Julian Assange

I am here today because I cannot be there with you today. But thank you for coming. Thank you for your resolve and your generosity of spirit.

On Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy and the police descended on this building, you came out in the middle of the night to watch over it, and you brought the world’s eyes with you.

Inside this embassy, after dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape. But I knew there would be witnesses. And that is because of you.

If the U.K. did not throw away the Vienna conventions the other night, it is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching.

So, the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the embassy of Ecuador.

Remind them how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world and a courageous Latin America nation took a stand for justice.

And so, to those brave people: I thank President Correa for the courage he has shown in considering and in granting me political asylum.

And I also thank the government, and in particular Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño, who upheld the Ecuadorian constitution and its notion of universal rights in their consideration of my asylum. And to the Ecuadorian people for supporting and defending this constitution.

And I also have a debt of gratitude to the staff of this embassy, whose families live in London and who have shown me hospitality and kindness despite the threats we all received.

Brandon Smith

Tyranny is nothing but an opportunity for the best in all of us to rise.

It is inevitable. There comes a point in the development of every crisis, every catastrophe, every impending disaster, every act of methodical dictatorship, in which the generations selected by fate or destiny to endure the trial must attempt to look beyond the intellectual and the psychological, to deeply consider the greater philosophical or spiritual questions of their epoch.

Certain moments in history demand that truly free individuals relinquish their cynicism, and embrace that inherent world of form and conscience that exists in each of us but remains largely unexplained. Without this act of “faith”, or intuitive knowing, good cannot exist, inspire, or prevail.

To understand what we face in our age of encroaching technocracy draped like glistening silicon across the face of a third world American cesspool, we must accept certain realities; the first and foremost being the existence of “evil”. Not the evil of ignorance, that is easy to recognize. Not the evil of apathy and moral relativism, though the stench of both sharply permeates the sour underside of our culture.

No, I am talking about pure, unbiased, unflinching, perfectly conscious and fully absorbed evil. The kind that they tell stories about. The kind that history books speak of almost in awe, as if it is miraculous in nature. A dark tide. A prehistoric leviathan. An unbelievable and seemingly inhuman myth made manifest by astonishingly vile despots.

This evil is so overwhelming that many people today scarcely imagine it possible. It is our society’s greatest weakness; the denial of ultimate malice.