Tucker’s Russian Adventure

What does the Putin interview really tell us?

By now many of you will have already watched Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin. You will have seen for yourselves exactly how Putin presents himself, and you will be reaching your own conclusions based on that, assuming you didn’t already have a strong view one way or another.

It’s another significant moment that is only possible because Tucker Carlson has a huge audience, because Elon Musk and a few others are prepared to host content from Tucker, and because Tucker is no longer constrained by working for an Establishment news outlet like Fox.

The first thing we should remind ourselves of is what actual journalism is. Actual journalism always wants both sides of a very major story. Actual journalism wants to interview significant figures and world leaders, particularly at moments of enormous tension and crisis. Actual journalism wants the full story on major events, not just one side of the story.

No western mainstream media would interview Vladimir Putin after the Ukraine invasion. None of the newspapers, and none of the radio stations, and none of the TV and satellite channels. That’s extraordinary. After all, Russia is not currently at war with any western nation. Russia’s war is with Ukraine, a nation that was not a traditional Western ally, by any means. Historically, Ukraine has deep ties with Russia. It was part of Russia for centuries. It’s something of a spiritual birthplace of the Russian people, and it’s intimately connected with the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, leading to a religious brotherhood felt very deeply by both many Ukrainians and many Russians. President Zelenskky has sought to quash that brotherhood. Clerics and representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have been arrested. Security measures have banned some churches and religious affiliations.

None of that sounds like freedom, does it? Nor can you find anywhere in the history of Ukraine strong ties with America, or the United Kingdom, or France, or Sweden. Ukraine was part of Russia. This isn’t Russian propaganda. This is established and known history. And in World War Two Ukrainians who opposed Stalin’s Russia, were Ukrainians who fought alongside and for Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Ukrainians allied with Hitler, and Ukrainians enthusiastically took part in everything that allying with Hitler in Eastern Europe meant. Death squads. The genocide of Jews. All of it. Some of those people, like Stepan Bandera, are still heroes in Ukraine today.

That doesn’t sound like freedom, either, does it? It doesn’t sound like a traditional western ally either. These people have been both enthusiastic Communists under Soviet rule, and enthusiastic Nazis during World War Two. Ukraine was so intimately part of Russia and part of Russian identity that it was in fact the last region to still have a White Russian presence during the Russian Civil War following the Russian Revolution. In Crimea, the part still controlled by Russia, the part where the last White Russian resistance against Communism fell. Nobody in the West in those days imagined that Ukraine was anything but Russian.

What all of this means is that the war in Ukraine is a lot more complicated than the version of that war we are presented with. It’s a war that is a Civil War between western Ukrainians who despise Russia and Putin, and eastern Ukrainians who do not. Those eastern Ukrainians appealed to Russia to save them from Zelenskky’s government. 14,000 people had died in fighting between Ukrainian government forces and eastern Ukrainian separatists before Russia invaded, or as Putin and the Russians see it, before they finally felt forced to respond. Not only to answer those pleas for help, but also to protect their own borders and their own security.

All of these things are true. All of them are things that real journalism would be mentioning, and real journalists would at least want to hear and discuss. But no mainstream media journalists wanted to do that. None of them wanted to talk to Ukrainians who opposed the Zelenskky government. None of them wanted to talk to the kind of Ukrainians who asked Putin for help and who voted to become part of Russia again. Those Ukrainians were ignored as if they didn’t exist. And none of these mainstream journalists wanted to hear from Putin himself why Russia had invaded, what the Russian position really is, and what would persuade Russia to stop fighting.

Those are fundamental questions that any real journalist should want to ask. You cannot understand this war unless you speak to both sides. And speaking to one side, speaking to Putin, does not mean you automatically agree with him. It doesn’t mean you support him. It doesn’t mean you think invading Ukraine was a decent or a noble or even a sensible thing to do. It means you are being a real journalist, and it means you are trying to get to the truth by hearing more than one side of a controversial conflict.

No mainstream journalist in two years has wanted to interview Vladimir Putin, despite repeatedly telling us that this war is all about Vladimir Putin. We are told that his personality, his alleged megalomania and his lust for foreign conquest is what caused this war. We are told that his personality and character is a threat to the whole world, as Hitler’s was.

But all that has to be taken on faith. It has to be taken solely on the word of a mainstream media who all immediately picked a side in a conflict thousands of miles away, involving people who were not established western allies in any traditional sense.

That sounds like the opposite of journalism, the opposite of wanting to find the truth. They picked a truth, and then they refused to listen to anything else. They said Putin was solely responsible, and then they refused to talk to Putin.

And this behaviour was not just on the part of the western media who day after day, week after week supported more and more western money and western intervention in the war. For a journalist, talking to Putin should have been an automatic if you want to understand the conflict and report it fully. But for the leadership of the West, talking to Putin should have been even more important. It should have been an obvious step for prevention of conflict, deescalation of the conflict, and for the pursuit of peace. If western leaders wanted the war to end, they would have to talk to Putin to achieve that.

According to Putin in the Tucker interview, the Biden administration closed all communication with Russia immediately after Biden was controversially awarded the Presidency by the media and by the western political Establishment following a highly dubious election riddled with fraud. Biden, on very shaky ground regarding his own legitimacy, refused to treat the serving Russian leader as a figure of significance he needed to talk to. His whole administration did not care to pursue the discussion without which peace is impossible.

I don’t find it at all unlikely that Putin is telling the truth, and that this is how it played out.

Think what it says about the West, the leadership of the West, and western media. It says that none of them were in the least bit interested in either gathering the information required to properly assess the truth, or in engaging in the dialogues that create peace and could have ended the war if such a process had taken place.

This refusal to treat with Russia and to speak to Putin was, from journalists, a betrayal of what journalism should be, which is the pursuit of the full truth and its disclosure to the public. The same refusal from politicians was a betrayal of what their role should have been.

Surely, if the West is better than Russia and Putin, and even if the West is simply sensible and pragmatic, the aim should be to achieve a swift peace and an end of the war in Ukraine. Since such a war involves a nuclear power and destabilises global relations as a whole, a Western leadership actually doing its job would want peace and would certainly be prepared to engage and discuss potential peace terms, no matter who the other party was.

Putin of course describes the West doing the exact opposite. They refused to speak to the Russians, and Boris Johnson was sent to Ukraine to prevent an already formed peace deal being signed. That one merely confirmed reports in alternative media going back many months. Interestingly, the first mainstream media acknowledgement of the squashed peace deal came in its coverage of the Tucker interview. Tucker forced mainstream media to acknowledge an important point that alternative media covered long ago.

Looking at the abortive peace talks in terms of the interests of western citizens, there’s no rational way to argue that an ongoing war protects western citizens more than one concluded by a peace treaty, or that provoking a spread of that war by arming, supplying and financially backing one side really serves the interests of ordinary people in the West better than peace would.

But this is the position of western leadership, and of the western mainstream media. Both insist that belligerent actions supporting Ukraine protect the West, when these actions prevent peace, extend the war, and risk nuclear escalation.

Hillary Clinton, always a good barometer of the madness of western leaders, described Carlson as a useful idiot for talking to Vladimir Putin. No doubt she would describe this article in similar terms. But the gaslighting on this really is remarkable. The Clinton position, which is as typical for her only the slightly more brutal expression of the mainstream Establishment position, is that pursuing dialogue (either for truth or peace) is serving the interests of Vladimir Putin. It’s a form of treason, apparently, to want to properly inform people, to want access to the full facts and opinions at work, and to make your own informed judgements following that.

It is treason to be a real journalist.

This is a pretty curious position, if one were looking for sense or consistency, when adopted by the wife of a President whose only lasting possibly positive legacy is the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, behind which Bill Clinton put the considerable power and influence of the US government. The Clintons believed in taking to the IRA when the IRA were murdering the women and children of the United States strongest actual ally. But talking to the leader of a nation at war with a country that isn’t a traditional ally at all is inherently siding with the enemy.

Nor have western journalists ever shown any reluctance to interview all manner of deeply unpleasant individuals or world leaders. Mainstream media interviewed the likes of Pol Pot and Idi Amin. Western media outlets howled and roared against media restrictions placed on them by the Thatcher government during the Troubles when they kept interviewing the IRA. In all these cases the media and politicians who now say that interviewing Putin is spreading Russian ‘disinformation’ or serving as Putin’s puppet (and that talking to Putin as a western leader does this too) had previously just as vehemently insisted that terrorists or dictators have to be spoken to and negotiated with. As a more recent example, multiple mainstream western journalists are perfectly happy to interview Iranian leaders who sponsor terrorism and talk positively about genocide, or to do the same in terms of platforming evil views by talking to Hamas or Hamas supporters.

None of the people they said were fit for official receptions, fit for continued dialogue, and integral to peace efforts, were possessed of a nuclear capacity like that of Putin’s Russia. There was less urgent and enormous threat justifying the pursuit of peace, but there was far more pursuit of peace with those people than with Putin.

And so we come to the things that the interview exposes best about both the western media refusal to interview Putin, and what Carlson’s interview shows us about Putin.

Western media and governments not only failed to pursue peace by refusing to talk to Putin, they happily trampled on the right of western citizens to judge for themselves when they banned and blocked the broadcasts of Russian media. The right to informed choice is as important in the field of foreign policy ethics as it is in medical ethics. You cannot make an accurate, informed choice about the policies you vote for when information is bring censored and the content you receive is being suppressed. But what is it about talking to Putin, or hearing Putin, that is so dangerous?

Surely it derives from the extent to which our leaders and media have been lying about Putin and his position. Those of us following alternative media and who have previously watched Putin know some truths that we aren’t supposed to know. We know that Putin presents as intelligent, cogent, quick witted and persuasive. We know that he can provide good and sometimes convincing explanations of Russia’s actions, and that he is capable of far more dry wit than any of our leaders.

Both from the dishonesties of their position, and some of the obvious truths in his, letting us listen to Putin is dangerous. We might recognise that our leaders are hungrier for war and conquest than he is. We might see that he seems to love his country, just as much as our leaders despise our countries. We might even think that Russians are better off with Putin than we are with Biden or Trudeau or Macron or Sunak.

The Russian channels in every sense were not blocked because Putin wants war. They were blocked because he doesn’t. And once you know that, before or after watching Tucker’s interview, you know why Tucker will be getting an awful lot of hate for doing his job and listening to the other side of the story.