Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…

… mais ceci n’est pas une pipe.

The Daily Mail accused Tucker Carlson of not issuing a statement on the death of Alexei Navalny, thus proving conclusively (although he was obliviously on a plane home at the time) that Carlson is a Putin stooge. This is the exact reason Boris Johnson gave for turning down an interview with Carlson, and not that Carlson declined to pay him £1m for the interview that Putin gave for free.

I suppose I had better avoid the same accusation by commenting, after a suitable interval and without charging a fee, on this sudden death. More particularly this piece is prompted by prayers in church last Sunday about the “killing of the Russian opposition leader,” in the same breath as praying about the lies and deception engulfing our society today. How do we know just 24 hours after the news broke, I thought, that the “killing” and even the “opposition leader” might not be part of the lies and deception?

A timeline is instructive. The death of Navalny, at age 47, was announced via the obscure website of the regional prison service. Sudden collapse whilst exercising, it said, and unsuccessful resuscitation attempts. Within just 15 minutes the BBC carried its first report blaming Vladimir Putin for the death, and literally every few minutes thereafter successive Western government leaders voiced their grief, invariably adding disgust at the murder by the dictator who wipes out all his rivals.

I doubt that national leaders routinely monitor the Siberian prison service websites, or that as soon as issuing their own condemnations they phoned up the next President on the prayer chain to share the news. It seems incontrovertible, rather, that some highly influential security service was on the case at the first announcement, immediately contacted all the NATO leaders, and that the latter dropped everything to make their instructions feelings public as their first priority. The news agencies were surprisingly quick to pick up these announcements too, almost as if rather than being a shocking and unexpected event, there was already precision machinery in place to get not only the news, but the blame, out at the earliest opportunity. Of course, I don’t find that in the least suspicious, but there are those who might, in the light of the lockstep policies of Western governments seen since COVID. “Well-drilled” springs to mind.

But was Navalny such a central opposition figure as the news suggests? He was certainly constrained in his ability to oust Putin by being in prison, but even when he was not, his following in Russia as a whole is estimated at between 2-5%. The real opposition to Putin comes from the Communist party, which consistently polls above 20% in elections. Navalny was as much about as much of a real threat to Putin as Laurence Fox and his Reclaim Party are to Rishi Sunak.

That said, unlike Fox Navalny had already tried to engineer an “Orange Revolution” in Russia, with funding and other support from the CIA, notably when he was at Yale University. This is well-documented, and together with his jumping bail on more than one occasion explains why he was jailed, although the ostensible charge was financial corruption (true charges, it seems, though admittedly selectively applied in a nation almost as corrupt as Ukraine).

Hailed as a freedom fighter in our news reports, the fact that he stood on an extreme Nationalist platform advocating the expulsion by force of all Muslim immigrants and the suppression or shooting of Russia’s Islamic minorities seems to have escaped our attention, though our media condemns Islamophobia here.

Whilst on biography, let me mention the strange “poisoning” incident that took Navalny out of Russia for treatment for what was eventually said by our media to be, like the Skripals, another surprisingly non-fatal dosing with the fashionable discontinued Soviet nerve-agent Novichok. As has been pointed out, apart from his (like the Skripals’) unique survival of nerve-gas poisoning, nobody on Navalny’s plane, or on his treatment team, either wore protective gear, or succumbed to the poison, although a poor woman in Salisbury had died months after the Skripal case simply by contact with a scent-bottle.

How coincidental that the Skripals happened to be found slumped on their park-bench by the Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, and that they were so close to the bio-weapons expertise of Porton Down, or they might have disappeared without trace… oh, they have, it seems. Navalny’s treatment was far more delayed, but was surprisingly successful for a nerve-agent that kills in minutes even in minute doses. I hate to suggest it, but perhaps the Novichok story was slightly exaggerated by our leaders?

Also interesting was the fact that the death coincided with the cybersecurity summit in Munich, which for reasons not altogether clear was attended by Navalny’s wife. That (completely fortuitously) put her in the position of being able to publicise her condemnation of Putin, her demands for the return of the body, and to be declared the heir to Russia’s Official Opposition by Victoria Nuland, whose undoubted authority to choose foreign leaders dates back at least to her choice of the leader of Ukraine after the 2014 CIA-planned Maidan massacre coup.

The dozens of articles in Western media decrying the murder (long before any actual evidence has been forthcoming from even a fake post-mortem) contrast sharply with the unheralded death of the freelance American journalist, Gonzalo Lira, who died without trial in a Ukrainian jail only a month or so ago, coincidentally, without a single Western leader, let alone an American president or even an embassy, lifting a finger to help him.

Also coincidental is the largely unreported final appeal against extradition of journalist Julian Assange, an Australian kept without charge in solitary confinement in England and inexplicably liable to US charges of treason. He is liable to get life imprisonment without parole, after a secret trial. When head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo sought to have Assange murdered whilst holed up in the Equadorian Embassy (information from a whistleblower in the CIA). But it seems likely that he’ll be extradited and disappeared anyway, because our judicial system is the envy of the world for impartiality and justice. No “right to family life” for enemies of the deep state.

This leads me to ask whether a CIA capable of contemplating wiping out an enemy in a foreign embassy in London might not also be a suspect in the suspicious death of an apparently redundant asset in a Siberian jail. We have been swamped with the narrative of a Putin murder, but why not a CIA wanting to distract attention from Assange, or the total collapse of the Avdeevka defence lines in Ukraine? Or indeed to offset the propaganda damage of the 1 billion views of Putin’s interview by Tucker Carlson? Or why not death from entirely natural causes? We need to consider, who, if anyone, benefits from his death.

First, consider natural causes, because they are not ruled out by repeated cries of “Murder” from far away. My guess is that the Western conspirators actually know that the official Russian story – that he collapsed from “SADS” and could not be resuscitated – is true. That’s because of the strangely specific claim experts have made that Putin’s hoods would have killed him with a karate blow to the chest, “a favourite KGB trick,” though I’ve never heard it described as such before. This claim would enable them, once the body is released, to have already laid the ground for attributing the bruising and, in all likelihood, broken ribs from a resuscitation attempt (especially by inexperienced prison staff) to marks of murder. Yet any of us who have actually performed chest compression, and failed, know what a brutal procedure it can be.

One commentator pointed out that, after his long stay in Germany until January 2021, Navalny would almost certainly have received mRNA COVID vaccine. That alone makes an early death from a vascular condition more likely, even without the rigours of prison life in Siberia.

So although natural causation is by no means as implausible as our Russiophobic press wants us to believe, the coincidental timing after a recent Putin interview, bad news from Ukraine, and a well-publicised security conference with Navalny’s wife in unexplained attendance raises at least the suspicion that he may have died in the same non-suspicious way that Jeffery Epstein did, at the same ultimate hands. If the CIA and the rest of the state Mafiosi are not to blame, they were certainly very slickly off the mark in capitalising on it. The BBC is known to have obituaries prepared for the deaths of important people, but it would surprise me if they had a “Navalny murdered in prison” story ready to pull off the shelf at a quarter of an hour’s notice.

But why even discuss this when we all know that Putin dunnit? The problem with this instinctive response is that, as with the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline, Putin is the very last person to benefit from it. I don’t doubt that he would order it it if it served his purposes. It seems to me from my reading that his entire purpose in life has been to drag Russia back from near-death after the collapse of the USSR, pitting the various factions against each other until they could be assimilated into one successful nation – the corrupt (and Western-funded) oligarchs who were managing the ruined economy, the old communists, the Europhiles, the Sinophiles, the demoralised, impoverished, and alcohol-sodden population, and ideally the Western powers beavering away at regime change and breaking up Russia. I suspect a task like that entails a certain degree of ruthlessness, that may yet become necessary for whoever tries to reform the cess-pit that the West has become. I don’t think a polite request to the CIA to disband would work.

But all the factors that tend to cast suspicion on Western players as murderers actually combine to make it the least strategic time for Putin to wake up and decide to dispose of someone already safely banged up in Siberia.

His interview with Carlson opened the eyes of many of the 1 billion people who have watched it to his level-headedness. If nothing else, the interview taught us that he is not the kind of madman to order executions in a pointless burst of temper. Now the world has been able to contrast, almost in real time, Putin and Biden, why would he throw away the propaganda victory for the sake of petty vengeance – especially as in that interview he acknowledged that the West are the masters of message-management?

Then the military and political situation in Ukraine is working in Russia’s favour as never before. At the very least, the fall of Avdeevka necessitates Putin’s input on the next strategic goals, and his assessment of the simmering likelihood of a Zaluzhny-Poroshenko coup in Kiev. If you were thus occupied, would you be likely to decide, during the coffee break, to have an imprisoned dissident liquidated and stir up your enemies’ nest?

Lastly (for I doubt Gonzalo Lira or Julian Assange figure much in his thinking) Putin was well aware of the conference in Munich, and probably had the guest list too. Is he really so stupid as to choose the very time when his enemies, including Yulia Navalnaya, were best placed to formulate a response, to perform a purposeless extra-judicial execution? If it’s credible, it’s only because we have been programmed for years to believe that Putin is both an evil madman and a clever liar, too sick to make rational decisions yet carefully planning to take over the world.

That’s how it seems to me, then. And because the last few years have somewhat led me to take anything our press and governments tell us and believe the opposite, I will try and compensate for my bias by concluding that, in all probability, Navalny died from natural causes, just as the prison authorities said in the first place. But our people never waste a good death, do they?