Nationalism Wins: Reflections on the Carlson - Putin Interview

This is an exceptional aftermath analysis of the interview w/ Putin given by Tucker himself. It is worth every minute watching and listening to (9:30 min).

This interview will be dissected by many (and rightly so) who need to better understand the drivers of war and peace, diplomacy and statecraft, global leadership and global power and who does and does not make decisions.

Speaking for myself, I found the interview fascinating, at times, somewhat confusing until I understood the key point - and Tucker states that in this analysis when he uses the word "wounded."

In history, great powers compete, but there has always been a modicum of respect for their power. You would be an idiot to not respect the power, especially of the largest nuclear armed nation on the planet. And maybe that's the point. While we have "smart" people in key positions in the USG, as I've learned in my own lifetime of experiences, smart people do stupid things all the time... and boy have we done some really dumb things since the end of the Cold War when it comes to Russia.

Imagine if we had invited Russia to become a NATO member nation? What a completely different world would we live in now.

But no, we must maintain a bogeyman and that now has us on the potential brink of nuclear war. That's the definition of stupid.

... Putin spoke articulately, at great length, and in depth about history. This highlights how we in the West are almost exclusively ruled by uncultured imbeciles. This is because democracy, and especially liberal democracy, tends to select for bad leaders. Aside from the way in which money selects leaders who will be obedient slaves to the financial class and essentially act as middlemen between the masses and big finance, democracy also selects for leaders who appeal to the masses...

But after the fall of the USSR, Russia ditched its glorious five-year plans for hard facts. Meanwhile, the liberal West, no longer feeling that it had any competition and had entered a post-historical world, dove head first into indulging theories over facts, especially when it came to racial equality. The previously bottled-up liberal impulses were unleashed, and in fact "wokeism" could be defined simply as liberalism devoid of hypocrisy and finally practicing what it preaches...

One of the other things which Putin’s lengthy historical discourse shows, aside from his intelligence and the boorishness of Western leaders in comparison, is that culture matters. The point of Putin’s history lesson was that Russia has a claim to Ukraine, and to place the current conflict in a broader historical context. Ukraine has indeed been a contested borderland between Russia and Europe...

This fight at its objective core is about blood and soil, culture and history. In other words, nationalism...

Russia and the West are fundamentally alien cultures...

... the Western establishment, much like Putin, has tried to cast this war as anything other than a nationalist conflict. The Left doomed Ukraine by portraying it as being about "democracy." When MAGA hears democracy... they have come to rightfully associate that word with oligarchy, hypocrisy, anarcho-tyranny, and condescension...

Liberal democracy is incapable of reversing course and making Westerners feel pride in their history again because this would run contrary to its leveling nature, and also because if our people were to feel proud of their heritage again, they might come to reject the Great Replacement...

Call it what one will, but we desperately need another option based on nationalism, authority, responsibility, efficiency, and self-sufficiency...

Probably the central propaganda state lie of the United States and the west about this war in Ukraine has been that this war began in February of 2022, when the Russians sent a large number of its soldiers into Ukraine. The reality is that there has been a war in Ukraine since 2014. A war between the eastern provinces right over the Russian border, that are Russian speaking and Russian allied, and the government in Kiev that was installed with the help of the United States...

This is a conflict that you have to understand from the Russian perspective. Of course they are going to feel threatened when right on the most sensitive part of their border there is a U.S.-installed government bombing the people who consider themselves Russian... It began in 2014 with the overthrow of the constitutionally-elected government, the annexation of Crimea, and the decision by the decision by the government in Kiev to start attacking the people of eastern Ukraine.

... Western media outlets "lie to their readers and viewers" by promoting Kiev's position while downplaying Russia's, Carlson claimed. "That's wrong. Americans have the right to know all they can about a war they are implicated in," he said in a video on X on Tuesday.

Carlson added that he wanted to talk to Putin because it is his "duty to inform people," especially with regard to the Ukraine conflict, since the US is Kiev's biggest military backer.

US conservative talk show host and filmmaker Matt Walsh compared Putin’s answers to Biden's latest press conference.

"Tonight as Putin gave intelligent, scholarly answers that delved into a thousand years of Russian history... Biden was babbling incoherently about how the president of Egypt is actually the president of Mexico," Walsh wrote on X.

... 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...

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...

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...

... Our globalist leaders may have deprecated sovereignty since the end of the Cold War, but that does not mean it has ceased for an instant to be the primary subject of politics...

When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that... Out of a crumbling empire, he rescued a nation-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country...

Putin did not come out of nowhere. Russian people not only tolerate him, they revere him...

... The other thing Putin did was restore the country’s position abroad. He arrived in power a decade after his country had suffered a Vietnam-like defeat in Afghanistan. Following that defeat, it had failed to halt a bloody Islamist uprising in Chechnya. And worst of all, it had been humiliated by the United States and NATO in the Serbian war of 1999, when the Clinton administration backed a nationalist and Islamist independence movement in Kosovo. This was the last war in which the United States would fight on the same side as Osama Bin Laden...

One theme runs through Russian foreign policy, and has for much of its history. There is no country, with the exception of Israel, that has a more dangerous frontier with the Islamic world...

To prevent a hostile NATO from establishing its own naval base in the Black Sea, by this account, Russia had to take Crimea, which in any case is historically Russian territory...

So why are people thinking about Putin as much as they do? Because he has become a symbol of national self-determination...