By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Vladimir Putin isn’t a hero, but his interview with Tucker Carlson brings out some basic truths that we would do well to consider. In contrast to brain dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, Putin isn’t dominated by an ideological vision that requires world hegemony. He is a nationalist who aims to advance the interest of Russia. This enables him to have a realistic perception of world politics. In what follows, I’ll discuss some of the vital points we can learn from him.
Some people don’t want us to learn these lessons. As usual, the great Dr. Ron Paul is on top of this. Right after the interview, the mainstream media attacked it. They don’t want you to know that there is another side to their propaganda. Dr. Paul says:
“There has been much written and said about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. As of this writing the video on Twitter alone has been viewed nearly 200 million times, making it likely the most-viewed news event in history.
Many millions of viewers who may not have had access to the other side of the story were informed that the Russia/Ukraine military conflict did not begin in 2022, as the mainstream media continuously reports, but in fact began eight years earlier with a US-backed coup in Ukraine. The US media does not report this because they don’t want Americans to begin questioning our interventionist foreign policy. They don’t want Americans to see that our government meddling in the affairs of other countries – whether by “color revolution,” sanctions, or bombs – has real and deadly consequences to those on the receiving end of our foreign policy.
To me, however, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin was the US mainstream media reaction. As Putin himself said during the interview, “in the world of propaganda, it’s very difficult to defeat the United States.” Even a casual look at the US mainstream media’s reporting before and after the interview would show how correct he is about that. In the days and weeks before the interview, the US media was filled with stories about how horrible it was that Tucker Carlson was interviewing the Russian president. There was the danger, they all said, that Putin might spread “disinformation.”
That Putin might say something to put his country in a better light was, they were saying, reason enough to not interview him. With that logic, why have journalism at all? Everyone interviewed by journalists – certainly every world leader – will attempt to paint a rosy picture. The job of a journalist in a free society should be to do the reporting and let the people decide. But somehow that has been lost. These days the mainstream media tells you what to think and you better not dispute it or you will be cancelled!
What the US mainstream media was really worried about was that the “other side of the story” might start to ring true with the public. So they attacked the messenger.
The CNN reporting on Tucker’s interview pretty much sums up the reaction across the board of the US mainstream media. Their headline read, “Tucker Carlson is in Russia to interview Putin. He’s already doing the bidding of the Kremlin.”
By merely doing what used to be called “journalism” – interviewing and reporting on people and events, whether good or bad – one is “doing the bidding” of the subject of the interview or report?
No wonder fellow journalist Julian Assange has been locked away in a gulag for so many years. He dared to assume that in a free society, being a journalist means reporting the good, the bad, and the ugly even if it puts those in power in a bad light.
In the end, the massive success of the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin demonstrates once and for all that the American people are sick to death of their mainstream media propagandists and liars. They are looking not for government narratives, but for truth. That’s the really good news about this interview.” See this.
Putin focused on the same point:
“Vladimir Putin: In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media. The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions. Don’t you know that? So it is possible to get involved in this work, but it is cost prohibitive, so to speak.” See this.
Putin argues that those who control US policy want to control the world, in the name of a battle for “democracy”. To do this, they want to use NATO to surround Russia with hostile powers, and they are willing to risk nuclear war to do so. They are also willing to risk nuclear war with China.
Vladimir Putin: The West is afraid of a strong China more than it fears a strong Russia because Russia has 150 million people, and China has a 1.5 billion population, and its economy is growing by leaps and bounds — over five percent a year, it used to be even more. But that’s enough for China. As Bismarck once put it, potentials are most important. China’s potential is enormous — it is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy. It has already overtaken the United States, quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a fast clip.
Let’s not talk about who is afraid of whom, let’s not reason in such terms. And let’s get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of “civilized nations,” nothing like that happened. You tricked us (I don’t mean you personally when I say “you,” of course, I’m talking about the United States), the promise was that NATO would not expand eastward, but it happened five times, there were five waves of expansion. We tolerated all that, we were trying to persuade them, we were saying: “Please don’t, we are as bourgeois now as you are, we are a market economy, and there is no Communist Party power. Let’s negotiate.”
The US claims to be spreading democracy, but the Zelensky government is riddled with neo-Nazis. This is a point Putin stresses again and again. Do we really want to support people like this?
“Vladimir Putin: When World War II broke out, part of this extremely nationalist elite collaborated with Hitler, believing that he would bring them freedom. The German troops, even the SS troops made Hitler’s collaborators do the dirtiest work of exterminating the Polish and Jewish population. Hence this brutal massacre of the Polish and Jewish population as well as the Russian population too. This was led by the persons who are well known – Bandera, Shukhevich. It was these people who were made national heroes – that is the problem. And we are constantly told that nationalism and neo-Nazism exist in other countries as well. Yes, there are seedlings, but we uproot them, and other countries fight against them. But Ukraine is not the case. These people have been turned into national heroes in Ukraine. Monuments to these people have been erected, they are displayed on flags, their names are shouted by crowds that walk with torches, as it was in Nazi Germany. These were the people who exterminated Poles, Jews and Russians. It is necessary to stop this practice and prevent the dissemination of this concept.
I say that Ukrainians are part of the one Russian people. They say, “No, we are a separate people.” Okay, fine. If they consider themselves a separate people, they have the right to do so, but not on the basis of Nazism, the Nazi ideology.
Look, the President of Ukraine visited Canada. This story is well known but is silenced in the Western countries: The Canadian parliament introduced a man who, as the speaker of the parliament said, fought against the Russians during World War II. Well, who fought against the Russians during World War II? Hitler and his accomplices. It turned out that this man served in the SS troops. He personally killed Russians, Poles, and Jews. The SS troops consisted of Ukrainian nationalists who did this dirty work. The President of Ukraine stood up with the entire Parliament of Canada and applauded this man. How can this be imagined?
What can be done to end this dangerous situation? Putin has a clear answer that makes sense. The US should stop supplying Ukraine with arms and money. Then, a territorial settlement should be negotiated that provides for Russian security, especially the inclusion of the pro-Russian Donbass region into Russia.
“Vladimir Putin: I already said that we did not refuse to talk. We are willing to negotiate. It is the Western side, and Ukraine is obviously a satellite state of the US. It is evident. I do not want you to take it as if I am looking for a strong word or an insult, but we both understand what is happening.
The financial support, 72 billion dollars, was provided. Germany ranks second, then other European countries come. Dozens of billions of dollars are going to Ukraine. There is a huge influx of weapons.
In this case you should tell the current Ukrainian leadership to stop and come to the negotiating table,”
On the Donbass, Putin says:
“So, in 2008 the doors of NATO were opened for Ukraine. In 2014, there was a coup, they started persecuting those who did not accept the coup, and it was indeed a coup, they created a threat to Crimea which we had to take under our protection. They launched a war in Donbass in 2014, using aircraft and artillery against civilians. This is when it started. There is a video of aircraft attacking Donetsk from above. They launched a large-scale military operation, then another one. When they failed, they started to prepare the next one. All this against the background of military development of this territory and opening of NATO’s doors.
How could we not express concern over what was happening? From our side, this would have been a culpable negligence – that’s what it would have been. It’s just that the US political leadership pushed us to the line we could not cross because doing so could have ruined Russia itself. Besides, we could not leave our brothers in faith and, in fact, a part of Russian people, in the face of this “war machine.”
The brain-dead Biden gang aren’t the only ones holding up a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine war The outstanding military intelligence expert Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski points out that former British PM Boris Johnson pressured the Ukraine government to reject a peace proposal it had accepted:
“A key advisor to Zelensky on US-UK-EU proxy war, and former UK PM Boris Johnson is an exemplar of magical thinking. He was outraged that Putin explained with evidence how the last 18 months of war in Ukraine could have been prevented, and the ended peacefully, as peace talks in Turkey produced a draft treaty acceptable to both Ukrainian and Russian teams. This was abruptly canned after Boris rushed to Kiev, where he demanded the Ukrainians reject the nascent agreement. Boris, bobbing in the flotsam of magical thinking, is a liar, and yet, one marvels at the power of believing that your desires and wishes can create a new world order.” See this.
Probably the most important fact to remember about the Ukraine war is the provocative nature of US foreign policy. John Leake gives a good summary:
“Russia is, in Churchill’s formulation, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” and it has always been governed by an authoritarian state. Nevertheless, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there is plenty of evidence that Russia wished to cease living in a state of enmity with the United States.
To me, it seems clear it was the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, and NOT Russia, that wished to maintain this state of enmity, for without it, there would be little justification for the U.S. government to spend hundreds of billions on weapons goodies such as the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II—a program that started in 1995 and (if DoD accountants are to be believed) has cost U.S. taxpayers about 500 billion.
With Bill Clinton’s NATO expansion in 1997, no less of a Cold War eminence than George Kennan characterized this decision as a Fateful Error that would likely result in precisely the instability and insecurity it was purportedly supposed to prevent.
From the beginning of the Russian crisis that developed in the autumn of 2021—shortly after the Biden Administrations’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after a 20-year occupation that achieved nothing—I have suspected that administration and the terrible people who advise it did everything in their power to BAIT THE RUSSIAN BEAR into invading Ukraine.
The Administration did NOTHING to defuse the crisis, and it insulted the Russians by sending the imbecilic Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference on February 18, 2022. I suspect that an Austrian-style neutrality deal would have prevented the catastrophe that has apparently gotten hundreds of thousands killed. It has also seemed obvious to me that, since 2014, Ukraine has been the CIA’s favorite pet project.
To to this day, not a single person has been able to explain to me why Russia would consider tolerating Ukraine joining NATO. Since President Monroe outlined his foreign policy in 1823, the United States government has increasingly pursued a policy of zero tolerance of any foreign military alliances or installations in the entire Western Hemisphere.
And yet, this same United States government, which has invaded and bombed dozens of countries since 2001, claims it is perfectly reasonable to propose that Ukraine (whose northeastern border lies 370 miles from Moscow) join NATO. The distance from the Mexican border to Dallas is greater.” See this.
Let’s do everything we can to end the futile conflict with Russia that brain-dead Biden and his gang of neo-con controllers have instigated.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
