Don't Look Up! Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladimir Putin

What The Interview Reveals About Our Leaders And Western Media Narratives

I’ll be honest, I was not looking forward to having to talk about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Not because I think he should not have done it, nor because I think it airing the interview is harmful or some kind of disinformation. In fact, I wish more journalists would be so bold as to try and find out everything they can about the other side’s perspective, instead of being so conspicuously uncurious to find out more about the world and what most of the people in it believe. No, the main reason is because it is just so predictable what is going to happen afterwards, as regardless of what was said in the interview, it gets spun to serve the same narratives that have led to this pointless conflict in Ukraine in the first place. That is why I still felt compelled to discuss at least some aspects of the two-hour interview, including the way it is portrayed in much of the Western media, because it reveals certain aspects of Western foreign policy and media narratives that the people that create them would rather have you remain unaware of. I will be linking to some other writers and journalists that have discussed other aspects of the interview at the end of this post, so be sure to check those out for some other worthwhile perspectives. Let me know in the comments if you know of any other insightful posts about the interview.

To give an example from my own country, I opened the left-leaning Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant just after the interview aired, to see them spend most of the article talking about everything Carlson did not do or talk about, as well as, for some psychic reason, use his facial expressions to make snarky inferences about his emotional state and innermost thoughts. I have seen similar takes in multiple news outlets. That is why this whole situation is worth talking about, because it once again exposes the real nature of Western media and power structures and how these are trying to do everything they can to prevent you from hearing other perspectives. The mere fact that Western media is so focused on discrediting the interview, both before it was aired and afterwards, already speaks volumes. For starters, clearly there is a belief that you cannot be trusted to make your own judgements about what is and is not true. Only they have the magical ability to do that for you, of course, following their own truly objective journalistic standard that is not beholden to subjective concepts like truth or reality when those do not fit their views of the world. As readers of my work will know, I wholeheartedly reject that type of journalism and way of looking at the world. I see my job as providing you with facts, while not feigning some kind of dishonest neutrality or objectivity, and giving you the tools and information necessary to make up your own mind. Of course my own biases shape the way I frame a topic, or what kind of information I might place more of an emphasis on, as it would for any human being. The best I can do is be honest and open with you about it, and link the original materials so that you can check those out for yourself and see if you come to similar conclusions. Here is the full transcript of the interview, thank you to

Ohio Barbarian

for bringing it to my attention, as well as the video footage of the interview itself.

The other thing that makes some people in the West so afraid of what Putin says, which I’m assuming is also why Russian media--and therefore Russian perspectives--have been banned, sanctioned, and/or suppressed in Europe, is that they do not want there to be any alternative versions of their truth out there, at least not anywhere where the general population might hear about it. A few independent journalists or critical thinkers, or groups of dedicated protesters, can easily be dismissed as doing Putin’s bidding and told to ‘go back to China’. You can only get away with such obviously ludicrous claims as long as you can keep making them unchallenged. And that is what hearing from the other side has the potential to do, to bring topics into mainstream discussion that evidently should not be discussed.

Before getting into what I believe are some of the most important takeaways from the interview, let’s get a few things out of the way first. Obviously Putin has all sorts of opinions about Russia and its place in the world, and about Western society, based on his experiences and views of the world. That is to be expected. As far as I can tell, Putin was for the first 20 – 30 minutes or so of the interview telling a selective history of the Russian state and contrasting it with that of Ukraine, in order to implicitly make the point that Ukraine as a nation is an artificial construct whereas Russia as a nation is based on a common identity, religion, and so forth. You do not have to be a historian to know that most if not all nations are artificial constructs, usually encompassing many peoples, cultures, and traditions, and considering how often lands have changed hands over the centuries, especially in that region, I personally do not think you can make any legitimate claims to a land without also having to recognise the legitimacy of about a dozen others. Nor do I think any historical grievances or geopolitical threats justify starting a war, but history and context matter. That is the same thing I explained at the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, when I talked about the role of NATO in bringing about this whole situation. However, there is a grain of truth in what Putin said about Ukraine, in the sense that that country remains geographically divided, with the eastern half of the country feeling a closer affinity to Russia and the western half wanting to get closer to Europe, although the past years of violence might have changed people’s minds somewhat.

That is why Ukrainian leaders have always had to walk a fine line between both camps, as there has been significant support for cooperation with both West and East. Until the 2014 Maidan coup, that is, when with Western support and backing the government was deposed by far-right nationalists and replaced with one that started enacting measures to suppress the use of the Russian language, glorified Nazi collaborators from WW2 like Stepan Bandera, bombed the eastern, Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, and of course go after political opponents, which seems to be kind of a tradition for all Ukrainian leaders (or Russian for that matter) including current president Zelensky, who has suppressed media, cracked down on labour unions, and indefinitely postponed elections. To some extent, you can argue that those are necessary acts during a time of war, but I would argue that it does call into question the whole narrative about supporting Ukraine to save its democracy.

I think this quote from Jacobin is a pretty fair assessment of the complicated events that unfolded during the Maidan Revolution:

“In truth, the Maidan Revolution remains a messy event that isn’t easy to categorize but is far from what Western audiences have been led to believe. It’s a story of liberal, pro-Western protesters, driven by legitimate grievances but largely drawn from only one-half of a polarized country, entering a temporary marriage of convenience with the far right to carry out an insurrection against a corrupt, authoritarian president. The tragedy is that it served largely to empower literal neo-Nazis while enacting only the goals of the Western powers that opportunistically lent their support — among which was the geopolitical equivalent of a predatory payday loan.”

The fact remains that there were some uncomfortable truths behind the things that Putin talked about, even if surrounded by questionable recollections of events both recent and historic, and those truths is where I believe the media hostility is coming from. A lot of these truths remain undiscussed and absent from a lot of news coverage about this interview. Like how before the fall of the Soviet-Union was made to believe that NATO would not expand eastwards, or that there were at least several times that Russia actually wanted to cooperate with the West (even join NATO) but was rebuffed, or how as I mentioned above the Ukrainian government was deposed with a coup that the West funded and supported after its president started backing out of a trade deal with Europe, or how the West and Ukraine never intended to implement the Minsk agreement that was made to stop the violence of the Ukrainian government against its Russian minorities, or how there was almost a peace deal a few months into the war until the UK and US deliberately sabotaged the talks, which has since been confirmed by multiple people involved in the negotiations, including the previous president of Israel and Germany’s former chancellor. Then there is the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline, which resulted in a massive leak of methane gas, a greenhouse gas which traps over 100 times as much heat as CO2. In all likelihood the United States is behind this, which apparently is still not enough to shake European nations out of their self-flagellating obsequiousness to the American empire. I would have loved to see Putin provide some evidence or unreleased documents of some kind, which I’m sure he must have, to give us further insights into what exactly happened in all these events, at least from the Russian perspective. The same thing goes for Western leaders, for that matter. But then, that is the entire issue, isn’t it? The fact that there have been so many lies, obfuscations, and backtracks as new evidence emerges, of leaders from the so-called free and democratic West, that I am now hoping Putin, the last person I would trust with safeguarding values like democratic representation and journalistic transparency, shares information to help us make sense of what happened.

What the West has done, through its constant war-mongering, propaganda narratives, and refusal to even entertain the slightest idea of a compromise with their rivals, is create a situation in which Vladimir Putin appears as the reasonable one. In this interview, he once again called for negotiations, which the U.S. predictably rejected because they “remain sceptical of his intentions” and “have seen no actions to indicate he is interested in ending this war.” Imagine being so willfully blind that you think that someone calling for peace actually wants more war, while people calling for literal genocide are really just peace-loving hippies at heart, who just can’t help but find themselves in constant conflict with all of their neighbours. It must be so frustrating that protecting and pumping a country full of weapons just can’t seem to bring across that message of love and peace that the U.S. government so desperately wants them to take to heart.

The obvious alternative explanation is that they are just lying, of course. And that all talk of human rights, peace, democracy, and whatever other empty platitudes they want to use, is just a facade to obfuscate raw geopolitical and economic interests. Just seriously consider for a moment, how far gone you have to be to think that in order to convince us that the demented president whose brain is almost visibly decomposing as he talks, is not in fact unaware of where he is or what is saying most of the time, you use the genocide he is directly supporting to prove how well-functioning and clear-minded he is. Let that sink in for a moment.

I guess all that is what annoys me so much about all this. Because while people like the Dutch defence minister Kajsa Ollongren say that ‘support for Ukraine will simply continue’ because otherwise we would be fighting in the trenches, while president Biden openly admits that bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries on Earth, accomplishes nothing but will continue regardless, while Western leaders pull support from humanitarian organisation UNWRA providing one of the only lifelines to the millions of Palestinians being massacred in Gaza based on unproven Israeli accusations, a mere two days after the International Court of Justice ordered it stop committing genocide and allow exactly that kind of aid into Gaza, and while these same leaders keep floating out ideas of conscription to fight and win World War III…et cetera ad nauseam...

...I have to sit and listen to Vladimir Putin, the man who sees violence and threats as a perfectly legitimate way of resolving disputes, and whose opponents seem to suddenly disappear as magically as international law does when it is our side violating it, describe a vision of the world that is based on cooperation, negotiation, and compromise. The very fact that he can make that point and sound infinitely more reasonable and believable than our own ‘democratically elected’ leaders supposedly representing the ‘rules-based international order’ to me is the most damning thing of all.

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