Knowledge Is Power: Why Julian Assange Is a Champion of Democracy
Love him or hate him, the arrest of Julian Assange is most certainly a travesty of not only justice, but also of the core democratic values that the Western world prides itself on. Of course, politicians in Washington are rather delighted to see the downfall of a modern-day muckraker who has exposed the US government on numerous occasions throughout the years. Yet, it has been quite stunning to see that many common American citizens on both sides of the political spectrum seem to be celebrating Assange’s arrest and advocating for his potential extradition to the US, where he could be subject to government sanctioned-torture (“enhanced interrogation,” if you prefer euphemisms) and serve a lifelong sentence at a maximum security prison. Unfortunately, the reason why so many American citizens are cheering on the prosecution of Assange is because those who are born into the free world oftentimes take democracy for granted - so much to the extent that they forget to acknowledge what such a term really means, and are therefore rendered incapable of understanding precisely why his arrest would represent a threat to the fundamental pillars of democracy itself.