By Daniel Franco
Video Production by Mobilized
Building on the idea of ‘Strongmen’, and how to defeat them, from just a few days ago: As weak as Donny is, there is someone even more fragile. And that’s Putin. He spent a lifetime amassing power, but making his entire nation brittle in the process. The common Russian knows that he is an evil tyrant, and one who is losing his health and grip by the day. Presently they can do almost nothing about that, mostly… mostly. And then there was Alexei Navalny. Nobody alive did more to weaken the chump Vladimir than he did. As it happens, by murdering Navalny, Pooty-Poot has exposed his weakness even more widely to the Russian populace.
I was one of millions who thought it was truly insane for Navalny to return home, because it was obvious he’d be killed. Of course, we see now that it was not crazy. Of course no one knew this more than Alexei himself. He made a calculation – even abroad, he knew that he was a dead man walking anyhow. He knew the poisoning had really damaged his health. So for him it was an easy choice to make. Dying quietly in the ‘safety’ of the west would do little to bring down the tyrant. But dying publicly, by making himself a testament to the evils of the regime… well that might help tear back the curtain, help show the world the illusion.
Don’t listen to me, let’s go to his own words on the topic:
“Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You are not allowed to give up! If they decide to kill me, it means we are incredibly strong.”
All tyrants fall. I’m not sure that I would have his bravery, if put in the same situation. But I am sure the good folks in Russia are waking up, and one day soon may they shake off this murderous, klepto-cratic regime.
https://www.politico.com/video/2024/02/16/navalny-explained-desire-to-return-to-russia-in-2020-1227113
- Alexei Navalny isn’t the first person to have suffered “sudden Russian death syndrome”, as some commentators have called it. A number of Putin critics, allies who have become threats, or those who have simply insulted the Kremlin, have died in suspicious circumstances:
- Pavel Antov, a member of Putin’s United Russia party, fell to his deathfrom a hotel window in India in 2022, shortly after denying he was the source of a WhatsApp message critical of the war in Ukraine. A friend on the same trip, Vladimir Budanov, also died in his hotel.
- Months earlier, the head of one of Russia’s oil giants, Ravil Maganov, apparently fell from a hospital window in Moscow, after criticising the war in Ukraine.
- Former deputy prime minister, and charismatic opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot four times in the back within sight of the Kremlin in 2015.
- Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote books about Russia’s police state under Vladimir Putin, was murdered in 2006 by contract killers. One of them later fought in Ukraine, and has since been pardoned.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent and critic of Putin, died in London in 2006, three weeks after drinking a cup of tea that had been laced with the deadly radioactive element, polonium-210. A British inquiry found he was poisoned by Russian agents who were acting on orders that had “probably” been approved by Putin.
Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-68316979?
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/16/navalny-death-ukraine-aid-00141892
https://www.politico.eu/article/alexei-navalny-dead-russia-vladimir-putin-mikhail-khodorkovsky/
“So… assuming he wasn’t just beaten to death, he was poisoned? (Again?) Seems like there’s little incentive for the Putin regime to actually put any effort into making it seem like he somehow died of natural causes, because there’s the threat involved to any opposition in obviously murdering him, plus making clearly false claims (and having others go along with it) is an authoritarian power move, where the more absurd the claims are, the better (“Oh he died by having his head cut off? He did it to himself, with a pocket knife.”)”
https://boingboing.net/2024/02/19/navalny-body-seen-to-be-bruised-on-head-and-chest-at-morgue.html
Let us not forget the traitors in our midst, who share a measure of the blame. “I’m sure it’s just another remarkable coincidence that a GQPer who wants to slit Ukraine’s throat is being funded by Russian Hitler, the same way that this here penny of mine has flipped tails 37 times in a row. Thanks to these bastards Adviivka was lost, and Russian Hitler gets his ‘win’ having now seized full control of Donetsk oblast.”
https://theintellectualist.com/campaign-finance-controversy-johnson/?
>> Mojo Nixon
I don’t want this essay to be all sad news, but we should also pay tribute to one of the wildest and most original musicians of the last 50 years, Mojo Nixon. His music was the soundtrack of my teenage years. And it was joyous, loud, and weird.
https://alternativetentacles.com/blogs/news/mojo-nixon-unabashed-outlaw-cult-hero-dead-at-66
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/mojo-nixon-dead-obituary-1234964257/?
“For new listeners, this song is about a lot more than just two amateur musicians playing a gig at a club with a not-entirely-ethical owner. Understand the song, understand finance and business for the past 40 years. I first heard it halfway through by randomly tuning in to some radio station in 1986 and was like “dafuq is this?” and by the time the song was over (some fist-pumping might have been involved) I realized that whatever I did in my life (and at the time I had no farking clue what I was going to do in my life), but I knew that whatever it was I was gonna do, it was gonna be my industry’s equivalent of doing the rock-and-roll thing was gonna be. Rewinding a few decades, and having spent some time in both the finance and tech industries, I didn’t exactly do the rock-and-roll thing. I wasn’t Gordon Gekko, nor was I ever a 10X Rockstar Ninja, but I did get to retire, and I can say that I met my obligations to Mojo: I picked up anyone I could help, got them to where they needed to go, and when I retired, I pulled out onto the interstate in the War Wagon, secure in the knowledge that whatever I did, I didn’t knowingly add to the masses of everybody on the side of the road shaking their hands in the air having been done wrong, cheated, swindled, or taken in, wondering where the hell was their money.”
https://boingboing.net/2024/02/08/psychobilly-rocker-mojo-nixon-has-died-at-the-age-of-66.html
**Here you can see why Navalny and Nixon must be honored together – they had a lot in common. “On a happier note, here’s a toast to the fan who made this tribute. Guthrie open-sourced his lyrics, to which Mojo picked up the ball and ran with it, and to the country they all loved. In the middle of the song, Mojo just breaks into this rant: ‘This land was made for everybody. Each and every one of us! The old, the young, the poor, the rich, the black, the brown, the yellow, the red, everybody! No matter what religion you have, no matter what part of the world you come from to get here, this piece of dirt under our feet doesn’t belong to just one person. The person with the most lawyers doesn’t own all of it! It belongs to everybody!’”
Putin’s Downfall Weekly Recap, for week #104: Strongman.
El Salvador. Venezuela. Cuba. Thailand. Turkiye. Israel. Russia. The Philippines. North Korea… I could go on and on. These are all countries that have fallen to ‘strongman’ dictators, and presently run right over human rights and legal norms. More’s the pity. We are in grave danger of having that happen here too, come November. The stakes are high – he could drag us into wars with millions of casualties. I have gone a lot about this risk, and will in the future. It’s a big problem and we need to solve it.
But not today. Today we need a plan to stop him. We need to deny Dastardly Donny any notion that he is a ‘strongman’. He sure wants to act like one, and luckily last time he failed pretty hard. The nation rejected his horse-doody and sent him packing. But he’s learned from his boss Vladimir, and will try again if given the chance.
Here’s how to thwart his goals: the one thing he and all dictators cannot handle is mockery. They can use their lackeys to silence dissenters, and we sadly just saw it happen to Mr. Navalny. (I will have an in-depth essay about him soon). They can hire propaganda fools like *ucker Carlson to spin lies and deny reality. But mockery, especially public mockery to their face – that is what exposes them and brings them down. Like the Wicked Witch of the West and a bucket of water, nothing will reduce these goons to sputtering fools as fast as mockery and humiliation. The Quaker traditions would tell you to shun them, and let silence do the work. With Mango Mussolini, we’re way past that strategy. Your mission, from now until the election, is to expose how weak he is, and to do it via mockery. Let’s get the fool to stroke out with rage, let’s challenge him at every turn. No safe ground, no mercy. He will show none if given the reins of authority, and has not just said as much but makes it the center of his 2024 campaign. So turn that around, push it back on him.
I have been writing these weekly essays since spring of 2015. All this time I have looked for a way to bring in Elvis as a musical selection – – today I can finally make that work. All hail the king, (and I don’t mean weak-ass Donny).
I hope you can see that I have not given up on America, not by a long shot. I always work from the adage “hope for the best, plan for the worst.” So if the tyrant wins and we have to suffer the lunacy of another Trump presidency, that may be the time I throw in the towel. I have no desire to live through the equivalent of Germany c. 1933. But that fate can be avoided, and we have 9 months to ensure it does not come to pass. There is still much I can do.