Saturday, March 12, 2022

How Tucker Carlson Defends Putin's Genocidal War Crimes In Ukraine
(And Why Russian State TV Considers Him A "Co-Host")

As I wrote yesterday, Russian propaganda pawn and Putin-sycophant Tucker Carlson has been relentless in his defense of Vladimir Putin's numerous and obvious war crimes in Ukraine. In Russia, state propaganda stations broadcast Carlson's Fox segments unedited and describe him as "practically one of their cohosts". He has also embraced Turkey dictator Tayyip Erdogan and his segments are shown on Chinese Communist Party TV. Carlson cheerleads for an authoritarian and mass murdering despot on a nightly basis.

Seth Abramson (Proof) has written a lengthy and unsettling essay highlighting "10 terrifying things about the worst military crisis in Europe since 1945". (Note: Abramson is the only journalist providing extensive and in-depth reporting on the Capitol Insurrection, uncovering countless disturbing facts and making mind-blowing connections that might eventually appear in the mainstream media in six or eight months (or, more likely, will never appear).)

Abramson understands that his 13,000-word essay might seem "not just alarmist but almost ludicrously paranoid". Nevertheless:
I've been nervous about publishing this article ever since I started writing it.

The reason for my anxiety will be familiar to anyone inside or outside the American government who has extensively researched Vladimir Putin and understands what the current atrocities in Europe represent: a terrifying new stage in the war against the West that Putin has been waging for twenty years, and that he's been winning for at least half that time in part because many in the West remain unaware they're at war.

To write at length about Putin and his twenty-first-century infiltrations of Western democracies and their institutions—as I did in the "Proof" trilogy—is to run the risk of seeming not just alarmist but almost ludicrously paranoid. It's only the fact that all the warnings those who've written extensively about Putin have been giving for years are now coming to horrific fruition that it even feels safe to write candidly about what we're all now experiencing.

Academics can debate whether our current period is in the umbra of the same Cold War that dominated the last century, or a new one; whether we're on the doorstep of World War III, or are already in it; whether the conditions on the ground in Europe today are most reflective of the eve of World War I or World War II; but what no one can deny is that what is happening in Ukraine is not merely a "news story" or even a spate of well-televised war crimes but a fundamental shifting of our age toward chaos.

There is no need to rehash the core facts beyond this brief summary: Putin is a former KGB agent and current murderous autocrat who is almost certain to be a dictator over Russia until his death; he has repeatedly said that the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century was the 1991 fall of the Communist Soviet Union; he seeks to reconstitute the land area of the Soviet Union by whatever means necessary and over however long a period of time is required, though he understands that this cannot be accomplished without the dissolution or destruction of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization defensive alliance (NATO) and possibly both the European Union and the United States; the post-Soviet government in Russia, including (indeed perhaps especially) Putin's KGB, began searching for ways to collapse American democracy through asymmetrical warfare from the moment the Soviet Union passed into history; and some significant portion of the current domestic political strife in the United States has been deliberately provoked by the Kremlin and its agents through acts of subterfuge, espionage, propaganda, and hacking that properly answer to the name war.

Yesterday, a former high-ranking official in the Donald Trump administration, Miles Taylor, said that the current Trumpist-Putinist Republican Party is far and away the greatest national security threat America has faced in his lifetime. That he is correct is confirmed not just by the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trumpist irregulars or the fact that former president Trump—to please Putin and ensure his own future business opportunities in Russia—put every U.S. alliance and interest lying beyond our shores at risk, but the fact that America is now in a global conflict (call it the Cold War, World War III, or Second Cold War, as you like) at a time when Trump and Trumpism have deliberately put our body politic at a point of permanent fracture. That most Americans still do not understand what Putin is trying to do and the cost that will be exacted upon the United States as he seeks to do it means that the coming months and perhaps years will be the darkest and most fraught in a century. . . .

[T]here are already significant signs that the war in Europe will destabilize Earth's international economy for the foreseeable future; the war has also shifted global alliances in such an extraordinary fashion and to such a dramatic degree that America's supposed allies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will not speak to the President of the United States, and the United States has now sent emissaries to negotiate with our long-time enemies in Venezuela. . . . Thousands of civilians are now being killed in Ukraine because they lack air cover, and yet the United States has just declared that it has no appetite for aiding Ukraine in rebuilding its air force via MiG-29s from Poland.

In short, we're in the earliest days of a sequence of global events whose end none can know but whose present is a darkness deeper than anyone younger than 85 has known. . . .

This essay seeks to speak candidly . . . and to do so in terms that American media has so far eschewed—in part because it is habitually and temperamentally "present-oriented," and in part because it has missed the fact, as have most Americans, that our country is, sadly, already implicitly at war with Russia.

While this may seem an inauspiciously hot-headed and alarmist start to what intends to be a sober essay on the very geopolitics that I wrote three national bestsellers about over the last forty months, understand that with the advent of the internet and the establishment of a global economy there was never a chance that World War III would look like World War II or World War I. The war we are in now is very much a twenty-first-century war, which doesn't mean that there are no conventional components to it—as the Ukrainians are learning right now, with devastating consequences—but that if we fail to appreciate the unconventional components of international warfare in this century we are dooming ourselves to defeat at the very moment that the inchoate and unconventional aggressions of our enemies have become conventional and dire.

With all this said, here are ten truths that American media and American voters need to come to terms with immediately.

The Ten Hardest Truths About the War in Europe

(1) America is now in a world war. . . .
With that as background, consider that the most popular cable news [sic] host in the United States is pushing blatant Russian propaganda for three hours every night.

Aaron Rupar (Public Notice) tweeted an excellent summary of what Carlson is doing and how he does it.

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1 comment:

  1. Paul HickmanTuesday, March 15, 2022 11:06:00 AM

    Wonder if the death of a Fox Cameraman has changed Tucker's Tune on Vlad ?

    ReplyDelete