An idiot’s guide to Russia
TUCKER CARLSON’S INTERVIEW OF VLADIMIR PUTIN WAS SHAMELESS SYCOPHANCY
It is perfectly acceptable, indeed necessary, for journalists to interview autocrats, but Tucker Carlson’s recent sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin was not journalism in any sense. It was sycophantic, sloppy and shameless — and its positive reception in some circles only highlights the deep rot lurking within American conservatism.
Throughout the twohour interview, Carlson rarely challenged or factchecked the Russian president and, worse yet, often seemed shockingly ignorant of basic information about Eastern European history and geopolitics. As a result, Putin was able to give an almost-uninterrupted stump speech rife with falsehoods.
Yet the Russian president squandered his golden propaganda opportunity by misjudging what topics might appeal to North American audiences, whom he inadvertently bored. This was immediately apparent when, at the beginning of the interview, he began rambling about European history — a topic he fixated on, to everyone’s exasperation, for an entire 40 minutes.
For those who have followed the invasion of Ukraine closely, Putin’s historical obsessions were unsurprising. While Russian officials claim that their foreign policy is a response to NATO’S eastward expansion, Putin has repeatedly made it clear that his warmongering is fundamentally fuelled by his imperial understanding of regional history, which denies the legitimacy of the Ukrainian nation.
This is not just speculation. Putin made his world view clear in the summer of 2021 when he published a 5,000-word essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The narratives presented in this essay, which have been thoroughly debunked, are frequently invoked by Putin
and are generally understood to be the ideological foundation of his full-scale invasion.
The interview with Carlson was, in this sense, just a tired rehash of old ideas. Putin began by referencing the Kyivan Rus — a state founded in the 800s which, as the name suggests, called Kyiv its capital. He claimed that this state was fundamentally Russian and that all of the lands it once occupied consequently have a Russian soul.
But this argument is absurd.
The Kyivan Rus was indeed the predecessor of both Ukraine and Russia (and Belarus, too), but, after the state collapsed beneath Mongol onslaughts in the 1200s, its constituent
peoples diverged. Using the Kyivan Rus to claim that contemporary Ukrainians are actually Russians is as nonsensical as claiming that Italians are actually Turkish since both nations once belonged to the Roman Empire.
Putin then went on to claim that Ukraine is an artificial nation that was predominantly invented by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s — but this narrative is also false.
Ukrainians first established their own state in the
1600s (known as the Cossack Hetmanate), which was subsequently liquidated by the Russian Empire. Moscow then tried, unsuccessfully, to assimilate its Ukrainian subjects by banning public expressions of Ukrainian culture and language.
After the First World War, Ukraine once again established an independent state (a fact that Putin conveniently skipped), which survived for three years before being crushed by, and absorbed into, the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, the Soviets tried to
politically neutralize Ukrainian nationalism by tolerating and legitimizing it (this is the era wherein Putin claims that the Ukrainian nation was “invented”), but, from the 1930s onward, Ukrainian culture was, yet again, marginalized and slowly erased.
Had Carlson done his homework like a real journalist, he could have pushed Putin on his revisionist history — but he was out of his depth and didn’t seem to even understand why these narratives are relevant to contemporary conflicts.
Putin then went on to claim, incredibly, that Poland started the Second World War by being “unco-operative” and refusing to allow Hitler to annex part of its territory, which “forced” the Nazis to invade.
In pushing this point, not only was Putin lying again (Hitler had long-standing plans to murder and enslave most of the Polish population), he was also drawing shocking parallels between his own foreign policy and that of the Nazis.
And of course, Carlson said nothing.
The rest of the interview was just as bad. Putin claimed that Ukraine’s 2014 pro-west Maidan Revolution was an American-engineered coup — which is false. Carlson not only nodded along, he seemed unaware of who the two main Ukrainian political candidates at the time actually were.
Putin then repeatedly asserted that Ukraine is governed by neo-nazis, which was another lie that went unchallenged. Not only have far-right parties never gotten more than five per cent of the national vote in Ukraine, the country’s Jewish and LGBTQ communities have vehemently condemned this narrative as Russian propaganda (it is also worth noting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish).
Carlson asked Putin if he had any further invasions planned in the future — to which Putin said no. After the interview, Carlson declared to his cameraman that “Russia is not an expansionist power” and that you’d have to be “an idiot” to think otherwise.
But apparently Carlson and his supporters suffer from severe memory loss. Just two years ago, Putin and his allies spent months assuring the world that Russia had no plans to invade Ukraine and that any suggestions otherwise were “American aggression.” Only an idiot, useful or not, would blindly trust Putin’s newest promises of non-aggression.
But perhaps it’s unfair to expect Carlson to pay attention to reality. In 2020, he successfully argued his way out of a defamation lawsuit by asserting that his work is just entertainment, not journalism, and that people do not expect him to state actual facts. A man like this is a perfect fit for Putin, who is notorious for killing and imprisoning actual journalists who ask hard questions.
HE WAS OUT OF HIS DEPTH AND DIDN’T SEEM TO EVEN UNDERSTAND WHY THESE NARRATIVES ARE RELEVANT TO CONTEMPORARY CONFLICTS. — ADAM ZIVO
A MAN LIKE THIS IS A PERFECT FIT FOR PUTIN.