The fathers of Lira, Assange, an2d Conlon soldier on, armed with halos of dignity those who oppose them can never begin to comprehend
Former British MP George Galloway recently interviewed Gonzalo Lira Senior, the 80-year old father of American citizen Gonzalo Lira, who is currently being held in one of Clown Prince Zelensky’s dungeons. With John Shipton, the 80-year old father of Australian citizen Julian Assange, who is currently being held in King Jug Ears’ darkest dungeon, and with Guiseppe Conlon, the father of Gerry Conlon, who died in another of Queen Elizabeth’s darkest dungeons, he forms the heart of this article.
Lira’s interview with Galloway is a passionate one, done by an ageing Chilean, who would much prefer to be playing with his grandchildren than fighting to free the father of those children, his own son, from Zelensky’s clutches. Lira junior, as the photographs of him being arrested attest, was no threat to Zelensky’s junta. We are not here talking of a General Armageddon, a Chechen or of a Wagner musician but of a middle-aged, stooping father of two young children his enemies, the enemies of his children and of all such children, find all too easy to denigrate.
Although Gonzalo Lira, like the young girls Zelensky’s valiant warriors strap to lamp posts with their panties down around their knees, make easy targets, they also stir a hornet’s nest and arouse the wrath of good God-fearing folk like General Armageddon, the Chechens and the Wagner musicians, who are much harder nuts to crack than are middle-aged Chilean dumplings like Gonzalo Lira.
If Zelensky’s Nazis were humans, they would give Lira a kick up his transom, stick him on a Western-bound train and warn him never to show his face in Ukraine again. But that would be to act intelligently and humanely and those attributes are no more part of their job descriptions than they were of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.
Then we have John Shipton, Julian Assange’s octogenarian father, who is putting in the mother of all shifts to free his son from the British, whose rank hypocrisy is always of Olympian levels. Assange, thanks to the connivance of the British and the CIA’s Swedish doormats, has been a political prisoner more or less since November 2010, when the Swedes, acting on the orders of their Yankee masters, tried to frame him on trumped-up rape charges.
Twelve long years and all for what? Because Julian Assange exposed a bunch of American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, John Shipton, Julian’s father, must tramp the world trying to garner support from any fair-minded people he can for his son. The bottom line is support for Assange only comes from British politicians like Jermey Corbyn, whom MI5 have marginalised and most mainstream British (or Ossie) politicians don’t care a whit. So why not give Assange a kick up his transom, stick him on an Ossie-bound plane and warn him never to show his face in Pommy land again? But that would be to act intelligently and, as with Ukraine, we know the rest.
Shipton finds himself less in Borrell’s Garden of Eden or Psalm 84’s Valley of Tears than in Sodom and Gomorrah where the only just people God could find were Lot, the Gonzalo Lira of his day, and his wife, who famously ended up as a Pillar of Salt for pining over Sodom’s debauchery.
The octogenarians Lira and Shipton do not look wistfully back like Lot’s wife at the grave injustices done to them, to their sons and to their grandsons. Rather, they soldier on, armed with halos of dignity those who oppose them can never begin to comprehend. Though their fealty not only to kith and kin but to all that is good and wholesome is a light in this very dark world of ours, it is not the first such light in the darkness just as, sadly, it will not be the last.
The most poignant such case I was ever involved in was that of the sickly Guiseppe Conlon, who travelled from the Lower Falls Road in Belfast to help his son, who had been arrested with some other dope-heads in London on suspicion of carrying out a number of atrocities, which the IRA’s crack Balcombe St unit claimed.
As part of my own campaign to help Conlon and the others (some of whom were members of the British Conservative Party), I called into the house of Sarah Conlon, Guiseppe’s widow, I held public meetings in Dublin with their relatives and with well-known media and political personalities, I billeted their relatives, I published magazines on their case and I contacted Amnesty International and other fake MI5 NGOs about their case.
Small, insignificant things that only come back to mind, not because In The Name Of The Father, a movie based on how the British regime murdered Guiseppe Conlon in one of their notorious dungeons, won a gaggle of awards, but because of the power and poignancy of Galloway’s interview with Lira.
Hebrews 9:27 tells us that after the death comes the judgement. It is a statement, profound in its simplicity, and signals that the light we dispense in this world should be weighed against the darker shadows we cast. Some things are simply wrong and others, well, not so wrong.
The cases of Guiseppe and Gerry Conlon were not only very wrong but symptomatic of a British judicial system and regime that is not only very wrong but very evil as well. Not only were those cases and all others connected to them complete travesties of any semblance of justice but folk like me, like Sr Sarah Clark, Fr Denis Faul and Fr Raymond Murray could, without breaking a sweat, show from the very beginning that they were wrong, that they were a perversion of justice and that they were thoroughly and inexcusably evil.
Although Sr Clark and Fr Faul are long dead, Fr Murray, who is 95 years old, is still with us, and, like John Shipton, Gonzalo Lira Senior, Guiseppe Conlon and Syria’s great St Paul himself, he has fought the good fight and seen the race through to the end.
But that is not how it should be. There should be millions of others, not only on the streets of Paris and Warsaw but everywhere else as well, straining like wild dogs on a leash, to carry their baton and banners of all that is good and holy onwards and upwards.
Although I could finish by declaring that is all part of some Manichean struggle between good and evil we are all involved in, the truth, as ever, is more prosaic. Guiseppe and Gerry Conlon are both dead, AI advances have rendered Julian Assange’s modus operandi obsolete and the treatment of Guiseppe Lira is a blight not only on Zelensky’s rump Reich but on the United States, which is the organ grinder to that repulsive monkey.
As for me, I am now, yet again, off to Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison to protest against yet another miscarriage of justice, after I check out and act on complaints others have sent me about their treatment at the hands of Mother Ireland’s own rump Reich.
And so, the game, like life itself, goes on and we, with consciences, must play it to the very last. In his recent interview with Gonzalo Lira Senior, Galloway makes some fine suggestions as to what his viewers can do to help Gonzalo the father and Gonzalo, the son. All very fine but perhaps the times and therefore the methods we must use have changed. Who is to know? All I know is I am duty-bound to go to Mountjoy Prison and to do whatever it is I can do for Assange and for Lira. I hope, wherever you are, that you feel the same.
