We Are All Julian Assange!
An Anarchist Soliloquy

These are the days, dearest motherfuckers. These are those days. These days. These days of rage. These do or die days. These all or nothing days. These days with the ice caps melting and the seas rising to drown their wayward children. These days with the empire collapsing all around us in heaps of flames like the glowing red spires of a thousand Notre Damme’s. Days of hysteria and blindness. Days of gnashing teeth and talking heads decapitated from the reality they pontificate upon. Days of drones strikes and indefinite detention. The end of days for the worlds most abominable superpower, exit stage right. But the actors in this epic tragedy are revolting. Swing low, sweet cherry, Helter Skelter is coming down with a fight. Nero’s finale is rapidly becoming a concerto. In days like these, truth has become a precious commodity. The kind of glimmering prize that even the better angels of our nature are tempted to horde. But sadly sometimes even horded prizes can be taken for granite. Washed away in the rapids of filth that can only be called “truth” in parentheses.

It’s not easy to tell eight billion people that they are damned to a hell of their own creation. Pacifists have been crucified for far less. An entire estate once devoted to just such a task has collapsed beneath the weight of its responsibility. A whole new estate had to be created on the fringes to take their place. Unlike the Fourth, we dreary partisans of the Fifth Estate are not charming birds performing behind the gilded cage of a faberge news desk. We are not the beautiful people. We are the freaks, the weirdos, the hackers, the leakers, the bloggers, the trolls, the 300 pound kids in Belorussian babushka’s basements pounding our stubby little fingers black and blue against our machines. We are the heard unseen. We are the fissures in the crumbling iceberg. The embers in the belfry. And this week we are all Julian Assange.

Seven long years buried alive in the catacombs of a South American embassy. Or was it eight? So hard to tell with no sunlight. Shanghaid on trumped up charges for the crime of exposing the horrific realities of America’s rapidly collapsing forever wars. Seven long years of playing claustrophobic games of cat and mouse with the closing walls. Tempting fate to jump first from the brink of our burgeoning insanity. We told the truth. We showed it to them in stark black and white. We showed them the bodies. First the men, their guilt unverified, irrelevant. Then the women. Then the children. Fed, charred, writhing and screaming to the tomahawk fangs of a great green machine, it’s vital organs laughing and cheering, basking in the thick black smoke of their state sanctioned cruelty. We showed them the digital kraken in the Utah desert. We showed them the tentacles connecting our police state to every flickering screen in this country and beyond, keeping tabs on the indentured citizenry of a world that can only be called “free” in parentheses. They just shrugged.

We told you the truth! We told you everything! We carried the freedom the press dropped on Golgotha like a soiled cross. We carried it on our brittle shoulders with no help from Christ. We sacrificed our freedom, our health, our very sanity. We gave it all to you on a silver platter like the severed head of John the Baptist and your thanks for this sacrifice is cruel indifference, total radio silence while the cameras of the Fouled Estate capture our final journey between prison cells. Skin bleached by shadows. Long beard, tangled and grey like the smoke from a drone strike. Head still held high, screaming obscenities to the heavens with the crumpled proverbs of Gore Vidal clenched in our shackled fists. Still speaking truth to no one like an Old Testament prophet warning a joyfully oblivious Gomorrah of the flames that await it if it consents to such barbarism. And it consents, with a shrug. It always consents. The truth is a second rate high at best to a population of permanent children weaned on fentanyl and war porn.

Today we are all Julian Assange because if they can crucify Julian Assange they can crucify any one of us. Like Julian, we are not simply guilty of being journalists. We are guilty of being members of the Fifth and final Estate. We are guilty of being truth tellers, untethered to the multinational life-support-system of big business and bigger government. We are guilty of colluding with one another across their manufactured borders dividing us into left and right. We are guilty of spitting out the poison of the propaganda that once passed for journalism in this country. We are guilty of betraying their shallow patriotism in the name of truth. We are guilty as charged and we are aggressively unapologetic for our crimes.

We are all Julian Assange. We are all Chelsea Manning. We are all Reality Winner. We are all Edward Snowden, Glen Greenwald, Ross Ulbricht, Cody Wilson, Jeremy Scahill, Peter Van Buren and Laura Poitras. We are the charred, writhing, screaming corpses of the earth. We are the children you left home alone while you went out starting fires in the Middle East and we found the loaded .45 you keep under the bed. We are the Fifth fucking Estate. We are pissed off and we are not going away. When you crucify one of us, you crucify all of us. I hope you brought a lot of nails. We will make things ugly for you and that’s a promise I aim to keep. You want a war? You got one. Bring your guns, hell, bring your goddamn atom bombs. I will outfox them all with my blog. My keyboard is one weapon of mass destruction you don’t have to fabricate. This isn’t over. Not by a long shot.