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    From 'Defend Scots': What's the difference between Clara Ponsati and Julian Assange? Archived Message

    Posted by margo on November 18, 2019, 3:33 pm

    From new group - Scots Defend Assange @DefendScots


    Why Scotland Should Defend Assange

    Q: What is the difference between the human rights of Clara Ponsati and Julian Assange?

    A: There is no difference.

    Preservation of human rights is an inviolable moral duty. It is an unassailable position to be defended, by and for each and every one of us, without fail and without hesitation. Maintaining the proper moral fabric of our communities and societies demands this type of activism be a moral imperative.

    Clara Ponsati

    The case of former Catalan government minister Clara Ponsati, now facing extradition to Spain, is a case to be defended without hesitation. Her personal human rights are directly under threat, but a guilty verdict in her case potentially threatens collective human rights. This must be resisted, by community and society alike. In Scotland we have a great Scots phrase to describe our support and egalitarianism, and that is that ‘we’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’. Nothing demonstrates that Clara Ponsati is one of Jock Tamson’s bairns more than the swell of support she has received from the Yes movement for Scottish independence.

    Ponsati’s defence lawyer is Aamer Anwar, who joined the SNP following the Scottish independence referendum in 2014. Speaking at the SNP 2018 spring conference with Ponsati at his side, Anwar appealed for cross-party support in solidarity with the Catalans.

    ‘Clara, if extradited and convicted at the age of 61, could face a sentence of up to 33 years, effectively taking her last breath in a Madrid prison. So silence is not an option for those on the side of justice.’

    Anwar stepped up his appeal by asking members for support. ‘This is your opportunity to make history and as a party we should never be afraid to raise our voices for the truth…’ He is right. We must all be willing to dig deep into our moral courage and ‘raise [our] voice for the truth’.

    Julian Assange

    Julian Assange has consistently acted from moral courage to defend truth. In fact, in 2017, Julian Assange identified a unique way to help the Catalan people organise their activism through more secure channels of communication. He taught them how to protect their movement from the oppressive Spanish state via a video he recorded and posted to Twitter. Assange explained:

    ‘The Spanish state security is repressive towards the Catalonian population. [The Catalans] make it easy for them to understand the structure of Catalonian society; who speaks to who, what do they speak about, who’s important, who’s not important etc. So, [if] you protect yourself you protect your friends. If you protect your friends you protect your community. If you protect the community you protect the whole society… In a situation like this where there is serious repression developing against people who are trying to communicate their political desires then actually we have a responsibility, a burden falls upon us (those people who understand) to try and teach everyone else.’

    Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed Assange in October 2017 on Catalonia, asking why he offered his expertise and for his opinion on the Catalonian situation and he replied, ‘I don’t have a position on independence itself, I think that’s a matter for Catalonians. But that’s precisely the point.’ Meaning, the moral imperative was to support people seeking self-realisation as an escape from countless years of struggle, colonial subjugation, and cultural censorship.
    In part, this closely resembles the desire of many Scots for an independent Scotland free of the corrupt and broken Westminster system which subjugates Scotland’s voice.

    Prior to that intervention, Assange spoke via video link to a large audience attending the Commonwealth Law Conference in Glasgow in 2015 where he helped the Scottish independence Yes movement by confirming that they were ‘not paranoid’ in thinking that British state surveillance had been deployed to spy on Scottish nationalists.
    They had, and the FCO called on numerous state interventions to sway the result towards a No vote.

    Oddly enough though, Julian Assange is not regarded as one of Jock Tamson’s bairns. Why is that? Why is Julian Assange not as vigorously supported by the Yes movement as Clara Ponsati?

    UK Human Rights Abuses

    Julian Assange’s vast body of work is rooted in the ethical principle that we must have transparency for governments and corporations and privacy for the rest of us. Many WikiLeaks publications have revealed brutal US war crimes, savage torture practices, murder, corruption, ecological crimes, mass surveillance programs, secret trade deals, and very much more. He has consistently shone the stark light of transparency where truth has been most shrouded.

    He has been on the side of the people, and yet, tragically, has been strongly rejected by the vast majority of people. Right now he is suffering and in his greatest hour of need. He needs our help. Scotland can and must help.

    Currently, Julian Assange is languishing in Belmarsh, a super-max prison reserved for the most dangerous criminals, but he is a non-violent remand prisoner. His days are spent in solitary confinement – a form of torture – usually up to 23 hours a day. In 2011 a UN Special Rapporteur on Torture condemned this barbaric treatment, suggesting that it only be used in truly exceptional circumstances and that it be completely banned for the vulnerable. Assange’s confinement is constant torture, yet he is a remand prisoner.
    Another unusual strategy to increase his sense of isolation and, which is reserved only for Assange, is the lock down of corridors whenever he is being moved from his cell so that he may not fraternise with other prisoners.

    As if that is not enough, Julian’s father John Shipton recently revealed that his son was subjected to a ‘hot box’ prior to his appearance at an administrative hearing a few weeks ago. When Assange was presented he struggled to recall his name and DOB; hardly surprising given that torture in a hot box disorientates, dehydrates, exhausts, and even kills.

    Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur for Torture, along with two specialist doctors, found that Julian Assange has been subjected to significant and unabating psychological no-touch torture for close to a decade.

    ‘In the course of the past nine years, Mr. Assange has been exposed to persistent, progressively severe abuse ranging from systematic judicial persecution and arbitrary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, to his oppressive isolation, harassment and surveillance inside the embassy, and from deliberate collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.’

    Why is the UK government subjecting this man to extreme torture? And why are the majority of people silent about these terrifying human rights abuses being meted out right under our noses?

    In large part it is because the corporate media is the tool of the state. That could sound slightly paranoid, but given what is now known about the existence of the ridiculously named Integrity Initiative: Institute for Statecraft, it makes complete sense.

    The Integrity Initiative, a think tank designed specifically to function as an agency for the creation of information wars, received upwards of £2 million funding from NATO and the British state. It has cynically paid MSM journalists to write government narrative hit pieces or Twitter posts aggressively smearing Julian Assange, Jeremy Corbyn, and, supporters of Scottish independence.

    It is patently obvious that supporters of Scottish independence have much in common with Julian Assange. The Westminster system, which has constantly and consistently subjugated Scotland, eroded the human rights of Scots through punitive policies, eroded and co-opted Scotland’s cultural identity, and denigrated and denied Scotland’s voice, is doing exactly the same to Julian Assange through his silencing, vicious torturing, and through the sheer denial that it is even happening.

    The cruelty is immeasurable. The Westminster system is a rotting, stinking corpse. We have all witnessed the immoral state of moral dissonance that is a state-sponsored gaslighting to control and subtly punish those who speak truth to power so that the many might have privacy and a functioning system of human rights. Julian Assange, in his weakened state, continually experiencing inhumane torture, still serves as a beacon for truth by raying back to us the savage nature of the corrupt unmasked Westminster system in its naked brutality through the disturbing punishment of this one man who dared to stand up to the barbaric, oppressive forces of hegemony.

    The pressing question is, though, why has the Scottish government not made an intervention on a human rights basis alone given how vocal they are on the failures and abuses of the Westminster system?

    Why do we not hear the voice of people like Aamer Anwar ‘raised for the truth’?
    Where are his SNP colleagues who applauded rapturously when he exhorted them at conference with his great statement that, ‘silence is not an option for those on this side of truth’?

    What exactly is the moral difference between the extradition case and human rights abuses of Clara Ponsati and Julian Assange?

    Well, there is no difference. It is long past time for Scotland to defend Julian Assange’s human rights. Scotland needs the type of cross-party representation for Assange that Anwar exhorted for Ponsati. After all, Scotland is the country that took a courageous stand in defence of Nelson Mandela.
    In the Yes city of Glasgow in 1981 he was granted the Freedom of the City. Back then, a more principled Scottish Labour Party stuck their neck out in defence of Mandela, even though they had to struggle through a great criticism from the press and the public.

    But Glasgow’s courageous position of solidarity became a moral beacon, lighting the way of encouragement for other cities to fall into alignment in support of Mandela’s freedom. Mandela was one of Jock Tamson’s bairns, just as Clara Ponsati is, and just as Julian Assange desperately needs to be.

    Scotland needs to get behind Julian Assange with the same level of support being shown for Clara Ponsati and Nelson Mandela before her. Our representatives need to show solidarity for a man being unfairly, immorally, and unethically crushed by the boot a system that has become a vassal state to US hegemony.

    As Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison’.

    Until Julian Assange is free none of us are free. And until the Scottish government breaks the silence and confronts the UK government over this most vicious of crimes, Scotland cannot ever hope to be independent from Westminster hegemony or from the cancer of imperialism.

    Scots Defend Assange LINK https://scotsdefendassange.wordpress.com/

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