By Luc Trudel
A recently posted video allows anyone to quietly visit the site where, a man, a good man, is prevented to live his life peacefully because he exercised one of his human rights.
The video serves as a reminder of the disgraceful fact that Julian Assange has been held unjustly in UK’s Belmarsh prison since April 2019.
By making use of the modern means we enjoy today, these journalists and videographers of the Daily Mail have provided every human soul alive today, having a networked computer device at his disposal, the ability to get connected to the moral reality of the world.
No one will be able to say he or she did not know. A tragedy is playing out on the world’s stage, and we are all free to either realize what is going on or to look away.
Will you be paying attention?
Yes, I want to be clear. Julian Assange did not reveal state secrets. He revealed crimes.
The situation, of course is unjust however injustices are not new. Some of the greatest art ever produced, endures today with us partly because the artists intervened in history, capturing and sharing in the process the lessons in dealing with injustices to the benefit of humankind’s aesthetical education.
Watching the eloquent Stella Morris speaking with dignified poise of the injustices being faced by her fiancé, one is moved by her humanity, her strength, to fight for her man, the way… perhaps the way WE should ALL be fighting… determinedly and steadfastly for our fellow-brother-man, but for Stella, it’s her Julian… and yet she’s composed…
My heart goes out to this lovely couple and their family.
I have recently had the pleasure of watching, for the first time, Fidelio, the Opera, composed by Beethoven, known to have been inspired early on in his life by the exalted spirit of freedom of the famous German poet, Friedrich Schiller. I must say, for my part, I had never ever cared for Opera… before watching Fidelio!
In Fidelio, a devoted wife named Leonore will do anything she can, will go so far as to dress up as a man to ask for a job to work at the prison where her husband is hidden away in solitary confinement as a “dangerous” political prisoner. In disguise, she takes on the name “Fidelio” and risks her life, to find out if her husband is still alive and hopefully to free him.
Yes, Florestan of Beethoven’s opera and Julian Assange are both innocent political prisoners and they are both dignified by the unwavering support and courage contributed to their outcome by their loving partner, but there’s more. Journeying through Fidelio will have us benefit from the creative mind’s unique faculty to bend time, within imagination, rendering time as if in a kind of simultaneity of eternity, a sort of interweaving of time, within which our softest of whispered insight induces in us an ability to connect the immaterial dots/events separated by centuries.
What made my experience even more interesting was being able to imagine Julian’s story as being a modern-day reflection of the similar principle, in the quest of Freedom, playing out in real life, today, as a modern-day existential crisis for all of us to take part in, simultaneously.
Editor’s note: In Beethoven’s Fidelio, this sentiment is brilliantly displayed in the Prisoner’s chorus O welche Lust—”O what a joy” performed by all of the political prisoners jailed in the facility housing Florestan. This chorus stands as an ode to Freedom in the face of tyranny for all time. The appreciation of freedom is also balanced by a sobering recognition of evil that life under a tyranny imposes onto those who value their humanity more than their lives.
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Every Brit, Yank, and Australian, who has not opposed the imprisonment of Assange, is regarded by me as an enemy of freedom, democracy, and justice. I will leave it to you, the reader, to hazard a guess, what this declaration means. But when I eventually confront you, please do not whine. It is already too late for that.
Ah yes, Fidelio. I believe maybe we do speak the same language, after all. The only language Can truly understand.