This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
From Caitlin Johnstone Website
Prominent Australian/British WikiLeaks activist Somerset Bean has launched a GoFundMe with the simple goal of circulating 1,000 giant posters throughout Australian cities in the lead-up to our May 18th elections calling for Julian Assange to be brought home. The posters urge Australians to contact their representatives and put political pressure on them to stand up for one of our nation's best and brightest stars.
Bean writes the following:
"The goal is to print and paste up a thousand of these #BringAssangeHome giant (A0 size) posters in prominent locations in Australian cities during May 2019.
"With every $500 raised, another 100 posters can go up. We need to get printing and distributing right away to capitalize on the pre-election weeks.
"Saving Julian Assange should be an election issue. Politicians need a push to wake up on this issue and #BringAssangeHome. Can you help use this opportunity to highlight Julian's plight? Please share the Gofundme page with your networks on social media and by email and donate what you can. Use the hashtag #BringAssangeHome. Thanks for your support and please get in touch if you can help in any other way."
The GoFundMe, which has been endorsed by the Defend Assange Campaign on Twitter, is as of this writing more than halfway towards its goal of $5,000. Printing and posting is already well underway.
Help get these giant posters seen all across Australia: https://t.co/n3WOQf4iQqpic.twitter.com/k8yAYFTDv1
Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) April 29, 2019
Bringing Assange home would indeed be one of the best things that could possibly happen to Australia, because it would necessarily mean coming together in the name of national sovereignty and standing opposed to the US-centralized imperial blob that is constantly sucking us into stupid foreign wars and preventing us from functioning as a real nation. The path toward bringing Assange home also happens to be the path toward ceasing to have our fate as a nation defined by our existence as a giant US military/intelligence asset.
A recent segment on 60 Minutes Australia interviewed attorney Greg Barns about his call for the Australian government to step in and stop Assange's entirely illegitimate extradition to the United States.
"If he were for example detained in China for this period of time, and ill-treated, there would be a hue and cry, not only on the part of the government, but the Australian media," Barnes told 60 Minutes. "Because it's the United States, we seem to think there's some form of exception."
Assange's father John Shipton gave a spirited defense of his son throughout the segment, accusing the Ecuadorian government of handing the WikiLeaks founder over to the clutches of the US empire in exchange for an IMF bank loan and rightly dismissing the absurd list of accusations leveled against him as "smears." The segment concluded with a wish from Shipton for Assange to be able to live freely in his home country and spend time with his family.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).