Sometimes it takes a "martyr" to ramp up a war: What Russia's media have to say about the death of Alexey Navalny

Who's benefited most from his most timely passing?

Those who really know the history of totalitarian practices—unlike such bellicose pretenders as Noam Chomsky, Joe Scarborough, Naomi Klein and other “liberal” propaganda choristers—may see something all too familiar in the death of Alexey Navalny; and by that I don’t mean that it strikes them as typical of Putin’s reign. Those making that all-too-familiar case—that is, the great majority of Western “journalists” and politicians—have thereby shown that what they “know” is not the history of totalitarian tactics, but the anti-Putin propaganda that’s been pummeling hearts and minds throughout the West since Putin was elected Russia’s president well over twenty years ago. According to that narrative (as there’s no need to remind you), Putin rose out of the KGB to seize the helm as Stalin 2.0, and in that role has had his every rival whacked, along with every journalist who ever dared to criticize him.

There’s too much to be said about that propaganda to dissect it here, other than to note that its portrayal of Vladimir the Terrible is propaganda as we tend to use that word—i.e., as a synonym for simple lying. As the great Sovietologist Stephen Cohen argued, on the basis of real expertise, and solid sources (including his own many personal acquaintances in Russia), the myth of Putin as a second Stalin is just that, an image based on falsehoods, half-truths and exaggeration, whose purpose was, and is, to serve the interests of the neocons in Washington, and the military-industrial colossus that they serve (nowadays along with all too many “liberals”). Despite his scholarly credentials and exceptional lucidity—or because of them—Cohen was not allowed to make his counter-argument except in his own writings and lectures (and in certain sympathetic classrooms, such as mine), since “our free press” back then, as now, would never give a forum to so gross a heretic, or even quote him for the sake of “balance.” Thus the propaganda demonizing “Putin,” like those decrying “climate change,” school shootings, “January 6” and “anti-vaxxers” (just to name a few of the traumatic bugaboos deployed against us), has gone fatally uncontradicted by those few who’ve had the expertise, and courage, to reject the (as it were) party line.

On the other hand, there are, outside the collapsing loony bin of “our free press,” those who misread Putin not through defamation but by idealizing him as the antithesis of all the scummy heads of state throughout the West, on the premise that “the enemy of our oppressors is, potentially, our savior.” According to this line, Putin’s Russia has not pushed its jab—Sputnik, based on AstraZeneca’s concoction—on anyone, won’t use digital currency to keep an eye on all transactions, stands against Klaus Schwab’s agenda, and is otherwise a bastion of those freedoms that the Western states are seeking to destroy. This line too is absurd, albeit not as dangerous as the Russophobic fantasy that could well help to spark our next—and last—world war.

That threat compels us to resist the warlike furor over Alexey Navalny’s death, by pointing out what should be obvious to all: that Putin, however grave a menace you may “think” he is, is no bloodthirsty maniac or mad expansionist, but a politician far too smart to have Navalny murdered, and thereby hand the Western propaganda chorus yet another opportunity to damn him. The story of this “murder” is, in other words, as sketchy as “the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal” in 2018— “a botched assassination attempt” by Russia, claims Wikipedia (i.e., the CIA). For all we know, Navalny’s “sudden death” may well have had far more to do with Russia’s “vaccination” program than with Vlad the Bad’s sadistic whims, since Russians have been “dying suddenly” in startling numbers since their “vaccination” drive began (as we’ve been noting in our weekly compilations); and there—as here, and in so many other countries—the state and press alike have done their damnedest not to note the likelihood that Sputnik has caused all those untimely deaths. Thus the official “diagnosis” in Navalny’s case must seem chillingly familiar to all those who’ve had their eyes wide open since late 2020:

Navalny Was Struck Down With 'Sudden Death Syndrome', His Mother Was Told at Russian Prison

Feb. 17, 2024

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-02-17/alexei-navalny-is-dead-spokeswoman-confirms

(Those interested in knowing more of Sputnik’s “safety and effectiveness” should check out Edward Slavsquat’s several Substacks on the subject.)

In any case, whatever really caused Navalny’s death, it’s pertinent to note the dark utility of martyrdom for war-making purposes, and its notorious exploitation by totalitarian regimes. Thus, in 1930, in order to ramp up the Nazis’ war against the Communists in Germany, Dr. Goebbels made a martyr of SA man Horst Wessel, whose murder under murky, rather sordid circumstances was translated into a gratuitous homicide by “degenerate communist subhumans.” That “martyrdom,” idealized in the SA’s “Horst Wessel Song,” piqued the brownshirts’ fighting spirit. Five years later, Goebbels touched off Kristallnacht—“the Night of Broken Glass”— with an inflammatory propaganda drive over the shooting, in Paris’s German embassy, of Nazi functionary Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynzspan, a Polish Jewish teenager allegedly outraged over the deportation of his family from Germany to Poland. (That murder too was more complex than the official story, as was belatedly confirmed about ten years ago, when it emerged that Grynzspan actually survived that episode, and then the war—a fact that may corroborate the theory that the Nazis actually had little use for the ambivalent vom Rath, except as one more casus belli against “the Jews.”) For his part, Stalin pulled off the same infuriating ruse in 1934, when he used the murder of “Old Bolshevik” (and longtime Stalin friend) Sergei Kirov—a crime committed by Leonid Nikolaev, former communist enraged by his expulsion from the party—to mount a bloody party purge that bolstered his supreme authority. (The evidence suggests that Kirov’s murder had been set up for that very purpose.)

And there was a somewhat similar “martyrdom” in Greece in 1975, when Richard S. Welch, CIA Chief of State (COS) in Athens, was gunned down in the doorway of his home as he and Mrs. Welch returned from a Christmas party at the home of the American ambassador. A group that called itself “Revolutionary Organization 17 November” claimed credit for the crime, though it was not until 2003 that 19 of the revolutionaries (not communists, as first assumed, but anarchists) went on trial for several of their crimes (though not Welch’s murder, as the 20-year statute of limitations had run out).

At the time of Welch’s murder no one had heard of them; nor was there any connection whatsoever between them and the CIA’s American critics, who were especially vocal in the mid-Seventies, and whose critiques of Agency malfeasance got much US coverage, and congressional attention. To smear those critics, and dampen the congressional inquiries, the CIA immediately launched a strident propaganda drive that (wildly) blamed that murder on the pushback in America, on the premise that it (somehow) “exposed” Welch as Chief of Station (although a photo of his Athens residence had been published in Greek newspapers). Specifically, the CIA pinned Welch’s murder, indirectly, on Philip Agee, a former CIA officer (all over South America), whose Inside the Company: A CIA Diary had been published a few months prior to Welch’s death, and Agee’s associates at CounterSpy, which had started publishing in 1973, and was shut down by Agency harassment just a few years later. (In 1978, the journalists at CounterSpy replaced it with the Covert Action Bulletin—which, like Agee’s book, is still essential reading for all champions of democracy, if you can find back issues of the journal or used copies of the book.) Thus Welch’s “martyrdom” served much the same belligerent purpose in America, and elsewhere in the “democratic” West, as Wessel’s and vom Rath’s had served in Nazi Germany, and Kirov’s in the USSR.

Let this last point provide some context for the current furor over Alexey Navalny’s “sudden death,” which is now serving to intensify the “case” for war on Putin (though he’s no more a communist than his detractors are defenders of democracy).

In any case, let’s now turn from the repetitious Western “outrage” over Navalny’s death, and take note of what the Russian media have had to say about it, as they’ve raised some noteworthy points and questions (whereas “our free press” has—as usual—raised nothing but the temperature, and countless hackles).

Navalny's death: Views from Russian media