Rick Falkvinge, pirate

Epic winnage

Friends, brothers and sisters all over the besieged free world:

Today, we have won our first crucial battle for the future of civil liberties. The right to be a free citizen. The right to privacy as a concept. Indeed, the freedom to voice one’s opinions at all.

These are freedoms that our mothers and fathers fought, bled and died for. And we are the proud sons and daughters of those our mothers and fathers. Once again, we have manned the barricades and stood tall, shoulder to shoulder. Once again, we have realized that we must fight for our liberties.

Today, we shook the old politicians at their core in that fight. We got 7.1% in a general election for those ideas, and those ideas alone, and representation in the European Parliament.

We won two seats, one of which has observer status until and if the Lisbon treaty is ratified.

In 2005, I realized that politicians were completely at the mercy of the corporate lobbyists. Politicians did not consider these issues important, they did not care about them in the slightest, except to look tough on crime and crack down on civil liberties.

And so our liberties have been chipped away, one piece at a time. Our right to privacy violated. Our right to communicate in private eliminated. Our right to express opinions censored.

The time had come in 2005 to take a stand. The time had come to stand proud. They called us pirates, because we shared society’s common culture. The time had come to kick out those politicians. The time had come to bypass the politicians, and talk directly to the citizens at the voting booths.

Because, the thing that struck me in 2005 was, that even though the lobbies have wheelbarrows of cash to fuel politicians, there is one thing that would make all those bills worthless overnight. That’s votes in a general election. And we would be able to get that. We, as pirates, would be able to build the support for civil liberties and reclaim the rights that are ours.

We would be aiming at the one thing that politicians care more about than lobbyists’ grease: their jobs. The instant politicians lose jobs over not understanding these issues, all the lobby’s money will devalue to ash overnight.

On January 1, 2006, I launched the Pirate Party’s web page, and mentioned the address just once in a chat channel. It got three million hits in the first two days. It turned out that the problem would not be attracting interest, but channeling an immense energy into an organization. It was not me anymore. It was tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

And here we are.

We rebuild.

We rebuild our civil liberties. We rebuild the freedoms of the net. We build civilization anew. We rebuild the liberties that our mothers and fathers fought, bled and died for.

And we do so proudly.

This is not the end. This is just the end of the beginning: the first major, decisive victory of the next generation’s civil liberties movement. The Pirate Party is now the largest party for voters below 30 years of age. That bodes well for the future fight for liberties. But the fight is not over. Not by far.

The next step is to spread this fight outside of Sweden. That’s where we will need the help of activists, people and dot-com millionaires all over the world. We have shown the world that this is possible. Now, all of us need to do the same thing where each of us live.

We need to build civilization anew, and to do so together. We need to rebuild, and we need to stand tall, or we will lose the liberties that are under siege.

Today, we all won our first major victory. Congratulations to us all.