Know Hope — And Demand Freedom for Navalny and Assange
“Know Hope.” That’s the graffiti spraypainted on some scruffy steps in my neighborhood. (And no, they weren’t written there by the millionaire Israeli street artist of the same name.) The words are scrawled in a way they can be easily overlooked, but they make me smile when I descend unsteadily on my cane.
We were devoid of hope throughout the Trump regime. And Obama (and Bansky) tried to market it during his presidency. But now hope feels like a long gulp of spring water after a throat-parching drought.
I argue with a young radical I know about Biden. He feels guilty about voting for him. Maybe Americans needed to feel even more immiserated under Trump before they finally took revolutionary action. No, I tell him – in my experience, despair only leads to more despair. People take action when they sense there is possibility.
In my aging lefty estimation, President Biden is better than I expected – more ambitious in his domestic goals and more defiant of Republican opposition than President Obama. Biden’s surprising expansiveness allows radicals and progressives to think bigger.
And when it comes to national security and foreign policy, the U.S. DOES need to think bigger – much bigger. Our government remains mired in Cold War think – endless wars against endless enemies, a grossly bloated military budget, and a dangerous global policing mentality.
Take the case of Julian Assange. Two years after being dragged out of the Ecuador Embassy in London, the Wikileaks critic of U.S. empire is still rotting in a British high-security prison. And even worse, the Biden administration is appealing the ruling of a UK magistrate that prevented Assange from being extradited to the U.S. (because our prisons are widely regarded as inhumane).
Meanwhile, the Western press is celebrating Russian dissident Alexei Navalny as a hero. He is and so are his supporters – like Anastasia Vasilyeva, the doctor just arrested outside of his bleak dungeon for speaking out about his deteriorating medical condition.
But so is Julian Assange. The continued incarceration of these two political prisoners reveals the continuing moral bankruptcy of the East and the West.
Dr. Anastasia Vasilyeva being arrested outside of Alexei Navalny’s prison
Yes, the Pope should publicly demand the freeing of both Assange and Navalny, as their supporters have recently urged. But more important, we need mass movements on their behalf.
Know hope. We feel it now. And we need to demand more. We need to free our heroes.