The world is in agreement that Alexei Navalny was murdered. The only surprise is that, unlike most of Putin's opponents who seem to suffer this fate, he did not fall out of a window.
Navalny's early politics were far from liberal. Few, however, can doubt that he appeared to leave them behind as his campaign against corruption and for democracy brought him into conflict with Putin. He has now paid the ultimate price for that. His wife and children live with the consequences. They have my sympathy. Too few seem to be saying that today.
Why note this? Three reasons.
First, this is the reality of Putin's Russia.
Second, Trump models himself on and admires Putin and his methods.
Third, where Trump goes many on the far-right follow, only a little behind.
This is a dangerous world for the opponents of the far-right.
That said, Navalny was right that the opposition has to continue. There is no choice.
I always recall the conversation John Christensen and I had in January 2006 when we realised that what we were doing on tax justice was going to be our working lives. We asked each other what would prevent our success. We both agreed it was fascism. It still is. It's just much closer than we imagined back then.
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Agree & fascism’s rise could be fostered by the inability of politicos (most of ’em) to act on just about any topic you could care to identify. Dentists (!!) lack of, ditto doctors, nurses, food, out of control financiers, the climate disaster………..fertile ground for those with easy answers (we are in Benito territory – making the trains runs on time).
And for the avoidance of doubt – the situation is as bad in mainland Europe as it is in the UK. re the (fertile ground for fascists – sic) farmers – an anecdote from Spain – all grist to the fascist mill (& note – Catalunya – 60 month drought!!)
Was at a farm yesterday – bio, oilive oil and wine. The owner (in his 70s) despises the current actions. He has a bio-oasis surrounded by an industrialised ag-desert. He notes that Spain does not buy much bio stuff – but the North Euros buy a load (Spain 60euros per capita, Sweden/Swit’ etc 500euros per capita – aye – he had all the numbers in his head – sharp cookie). He is not popular with his neighbours – who resent his success – one wonders why it never occured to them to replicate – it’s ot as if it is a small market.
It’s much easier to hate someone than do something positive.
That’s also why there are so many trolls.
That’s interesting, Mike.
A level geography students are studying Catalunya at the moment. That’s in human as well as physical geography.
I prefer to eat organic food, and most of it at the moment is from Spain, but I have wondered why more farmers in this country do not change to organic produce.
Obviously there won’t be much this time of year, but they could be planting organic as well as any other.
I was listening to R4 this morning, listening to Nick Robinson and his cod concern for Navalny’s friends whom I think he was interviewing.
I couldn’t help reflect on the political state of this country and the political and economic state of the West in general. And how those factors had actually contributed to this man’s demise?
It all seemed surreal to me. The conflicts and intertwining’s of interest of the back story just made the whole thing reek of hypocrisy and I turned the radio off.
The West helped create Putin.
It’s arrogance and piety towards market fundamentalism.
Modern Russia is our Russia – the Wests. Nice job eh!
No wonder China remains on the defensive.
Political reform starts at home folks, just case you need reminding.
Suck that up before getting outraged about Navalny.
At this point it’s worth mentioning Abby Innes’s book “Late Soviet Britain. It’s final chapter, which looks at where we now are l, should be enough to make us realise that we now live in a time of fantasy politics, where history has no place.
Potentially very dangerous times indeed.
‘we now live in a time of fantasy politics, where history has no place’.
Wow.
That sounds eloquent. I must read that book Karl – thanks.
Dear Pilgrim
I sucked up what you wrote. I think you are right in that the West did play a part is creating Putin’s Russia by the shock therapy transition to capitalism -ably covered in Naomi Klein’s book of that name. It was also tried in eastern Europe but they didn’t go as far and are now members of the EU by their choice, and democratic (Hungary much less so and Poland detoured but is now coming back) and more prosperous.
Jeffrey Sachs was a leading player in that process and regards it as successful ! He now pops up on Youtube insisting that the war in Ukraine is the result of US planned hegemony and appears to have little insight into the politics and views of the people of Eastern Europe or of the Russian regime. Some of his examples of US involvement around the world have more validity but they don’t prove his case in Ukraine. We need to look at real historians like Tim Snyder.
He strikes me as someone who has immense intellectual arrogance of the sort you say.
But your point is that our -the West’s -influence is the wider world depends on the war we conduct ourselves is also right.
The ICJ called for immediate and effective aid to Gaza and the following day Israel claimed a dozen of UNWRA workers had aided Hamas. About 0.01% of its work force and as yet unproven and our Govt and a dozen nations suspended aid, thus imposing a collective punishment.
It is a massive own goal.
Morality starts with ourselves.
Ian
Thank you for your comment.
The West has gone on to lose the moral high ground over the years that it gained in the prosecution of world war two.
The U.S. lied when it said that it was relaxed about post war countries voting in governments that they wanted because real democracy wants public ownership of sugar, fruit plantations, diamond and gold mines. All this gets in the way of U.S. big business – who captured U.S. democracy and its new empire that it nicked from Britain and others years ago – and gets in the way of exploitation.
And the end result – an illegal, falsely contrived war in Iraq in order to get its hands on the oil supply.
Western morality is a ship without a rudder. And the ex-communists in modern Russia may well be brutal, unscrupulous and worse.
But they are not stupid.
They see the us for what we are.
And that is why they act like they do.
Time to re-read George Monbiot from a year or two ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/russian-propaganda-anti-imperialist-left-vladimir-putin?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Then read Catherine Belton and John Sweeney on Putin and his rise to power. The West was a bit part player, used and taken advantage of by Putin and his intelligence and mafia friends to line their pockets and launder their money. But the West did not make Putin, however naive and self interested they were. That is why Poland and other countries escaped their decades and centuries of Russian domination – they got rid of the KGB and have to greater and lesser extents recovered. The KGB lived on in Russia and has taken over.
Then read Timothy Snyder or listen to his great podcasts on Russian history. Or rather than ‘Russia’, the imperialist and colonialist Muscovy, of Moscow and St Petersburg. The inhabitants to the West, South and East of Muscovy are no more Russian than those of the Punjab or Kenya were British. They were brutally invaded, colonised, the cultures trashed, and then re-invaded when they attempted to escape. Hungary, Czechoslovakia , Poland, Georgia, Moldova etc … and Ukraine. Putin and his supporters are quite explicit in their aim of re-establishing the Russian empire.
If you want to see imperialism, colonialism and fascism in actual brutal practice right now look East to Russia. However bad our politics, the West are merely in the foothills. But as Monbiot says, you won’t read that in Socialist Worker, Stop the War or Morning Star. Or from Corbyn or in the studies of SOAS. Just as Stalin had his useful idiots, so does Putin. The socialism of Dave Spart that as Monbiot says, undermines Labour.
And this a few days after Putin murders his one serious opponent, whatever his failings.
Thanks
Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism ought to be compulsory reading for all students of politics and history. With so many events piling up on each other, globally, I think it might be a good time for me to re-read it.
We are clearly living in a time where autocracy, authoritarianism and totalitarianism seem to be an aspiration of linear progression for some regimes. The margins do seem to be blurring.
Arendt’s view that totalitiarianism was the oppression and coercion of entire populations, not simply political adversaries, might be the thinking behind Navalny’s murder.
He would seem to have been no real practical threat whilst incarcerated, so the audience must have been the wider population…
I cannot think of any other mindset that might have triggered his murder in the lead up to Russian “elections”.
I agree. This heinous action has acted to demoralise opponents of the Putin/MAGA nexus as well as force them out into the open. Putin’s arrests of Navalny’s grieving supporters is a template of public performative cruelty and oppression Trump will emulate if he returns to the White House in 2025.
And Stalin is being re-habilitated in Russia. A man who polices lead to millions of deaths.
Just watched ‘Einstein and the Bomb’ on Netflix which included historical footage of Hitler’s raise to power and the German fascist state. Worrying parallels around the world and, dare I say it, recent legislation in the U.K.
I wonder if Trumps admiration for Putin might become an own goal following Navalny’s death.
Nauseous hypocrisy of the week? Old-Etonian spiv Lord Cameron claiming the moral high ground on Navalny’s death.
When simultaneously, the govt he represents is going to extraordinary lengths to conceal the (supposedly public) Assange extradition hearings next week. With the usual abject servility to Washington, supporting America’s extradition of Mr Assange to the US prison system, where he will almost certainly suffer the same fate as Mr Navalny (albeit from neglect or deprivation/psychological torture, rather than poison). Fascism, indeed.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/02/state-secrecy-and-public-hearings-part-one/
Once again, the chosen judge is a closely connected member of the Tory elite. Corruption.
‘The Rise of the Nazis’ on BBC4 offers chilling parallels – in 1933 in a few months they ruthlessely took over the top institutions of the state – Goering, Himmler, etc arresting thousands, banning opposition, demonstrations etc
We are much more subtle and softly softly – but getting less soft – we already seem to have political prisoners – and quasi prisoners (injunctions, tags)
Its against the law to demonstrate if police decide – and against the law to be annoying etc
Already moves against the judges and corrupt money controlling politics and media
Navalny said there is no option but to resist.
.
News of Navalny’s death has been seized on – predictably is too weak a term – by ‘our’ politicians and media. Any headway made by the Tucker Carlson interview in shifting perceptions of Putin and the country he leads has, since humans are more psychological than logical animals, been set back. For the same reason the chances of a successful passage of the “aid package” for Ukraine in the US House of Representatives have been given a fillip. On these grounds – plus his having never exceeded 5% of domestic approval even in Western polls – the idea of Navalny being rubbed out by order of the Kremlin fails the cui bono? test.
https://steelcityscribblings.uk/wp/2024/02/17/on-the-death-of-a-dissident/
“The world is in agreement that Alexei Navalny was murdered.” When such claims are made, it’s often due to confusing “the world” with “the collective West”. Is that the case here?
Yep – it’s a slipery slope. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/19/rights-of-juries-activist-decries-tory-challenge-legal-defence-for-protesters-climate