 On the 3rd of July, a song will celebrate his 50th birthday, alone in a solitary prison cell, without any conviction, just waiting for extradition. In a supreme twist of irony, his birthday comes one day before July the 4th, celebrated in the United States as their independence day. It is as if a song's day of birth is here to remind us of the dark aspects, not only of the land of the free, but of most of western democracies. When Belarus forced a pioneer plane, which was on its way from Athens to Vilnius, to land in Minsk in order to get hold of Roman Protasevich, a Belarus dissident, this act of piracy, which was made by global condemnation, is not the entire story. We should remember that a couple of years ago, Austria did exactly the same thing, landing a plane crossing its airspace with the plane of the Bolivian president Evo Morales. This was done on the order of the United States, which suspected that Edward Snowden is on that plane trying to get from Russia to Latin America, to add insult to injury Snowden was not on that plane. Against his will, a song became a symbol of this dark side of western democracies, a symbol for our struggle against the new digital forms of control and regulation over our lives, which are much more efficient than the old totalitarian ones. Many western liberals point out that there are countries in the world with much more brutal direct oppression than the United Kingdom and the United States. So why such an outcry about Assange? True, but in those countries oppression is open and obvious, while what we are getting now in the liberal west is oppression which largely leaves intact our sense of freedom. Assange brought out this paradox of non-freedom experience as freedom. That's why all the dirty tricks were used against him, even liberal feminists dirtied their hands. However, Assange is not just a symbol, he is a living person who suffered quite a lot in the last decade. According to a legend, probably no more than that, the first words pronounced by Neil Armstrong, after making the first step on the moon on July 20th, 1969, were not the officially reported. That's one small step for men, but one giant leap for mankind. It was the enigmatic remark, good luck Mr. Gorski. Many people at NASA thought it was just a casual remark concerning some rival Soviet cosmonaut. We had to wait till July 5th, 1995, when, while answering questions following a speech, Armstrong explained the enigma. In 1938, when he was a kid in a small Midwestern town, Armstrong was playing baseball with a friend in the backyard. His friend hit the ball which landed in his neighbor's yard by their bedroom window. His neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Gorski. As he leaned down to pick up the ball, young Armstrong heard Mrs. Gorski shouting at Mr. Gorski. Sex, you want sex, you'll get sex when the kid next door walks on the moon. This is what literally happened 31 years later. Upon hearing this anecdote, I imagined a version with Julian Assange. Let's say that when he was visited in his prison by his partner Stella Morris and they were separated by the usual thick glass, he dreamt about intimate contact with her. And he tersely replied, sex, you want sex, you'll get sex when you will walk freely on the streets of New York celebrated as a hero of our time. A prospect no less utopian to imagine than that of a human walking on the moon in 1938. That's why we should put all our energy into achieving this goal with the hope that earlier than 31 years from now we'll be able to say with all sincerity. Good luck Mr. Assange.