President Roosevelt had in his time declared that one of the most important freedoms is the freedom facing the fear. Nowadays, the burden of fear and stress is being felt by hundreds of millions of people around the world. The economic crisis, the conflicts, the competition towards weapons and the nuclear weapon standing as the sword of Damocles are the reasons which have led to this stressful situation. Removing the fear from the world means making citizens freer. This should be our common goal and would thus make many other problems easy to solve.

Whistleblowers have become pariahs because the culture of the fear has been developed against all citizens in order to avoid that not a single person would follow suit. Even if all the whistleblowers acknowledge the satisfaction of having done their duty, it is clear that we have all been sent to court very thoroughly. We have all been exposed and most of us live in absurd situations.

In her documentary Meeting Snowden (Documentary programmed on Arte channel - June 10^thand 25^th, 2017), Flore Vasseur films Larry Lessig, Professor of Law at Harvard, anti-corruption activist and candidate running for the primary elections of the American Presidential Election in 2016 and Brigitta Jonsdottir, a cyber poet, punk, key player of the ‘Pots and Pans Revolution’ which was born from the 2008 Subprimes Crisis in Iceland. Both of them traveled to Moscow in December 2016 and met with the American whistleblower Edward Snowden. The movie director explains that one wants to break down whistleblowers even though they are the spearhead of the democracy. As far as Larry Lessig is concerned, he insists on the fact that our governments do not represent the citizens anymore. He has been wondering whether the elites are going to understand quickly enough that they have to represent the citizens since he had sadly acknowledged the fact that the idea of democracy is today a global failure facing local governments. The fear lasts in the world because all the demonstrations and all the actions are isolated collective moments. The link does not exist between people. Furthermore, one comes to an agreement to get people to believe that whistleblowers are crazy people and try to claim they are fanatic. He insists on the fact that “one does not live in democracy anymore because the power of our elected people is under the influence of multinational companies. Elected people vote and amend laws without needing the citizens, which allows multinational companies and governments to continue to maintain a culture of the fear, thus not to blow the whistle. They absolutely have the will to avoid other whistleblowers. Therefore, the bonds of fraternity in the world must be bigger than our governments because it is only a matter of humanity. Unfortunately too many people still have too much to lose”.

For the past seven years, I have spent a lot of time to meet these citizens and to develop relations with these women and men – so-called ‘whistleblowers’, in order to stand united together. It is all about everyone because anyone can become a whistleblower. As a matter of fact, not supporting whistleblowers obviously means supporting crime. After the media published these rampant corruption scandals, one does not have to demonstrate that the ultra-powerful lobbies representing the interests of the multinational companies are a real problem because they are ‘anti-human’. The more wealth is being created for a tiny group of individuals, the more important number of citizens is being constrained to poverty. It is more than time to focus in large numbers on causes and not only on the consequences of these evils afflicting our society.

Cover photo: Mrs. Monique Dits, Free Assange Belgium Committee