The American journalist Gonzalo Lira died in custody in Ukraine. He had been reporting from Kharkov from the very beginning. To bring him home after his arrest would have been the easiest thing to do for Joe Biden and his team, since they were paying all the bills for that country. But obviously they were not interested, because Lira was an embarrassment. His reporting did not serve their agenda, at all.
The principled choice, underscoring the narrative about standing for traditional liberal, western values, would have been to tell Kiev to release the man, and put him on a plane, since he had done nothing wrong. But liberal western values are not what the NATO-countries are about, these days. Openly censoring the media and ‘platforms’ they (want to) control if they produce information contrary to what the government is saying, most certainly when writing about acts of war, war crimes, or policies which are in direct conflict with every imaginable law, and even their self professed ‘rules’, will mark you as an enemy of the state.
With Assange already suffering the consequences, as a journalist revealing Abu Ghraib and other horrors, Lira should have known. His friends in the world did warn him, and he did try to leave the country eventually, but too late, if he ever had a chance to begin with. This article is not to defend all his opinions, but isn’t that what we should stress with our dying breath, that we stand for the freedom of speech? He did not use violence, do drugs, or offered his writing to the highest bidder, and he did not touch the children to satisfy his lust, as far as I know. If he had, he might have earned more credits in governmental circles these days, judging from all the scandalous things being revealed about who, where and when ‘officials’ knew such things about the people they work with. If they are not mentioned themselves in those files doing the rounds about such practices.
Though I did watch his videos occasionally, and concurred with his friends and colleagues that he was risking his life in that hostile environment, he was not a prominent source for me personally. I did not correspond with him, or add to his channel by writing comments. But isn’t that the whole point? Therefore this is a sad day indeed. It does confirm, once more, that we lost our marbles. Oh, how I wish it were different, and that I could still be proud of what our part of the world had to offer. But those days are gone. We all need to watch our ‘six’, or toe the line. Who would have thought it would come to this after the USSR collapsed, and our leaders announced the ‘End of History’?