Ask who Russia's Navalny words toll for; they toll for us too.

Americans often champion or feel deep affective identification with foreign dissidents and movements against tyrannies. We recognize that our own political traditions are prominent among the ideological and cultural forces that those dissidents and popular movements often draw upon. And these sentiments and judgements are correct.

This is true even when it also begins to appear that the old liberal and constitutional discourses that triumphed in England, America, and France in the 17th and 18th centuries with the rise to power of bourgeois movements of representative democracy and limited government in the interest of personal liberties, that this trend is both of continuing vitality and, alas, not enough.

For what also needs to be recognized is that our own society and its institutions can easily appear to be on either side of the tyranny/democracy barrier, and it is not enough to defend it. In fact, the forms of oppression that we notice yesterday and today in places like Hong Kong, Myanmar, and Russia (among quite a few others in the last few years and many more in recent decades), these are possibilities in this country too. Americans know this now unmistakably following the capitol riot that provided the fittingly horrifying ending of the Trump administration, which in purely discursive and strategically rhetorical terms was as much a banner flying high in the name of opposition to any kind of democracy in the mere and minimal forms of the use of language to contest the way things are or what is being done on the basis of the sincerity conditions of ordinary language use, which make it possible for statements to be true and false and argued for with reasons, and something other than mere rhetorically colorful commands. Trump's public statements were all about dismantling rational public discourse and any connection between governance and any notion fo reason or truth, and this was done to ideologically legitimate a naked tyranny.

In other words, Russian dissent Alexsei Navalny is speaking not only about and for Russia and the Russian people; in fact, he's talking about the whole world, and his speech should resonate with Americans as being not or not only a call for some freedom we take for granted and not need struggle to achieve or maintain. Because: If they come for our friends and likenesses in Russia, China, or anywhere else today, they will be coming for you tomorrow.

So I present these quotes from the speech of Navalny that appears in today's New York Times as an opinion essay, and I present them as being in potentiality, which is what matters, also about us, about the citizens of the world and the people, even and also, of the United States. Read and think about it:

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"This is happening to intimidate large numbers of people. This is how it works: Imprison one person to frighten millions.

We’ve got 20 million people living below the poverty line. We have tens of millions of people living without the slightest prospects for the future. … Life is bearable in Moscow, but travel 100 kilometers in any direction and everything’s a mess.

The only thing growing in [Russia] is the number of billionaires. Everything else is declining.

This is what happens when lawlessness and tyranny become the essence of a political system, and it’s horrifying.

It’s the duty of every person to defy you and to defy such laws. …

There are many good things in Russia now. The very best are the people who aren’t afraid."

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They want you to be afraid. They did it to me (see “Postcards from the Fourth Reich,” on this site (www.questionsducinema/literary), and I’m a small fry. Indeed, there are lots of us. That is the state of terror. It is the duty of all citizens to not merely uphold the laws when they are manifestly just, but resist or disobey them when they are manifestly unjust. It is our duty to be willing to defy orders, disobey the state’s authorities, and resist, always, what we are expected to do, especially when tens of millions of the people are employed in policing or socially controlling tens or hundreds of millions of others. And when, and of course this is why, the few prosper (tenuously and fearfully) at the expense of the many.

The liberal ideas of multiculturalism based on affirming identities on the grounds that they are the index of oppression, these are not enough and will not help us that much. More is needed. Proclaiming and defending the old ideas of liberty and democracy and ‘human rights’ will not help us much either. And it goes without saying, going in search of some supposed “spirituality” that is really empty, appeals to trendy (with Americans) Orientalist antiquities, as a supposed alternative to whatever one finds alienating or insufficiently inspiring to virtuous action in their own culture’s traditions, especially when these spiritualities are only echos of the (lucrative) management of the population by medical authorities, in the interest of the quiescence of complacent obedience and conformity. These are paths that will little help us. There is no need to look for sustenance in an elsewhere, as the world today is already culturally a neo-European and hybrid post-colonial one. The liberalism that triumphed in the 19th century (for instance, in Reform Judaism, which was a movement for recognition as normal in an ethnically particular subset of the classes of merchants and professionals) will little help us now, as the New Age Orientalism (a cultural movement that is entirely false, based on an ideological invention) will not.

Navalny will get his human rights if he is lucky, by being kept alive in prison instead of being murdered by the same authorities; that alone is a small difference; all too often, human rights are just animal rights, even if those are not to be scoffed at, which is a sure sign of the depravity into which the world’s capitalist local national governments have descended. Defending boundaries between locales and nations where the old liberal and constitutional ideals seem still plausible to enunciate is not enough, especially since the existence of those boundaries and the possibility of appearing to defend them is actually a function of other concerns, like defending wealth, power, and property. But what Navalny says is certainly true.

This is what happens when lawlessness and tyranny become the essence of a political system, and it’s horrifying.

This is happening to intimidate large numbers of people. This is how it works: Imprison one person to frighten millions.

We’ve got millions of people living below the poverty line. We have tens of millions of people living without the slightest prospects for the future. … Life is bearable in New York and Los Angeles, but travel 100 miles in any direction and everything’s a mess.

Russia and America are part of the same system, under the same global governance. Tyranny may appear in different ways, but today's form of it is one thing said in many ways. Avanti (Forward)!