Julian Assange and Alexei Navalny should be swapped by the opposing regimes of America and Russia. The suggestion comes from the Lordre blog, posted at the end of January.
Assange is clearly the better and more valuable of the two dissidents, the blog claimed, focusing on how Assange tended to release unedited raw content while Navalny produced partisan propaganda. Nevertheless, geopolitically, "each man is the other's parallel", the argument went.
Expecting the Americans to be too cynical about the welfare of Navalny to agree to such a swap, the blog predicts "the Americans would never let go of Assange", but suggests Moscow should make the offer to embarass Washington and improve things a little for Assange. In doing so, Russia might benefit:
A swap offer would give the Americans a difficult choice: either expose the worm they support in Russia, by showing their refusal to take him, or send Assange to Russia and risk a resurgent WikiLeaks. A successful swap would be a coup for Russia's reputation, and a failed swap would be equally incriminating for the US and make the US hesitant to harm Assange.
Finding Navalny lacking in comparison with Assange, the blog derided him as being no whistle-blower but a "dishonourable propagandist whose goal is power, not revealing facts to the public". The blog condemned the "profound inferiority of the West's championed dissident", a "miserable little worm" - words originally used by a British politician for Assange.
- ClubOfInfo
