Weekly Mind Dump: Dissidents Like Navalny Are Martyrs for Freedom
And - Today's GOP finishes Charles Lindbergh's job.
Week of 2/4/24-2/10/24:
Navalny
Alexei Navalny’s death this week hit like a gut punch to all freedom-loving people. Only 47 years old, he stood apart from most other political dissidents with his trademark charm, irrepressible humor and radiant humanity. The Oscar-winning 2022 documentary on him bore these out. Seeing the joie de vivre of his beautiful family juxtaposed with his fearlessness was riveting. I recall shouting at the TV screen, “Don’t go back, Alexei! They’ll kill you. Remain with your wife and kids!” He, like Boris Nemtsov and so many others, are martyrs for freedom. Vladimir Putin adds another notch in his murder belt. I draw from an article I wrote for the Washington Monthly a few years ago describing some dissidents I’ve known through the years:
Few Americans fully appreciate the freedoms provided to us in our Constitution. Basking in them for 246 years, we tend to take them for granted. Having served the United States in countries where people are deprived of basic rights, I came to have a profound respect for the Founding Fathers and the pains they took to protect us from tyrants. But for the first time in our history, we have a would-be autocrat who, having lost the presidency, is hell-bent on returning to the White House to complete his stated mission of vengeance and retribution, and sidle up to Navalny’s killer, Vladimir Putin.
Throughout history, dissidents have notoriously gotten themselves into trouble for their ideas: Socrates was forced to kill himself by drinking poison for the crime of “impiety”; my namesake, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake for having the temerity to say, among other things, that the earth revolved around the sun; the British Crown convicted in absentia the great English-American firebrand, Thomas Paine, for “seditious libel”; Hannah Arendt, author of The Banality of Evil, managed to escape Nazi Germany by the skin of her teeth and resettle in the United States; and the Soviet Union expelled Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 for exposing the vast gulag forced labor camp system.
In more than two decades as a U.S. diplomat, I served in communist-ruled Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, and Cambodia, promoting human rights and basic freedoms, including that of expression. Part of that work included meeting with political dissidents, who often put themselves at great risk by talking with an American official. I helped resettle several Cuban dissidents in the U.S., and was later denounced by the Castro regime as a “Yankee ex-intelligence officer” who helped “carry out subversive actions against the Cuban government” for publishing a novel highly critical of that regime.
But my favorite Vietnamese dissident was the writer Duong Thu Huong. At our first get-together — over lunch in Hanoi — I asked her how she dealt with communist officials harassing her. With a twinkle in her eye, and without hesitation, she said: “I spit in their face!”
The groundbreaking Russian investigative journalist Artyom Borovik was intensely critical of Vladimir Putin. I’d occasionally meet him to pick his brain on Moscow’s role in Afghanistan. His “Top Secret” TV program exposed the corruption of Russia’s political and economic elite — earning him many enemies. Borovik quoted Putin in a 2000 article saying, “There are three ways to influence people: blackmail, vodka, and the threat to kill.” Days later, he died in a still-unsolved Moscow plane accident. He was one of many Putin critics who have randomly turned up dead. He was 39.
I found it a privilege being acquainted with these very courageous people, men and women who stood up against tyranny and authoritarianism — and who often paid a heavy price. Some were denied employment, others were harassed and imprisoned. Some lost their lives. These defenders of freedom deserve our unmitigated admiration and respect, not to mention our support.
Here at home, we Americans must stand up to the ongoing assaults on our democracy and fundamental freedoms. Each person can find their own way to do so, but they have to do it — for all of our sakes, even if it means making some fierce enemies along the way. As Winston Churchill reputedly said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” Alexei Navalny understood this and paid the full measure for his beliefs.
Mike Johnson & the GOP Pick Up Where Charles Lindbergh Left Off
“The doctrine that we must enter the wars of Europe in order to defend America will be fatal to our nation if we follow it,” declared Charles Lindbergh in 1941. The America First booster argued vociferously against sending military assistance to Britain as it stood alone against the Third Reich — until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor weeks later suddenly settled America’s role in World War II.
Americans have embraced isolationism for extended periods ever since George Washington admonished that the United States should have “as little political connection as possible” with foreign nations. America’s post-war active engagement with the world, as chief defender of democracy and opponent of aggression, went unchallenged domestically until Donald Trump became president. He resurrected the “America First” label and then proceeded to insult our allies and embrace tyrants. And he holds a special grudge against Ukraine’s president for refusing to succumb to his mafia-like effort to extort him, which led to his first impeachment.
Had Joe Biden not won the 2020 election, Ukraine would again be a Russian satrapy. Indeed, having devoured Ukraine, Vladimir Putin would have had his sights next on the Baltic States and beyond.
House Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to allow voting on a bill that includes $60.1 billion in much-needed aid for beleaguered Ukraine. Johnson, a Trump acolyte and architect of the former president’s Big Lie effort to overturn the 2020 election, has consistently voted against any aid to Ukraine. The puppet strings from Johnson’s shoulders to Trump’s tiny hands are very visible. The irony, of course, is the GOP traditionally was a stalwart defender of national security and our overseas friends and allies. Now known as the Party of Putin, Republicans shamelessly do the Russian dictator’s bidding.
It appears MAGA-messaging on Ukraine may be having an effect.
A new Pew Research poll finds that 74 percent of Americans believe that the war in Ukraine is important to U.S. national interests with 43 percent saying that the war is “very important.” Among Democrats, 81 percent believe that Russia’s war against Ukraine is important to America’s interests, whereas only 69 percent of Republicans feel that way. However, when asked about backing up their support for Ukraine with hard cash, a Ukraine Freedom Project poll of Republican voters shows that only 36 percent favor spending more money on Ukraine and only 16 percent strongly favor spending the money. Taken as a whole, in other words, a mixed picture.
Today’s Republican Party encompasses the isolationism, xenophobia and disloyalty to American principles as previously pushed by Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement. Just as the pre-World War II America Firsters were perfectly content to let Hitler swallow Europe, today’s heirs to that movement appear to have little problem with letting Putin do the same. After all, Trump just said he would let the Russians “do whatever the hell they want.”
What would Alexei Navalny tell them?
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
I knew another Russian dissident journalist. She and her husband were poisoned and died in Moscow at a much too young age prior to 2014.
When did you serve in Moscow?