Why pay attention to Tucker Carlson - and rebut him?

20240208

I am a usually passive participant in an email group of Ukrainian patriots. It is a pretty impressive group including businesspeople, authors and the like both in Ukraine and then the expatriate community.

They are divided on the question of whether they should even listen to the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin. Several have questioned my wisdom in planning to do so. They think he is best ignored.

In doing so many of them display the kind of naïveté that characterizes a lot of the American establishment left. They denigrate Carlson, as if he never had anything useful to say. They denigrate his audience as a bunch of rubes. Though too polite to say so, I suspect that they consider me to be a rube as well. This despite the fact that I have tried to show my bona fides. I have favorably reviewed their books here, here, here and here.  Among many others on the subject which you can find here under Russia-Ukraine. In short, as good leftists they think Tucker Carlson is wrong about everything and that he can safely be ignored.

Carlson is demonstrably wrong about Ukraine in many ways.  In August I posted this rebuttal to the ridiculous claim that Ukraine had blown up the Nova Kakhovka Dam, flooding out its own people.  No!  Not only is such a dastardly act totally out of character for Ukraine, and totally in the Russian character, but the explosion took a hundred times more explosives than Ukraine had any way of delivering.  The dam, as I show in the video, was thick enough for both a railroad and a highway to cross over it.  The Soviets built it to withstand another Nazi attack.  There is no way a single missile – which, by the way, nobody even saw or heard – could have done the damage.  It would not have taken much digging for Carlson to know he was wrong.

Ukrainians are a naturally conservative people, socially and politically. As a case in point, while the Ukrainian language has three genders, Ukrainian people have only two sexes. And we like it that way. A lot of us are religious in an old-fashioned way. We on the conservative side tend to:

1.       Agree with Tucker Carlson most of the time. I applaud his recent taking down of Justin Trudeau. I agree with his stand on political correctness. I loved his interviews with Javier Milei and Bret Weinstein.

2.       Respect Tucker Carlson's intelligence and integrity. We respect his dedication to journalism. We also respect that of Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Celia Farber, Naomi Wolf and Alex Berenson, formerly liberal journalists who champion free speech and oppose government lies.

3.       Believe that the current American government, the huge Internet companies, big Pharma and the media cannot be trusted. They lie all the time.

Because we believe in Carlson's fundamental decency and integrity, we believe that it is worth our effort to present Ukraine's case to him. Because we appreciate the breadth of his support throughout the American public and indeed the world public, we think it is of vital importance to rebut Carlson where he is wrong.

Therefore, we are going to compile an analysis and rebuttal to his interview with Putin. We will also – and this will make establishment people uncomfortable – point out where we think Tucker and Putin are right and the US government and media are wrong. In my opinion this is what they most greatly fear. Not that Putin will lie, which we take as a given, but that American lies will be exposed.

One of Carlson's greatest errors is to project his American process of rationality onto Putin. As I wrote at the very beginning of this war, Putin does not think like us.  Russians do not share our Western values. As the Marquis of Custine wrote two centuries ago, deceit is so deeply woven into their society that telling the truth is an unnatural act. They have always lied to everybody, including their own people. America – Carlson's America at least – is up in arms against the lies the American people are being told. The Russians have known nothing else throughout their history. Most of them passively accept it.  Zinoviev and Solzhenitsyn wrote about it. Carlson and Donald Trump are naïve to imagine that they could negotiate with the Russians. No – Russian diplomacy has frustrated Americans from the time of John Quincy Adams and John Hay.

Russians do not value human life, that of their enemies or of their soldiers. Yesterday I posted this link from a local TV station showing their wanton destruction of high-rise buildings in a civilian neighborhood of Kiev. They have been using such terror tactics throughout the war. The world saw what they did in Bucha and Irpin.  They send their own soldiers to die in so-called "meat wave" attacks on Ukraine. The most consistent bloggers are Denys Davidov, Reporting from Ukraine and The Russian Dude.  If you go back to their posts, you will see an extraordinary number of videos of Russian equipment being destroyed.  YouTube in particular doesn't permit them to show Russian soldiers dying, but they offer links to Telegram channels for the gory minded.

Historians write of a Pax Romana and a Pax Britannica.  Rome and England brought benefits to their subject peoples.  Many former subjects regret the independence that the British granted them.  Things were better off before.

Nobody ever writes about a Pax Russanica, or a Pax GoldenHordia.  Russia has been a cruel overlord throughout its history.  The Eastern European satellites are all glad to be free of them. Former Soviet Socialist Republics Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are among the most ardent members of NATO. Former SSRs more distant from Europe, such as the central Asian 'stans, are wary. Belarusians are kept on a short leash.  Though the ordinary people would love to be rid of him, their dictator Lukashenko is propped up by Putin.

Russia recklessly wastes the lives of its non-Slavic minorities in this war in Ukraine. This includes a number of predominantly Muslim peoples – the Chechens, Bashkirians and Tatars to name three. Russia's failure to develop has left its hinterlands in poverty. This in turn makes enlistment in the Russian army an attractive proposition. It is, however, decimating the young men of these countries. They are growing restless and resentful. At the same time Slavic Russia exploits the mineral wealth of these backwaters, enriching the few local satraps it places at the top of the local power structure but giving nothing to the common people.

More than anything else Carlson needs a lesson in history and ethnography. The Russians are different. They always have been different, and pretending otherwise, as the West did in the Minsk agreement, the Budapest Memorandum and so on, is a mistake. They will not understand anything other than defeat.

On the other hand, the deceit that pervades their own system has brought defeat in the past: Japan in 1905, Finland in 1939, and in the first Chechen war.  They suffered greatly in World War II and would have lost without the support of the United States. They have already burned through a vast amount of their modern military equipment in this war. Defeat is what they will understand, and the West, which armed itself in order to contain them for 74 years, can affect that defeat by properly arming Ukraine.

That's the post from Lake WeBeGone for today. Looking forward, as are we all, to the interview.

Graham