ALEXEI NAVALNY AND JULIAN ASSANGE
Assange-Navalny, a comparison that doesn't stand up. And the reason is communicative: here's why
Julian Assange as Alexei Navalny? We're not joking. Even though the Australian journalist's wife, Stella, has put on Yulia Navalnaya's mourning dress and demands equal support for her husband in the name of press freedom, that comparison doesn't hold up. And even more arbitrary is the ongoing attempt by some politicians (Giuseppe Conte and Marco Rizzo, to name two) to extend the discussion to the Italian media, who according to them are guilty of using double standards. It doesn't stand up, first of all, because Navalny acted personally, accusing Putin's repressive regime and thus putting at risk, tragically as we have seen, the his life. And, precisely to give more value to his commitment as an opponent, he agreed to return to Russia even after fortunately surviving a poisoning attempt. Assange instead resorted to covert informants and “deep throats”; then, when the situation worsened, he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and now he has sent a medical certificate to the High Court which must decide on his extradition to the USA to justify his absence.
It is then superfluous to remember that the press, and so the judicial system, in the West they are full of defects, even serious ones, but they still allow freedom of expression and do not call into question personal safety. While in Russia the list of political murders committed in this century already fills entire pages, and that of Navalny is not even the last (even more recent is the execution in Spain of the Russian helicopter pilot Maksim Kuzminov, who had defected to the 'Ukraine).
But there is a particular reason that should lead us not to confuse Assange with Navalny, and it is exquisitely communicative. The one performed by the site Wikileaks in fact, towards the USA it is to be classified as a “dark mission”, i.e. a covert mission in espionage style, although disguised as a journalistic investigation. It is not decisive that Assange encouraged his “deep throats” to hack into American government sites and rob them, even if by doing so he jeopardized the lives of agents and informants engaged in risky missions. All of this may still fall within the parameters of investigative journalism, albeit extreme. The point is that, after having stored the data in a “drop box” reservoir protected by a powerful encryption system, Wikileaks retained them to verify not only their reliability, but also the opportunity to disseminate them. And no one knows the most important thing: manipulations aside, what has been deliberately kept quiet?
Assange heavily influenced politics, arbitrarily establishing what and how much should be published. No one has been able to establish with certainty the methods of selection of his material, and the media that subsequently disseminated them were used by Assange as “letterboxes”, a bit like what had happened to some Italian newspapers at the time of the press releases released by the Red Brigades. And it remains to be established whether all this occurred in agreement with some political or state entity that remained in the shadows. Invoking freedom of the press in the case of a “dark mission” is equivalent to illuminating half the scene, leaving the other carefully, and calculatedly, in the shadows. This is why the case of Julian Assange cannot be compared to that of Aleksei Navalny.
#challenged #Putin #fled #Assange #Navalny