Russia: Why Navalny, and What’s Next?
On February 16, the Russian Federation’s Federal Penitentiary Service announced the death in custody of a prisoner at its FKU IK3 “corrective colony.” The prisoner – one Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny – “fell ill after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness,” according to an official statement, and could not be resuscitated by medical staff.
US president Joe Biden’s blunt statement fairly summarizes western regimes’ political responses to Navalny’s death: “Make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible.”
Navalny spent the final years of his life in and out of prison.
According to the Russian regime, he was incarcerated for crimes ranging from embezzlement to fraud to money laundering.
According to his supporters in Russia and elsewhere, he was a political prisoner whose anti-corruption work and campaigns for public office represented a threat to Vladimir Putin’s rule.
Maybe he was one or the other, or both, or neither. But I’ve always found his status as a darling of western Putin opponents puzzling.
Navalny’s rise to prominence in Russian politics came from his support for a Russian nationalism to the right of Putin’s, starting with his advocacy of the 2006 “Russian march,” an annual far-right gathering banned that year in Moscow, and his opposition to freedom of immigration to Russia.
He supported Russia’s intervention against Georgia on behalf of, and supported Russian recognition of, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in 2008.
As late as 2012, at the height of his public influence, he preached that “Russian foreign policy should be maximally directed at integration with Ukraine and Belarus.”
His stated views moderated later on, but seemingly more as a function of courting western support and styling himself “the anti-Putin” than as a genuine change of belief. There’s no particular reason to believe that, had he replaced Putin as president at some earlier point, we’d have seen much difference in Russian foreign policy going forward.
Which of course, tells us nothing about whether he was 100% genuine political prisoner, or 100% criminal con man who cast his prosecution as political persecution in an effort to avoid punishment, or some mix of those things.
But it does raise the question of why the US regime chose him as the face of a nascent Russian opposition to support in its foreign political meddling. Were there no other opposition figures with more personal credibility and with, or willing to adopt, sufficiently “pro-western” views? Was it just about who could be most loudly “anti-Putin?” Inquiring minds want to know.
I don’t welcome Navalny’s death. I don’t welcome anyone’s.
But I do hope that a genuine, organic, anarchist or near-anarchist political opposition, rather than yet another west-backed ringer, can fill the vacuum his death leaves.
We could use such an opposition in America, too.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
Alexei Navalny’s Death and Curious Well-Timed Coincidences
There is propaganda by commission and propaganda by omission, the former often serve to conceal the latter. Timing is crucial.
That the U.S. President Joseph Biden, his British, NATO, Israeli allies, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, have been condemned throughout the world for the genocide in Gaza, and are ruling over a disintegrating empire. Biden and Netanyahu’s political lives are at serious risk. And so they have just rolled out a full-court propaganda press effort aimed at covering their losses. It should be crystal clear to anyone who can use logic to see the timing involved.
The great French scholar of propaganda and technology, Jacques Ellul, wrote years ago that propaganda “is not the touch of a magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition.”
However, once this groundwork has been laid over time – as it has been with the continuous anti-Russia Putin hysteria and support for Israel’s Zionist policies – it can be intensely ratcheted up in exigent circumstances when the long-serving narrative is in jeopardy, such as it is now.
Once the death in a Russian prison of the Western backed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was announced on Friday, February 16, 2024, it was immediately followed by a cascade of anti-Russia pronouncements whose aim was to not only continue the demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin but to serve other purposes as well.
With one fell stroke, the calm history lesson about Ukraine, Russia, and U.S./NATO that Putin had just delivered to the world via Tucker Carlson disappeared down the memory hole, as Biden, without any evidence, declared that “Putin and his thugs” and Putin’s “brutality” are responsible for Navalny’s death. This, of course, is a replay of the false charges sans evidence waged against Russia for an earlier poisoning of Navalny, the Skripals (since disappeared by the British government), Alexander Litvinenko, et al.
Shortly after, Zelensky, performing his puppet routine while coincidently appearing at the Munich Security Conference – on Saturday, February 17, a day after Navalny’s death was announced – with Navalny’s then widow, said it was “obvious” that Putin had killed Navalny, while Biden pushed for more money for Ukraine’s doomed war against Russia, a U.S./NATO war created by the U.S. from the start with its aggressive military push to Russia’s borders and its 2015 Ukrainian coup d’état that ousted the pro-Russian leader, setting the stage for Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in February 2022. That Putin told Carlson these obvious facts, while slyly mentioning to Carlson that he understood that Carlson once tried to join the CIA, is now for most people in the West history lost behind the headlines, if it ever were anything more.
All this happened while Russia pushed through Ukraine’s defenses and took the city of Avdeevka, which had long been contested. With each day that passes, it is obvious that Biden’s Ukraine war strategy is that of a desperate politician on the ropes and that Putin has completely outfoxed the American desperados and their NATO European stooges. The MSM prefer to suggest otherwise, that hope is just around the corner if we send billions more dollars and weapons, and if with the help of our British friends, we take the war further into Russian territory and risk a nuclear confrontation. But we are in a propaganda war for the minds of the Western public.
Much of the rest of the world has seen through the risible MSM headlines used to delude the public that Russia is the great threat to world peace and stability. Like the previous Russia-gate lies, this ongoing one, coinciding with Navalny’s death, is timed to divert the public’s attention from key ongoing matters.
Tomorrow and Wednesday, Julian Assange will have his final appeal in a British court to prevent his extradition to the United States. Biden wants this journalist prosecuted for doing the job that the MSM have failed to do: Exposing the facts about the ruthless U.S. killing machine. But the bruhaha about Navalny has rendered the absolute hypocrisy over the torture and imprisonment of the innocent and brave Assange secondary and “inconsequential.” As intended, this has now become an afterthought as the mainstream media’s Russia-obsessed headlines flow uninterruptedly. The New York Times, the key propaganda organ for the Biden administration and the deep-state, reports just today that “The gravity of President Putin’s threats is now dawning on Europe” and “Navalny’s Widow Promises to Carry on Opposition Leader’s Work.” These are typical Times’ rants. As is its Magazine article headline from yesterday “Marilyn Robinson [the writer and friend of Barack Obama] Considers Biden a Gift of God.”
I don’t think the Palestinians would agree, but then too, their slaughter by Israel with U.S. assistance – more than 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone have been killed so far – and the coming IDF invasion of Rafah, have also been pushed to the back pages or to nowhere by the propaganda about Navalny and Russia.
I won’t mention the Russian election in mid-March that might possibly factor into all this since we all will be dutifully and timely told that the evil killer Putin is a dictator, ignorant, ruthless – add your own adjectives – and is no doubt trying to rig the fair-and-square U.S. November presidential election – for someone, just as he did in 2016.
Nor mention The NY Times article of February 17 by David Sanger and Julian Barnes that the “U.S Fears Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space.”
Everyone knows that the Russians are coming to get us, as they always have. They probably killed JFK, right?
It’s easy to follow along as this propaganda eruption circles the Internet like painted ponies on a carousel. There will be no time to stop and think, to pause; to ask what the hell is going on? The ponies will dip and bob and make you dizzy.
For more corroboration of these matters, read the political analyst Gilbert Doctorow’s astute piece on how the Turkish broadcaster TRT World refused to post the interview that they did with him. Doctorow claims British intelligence killed Navalny. For some reason this should not be broached, according to TRT.
Whether Doctorow is right or not, only a very dimwitted person would think that Putin would have Navalny killed. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. Yet the MSM and their government overlords consider most people very stupid and so are trying to blitz them with obvious propaganda through commission and omission. We have heard this story before.
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