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Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, attends the European council on October 1, 2024, in Strasbourg, FrancePhoto by Johannes Simon/Getty Images

Canadians: Send an urgent message to legislators urging them to stop Trudeau’s ‘Online Harms Act’

(LifeSiteNews) — On October 1, Julian Assange made his first major speech since his release. In it, he delivered a verdict on how we are governed which is as damning as it is revealing.

“I am not free today because the system worked,” Assange said, “I am free today because after years of incarceration I pled guilty to journalism.”

Julian Assange was convicted under the U.S. Espionage Act and spent 12 years in confinement, first taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, followed by five years in Britain’s maximum-security prison in Belmarsh.

Had his plea not been accepted he faced a sentence of 175 years in prison. He was speaking in Strasbourg, France, at a hearing convened by the Parliamentary Assembly of the European Council – which recognized Assange as a “political prisoner.”

Saying how “incarceration has taken its toll,” Assange noted how the world he had rejoined had changed – for the worse:

I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period. How expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished.

Assange gave a chilling account of the state of the Western world today, saying he now sees “more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth, and more self-censorship.”

He believes that his own treatment was a turning point for the suppression of freedom of speech in the West:

It is hard not to draw a line from the U.S. government’s prosecution of me – its crossing the Rubicon by internationally criminalizing journalism – to the chill climate for freedom of expression that exists now.

During his speech, Assange alleged that former CIA director Mike Pompeo devised a plan to kill him, following Wikileaks’ revelation in 2017 of CIA operations in Europe.

Citing the testimony of “more than 30 former and current U.S. intelligence officials,” Assange said that “it is a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me” while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The revelations published by Wikileaks which prompted the plot included evidence of CIA espionage on European governments and industries. In addition, Wikileaks reports “revealed the CIA’s vast production of malware [spy software] and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs, and iPhones.”

Assange was originally pursued for having publicized U.S. actions in Guantanamo Bay, and alleged war crimes in Iraq, which he explains intensified following Wikileaks’ CIA revelations.

In a recent prank call, Pompeo revealed his business interests in Ukraine, through his merchant bank and the directorship of a Ukrainian media company. He said long range missile strikes into Russia with NATO weapons were necessary – a move which could escalate the war to a full-scale conflict with a nuclear threshold.

Pompeo said the U.S. public sees the “Ukrainian leadership is broken, it is corrupt,” and believes that a defeated Russia can be persuaded to become an ally of the West – and pried away from the influence of China.

The former CIA chief also said that the “narrative … that Zelensky is persecuting Christians” must be countered, in a series of remarkable revelations made to Russian pranksters impersonating “an African official.”

Cracks in our system

Assange’s case and his extraordinary testimony reveals one of many fault lines in the Western world.

“Today, the free world is no longer free.” said Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele, describing also how the West is becoming “more pessimistic,” adding that, “[t]ragically, we can see more evidence of this decline every day.” Speaking at the United Nations on September 30, he said:

When the Free World became free it was due to freedom of expression, freedom before the law. But once a nation abandons the principles that make it free it’s only a question of time before it completely loses its freedom.

His observations are echoed by statements from across the political divide in the U.S.

The former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard warned on October 5 that the party she left now seeks to undermine the First Amendment. She said on X, “People like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris do not believe in the First Amendment because they see it as an obstacle to achieving their real goal: ‘total control.’”

Her remarks followed those made by Hillary Clinton in a recent video interview, in which Clinton said “whether it’s Facebook or Twitter/X or Instagram or TikTok … if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.”

Clinton’s remarks about losing “total control” come after Sen. John Kerry spoke at the World Economic Forum on September 25, saying “our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer [disinformation] out of existence.”

Kerry argued that opposition to the polices of the WEF was fueled by “disinformation” when critics in fact simply dislike its policies. Populism generally is described as a threat to democracy in the West, when it is also simply the preference for popular policies, against the unpopular ones of the current ruling elite.

“Disinformation,” and “misinformation” are terms invented and used by the language and ideological police to hide their malicious intent.

It appears that unpopular policies such as those of permanent war, Net Zero, deindustrialization, and denationalization can only be pursued with “total control” of the information seen by the public.

In the same period, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. stated bluntly that the U.S. Federal Reserve exists to plunder Americans and their nation. The Fed, said Kennedy, “operates on behalf of a few Wall Street banks, and its function is to act like a pump. It is literally strip-mining the wealth and equity away from the American middle class.”

Does Kennedy have any evidence for this claim? Thirteen years ago, a report warned of the power of the central banks – such as the Fed – to move enormous wealth to and between themselves, and to preserve their own power.

While the 2008 financial crisis has faded behind those of the present, a study on its causes and effects found that not only did the banks themselves help to create it, but the crisis saw $29 trillion flood into the banking system from the Federal Reserve.

This was not done for the benefit of the American people, as the authors of the Levy Institute report in 2011 concluded. Instead, “it exposed the lengths to which central banks worldwide – the Fed being perhaps the best example – would act to save the existing financial order.”

Aside from the financial crisis, which has continued to produce a U.S. national debt of over $35 trillion, leading figures warn of moves by unpopular politicians to undermine freedom of speech – and democracy itself – in America.

On October 5, Elon Musk warned that, “If there is a Democratic Party victory this election, they will ban voter ID requirements nationwide, enabling massive voter fraud.”

He went on to explain the consequences of this move:

Banning voter ID is their stated goal – they are not hiding it!

After that, your vote won’t matter, so this is therefore the last real election.

The meaningful political debate is not about left and right. It is about the meaning of what is right, and the outrage at what is obviously wrong. Assange says “it is uncertain what we can do” about the “impunity” of our leadership, which as yet has faced no meaningful consequences for its pursuit of deeply unpopular policies at the expense of widespread corruption and defended by censorship.

With the politics of permanent war leading to the brink of nuclear Armageddon in Ukraine and in the Middle East, it is likely that if our politics does not change, there will be nothing much left to change in future.

Canadians: Send an urgent message to legislators urging them to stop Trudeau’s ‘Online Harms Act’

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