The man who loved his country
Americans used to care about human rights and human rights heroes
Vladimir Putin cannot be haunted.
He belongs to the dark and remorseless school of killers whose ranks include Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Idi Amin. The scale of their crimes may vary but not the intent, and not the aptitude for cruelty and violence.
But his eventual successors in Russia will be haunted.
And totalitarian copycats of Putin, both present and future, will be haunted.
Alexei Navalny is the martyr to liberty and democracy of our time.
And he will haunt all enemies of freedom.
But, in a different sense, he should haunt the West. In two ways:
First, did we do enough to keep him alive?
I don’t think we did.
The United States got Brittney Griner, the female basketball star, out of Russia. (Marc Fogel, of Pittsburgh, is forgotten and remains).
If not release, might the West, collectively, have made Mr. Putin at least think twice about killing Navalny?
Probably not. This is what remorseless means. Putin certainly has not thought twice about his war on Ukraine and its innocents – war crimes as war strategy.
Maybe this is just who Putin is. The explanation is not geopolitical but meta-ethical – evil organized.
Navalny himself once observed that war has always worked for Russian dictators. So don’t expect Putinism to die with Putin.
We might have failed to save Navalny if we’d tried harder. But why didn’t we try harder? We did not pay much attention when they hauled him off to the Arctic Circle, though it was pretty clear what would happen.
The second way Navalny should haunt us is this: A total commitment to an ideal can cost a person his life in this world.
That ought to sober us.
His ideal was a democratic Russia – a Russia of law, free speech and free association.
In the days since his death, hundreds of Russians have been arrested for paying tribute to him in the streets.
An awfully small start, you may say.
Ah, but millions have read his writing and watched his interviews and videos and know how, and where, and by whose ultimate hand, he died.
He was not a perfect man. No man is. But what kind of a man, having been poisoned twice, goes back to Russia to face prison, torture, and death?
Tell me the right word.
Solzhenitsyn, the pre-eminent Russian dissenter of two generations ago, got out. But he had help. He had been poisoned and would have been re-imprisoned and killed. But Willy Brandt, of West Germany, offered shelter in his country. So the KGB expelled the dissident. And Stanford University, in the United States, soon thereafter offered to host him.
Those were the days of detente, when we thought we had to engage evil, not just name it, to defeat it.
And of the diplomacy of human rights – when every small fight for human dignity mattered and was our cause.
What is our cause today?
What became of human rights?
Do we even begin to understand Navalny’s bravery?
Where was the West when he was taken and tortured?
Where is it now?
Where were the protests?
Where is our outrage?
And how many of us would die for our country?
A country is land, language, tradition, but, also, ideas.
This country, more than any in the world, is based upon ideas. Few of us are indigenous.
We are bound by concepts: Due process of law; free speech and thought; the right to dissent; essential human equality with all its ramifications.
How many would risk even their political lives for these rights?
There have only been a few “profiles in courage” in recent years. Mike Pence and Rusty Bowers stood up to election theft, and paid. And, some years back, Bob Casey Sr., dared to insist that pro-life Democrats had a place in his party.
This kind of courage pales in comparison with Navalny’s, but there is precious little even of it.
Indeed, I am not sure that there is much sense of the country, or of citizenship, in the U.S. today.
The young think in terms of group identities.
But it is not only the young.
If wokism is a civil religion, the fake nationalism of the right (everywhere) is both a religion substitute and an identity.
And both yahoo nationalism and wokism are cheap: Put a “let’s go Brandon,” or a “resist,” sticker on your car, and you are good to go.
Fake conviction and fake patriotism are alike in this: No service or sacrifice is required.
Navalny had to go back. He was not a writer like Solzhenitsyn. He was a citizen. He needed to be in a public space, even if it was as small as a cell.
His life should unnerve bully boys and tyrants and shame liberal democrats, but then teach us and give us courage.
“His life should unnerve bully boys and tyrants and shame liberal democrats, but then teach us and give us courage. “. It’s not the liberal democrats who should be shamed by Navalny’s death, but the MAGAs who encouraged and pimped for Putin.
A challenge for all of us