On November 4th Yanis Varoufakis and Brian Eno, both well known in Wikileaks supporters circles for being outspoken in the support of WikiLeaks and their friendship with Julian Assange got together in Cadogan Hall in London for an interesting discussion about Money, Power and the need for Radical change in society. Cadogan Hall with a capacity of 950 people was an ideal venue for a rallying cry to solidarity with Julian Assange.

Several supporters gathered early outside the hall with posters and flyers for distribution to the people walking into the hall to watch and participate in the discussion.

We had good discussion with several people, students, professionals, of a variety of political beliefs. We advertised upcoming events, like the upcoming MIA/Lowkey concert the day after and the Free the Truth conference on 28th of November. It was very rewarding to see people embracing our message and for the few who challenged it, to have the opportunity to challenge them to think differently.

After helping with the flyering I went inside and enjoyed the discussion and my question during Q and A prompted heartfelt responses from both:

Brian Eno said: ” We both know Julian and we both visited him when he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy, several times each I guess. And, it was certainly a kind of torture and he is now in a worst kind of torture, he is in solitary confinement. Yanis has spoken to him quite recently, he is quite ill. So, whatever you think of Julian Assange and what he did, this is not what he deserves. He’s been tortured.

Yanis Varufakis said: ” When I was a young person, like most of us, upon reading ‘1984’, Orwell’s ‘1984’ I was terrified cause I could see that it was coming, Big Brother is coming, the technology would always improve and […] Big Brother and we would be under surveillance. The first time I felt a glimmer of hope that this can be reversed was when I read about the work of Julian Assange even before he started WikiLeaks. His great, brilliant idea was to use Big Brother’s technology to turn it into a digital mirror, turn it towards Big Brother so the rest of us can see what Big Brother is doing. The reason that Julian is now in Belmarsh prison, 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, something that is not even done to the multiple victim murderers in this country. Every day 23 hours a day is in solitary he has one day is because he exposed the crimes against humanity that were performed in our name, in the name of the West in Iraq, here and there, in Tunisia, and so on and so forth, that is the only reason.

I think that those progressives who, have ever reason to be critical of Julian’s choices as I was regarding you know, seeing Nigel Farage, supporting Trump, in the faint hope that maybe he’d be released from his predicament, they should apologise to their own conscious for spending the last 7/8 years saying that he is running away from a rape charge. It is absolutely abundantly clear that there was never such a charge and all that is going on is […] to effectively perish in a supermax prison in the United States of America for embarrassing the national security apparatus.

And everyone clapped :-)

In solidarity #DontExtraditeAssange