By: Joseph Schneider
Edited By: Aakrith Harikumar
This last February, many Russians reported gaining one more celebrity ally after Twix the Cat’s much-celebrated endorsement: former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson. Through his interview of Vladimir Putin inside the Kremlin this past February, not only did Mr. Carlson achieve the milestone of being the first Western journalist to interview the man who has directed the destinies of Russia for the last 24 years for the first time since his invasion of Ukraine, but also provided us with front-row seats to his historically informed thought process.
Befitting our polarized and morally relativistic day and age, both Mr. Putin and Mr. Carlson blatantly used the encounter to promote their respective versions of reality. Although many say Mr. Carson behaved like a Putin sycophant during his interview, reality is more nuanced. Evidently, Tucker Carlson did not ask Mr. Putin about his meteoric rise and consolidation of power; his repression of the political opposition — including Alexei Navalny, who died around a week after the interview — and his other domestic policies. Mr. Carlson’s goals during the interview were to consistently find ways to place his country’s president, Joe Biden, at a disadvantage by trying to magnify foreign policy failures that could bolster his own “Make America Great Again” Movement for the upcoming presidential election. It is important to concede, however, that Mr. Carlson did ask Putin some difficult questions, such as that related to the fate of Evan Gershkovich, a journalist at The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Carlson only started to heap praise on Russia during his now viral supermarket and restaurant visits, in which he delighted us with his dual discoveries of escalators that could comfortably hold shopping carts for shoppers and his avowed “radicalization” by paying four times less for groceries in a country more than four times poorer than his own.
Mr. Putin, for his part, let us savor his nationalistic and encyclopedic knowledge of history by assuring Mr. Carlson that at least one-and-a-half hours of the two-hour interview would be devoted to a “serious conversation” that took the form of a monologue. Mr. Putin’s historical reviews contained such risible fallacies as ignoring the roughly thousand years of history separating him from Rurik and Yaroslav the Wise, such as ignoring Ukrainian cultural distinctiveness; and such as blaming Poland for starting World War II through Hitler’s invasion by not letting the weak “suffer what they must” and the strong “do what they want,” as the saying goes. Nevertheless, Mr. Putin was able to make a case for the latter assertion by sharing the little-known fact that Poland took advantage of Hitler’s gradual takeover of Czechoslovakia to carve out some previously disputed territory itself. Moreover, Mr. Putin did emphasize the fact that Nazi sympathies have been popular in Ukraine, to the extent that the Parliament of Canada even honored a Ukrainian Nazi World War II veteran by mistake.
Given the uniqueness of this event, it is important that we, as current and future policymakers, draw the appropriate teachings. One lesson is that deepening our knowledge of history and providing such knowledge to others is important to teach us nuance and to place everything in context. Although Mr. Carlson felt radicalized by Russian supermarkets, it is more likely that he would feel even more radicalized by an authoritarian regime not of his political persuasion. Other countries, including the United States several decades ago, would have him imprisoned or tried him for treason. Mr. Carlson’s interview and its aftermath should convince us of the remarkability of the democratic system of government.
Moreover, being more exposed to historical facts will help us strengthen our convictions and root them more strongly, for we will have faced arguments counter to our own. Finally, it is important to keep public discourse open, lest the citizenry’s trust deteriorate so much that it expresses with violence what it could not express through words. May we all take these lessons to heart from Tucker’s Russia, with love.