David Langwallner is a barrister working in the U.K.. He has written numerous articles for Cassandra Voices, and was a natural choice to speak to about the Julian Assange case, which shows every sign of drawing towards a dénouement in a London courtroom.
Between Tuesday, February 20 and Wednesday, February 21, a strange scene played out before the High Court. As the judges listened to Assange’s lawyers and to American envoys advance contrasting arguments about the case, outside the chamber protestors demanded freedom and clemency for the Australian journalist. Facing a 175-year custodial sentence in the U.S. in what could be a CMU (a Communications Management Unit), Assange must struggle with the possibility of a future that could mean death – or even worse.
The CMU, as we discuss in conversation with David, represents a carceral system many degrees more cruel than the Belmarsh Prison where he has languished for half a decade.
In places like the Terre Haute, Indiana facility or Colorado’s Supermax, inmates typically enjoy nine hours of visiting time per month, and CMU prisoners are barred ‘from any physical contact with visiting friends and family, including babies, infants, and minor children.’
However, Assange’s lawyers may have a compelling argument to work with in this respect, as Britain, despite Brexit, still adheres to the European Convention on Human Rights. A U.K. Court must still follow judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Assange’s lawyers based their arguments on his current condition, and the probability of torture and death resulting from the extradition.
Over the two days – with their client unable to attend due to physical weakness – Assange’s lawyers pushed back against the U.S. argument that Assange and Wikileaks committed harmful acts of espionage when they published huge tracts of confidential material, as America’s post-9/11 wars were raging across the Middle East.
The Court’s decision on whether to grant a final appeal hearing in this case is expected in the coming weeks. For David Langwallner, while he did entertain a number of options – including one whereby Assange might be publicly condemned but eventually released after informal, behind the scenes diplomacy – Assange’s fate, and the state of the world more broadly, looks increasingly dark.
He argues that a ‘New Dark Age’ may be upon us, whereby authoritarian dictatorships and Western democracies alike are emboldened to fling their truth-telling critics into the oubliette with impunity.
Citing the proposed ‘Hate Speech’ bill in Ireland as an example of creeping authoritarianism in the digital age, he condemned the clear hypocrisy:
We’ve reached a world where a subversive is what you designate to be a subversive… Under the Hate Speech bill in Ireland, which is totally ludicrous in my view, we are going to have the criminalization of offense. As long as you offend them. They can offend you by locking you up, but if you offend the establishment they’ll prosecute you… Also, with the notion of taking rigorous actions against hackers who may not have done anything criminal, it is the slippery slope to ‘pre-crime,’ and guilt by accusation.
The interview began with a question about the prison where Assange is being held – His Majesty’s facilities at Belmarsh, a place with which David Langwallner has an interesting history. It was apt to start by discussing complex questions of fundamental rights and justice systems in democracies, and our ability to trust the behaviour of technocratic leaders in this digital age.
The brutal treatment of an increasingly frail Julian Assange is diminishing any trust in the rule of law, natural justice and freedom of speech.
‘We dream – it is good we are dreaming – It would hurt us – were we awake – But since it is playing – kill us, And we are playing – shriek –‘ ‘We dream – it is good we are dreaming’ Emily Dickinson
There are quite a few things in life which I deem to be frankly repulsive – cancer, world hunger, terrible Twitter takes, right wing politics, capitalism et cetera but truly the worst thing of all is when a writer writes about their own work. So please forgive me, dear wonderful reader, because I’m about to do just that.
It Is Good We Are Dreaming runs from May 31st – June 11th in the New Theatre here in Dublin. It’s the first in person play from a new emerging queer theatre company called LemonSoap (yes, we’re James Joyce fans) of which I am delighted to be a member.
The play explores the relationship between two estranged siblings, Fionn and Fiadh. Unexpectedly one morning Fionn arrives at his elder sister Fiadh’s house and over the course of a morning they end up discussing everything from the man made of rock their mother fell in love with, the nature of inheritance, the ecological collapse of our world, Just Dance on the Wii and their respective love lives.
It’s a strange little play about family and Irish mythology and how difficult it is to live in Dublin city and I’ve realised over the course of writing and rehearsing this piece that there were three impulses behind it’s creation. Three thoughts I wanted to think through in a play and of course being a writer of an utmost writerly disposition I find I do my best thinking while pretending to be someone else inside a literary framework of my own creation and so a play was born. See! Writers writing about their own work is horrific!
I have been thinking a lot recently (while pretending to be someone else, obviously) about living at a time when it feels like the world is ending. I can’t put my finger on when it became a part of my daily existence to wonder about these things – worlds ending, civilisation collapsing and the like.
Maybe the pandemic, the recession, the wars or too much time during lockdown to bake brownies and stare at myself. But I think about them, the end of the world as we’ve known it, a lot now. Probably to an unhealthy amount really but then I am a writer so hopefully people (you) won’t call me crazy but rather contemporary or finger on the pulse or some such and I’m not a fan of doomsday talk in general really but my god how can you avoid it at this rate?
I’m always it would seem thinking about Mary Robinson’s righteous anger and tears at COP26 or the rise in anti-LGBT hate across the globe or how there’s months left to avoid mass extinction events or how it seems the slow march towards oblivion for us doesn’t seem like it can be avoided anymore and I’ll tell you a secret: I lied earlier.
I can put my finger on when Armageddon thoughts became daily daydreaming for me and it was while writing this play. Which is hilarious! But true. Existential despair caused by playwriting. I betya Beckett and Caryl Churchill would say the same thing. Well, I hope they’d say it anyway because that would make me feel better.
With this show, I wanted to write about a brother and sister who have a frank and honest conversation about how to continue to exist in the world right now, how to push on and live and love despite the creeping sense that the life we’ve been sold, the life our parents and grandparents and great grandparents were able to afford, more than likely may never come true for us.
Our two characters, Fionn and Fiadh, find very different ways to deal or not to deal with the dying of the light. Fiadh’s decided to learn to actually like oatmilk, to buy a pair of wellies and a gas mask too.
Fionn’s taken to railing against the world and struggles to come to terms with the gross unfairness of it all and throughout the play we see these two siblings clash up against eachother as they attempt to navigate and explore their own relationship and the world around them.
This is a play with two characters under the age of thirty at its heart and I’m excited and terrified to see how people, particularly older people, respond to the conversations these two are having. Conversations which firmly reflect the ones I am having with my peers, us much maligned Generation Zs.
Questions about existence and living and climate collapse and how we emerge into and are meant to thrive when the notions of thriving we’ve been force fed are actually literally contributing to the world’s dying.
While I don’t think literature can solve the climate crisis or housing crisis or stem the rising tides of inequality, I do think what it can do is provide voice and space to those concerns and provide some much needed catharsis for those of us who need it. That’s what, amongst other great things like funny and riveting and not boring, I hope this play is. A rumination on existing.
I am always and forever fascinated by how we as people are defined by what we inherit. How it’s written in our bones really from birth some things about us that we maybe in ways can’t really escape.
There are countless studies out there about how traumas can be inherited from our forefathers and they all are eminently debatable and fascinating and so with It Is Good We Are Dreaming I set out to try and explore what can be inherited in many little ways. In the play we hear whispers from Fionn and Fiadh’s mother coming from the walls. She whispers bed time stories which the two siblings would have heard growing up, each of them with a decidedly Irish mythological bent to them.
Their mother, played in a voice over role so mercurially by Fionnuala Murphy, is a complex enigmatic figure who spent her life chasing after the ghost of a man made of rock. She’s someone who in very many ways slips in and out of our known world and into another and the play explores the myriad ways in which that’s defined and repulsed her two children.
Fionn and Fiadh too are half siblings, joined together in life by the mother they share. They were raised separate to one another, Fiadh raised by her father and Fionn by both his Mam and Dad. Because of that they come from very different material backgrounds. Fiadh was raised in a wealthy suburb and went to a private school while Fionn was raised in a working class environment and has had to work to put himself through college.
I wanted to see in this play what happens when you place two people, two siblings, born into very different material circumstances together and how their difference in circumstance and class would manifest itself throughout.
Class is something I don’t think is often represented enough or interrogated on Irish stages. We either see families falling apart in wealthy suburbs or peasant farmers from Donegal or Kerry fighting over land, rarely in Irish theatre do we see examinations of the material reality of class and how it impacts us today.
With this play, I wanted to explore the subtle ways in which our class defines and differentiates us. These are two characters bashing up against each other who have inherited many different things from their families and the world around them. Their socio-economic status or a mother who dreams of another world or a planet riddled and rank with issues near even beyond their comprehension.
The weight of history and family and their inheritance sits in this room with these two siblings and in ways they escape, subvert and succumb to that which they’ve had no choice in being given.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that we are all boats, borne back ceaselessly into the past. I’d like to think we are more than what came before us or at least that if we want to we can escape it. But I don’t know really and so I felt wrestling with the role of inheritance in our lives would be worthwhile subject for a play and I hope you’ll think so too.
Image (c) Daniele Idini.
Myths and Legends
In case you haven’t noticed by now I am really fascinated by intergenerational trauma and the ecological collapse of our world. But what really and truly set me off on writing this play was the idea that it would in its way explore the vast array of rich and crazily original Irish mythological stories, legends and fairy tales which underpin this island we live on. We know the stories, we’ve read many of them as kids.
The Children of Lir, Tir Na nOg, The Giants Causeway and The Fianna. We know of them as children’s stories but when you begin to discover just how rich and detailed and earthy and ethereal these Irish legends are you won’t be able to get enough of them. I wanted to capture the essence of the mythology of our Island and infuse it with this play and so it became about a mother who lives in the mythological realm and her two children who sit in the mundane one reaching out for the mythological, reaching out for her.
It became a play about two siblings puzzling through the enigmatic myths and legends their mother told them. Stories of the man made of rock she fell in love with. The crystal fish that float in the sky. The person in the attic saying prayers late at night. The four swans taking flight.
I think sometimes we are afraid in this country of the stories our ancestors told. I think that’s probably colonial and also the fault of the church who stole a lot of those stories to make saints.
Yeats and Lady Gregory however brought our stories and our mythologies so vibrantly onto the stage with their Celtic revival in the early 20th century and today Marina Carr with her extraordinary body of work explores Irish and Greek mythologies with startling insights. But by and large we shy away from our legends, we leave them as stories to be told to kids and that’s it. I think they are too rich, too complex, too full to the rafters with brilliance to be hidden away because of some post-colonial theocratic embarrassment.
So I’ve stuffed this play to the gills with obscure references. To the Children of Lir, the Fianna, Diarmuid and Grainne. To the Gods we worshipped once and the peoples our ancestors would say came to this land before us. In It Is Good We Are Dreaming the mythological joins us at the kitchen sink. It whispers from the walls in stories told by a mother who has always had one foot in either world.
The image of Ben Bulben looms large over this play, which in our mythology is said could act as a gateway to the other side. The third and final impulse for this piece was that it must be epic yet tiny in scope, it must be a naturalistic drama where the mythic bleeds in to warp and distort, it must pay tribute to the legends our ancestors gave to us while forging new ones that Fionn and Fiadh tell one another. It must be a play that in many ways is hard to define.
A slippery complex piece about family and myth and climate change and more. And I think, dear reader, you probably have most of all gotten the impression that this play is hard to define after all of my ramblings. But that’s why you should come see it. To define it for yourself.
One last thing. The title of this play, as you’ve probably noticed, is taken from the above quoted Emily Dickinson poem. I chose the title because I believe it’s a perfect encapsulation of in the end what this play is aiming to be. Because despite the many horrors of life right now, despite the inheritance that defines us or haunts us or the crises that besiege us, we continue to dream. We have to.
To hope for better. To hope for change and for beauty and for joy. To dream so that all the future generations can too. It is good we are dreaming. And despite all that awaits us and the portents of doom ahead we can’t lose it, we mustn’t. Because even if everything else leaves us, we’ll always have and we always will be dreaming. And despite everything, I think that’s really beautiful.
Feature Image: Laoise Murray as Fiadh and Luke Dalton as Fionn. Photo by Owen Clarke
As a journalist, I receive a variety of emails, Facebook messages and text messages almost every day alerting me to this problem, that conspiracy, or whatever the government is doing. Many ask me to report on, or at least take notice of, what they see as important. While I would like to investigate everything, the truth is that I would need a team of researchers to get through these requests.
With that said, I was really struck by a piece written by Lithuanian citizen-journalist Gluboco Lietuva and decided to look more deeply into what initially seemed over the top claims about the Lithuanian government seriously infringing the human rights of individuals choosing not to take a COVID-19 vaccine.
To say I was gobsmacked is an understatement. What is happening there is a stark warning of how much control a government is prepared to exert over the lives of an individual declining to take a COVID-19 vaccine.
It should be noted that this article is not concerned with of the jab itself, but with how an EU government has withdrawn civil rights and forced businesses to choose between profit and a citizen’s right to privacy and bodily integrity, enshrined under Article 8 of the European Charter on Fundamental Rights.
Gluboco reported that the Lithuanian Pass system prevents him and his family from entering shopping centres to purchase food, banks, clothes shops, or to conduct business in government buildings; or enter book stores, second-hand shops, hairdressers, barber shops, phone repair shops, or even art supply shops. Nor can an unvaccinated person visit a relative or loved one in a hospital or nursing home.
In promulgating this law it seems the Lithuanian government is pitting one group of people against another after a recent surge in cases. The worry is that such a draconian measure won’t be confined to Lithuania either, as we can see from what is happening in Italy and France.
Excellent article on vaccine passes in Italy which is relevant to everywhere else: https://t.co/tug0TMUMOF
According to Gluboco in Lithuania the Covid Pass is called the ’Opportunity Pass’, as it offers the ‘opportunity’ to participate in society. The ’Opportunity Pass’ or Freedom IDis available to Lithuanians who are able to present a vaccination certificate, a recent negative PCR test, or proof of COVID-19 immunity (after having recovered). However, the government is considering excluding people with a negative test.
Without this Pass rights are seriously restricted. Gluboco went on to say: “My wife and I don’t have the Covid Pass. We refuse to accept authoritarianism and control of the new regime. So, we’ve lost our jobs and been banished from most of society. It’s been six weeks so far.”
He revealed, furthermore, that there is no end date planned for the new regime. With no Pass, he may only enter small shops with street entrances that mainly sell essential goods: food, pharmaceuticals, optics, or farm/pet supplies. Every other store must, by law, ban people without the Pass.
In Lithuanian, the Pass is referred to as the Galimybių pasas, abbreviated as “GP”. By law, GP signs must be displayed at the entrance to stores and public buildings to signal compliance with government policy. You must also provide photo ID to prove that the “Opportunity Pass” is your own.
As an example of the level of control that the state exerts, a construction worker went into a small supermarket to buy breakfast before his morning shift. After using his boss’s QR code he was reported to the police by a staff member and fined €5,000.
Gluboco went on to say that Lithuania’s Covid Pass started in May as a temporary measure, the goal being to facilitate economic activity. In August, the temporary measure, justified in order to restore the economy, became a permanent law, all but banishing certain people from participation in society.
Lithuania’s Covid Pass law does not ban specific activities. Instead, it prohibits people without an Opportunity Pass from all services and economic activities involving human contact, apart from limited rights, such as purchasing food in small shops.
This represents an inversion of traditional rights. In a free society, within reason, you can expect to do whatever you want, unless a law specifically forbids it. Under Lithuania’s new Covid Pass regime, however, the presumption is reversed to the extent that you can’t perform normal activities unless the state allows it.
In an EU member state, almost every business is forced to comply with the Opportunity Pass and enforcement seems to be strict. Gluboco indicates that many of those who initially opposed the Pass now acquiesce. People grow accustomed to coercion it seems.
Further to this, he goes on to say: “In just 6 weeks, the Covid Pass has transformed my country into a regime of totalitarianism, control and segregation. This is the new society created in Lithuania, the nation furthest along the path towards authoritarianism confronting all countries which have imposed a Covid Pass regime.”
What is happening in Lithuania is a warning to those who choose not to take the jab no matter what country you live in. It begs question: could we see this level of coercion, human rights infringement and control introduced into the Ireland and the rest of Europe eventually? The aim appears to be to punish people economically and socially for non-compliance.
There are also questions in regard to the use of data collected through the Covid-19 digital passes, held jointly by private companies and the relevant EU state which are supposed to abide by GDPR legislation. A citizen’s private data is kept on file by the state and could form the basis of a national identity card.
I leave you with the chilling words of ex-Lithuanian parliamentarian and now TV host Arúnas Valinskas who said: “There are people who deliberately take sides with the enemy… In times of war, such people were shot. But there is no need to shoot the anti-vaxxers, I hope, they will die out on their own.”
Featured Image: Lithuanian Army soldiers marching with their dress uniforms in Vilnius (2012).
