Exploiting the Dead

Alexei Navalny Is the New Great Hero of the West

RYAN DELARME

Arguably the biggest story being parroted and commodified in the corporate media these last couple weeks is the death of Russian “opposition leader” Alexei Navalny. I think it’s worth asking why, in a time where there are no shortage of domestic issues, are our media institutions dedicating so much time and energy to the death of a foreign activist?

In case you somehow missed it, Alexei Navalny, who was cast as the West’s answer to Vladimir Putin, died in a Russian prison under extremely mysterious circumstances with most fortuitous timing.

A litany of establishment partisan hacks, and just about every major corporate media talking head, have extensively discussed this event with uncanny emotional intensity, unanimously agreeing that it was a historically significant occurrence of gravity.

Our readers understand that there is much more to the MSM today than simply turning a profit. Rather than informing the public, the primary function of the media is shaping civil discourse; cable news anchors are less journalists and more social engineers.

In my last piece for Badlands, I included a quote by political scientist Bernard C. Cohen from his 1963 book, The Press and Foreign Policy, that I believe is extremely relevant here:

"The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about." (#)

What is so significant about Alexei Navalny's death that it merits dominating American political and media discourse? Why is this instance of a dissident dying in prison any more relevant than when it occurs in U.S.-friendly places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Ukraine?

The answer? Most likely $60 Billion.

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You know some top-shelf deep-political skullduggery is afoot when the entirety of the American media apparatus joins hands with the uniparty representatives in Congress to feign sincerity over the death of somebody who was completely inconsequential to their lives only yesterday.

They all read from the same script, deliver the exact same talking points with the same amount of dramatic intensity—all of which is designed to manipulate the emotions of cable news audiences.

Whenever you see this level of coordinated messaging, you can rest assured that there is an objective being sought.

In a nutshell, Alexei Navalny died in a Russian Prison; the Russian government claims Navalny was guilty of embezzlement and “extremist activities,” while the Biden Administration and U.S. legacy media claim that Navalny is a saint who would never hurt a fly and that his legal troubles were all the result of political persecution.

Joe Biden himself has gone so far as to claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin and “his thugs” are responsible for Navalny’s death, a claim that so far has zero tangible evidence to support it.

Unfortunately, the Russian government and the United States' government are both generally perceived as lacking honesty. It’s worth mentioning that it’s tactically illogical for Putin to order an attack on his opposition right now, but for argument's sake, let's assume the Western narrative is accurate.

The question still remains: why is the Western media reporting so heavily on this man's death? Why is it crucial for Americans to concentrate all their energy, attention, indignation, and rage on this specific news story, neglecting the fact that their own government is guilty of much worse?

You know a narrative is beneficial to the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and the deep political establishment as a whole when you see career politicians from both sides of the political aisle come together to hammer home a message. It’s one of the few times you’ll see Hakeem Jeffries statements mirror those of Mitch McConnell.

So what’s the angle?

A good place to start would be the $60 Billion in American money for Ukraine that’s currently being held up in Congress.

As The War Machine Keeps Turning

It started in October, when the Biden Administration, hell bent on funneling American tax dollars into a nation where money has a tendency to disappear, requested an additional $60 billion be sent to Ukraine.

The money that IS actually accounted for is going to feed the arms manufacturers of the MIC.

Ever since the war in Ukraine broke out, it’s been one multibillion-dollar aid package after another, but the spigot has been turned off since Mike Johnson took over as Speaker of the House. Now, I have mixed feelings about Mike Johnson, but he has so far kept his word that there would be no spending packages approved until the border was secured, and that any further aid to Ukraine would be offset by spending cuts.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans’ hope to secure the border were dashed upon the rocks when the bipartisan bill, sponsored by Establishment Republican and shambling corpse Mitch McConnell, was revealed.

The America First, anti-establishment wing of the Republican party were actually offended by the bill; it did literally nothing to secure the border and was considered dead on arrival. The usual suspects, uniparty representatives like Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, have dropped the pretense entirely of pretending to do anything about the American border before they help Ukraine and Israel.

Mitch McConnell confessed to the New York Times that he never truly prioritized border security. He was only making a hollow gesture to make it look like he cared at all about the wants and needs of his constituents, while making sure his real masters in the security state got what they wanted.

So, in case you were wondering whether the Senate GOP’s loyalty lies, 20 Republican senators and every Democrat, voted to pass this bill, sending $60 billion to Ukraine, $17 billion to Israel, more money to Taiwan and more money to bomb Yemen.

We covered in previous editorials that the modern incarnation of the democrat party has extinguished any true anti-war sentiment within its ranks almost completely. There’s a Democrat majority in the Senate presently and, naturally, every Democrat will vote ‘Yes’ on this bill to send all that money to fuel these wars.

It’s actually quite remarkable, even if you’re the sort of person who watches Vaush, Destiny and Hasan Piker all day long, you have to admit it’s interesting that there's not one Democrat in the House of Representatives willing to vote No on a bill to send billions and billions and billions of dollars to the arms industry. The only dissent that exists at all is a result of Israel’s inclusion in the Bill, but the vast majority of Democrats are ready to vote Yes without hesitation.

But despite the Senate being dominated by security state reps, there is one thing that stands in the way of another major cash injection to the War machine, and that is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s promise.

This promise is fortified by the fact that there are members of the Republican caucus who have vowed that they will remove him as speaker if he brings this bill to the floor. It’s worth mentioning that the margin that he works with is extremely small. You'll need about 4 or 5 members of the Republican Freedom caucus to decide they want Mike Johnson out of that job, and he will be out of that job.

As somebody who’s been paying close attention to the political mechanics in this country, I have noticed quite a few unspoken rules that exist in the snake pit, chief among them being the inevitability of the Military Industrial Complex getting what it wants. For the first time since the Trump administration, we are starting to see an exception to that rule.

$60 billion is a lot of money to be hanging in the balance for this long, and with no oversight, it could end up in a lot of pockets. Now, we suddenly have the death of Navalny, and, right on cue, we have the corporate talking heads assuring us that this is the most significant and morally reprehensible thing that's ever taken place in the history of the planet.

As you read through this New York Times article from February 13th, you can feel the sense of urgency surrounding this bill.

Isn’t it crazy how desperate they get in Washington when they really want to pass something? How they scramble to get it passed? Have you ever seen lawmakers get this jazzed for a bill that would actually improve the lives of American citizens?

Here’s some sobering reality to consider for those of us who try to surmise what’s going on behind the scenes:

We just saw Western leaders and Kamala Harris meeting in Munich for the Munich Security Conference. As you might have guessed, there’s a sense of panic that the Americans might not be able to shell out $60 billion to Ukraine.

This comes as Russia has just obtained its most significant victory in months by taking the city of Avdiivka, a city that has great strategic value in being able to cut off Ukrainian supply lines. It's certainly the biggest change in the frontline that's happened in the last half-year or more.

You might recall the MSM’s desperate attempt to frame the war as a stalemate, but this recent victory has completely destroyed that narrative. They’ve clearly been tasked to keep alive the idea that Ukraine could actually win somehow, a charade that must be getting increasingly difficult to maintain as this war drags on.

Last week, regarding the Munich Security Council, Politico wrote:

Attendees of the Munich Security Conference were worried about Ukraine’s prospects against Russia and American commitment to Kyiv.

Four American senators recounted a story Ukrainian officials told them at the Munich Security Conference: A soldier in a muddy trench with Russian artillery exploding nearby, scrolling on his phone for signs the U.S. House would approve military aid. (Politico, February 18, 2024)

It’s so Hollywoodesque, you can almost picture Timothée Chalamet cast as a downtrodden Ukrainian soldier, weeping as he scrolls through headlines in a muddy trench, hoping for that critical $60 billion that will most assuredly tip the scales in Ukraine’s favor this time.

This kind of imagery is classic war propaganda; it’s nauseating to the senses when you start to see the psychological manipulation for what it is.

The article goes on:

Many politicians and officials used the moment to press that Ukraine would lose the war without the $60 billion more in U.S. military aid currently awaiting a vote in the House[…]

Ukraine is low on ammunition and infantry. The decade-long stronghold of Avdiivka fell to the Russians over the weekend, giving the Kremlin its first major conquest since May. Before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy changed leadership at the top of his country’s military, generals insisted the president had to mobilize 500,000 more troops to keep pace with a larger, still-stronger Russian force that appears willing to take massive casualties to gain just a few yards of ground. (Politico, February 18, 2024)

All of us here at Badlands, and many others in the decentralized media space, were dissidents from the start regarding this War. There was little wisdom in the idea that Ukraine could somehow beat back a Superpower so long as the U.S. poured an endless stream of Taxpayer dollars into the country.

Russia dwarfs Ukraine in every way, it can afford to send willing men to go fight on the frontlines all day while Ukraine, a nation where a good portion of the country is still sympathetic to Russia, is forced to drag 45 and 50-year-olds off buses and is even drafting people with chronic conditions to fight.

There is no path to victory for Ukraine, and we can only surmise that—for the Western establishment or Deep State—Ukrainian Victory was never the priority.

There's no way Ukraine can win this war, no matter how much the United States spends to fuel this war. It's just not possible, and it doesn’t take some great military mind to see that. At this point, it's gotten increasingly visible that Russia is able to produce far more military equipment and artillery shells than all of NATO combined, leaving Ukraine at a huge artillery disadvantage.

We spent somewhere in the ballpark of $120 billion, the Europeans have spent additional tens of billions of dollars, and yet Russia occupies 20% of Ukraine, and the chance is high that Russia will continue to occupy more and more of Ukraine as time goes on.

The security state isn’t operated by imbeciles; it’s not as if they can’t see this for what it is. So the real question is, if Ukraine cannot win, then where is this money going, and what is its real purpose? 

A Most Convenient Death

Just when the optics regarding Ukraine had reached their absolute lowest point, Alexei Navalny dies in a Russian prison. All news, global and domestic, must now take a backseat to the ceaseless hagiography and canonization of the great hero Navalny.

Honoring the dead is one thing, but this has gone far beyond simply paying respects.

As per AP last week:

Navalny’s death shows Putin’s “complete ruthlessness and disdain … for both Western and international opinion,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus and senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Russia announced Navalny’s death on Friday, just as Western leaders gathered at a security conference in Munich. (AP, February 17, 2024)

Isn’t the timing interesting?

Just after Tucker Carlson provided a platform for Putin to articulate his position to Western audiences for the first time, he decides to have his Western-backed political rival executed in prison—a move that would completely ruin any positive optics he may have gained from that interview.

It makes just about as much sense as the idea that Russia blew up its own pipeline.

Alexei Navalny is often cast as Putin’s primary competition, but it’s not as if he had a significant percentage of the country behind him, as his approval at its height barely cracked the double digits. Additionally, he’s been incarcerated for almost three years, in a prison near the Arctic, completely out of sight and out of mind. He posed zero threat to Putin in that state. Not to mention, Putin is currently enjoying a rally-'round-the-flag moment.

Statista 2024

His approval rating in Russia is extremely high, so why would a man as calculating and cautious as Vladimir Putin make the totally unhinged decision to execute a man who poses him no real threat?

He’d have had to do so knowing this would fuel the Western propagandist’s ‘mad dog’ narrative, and would put more pressure on Congress to authorize the aid and thereby make the special military operation in Ukraine more difficult, and ensure more Russian lives would be lost in the process.

When one considers all of these implications, the only logical assumption is that ‘Putin and his thugs’ probably did not choose to murder Alexei Navalny. While it’s my own conjecture, I think it’s far more likely that the Western security state had him killed, and that this media blitz was planned.

Another selection from the AP article:

Putin is “throwing down a gauntlet to the West,” Gould-Davies said. “As we come up to the second anniversary of the (Ukraine) war, he is again testing Western resolve.”

Navalny’s death should serve as a “wake-up call” to U.S. Republicans opposing aid for Ukraine in Congress and also encourage European NATO allies to bolster their assistance to Ukraine, Gould-Davies said. (AP, February 17, 2024)

Again, for the sake of argument, let’s continue to assume the western narrative is correct, and that Putin did indeed have Navalny iced; why is he receiving such an unmerited amount of media attention?

If only the Media and the Biden administration would have cared half as much about the death of an actual American citizen in a Ukrainian prison that happened just this last month. I’m referring to the tragic death of Gonzalo Lira.

I suppose that so long as it’s countries that are friendly to the Western establishment, it shouldn’t really matter when they kill prisoners, kind of like how another of our allies murdered an American teenager in the west bank last month.

Or what about Julian Assange, who the U.S. government has been trying to extradite and presumably kill or stuff away in a supermax prison for the rest of his life? I guess these instances are not as important, as they don’t serve to feed the voracious appetite of the perpetual warfare machine.

The only reason you know who Navalny is is because the West has been deifying him since well before his death. As we showed you before, he is not some cultural giant in Russia. Like all of the various Western-installed leaders of the world, he gets a solid PR campaign in the corporate media, and is depicted as a paragon of morality.

But even with the briefest look into the life and political stylings of Alexei Navalny, you can easily see that this is a man who would be canceled in the U.S. were he not being propped up for some reason as the Western establishment’s answer to Putin.

In the past, Navalny has expressed what could be seen as “xenophobic remarks,” and I’m not talking about a statement being taken out of context—he literally referred to immigrants as “cockroaches” that should be “exterminated.”

That’s not all. Here we have an excerpt from a recent Yahoo News article:

…as Western politicians pay their respects, some more uncomfortable aspects of Navalny's career have been brought back to the surface.

"Navalny took part in the Russian March, an annual demonstration that draws ultranationalists, including some who adopt swastika-like symbols," Rahman tweeted.

"He has never apologized for his earliest xenophobic videos or his decision to attend the Russian March.

Rahman appeared to be referring to a notorious video from 2007 in which Navalny appears to compare Muslim immigrants in Russia to "cockroaches" as he advocated for gun ownership. In another video, he is dressed as a dentist and appears to compare migrants in Moscow to tooth cavities, Radio Free Europe reports. He says: "I recommend full sanitisation. Everything in our way should be carefully but decisively be removed through deportation."

Shortly before releasing both clips, Navalny was expelled by the liberal Yabloko party over his "nationalist activities", having participated in the Russian March, an annual rally associated with ultra-nationalist far-right groups chanting slogans such as "Russia for ethnic Russians". (Yahoo News UK, February 18, 2024)

 

 And this is the very same man that liberal pundits in the corporate media are fawning over daily.

If you couldn’t tell, hypocrisy abounds when it comes to this narrative. The most glaring hypocrisy of them all though, is how despotic it is that Putin had his political opponent imprisoned. But wait, doesn’t that sound kind of familiar? Isn't the current government in Washington trying forcibly remove it’s primary opposition from the ballot and attempting to imprison him at the same time?

The difference is that Donald Trump is winning every opinion poll in the country—contrarily, Navalny had barely anyone behind him.

As per Reuters back in 2018:

Opinion polls put Navalny's support at less than 2 percent and many Russians, who still get much of their news from state TV, say they do not know who he is.

There’s no smoking gun evidence suggesting that the U.S. security state had Navalny whacked, as tempting as that is for me to believe. Similarly, there’s no smoking gun evidence that Putin had him killed either, though Joe Biden, a world leader (or so we’re told,) is recklessly running with that conjecture as if it were fact, and will likely face no consequences on account of being a withered old grandpa with no brains.

No matter how you slice it, it’s a pretty convenient death. The war of stories continues.

Source: Badlands Media