Both Whistleblowers and the Silent Majority have a Common Purpose

In recent weeks, there has been a gradual increase in the amount of press time dedicated to the personal vilification of Julian Assange, a man who has not been charged with anything, yet has taken refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in fear of his life. Let us look at the facts:

• He is accused of rape in Sweden.
• He has been handed an extradition order in the UK.
• He has embarrassed Western governments over their sinister activities in the Middle East and elsewhere.
• The United States has put like-minded individuals in a not-too-comfortable waiting room until they come to trial.

There is a link in all of this. The governments are playing the people for idiots. Most other whistleblowers and protestors unhappy with their government's actions (who are worth their salt) have been slowly picked off by governments for various other petty crimes, in a way Stalin and Khrushchëv would have approved of.

The whole planet is engulfed in an unofficial war of governor versus governed, but many do not see it yet. Or are indifferent to it. I wonder for how long. Assange is not alone in his plight, where even some anti-rape organisations do not want to see him extradited.

There is Pussy Riot in Russia, who like Assange, were not accused of their original anti-government "sin"; that of singing an anti-Putin song in an Orthodox church. To be sentenced to two years' hard labour for that is an exaggeration of breathtaking proportions. But during their trial, these three women were put in a glass cage, as if they were King Kong at any minute about to leap out and devour everyone. That is not taking into account the fact that they had the majority of their witnesses rejected by the judge. In the end, that may have been a blessing in disguise, as they could have got themselves into a whole lot of deeper trouble by having them politicise this sham trial even further. But I am convinced, that if they had not sung about their grievances with Putin, they would have just got their fingers rapped for it and everyone would have said the punishment fit the crime.

Then there was Bradley Manning, who leaked over a quarter of a million diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. After festering in various sinister U.S. detention centres for far longer than is legal under several laws and conventions, he is finally about to be put on trial. But for what, actually? For having passed classified information on to a third party; classified information that would put most Western governments on trial for less. Surely, as it was in the public interest, it should have made governments take a step back and look at their abhorrent treatment of poorer countries. But not a jot of it. This man is a liability and he will be hung, drawn and quartered for it.

Furthermore, he is not alone. James Gee, a Guantanamo priest, who blew the whistle on Guantanamo Bay torture, was charged with adultery and pornography on a government computer. How convenient.

Janis Karpinski, a former Brigadier General in the U.S. Army, was charged with shoplifting after revealing Donald Rumsfeld's policy of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Funny that.

Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector, who was adamantly against the invasion of Iraq, having found no evidence of WMD. He was detained for soliciting minors for sex on the Internet in 2001, charges he was later absolved of, but was rearrested nine years later on similar charges.

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who accused the Karimov régime of human rights abuses was suddenly accused of trying to seek sexual favours from visa applicants, which caused his removal.

Then there are the show trials in less democratic parts of the world, like that of Dzimitry Kanavalau and Vlad Kavalyou, the "lone wolves" accused of blowing up Oktyabrskaya station in the Minsk Metro in 2011, despite vast amounts of evidence to back their innocence. This includes the fact that a BBC journalist timed the walk from the station to the flat of the accused in just under half an hour, even though the Belarusian authorities claimed the accused had done it in four minutes. Even the Interpol representative was taken in enough to congratulate the Belarusian authorities for finding the perpetrators so quickly. Western governments not so much, but still, Interpol should have known better. Their real crime? They had been "spreading provocative rumours, sowing panic", by bringing up their own theories behind the bombings on social network sites. It was enough to make Lukashenko want to nail them for the charges, even finding evidence that they had committed another atrocity four years earlier at a concert.

But the fact that Western governments questioned the whole nature of the criminal proceedings against the men, and the European Parliament condemned the Belarusian government for sentencing them to death by firing squad, shows the underlying hypocrisy at the heart of Western politics. With Western governments professing to benignly protecting their citizens from cyber-attacks and terrorism whilst at the same time being connected to sinister acts of their own, I would argue that this makes it the most worrying aspect of it all.

We are all now suspects. And it is about to get worse with the attempt by governments to create a central authority that will handle Internet transparency: read this and weep.

If this becomes reality, we will all, at some point, do something that governments and law courts can use against us if they do not like our political views, or feel we are public nuisances, whether it be a naughty rendezvous we organised via Skype or Facebook, or a bill we erroneously forgot to pay, or a flippant remark we make on Twitter. It will also allow governments to crack down on what news we read about, how long it remains online (archiving online will surely mean we won't have backdated copies as evidence so readily available in years to come), and what they can rake up on us if they want to make us out to be persona non grata. It is a tactic used by dictatorships all over the planet, one now being employed indiscriminately by Western democracies, and by taking control of our Internet, our last freedoms are about to be extinguished. People are going to be put on trial for mere nothings simply to discredit them.

Fortunately, many actually see the comical side to this tinpot dictatorial stance by the West, as we saw last night on BBC3. "The Revolution Will Be Televised" is a spoof comedy in which two men drive a combine harvester straight through the Establishment. In one of the scenes, they try to get Tony Blair sainted, and campaign vigorously for it, claiming that turning a short speech into a large bundle of cash is evidence of a miracle. I punched the air with Schadenfreude at this, and when they turned up at Blair's London residence with a stained glass window of him in a venerable portrait with wings and a halo, I could not believe it that the housekeeper (or security) actually lent them a ladder to see if that small object of facetiousness actually fit above the front door. It was a moment when comedy came of age. A moment that said, "we're coming after you, and we're doing it through the medium of spoof television." Pussy Riot meets Sasha Baron Cohen and Monty Python on speed.

Although this type of hard-hitting satire is still possible in Western democracies, I see a slow degradation of our rights and freedom of speech. This process is so slow as to be very difficult to notice for the average Panem et Circences citizen of the silent majority. It is a little like watching a close family member growing up. You don't notice because you see that person every day, but others who only visit every Christmas do. Whether in the supermarket, driving your car, at school, on public transport, or when addressing your local council, technology has already taken the heart out of the procedures it was designed to administrate/calculate/record, by making them rigid, inflexible and often quite intrusive, insulting and undignifying, but just imagine what it would do to your democratic and even basic rights. Under this setup, everyone who is recorded doing something that legally is a grey area, or anyone trying to use their own initiative to speed up a process or help someone get out of a mess which is not the correct procedure, could be subject to investigation or even indictment.

If you want to change a law, the best way is to galvanise public opinion first. Make a scapegoat, get the information, hang it over the piranhas at the press and let them make the most out of it. It is a simple enough thing to do with the right power and money. And these days, governments do not need Berlusconi-esque control over their media to do that, although many prefer it.

Coming back to the main point: if you think the Assange dilemma is about rape, think again. He may have been a cad, he may be accused of having partaken in what George Galloway called "bad sexual etiquette" in a moment of extremely clouded judgement, but for him to prefer to spend what may turn out to be an excessively long period of time in the Ecuadorian embassy in London rather than go to Sweden to face those charges, I think there are some very big fish circling in the waters all around him, and if anyone is going to know it, then that's the boss of WikiLeaks. If this is a sign of things to come, I sure hope the televised revolution promised on BBC3 comes sooner rather than later.

An Olympic Homecoming

Three weeks and two days ago, the country of my birth kicked off the greatest show on Earth in East London's Stratford with a breathtaking, genial and charming, if somewhat trippy, opening ceremony. Some of it was truly inspired, but most of it reflected what Britain is all about, and who the British are. Probably more than any other public demonstration ever staged, transforming opinions of the United Kingdom by removing them out of the thoughts of the provincial-minded and landing them firmly at the door of the cosmopolitan, international, multicultural and the (figuratively) colourblind.

London is a city for everyone willing to give it a try. It has had a permanent stream of immigrants which started in Roman times and carries on today, which is why people from many countries find it hard to understand what constitutes a British person. In the opening ceremony, even some Americans thought the use of a black guy and girl in the dance sequence on the World Wide Web was an attempt at political correctness. That is so far from the truth as not only to be cynical but also patronising to the majority of people in the United Kingdom who do not see someone as a colour but as a human being. And a fellow Brit. And they are. But they can also be something else too, whether Caribbean, Australian, Kenyan, Sri Lankan or Turkish. In fact, the gripe in the British newspapers was that they were chosen due to their ridiculously photogenic features, that no ugly ones were allowed. Colour meant nothing.

This is how it works: you come to the UK with a smile and a wish to contribute, learn the language and join in with local society, and within a short space of time, you'll be just as British as everyone else. Which is to say with a pinch of immigrant in you. Practically everyone is. If you come to rip the state off, claim benefits and make chaos, you'll be a hate figure in the Daily Mail one day. And that is not a pretty place to find yourself.

They say you can never go back home once you've left. And yes that's true. The parental home is a place of your childhood, and to overstay your time or to move back in when you should be moving on is to risk causing untold damage to the relationship you have with your family. It did with mine. I went to university and afterwards, without money or a good contact to give my career a push (who needs linguistic skills in London?), I moved back into my parents' house. I became depressed, I started to neglect myself and I got involved in things which only bored twenty-somethings can get away with calling the madness of youth. When I hit my thirties, I soon got it thrown in my face and resolved to leave. Despite fly-by-night jobs, I was never mentally strong-willed enough to fly the nest. House/flat rentals were still prohibitively expensive, even at the turn of the century, and I didn't feel like flat sharing. An event in my life so disturbing as to make me physically sick occurred just before Christmas 2000, and I felt the urge to get out as life had become not only intolerable, but also impossible. I went to Prague for a few weeks to get over the ordeal and away from the situation. While I was there, I received a call inviting me to live and work in Belgium. Living costs were far lower there, and so I left the very next week for Belgium, where I remained for seven years.

But after nearly 12 years outside the country of my birth, which I appreciated more by not living there, and had only visited for long weekends once every funeral or shopping trip, it came as a surprise to arrive on 9th August 2012, in the middle of the Olympic Games, in the Britain I remembered from the late seventies and early eighties (my early childhood), where strangers said a merry "hello" to you, where station inspectors waved you through in the belief you had been good enough to buy a ticket, where you could leave your bag next to the table at a restaurant knowing it would still be there even if you did not keep an eye on it.

Yet what had fundamentally changed was the skin complexion. And I believe for the better. Living here in the countryside of Germany, it is seldom that you stumble upon a person who is not white. So I was always going to notice the change more than someone who already lives there. It's like an aunt you haven't seen in ten years who says "my my, haven't you grown?!" but your parents don't notice this because they see you every day. Local people seemed to be of all colours and religions. Despite the riots last year, London is still a triumph of integration. I saw a Moslem woman and a black woman sitting on a bench in Greenwich Park chatting and laughing in the manner of old mates, which they probably were; I saw a group of people in Jamaican flags in the shopping centre next to the Olympic Park showing a Polish girl how to get to the Underground station. I saw a guy in a turban draped in the Union Flag, hurrying to his venue. I saw a black woman weeping during the closing ceremony while the National Anthem was being played. The United Kingdom I had gone back to had caused these people to integrate in ways other nations had failed. In fact, I am doing them a great injustice by mentioning integration. A huge amount of them will have been born there. To be honest, even after seven years in Belgium and four in Germany, I cannot think of a moment when I truly felt proud of the places I lived in, and in Belgium I sympathised a lot with the North Africans in my neighbourhood, who had clearly been born there, but were still referred to in Dutch as "allochtoon", or all-comers. That was clearly not the case for these people in London.

Recently, I joined an online forum in Germany to discuss living in Rheinland Pfalz. One asked me where I was from, thinking he had noticed my bad German grammar. I said London. He replied that it would be impractical to meet then, wouldn't it? I told him I lived in Saarburg but I was from London. And there's your difference. People round here don't generally move further than their own WiFi zone. "Where you are from?" and "where you live?" are one and the same for most. But in London, the first question would be phrased, "what are your roots?"

In London, I have a Persian friend who was born in Italy. He's Jewish. I've known him for many many years, and not once would I ever say he was anything else except a Londoner. London made him a successful man and he makes sure he contributes back. I also have a Slovak friend who was a professional BMX athlete, who is still popular enough in those circles to get herself inside the Czech section of the Olympic Village. I met her in Bratislava a decade ago, when I coincidentally ran into a friend of mine and her mother out for a drink. Doing BMX, Slovakia was never going to provide the funding or the facilities to give her the career she deserved. So she moved to the UK. To Scotland first, and then to London. When I left her last, back in about 2003, she had a strong Slovak accent and a problem with articles (the/a/an). When I met her again in London last week, she was glottally stopping and diphthonging like a cockney wideboy. She's still Slovak, but she likes my country enough to want to sell her house in Slovakia and stay where she is, despite her long working hours, the much smaller living spaces and the relatively more expensive cost of living.

Many other nations in the world are frightened about the encroachment of "foreignness" on their culture, the French being the most useful example in their recent banning of Moslem veils, an act that would never be tolerated on the other side of the Channel. What you wear and who you are are not inextricably linked. Although many may find it not their own taste in clothes, most would go very far to assure those people the right to wear what they wanted. Britain vacuums up cultures, religions and colours and redistributes them equally, indiscriminately and fairly, a process that highlights the futility of the actions and ridiculousness of the views of extremists on any side, whether English Defence League activists, BNP marchers, Islamists, or non-integrationists like the parents who murdered their own daughter because she did not want to marry the man they had chosen for her back in Pakistan.

In his book "Johnson's Life of London", Boris Johnson, that most intelligent of merry-makers and mayor, said, "You would expect me to say this, and I must of course acknowledge that great many cities can make all kinds of claims to primacy, but at a moment when it is perhaps excessively fashionable to b gloomy about Western civilisation I would tentatively suggest that London is just about the most culturally, technologically, politically and linguistically influential city of the past five hundred years. In fact, I don't think even the mayors of Paris, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing or Amsterdam would quibble when I say that London is - after Athens and Rome - the third most programmatic city in history." I happen to agree with him. And my friends called it home, because it doesn't feel strange to them. It has an air of familiarity to everyone.

And the same thing happened to me. I suddenly, self-consciously and openly declared I found Britain was my home once more. But not the parental home in Kentish London. No. Too many memories, too many ghosts. But London as a whole. I was charmed by the village-like features of Kew where I have my pied-à-terre; I was beguiled by the noble maritime feel of Greenwich; I was blown away by the magnificence of the Thames as I travelled down it by boat from Hungerford Bridge to Tower Bridge; I was awestruck by the sheer opulence of Hampton Court Palace and its ancient gardens; I was taken aback by the amicable grandiosity of the Olympic Stadium as I viewed it from the top-floor window of a department store in the shopping centre. And it's so green, even in Homerton, Frognal and Bow. But most of all my heart was warmed by the Polish waitress at the restaurant on the South Bank who addressed me as "love" in true London fashion; I was impressed by the command of English of the German curator's assistant at Hampton Court; I was humbled by the local knowledge of the French-Spanish waitress at my favourite restaurant under the arches at London Bridge station; I was doubly impressed by the Persian man who could cook a splendid Full English breakfast at the greasy spoon at Kew Gardens station. There is simply no other city on Earth where inhabitants from every corner of the globe live side-by-side in fairly peaceful circumstances as equals. It is a success story that was highlighted at the Olympic opening ceremony, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the selfless British inventor of this fabulous tool we call the WorldWideWeb that I am writing these words on now, typed out on the stadium's LED pixels, "this is for everyone". How true.