Martyrs and Villeins: the Extradition of Julian Assange

William T. Cavanaugh is a US-based theologian who has done some important work on the privatisation of faith, the politics and economics of the Eucharist and related areas. In one paper he reflects on the relationship between the state, the martyr, and the Eucharist.

Cavanaugh's ideas may help us understand the current de-legitimising and persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. We are reminded to re-member the martyrs and not let them become empire's villeins.

Martyrs and the Eucharist
The Eucharist, a ritual meal in Christian tradition, sees bread and wine as 'being to us' the body and blood of Jesus. It re-members his execution at the hands of the Roman Empire and her co-conspirators. The Jesus movement went viral soon after his martyrdom with subversive claims that God and brought him back from the dead as a sign against his executors.

For Cavanaugh, those who are persecuted for the sake of justice now are following the way of Jesus - taking up their cross of execution - and demonstrating what the Eucharist re-members.

"The eucharist is the central act in this communal remembrance of martyrdom, because the eucharist is first the remembrance of Jesus' death at the hands of the powers." 

Cavanaugh claims that, because state-executions of political activists creates public martyrs, the first task of the state is to deligimitise the activist. Only then can she or he be got rid of. Cavanaugh writes that "A martyr is a public witness who makes the truth visible in her or his own body." This was true of Jesus as it was of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who he writes about.

Romero and The Eucharistic Sacrifice
Romero, an outspoken critic of the elites of El Salvador was shot while celebrating the Eucharist - where bread and wine are shared to represent our membership and participation in the Body of Christ. we "stand in the line of fire" he claims, when we share bread and wine together we also call to mind all those who were witnesses to the shadow world of state and corporate elites and paid the price of disappearance, torture, or execution.

Cavanaugh sums up, simply, the way the state deals with the knotty problem of martyrdom:

"Finally, the state-controlled media referred to people killed, not as martyrs, but as subversives, communists, terrorists, criminals, and delinquents. The intent of these strategies was to inflict suffering and death on those who would challenge the status quo while simultaneously preventing the revelatory nature of that
suffering from coming to light. " (p. 180)

Before you make a martyr, make a villein. This observation brings us neatly to the case of Julian Assange.

Assange the Villein-martyr 

Catholic Workers and Veterans for Peace (UK) vigil for Asange

Julian Assange is the founder and spokesperson of the news agency 'Wikileaks'. Unlike other news agencies (Associated Press, for example) Wikileaks staff have developed an extremely secure means of whistle-blowing - insiders releasing information on the immorality or illegality of their operators.

Thanks to Assange the video "collateral damage" in which US soldiers wantonly gunned down civilians, journalists and even children. They also leaked huge amounts of damaging information about US foreign policy matters that related to all kinds of regimes.

Julian Assange is due to be extradited to Sweden next week, not on charges of espionage, but on investigation of rape and another sexual offence. These relate to allegations from two incidents in Sweden involving to different women who both went to the police and were encouraged to press charges.

No charges have ever been pressed against Assange and no evidence put forward beyond witness statements. Nonetheless the UK judicial service have agreed to a European Arrest Warrant. Assange and his supporters fear that extradition to Sweden will not lead to charges of rape and sexual assault but to a quick extradition to the USA to face charges of spying.

I was at one of the appeal hearings last summer and sat through the details of the case. Despite the huge impact of Assange's work, few activists gathered outside the court. Before you make a martyr, make a villein.

Over the last two years I've lost count of the number of people and agencies Assange has public fallen out with: a publisher, newspapers, former colleagues, have all taken a chunk out of this strange, charismatic figure.

The work done by Wikileaks has suffered massively as a result. Perhaps if the news agency had been a little more anarchic it would have moved slowly but with greater resilience. With so much depending on Assange it is easy for the US to decapitate and thus immobilize the organisation.

Reclaiming the Subversive Messenger
Assange dared to do something few in contemporary news media engage in - he reported the unreportable. For this he is being personally slandered from every possible angle in preparation for his imminent disappearance.

What is to be done then? Anyone who cares about the future of press freedom, but particularly activists in Sweden, need to work hard to expose the Swedish governments hideous capitulation to US interests. We all need to continue to support the work of Wikileaks and emerging groups like Openleaks that take a similar, but crucially more manageable approach.

If we want to challenge the demonisation of Assange we need to keep the focus on the aims of Wikileaks:  the self-destruction of secret systems of power-elites and the return of a truly Free Press. As Mark's Jesus aptly puts it:

"For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light." (Mark 4:22; NRSV). 

Celebrating with the Martyrs: Cavanaugh's reflection on Romero's theology

Celebrating with the Martyrs: Cavanaugh's reflection on Romero's theology

By Keith Hebden

In Dying for the Eucharist or being killed by it? Romero's Challenge to the First-World Christians, (Note)Cavanaugh uses the theology and praxis of two of San Salvador's priest-martyr's, Oscar Romero and Rutilio Grande, to update St Paul's challenge to the Church not to eat and drink to condemnation (1 Cor. 11: 29 – 30) but rather carry the in the body the death of Jesus (2 Cor. 4: 10). (p. 177 – 178)

William T. Cavanaugh, a radical theologian based in the USA takes inspiration from Oscar Romero. Romero was made Archbishop and was expected to be a quiet, conservative pastor of the Church, unlikely to rock the boat. However, a week after his consecration a fellow priest and friend, Rutilio Grande was assassinated on his way to celebrate the mass in El Paisnal. Grande was an outspoken critique of his countries elites on behalf of landless peasants. Romero made the connection and as a prophetic act of defiance cancelled all the celebrations in the Archdiocese in favour of a Requiem for Grande at the Cathedral.

Romero intended the one Eucharist to be an anticipation of the kingdom, of the day when rich and poor would feast together, of the day when the body of Christ would not be wounded by divisions. (185)

Romero came under intense pressure from the elites who wanted no such "anticipation" but refused to acquiesce becoming for the first time a public prophetic voice and bringing the theologian of martyrdom back into the consciousness of the church.

Eventually Oscar Romero was assassinated – but not silenced – for his outspoken theology. He was shot while presiding at the Eucharist. For Cavanaugh, Romero's life, martyrdom, and teaching highlight the difference between dying for the Eucharist and being killed by it. One does the latter when eating the Eucharist without being in solidarity for others who share in the one cup but unequally so. Cavanaugh's energies in this paper are on illustrating the former. This means the article makes for a constructive read.

Cavanaugh's Christian theology of martyrdom finds its prototype in the execution of Jesus: "Christ triumphs by dying ignominiously, tortured to death on a cross, then peaceably rising again to new life." (178) So for the church father's, like Athanasius, the continuing tradition of martyrdom is not a failure of the political expansion of the kingdom but proof of the victory of Christ. The martyrs "bring a foretaste of the kingdom," by living and willingly facing of death as though "death does not finally exist." (179) Cavanaugh points out that the persuasive nature of public martyrdom is often cleverly undermined by those regimes who by means of secrecy and propaganda re-cast martyrs terrorists or delinquents. But this is where Cavanaugh moves the reader on to a more radical understanding of martyrdom than popular religion often allows. Martyrdom cannot be "the cult of heroic individuals" but rather the sacrificial act that sustains the body of Christ. (181)

What brought repression to a fever pitch in El Salvador in the 1970s and 80s was not merely the actions of heroic individuals but the efforts of the people to organize into bodies of a social nature: peasant cooperatives, base ecclesial communities, unions, student movements, and women's groups – many of them sponsored by the church and all of them a threat to the atomization of the poor that had traditionally worked so well for El Salvador's landed elite. The repression was meant to disappear, not merely individual bodies, but especially social bodies, largely through the spread of fear. To participate in any kind of social body meant confronting the very real possibility of one's own death. (181)

So it is the witness of the church to the efficacy of the death of the individual that makes her or him a martyr. Implicit in this, because of Jesus' model of martyrdom, is the ability of the martyr to resist violence with nonviolence. Anyone who resists martyrdom violently is not a martyr but someone overcome, tragically, by a greater violence than their own.

Cavanaugh brings to bear on this theology of martyrdom a theology of the Eucharist: that in sharing in the body of Christ we become that body and therefore partake in the sacrifice of God to us: a mutuality of grace. (182) But also that the Eucharist both draws the prototypical martyrdom into the present and the eschatological hope of the kingdom into the same present moment. In all of this he drawn on the theology of Augustine of Hippo, Roman Catholic teaching, and scriptural inference. (183 – 184)

The Letter to the Hebrews makes clear to the humble group of assembled Christians that their liturgical action is no mere earthly mumbling… At the Eucharist, the feast of the last day irrupts into earthly time, and the future breaks into the present. (184)

He poignantly notes that this eschatological element of the Eucharist is one easily forgotten by minority world Christians but not so by the persecuted Church. For Cavanaugh both the Eucharist and the martyrs participate in the sacrifice that makes builds and reveals a body of people. (186) They are signs and samples of the kingdom of God. But because, unlike Oscar Romero, we often sit down to the Eucharist without being in solidarity with the martyred Church we eat judgement upon ourselves.

This is not simply a matter of wishful thinking; our unity is true eschatologically, for we will all feast tighter in the kingdom. Where divisions exist now, in history, Christ in the Eucharist appears in judgement, according to Paul, and the judgement is severe…(186)

The Eucharistic feast penetrates through the nonsense of globalisations myth of world harmony; of "Thai villagers and Minnesotan suburbanites happily communing on the internet." (187) In the feast of the kingdom we are invited to properly discern the body and to give greatest honour to those considered least important. Romero shows us the way.

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William T. Cavanaugh, Dying for the Eucharist or being killed by it? Romero's Challenge to First-World Christians, Theology Today 58:2 (July 2001): 177–89.

Find Cavanaugh's original article and others by the same here and even more here.