What’s common between Alexei Navalny’s poisoning and Jew’s extermination?
Alexei Navalny is a 44-year-old political opponent of Vladimir Putin (Russia’s longest-serving President since Stalin). He was travelling back on Aug 20, 2020, to Moscow (Russia’s capital) after his political campaigning from Tomsk via aeroplane. 30mins after takeoff, suddenly the health of Alexei deteriorated and was heard falling near the washroom and loudly crying (Recorded by other passengers). The pilots quick thinking led to an emergency landing to Omsk, wherein immediate first aid was given to Alexei and he was taken to the hospital. Two days later, being in an induced coma, he was taken to Germany where he then received the treatment. It was discovered through multiple tests that Alexei’s blood had samples of Novichok (a warfare chemical weapon) and later corroborated by authorities in Sweden and France as well. He remained in medically induced Coma for a couple of days and then later discharged after around a month on Sep 22, 2020.
80 years back, in 1941, Jews residing in many parts of Europe were facing serious consequences to hatred of the Hitler Army. They would either be murdered through mass public shootings (Warsaw, Krakow), those deemed to be fit to work would be transported to concentration camps in multiple sites in Poland. They would be then beaten, forced to work in inhumane conditions, no food, paraded naked, some of them would have experiments performed on them and lastly, majority of them would be exterminated through deadly gases. To top it all, the clothes, hair, accessories would be collected by the remaining Jews in the camps who would then further wait their turn to die. Around 6mn Jews died in these multiple events during the span of 4 years.
Both of these events, spaced 80 years in history, have one thing in common, they are black swan events. You see, before the discovery of black swan in Australia, the world thought that swans are only white, an unassailable belief which was confirmed by empirical evidence (Taken from the book “Black Swan”). Similar to the world not believing a black swan could exist, when in the 1930s the Jews reached out to the world about the horrendous exterminations, the world didn’t believe them. Why would anyone, humans tend to resort to Motivated reasoning (People convince themselves or remain convinced of what they want to believe — they seek out agreeable information and learn it more easily; and they avoid, ignore, devalue, forget, or argue against information that contradicts their beliefs). These events totally shatter our belief system and create confusion in our minds. It doesn’t seem logical to us? Why would someone want to kill Jews, soldiers are understandable in a war-setting but why all citizens, we would try and look away from the discomforting signs and evidence to disprove the original point. We will try to get some comfort from treating this yet another conspiracy theory thinking maybe Jews spread this news themselves to get support from others or malign Germany.
Similar is the case with Alexei, why would one of the powerful man in the world (Putin) or his administration need to develop/use a warfare chemical weapon to deal with Alexei, he could have been made to die accidentally in Jail, hit by Car/Truck, murdered in some alleged robbery. The chemical attack seems too much for any government to take down their opponent. While our mind wanders to get answers to these questions, the matter of the fact is that Novichok was found in Alexei’s blood and clothes. This is a prohibited chemical that couldn’t have been developed in any country due to the Chemical Weapons Conventions signed by 193 countries that included Russia (Only 3 countries which are not part of this treaty are “North Korea, South Sudan and Egypt). Now whether Novichok continued development in Russia or got exported from any of these countries, the fact is it was available in Russia. If the chemical is that easy to obtain (let’s assume that Alexei is the one who obtained it), just imagine what could be the consequences of this? This can then be easily used to kill masses, stop protests not just in Russia but across the world and god knows how many killings it would bring.
As you are reading this, your mind must be wondering, this probably doesn’t affect me, its Russia’s internal matter, well make no mistake my friend, as soon as Novichok becomes involved, this becomes an international matter. Just imagine, if this was not specially prepared by the military (which our mind refuses to believe), but maybe was done in a manner that could be easily replicated, how dangerous it is for us. With the ease of information exchange and difficulty in tracking consumption of the information, terrorist organisations (and some governments as well) could use this against the citizens.
This surely is an alarming situation and only the time will tell what happens to Alexei and Novichok but for the time being, I would like to salute Alexei for being brave enough to continue fighting to find the killer as well as fighting the elections in the situation that’s developed in Russia.
PS: If you would want to know more about Alexei’s incident and past there are some video links you can go through:
Alexei and CNN joint investigation for his poisoning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smhi6jts97I&t=13s
Detailed chain of events on the day of poisoning and grilling by a Russian YouTuber:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vps43rXgaZc&t=4053s
Poisoning of Alexei Navalny:
