Lucas: Prigozhin’s death reveals dark side of power, politics, and Russia – Boston Herald

Yevgeny Prigozhin makes a video statement from an unknown location in this May 2023 file photo. (Prigozhin Press Service via AP, File)

Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin never read Machiavelli.

Or Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Otherwise, he might still be alive.

It was Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1532) in his famous treatise “The Prince,” which is a dark study about obtaining and keeping power, who wrote that when you strike an opponent or an enemy you must kill him, or else he will seek retribution and kill you.

Emerson (1803-1882), a well-known philosopher from Concord, reworked that to mean, “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”

Prigozhin, head of a mercenary army called the Wagner Group, which fought unhappily fought for Putin in Ukraine, led a short-lived mutiny against Putin in June. Prigozhin, in a march on Moscow, sought the ouster of several of Putin’s generals and perhaps even Putin himself.

Prigozhin struck but failed to kill the king.

Putin called the failed coup treason and accused his former friend of stabbing him in the back.

Days later Putin appeared to have forgiven him and allowed the sorrowful Prigozhin to move his forces from Ukraine to Belarus while continuing military activities in Africa.

Everyone, if not a lulled Prigozhin, knew his days were numbered. Putin is not a man who forgets and forgives.

Last Wednesday, on the eve of the first Republican presidential debate, Prigozhin’s plane was blown out of the sky by a Russian ground to air missile or a bomb shortly after taking off from Moscow.

Prigozhin, six lieutenants and a flight crew of three, were all killed, and Prigozhin was no longer a threat to Putin or Putin’s stranglehold on Russia.

Putin had read his Machiavelli.

It is not as though Putin was prepared to debate Prigozhin, or anybody else, the way debates are held in democracies like the U.S.

One of two things happen to Russians who oppose Putin They are murdered, or they go to prison, or both.

Things like that do not happen in the United States, at least not yet.

Joe Biden is not going to shoot down Donald Trump’s plane. He just wants to send him to prison on phony charges the way Putin does with his opponents.

Who would have thought for openers that President Joe Biden—in the first time in history–would sanction an FBI raid on a former president’s home seeking illegally held classified documents that Biden himself had stored in his own garage?

That was the beginning of Biden and the Democrat’s underhanded twisting of the U.S. justice system to bring down Trump and stop him from beating Biden in 2024 and becoming president again, which just might happen.

No, no one is going to blow up Trump’s personal plane, the glitzy Being 747 he flies around in traveling from courthouse to courthouse in between campaign appearances.

Like Air Force One, it is a hard plane to ignore. It has Trump’s name emblazoned on it along with the American flag. And Trump flies around the country as though he is the president in waiting, which he just might be.

And which is why he must be stopped, and why the Biden-controlled U.S. Justice Department has twice indicted Trump on questionable chargers, while a pair of progressive Democrat district attorneys in Manhattan and Georgia have piled on with two more ludicrous indictments.

The hope is that something, anything, will stick and destroy Trump’s chances of returning to the White House.

Hence, the latest effort to humiliate and destroy Trump by forcing him to pose for a mug shot at the Fulton County courthouse in Georgia where he pled not guilty Thursday to a series of phony charges that he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

Biden may not care about the damage he has done to the country by politicizing the justice system in order to take Trump out. But the country does.  It is all out of Putin’s playbook. Biden is an American version of Putin, only with a grin.

Biden may succeed in one Democrat kangaroo court or another. But Trump just might become president anyway.

Then all hell will break loose, and retribution will be a mother.

Because when you strike at a king, you must kill him, metaphorically speaking, of course.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.