one final recourse which is he has gone to a panel of two judges to review the decision and there will be a public hearing.
So the good news is that there will be a public hearing and we are calling on everyone Who can come to come on that day in front of the High Court, in front of the Royal Courts of Justice in central London.
We're calling it Day X because we don't have a date for it yet.
We're waiting for the court to actually announce it.
But we expect it to be within a matter of weeks, really.
And this is, you know, if you have never Actually come to a protest or support Julian but haven't expressed it.
This is the moment to really express it by showing support for him on that day and to come in from the royal courts and I'll address the people who come as well and there will be press so it's important to show Julian's support.
Thank you, Stella.
We will ensure that we publicise that event in any way that we can.
Thank you very much for joining us.
It's always an incredible pleasure to speak with you and to see your ongoing courage and optimism.
Thank you.
Thanks, Russell.
You can keep up to date with Stella's campaign to free Julian Assange by following her on x at Stella underscore Assange.
We'll post all that in the chat, of course.
We've got some other fantastic guests coming up this week.
Tim Pool's joining us.
Kim Iverson is joining us.
Scott Adams is joining us.
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