I’ll tell you straight away what I’m up to in this column. I’m trying to persuade you that Vladimir Putin is not worthy of your support, and that Alexei Navalny is a hero for our time. We should point to him in every elementary and high school class, and in every Sunday School, and say “That is someone you should emulate, an honest-to-goodness role model.”
Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, Navalny stood with almost superhuman courage against a bloodthirsty dictator. He spoke truth to power. Against all odds and like John the Baptist denouncing the evil Herod to his face, Navalny — for the sake of democracy — stared down the Herod of Russia, Vladimir Putin.
“I’m on the very blackest of the black list,” he once said, fully aware that Putin had attempted, was attempting, and would eventually succeed at snuffing out his life. Still, he also said, “I’m not afraid and these 15 days convinced me there is nothing to fear. Let them be afraid instead.”
In the 2022 Oscar-winning documentary “Navalny,” the Russian opposition leader sent a message to the Russian people in the event that he would be killed: “You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.”
What seemed to be inevitable finally happened last Friday, Feb. 16. The Russian “Federal Penitentiary Service” reported that Navalny had collapsed after “taking a walk” in the arctic air of his Gulag prison. “All necessary resuscitation measures,” so the report stated, “were carried out but did not yield positive results.”
That report smells of that characteristic Soviet word salad of euphemisms and Orwellian newspeak. It cannot be believed, except by the gullible and those who long for Putin’s approval. There were many of those in the horrible years of Stalin. There are many now.
There are even some Americans in this rogues’ gallery. On the same day that Navalny was put to death, one American media personality was busy touring a grocery store in Moscow and reporting that “Russia has better things than America,” neglecting to add that the grocery was a French company, and that the average Russian income is one ninth of the average American. The whole scene was reminiscent of Jane Fonda visiting and gushing about North Vietnam in 1972.
Just days before Navalny’s murder, a U.S. senator applauded Putin for being “at the top of his game,” and also said that America “forced” Russia to invade Ukraine. Somehow, a man so ignorant of history and history’s lessons (like “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”) made it all the way to the U.S. Capital.
It is hard to believe that there could be any support for Putin in America. I grew up in an Evangelical, very conservative Republican household, and the words “authoritarian,” “dictator,” and “soviet” were synonymous with the antichrist. Fifty years ago, it was unimaginable that any American would sympathize with strong men who opposed Western democracies, invaded neighboring countries and committed barbarous atrocities. Even though my father and grandfather bemoaned liberal secular changes in America, they would never have tolerated any suggestion of an authoritarian regime, no matter how “Christian” it purported to be.
There’s been so much partisan fog in the last 10 years that Putin’s immorality has been obscured. A comparison and contrast of Putin with Navalny might be illuminating.
Putin lives in a $1 billion mansion on an estate 39 times larger than Monaco. Navalny spent most of the last years of his life in Putin’s gulag, often in solitary confinement at a “special regime” colony known as “Polar Wolf,” north of the Arctic Circle.
Putin travels in an armored train (like his fanboy Kim John Un). Navalny was poisoned with Novichok nerve agent on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow.
Putin has been married and is divorced, and has fathered five children with his wife and two mistresses. Navalny had one wife, now a widow, with a son and a daughter (who is now a student at Stanford).
Putin has invaded his neighbors Georgia and Ukraine for the sake of trying to restore the old Soviet empire (which he calls “Russkiy Mir,” much like Hitler’s Third Reich). Navalny denounced Putin’s expansionist agenda as wicked and disastrous for Russia.
Alexei Navalny was and is an Orthodox Christian (like me). Putin claims to be Orthodox, and is applauded as one by his partner-in-crime Kyrill of the Moscow Patriarchate, but his former adviser Sergei Pugachev rejects the sincerity of his faith. I’m with Pugachev: a man who has sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Russian young men as cannon fodder on the front lines, and has butchered a like number of Ukrainian men, women, and children simply cannot be Christian by definition. If he wants to be an Orthodox Christian, he should repent and voluntarily surrender himself to life in prison.
In our own history in America, we’ve dealt with characters like Putin. Over 250 years ago, our founding fathers wrote repeatedly that when power is acquired by force rather than by consent, it is used to enhance a tyrant’s glory and influence.
The people of Putin's nation and surrounding nations suffer deeply. Unconstrained monopolists of power become monsters, and their world becomes a slaughterhouse, a desert. Such a tyrant must be opposed, because let alone, he will never stop. “Submission to tyranny,” the Rev. Andrew Eliot wrote in 1765, “is a crime.”
For the founding fathers, that tyrant was King George III. Today, it is Vladimir Putin. Submission to him, sympathy for this murderous tyrant, is just as criminal.
Aid to Ukraine must be released, and immediately. Call your politicians and tell them so, because Putin will not stop. Switch off Putin’s American sycophants. As Navalny told his fellow Russians, he told us all: “You’re not allowed to give up.”
Most Popular
Comments / 0