S6 - Distruggere Assange. Per farla finita con la libertà di informazione

But in order to defend this system, to make it even better and so that Assange can regain his freedom, what else can we do? Why does it concern us, even us Sardinians? It concerns us Sardinians as any citizen of any state in the world. Because if the concept that a journalist can be arrested and condemned happens, because it has raised our awareness of reality, it means that they are fooling us and without hiding it. They are saying, no, we arrest and condemn this, because you do not have the right to know as citizens, you do not have the right to know if your rulers are really at your service, you do not have the right to know when there is some misdeed of the governments that you want to hide. So this is a fundamental point. Democracies are based on the responsibility of the citizens, who observe the behavior of the governments and decide if they can still have the possibility, those political figures, to go on, or not. Or they are not democracies. It is fundamental that moment when the operation of the governments is evaluated, but we cannot really evaluate it if there is not that press that I was talking about before, able to go beyond the surface. So this is the answer to the question of why it is important for us Sardinians and for everyone. The answer to the other question, what can we all do? Well, we can do a lot. We can use all our creativity to finally set up a great peaceful protest. We live in an era where we have forgotten the power that citizens have, the power that civil society also has when it moves peacefully to show that it has something in its heart. But what happened in Australia must make us reflect, because before the Australian governments didn't even think about intervening in favor of their citizens. As the peaceful protest grew, as the demonstrations grew, the demonstrations against the governments, the demonstrations of requests to the media to deal with the Assange case, things gradually changed, and we came to that Australian Prime Minister I was talking about before, who openly asked Biden to put an end to these accusations, which are accusations for doing journalism. In my book, for me, it was beautiful to tell not only the process, but what the London activists did when Assange was arrested, and then the activists from all over Europe, who realized how impactful the situation was on all of us. I'll give you an example. In London, at that time, the publication of inaccuracies about Assange and the media was very widespread. What did these activists think? Among their many ideas, in addition to the flyers, in addition to the demonstrations in front of the Guardian newsroom to ask them to defend Assange, in addition to a series of peaceful actions of this kind, they thought of censoring all the inaccuracies that the media published about Assange and writing to the newsrooms every time something that was not true was published. This is a big problem for the newsrooms, because they are forced, at least in England, to respond to these letters from the public. But responding takes time. Journalists already have little time. Giampaolo knows how it works in the newsrooms, that we have to do everything quickly. So I'm not saying that thanks to this action of the London activists, the media has changed their attitude, but in fact I've seen it happen. From 2019 to today, the position of the English media towards the Assange case has changed. There is the Sunday Times Magazine, which published at the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021 a photo on the cover of Assange and his wife, his partner Stella Morris, and it is evident from that article and from many other positions taken by the Guardian, by Daily Mail and other newspapers, that the English press, as a fundamental line, is opposed to the extradition of Assange. I'm not saying that this is due to the action of the activists, but I have certainly seen that this has contributed, that we have seen less and less inaccuracies. And this is just an example of what civil society can do. We can, and in my opinion we really have a duty in this historical moment, to organize something big and peaceful to push our government, it doesn't matter if it's a right-wing, left-wing or central government, it has to happen in all countries. We have to push these governments to ask Biden to file the charges, because it is much more likely that Assange will be released thanks to this diplomatic campaign supported by civil society rather than through the legal campaign. And I'm telling you that Assange's fate depends on us, and the fate of everyone's right to knowledge depends on us. Either we move, and many of us do, or we will live in a world where journalism will become marketing.