What follows is an excerpt from a Nov 20, 2024 discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. This is a critically important discussion regarding recent developments in the Ukraine War and related U.S. Propaganda:
Glenn Greenwald [00:18:53] Tucker, there’s nobody I’m certain of this in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules various provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It’s an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people’s allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be, should it be somehow autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you well know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened, the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the eastern and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU. The only concession they extracted in exchange for that was with reunification. NATO’s now moving eastward, closer to our border in a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that. And immediately in the 90s, an administration, the administration started talking about it and implementing NATO’s expansion eastward toward Russia. Exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why? Why? Why did we need to expand eastward toward Russia. And now it’s not just eastward in general. It’s going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia. And both of those world wars, we also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him. [U.S. State Department’s] Victoria Nuland constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-U.S.. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to us and put in a hard line, pro Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that’s exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is, though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they’re threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act.
… This is not a lame duck decision and it’s not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn’t there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn’t. And so they did.
Tucker [00:27:52] It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin. This person, we’ve been told, is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer can’t be trusted like the only reason we’re not. I mean, we’re all relying on his restraint. That’s just a fact right now. How weird is that?
Glenn Greenwald [00:28:13] Well, I mean, first of all, this is this is what amazes me is that sometimes propaganda and propaganda is you have to respect it. It’s a very potent field of human knowledge that has been refined over many decades, using every field, the disciplines of social sciences and psychology and psychiatry. I mean, propaganda is not just some, you know, intuitive thing that people do.
Tucker [00:28:35] It’s an argument you make. Yeah.
Glenn Greenwald [00:28:37] And it’s very powerful. And we love to talk about how propagandized the Russians are and the Chinese are and how there’s no dissent allowed. You know, George Orwell, in the preface to Animal Farm, wrote actually in 1984, wrote an essay where he was essentially saying that overt totalitarianism of the kind that was taking place in the Soviet Union is repressive, but it’s not nearly as effective as subtle repression, the kind where you give the illusion that people are free. But in reality, the flow of information is heavily controlled because at least when you know the guys dressed in black with weapons come and take you and put you in a gulag for criticizing the government, everybody understands the level of oppression that often generates a backlash. But when you combine repression with the illusion of freedom, that’s what’s incredibly effective. And that’s what we have.
Tucker [00:29:30] People with an abundant consumer economy. Like, you know, here your edibles, here’s your Netflix come down. Yeah, yeah. And you can basically get them to do anything.
Glenn Greenwald [00:29:40] Yeah. And at the same time, there has been a concerted effort to control what was supposed to be the one innovation that was going to break the centralized control of information, which is the Internet. That’s why there’s so much attention and energy. It’s why it’s the number one priority of Western power centers to control the Internet, because it’s the one threat to their ability to maintain this propagandistic control. You know this I still can’t believe this, that it’s not talked about as much. But right after Russia invaded Ukraine and Western governments decided they wanted full on support for Ukraine and this very simple minded narrative that they fed their public…
Tucker [00:00:00] I think we’re watching the most evil thing I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, which is the lame duck administration leaving the next administration with a world war, with a nuclear conflict by allowing Ukraine a proxy state of the United States to strike within Russia.
This is something that even the Biden administration, for all their hawkishness on Russia and Ukraine, feeding that war, fueling yet preventing diplomatic resolutions because they wanted this war even they were unwilling to do it because they understood the dangers of the escalatory risks for Joe Biden or whoever’s acting in his name to do this. Just two weeks after the country resoundingly rejected governance by the Democratic Party in the administration and on his way out as an 81 year old man, knowing that he has about six weeks left in office to just say, Yeah, I know that these are massive risks, but I’m willing to take them. I’m 81. I don’t really care. And then to make it so much more difficult for the following administration to do what they promised to do during the campaign, which the American people voted for and wanted, which is to resolve this war. Instead, we’re risking escalation with the world’s largest superpower. Nuclear war. Over what? …
Glenn Greenwald [00:04:59] You. Yeah, I know. And that all happened in 2016 when out of nowhere, Russiagate appeared. And I remember like it was yesterday, the very first ad from Hillary Clinton’s campaign with this menacing baritone voice. You know, what does Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have in common? What are they? What is Russia have and Donald Trump? And journalistically, I just couldn’t believe it because it was so redolent of McCarthyism, which is a civil libertarian ism. I found I was caught was like one of the worst civil liberties of the 20th century. I agree. Yeah, I mean, you go around just accusing people of being Russian agents with no evidence, destroying their reputation, their lives, kind of like what they’re trying to do to Tulsi Gabbard. Now, what they tried to do for Donald Trump for the last eight years. So just on that ground, I was kind of offended by it journalistically. I was so skeptical of it because when you have intelligence agencies leaking anonymously, unverified claims to The Washington Post in The New York Times and they put it on the front page and their Pulitzers for that, and that’s usually a sign that a huge disinformation campaign of deceit is underway. That was the exact method used, for example, to sell the war on Iraq to the American people. Was that kind of process that why these intelligence agencies need to be rooted out? But what Obama most was that the climate was deliberately created in Washington, especially once Hillary lost, and they blamed Russia for it, that any communications. With Russia. Anyone who visits Russia, anyone who talks to a Russian official is automatically deemed sinister or treasonous. And as you said, during the Cold War, which dominated our American life for 50 years, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire. They were infinitely more powerful, more threatening, more everything than Russia is now. We always communicated with Soviet leaders. There were phones all over Washington that rang to the counterparts. They comment that they communicated constantly. After Russiagate, there’s basically no communication any longer between the Russian leaders and the Americans…
Glenn Greenwald [00:18:53] Tucker, there’s nobody–I’m certain of this–in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules various provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It’s an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people’s allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be, should it be somehow autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you well know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened, the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the eastern and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU. The only concession they extracted in exchange for that was okay with reunification. NATO’s now moving eastward, closer to our border in a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that Neda will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that. And immediately in the 90s, an administration, the administration started talking about it and implementing NATO’s expansion eastward toward Russia. Exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why? Why? Why did we need to expand our borders eastward toward Russia? And now it’s not just eastward in general. It’s going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia.
And both of those world wars, we also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him. Victoria Nuland constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-U.S.. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to us and put in a hard line, pro Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that’s exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is, though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they’re threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act…
Glenn Greenwald [00:23:20] But can I just say one thing about that, don’t you think? Aren’t you kind of amazed by how impervious and dismissive media and political elites are, the prospect of nuclear war?
Tucker [00:23:32] Well, I it’s unimaginable. And and yes. And I mean, that’s why I.
Glenn Greenwald [00:23:36] Think it can’t happen.
Tucker [00:23:37] Without knowing the situation. Yeah. And I will say, the one thing that Trump has said repeatedly over the over the past, certainly since he left the presidency for years, that he’s received no credit for and should get enormous credit for, is that nuclear war is the worst thing. He was, of course, been briefed on it as the person who controlled the launch codes. He knows what it means. And anyone who spends five minutes looking into what a nuclear exchange would actually, you know, do is is terrified of it. But only Trump seems worried about it. I don’t understand.
Glenn Greenwald [00:24:13] I’ve said this. I’ve talked about it so many times. And I think it goes back to when Trump was president in the early stages of presidency. Every time Trump talks about the prospect of nuclear war, he knows that he’s limited in what everything he can divulge. But he’s so clearly trying to signal and he often says that these weapons are of a different universe than even the ones we dropped. And. That’s correct. And he’s obviously, as you said, understands and been briefed on.
Tucker [00:24:40] But you see these morons at the Atlantic Council or AEI or Hudson or these like this cluster of the dumbest people in the world all implicated in the Iraq disaster say, well, you know, maybe tactical nukes are fine.
Glenn Greenwald [00:24:] That’s such next level crazy.
Tucker [00:24:55] That’s crazier than any schizophrenic sitting next to you on a public subway.
…
Glenn Greenwald [00:28:37] And we love to talk about how propagandized the Russians are and the Chinese are and how there’s no dissent allowed. You know, George Orwell, in the preface to Animal Farm, wrote actually in 1984, wrote an essay where he was essentially saying that overt totalitarianism of the kind that was taking place in the Soviet Union is repressive, but it’s not nearly as effective as subtle repression, the kind where you give the illusion that people are free. But in reality, the flow of information is heavily controlled because at least when you know the guys dressed in black with weapons come and take you and put you in a gulag for criticizing the government, everybody understands the level of oppression that often generates a backlash. But when you combine repression with the illusion of freedom, that’s what’s incredibly effective. And at the same time, there has been a concerted effort to control what was supposed to be the one innovation that was going to break the centralized control of information, which is the Internet. That’s why there’s so much attention and energy. It’s why it’s the number one priority of Western power centers to control the Internet, because it’s the one threat to their ability to maintain this propagandistic control. You know this I still can’t believe this, that it’s not talked about as much. But right after Russia invaded Ukraine and Western governments decided they wanted full on support for Ukraine and this very simple minded narrative that they fed their public.
Tucker [00:30:15] After they started the war, I mean, the bad administration started. That’s my view of it. They knew that Russia would invade if they publicly pushed Zelensky to join NATO’s. So they did that. Kamala Harris did it in Russia with my view as they started this war.
Glenn Greenwald [00:30:28] And threat, talking openly about expanding NATO’s to Ukraine, you could find memos from the highest levels of the US government. Exactly do that. It’s not just Putin. It’s every political faction in Russia that will see it as a war and war. And they’ll invade. They’ll go annex Crimea and invade eastern Ukraine. Of course, the American government knew that you can show documents where it says that. But the EU, the minute that war started, in earnest with the Russian army invading, one of the very first steps they took legislatively was to ban the platforming, to criminalize the platforming of Russian media like Russia Party and Sputnik. They made it a crime and YouTube immediately pulled it off because they didn’t want their citizens hearing any information from the Russian perspective. I mean, you can hate Russia. You can think Russia is evil, you can think whatever you want about Russia. But why wouldn’t you want to hear from the other side? You know, The New York Times used to publish all the time, like the speeches of Brezhnev have, of course, and Yuri Andropov and Khrushchev. And you could read what the Russians would say. They would come to United States. They would speak openly. Now, it’s practically criminalized.
