ALEKSEJ NAVALNY

Hostage taking is yet another form of the barbary that infiltrates States' behavior. It is becoming difficult to keep up with the hostage-taking plague which is becoming rampant worldwide.  

Some actors count it as just another tool for blackmailing the adverse party.  But mostly Putin considers it the new normal. Russia has a long history of repression by way of destruction of the psyche:  Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov come to mind. They were the faces of the oppressed and of the existentially mutilated for life, who endured hell.  They also became the stewards for the shared outrage worldwide.

Navalny is rotting, out of sight and covered under a layer of concrete, not unlike a nefarious outdated nuclear plant. His sin is to have dared to call up Putin for being the monster he is. The torture he suffers is the punishment for the revulsion that lives in the  legions that support him.

The measured outrage in the West is both cowardly and immoral. This form of slow execution is a scandal. Silence equals complicity. The Security Council became just like a car running on empty, but it is still a sounding board.  All these new crooked summits and multiplying bastardly gatherings do not want to touch an issue which reminds them of embarrassments home. 

The West has to speak out loud and point the finger at the evil doer. There is something basically wrong and perverse in the EU psyche. On all issues, it approaches the core but refrains from too direct intervention. This pill becomes difficult to swallow. With regard to Navalny, the West had better beware of appearing too aloof, complicit in a murder by stealth, which unlike war crimes, still has a chance to be forestalled.