Sunday Concerts for Assange with Viva La Muerte
Every Sunday Only on Youtube!
Every Sunday at Noon PST/15h EST/20h GMT on Assange Defense, Stella Assange, we will be premiering concerts from musicians around the world in support of my husband, Julian Assange.
An eclectic mix of never before streams on Youtube, the series will include live, acoustic and home studio music sets from musicians including James Kennedy from the Underdogs, Adelchi & Jes, David Rovics, Ben Mitchell, Mark Chadwick from the Levellers, Gabriel Moreno, Alabama 3, Siobhan O’Brien, Jessie Grace, Rick DellaRatta, Banda POPolare Emilia Rossa and many more.
This series aims to spread awareness about Julian Assange's case in preparation for the New Public Hearing that will be on Tuesday-Wednesday, 20-21 February, 2024 at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Please check our Toolkit for more resources and info.
Every week we will be premiering a music set with weekly priority actions and other information on how you can join the fight and help Julian.
WEEKLY PRIORITY ACTION
Help Us Spread the Word!
Day X is here.
There is a new public hearing for my husband Julian Assange on Tuesday, Wednesday, 20-21 Feb which could very well be UK's last chance to stop Julian's Extradition to the United States. We need your help. We need as many people as possible to gather outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London at 8:30am on both days. If you can't make it to London check out my website StellaAssange.com for participating locations.
Last week’s Sunday Concert was with Viva La Muerte!
Watch it now on Youtube
Tracklist:
1. Spirit
2. Loan Me A Wolf
3. Feel Like I'm Feeling Again
4. Tom Waits' Basement
5. Santa Muerte
In 2019 Viva la Muerte was selected by YES! Weekly's readers as THE BEST ORIGINAL BAND IN THE TRIAD. Joey Oldaugh of Amplifier Magazine says Viva’s music “screams with creativity.” “Dead on,” wrote John Adamian of YES! “Very nice variety of feels and flavors,” wrote David Gans of VLM’s first album, “All the Birds.” In 2020, VLM was featured by Relix Magazine as a "Band on the Rise." In 2021, VLM released their third studio album, “Storm Country.” You can follow them on Instagram at @vivalamuerteband and Twitter at @VivaLaMuerteN
Lead Singer, MC Armstrong is the author of The Mysteries of Haditha, published in 2020 by Potomac Books. The Brooklyn Rail called The Mysteries of Haditha one of the “Best Books of 2020,” and Armstrong’s story was nominated for “Best Memoir” at the 2021 American Book Festival. Armstrong, who grew up in Winchester, Virginia, embedded with Joint Special Operations Forces in Al Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2008. He published extensively on the Iraq war through The Winchester Star. Armstrong is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, American Book Review, Criticism, Consequence Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Mayday, Monkeybicycle, Wrath-bearing Tree, Epiphany, War, Literature, and the Arts, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the guitarist and lead singer-songwriter for Viva la Muerte, an original rock and roll band. His first novel, American Delphi, was published in the fall of 2022 by Milspeak Books, and his study of post-9/11 veteran-activists will be published by Bloomsbury in 2024/2025. You can follow him on Twitter @mcarmystrong
Check out M.C Armstrong’s latest article in support of Julian here on the Honest Media Substack.
Lead Guitarist, Tom Troyer, is also in the band, Farewell Friend.
Drummer, Bob Powell, is also in the bands, Mystic Syndicate and Royal Jelly.
Bass Player, Jared Zehmer, is also a master potter! Check out his work here.
Saxophone Player, Nikki Trail, also did the cinematography for the set!
You've decided to join the fight and speak up for Julian in an industry where many may find it expedient to keep silent. What do you think formed your political perspective and activation?
MC Armstrong: My POV comes from being a journalist in America who has seen war first hand in Iraq. Why should Main Street America care about the fate of this Australian journalist and the media organization Assange founded in Iceland? Because Assange risked his life to defend endangered Americans. A decade before the death of Beau Biden and so many other American soldiers who lost their lives due to toxic exposure in Iraq and Afghanistan, Assange and Wikileaks released a 2006 United States Air Force memo documenting the toxic effects of the burn pits, the open-air waste facilities that have been the Agent Orange of the Forever War generation. Surveys estimate that as many as 3.5 million American veterans (to say nothing of Afghans and Iraqis) were exposed to this “silent killer,” or what the scholar Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.”
Reporting from Haditha in 2008, I was one of those Americans exposed to the burn pits. Assange’s journalism has saved lives and altered discourse. Assange has courageously called corporations (like Monsanto and Kellogg, Brown, Root who manned the Haditha burn pits) to account all around the world. It was not just the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay or the murder of foreign journalists in Iraq that Assange spoke up for through the releases of Wikileaks. Assange risked his life to speak up for the Americans who are, to this day, still dying from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How did you come to care about this cause?
MC Armstrong: I met John Perry Barlow, songwriter for the Grateful Dead and a close friend of Julian’s, about a year before I traveled to Iraq. Barlow, who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and helped start the Courage Foundation, died in 2018, leaving a massive void when it came to artists standing with whistleblowers like Assange and Snowden. As a journalist and as a member of the Grateful Dead community and the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus (as well as Grateful Dead Studies), I felt speaking up for Julian and others like him was my duty to Barlow’s vision of cyberculture as an extension of counterculture.
And what's the most important thing you'd like people to understand about Julian's case?
MC Armstrong: That Julian’s struggle is our struggle. This is the most important press freedom case of the 21st century. Julian’s prosecution is a persecution of all who dare speak truth to power. The trial of Julian Assange is, essentially, the First Amendment of the American Constitution on trial. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. recently wrote, “There’s no America without a free press. There’s no free press without a free Julian Assange.”
For more information on Viva La Muerte, click here.