• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    10 months ago

    I mean… yeah, I respect. He was an opposition candidate for a government that regularly kills its opponents. He organized for a while, he left Russia for Europe, and then he fucking went back to Russia to organize more. I barely know about any of this stuff and I still knew there was about a 90% chance he’d be killed. And look, they killed him. Because his aim was to bring an improvement to his home country’s system of government.

    I know one thing: If your goal is to have a comfortable life and more for yourself, and you’re not that worried what happens to other people or what kind of world you leave behind when you’re gone, you don’t do that.

    He could have had a long hug and a tongue kiss with Nick Fuentes and I’d still find a lot that’s good to say about him. There’s a lot I respect about Heinz Guderian even though he was a Nazi. There’s a lot I respect about Martin Luther King even though he cheated on his wife. Lyndon Johnson had a ton of things wrong with him and I still like him. I have no idea if any of this about Navalny being far-right is in any way true; it’s the type of thing the Putin regime likes to make up and repeat about its enemies, so maybe it’s a load of horseshit, but honestly it doesn’t impact my assessment of him all that much even if it’s the God’s honest truth. It is ok for people to support bad things and still be good people and have good things about them. Honestly, just the fact that whatever he was doing was enough for Putin to make him public enemy #1 is good enough for me.

    This thing that certain segments of the Lemmy community try to do where you CANNOT support a person, full stop, if they have ever done thing X, Y, or Z, and it COMPLETELY NEGATES anything good they may have done even if there are significant qualifiers to the thing you’re blowing up as X and they only were friends with people who did Y or Z, never did it themselves, and it was all twenty years ago… man, it’s just a bunch of horseshit. I don’t care. Navalny was clearly good, on the total balance, and you’re not gonna be able to convince me otherwise unless he was secretly a serial killer and even then I would want to know how many people were involved and if they’d done anything to deserve it.

    I’m not tryin to jump down your throat about it; I know the “completely negates” isn’t actually what you were trying to say. I’m actually glad for the information even if I’m a little suspicious of the motives behind it. It sounds like we’re more or less on the same page actually. I just thought he showed a ton of courage and commitment and I wish people on the left in the US, whatever they’re going after, would have one tenth of his stones to get out and try to make it happen.