It’s tough to be a hero
There are several wise old sayings about being sure about what you are saying before you talk. “Put your brain in gear before you put your mouth in action” is one. Another is “You better load your brain before you shoot your mouth.”
But in these current times—and unfortunately often in the press/ media—research is hard and “fact-checking” depends only a little on the truth and much on if the “fact” supports the narrative.
Alexei Navalny is a “Russian opposition leader, lawyer, and anticorruption activist.” Now this is definitely someone that the “progressive” press/media in the West can get behind. “Russian opposition” means that he is against Vladimir Putin whom we all know is right up there with Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter.
Count Dracula’s real name is Vlad the Impaler Dracula. There are no coincidences.
Navalny is a lawyer and lawyers always fight for truth and justice, except when they don’t. Finally, he is an anti-corruption activist who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace prize along with Greta Thunberg. His parents have owned a basket-weaving factory since 1994. The man has perfect credentials.
In August 2020 Navalny was poisoned with the Russian Novichok nerve agent, perhaps on the orders of his arch-nemesis Putin. That is certainly possible. Navalny has been a thorn in Putin’s neck for 20 years.
The man is serious about government corruption since the government of the former USSR was perhaps the most corrupt in world history from the top down to the local guy who counted the sheep on some farm a thousand kilometers from Moscow. Post-soviet Russia was the perfect blending of Mafia-like organized crime and “free and fair elections.”
You may have been mostly ignorant of Alexei Navalny until recently. Since January one local news source has published 20 stories including an opinion piece titled “Navalny pulls a Ninoy in Russia. Who will pull a Navalny in the PH?”
Granted, Navalny was facing immediate arrest for several crimes he was charged with if he decided to come back to Russia from Germany and Aquino’s murder was a senseless tragedy. But “People Power” probably started on the afternoon of July 14, 1789 in Paris, France with the Storming of the Bastille to release seven prisoners: four forgers, a “lunatic” imprisoned at the request of his family; Auguste-claude Tavernier, who had tried to assassinate Louis XV 30 years before; and one “deviant” aristocrat imprisoned by his father.
However, being a “hero” to the Progressive wing of global politics requires near-sainthood qualities. Just ask Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi. She was right up there with Mother Teresa with a Nobel Peace Prize until she failed the “sainthood” test regarding the Rohingya people.
Amnesty International named Navalny a “Prisoner of Conscience” after his arrest in January. Now, though, he is just an “ordinary” political prisoner because of old videos and social-media posts in which Navalny made controversial pronouncements. “Some of these comments, which Navalny has not publicly denounced, reach the threshold of advocacy of hatred, and this is at odds with Amnesty’s definition of a prisoner of conscience. Navalny has not publicly denounced his past comments.”
The comments attributed to Navalny in the mid-2000s were not specified but might have been “statements seen as racist and dangerously inflammatory.” Imagine what would happen to him if he had denied Global warming or rejected transgender females competing in women’s sports?