“Stark,raving, madness”. The curent Russian government’s reaction to the suggestion that they had anything to do with the attempted (and probably successful) murder by poison of Alexander Litvinenko.

The very idea! But accept for the moment the possiblity that their denial of immediate instrumentality is true. Suppose another group did it for shadowy ex Soviet espionage underworld reasons. Who is respnsible for the KGB thug state now ruling the former Soveit Union? Nobobdy seems to care–or at least look too closely–at what’s happening, what’s already happned in the greatest failure of “democracy promotion” in history. Was it because unregulated free market captialism, red in tooth and Darwinian claw was promoted at the expense of democracy promotion? Or is democracy unpromotable in nations and cultures abused by totalitarianism of the theocratic or Marxist/Fascist mode.

(I urge you to read an absoutely fascinating book about KGB cuture which raises all sorts of moral questions and yet provides all sorts of provacative insights, %%AMAZON=0465009689 Spy Handler%% by Victor Cherashkin, former KGB counter intelligenc opeerative who “handled” Aldrich Ames.)

Is Ltvinenko a doomed Cassandra like those German journalist refugees such as Konrad Heiden who tried to tell the world about Hitler before it was too late? Or is he compromised by his past? Or both?

In any case whoever did it to him, for whatever reason, I want Litvinenko to live not merely out of fellow-human feeling but because I feel he has a lot to tell us (he was supposedly investigating the death of Moscow investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya when he was posioned.

Maybe some people will join me in wishing, on this Thanksgiving, that he lives and talks for years to come. We need to hear more about the “stark, raving madness” he’s experienced.