In Tucker vs. Putin, Nationalism Wins

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Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin ^[2] illustrates a number of points. Its first approximately 30 minutes consisted of an extensive history lesson going back to Novgorod, up through the Second World War and ending in the present day. It was a tad excessive even for my tastes as a history buff and connoisseur of strategy PC games.

Putin spoke articulately, at great length, and in depth about history. This highlights how we in the West are almost exclusively ruled by uncultured imbeciles. This is because democracy, and especially liberal democracy, tends to select for bad leaders. Aside from the way in which money selects leaders who will be obedient slaves to the financial class and essentially act as middlemen between the masses and big finance, democracy also selects for leaders who appeal to the masses, and thus via the inverse of quality and quantity we find today, tend to be rather dumb.

This may sound misanthropic, but it is a danger which cannot be politely danced around. Politicians who are relatable to the Common Man — i.e., dumb — have more appeal despite the fact that one should vote for someone who will be the most effective leader, not for the one who would make a good friend. Smart psychopaths such as the two Bushes could pull this off, or even worse Lyndon B. Johnson, who behind his hokey bleeding-heart façade was a warmongering savage and proponent of the nascent anti-white civil rights regime. But the best impersonator of the idiotic Common Man is sometimes just that: an actual idiot, such as John Fetterman ^[3], who is literally mentally impaired.

For all their conniving, the people in big finance who almost exclusively select the leaders in Our Democracy™ aren’t any more sophisticated than the midwit middlemen they select to be politicians. They can’t buy quality any more than they can buy honor.

While Russia is technically a democracy, it is illiberal, and thus it has authority and responsibility, which tends to select competent leaders — or at least less incompetent ones, when compared to those of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy will almost exclusively select leaders who are evil, dumb, and shallow. The exceptions, such as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump, prove the general rule because the Deep State assassinated JFK, character-assassinated Nixon, and deposed Trump in a color revolution.

Because liberal democracy almost exclusively selects for bad leaders, almost any other form of government will have better leaders who will out-compete or even run circles around liberal democracies. Illiberal leaders need not be particularly spectacular to succeed. This is because the bar is so low compared to their liberal competition, and in a competitive environment like international relations, relative quality matters more than absolute quality

Liberal democracy has gotten away with much because its only competition after conspiring to conquer Europe with the Soviet Union in the Second World War was the Communism that it had propped up. The USSR collapsed first because they managed to be more retarded, theoretical, and selective of midwit “yes men” than liberal democracy (an amazing feat indeed), and because America was propped up by unsustainable debt spending and kept the worst of its liberal impulses in check, even if this was oftentimes hypocritical. The relative, rather than absolute, nature of international affairs can allow one to get away with a lot.

But after the fall of the USSR, Russia ditched its glorious five-year plans for hard facts. Meanwhile, the liberal West, no longer feeling that it had any competition and had entered a post-historical world, dove head first into indulging theories over facts, especially when it came to racial equality. The previously bottled-up liberal impulses were unleashed, and in fact “wokeism” could be defined simply as liberalism devoid of hypocrisy and finally practicing what it preaches.

So, comrades, should we praise Putin for charging at a white polar bear to save us from our liberal overlords? No, for several reasons.

One of the other things which Putin’s lengthy historical discourse shows, aside from his intelligence and the boorishness of Western leaders in comparison, is that culture matters. The point of Putin’s history lesson was that Russia has a claim to Ukraine, and to place the current conflict in a broader historical context. Ukraine has indeed been a contested borderland between Russia and Europe.

But don’t the Ukrainians have a say in this, too? They certainly consider themselves a nation. While trying to justify the invasion of Ukraine, Putin ironically highlights a reason for Ukraine’s staunch resistance. Ukraine does not want to be part of the big “family” of the Russian Empire that Putin talks about. Ukraine wants to be European — no, not the decadent modern Europe and Western world, but Europe in its proper historical sense.

This fight at its objective core is about blood and soil, culture and history. In other words, nationalism.

If Putin had cast the conflict in nationalistic terms, it would have been a lot more relatable to the average Republican than a long historical discourse, talk of multicultural Russian imperialism, or switching to the Chinese yuan for international transactions. Why didn’t he?

Part of this might be because he didn’t want to lend credence to the claim that the interview was Kremlin propaganda. This is buttressed by the fact that he didn’t go for the jugular on a lot of other matters, such as the West’s anarcho-tyranny or inflation. Putin even remarked that the United States’ gross domestic product is growing, although he also said that Russia’s is as well. By mostly avoiding what could be called propaganda, Putin did in effect make the Left’s hysteria about the interview seem even more absurd.

But another, even more plausible explanation is that Russia and the West are fundamentally alien cultures. Despite the fall of the Iron Curtain and the rise of global interconnectivity, we still have difficulty understanding each other because we are just as fundamentally alien as when Spengler wrote The Hour of Decision in 1934 — or indeed, at the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. As an American, I know that Putin’s lengthy history lesson would go over most Western, and especially American, heads. What does Homer Simpson know or care about Novgorod?

This vast cultural gulf also seems to have led to Putin to refuse to release Evan Gershkovich, a 32-year-old journalist, despite Tucker imploring Putin to release him at the end of the interview. Putin was right about the objective facts when he stated that there has been no reciprocation and that the services can handle it. But he was oblivious to the subjective reality that Western culture tends to admire magnanimity as a sign of strength, and the subjective is what really matters. Putin could have partially whitewashed his persecution of political prisoners at home as well as the invasion of Ukraine by releasing Gershkovich. He could also have humiliated the West if he had pointed out the political prisoners that they are holding in their own countries, such as the January 6 prisoners. Despite his high intelligence, Putin still ended up committing this huge blunder, because our cultures are so different that even intelligent Russians and Westerners have trouble understanding each other.

Putin’s history lesson was followed by talk about Nazism, despite the fact that Putin blamed Poland for the Danzig crisis that sparked Germany’s subsequent invasion, and in turn the Second World War. When Tucker pointed out that Nazism had been defeated 80 years ago, Putin replied that Nazi ideas are still alive. This is the type of analysis I would expect from a boomer such as Alex Jones instead of a mastermind like Putin. Perhaps Putin was appealing to his own countrymen, who will also watch the interview, or to American boomers. But it’s even more likely that this is his sincere worldview, as an ex-KGB agent.

Since everyone on the Right is called a Nazi, especially on the dissident Right, Putin alienated a lot of potential supporters in the West. This is particularly the case in America, where many nationalists admire Putin in part because the regime which hates them is an enemy of Putin, and because the Russian bear is not at their doorstep. Putin’s attack on “Nazism” was extensive, thereby proving those who have been saying that he is not a friend of White Nationalism to be correct and disproving the claim that Putin’s anti-Nazism is superficial. Putin was undeniably sincere on this point.

Those on the dissident Right who adore Putin should understand that the man, through both his words and actions, has made it clear that he either does not want their support or takes their support for granted. He does not care about them one bit. Despite hysteria about Russian collusion, Putin would not actually want Trump in power, and the dissident Right even less. It is in Putin’s interests to play against an incompetent adversary who is weak but who doesn’t allow his nation to completely collapse, as that would cause international chaos. A resurgent nationalist West might be less prone to conflict with Russia, as we would be more statesmanlike, but our potential danger as a stronger adversary could not be discounted, either.

Returning to the fact that the underlying conflict is one of blood and soil, the Western establishment, much like Putin, has tried to cast this war as anything other than a nationalist conflict. The Left doomed Ukraine by portraying it as being about “democracy.” When MAGA hears democracy, they instinctively recoil in disgust, as they have come to rightfully associate that word with oligarchy, hypocrisy, anarcho-tyranny, and condescension. By associating the war in Ukraine with democracy, which MAGA finds repulsive, instead of nationalism, which they can relate to, the Left all but ensured that Republicans would become anti-Ukraine when they should be even more pro-Ukraine than the Left.

It doesn’t help that democracy’s misbegotten spawn, the military-industrial complex, is inefficient and corrupt, thus causing military aid to be overpriced and tardy. It turns out that deindustrializing the West in pursuit of liberalism and white genocide has had lethal consequences, and not just in opioid deaths ^[8]. Republicans have a point when they ask what the final price tag of supporting Ukraine will be. Cringe-inducing Harry Potter references and threats of drafting America’s sons if Ukraine doesn’t receive more aid only serves to further alienate Republicans.

I have come to stringently oppose military aid to Ukraine at this point, as it will only encourage Zelensky to throw more of Ukraine’s best men into a bloodbath instead of cutting their losses and getting to work on preparing for the next war. Retaking all of the land they have lot to Russia has ceased to be feasible because of democracy’s gross incompetence — and even if it were to become feasible, the cost in healthy blood would be too steep.

People will fight, sacrifice, and die for the mystic forces felt in their blood, for history, and for tradition — what some would call fascism. Filling out ballots for the least bad candidate, watching the GDP go up, and self-indulgent degeneracy cannot inspire the outpouring of energy needed for any important national endeavor, let alone a war such as the defense of Ukraine. That both the Western establishment and Putin avoid these forces as if they are caustic chemicals and even go out of their way to forcefully disavow them despite their usefulness strongly suggests that the reasons for this merit further investigation.

Hot-Take: Putin wants westerners to feel like they live in an ahistorical abomination.

— Morgoth (@MorgothsReview) February 8, 2024 ^[9]

Morgoth remarked on X ^[10] that “Putin wants westerners to feel like they live in an ahistorical abomination.” This is probably true, and yet the people most perturbed by the interview are the Leftists who have allowed this circumstance to come about in the first place. They are the ones who gutted American education so thoroughly that I learned more about history from playing video games than from formal education. Liberal democracy is incapable of reversing course and making Westerners feel pride in their history again because this would run contrary to its leveling nature, and also because if our people were to feel proud of their heritage again, they might come to reject the Great Replacement. This tendency to make people feel as if they live in an ahistorical abomination is but one reason why liberal democracy is doomed to destroy itself. Because it is a self-destructive ideology, we have no choice other than to reject it entirely so that it doesn’t drag us down with it.

The rest of the interview consisted mostly of talk of geopolitics and the world becoming multipolar, which will go over most Americans’ heads as much as medieval history does. Tucker did not play softball with Putin. Thus, despite the fact that Putin may be using Ukraine to fight a proxy war against the neoconservatives, Tucker is certainly not a “Russia shill.” While saying that it was the CIA which had destroyed the Nordstream pipeline, Putin even remarked that Tucker had applied to the CIA himself and been rejected – a clear jab.

Putin is not coming to save us, and democracy is weakening and will eventually destroy us. As such, we have no other option than to reject both Moscow’s imperialism and Washington’s liberal democracy, both of which Francis Parker Yockey ^[7] correctly identified as hostile, extra-European forces. Call it what one will, but we desperately need another option based on nationalism, authority, responsibility, efficiency, and self-sufficiency.

For the West to survive, we may have to become the nationalists that Putin fears we are.