If you don’t speak up

The power of people speaking up and resisting together terrifies corrupt and undemocratic power. So much so that ordinary people here in the West are now the enemy of governments, an enemy to be watched, an enemy to be controlled and to be impoverished.

True democracy is not the White House. True democracy is not Canberra. True democracy is the resistance of people, armed with the truth, against lies, from Tahrir to right here in London. Every day, ordinary people teach us that democracy is free speech and dissent.

For once we, the people, stop speaking out and stop dissenting, once we are distracted or pacified, once we turn away from each other, we are no longer free. For true democracy is the sum – is the sum – of our resistance.

If you don’t speak up – if you give up what is uniquely yours as a human being: if you surrender your consciousness, your independence, your sense of what is right and what is wrong, in other words – perhaps without knowing it, you become passive and controlled, unable to defend yourselves and those you love.

People often ask, “What can I do?”

The answer is not so difficult.

Learn how the world works. Challenge the statements and intentions of those who seek to control us behind a facade of democracy and monarchy.

Unite in common purpose and common principle to design, build, document, finance and defend.

Learn. Challenge. Act.

Now.

Julian Assange, after six Months in the Ecuadorian Embassy (excerpt)

Read full statement: wikileaks.org