Martin Jay: western elites are panicking with Durov arrest
The arrest of Pavel Durov has shocked the world as the Telegram app continued to dominate more and more people’s timelines. The most interesting aspect of him being nabbed is what western media aren’t telling us, rather than what we know from the few details they offer
The arrest of Pavel Durov marks a new low point on the scumline of the side of the bath – the bath being western democracies and the line being their desperation to stay in power at the costs of controlling social media. Durov, who owns Telegram and lives in Dubai, could be in jail for months and possibly years on the trumped up charges which the French state has conjured up simply because he refuses to allow any government have a back door into Telegram. He has fought this tooth and nail for years with the west, in particular the US, playing every dirty trick in the book to get access to the platform for its own nefarious purposes – to destroy opposition figures, their strategies etc – rather than what it is dressed up to be, identifying terrorists and international criminals.
As the UK ponders how its own state has sunk to a new totalitarian level in recent days with the arrest of its citizens who merely like a posting on a social media platform, the West has arrested this French Russian dual national genius who is charged with the crimes of those criminals active on Telegram. And so charges of terrorism and trafficking in minors, drugs and whatever else they can find on the platform will be made against him as someone abetting in the crimes. Of course the same rules will not be levelled against Elon Musk who surely has criminals on his platform or for that matter any of the other social media platforms. The logic is perverse. Drug dealers in the north of Morocco drive Porsche Cayennes but it is hardly likely that the CEO of Porsche is about to be arrested for assisting them in their tawdry work.
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But how many of these platforms are also taking the same stand as Durov? We are led to believe that most of them aren’t but in light of his arrest we should assume that many of them have already allowed some sort of access to them for the deep state. Elon Musk likes to brag about his refusal to comply with the EU’s demands that he ‘moderates’ who he allows onto X, adding that other social media platforms accepted the deal offered to him by Brussels: comply with our requests and we grant you some leniency on future anti trust fines. This offer, which he claims was happily accepted by other platforms is a close as you can get to the EU offering a brown envelope stuffed full of cash to a man in a pub. It’s a bribe and gives a clue as to how anti democratic the EU is and how it operates in the shadows.
The French arrest however goes deeper in that we can assume that it was not France operating alone to nab Durov. We can assume that the FBI and CIA had probably pushed Macron to do this appalling dirty work but perhaps also Israel had a hand in it. Just recently, Netanyahu complained that data which was stolen from the government was being exchanged on Telegram and asked Durov to step in and retrieve it. He got not reply. Did Mossad have a hand in the arrest of Telegram’s boss? It seems credible given that it is hard to believe the Durov would fly into French airspace eyes wide open. Was it a kidnapping operation to get his plane and his pilot to land in Paris? French tv channel TF1 said Dubai-based Durov had been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) on Saturday 24th of August but did not state whether the plane’s ultimate destination had been France.
The details around the arrest are very sketchy, but according to Reuters, Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had sought to pressure him but the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”. What Reuters doesn’t mention is that Telegram is by far the best app for getting real news about the war in Ukraine and holding Israel to account for its daily genocide in Gaza and perhaps this is also part of the ruse, to shut it down so as to start to clean up what surely is too big now to ignore. Regardless of how effective western msm is at dutifully ‘reporting’ on these two conflicts without a trace of objectivity, the numbers of people moving to Telegram – estimated to be 2,5m a day – make it a threat to Washington and London’s objectives and stability.
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Another question which arises from the arrest is whether it is an international effort by western countries led by the US – with Israel very much part of it – to test the waters for other arrests. Pundits have been dismissed as conspiracy theorists for weeks now suggesting Elon Musk will be arrested at some point, or charged in his absence, by UK authorities for some of the more controversial posts he has made about the political situation in the UK, or even by the EU which appears to have started a legal battle with him after he refused to respond to two letters sent to him by a French European Commissioner. Perhaps even the democrats in the US might play the same card given that Musk has lost all credibility as this neutral player in US politics after he has so openly supported Trump who has promised him a position in a new government if he were to enter the Oval Office. There is no such thing really as free speech. It comes at a very high price for those who want to protect and cherish it and now France will test the political landscape to see how the arrest of Durov will affect Macron’s ratings. The French president has made outstandingly poor judgment in the past in calling for parliamentary elections immediately after EU ones which gave so much power to far right groups, so he seems to be good at falling on his own sword. He may well have factored that Durov does not have the popularity of say Assange who didn’t stir so much political anger when he was banged up for years in a filthy, dank cell in the UK on trumped up charges from the US. What is especially worrying is that locking up powerful people who have huge followings on the internet is becoming a trend which people are getting used to. The war between those who want to control the perceived truth and those who hold the actual one is hotting up. Scott Ritter, Andrew Tate, Richard Medhurst all arrested within days of one another, while Musk himself shuts down Egyptian comedian Bassem Youseff who had 10m followers on X. What we are witnessing is a new level of desperation that western elites are more afraid than ever that after wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in Ukraine and starting a world war in the Middle East that voters have no confidence any more in their decision-making, as they, the public, struggle more and more to pay for groceries or even heat their houses. It’s a new milestone in the blind dogma of elites to resort to tactics which we would have scorned China or North Korea for using just a few years ago. It’s a new level of panic which we haven’t seen before.
The author is an award winning journalist based in Morocco, working for a number of international titles while also the editor in chief of Maghrebi.org. He can be followed on twitter at @MartinRJay or supported on Patreon here. This article was originally published by Strategic Culture Foundation.
