The Hero Haunted World

I do not understand. Perhaps, I never will. Does anyone?

As Russia kills innocents in Ukraine and dissidents within its own borders, a former American president refuses to criticize the murderous dictator. Maybe, it’s because he idolizes the brutality and wants some of his own to deploy for political purposes on American soil. In the U.S. House, there is a refusal to provide military resources to save Ukraine from Russia’s expanding totalitarianism while the American government has already armed Israel’s attack on Gaza to the point the wider world has begun to view it as the facilitation of a genocide. Israel, however, refuses to be chastened even by the humanitarian concerns only recently expressed by its most significant benefactor, U.S. taxpayers. Meanwhile, the U.S., once the moral and democratic guidepost for other nations, wants to sanction South Africa for calling out genocide in Gaza. The contradictions and hypocrisies can hardly be catalogued or annotated.

Who can keep up?

But Russia’s Putin may have hastened his own demise with his murder of opposition leader Alexi Navalny. Political movements often crystalize with the acquisition of a martyr. Navalny, even after being imprisoned in a six-by-seven foot cell after an attempted poisoning, never relented in his fight against Putin’s control. He may have been sent to a prison north of the Arctic Circle, beaten and poisoned until he died, but his words and aspirations for his country have been amplified in death. Russia cannot incarcerate all the citizens who will begin to gather in the streets and demand democracy and freedom, unless the entire nation is turned into a gulag. Deposing Putin seems more of a possibility for the Russian people today than while Navalny was drawing breath, and his wife, fearlessly, has taken up his cause and his message.

Putin will not stop killing his detractors and opponents, however, until he is out of power or out of breath. The threat of a nuclear event will also not be eliminated while he controls Russia’s military and is able to continue selling oil to India and China. Sanctions are not reducing his oppressions, and in this country, a former president sees himself as a Navalny-like hero instead of the Putinesque villain. He wants authoritarian rule like Putin but to be lionized as if he were principled like Navalny. How does that work? Putin has found creative ways to get his political opponents to jump out of high rise buildings or fly in planes that point at the ground and the political right in the U.S. still aligns itself with the murderous machinations. A former American network TV host flies to Moscow and praises the dictator in an interview that amounts to a kind of journalistic fellatio, which encourages American MAGATs to see in Putin a powerful and decisive leader. The saner political world wonders how much more time is left on Putin’s clock before there is another Russian revolution.

While American politicians praise the defiance of Navalny and his courage of speaking truth to power, our judicial and political systems continue to push for the extradition and prosecution of Julian Assange, who shared a truth that American power did not want made public. The Wikileaks founder distributed 2007 videos of U.S. helicopter pilots gunning down two journalists and Iraqis in the streets. The total dead was eighteen civilians, which included two Reuters reporters and two children. The Apache helicopter pilots mistook shouldered video cameras for handheld RPG launchers, but also later laughed at the killings they had committed. Gunships had reportedly been dispatched to the area because U.S. soldiers had been dealing with small arms fire in that location earlier in the day. Assange and Wikileaks released a 39 minute video (below) showing the attack, which prompted global outrage.

Assange, who is considered by many publishers and reporters to be a hero for committing an act of journalism, is, instead, facing extradition from the UK to the U.S. and likely prosecution that could put him in prison for 170 years. The U.S. is in court in London pressing for Assange to be extradited to face numerous charges in America. We do not necessarily honor people in America who risk much to reveal the truth. Rather, we prosecute them because it risks revealing the horrors and the lies of our geo-political ambitions. Assange received the videos, and more than 750,000 classified and unclassified but sensitive documents, from Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army soldier who was convicted under the Espionage Act. Manning spent seven years in prison until her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama. Assange, meanwhile, held out with diplomatic immunity in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London while the CIA plotted to have him kidnapped or killed.

There is a tradition of American citizens releasing information of value to the public when it will inform them of the actions of their government that might be improper. There is also a tradition of prosecuting those citizens, emotionally and legally, whether it is Edward Snowden, who defected to Russia after revealing global surveillance operations by the CIA and NSA, or it’s Reality Winner, a U.S. Air Force veteran who released classified information to journalists about Russian hacking of the 2016 presidential election. She received the longest prison sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media, which would have little reason to suspect Russian meddling in U.S. elections without Winner’s actions. There is also, of course, Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1973 was charged under the Espionage Act for releasing the Pentagon Papers, an extensive analysis by the Department of Defense on flawed U.S. decision-making policies regarding the War in Vietnam. He was facing 115 years in prison until his prosecutors and investigators bungled evidence collection and all changes had to be dropped, even though the New York Times and Washington Post had published his massive report, which hastened the end of our Southeast Asian tragedy.

There ought to be no difficulty in deciding what kind of actions or character comprise heroism. They are definitely not contained in spray-tanned conmen who compare themselves and their 91 indictments to the heroic resistance of Alexi Navalny to the Russian killer of humans and facts. Heroes are not American politicians who decry the murder of Navalny for confronting Putin with facts while denouncing the release of information by Assange, who saw wrongs in how the U.S. was prosecuting the Iraq War, an invasion and occupation based upon a demonstrably false claim of weapons of mass destruction. Governments must, of necessity, keep some secrets to maintain advantage over adversaries and control threats to sovereignty but that hidden information ought not be protected when it hides facts that deceive citizens and their rights to know what their government is doing and why.

American history is replete, though, with the elimination and assassination of inspiring leaders who were taking the country in an informed direction toward equality of opportunity. Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy, exactly a century apart, had messages the nation wanted but other interests did not, whether it was JFK’s peace efforts to end the Cold War or Lincoln’s to reunite a nation and free people from slavery. Our own CIA was likely culpable in JFK’s death, and, according to the family of Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader was assassinated by the FBI, which had been listening to his plans with endless wiretaps. Bobby Kennedy’s death ended any hope of finding the truth about his brother’s murder in Dallas but there were other inspiring American figures who were wronged for confronting wrongs. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and lost years of earnings and competing because he resisted the draft and the War in Vietnam, and now we are engaged in funding a genocide in Gaza by Israel even as we proclaim our outrage of Putin’s assault on Ukraine.

It’s a sad country that has no heroes, and an even sadder one that needs them.