The persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is unfortunately nothing new in the history of Australia or other Western nations. The outward appearance of democratic government often masks a darker, anti-democratic reality.
Dissenters and truth-tellers such as Assange, who dare to challenge the official version of events, have been subjected to acts of bastardry in the past.
The Australian government’s treatment of Assange today invites comparison with the earlier case of the Australian socialist journalist Wilfred Burchett, who died in 1983.
As a young, mostly self-educated free thinker from rural Victoria, Burchett’s left-wing, internationalist views formed during the Great Depression.
In the 1930s, Burchett moved to Europe. Appalled by Western government complicity in the rise of fascism, he took many personal risks to help rescue Jews from Hitler’s Germany.
As a frontline correspondent during World War II, he blazed a trail through remote jungle country in southeast Asia.
Shortly after the Hiroshima bombing in August 1945, Burchett’s anti-fascist tendencies set him in opposition to a new bully pursuing world domination, the United States.
In defiance of the US army’s ban on journalists, he made his way to the devastated Japanese city.
What he saw appalled him beyond measure. Burchett’s reports from Hiroshima opened the eyes of the world to the reality of nuclear warfare.
He was the first journalist to expose the truth about the devastating after-effects of the atom bomb.
The US military had wanted to keep radioactive contamination an official secret, concealing the death and suffering it caused for hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
Burchett dedicated the rest of his life to exposing the lies told by Western governments.
In later years, as a correspondent covering the Korean and Vietnam Wars, he continued to report from the “other side”, exposing the brutal methods employed by US forces against “enemy” civilian population groups: indiscriminate bombing, biological warfare and chemical weapons.
In his 1953 article, “The Microbe War”, Burchett presented evidence that linked the US with disease outbreaks in North Korea.
He witnessed North Korean clean-up brigades in action after a US insect drop: “Thousands of people with improvised gloves and masks … slowly moving over the field, picking up insects and dropping them into buckets to be burned in heaps.”
Burchett described the remains of a bomb made of an eggshell-like material, “porous enough to allow insects to breathe and which shatters into a thousand fragments [to] pass unnoticed by anyone looking for containers”.
He was also among the first to decry Operation Ranch Hand: the spraying of poisonous chemical defoliants in South Vietnam.
As Burchett wrote in his influential book, The Furtive War: “The expression ‘war against trees’ was one that stuck in my mind … The picture that emerged is horrifying.
“Wide-scale spraying of chemical agents from planes has been used not only against trees but against food crops with the deliberate intent of starving the peasantry into entering the ‘prosperity zones’ and ‘strategic villages’…
“The South Vietnamese people have now become guinea pigs for testing out new types of weapons … for the sort of ‘local wars’ which Pentagon ideologists like Henry Kissinger had been urging on Washington for years previously.”
For daring to out these and many other important truths, Burchett was marked by Western intelligence services.
Australian conservatives branded him a traitor and communist, but his books and articles were popular with anti-war and anti-imperialist movements all over the world.
“My duties as a citizen,” Burchett later explained in the context of the Vietnam War, “go beyond my responsibilities to my own country. In other words, I reject the ‘my country — right or wrong’.”
He also said: “I’ve opposed policies in Vietnam [but] if it were Vietnamese invading Australian soil, I’d be supporting Australia.”
Burchett lost his Australian passport (he suspected it was stolen) while he was on assignment in Indochina in 1955. Seizing this opportunity, the Australian Robert Menzies government illegally refused to replace it.
It meant Burchett lived for years without a passport. He was barred from re-entering Australia, despite his citizenship. His children were also denied Australian passports.
Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro admired Burchett’s work. In 1968, he organised to provide the persecuted Australian journalist with a Cuban passport.
In 1969, Australian authorities refused Burchett entry to attend his father’s funeral.
Only in 1972 — after 17 years of exile — was Burchett finally given an Australian passport by the incoming Whitlam government.
Burchett’s passport saga symbolises the lengths to which the Australian establishment can and will go to victimise dissidents who dare to raise serious questions about the morality of Western foreign policy.
In May 2010, when the story broke that the Australian government had threatened to cancel Assange’s passport, the parallels with the Burchett case were immediate and striking.
Assange is now in legal limbo fighting extradition to Sweden. His lawyers have described the charges he faces as politically motivated.
By refusing to intervene on his behalf, and by supporting calls for him to be treated as a criminal, the Australian government has sold Assange down the river to prove its loyalty to the US: the menacing godfather of the international system.
It was the same with Wilfred Burchett.
Times and circumstances may change, but it can still be dangerous to speak out against the forces of capitalist imperialism when unjust wars are raging.