Tucker Carlson in Moscow special edition
20240207
Tucker Carlson is in Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin. The mainstream media is beside itself. Here's a paragraph from the CNN link above: " Carlson predictably and dishonestly villainized the press. The right-wing extremist, who has lauded autocrats in recent years, claimed English-speaking outlets are 'corrupt' and 'lie' to their audiences as they disseminate 'propaganda of the ugliest kind.'"
Yes! I certainly believe that Vladimir Putin lies, but I believe that Joe Biden, his entire administration, and the media as exemplified by CNN also lie. Let's let Putin's lies be heard. Let's let the neocons parse Putin's speech and tell us point by point where he is wrong. Where he is lying. There will be lots of material. I am certain that Putin will lie egregiously.
However, Putin is not wrong to say that the United States government and press also lie. He is sure to bring up the biological warfare labs in Ukraine. I think they are real, or at least were real. He might mention the administration's lying about the Covid pandemic. His own administration in Russia has also lied extensively. Let him open himself up to being cross examined.
I do have an ax to grind. It is totally obvious now that Andy Slavitt put extraordinary pressure on Amazon at Joe Biden's request. They were supposed not to carry books that contradicted the party line, or post book reviews that did so. They took down my 550 or so reviews on the pretext that I violated never articulated "community standards." That was a lie.
Andy Slavitt, with the full support of Joe Biden and his Justice Department, has defied a congressional subpoena to testify about it. Peter Navarro, a Trump appointee, is sitting in prison for refusing to answer a January 6 subpoena. There is the kind of blatant double standard which Tucker Carlson is trying to expose.
One of Voltaire's most famous quotes is "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Freedom of speech is the hallmark of a free society. Political correctness has put it under pressure for the last couple of decades. The Biden administration has gone out of its way to suppress free speech. Tucker Carlson, Alex Berenson, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Margaret Anna Alice , Peter McCullough, Robert Malone and Katherine Brodsky, among many others, are fighting back by speaking freely and risking the consequences. Without such brave souls we will certainly lose what remains of our freedom of speech.
Tucker Carlson is poking the right people in the eye. Starry eyed optimist that I am, I hope that Putin perjures himself richly enough that supporters of Ukraine can make points against him. At any rate we should not object to being asked to articulate our reasons for supporting Ukraine.
You may recall that back in October I posted a couple of pieces on Russian propaganda. Colonel McGregor, who has been incredibly wrong throughout the war, displays himself to be wrong again with three months' hindsight. The fact that Tucker references this guy unthinkingly is the strongest point I can think of discrediting him. There is also Simplicius, who claimed, as of October 20, that Ukraine was losing 1700 soldiers a day, killed and wounded. If that were so, they would have lost 187,000 since then. Their entire army. It has not happened. Denys Davidov, the Institute for the study of war, and Oryx provide widely varying but nonetheless consistently far lower figures. The two propagandists predicted in October that Adiivka would fall "any day now." Denys Davidov offered his opinion back then that it was probably time to leave. However, despite the enormous pressure now being placed on it, Adiivka still holds. It is costing the Russians a vast number of losses, in troops and equipment.
The United States press has been pushing doom and gloom about Ukraine for several months now. Nonetheless, very little ground is actually changed hands. General Zaluzhnyi's strategy of emphasizing defense and attacking Russia's heartland with missiles and drones seems to be effective. The United States press does not give as much coverage to the internal difficulties in Russia, such as unrest in Muslim areas such as Bashkiria and Tatarstan.
Putin is given to grand gestures and big surprises. Call me a super starry-eyed optimist, but I would afford a glimmer of a chance to the notion that he could use his moment on the world stage to put forth a realistic plan for drawing down the war.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where we were awakened to loud explosions and the lights went out. About two seconds before we heard the explosion, to be precise, which leads me to believe it was a mile or so away.
Zoriana ran crying into my room. Crying is something little girls do. As with so many other minor crises, I told her that crying hurt rather than helped. At a moment like this you need to think what to do. She needs to recognize that we are a mile from anything the Russians would want to blow up and their aim is better than that. If anything hits us, it will be falling debris from an intercepted missile. If she was worried, she should stay downstairs where we have shatterproof plastic on the windows and there is a second story and an attic to protect her. But the main story is that big girls don't cry.
Tucker on why:
First, because it war in Moscow tonight were here interview the president of Russia Vladimir will be going out soon. There are risks to conducting an interview like this, obviously, so we thought about it carefully over many months. Here's what were doing. First, because it's our job were in journalism. Our duty is to inform people. Two years into the war that's reshaping the entire world. Most Americans are not informed. They have no real idea what's happening in this region here in Russia or 600 miles away in Ukraine, but they should now their pain for much of it in ways they might not fully yet perceive the one Ukraine is a human disaster left hundreds of thousands of people dead and entire generation of young Ukrainians and is depopulated, the largest country in Europe, but the long-term effects are even more profound. This war has utterly reshaped the global military and trade alliances and the sanctions that followed have as well and in total they have upended the world economy. The post-World War II economic order system that guaranteed prosperity in the West. More than 80 years is coming apart very fast and along with it. The dominance of the US dollar. These are small changes. They are history altering developments that will define the lives of our grandchildren most of the world understands this portability can see it. Ask anyone in Asia or the Middle East. What the future looks like and get the populations of the English-speaking country seem mostly unaware they think that is nothing has really changed and they think that because no one has told them the truth. Their media outlets are corrupt, they lie to the readers and viewers, and they do not, mostly by omission. For example, since the data worn. Ukraine began American media outlets of spoken discourse of people from Ukraine and they been scores of interviews with Ukrainian Pres. Zielinski we ourselves have put a request for an interview with Lindsay. We hope he accepts, but he's already done in the United States are not traditional interviews. They are fawning pep session specifically designed to amplify Zielinski's demand that the US enter more deeply into war in Eastern Europe and pay for that is not journalism. It is government propaganda propaganda of the ugliest kind, the kind it kills people at the same time, our politicians and media outlets have been doing this promoting a foreign leader like he's new consumer brand, not a single Western journalist is bothered interview, the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin, most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine what his goals are now never heard his voice. That's wrong. Americans have a right to know all they can about a war there implicated in and we the right to tell them about it because we are Americans to freedom of speech is our birthright. We were born with the right to say what we believe that right cannot be taken away no matter who is in the White House, but they're trying anyway. Almost 3 years ago, the Biden administration illegally spied on our text messages and then link the contents of their sermons in the news media. They did this order stop up an interview that we were planning last month were pretty certainly get exactly the same thing once again but this time we came to Moscow anyway. We are not here because we love Vladimir Putin. We are here because we love the United States. We wanted to remain prosperous and free. We pay for this trip ourselves with no money from any government or group, nor are we charging people to see the interview is not behind a pay wall, anyone can watch the entire thing shot live to tape and unedited. On her website, Tucker Carl.com Elon musk. His great credit has promised not to suppress or block this interview. Once a coach on his platform acts and were grateful for that Western governments, by contrast, will certainly do their best to censor this video on other less principal platforms because that's what they do. They are afraid of information they can control what you have no reason to be afraid of it. We are not encouraging you to agree with what Putin may say in this interview, but we are urging you to watch it, you should know as much as you can and then like a free citizen and not a slave. You can decide for yourself. Thanks
Hello, Graham,
The targeting of civilians that Russia does in Ukraine is an old story. They did the same thing in Afghanistan in the 1980s and when I was there decades later the evidence of the ferocity of their attacks was still evident.
Historian Mohammad Hassan Kakar has written extensively on the horrors the Russians perpetrated in Afghanistan. As an introduction to the chronicle of massacres and senseless destruction in his book, "Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response," published by the University of California Press, he wrote:
"Indiscriminate mass killing of the civilians by the Soviet soldiers dates from the invasion. In none of their operations did they confine themselves to battles with the combatants. Indeed, the Soviet soldiers failed throughout to conduct themselves with proper discipline, showing themselves to be ill trained and unconcerned with observing the laws of war. To kill civilians indiscriminately, deliberately, and as a matter of policy; to destroy their sources of livelihood; to force them to flee abroad; to do so without provocation on the part of the civilians constitutes a crime defined at Nürnberg as “devastation not justified by military necessity.” The laws of war have as their objective that “the ravages of war should be mitigated as far as possible by prohibiting needless cruelties.” The Soviet soldiers did not observe such laws. On the contrary, they carried out the war in Afghanistan by indiscriminately killing civilians, individually and in groups, and devastating their land, visiting on them a terrible variety of unmitigated cruelties."
Reisman and Norchi also extensively documented the ferocity of Russia's war in Afghanistan. See their "Genocide and the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan" which particularly calls out the deliberate program of depopulation by massacre the Russians carried out. A summary is in this short newsletter:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161026182528/http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/afghan/genocide.pdf
The reason I bring this up is to point out that what the Russians are doing to Ukraine in the present war up to today is SOP for them, destroying civilian infrastructure and killing civilians just to do it. Should Ukraine be defeated, the only course is to flee or be massacred. So if they are going to kill you anyway, you might as well stand and face them, and die with your boots on, as the old Indian-fighting cavalrymen said.
I hope you and your family stay safe and that one day the Russians will give up and go home.