‘In Donald Trump’s “absolute immunity” mind, if a United States president orders the poisoning of a critic like Navalny, he is immune from liability.’
DONALD Trump must be filled with envy.
His friend Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, has lost an arch critic in the person of Alexei Navalny.
Navalny, who had attempted to run for president against Putin, died in a Russian prison in far off Siberia, the same god-forsaken frozen wasteland that was once the region where the tsars and the Soviet leaders exiled their harshest critics.
It’s the region that “inspired” the Gulag Archipelago, a series of books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that detailed the inhuman prisons the Soviet communist government maintained for those accused of anti-Soviet activities. In post-communist Russia, the system of the police state remains, with the Gulag apparently in place.
And that’s where Navalny met his end.
He had been close to dying, once.
On a flight to Moscow about 20 years ago, Navalny began moaning – necessitating the plane’s emergency landing and his transfer to a Russian hospital. Accusations flew fast that he was a victim of poisoning, but this could not be verified because he was being held in the ICU in a Russian hospital unable to accept visitors.
International condemnation “forced” the Russians to release Navalny who was flown on a German air ambulance to Germany where he was given medical treatment, eventually saving his life. But the experience did not silence Navalny; he remained an arch critic of Putin and a rallying point for anti-Putin forces within and outside Russia.
That rallying point is no more.
In Donald Trump’s “absolute immunity” mind, if a United States president orders the poisoning of a critic like Navalny, he is immune from liability. It is a viewpoint still to be passed upon by the US Supreme Court, but you and I know which jurisdiction inspires him to dream of an America where the leadership can act that way.
The same used to be true In the Philippines, dark years where many people exercising powers of an absolutist government ran roughshod over human rights, albeit always with a semblance of legality. It took us decades to get over those dark years — with a recent experience refreshing the painful memories of that past.
Are we done with such a system forever? No one can say, because even Americans seems to be longing for it.
Which means Navalny will only be the latest and not the last critic to be killed for his political views.
