2012-06-17 What #JA41 means to me (Central)

I'm one of four people currently running WLC. We took over about four months ago. Several members of the current team were in at the beginning and helped launch WLC. That was back on 17 November 2010. Going on two years ago.

There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then, through all of the year 2010 when our lives and our world were turned topsy-turvy.

The increasing prevalence of 'sharing' on the InterWebs gave birth to new social media such as Twitter and to the emergence on 5 April 2010 of the natural force known as Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

No longer were we to trust our duly elected representatives to tell us the truth. Julian's WikiLeaks showed us in a dramatic way how much they lied right in our faces, what unspeakable war crimes they committed without our knowing, what injustices they perpetrated with such calm panache.

We learned that the MSM were essentially worthless. We learned to dig for the facts ourselves. We learned to trust Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to bring us the truth as no one has ever done before. We suddenly felt like we were on the cusp of a new era in our civilisation.

The very idea of a completely anonymous and impenetrable news submission system broke all the rules. The organisations of the MSM such as the Guardian, the Rupert Murdoch outlets, and the New York Times were dealt a blow from which they will never recover.

As the events of the summer and autumn of 2010 unfolded, we learned that our own research gave us far more accurate results than the MSM ever cared about.

And we made a lot of new friends.

The genie's out of the bottle. Never to go back in again. And Julian Assange, the founder of the International Subversives, coauthor of Underground, member of the Realm, and founder of WikiLeaks and so many other things: he's a man of the times. He can hack, he has his heart in the right place, he's extraordinarily insightful, and he has changed our lives and our world forever.

Here's to Julian Assange on #JA41. May it be the best of all possible birthdays. And many many many many happy returns.

WL Central are currently collecting tweets (#JA41) and email greetings to Julian Assange to be published 2 July, the day before his birthday.