'Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air' -William Shakespeare This is exactly how the world's pre-eminent bard and playwright writing in the 16th and early 17th centuries, exposed the hypocrisy of people, particularly in position and power. More than three centuries later ---if Macbeth was written in 1704, there seems to be an epidemic of foul plays under the garb of fair plays. On the occasion of Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange's walking out of UK prison as a free man, Shakespeare's observation could not be more appropriate. Under a deal, Assange has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents. By this time, Assange has joined his family in Australia before briefly appearing at the district court in Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific.
The saga of his imprisonment for five years in high-security UK jail and self-confinement in Ecuadorian embassy in London for long seven years is a testament of how whistleblowers are hunted down by the so called champions of democracy and free press. Under the deal, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment which he has already completed. But the charges of rape and sexual assault brought against him by two women respectively in Sweden were dropped by Swedish prosecutors on the plea that credibility of the accusations notwithstanding, the long passage of time has destroyed many of the evidences.
If Assange has committed the sexual offence, he surely should have suffered the punishment but so far as the disclosure of US classified defence documents is concerned, his is an act of heroism. The materials that he made public concerns US invasion in Afghanistan and Iraq and the related war crimes there. But there is nothing to be surprised if Julian was framed because the incidents were reported immediately after the Wikileak's release of hundreds of Washington's classified military documents on US war in those two countries and diplomatic dispatches to support those.
A man who boasts a loving life partner in Stella Moris and had two sons as a couple before their exceptional marriage in the oppressive high-security Belmarsh prison on March 23, 2022 provides one example too many of the bond between the two. Before the marriage, she declared, "This is not a prison wedding, it is a declaration of love and resilience". She further declared, "I will marry the love of my life", who "is a wonderful man, intelligent and funny" and has "a deep-seated sense of right and wrong". It is difficult to believe with such a testimonial from his wife, he suddenly turned into a sexual predator to pounce on two women and that too at the time of a Wikileak conference in Sweden.
The administration and military establishment in Washington were seething with rage that their misdeeds in Afghanistan and Iraq had been exposed. Saddam Hussein was falsely painted as a villain and the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction including chemical weapons was a damn lie. In Afghanistan, America's own creation of the Taliban turned its nemesis but not before extensive war crimes had been committed by the panicked US soldiers deployed there. It was not for nothing that the US invasion of one oil-rich country and another mineral-rich one was carried out.
Assange did not commit any crime by exposing the lies and hypocrisy of US administration, which were used as a ruse for attacking the two countries and committing mass murder there. In fact, he is a hero who dared rise up to the occasion to show the world that the foul play is passed by the powerful parties as fair play. Accused of foul play, Julian had his life threatened but he deserves to be rewarded for his heroism, courage and doing exactly what his conscience asked him to do.
When it comes to invasion of foreign lands, whether in the past or even in this so-called highly advanced civilisation, the mentality behind it remains the same and excuses advanced are equally flimsy. There is not much to choose between an invader of the Middle Age and a war-monger of present time. When Nadir Shah invaded India, the excuse was the insult inflicted to the Persian envoy by Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah at the royal court of Delhi. All Western colonial powers followed the arcane logic that the countries they wanted to take over were populated by people uncivilised and needed their help for the natives' education, material well-being and moral enlightenment. Perhaps the sub-continent provides the best example of how the ulterior motive of capturing the rich swathes worked behind the apparently innocent appeal for carrying on business transactions. Then the two world wars, although they look detached from the endeavour to loot wealth from colonies, had their seed sown in the rivalry between and among leading European powers over colonial expansion.
What the big powers preach and practice at home is mindlessly violated abroad in advancing their interests and spheres of influence. That is criminal and contrary to the right to information. Julian took help of his techno-savvy mind and sense of responsibility to skirt around US cyber security for bringing the truth to the fore. Hats off to him!
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