Alexey Navalny - Alexey Navalny and the schroederisation of the West

Alexey Navalny – Alexey Navalny and the schroederisation of the West

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Speech by the President of Estonia (2006-2016) Toomas-Hendrik Ilves on the occasion of the presentation of the “Knight of Freedom” prize to Alexei Navalny in Warsaw 5/10/2021.

We are gathered here to pay tribute to Alexei Navalny. A person who was persecuted, arrested, tried to kill with poison, was thrown into jail for standing across the throat of the gangster autocracy, with a brisk gait approaching the classic totalitarian type of government. What is his crime? Only in the fact that he, by peaceful means, embodying the fundamental right of every person to freedom of speech and expression, challenged the regime that holds the security forces, thieves and murderers together.

Navalny’s story is not new. In the decades leading up to the collapse of communism, this story repeated itself over and over again. Joseph Brodsky, Natan Sharansky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and hundreds of others were persecuted in the real Mordor of that time, the USSR. However, there are also new nuances. In those years, when I was still a young researcher and analyst and then the head of the Estonian Service of Radio Liberty, in the West we had at least a clear confidence in our moral right to resist the dark Soviet forces – at the level of governments, parliaments, and international forums.

Paradoxically, this moral clarity was ideologically supported by the Soviets themselves, with a consistent anti-capitalist stance. It was impossible to imagine that Stalin’s commissioners or members of Brezhnev’s Politburo would buy villas on the Riviera, ski chateaux in St. Moritz, apartments in a skyscraper owned by the American president, or docks for their 100-meter yachts in Saint-Tropez or Piraeus. For us, receiving money from totalitarian structures would definitely mean either bribery or espionage – and in both cases it would entail criminal punishment and amicable public censure.

Today, the liberal democratic West has lost this moral clarity of vision. We became accomplices of criminals, in fact, united with the enemies of freedom, enemies of education, the rule of law and human rights. We have become accomplices in the fall of Russia, which is falling apart under the weight of theft and corruption – but this also brings our end closer.
Therefore, in my short greeting to Alexei Navalny, I will not focus on his indisputable merits in exposing corruption in Russia. It will sound smug and give off a false sense of our moral superiority. To truly pay tribute to Navalny’s efforts, we must, first of all, firmly resist the process of decay that is in full swing in our dear liberal West.

This stench comes from our corrupt politicians and political parties, from our simple-minded and greedy governments, and even prestigious universities with age-old traditions. It comes from a business that puts the interests of profit far above the values of justice, truth and freedom. It comes from bankers, lawyers and financiers who are always ready to launder both dirty money and dirty reputation. This corruption is our corruption! – which allows both the Kremlin boyars with their sixes and other similar regimes to continue robbing and killing with impunity.

Ladies and gentlemen:
About 15 years ago, I unwittingly put into circulation a new term – “schroederisation”. I remained its anonymous author until my dear friend Edward Lucas betrayed me in his article in The Economist, when I left the presidential office and the authorship of the neologism no longer mattered. The suffix “-ization” in remarkably flexible Russian denotes a certain general process and, unlike the analogous English “-zation”, has a recognizable Russian sound, tying it to a state that uses bribery more effectively than any other in the world today.

Many other regimes are also not without sin in this regard: from China to Azerbaijan, from the Philippines to the DR Congo – dirty money is squeezed out and knocked out of the weak and disenfranchised in order to be pumped into the swamps of our political processes and corrupt our state system.
Whether it be European parliamentarians whitewashing blatant human rights violations in the Caucasus or a leading British university accepting money from the Chinese Communist Party in exchange for refusing to publish critical materials about the PRC in its scientific works. The Western fabric is all permeated with this corruption.

Even worse, we cannot even talk about it openly for fear of negative legal and financial consequences! The brilliant journalist Catherine Belton, author of the shockingly revelatory book Putin’s People, is now facing a harsh trial by an alarmed regime elite. The purpose of this process is not only to bankrupt the author, but also to intimidate everyone else who dares to investigate the secret connection between the security forces, business, organized crime and the state authorities that form the Russian ruling elite.

And this may not only be a matter of greed and money. Sometimes it’s a lust for power. Remember how the European People’s Party faction did not begin to exclude the populist party from its ranks, despite its fundamental incompatibility with the declared values - only in order to maintain its quantitative presence in the European Parliament. It would take not one hour to list all the manifestations of corruption in Western practice, but days, weeks and whole years. Ladies and gentlemen, we have no time to be horrified by this problem. We need to start solving it.

Alexei Navalny received his current term for the most ridiculous reason: for not showing up on time, serving a suspended sentence, despite the fact that at that time he was recovering from the almost fatal poisoning by Novichok. However, his real sins against the authorities are a series of investigations and revelations, including those concerning the grotesquely tasteless trash palace built for the Kremlin dictator and exactly repeating all the wretched clichés of the nouveau riche and self-made kings, from Trump to Yanukovych. However, accusations of bad taste of these grabbers are not particularly upsetting; on the other hand, they are very much afraid of something else: the discontent of the population living in poverty – like Russians, 40% of whom are saving even on food at rapidly rising prices. We in the West do not care about their problems – we just accept stolen money.

Dear guests,
In one of his most recent books, Property and Freedom, the late Richard Pipes, historian and leading expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, explains in sufficient detail why not only Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats, but also the elite of all autocratic regimes seek to keep their money in the West. This concerns Russia to the greatest extent, since this country lived according to civilized laws only for a very short period in its history – from February to October 1917.

Where there is no rule of law, where an autocrat can easily steal or forcibly appropriate someone else’s property, he is haunted by the fear of the Kantian “categorical imperative” – in this case, that someone will do to him what he, driven by the desire for enrichment, did in relation to others. That is, it will simply take away the loot. Therefore, the only way out for them is to forward their immodest savings to where the law is in effect – be it London or Dubai, New York or Tallinn. Anywhere, where the legal state structure assumes that the depositor’s money is earned by labor, and not by direct theft and not pumping it out of the bowels or the budget, which is also an indirect form of theft.

It was the rule of law that ensured the prosperity of the West. We just know that no authorities can illegally take away our inviolable property. However, it turns out that the same authorities allow authoritarian regimes to keep stolen wealth from us and to persecute those who, like Alexei Navalny, are trying to fight this outrage. This means that it is necessary to change our own laws and practices. The British system of investigating “wealth of unexplained origin” should be extended to other Western countries and applied more broadly and more rigorously. Anonymous shell companies, such as those with the help of which the henchmen of the Russian, albeit non-governmental, mafia of Semyon Mogilevich bought apartments in the Trump Towers, should be outlawed. Much stricter regulations and visa bans must be enacted to prevent GRU / FSB agents from entering Europe and carrying out criminal orders. Likewise, entry restrictions should apply to government officials, up to and including heads of state. Rather than allowing murderers and saboteurs to roam freely in our countries, it would be worth bringing to justice some European officials, such as the former Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger, who, in order to appease the Kremlin, demanded that the Austrian border guards release Mikhail Golovatov, requested by Interpol, in absentia convicted of the murder of 13 Lithuanians. Or take the same Austria, which has blocked sanctions at the Council of the European Union, which would have prevented Raiffeisenbank, the largest creditor of the dictator Lukashenko, from continuing to finance this horrific regime.

As I have already noted, corruption knows no boundaries. Our own “Schroederisation”, our François Fillons and Karin Kneissl, our Lipponens and others like them – who, after leaving government structures, immediately in pursuit of profit begin to work for the benefit of the so-called “independent” energy companies – but in fact, companies, owned and run by kleptocratic regimes. All of them, to paraphrase Lenin, are buying a rope on which they themselves will be hanged by autocrats. I repeat: we Europeans will be hanged, not they.

And this is another major reason why we must pay tribute to the determination and courage of Alexei Navalny. He demonstrates to Russians and the whole world not only pathological theft and lawlessness in Russia; he also puts a mirror in front of us! We, as accomplices in crimes – helping to siphon day after day, million after million from impoverished Russia and its disenfranchised people. These euros and dollars sit comfortably in the pockets and accounts of our own leaders, banks, universities, film studios, political parties and lobbyists. Lobbyists are enemies of our open society.

Thanks.

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Alexey Navalny – Alexey Navalny and the schroederisation of the West

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