Originally published on February 14 at Notes from the Underground.
The Russian regime has finally extinguished the life of Alexei Navalny. Navalny was being held in a remote labour camp and, according to the prison authorities earlier today, died while taking a walk — like you do.
Eight days earlier Tucker Carlson that former hero of Fox News (only fired last April, we might note) aired the two hour interview that he had managed to procure with Vladimir Putin. It was an interview Carlson claimed no other Western journalist had “bothered” to ask for, implying that they just weren’t as BRAVE and FREETHINKING as him. In fact such an interview had been sought dozens of times but with Putin access is a seller’s market, not a buyer’s. Putin chooses the interviewer and he chose Tucker. And we know why.
In that two hours Carlson did not press Putin on much at all, but certainly not on the treatment of Russian dissidents like Navalny. And here let’s remind ourselves of the recent history of Alexei Navalny. In August 2020 while in Russia Navalny was poisoned with Novichok (according to the German authorities whose doctors treated him in Germany) but elected to return to Russia. That was courage almost beyond comprehension.
Navalny had been physically attacked before, but this was the most serious attempt on his life. In January 2022 he was designated by the Russian courts as a “terrorist”. From then on he was variously tried and sentenced for various trumped up crimes, moved up through the hierarchy of ever more remote and violent penal institutions and often held in solitary confinement. Last December, without notification to his family or legal team, he was transferred to the IK-3 “Polar Wolf” camp near the town of Kharp. Look it up on the map. It stands on the river Sob, as well it might.
Putin sometimes takes a while to kill his opponents, as Yevgeny Prigozhin discovered in August last year, two months after leading his abortive march on Moscow.
So why murder Navalny now? Is it possible Putin took from Carlson’s total lack of interest in Russian dissidents that such awkward folk as Navalny no longer rated even a thought among conservative opinion formers in the West? Maybe. For sure Carlson did nothing whatsoever to help save Navalny and others like him. Indeed within days of the interview he was filmed prancing around a central Moscow supermarket comparing Putin’s capital favourably with the cities in the US. “Coming to a Russian grocery store, the heart of evil,” Carlson said, “And seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalise you against our leaders. That’s how I feel, anyway—radicalised.”
And of course, rather than finding himself banged up in an Alaskan penitentiary as a result of his “radicalisation” the returning Carlson will hope instead to have monetised his treachery. Because that’s what it is.
Back in Washington Trump ally and Republican bigwig Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green (she of the Jewish space lasers), when told that Britain’s foreign secretary Lord Cameron was pleading for Congress to pass an aid package for Ukraine commented that “he can kiss my ass”.
It is something to be wondered at that Carlson and Greene portray themselves as brave dissidents in the cause of freedom when in fact they sacrifice nothing, but through their actions effectively encourage the persecution and murder of truly courageous men and women in Russia and Ukraine.
In this context, though it doesn’t really matter what these has-beens think, it is instructive to recall recent support for Donald Trump from both Jacob Rees Mogg and the self-styled Hero of Kyiv, Boris Johnson.
One US report of the Carlson-Putin interview recounted how:
…it seems Carlson was moved by his experience, too. His interview, which included a question about the supernatural, ended with Putin talking about souls. Both men fell silent for several seconds, before Russia’s leader broke the spell. “Shall we end here?” Carlson blinked. “Thank you, Mr President.”
Souls? What souls? Souls, no. Arseholes? Definitely.