Julian.
28 MARCH—On 10 March Caitlin Johnstone, the insightful, prolific, and searingly honest Australian political and social commentator, began yet another creative project she calls “The Disappearing of Julian Assange.”
Published on her substack newsletter, each edition in the series features a short video showing Johnstone painting a portrait of Assange accompanied by commentary. As she describes the project, it is both meditation and prayer, and is “about the way Assange's image is being deliberately erased from the public's consciousness.”
In the third and most recent installment, Johnstone talks about her decision to enter a portrait of Assange into The Archibalds, a prestigious annual Australian portraiture show. It is her way to keep him before the public so that he will not be forgotten.
Hoping to get a more current photo to work from she contacts Julian’s wife only to learn that there are no recent photos available.
Bellmarsh prison—where Assange has been held in solitary confinement since April 2019, a practice recognized by the UN and various human rights groups as torture, and where he has been imprisoned on no legal grounds having been charged with no actual crime under English law—won’t allow her to bring anything into the room, not so much as a tissue, when she visits her husband.
What makes this man so dangerous you have to wonder?
Johnstone next learns that entry into The Archibalds carries a requirement that the subject has to have had at least one live sitting with the artist. Unfailingly creative and certainly undeterred, she contacts Julian’s father, John Shipton, and invites him for a cup of tea. As they visit, Johnstone paints a portrait of Shipton holding a photograph of his son. A portrait of Julian Assange will indeed be submitted to The Archibalds.
There’s a tradition in Japan that the folding of 1000 origami cranes is considered a powerful prayer for peace. Might 1000 paintings of Assange bring about his release, Johnstone ponders in her video.
And that is when I decided to do my own painting.
Perhaps Johnstone will paint 1000 portraits of this man, a journalist and publisher, an Australian citizen being prosecuted by the United States, a country that has no jurisdiction over him, under the Espionage Act of 1917, which cannot logically or legally apply to foreigners.
Assange has been hounded and persecuted for over a decade, his reputation destroyed by lies and falsehoods spread by a cowardly and corrupt media that turned on him, throwing him under the bus to protect themselves, and all for one reason: because he revealed U.S. war crimes.
This is my first portrait of Assange, but not my last.
Thank you, Caitlin!
No, Cara. The US is not prosecuting Julian. It is persecuting him.