ON Monday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was freed from the high-security Belmarsh jail after a deal was agreed for him to plead guilty to one minor charge of breaching espionage law in the US.
In return for this plea Assange was flown to the US Pacific territory of Saipan yesterday where, according to the deal, a US court will sentence him to 62 months in jail. Having spent 1,901 days in solitary confinement at Belmarsh, in conditions described by doctors and lawyers as amounting to near torture, Assange is expected to be immediately released and flown to Australia.
Since 2019, the US government has demanded Assange’s extradition to America to face trumped-up charges of espionage over WikiLeaks publishing evidence of atrocities and war crimes committed by US forces in the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the ‘crime’ of exposing these crimes against international law, the US pursued Assange relentlessly demanding his extradition to face charges that put him at risk of being imprisoned for over 130 years.
This deal, which changes 130 years to 62 months, represents a huge climbdown and retreat for the US government of Joe Biden and spells out the weakness of US imperialism.
Despite all the legal support from its faithful lapdog in the UK government, the outstanding campaign from the Free Julian Assange movement in Britain and across the world has won the overwhelming support of workers and youth for a man whose crime was to speak out and expose imperialism’s war crimes forcing Biden to back down.
As the US presidential elections loom, Biden is increasingly aware of the precarious position of both the Democrats and Republican parties. After all, the most powerful imperialist nation in the world is set to experience a presidential contest between two extremely elderly men whose mental and physical faculties are increasingly being questioned.
The sight of the US being run by one or the other of these geriatrics is sobering enough for the ruling class, but crucially it is being accompanied by the stark realisation that the mantle of supreme and mighty ruler of the world is collapsing daily while millions of workers are taking action in support of Palestine.
Nowhere has imperialism’s ‘feet of clay’ been more exposed than in its failure to crush the resistance of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Despite all the weapons, bombs and ‘logistical support’ gifted to the Israeli occupiers and a genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, the Netanyahu regime has completely failed to destroy the Hamas resistance movement in Gaza while thousands of Israeli citizens demonstrate weekly, demanding an end to the war.
The desperate response of the Zionist regime is to ramp up the war drive insisting that it intends to invade Lebanon to take on the powerful and well trained army of Hezbollah.
Biden reportedly has strenuously opposed this move fearing that it would inevitably lead to the defeat of Israel and plunge the Middle East into an inferno that would cause irreparable damage to capitalist exploitation of the region. After all, Israel was created by imperialism to act as its attack dog in the region to sort out the Arab masses for the benefit of capitalism, not to inspire a revolutionary uprising.
Many are questioning whether the Israeli attack dog is off the leash and dragging Biden and US imperialism into a catastrophic war that tens of millions of workers and youth across the US, UK and EU are mobilising in opposition to.
What is clear today is that imperialist domination of the world is breaking apart. Capitalism in its final imperialist stage stands exposed as on its last legs with its feet of clay crumbling before the mass revolutionary movement of workers, youth and the masses of the world.
But no social system leaves the scene of history peacefully and capitalism is no exception. The only force with the power to put imperialism out of its agony and consign it permanently to the pages of history is the international working class, leading the oppressed people of the world, taking action to advance humanity by bringing down capitalism through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This task requires the immediate building of parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership necessary to carry the world socialist revolution to victory. There is not a moment to lose. Forward to the victory of the World Socialist Revolution!
