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How the N.Y. Times Heroizes Russia’s Most Infamous Traitor

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

Here is from the front page of the 18 February 2024 Sunday New York Times:

“Why Navalny, Sacrificing His Freedom and Ultimately His Life, Had to Return”

There was one question that Russians repeatedly asked the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony on Friday, and he confessed that he found it a little annoying.

Why, after surviving a fatal poisoning attempt widely blamed on the Kremlin, had he returned to 

Russia from his extended convalescence abroad to face certain imprisonment and possible death? Even his prison guards, turning off their recording devices, asked him why he had come back, he said.

“I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs,” Mr. Navalny wrote in a Jan. 17 Facebook post to mark the third anniversary of his return and arrest in 2021.

“I cannot betray either the first or the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.”

That was the direct answer, but for many Russians, both those who knew him and those who did not, the issue was more complex. Some of them considered it almost a classical Russian Greek tragedy: The

Continued on Page 8

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PUTIN CRITIC Alexei A. Navalny, 47, endured. Obituary. PAGE 26

That’s the Sunday N.Y. Times, and it’s the U.S. Government’s line, too. So: here was the reality about Alexei Navalny:

Though in America and its allies Navalny is presented as an anti-corruption campaigner who long aspired to replace Putin as Russia’s leader and who was in prison in Russia because Navalny was so popular there that in a fair-and-square democratic election, Navalny would beat Putin, Navalny was actually almost universally despised within Russia, and not for any reason pertaining to corruption, nor for his wanting to become Russia’s President.

Though the dominant public image of Navalny in the United States and in its ‘allied’ countries (America’s colonies) is that of his being an anti-corruption campaigner in a very corrupt Russia, and of his being Russia’s most-popular opponent against Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, and therefore was blocked by Putin from running against Putin, and who was even poisoned by Putin, but — amazingly — survived that poisoning by Putin, and was therefore imprisoned by Putin, so as to prevent Navalny from being able to run against him in a free and fair democratic election in Russia, the dominant public image of Navalny inside Russia is and has been that of his being a CIA-MI6 asset who was a racist-fascist traitor who would sell-out his country for anything so long as he could become its leader, just like Benedict Arnold was in early U.S. history, when the then U.S. Vice President Arnold worked with the intelligence services of Britain’s King George III in order to become America’s leader so as to restore the United States to British control — America as being again merely another British colony. (That ploy, by Arnold, failed, of course.)

Typical of the view regarding Navalny that’s popular in the U.S. and in its allied countries was a news-report from Britain’s Reuters on 6 May 2021, titled “Defiant but cornered: Jailed Kremlin critic Navalny’s movement is on the ropes”. It opened:

He has been poisoned, jailed and his close aides are either being prosecuted or have fled abroad. His anti-Kremlin opposition movement is now also likely to soon be outlawed as extremist.

Yet Alexei Navalny and his supporters continue to work on ways to remain a thorn in President Vladimir Putin’s side, even as one of his most important financial backers says the movement in its current form is finished and will take time to rebound.

In the eyes of the Kremlin, the only half-meaningful political weapon the Navalny camp has left is its campaign for tactical, or what it calls “smart” voting against the ruling United Russia party in a parliamentary election in September, according to three people close to the Russian authorities.

Navalny’s supporters are set to be barred from that election via a court case, due to unfold later this month, and planned legislation unveiled on the parliamentary website on Tuesday that would ban “extremists” from running for office.

A court, meeting in secret, is considering a request from Moscow prosecutors to have Navalny’s network designated “extremist” for allegedly plotting a revolution, state media have reported. Russia’s financial monitoring agency has already added the network to a list on its website of groups involved in “terrorism and extremism”.

In response, Navalny’s movement has redoubled its call for sympathisers to vote for other opposition parties in September, however unpalatable they may consider them.

Typical of the view of Navalny that is popular inside Russia itself are the following:

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. It was a sting-operation filmed by Russia’s Government.

Navalny was 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 of “НАРОД за легализацию оружия” meaning “PEOPLE for the legalization of weapons”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVNJiO10SWw

or

https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/oVNJiO10SWw

He said 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 Zhirinovsky at 5%, and Alexey Navalny (shown there as Алексей Навальный), 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 11.77%, 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.

That’s what Russians knew about Navalny. And, of course, it’s very different from what the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries knew and know (or, at least, believe) about him.

Here was some typical May 2021 propaganda that was published by U.S.-and-allied regimes about Navalny:

On May 22nd, Japan Times ran a Reuters report, “How Russia’s new gulag tries to break convicts like Alexei Navalny”.

On May 23rd, the Wall Street Journal headlined “Russia’s Navalny Fights to Stay in Public Eye in Putin Standoff”.

On May 4th, the Washington Post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza headlined “Russia just took a big step back toward the Soviet Union”, and said: “Last week, for the first time since the Soviet era, the Kremlin officially classified opposition to its rule as a criminal offense. … Moscow prosecutors suspended the activities of the nationwide organization of Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent. Navalny is currently incarcerated in a prison camp after surviving a state-sponsored assassination attempt last year.”

Navalny, though he actually was favorably viewed by only around 2% of Russians (as indicated in polls there), was widely publicized in U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media as having instead the highest support by the Russian people of anyone who might challenge Vladimir Putin for Russia’s leadership. It’s a lie, and always has been. Other politicians had far higher polled support in Russia — but none was nearly as high support by Russia’s voters as Putin was.

Back in 2017, the British firm of WIN/Gallup International issued “Gallup International’s 41st Annual Global End of Year Survey Opinion Poll in 55 Countries Across the Globe”, which sampled 1,000 persons in each country in order to determine in each one the percentage of the public who rated “Favorable” and who rated “Unfavorable” each of the following 11 national heads-of-state (listed here in descending order of their net favorability, or “favorable” minus “unfavorable”): Merkel, Macron, Modi, May, Xi, Putin, Saud, Netanyahu, Rouhani, Erdogan, and Trump. (Merkel globally scored highest, Trump lowest.)

This was an extraordinary poll because it reported not only the job-approval percentages worldwide for each of those 11 heads-of-state, but also the job-approvals for that person within that leader’s own nation — by his or her own countrymen, citizens. Who would be in a better position to evaluate a nation’s leader than the citizens of that country are? Can the people who don’t live there be reasonably be expected to be better-informed of that than the people who do live there are? Hardly.

Amongst Russians, the score for Putin was 79% Favorable, 11% Unfavorable, for a net score of +68%.

Though Germany’s Merkel had the highest score worldwide, her score in Germany was only 54% Favorable and 44% Unfavorable, for a net of +10.

Macron’s net score in France was -1%.

May’s net in UK was -18%

Rouhani’s in Iran was +37%

Erdogan’s in Turkey was +22%

Modi’s in India was +72% (that’s 84%-12%)

Trump’s in U.S. was -23% (35%-58%) — the worst of all.

The following leaders weren’t surveyed in their own countries: Xi, Netanyahu, and Saud.

So: Putin’s net +68% score amongst his own country’s population was second ony to Modi’s — and, whereas Modi had been in office for only 3 years, Putin had led Russia for 17 years, and was a very firmly established high performer in these figures. Here were some of the reasons for this.

To say that Navalny had enough public supporters for him to have become elected as Russia’s President is like alleging that the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke had enough public supporters for him to have become elected as America’s President.

Navalny was convicted on 2 February 2021 on a parole-violation charge, instead of on the possible treason charge (which would have produced a much longer sentence) and sent to prison with a 3.5-year sentence. On 17 February 2024, the Moon of Alabama blogger, who has an extraordinarily high percentage of his predictions turning out to have been right, headlined “They Finally Killed Navalny …” and predicted that if ever the circumstances that led to Navalny’s death become documented, it will likelier turn out to have been a hit-job by MI6 or that CIA than by Vladimir Putin. (He presumed that it hadn’t been unintentional; and, since Navalny’s sentence would have been ending very soon, suicide would have been very unlikely.)

Contrast the case regarding Navalny with the case of Julian Assange, who has been in prison now for over a decade without having been convicted of anything at all except for jumping bail on a fraudulent rape-charge that even the two alleged victims acknowledged didn’t actually happen:

The Assange case legally involves the Governments of U.S., UK, and Sweden (as well as his home country, of which he is a citizen but which Government likewise opposes him: Australia), but, by contrast, the Navalny case legally involves only the Government of Russia, but has been taken up by all of the countries that are trying to conquer Russia — the U.S.-and-‘allied’ countries.

Assange is a super-intelligent fanatic working for the public’s right to know, and is therefore loathed by dictatorships all around the world, as well as by extremely powerful corporations and gangsters, all of which, however, have failed in all of their private attempts to bring his WikiLeaks organization to a halt, and so various Governments that are controlled by his enemies have by now imprisoned him in Britain for the past 11 years. He has never been convicted of anything anywhere except that in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail (on sexual charges against him that even the alleged accuser denied were true). And yet he remains now in solitary confinement (“23 hours a day locked in their cells”) in a super-max British prison, because the U.S. Government won’t stop its demand that he be extradited to the U.S. (and killed here — imprisoned for up to 175 years in America — instead of continuing unsentenced and unconvicted in Britain for however long it willl take before he dies there). His only ‘crime’ was his publishing only truths, especially truths that cut to the core of exposing the U.S. regime’s constant lying. So, this blatant and illegal injustice against an international hero (virtually everywhere except in the United States) is today one prominent disproof of the U.S. and UK lies to the effect that they are democracies. On 26 September 2021, Yahoo News reported (based largely on reporting in Madrid’s El Pais on 5 January 2021) that the Trump Administration felt so embarrassed by some information that had been WikiLeaked, they drew up detailed plans to kidnap Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to “rendition” him for possible execution by America. The plans, including “meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president,” were finally stopped at the National Security Council, as being too risky. “Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration”, even without any legal basis to try him in the United States. So: the Trump Administration then prepared an indictment against Assange (to legalize their extradition-request), and the indictment became unsealed or made public on the same day, 11 April 2019, when Ecuador’s U.S.-bribed Government allowed UK’s Government to drag Assange out into UK super-max solitary-confinement imprisonment, and this subsequently produced lie-based U.S. & UK tussles over how to prevent Assange from ever again being able to reach the public, either by continuing his solitary confinement, or else by, perhaps, poisoning him, or else convicting him of something and then executing him. On 4 January 2021, a British judge nixed Assange’s defense case: “I reject the defence submissions concerning staying extradition [to U.S.] as an abuse of the process of this court.” Earlier, her handling of Assange’s only ‘trial’, which was his extradition hearing, was a travesty, which would have been expected in Hitler’s courts, and which makes clear that UK’s courts can be just as bad as Nazi courts had been. However, the U.S. regime’s efforts to grab Assange continued on. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the overwhelmingly compliant U.S. Congress, are all to blame for that dictatorial regime’s pursuit against this champion of truth-telling; and the same blame applies to the leadership in UK. The UK regime has, throughout the Assange matter, been fronting for its hegemonic imperial master, the U.S. regime. On 10 December 2021, BBC bannered “Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules”. Blatantly, both America and England lie in order to refer to themselves as being democracies. In fact, America has the world’s highest percentage of its residents in prisons. It’s the world’s #1 police-state. Is that because Americans are worse than the people in other countries, or is it instead because the thousand or so individuals who collectively control the nation’s Government are, themselves, especially psychopathic? Evidence will now be linked-to on that question: America has been scientifically examined more than any other country has, in regards to whether it is an aristocracy, or instead a democracy, and the clear and consistent finding is that it’s an aristocracy, no democrachy at all. And it clearly is that at the federal level. (Here is a video summarizing the best single study of that, and it finds America to be an aristocracy, because it’s controlled by the richest few). And Norway’s aristocracy had also been part of this scandal. It is an international scandal, and keeps getting worse.

U.S.-and-allied press, who claim to be for the public’s right to know regarding all matters of national and international policies, have been overwhelmingly hostile toward him and slanted in favor of the regime against him. For example, on 11 April 2019, the day that Trump got the new President of Ecuador to allow Britain to sieze Assange at Ecuador’s London Embassy nearly 7 years after Assange had first sought refuge in that Embassy in 2012, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post headlined its editorial “Julian Assange is not a free-press hero. And he is long overdue for personal accountability.” They wrote:

Contrary to much pro-WikiLeaks propaganda, Mr. Assange had no legitimate fears for his life, either at the hands of CIA assassins or, via extradition, the U.S. death penalty, when he fled to the embassy of what was then an anti-American government. Rather, he was avoiding transfer to Sweden pursuant to a seemingly credible sexual assault charge lodged against him in that country. He then proceeded to abuse the hospitality of his South American hosts, most egregiously by presiding over what an indictment by U.S. special counsel Robert S. Mueller III described as Russian intelligence’s use of WikiLeaks as a front for its interference in the U.S. election. Democratic Party documents stolen by the Russians made their way into the public domain under the WikiLeaks label. Ecuador’s new, more pragmatic president, Lenín Moreno, cited Mr. Assange’s more recent alleged involvement in the release of confidential Vatican documents, along with threats against the government in Quito, as reasons to oust him.

It was mostly a string of lies, but the American public have become so used to that for so long a time from the regime’s press, that in the only international poll which has been taken of public opinion about Assange, which was by Ipsos in April 2011 and covered 23 countries (including U.S., Britain, India, Russia, and others), Americans had by far the most hostility against WikiLeaks, and also by far the most hostility against Assange. Britain was the second-most-hostile against WikiLeaks and the third-most-hostile against Assange (after only South Korea). Furthermore, because America’s aristocracy, which controls not only the weapons-manufacturing firms such as Lockheed Martin but the ‘news’-media, and so controls public opinion in the U.S., the U.S. public are extremely jingoistic and swallow the lie that America’s Government is a democracy instead of an aristocracy. For example, on 14 December 2010, the Washington Post bannered “Poll: Americans say WikiLeaks harmed public interest; most want Assange arrested” and reported that their poll of Americans showed “68 percent say the WikiLeaks' exposure of government documents about the State Department and U.S. diplomacy harms the public interest. Nearly as many - 59 percent - say the U.S. government should arrest Assange and charge him with a crime for releasing the diplomatic cables.” They overwhelmingly trusted their Government as-if their Government hadn’t previously lied psychopathically in order to deceive them into supporting the entirely lie-based invasion and subsequent destruction of Iraq; so, clearly, the vast majority of Americans are willing to be lied-to by their Government and its ‘news’-media constantly for decades. They don’t learn from experience but instead from propaganda. It’s as-if the American mass robotically follows the leadership of their aristocrats, America’s billionaires. And so they believe that this is a democracy, no aristocracy. That is the fundamental neoconservative belief — it is that the public in America rule, no aristocracy do. No wonder, then, that America leads the hanging-party against Assange globally.

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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.