Alexei Navalny did not simply die. He wasn't just killed. He was tortured to death.
It didn't happen on the rack or in the middle of a beating, but Vladimir Putin, who had tried to eliminate him before, slowly killed Navalny anyway.
Putin sent the Russian dissident and anti-corruption activist to the gulag with the aim of subjecting him to forced labor, isolation, hunger and poor medical care until he died. Russia's claims that he died from “sudden death syndrome,” even if true, change nothing, given that being poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent (2020) and dumped in an Arctic labor camp ( 2023) presumably increases the chances of being a victim. to SDS.
The question of whether the timing of Navalny's death was deliberate is important geopolitically, but not morally.
If Putin were to order Navalny's death on Friday, it could shed light on his state of mind. Was Putin sending a message ahead of next month's “elections” in Russia? Does that message reflect confidence or insecurity? Was Putin encouraged by his recent military successes in Ukraine or his related political victories in the US Congress? Perhaps Navalny's death was a poke in the West's eye timed to coincide with the Munich Security Conference?
Or was he, like some Russian propagandists have speculated, somehow motivated by Tucker Carlson's insidiously insidious comments a few days before?
Returning from interviewing Putin and celebrating Russia's superiority over the United States in a series of embarrassing videos about supermarkets and the Moscow subway, Carlson appeared at a forum in Dubai. When asked why he had not questioned Putin about Navalny, then still alive, Carlson shrugged and said: “Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.” Putin undoubtedly agrees.
At the very least, if Putin didn't want the world to know about Navalny's death on Friday, the world wouldn't know. The revelation itself is a statement in itself.
What does Navalny's death (and his life – say about Putin’s Russia should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t believe “leadership requires killing.”
What it says about the moral rot of sectors of the American right is another question. For numerous Republican and right-wing figures, the real lesson of Navalny's murder is that “Navalny = Trump,” in the words of Trump, who was pardoned. writer Dinesh D'Souza. “The plan of the Biden regime and the Democrats is to ensure that their main political opponent dies in prison. “There is no real difference between the two cases.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich agreed on X (formerly Twitter): Navalny “is a brutal reminder that imprisoning your political opponents is inhumane and a violation of all principles of a free society. Watch the Biden Administration speak out against Putin and the jailing of his main political opponent, as Democrats in four different jurisdictions try to turn President Trump into an American Navalny. The hypocrisy and corruption of the left is astonishing.”
D'Souza and Gingrich were hardly only by indulging in this grotesque Soviet-style propaganda exercise. On Monday, Trump himself invoked the comparison on social media. His first mention of Navalny's name was not to condemn his death or Putin's role in it, but to issue himself as an American Navalny. “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me increasingly aware of what is happening in our country,” he declared before spitting out the usual self-serving complaints.
Condemning that false moral equivalence was once central to American conservatism. Ronald Reagan Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick and National Review founder William F. Buckley He led those who denounced the anti-Americanism inherent in the equation of democratic and non-democratic regimes. When someone he told buckley that the United States and the USSR were equal because they both spent so much on the military, he responded: “That's like saying that the man who pushes old women out of the way of an arriving bus is like the man who pushes old women into the path”. on the way to an incoming bus. “They both push the old women.”
Trump is not an innocent anti-corruption crusader brutalized and murdered for defending democracy and the rule of law. Neither does the Moscow metro system… built with slave labor – they raise a big accusation against the United States, like Carlson implied.
There are many plausible criticisms of the legal cases against Trump, but even if you agree with all of them (I don't), the notion that Joe Biden is the moral equivalent of Vladimir Putin is a slander, not just of Biden but of the United States. United himself. In fact, there's a reason we know it's not true: Publicly criticizing Putin's treatment of Navalny can land you in a Russian cell. Criticizing Biden's (alleged) treatment of Trump can land you in a Fox News studio.
