There is a saying popular in the former Soviet Union: “Once you start playing cards with a cardsharp, you’ve already lost.” When two cardsharps play, the truth gets lost, because if one person lies and another speaks the truth, the truth is never in the middle. Actually, the truth is not a compromise between the left and the right, a middle road between speaker/position 1 and speaker/position 2. The truth is where it is. Throughout Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, truth was nowhere to be found.
It appears Carlson was handpicked by the Russian propaganda machine. Why? To broadly disseminate false messages? To dissuade a conservative audience from supporting Ukraine? There were threatening undertones, dire warnings to the West, particularly the United States. For Putin, Europeans don’t really count; they’re feeble and fragile. Yet his most caustic disdain is reserved for America. It oozes from every narrative and image. It is particularly noticeable when you listen to the intonations of the answers in the original Russian. As he does in real life, throughout the conversation Putin sought to disparage and undermine American democracy, while demeaning an ultimately inconsequential Europe.
And Carlson, avowed warrior for all things all-American, did nothing to challenge the world’s greatest America-hater. On the contrary, he provided a platform from which Putin could project his loathing for the West and his fabrications about it: It was America that provoked Russia to attack Ukraine. Just as Poland “provoked” Hitler to invade it in 1939.
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Archbishop Borys A. Gudziak is the metropolitan-archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia and the president of Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine.
With thanks to Our Sunday Visitor (OSV), where this article originally appeared.
