NAVALNY'S ASSASSINATION FOLLOWS WELL ESTABLISHED PATTERN

Seventeen years after he began his anti corruption, anti Putin campaign in Russia, Alexei Navalny was murdered on February 16 in the "Polar Wolf" penal colony in Kharp, about 1200 miles north east of Moscow. Those who revile the dictator ultimately responsible for this crass assassination used social media and political commentary to utter their venom about this, not entirely unexpected, turn of events. For those who revere the Russian dictator, silence has been deadly. A photograph depicting Navalny on a protest poster asked succinctly: "Who is next?" It is quite clear that Vladimir Putin is no longer concerned about keeping lethal pursuit of his critics and political opponents under wraps. This was already apparent when, in 2020, during a flight from Siberia to Moscow, Navalny collapsed after being poisoned with the nerve agent novichok. The entire world watched. Navalny's longevity in Russian detention centers may well have benefited from his strategic use of public media. Many others were not so fortunate. Putin's blatant, consistent and, to some extend traditional approach to silencing his critics profited from his career in the KGB (currently FSB). His rank of Lieutenant Colonel provided access to a cadre of professional assassins, and he made use of them. Some of his lethal targets included: Alexander Litvinenko - a former Russian spy who defected and became a prominent Putin critic. He was poisoned with Polonium 210 and killed in London. Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin. Human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Barburova were assassinated. Pavel Antov, a Russian tycoon, fell from a hotel window in Rayagada, India. Yevgeny Prigozhin, mercenary leader of the Wagner group and failed coup leader, was killed in a plane crash. Mikhail Lesin and Dan Rapoport were both killed in Washington D.C.. And the list goes on. Putin prides himself on being the second longest serving leader of his country since Joseph Stalin. He has no qualms about using political assassination as a means of silencing his critics. His approach is considerably more subtle than that used by Stalin, who openly executed 750,000 during a two year period in the mid thirties and sent a million more to the Gulags. However, he is still effective. His political apologists in the U.S. seem to care less. After all, San Francisco is 6,000 miles away from Moscow. Political assassinations have been part of social reality since the emergence of communal social frameworks, as the leaders of tribes, villages and other types of communities constantly needed to defend their privileged status. The Egyptian pharaoh Teti during the 23rd century BCE, is thought to be the earliest known victim of assassination. During the Roman Empire, which lasted about 1,000 years, 37 known emperors - including Caligula, Claudius and Julius Caesar, were assassinated. During the Middle Ages several European monarchs and other leading figures were killed during religious wars or by religious opponents. We are obviously also not immune to this method of eliminating political adversaries. After the Civil War a wave of political violence swept the nation. Between 1865 and 1877, 34 political officials were attacked, 24 fatally. All in all, nine of our presidents have been targets of assassination attempts, along with one president-elect and three presidential candidates. Although the CIA has steadfastly denied that neither its personnel nor their directly controlled foreign agents, personally killed any foreign leader, it is undeniable that the agency featured prominently in deposing a string of political leaders outside of our borders. Some of the most notorious of the CIA's operations intended to eliminate foreign leaders included attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. During that ultimately failed operation operatives became very imaginative , using exploding cigars and a poison-lined scuba diving suit. Other attempted, but not executed plots, involved Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Congo, who was later assassinated by Belgian partisans, President Sukarno of Indonesia, Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. After a Senate investigation, President Gerald Ford, in 1976, signed an Executive Order banning political assassinations. Subsequently, the CIA redefined their efforts by coining assassination as "murder for religious, ideological, political or emotional gain," prohibited under U.S. law. International assassination attempts were hence identified as "targeted killings - intentional killing by a government or its agents of a combatant who is not in custody, either out of self defense or because the target is a combatant in armed conflict." Our currently preferred method of execution is with the use of drones. Estimates are that we have killed hundreds, if not thousands of militants in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Libya. Exact numbers are difficult to come by. However, the method is not always precise and many non-combatants need to be counted among those killed by these modern weapons. So yes, Putin is an unprincipled killer. His termination of political opponents speak to our sense of civility. During a different century he might have gotten away with it without anyone noticing. Today, social media, even in Russia, will keep his feet to the fire. Somehow, however, we are more confident calling out individual situations. Navalny's murder is a focal event, much easier to concentrate on than the 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers that were killed and the 90,000 Russian soldiers he sent to their deaths, for which he is solely responsible. We tend to turn a blind eye to mass killings. Too many for us to consider, or have we become numb to these statistics? Sadly, there are those among us, elected or not, who apologize for this wannabe czar. By doing so, they are complicit. They should be held accountable. Theo Wierdsma