By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal
A leading Australian Communist Party has come out in defense of Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.
The Socialist Alliance has issued a statement in support of Wikileaks, while the organization’s newspaper Green Left Weekly has devoted a cover story to Assange and his project.
The Socialist Alliance’s statement is printed on the website of the S.A’s other publication LINKS, “a journal of international socialist renewal.”
“The Australian government should defend and support Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange and their efforts to expose the lies, duplicities and outright crimes of the US government and its allies,” said Peter Boyle, national convener of the Socialist Alliance on December 7.
“We condemn the Australian government for collaborating with the US government in hunting Julian Assange down. The exposure of classified US government cables and other material by Wikileaks is an enormous plus for all those who are fighting for truth and democracy, and against war and exploitation. Wikileaks and Assange deserve our strongest support.
“The Wikileaks exposures are not a threat to life and safety. Rather, the forces that want to silence Wikileaks are the most deadly threat to human lives, as Wikileaks releases of US documents on the bloodbaths in Iraq and Afghanistan so dramatically show.
‘The Labor government must immediately guarantee that it will extend to Assange the basic rights of any other Australian citizen… It must also offer no assistance at all to the brutal US campaign to close Wikileaks and silence Assange.’
“The Australian Labor government must immediately guarantee that it will extend to Assange the basic rights of any other Australian citizen to return to Australia and get any consular support and assistance requested.
“It must also offer no assistance at all to the brutal US campaign to close Wikileaks and silence Assange.
“An Australian government acting in the interest of the people would do everything in its power to protect Assange from the grave threats that have been made to arrest or even assassinate him for what he has done.
“It would offer to help keep the Wikileaks websites up, in the face of mounting cyber attacks and denials of service and hosting. And it would refuse to cooperate with any attempts to have Assange detained and or extradited.”
“A government for the people would also help maximize Wikileak’s exposure of the war criminals and immediately break the Australian-US military alliance,” Boyle said.
The Socialist Alliance is joining with other groups and individuals in a campaign of solidarity with Wikileaks, and to force Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s government to abide by its responsibilities to Julian Assange as an Australian citizen.
The Socialist Alliance, formerly known as the Democratic Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party, is Australia’s largest Marxist-Leninist formation.
Strongly tied to both Cuba and Venezuela, the S.A. is also close to the Trotskyist Fourth International, some major Maoist parties in India and Nepal and some former and current “mainstream” communist parties.
Andre Brie, a leader of the former East German Communist Party serves on the LINKS editorial advisory board.
LINKS contributing editors include:
- Francois Vercammen, a Belgian member of the executive bureau of the Trotskyist Fourth International.
- Maria Elena Alvarez Acosta, Senior Professor/Senior Researcher, Instituto Superior de Relaciones Internacionales, Havana, Cuba.
- Jesus Aise Sotolongo, former Cuban ambassador to Vietnam.
- Roberto Regalado Alvarez, director of the Group of Analysis of the Americas of the Department of Foreign Relations of the Communist Party of Cuba.
- Gerson Martinez, El Salvadorean Minister of Public Works and long time leader of the communist led F.M.L.N.
- Alain Krivine, for many years one of the main spokespersons of the Trotskyist French Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire.
- Alejandro Bendana, a former ambassador to the U.N. for the Nicaraguan Sandinista government.
- Dale McKinley, A former leader of the South African Communist Party.
- Boris Kagarlitsky, a Russian Trotskyist leader.
- Manning Marable, a U.S. leader of the Communist Party USA offshoot, Committees of Correspondence.
- Barry Sheppard, A U.S. Trotskyist
Almost certainly some of these people, particularly the Cubans would have intelligence connections.
Is the Socialist Alliance merely jumping on an anti-U.S. bandwagon, or are they trying to drive it, at the behest of some of their foreign friends?
Interestingly Julian Assange was active in radical circles in Melbourne as a teenager. Did he ever cross paths with Socialist Alliance (then Democratic Socialist Party) comrades at that time?
As Melbourne was a D.S.P. stronghold, it is certainly possible.
Is Julian Assange truly a lone wolf, or is he being used? Perhaps some clues could be found in Melbourne.
