There was a great deal of hissy hysterics across the western world with regard to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin. However, you don’t have to be.a fan of either man in order to find some real value in what was presented if you look at it objectively. Would there have been such n outcry if ,say, Barbara Walters had done the interview? It doesn’t matter how salient the questions were, friendly or hostile, probing or softball, or any other “performance” criteria that stupid media are focused on. For what we very clearly saw was a fairly deep, unfiltered glimpse into the mind of an adversary, How much was truthful and how much misleading, self-serving, or completely false ought to be secondary to what was revealed in spite of those things.
We got a pretty clear idea of what Putin’s thinking is on a wide range of topics, what his feelings are, and what motivates him. That is far more enlightening than any misleading statements he might have made, or how some claims might be factually incorrect, or merely disputable. Anyone observing this with an open mind would have learned a great deal about where he is coming from, and even if you consider him an outright enemy, it is clearly valuable information to possess. His history lesson was shaded by a sentimental and prejudicial perspective, as would be the same from another side, but overall it was not historically incorrect.
When it comes to the west and NATO he revealed a good deal of resentment and hurt due to what he sees as rejection from the west, and his viewpoint does deserve some consideration based upon the way things evolved that could have turned out differently. When he says that Russia and Yeltsin were seeking to join the west and were rebuffed there is enough truth to it to question some of perceptions and policies instituted in our name. Clearly policy makers discounted the very real differences between the Soviet Union and Russia, the latter of which they wanted to contain and reduce as though it were still run by aggressive communists (rather than committed anti-communists). When he points to NATO expansion despite assurances that wouldn’t happen, he is historically correct, but would clearly have been acceptable if Russia had been allowed to become part of it along with all the rest. This does not negate Russian duplicity regarding other matters regarding Ukraine, etc.or breaking agreements, but there is enough historical reality here to be considered thoughtfully, and free of our own biases and ideological sentiments. *
But the ideological propagandists that control the media don’t want you to be able to make your own judgement, because they “know better” and believe you are too stupid or gullible enough to make a sound judgement on your own. However, their dishonesty is only verified by the fact that they don’t even want you to hear anything they don’t like or that might be contrary to their worldview. They want to suppress information rather than allowing its free flow, which is absolutely contrary to everything we stand for in the west.
In current reading it is easy to find numerous instances of this malignant perspective. In The New Republic, (which used to be a thoughtful, serious publication I used to subscribe to until they descended into progressive leftism) they are still writing about ways to get rid of Fox News, to literally shut them down because they don’t like its content. It is telling that people who used to feign open-mindedness cannot abide even one outlet that has different viewpoint than the media cartel, and are apoplectic because of its dominant audience statistics. Then you have the current issue of The Atlantic, that once made at least some effort at fairness, devoting an entire issue to nothing besides anti-Trump articles that are more revealing of their own paranoia and ideological limitations than anything meaningful we don’t already know.
But at the pinnacle of the toxic garbage heap is the New York Times, due to the extent to which it still dominates the media cartel. Yesterday they ran a really juvenile article purporting to show how the Republican party is “racist,” based upon a handful of fairly innocuous comments, so beneath journalistic standards it is only comprehensible when you do a careful reading of at least half of all articles in the Times every day. They constantly and consistently view everything through race-based ideological blinders even when the topic has little or nothing to do with race. This in turn leads to defining people in identity boxes that are then ideologically interpreted to portray individuals and populations that simply don’t exist in the real world. I’m not even going to bother with all the factual errors and conceits in this case, if only because the practice is so continuously widespread in the Times.
For a broader view on this topic and its implications see Russia, the West and the World following this.
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