Eric Zuesse
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
What Happens When a Too-Honest News-
Report Slips Through America’s Censors
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
This will start from a superb presentation by Glenn Greenwald:
https://youtu.be/f1Vvgo7SKf0?si=1DqBjeflLVi_J-wu&t=243
Alexei Navalny: An Unsavory, Manufactured Product of the West
Glenn Greenwald, 21 February 2024 [includes:]
“Alexei Navalny’s ‘far-right racist’ past back in spotlight after Putin-critic’s death”
A Google search for that UK Yahoo article didn’t show the article, but did include:
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1aukt3r/alexei_navalnys_farright_racist_past_back_in/
135 comments
[The direct link to the UK Yahoo article was blocked from Google-search or by Yahoo itself, but clicking onto that link at Reddit finally brought me to:]
“If you are not redirected, click here”
“Alexei Navalny’s ‘far-right racist’ past back in spotlight after Putin-critic’s death”
As world leaders pay tribute to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, some have drawn attention to some inconvenient aspects of his past.
James Hockaday
Sun, 18 February 2024 at 10:06 am GMT-5·
Tributes have been paid across Europe and the US to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the latest critic of Vladimir Putin to die under mysterious circumstances.
Navalny, who died on Friday after falling unconscious in an Arctic penal colony, was hailed as one of the Russian president’s most formidable foes – a thorn in Putin’s side who refused to cower to him. However, as Western politicians pay their respects, some more uncomfortable aspects of Navalny’s career have been brought back to the surface.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was criticised for praising the ‘courage’ of Navalny by Mish Rahman, who sits on the party’s NEC ruling body, referring to the opposition leader’s “far-right” past.
“Navalny took part in the Russian March, an annual demonstration that draws ultranationalists, including some who adopt swastika-like symbols,” Rahman tweeted. “He has never apologised for his earliest xenophobic videos or his decision to attend the Russian March.
“Putin is an evil tyrant and nobody should be imprisoned for political opposition, let alone die this way. But that doesn’t mean that the leader of the Labour Party should be lauding a man with links to the far-right who refers to Muslims as ‘cockroaches’.”
Recommended reading
- Wife of jailed Russian activist believes ‘many more’ prisoners’ lives in danger (The Independent)
- Alexei Navalny: What we know about the death of Putin’s critic (Sky News)
- ‘Some buy the propaganda. Many have changed their minds’: life in Russia after the invasion (The Guardian)
Rahman appeared to be referring to a notorious video from 2007 in which Navalny appears to compare Muslim immigrants in Russia to “cockroaches” as he advocated for gun ownership. [This UK Yahoo news-report censored-out the link to that Navanly video, whch I described and linked-to
In another video, he is dressed as a dentist and appears to compare migrants in Moscow to tooth cavities, Radio Free Europe reports. He says: “I recommend full sanitisation. Everything in our way should be carefully but decisively be removed through deportation.”
Shortly before releasing both clips, which are still on his YouTube channel, Navalny was expelled by the liberal Yabloko party over his “nationalist activities”, having participated in the Russian March, an annual rally associated with ultra-nationalist far-right groups chanting slogans such as “Russia for ethnic Russians”.
Miqdaad Versi
@miqdaad
When remembering Navalny, it is important not to whitewash the parts of his past when he compared Muslims and immigrants to cockroaches.
His whole life has not been courageous. Some of it is disgusting too.
https://aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/25/navalny-has-the-kremlin-foe-moved-on-from-his-nationalist-past…
Rishi Sunak
@RishiSunak
This is terrible news. As the fiercest advocate for Russian democracy, Alexei Navalny demonstrated incredible courage throughout his life.
My thoughts are with his wife and the people of Russia, for whom this is a huge tragedy.
“Anybody who expects Navalny to be an ideal Western liberal Democrat has been mistaken,” Jade McGlynn, a researcher on Russian politics, told Euronews.
After leaving Yabloko, Navalny went on to co-found the National Russian Liberation Movement ( NAROD, which vowed to “fight against the ruling regime and kleptocracy” but was also viewed as far-right and anti-immigration.
In August 2008 Navalny referred to Georgians as “rodents” during Russia’s attack on the country, in comments for which he later apologised.
Did Navalny’s views change over time?
Navalny never apologised for the controversial videos from 2007.
Leonid Volkov, who served as the head of Navalny’s network of regional political offices in Russia, told the New Yorker in 2021 that he regrets the videos but decided not to delete them “because it’s a historical fact”.
He told the magazine that Navalny always saw the Russian March as a legitimate form of political expression among Russians who want a free and democratic society. He added: “He believes that if you don’t talk to the kind of people who attend these marches, they will all become skinheads. But, if you talk to them, you may be able to convince them that their real enemy is Putin.”
Since the mid-2000s, Navalny appeared to have softened his stance on immigration, advocating for a visa scheme for Central Asian migrants and to protect their rights as labourers. He has also adopted more left-leaning economic positions and came out in support of gay marriage.
In interviews Navalny has said his ability to engage with both nationalists and liberals was a strength of his as a politician, according to Radio Free Europe. However, some remained sceptical that he had truly left his far-right populist life behind him, particularly due to his refusal to apologise for many of his older statements.
While Navalny clearly leaves behind a complex legacy, many people still valued him for being such a strong voice against Vladimir Putin. (AP)
A row at Amnesty International
In 2021, Amnesty International apologised to Navalny for stripping him of his status as a “prisoner of conscience”.
The human rights group said in February of that year that it would stop using the term, after deciding his remarks in the 2000s amounted to “hate speech”.
At the time, Julie Verhaar, Amnesty International’s acting secretary general, said speculation over the use of the term “prisoner of conscience” was “detracting attention from our core demand that Aleksei Navalny be freed immediately”.
“This distraction only serves the Russian authorities, who have jailed Navalny on politically motivated charges, simply because he dared to criticise them,” she added. “The term ‘prisoner of conscience’ is a specific description based on a range of internal criteria established by Amnesty. There should be no confusion: nothing Navalny has said in the past justifies his current detention, which is purely politically motivated.”
Then, in May 2021, Amnesty International said “following careful evaluation”, it had decided to restore Navalny’s status, arguing that the Russian government had used its earlier decision to further violate Navalny’s rights.
It said it apologised for the “negative impacts this has had on Alexei Navalny personally, and the activists in Russia and around the world who tirelessly campaign for his freedom.”
However, the saga didn’t end there, with a Muslim former Amnesty employee, who claims she was sacked for challenging the U-turn, going on to sue the organisation. In July 2023, Aisha Jung said she was lodging an appeal after all of her claims were dismissed by the Central London Employment Tribunal.
——
On 22 June 2021, I headlined “Two Opposite Views Of Alexei Navalny” and described the view by the people inside Russia, and the view by the people outside Russia in the U.S.-controlled countries (the collective “The West”). I pointed out that
Navalny is also known in Russia as a far-right ethnic supremacist. Here is a video that he posted to youtube on 19 September 2007, under the title meaning “PEOPLE for the legalization of weapons”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVNJiO10SWw
He was saying there that all Russians should get guns in order to kill Muslims who are infesting Russia, which would be like swatting big flies or stamping on big cockroaches. Later, he decided that demagoguing against Russia’s “corruption” was far likelier to win him the backing of the U.S and its allies than demagoguing against Russia’s Muslims would. This was when U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media began presenting him as the ‘democratic’ alternative to Vladimir Putin, who has always been vastly more favorably viewed by Russians than Navalny has been. On 5 September 2020, right before the latest Russian Presidential election, the internationally respected Levada polling organization in Russia reported that the top choice of Russians to lead the country was Putin at 56%, the second-from-top choice was the nationalist Zhirinovsky at 5%, and Alexey Navalny (shown there as ), was the third-from-top choice, at 2%. In the 2018 Presidential election, Zhirinovsky polled at 13.7%, Grudinin polled at 12.0%, and Putin polled at 72.6%. The actual election-outcome was Putin 76.69%, Grudinin 11.7%, and Zhirinovsky 5.65%. There were many polls and Navalny was never any serious contender for Russia’s Presidency. The U.S. regime lies as it usually does (at least about international matters).
That’s what Russians know about Navalny. And, of course, it’s very different from what the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries know (or, at least, believe) about him.
I also mentioned:
An RT news-report on 1 February 2021 headlined “Top Navalny aide asked alleged British spy for millions in funding, intelligence video released by Russia’s FSB claims to reveal”. Back in 2012, Russia’s equivalent of America’s FBI had a hidden camera in position filming, and recording, Navalny’s top aide trying to persuade a person he thought to be an MI6 (UK’s CIA) agent that MI6 should annually donate tens of millions of dollars to Navalny’s organization because doing this would provide billions of dollars of benefit to UK corporations if Navalny would then succeed and become Russia’s leader.
As regards whether Putin was behind whatever directly caused Navalny’s death, I am extremely concerned at the way that Russia’s Government is apparently making impossible an independent post-mortem on his corpse, but is that due to Russia’s amply demonstrated gross incompetence at PR (especially in The West), or instead to the Government’s covering-up how Navalny died? One very highly regarded Western scholar on Russia, Gilbert Doctorow, argued at his blog on February 16th, “Death of Aleksei Navalny: the Brits did it!” Everyone in The West should read and consider it; but, at this stage, no one who is at all distant from the event can yet say with any credibility exactly what the cause of Navalny’s death was. Only one thing in this is certain: as even Reuters acknowldeged (skillfully buried 64% of the way down their lengthy article) back on 21 February 2018 during Russia’s Presidential campaign, “Opinion polls put Navalny’s support at less than 2 percent and many Russians, who still get much of their news from state TV, say they do not know who he is.” Each one of the U.S.-and-allied commentators and ‘news’-reporters who assume that Navalny had more political support inside Russia than any other contender or possible contender for the Presidency is either loony or else a baldfaced liar, because I have seen the polls and the 2% figure was normal and at no time did it go higher than 6%, and there have always been several contenders for the Presidency who scored higher than that — and none of them were far-rightwing like Navalny nor viewed by a predominance of the Russians who did know about him as being and having been a darling of the very anti-Russian West.
So: What Happens When a Too-Honest News-Report Slips Through America’s Censors? Apparently, it becomes buried instead of promoted.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
We all go into shock? We wonder who was asleep at the job? We think somebody got religion and decided to tell the truth? We suspect they’re trying to fool us into thinking they have reformed? Wow!! The MSM and the truth don’t belong on the same planet.
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Humans are, by our nature, extremely susceptible to propaganda. The reason for this is sociological. The majority of the population has not evolved socially, past the point in which we were a tribal species, and our survival depended in large part to our acceptance within the tribe. Independent thinking was not accepted by the tribe, and outcasts were much less likely to survive and reproduce. We have evolved to accept group think and to fear anything different or challenging to the status quo. Our leaders understand this and use it to keep themselves in power and exploiting the masses.