In all the time The United States has persecuted Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, democracy has needed to be re-examined for what it may really be. Is it a political system that guarantees all peoples’ meaningful involvement in government? Is it not?
Ancestrally so, American democracy is derived from the first manifestation of “rule by the people,” established around 500 BCE in Athens, Greece. About one hundred years after senior-ranking Athenian magistrate Cleisthenes founded the original of such governments, democracy was still the law of the land, when a philosopher, Socrates, was put to death merely for questioning authority. Like the philosopher, Assange has been brutally penalized for challenging governments, which he has only ever done by non-violent commitment to radical freedom of information. In his activism, he has always engaged in the constitutionally protected activities of press and expression. As the Twitter hashtag goes, “#JournalismIsNotACrime.” And it really is not a crime. Or so The Framers of our country claimed.
Assange and Socrates are very different in their respective attitudes towards democracy, the former being for all peoples’ human right to self-determine and the latter being against this form of government in an overwhelming way. What is similar about them, however, is the nature of the penalty imposed upon each for challenging authority. And the ramifications of these penalties are useful in understanding what “rule by the people” actually looks like.
What happened to Socrates and what is happening with Assange expose what democracy may originally have been and what it may continue to be at present. The stories of the Australian journalist and the classical philosopher suggest that this system of government is far more oppressive than what popular narratives about “rule by the people” have suggested. Silencing dissidents is an age-old practice, and it is as present today in American democracy as it was in classical Greece. Such a practice flies in the face of the aforementioned narratives. In other words, democracy may have never been democratic. It may have always been the opposite.