Navalny: Wolf in Human Rights Activist’s Clothing?
Caleb Maupin
Dispatch dateline: Feb 28, 2021
An important question for us: can we consider that a person has stopped being a racist, homophobe, chauvinist, neo-Nazi, anti-Semite, if he simply stops expressing such views? Most Americans will say no. There should be at least some evidence that a person has realized the problems of xenophobia and bigotry, and its potential consequences for society.
If such a standard is applied in America, it should be in the rest of the world as well. When the highly respected US publication, The New Yorker, references a respected human rights organization, a contradictory phrase stands out: “Navalny did not renounce his past statements, but he hasn’t made new xenophobic statements for many years”. (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-wont-amnesty-international-call-alexey-navalny-a-prisoner-of-conscience).
After Amnesty International declared that they no longer consider Navalny a "prisoner of conscience", it was as if a mental nuclear bomb had exploded in the media environment. But what are the views of the Russian oppositionist? What is the actual problem?
Let's go over a few examples. In 2009, Navalny called Jews “dudes in fox hats, lapserdaks, peys and all the other bells and whistles,” and the Arabs “chumaziks” - a derogatory term roughly translating to “dirty faced people” (https://navalny.livejournal.com/347891.html).
In 2013, the Israeli newspaper Jerusalem Post published an article in which it reported that at a party in the editorial office of The New Times, Navalny uttered a rhymed slogan: "First toast to the Holocaust!" (the original video has been removed from the web).
In addition, the publication quotes the words of the blogger that “those who want to live in Russia must become Russian in the full sense of the word” (the original publication has also been deleted). (https://itongadol.com/noticias/73171-moscow-mayor-hopeful-raises-jewish-fears-with-anti-semitic-remarks) During the war in the Caucasus in 2008, the blogger called the Residents of Georgia - "rodents" (a play on words in Russian - "Groozeen-greezoon), and also suggested" to fire a cruise missile at the Georgian General Staff,” while calling for a complete blockade of the country and expulsion from Russia of all citizens of Georgia at once.
These words give the proper context to understanding why back in 2007 the blogger was expelled from the democratic Russian party Yabloko for promoting nationalism. [National chauvinism]. However, in 2009, during a live broadcast on the popular radio station Echo of Moscow, Navalny still called nationalism the defining point of his ideology, confirming, literally, that he could be called a "neo-Nazi." (http://echo.msk.ru/programs/smoke/566088-echo/).
In addition, Alexei Navalny has many times openly declared his support for a right-wing nationalist event called "Russian March,” and attended this event in 2007-2011. And in 2013, in his personal blog Echo of Moscow, he wrote: “I still support the Russian March as an idea and as an event, I am ready to help with information or somehow, but I cannot participate in the new situation.” (https://echo.msk.ru/blog/b_akunin/1190412-echo/). These words confirm our main thesis: silence is not yet denial.
Navalny's theses on other topics look no less bright. Alexei long had a habit of calling women “heifers.” By his own admission, he only stopped this in the hopes of winning feminist votes. (https://www.instagram.com/p/BW7gn67BTDo/?taken-by=navalny4).
On the LGBT community, Navalny's position is also known. “I believe that people have the right to formalize civil relations with each other as they want and need. [But] for example, [on] the issue of adoption of children, here I am categorically against." (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Ru0EyJxcQ).
In the case of civic activism and political struggle, Navalny has always been in favor of a setup in which authorities, including, judges, can be dispensed with quickly, and then shot. (https://twitter.com/navalny/status/433537573797892096).
While talk about the danger of social media rhetoric inciting violence is very prevalent across the United States these days, in 2020 Navalny announced publicly that he calls for the immediate forcible overthrow the government of Russia: "Such a government must be overthrown right now, quite possibly even by force." (https://clck.ru/TLUg4).
Looking over the history of Alexei Navalny's statements, there should be no questions as to why the Kremlin treats him with suspicion. A person who has been carrying such a thick mixture of stupidity and bigotry for years is unpredictable and dangerous. He is even more dangerous if engaged in “opaque business” and political scams.
But yet, such a person was recently awarded the highest prize of the Geneva Forum for Human Rights and Democracy - the Courage Prize. The opposition's website says that the award ceremony is scheduled for June. In response, we must repeat an important question, which we asked at the very beginning: can it really be considered that a person has ceased to be a racist, homophobe, chauvinist, neo-Nazi, anti-Semite, if he simply pretends for a short time that this is not so?
Rev. 11.11.20
The Killing Of Rayshard Brooks Shows How Police “Reform” Is A Joke
Caitlin Johnstone
A black man named Rayshard Brooks was recently killed by an Atlanta police officer who shot him in the back while he was attempting to run away.
Video footage from the police bodycam and a nearby witness makes it clear that Brooks resisted arrest after failing a breathalyzer test when police approached him sleeping in his car at a Wendy’s parking lot, punching an officer and taking a taser the police had attempted to use on him before trying to flee the scene. Video footage from the parking lot makes it clear that Brooks was running away, and, without ceasing to run, pointed the taser at police behind him, at which point he was shot twice in the back by an officer named Garrett Rolfe.
New video released by the GBI shows the moment #Atlanta police shot and killed #RayshardBrooks in the parking lot of a Wendy’s. Police say Rayshard Brooks grabbed a taser and pointed it at police before an officer fired shots. pic.twitter.com/8DEeOdtyqF
— Courtney Bryant (@CourtneyDBryant) June 13, 2020
There is no rational defense of this shooting. If someone is running away from you with a short-range weapon, it is literally impossible for them to pose an imminent threat to you. Just allowing Brooks to run out of the range of the taser, as he was already trying to do, would have nullified any potential threat to either of the two officers on the scene, because it would have been literally impossible for Brooks to tase them while continuing to run in the direction he was running.
This indisputable and self-evident fact hasn’t stopped people from bleating moronic police apologia in my social media notifications since the shooting occurred.
- They claim Brooks could have tased an officer and taken his gun (again, let Brooks take himself out of taser range and there’s exactly zero risk of this happening).
- They claim they couldn’t just let a “dangerous” criminal run around with a police weapon (it’s a taser; you can buy them at Walmart. What’s he going to do? Go on a mass tasing rampage?).
- They claim the cop had to execute Brooks because he posed a “danger to society” (it is not a cop’s job to act as judge, jury and executioner in determining whether someone poses a general threat to society; that’s what the courts are for).
- They claim if you punch a cop you deserve whatever you get (believing, because they are authority-worshipping bootlickers, that a cop being punched is worse than a civilian being killed by gunfire).
- They claim if you don’t follow police instructions then of course you’re at risk of being killed (yes, police doing inexcusably brutal things is the problem that people are trying to address here).
Even leaving aside any debate about policing as it exists in America today, there was absolutely no excuse for Rolfe’s behavior. They had all of Brooks’ information. They had his car. They knew where he lives. They could have followed him in their car and called for backup. They could have gone in with backup to arrest him later.
But Rolfe decided to kill. After watching all these protests against police brutality raging throughout his country since the murder of George Floyd, after being confronted with with all the public outrage about police killing black men day after day in news headline after news headline, after his society forced him to contemplate police violence and his role in it, Garrett Rolfe still decided to kill. After all that, he watched a black man running away from him, posing no threat to him whatsoever, and he decided to kill.
The fact that cops are so thoroughly inoculated against public demand that they change their behavior makes a complete farce of the decoy police “reform” agenda that establishment narrative managers have been actively trying to corral the current protest movement into to kill their support for police abolishment.
Let me pick up on what @staceyabrams just said. #DefundThePolice slogan is being used to divide us. She called for transformation of police, that's much stronger than just reform but not distracting like defunding. #TransformThePolice is appealing to most people & sounds strong.
— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) June 14, 2020
There’s a feud going on in America’s new protest movement right now between those who wish to abolish, defund, dismantle, and/or disarm the police, and those who want to “reform” or “transform” the police. The former are actually pushing for a revolutionary change which actually pushes back against abusive power structures and calls for the creation of a radically different social paradigm, while the latter wants to keep policing institutions in their irredeemably corrupt state and add more funding for “de-escalation” training seminars where grown adults are told not to commit gratuitous acts of violence.
Training seminars which, it turns out, Officer Garrett Rolfe had just completed.
“According to the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council, Rolfe had recently received use of force training,” reports Atlanta news outlet AJC. “On April 24, he took a nine-hour course on de-escalation options, his record shows. And on Jan. 9, Rolfe was trained on the use of deadly force at the DeKalb County police academy.”
And yet you’ve got fauxgressive establishment narrative managers like Cenk Uygur promoting the reform agenda and calling calls to defund the police “distracting”.
I wrote the other day that “if these protests end it won’t be because tyrants in the Republican Party like Donald Trump and Tom Cotton succeeded in making the case for beating them into silence with the US military. It will be because liberal manipulators succeeded in co-opting and stagnating its momentum.” This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about.
.@NYGovCuomo suggests protesters pack it up, in light of new reforms: "People are still out protesting. You don’t need to protest. You won. You won. You accomplished your goal. Society says, you’re right. The police need systemic reform.”
— Spectrum News NY1 (@NY1) June 13, 2020
People who claim these protests are the result of some kind of psyop often cite the fact that they’re being supported by establishment liberals, mainstream media, and giant corporations, but this misses a very important distinction in the dynamic that is at play here. While it is true that these institutions have been expressing general support for the demonstrations and the idea that black lives matter, what absolutely none of them have been doing is supporting the defunding or abolishment of America’s police force. None of the empire’s ruling elites support this.
The reason you are seeing manipulation and attempts at co-option in this new movement is because that is exactly what’s happening. But it isn’t what’s driving the enthusiasm behind the demonstrations. Rather, you are seeing an attempted hijacking of an actual revolutionary agenda that actually challenges actual power institutions (including increasingly common attempts to manipulate the narrative by claiming demands to defund and abolish are actually just calls for reform).
The widespread call to abolish America’s police state, an integral part of the glue which holds the US-centralized empire together, is revolutionary. It is not an exaggeration to say it’s as interesting and exciting as seeing a mainstream call to end US imperialism, and it is just as threatening to establishment power structures. The call for “reform”, in contrast, is just more milquetoast, Obamaesque fauxgressive verbiage designed to stagnate a real revolutionary change movement. It is as interesting and as threatening to establishment power structures as saying the US should push regime change in Syria rather than Iran.
Police abolishment advocates are pushing for something which would require the complete reconfiguration of power in society to accomplish, where the prison industrial complex and the war on drugs are ended and what we think of as policing can for example be mostly replaced by something more akin to social work. Police “reform” proponents are advancing a decoy agenda which people have been distracted by for generations while the police force has become increasingly militarized behind a veil of meaningless verbiage about community outreach and training programs.
It's not just that Biden doesn't want to defund the police, per his spox, its that he believes cops just don't have enough resources for reform. Would be laughable if it wasn't so dire. https://t.co/3lbnjQOBML pic.twitter.com/yCKf2iwQP9
— austin walker (@austin_walker) June 8, 2020
It’s textbook liberal manipulation used to steer the revolutionary zeitgeist into an impotent conceptual tar pit for another few years while the prison bars are reinforced.
As I explained a while back in my article “How To Tell Real News From Useless Narrative Fluff“, you can tell what’s really going on by watching where the money is going, where the weapons are going, where the resources are going and where the people are going. You can see in these demands for dismantling the police state a bunch of people moving around demanding to drastically change all four of these things, and you can see from the liberal narrative managers an agenda to prevent any of those four things from actually changing. And if they win out, you will be able to watch the people, police, weapons and resources continue moving in more or less the exact same way they’ve been moving.
They’re trying to replace a real revolutionary impulse with useless narrative fluff. They have learned that it is much easier to neuter such impulses with empty agreement and a bunch of insubstantial words than to tell them no and stomp them down. Hopefully, the people have learned this too.
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12 days ago
It's okay to question things and keep an open mind.
I feel like these types of articles are designed to suppress independent thought and label and dismiss an entire group of people. Can't be using critical thought when you're supposed to eat up everything the corporate media tells you.