Follow-up Thoughts on the Tucker Carlson-Putin Interview (and Memes)

Yesterday I met with Billy, Ben, and Carlo on their show to talk more about the Tucker-Putin interview, which was good as I had more time to reflect since I wrote my previous post on the matter.

The main thing is that Tucker commented afterward that this is an interview he’ll be reflecting on for a year, which is the right attitude. People typically only retain about 40-60% of what is said to them, so while Putin’s 30 minute dissertation was interesting, no one new to Russian history is going to remember most of it. However, it was still worthwhile, as it drove home a couple of important points. The first one is that Putin is actually well-read and can coherently give such an explanation in the first place, which is more than can be said about Biden, or most other western heads of state. The second and actually more important point is that the history of the Russian and Ukrainian nations go far back, and they’re parts of one and the same people. For a large portion of the primary – American – audience, this was the first time they had ever heard such a thing.

Another interesting point of discussion was the idea of “denazification,” which Putin spelled out clearly. Ukraine’s current government openly celebrates nazis and nazi collaborators in World War II, which makes both Ukrainian nazism and the solution to it well-defined. As far as I can tell, this part of the discussion was not mentioned at all in any western mainstream article.

Another part of the discussion that went unmentioned in western news coverage was Putin’s closing anecdote about the trapped Ukrainian soldiers who, when asked to surrender, shouted “Russians don’t surrender” and fought to the death. That’s one of those re-occurring stories throughout history that started in reality, entered the realm of fairy tales, then came back to reality. Tucker was visibly moved by the story, and that’s probably the first time he’s ever heard of such a thing. That’s just not how Americans talk about our enemy, or for that matter anyone except ourselves. Below is the full video, and after that some memes that I particularly liked.