Julian Paul Assange, the unloved whistleblower
We may not like him as readily as we like Edgar Snowden, his own sympathies leaning to the right, but controversial journalists also have a right to justice, especially since the Australian founder of Wikileaks, through the extensive revelations that Chelsea Manning made available to him, exposed substantial injustices himself. Anyone who read carefully suspected for some time that the rape accusations that Sweden made against Assange were constructed. These are not his friends from the Chaos Computer Club or other hackers spreading the accusations published by the Swiss online newspaper Republic as a primer: The UN Special Envoy on Torture, Nils Melzer, states that Assange’s case is dishonest and that it is illegal to imprison someone in such a way that his – physical, mental and social – health suffers. This is more than given with Assange; the images of a broken man on the verge of dereliction being dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy by the police, after almost seven years of what amounted to solitary confinement, went around the world. Since then he has been rotting away in a London prison. Let us hope that the international appeals and demonstrations for his release will bear fruit. Ex iniuria ius non oritur!*
Please, stay well!
Susanne G. Seiler
*No right can come from wrong.
A non-binary person walked by
And I thought of my daughter, I mean my child. And of my breasts,
which protrude in a superfluous fashion, and of my make-up,
mask of an aging drag queen. And I felt ridiculously out-of-touch.
A woman gets tired of impersonating a woman, like keeping the
front porch clean for the drivers-by. Why not write a book instead?
Why not tattoo Fuck the Gender-Cops on your knuckles?
I asked my child what should be done with my jewelry when I die
and they said I still like jewelry, and something inside me as primitive
as putting flowers on a grave felt gratified. I can die now, I thought,
and all the ways I tried to make them conform to femininity, may they
die with me. I’m sorry, darling, that I wrapped you up in all that soft
pink fairy shit, that tulle, for your quinceañerx.
Gail Wronsky