Death of Aleksei Navalny: the Brits did it!
It is remarkable how an invitation to do a live television interview can change your schedule and concentrate your mind.
This afternoon I got a WhatsApp message from TRT, Turkey’s premier English language international broadcaster with whom I had done several interviews a year ago, followed by many months of silence. That is not unusual. Broadcasters rotate experts in and rotate experts out at their pleasure.
The invitation today was to speak about breaking news, the reported death in a remote Yamalo-Nenets prison colony of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny at age 47. A glance at the latest online edition of The Financial Times confirmed that Navalny had indeed died and set out the comments of leading Western statesmen condemning what they considered to be the latest murder by Vladimir Putin of prominent activists who oppose his rule. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, European Council President Charles Michel and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were among those who already had spoken before microphones and were reading from the same anti-Putin script.
In short, what happened in the West this afternoon was a new campaign to vilify Vladimir Putin on the world stage based on a death which was, if I may quote former British PM Theresa May, ‘highly likely’ to have been perpetrated by British Intelligence for this very purpose.
In all of the false flag operations that have been directed by the West against Russia over the past decade or more, I have argued that the old Roman investigative principle of cui bono militated against the Kremlin having been involved in any way. So it is today: why would Putin want to murder Navalny, when the man is now largely forgotten within Russia. Navalny is yesterday’s news and his ‘anti-corruption’ campaign is irrelevant to Russians in the midst of an existential struggle with the Collective West that is being fought on the territory of Ukraine? However, the murder of Navalny clearly serves the interests of that same Collective West as an intended antidote to the major Soft Power coup of the Carlson Tucker interview with Vladimir Putin just a week ago and perhaps even more important, to the follow-up Tucker News Briefs showing his visits to the Kievskaya Metro Station and to an Auchan supermarket in downtown Moscow. This was not Gilbert Doctorow publishing his travel notes of visits to St Petersburg markets and reaching 10,000 readers; it was Tucker Carlson, with a regular U.S. audience of 40 million or more for his every broadcast, and a peak of one billion views for the recent interview.
Let us go beyond the cui bono argumentation to circumstantial evidence that is damning for the Brits. As the Americans like to say, there are ‘fingerprints’ of the Brits all over this death of Navalny.
A fair number of the poisonings and other assorted deaths of people who could be said were ‘inconvenient’ to the Kremlin happened in the U.K., after all. That is where Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch who opposed Putin tooth and nail, was ‘suicided’ and it occurred in 2013 at his London estate when it was widely rumored he was looking for forgiveness for his treachery and was preparing to return to Mother Russia with a trove of documents. Earlier still, the U.K. is where the Berezovsky employee Alexander Litvinenko met his death in 2006 from polonium poisoning in a very British cuppa tea.
However, more recently there were incidents in the U.K. which bear directly on the fate of Navalny, and their timing is very relevant. I am thinking about the Novichok poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Skripal in Salisbury at the start of March 2018, ahead of the 18 March presidential elections in Russia that year, when Putin was seeking a further term in office.
Hmm. A terrible attack on a Putin enemy in 2018 just weeks before a Russian presidential election. Hmm, again: the date of Putin’s next election happens to be 15-17 March.
The Skripal poisoning was shouted to the skies by the British political establishment. Can you just imagine, they said, that Putin is carrying out revenge murders on British soil! Of course, today, everyone has forgotten about the Skripals, who seem somehow to have survived the Novichok attack which is always fatal and to have been given new identities if they were not simply dumped by MI6 into shallow graves somewhere.
But the Novichok that the Russians were said to have invented also was in production in a chemical weapons facility located not far from Salisbury. Another detail that Western media chose to ignore.
Novichok just happens to be the poison that was allegedly used against Aleksei Navalny back in August 2020 while he was on the stump in provincial Russia working up the population to oppose the oligarchs and crooks who, he said, were running the country. Like the Skripals, Navalny miraculously survived his poisoning by Novichok. He was flown to Germany, where Angela Merkel extended a warm welcome to him and where, during his months long convalescence he oversaw the production by German crews of faked video exposés showing palaces on the Black Sea that were supposedly built for Putin.
Russian doctors at the prison colony were said to have spent half an hour today trying to revive Navalny, but in vain. He is just one more case of collateral damage in the British secret war on Russia
Time was, in the days of Tony Blair, we spoke of the British as the ‘lap dogs’ of Bush. Today it would be more appropriate to say that the British have become the Hound of the Baskervilles, ahead of and likely outside the control of Washington.
When the link to my interview with TRT becomes available, I will post it here.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024
“This was not Gilbert Doctorow publishing his travel notes of visits to St Petersburg markets and reaching 10,000 readers; it was Tucker Carlson, with a regular U.S. audience of 40 million or more for his every broadcast, and a peak of one billion views for the recent interview.”
Maybe so, but I’m pleased every time Gilbert Doctorow does a travelogue.
As for who dunnit, your assessment certainly jibes with John Helmer’s, which documented the very strange proceedings in a UK court regarding the skripals, whose lawyer seemed unable to say (among other things) where were they? As usual your assessments resonate.
Of course, you are a conspiracy theorist to have such a thought as your “the Brits did it!”.
It’s the standard rhetorical ploy, useful for a broad range of information management tasks. This, the world we live in; obviously. But, it’s worth noting the ploy is effective. Information Warfare, Non-Contact Warfare, and New Generation Warfare are well-reported elements of modern military strategy, thus, by direct connection, the political goals of all states. But, the duly managed citizenry seem oblivious to such modern (not so modern actually) concepts.
The rhetorical ploy is on the order of a transparent obviousness, but obviousness is relative, and certainly not so if your belief system lacks any conceivable, i.e. zero possible, disconfirmation. The guiding feature of belief, in this case, makes it barely distinct from metaphysics. Epistemological parsimony is therefore advised. Believe the absolute minimum of propositions.
There’s science that informs us that the physical world is so vastly different from what we think it is that its propositions astound our intuition, but it uses logic and mathematics and perception to construct its cosmology. And then there’s government, and associated think tankers and pundits to inform us how to think, and which, when employed to craft a convenient story of reality, blithely offends logic , and cognition, and perception. The cosmology it propounds is based on “if I say it three times, it’s true”. A world not so much a moral one, as it’s the necessary one, but becomes the only possible morality because we determine necessity. So goes the realpolitik weltanschaung.
Truth is as it is. Putin puppet, Russian apologist, anti-Semite, denier etc. It’s good stuff! And, it’s obviously true, right? We said so.
There’s an epic poem yet to be written about these days of blind belief, of real human tragedy, pathos, and ignorance. Evolution is not the same as progress, it’s merely what is now, and we are a point along the arc of evolution, not the end of it. I’m not sure i believe anything, but I can’t help but think it.