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Good evening. It's Monday, February 19.
Tonight, by far the biggest story of the last week in the corporate media is the death of Alexei Navalny in a prison in Russia. There's no question about that. Almost every political leader in both parties and every corporate media outlet spoke of this event at great length, with extreme emotional intensity, all in agreement that it was a historic event of immense proportion and gravity, but it is worth asking why was it depicted in this way. What is it about Albany's death exactly that makes it such a momentous moment in the United States and American political and media discourse generally? It is, after all, hardly news that Russia is authoritarian and intolerant of dissent, nor is it news or uncommon for political dissent. Such events as dissidents dying in prison or being killed in gruesome ways by authoritarian governments happen with great regularity, not just in countries that are enemies of the United States, but in some of the countries to which the United States is closest, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt. When was the last time you heard any American media mention of the deaths of Egyptian dissidents or Saudi dissidents in those countries, let alone day after day after day of intense media coverage? Even more notably, actual American citizens, the citizens of our country are killed with frequency by other countries, and one would think—wouldn't one?—that the death of Americans would attract at least as much indignation and attention from our political leaders and media outlets as the death of Russian dissidents. Ukraine—the country which has received more American money than any other country by far over the last two years—twice arrested the American citizen Gonzalo Lira, explicitly for the crime of criticizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and questioning the U.S. native narrative about that war—what the Ukrainians call the crime of spreading Russian disinformation. And then, exactly as Lira predicted, what happened? He ended up dying in a Ukrainian prison of pneumonia at the age of 55. Something his father told me in an interview last week was extremely unlikely for this previously healthy, relatively young man. How much of American media indignation or political concern or anger did we hear about the death of Gonzalo Lira in a Ukrainian prison? Israel has twice killed American citizens under extremely suspicious circumstances. Last month, the IDF shot and killed the U.S. teenager, the Louisiana-born Taufik Isaac. The year before, the Israelis shot and killed the American Shireen Abu Al-Khalifa, in Gaza. First denying they did it and admitting they did it but saying it was accidental, only for an independent investigation to conclude that the killing was intentional. I'd bet anything you don't remember the names of either of those American citizens because the media attention paid to the killing of our own citizens by allied countries such as Ukraine or Israel has no political or propagandistic value and is thus basically ignored.
Then, there's the case of Julian Assange, who has been effectively imprisoned since 2012 when he received political asylum from Ecuador explicitly against U.S. persecution and has been actually in prison since 2018, in a high-security prison in the UK known as the British Guantanamo. The only reason he's imprisoned is because the U.S. government seeks to extradite him and try him on espionage charges for the crime of reporting on the secret crimes of the American government. This week, Assange will face his final attempt to convince a British court not to extradite him to the United States. While the U.S. media and political class obsess about civil liberties in Russia, they ignore—when they're not cheering it—what all civil liberties and press freedom groups agree is the gravest threat to press freedom in the West, namely, the attempt to put Assange in an American prison for life, where he will almost certainly die. We'll tell you the latest on this story, and we'll dig into the context of why this obsessive focus on Navalny has real propagandistic value.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
