I stopped watching Tucker Carlson in 2020. His position on COVID-19 and the pandemic reaction was so distant from mine, that I felt that the $36/month I was paying to Shaw for the privilege of watching Fox News was no longer worth it.My position changed when Carlson left Fox News and established his own Twitter phenomenon. He is no longer the shrill harbinger of doom but is now the measured interrogator of interesting people. When he announced that he was going to interview Vladimir Putin, I was intrigued and started counting sleeps. Last night I watched the interview.In 2012/13 I made five lengthy consulting trips to Russia and one to Kiev, Ukraine. I was working for Russian companies with mines across the breadth and width of Russia and so the people I met represented a small but geographically diverse sampling of that population. Many spoke good English and I always had an interpreter. Apart from work related conversations, I put two questions to everyone I met. Had they read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and what did they think of Mr. Putin as their leader? I was anticipating that from this sampling of perhaps one hundred people I would find that less than ten percent had read the Gulag and perhaps forty to fifty percent would be supportive of their president. All the people I asked had both read the Gulag and were supportive of Mr. Putin. One hundred percent.These responses were so distinct from what I expected that I finally asked a young engineer why everyone had read the Gulag Archipelago.“That is easy,” he said. “It is mandatory in high school.” But the Gulag was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union. Who in the government would mandate its reading?“Mr. Putin,” he said.As to the overwhelming support for Mr. Putin, when I asked a senior officer in my client company what he thought of Mr. Putin, he frowned at me and didn’t respond. I thought my big mouth had separated me from a good client and shut up. He finally looked at me and said,“You think that I don’t want to answer you because to do so would be dangerous. That is not true. I am not very political and don’t like talking about such things, but I will say this. Mr. Putin gave back my life and now I can raise my children in peace with a positive future. I am indebted to him.” One needs to understand the horrible conditions in Russia during the 1990s to comprehend the depth of the debt.I heard similar stories from many of the people with whom I spoke. It is Mr. Putin, the giver-backer of lives and the “revanchist Stalinist,” if our politicians are to be believed, who mandates that Russian school kids read the book that shines a spotlight on the evils of Mr. Stalin. The man is an enigma. I don’t recount this to sing the praises of Mr. Putin because I know comparatively little about him and it seems his friends have a nasty habit of falling out of windows. However, I can say with certainty that the anti-Russian propaganda of our government and news media is as unanchored from reality as the untinctured praise of Ukraine. The history of that area of the world is far too complex, especially in recent years, for such sophomoric conclusions. I don’t wish to argue for one side or the other in the Ukrainian war — that is for others with greater knowledge. I just want the war to end. Surely the million dead and wounded Ukrainians and goodness knows how many Russians are a sufficient price to pay for even the most bloodthirsty of American neocons.The interview with Tucker Carlson did not disappoint. I found it riveting. Mr. Putin, in measured tones, gave his explanation of some of the complex history in that region of the world, the recent events of the EuroMaidan, the separation of the Donbas and Crimea by popular referendum and the tragedy of Boris Johnson causing the Ukrainians to pull away from an agreement with Russia in early 2022. Clearly, he was giving the Russian perspective and Carlson did his best to probe and upset with his questions. All of that is irrelevant, however. Finally, someone has brought the other key decision maker into the western consciousness. Nothing ever happens in life until there is a conversation. Is it too much to hope that this is the conversation that starts to bring this war to an end?Murray Lytle P.Eng, is a former member of the National Energy Board
I stopped watching Tucker Carlson in 2020. His position on COVID-19 and the pandemic reaction was so distant from mine, that I felt that the $36/month I was paying to Shaw for the privilege of watching Fox News was no longer worth it.My position changed when Carlson left Fox News and established his own Twitter phenomenon. He is no longer the shrill harbinger of doom but is now the measured interrogator of interesting people. When he announced that he was going to interview Vladimir Putin, I was intrigued and started counting sleeps. Last night I watched the interview.In 2012/13 I made five lengthy consulting trips to Russia and one to Kiev, Ukraine. I was working for Russian companies with mines across the breadth and width of Russia and so the people I met represented a small but geographically diverse sampling of that population. Many spoke good English and I always had an interpreter. Apart from work related conversations, I put two questions to everyone I met. Had they read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and what did they think of Mr. Putin as their leader? I was anticipating that from this sampling of perhaps one hundred people I would find that less than ten percent had read the Gulag and perhaps forty to fifty percent would be supportive of their president. All the people I asked had both read the Gulag and were supportive of Mr. Putin. One hundred percent.These responses were so distinct from what I expected that I finally asked a young engineer why everyone had read the Gulag Archipelago.“That is easy,” he said. “It is mandatory in high school.” But the Gulag was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union. Who in the government would mandate its reading?“Mr. Putin,” he said.As to the overwhelming support for Mr. Putin, when I asked a senior officer in my client company what he thought of Mr. Putin, he frowned at me and didn’t respond. I thought my big mouth had separated me from a good client and shut up. He finally looked at me and said,“You think that I don’t want to answer you because to do so would be dangerous. That is not true. I am not very political and don’t like talking about such things, but I will say this. Mr. Putin gave back my life and now I can raise my children in peace with a positive future. I am indebted to him.” One needs to understand the horrible conditions in Russia during the 1990s to comprehend the depth of the debt.I heard similar stories from many of the people with whom I spoke. It is Mr. Putin, the giver-backer of lives and the “revanchist Stalinist,” if our politicians are to be believed, who mandates that Russian school kids read the book that shines a spotlight on the evils of Mr. Stalin. The man is an enigma. I don’t recount this to sing the praises of Mr. Putin because I know comparatively little about him and it seems his friends have a nasty habit of falling out of windows. However, I can say with certainty that the anti-Russian propaganda of our government and news media is as unanchored from reality as the untinctured praise of Ukraine. The history of that area of the world is far too complex, especially in recent years, for such sophomoric conclusions. I don’t wish to argue for one side or the other in the Ukrainian war — that is for others with greater knowledge. I just want the war to end. Surely the million dead and wounded Ukrainians and goodness knows how many Russians are a sufficient price to pay for even the most bloodthirsty of American neocons.The interview with Tucker Carlson did not disappoint. I found it riveting. Mr. Putin, in measured tones, gave his explanation of some of the complex history in that region of the world, the recent events of the EuroMaidan, the separation of the Donbas and Crimea by popular referendum and the tragedy of Boris Johnson causing the Ukrainians to pull away from an agreement with Russia in early 2022. Clearly, he was giving the Russian perspective and Carlson did his best to probe and upset with his questions. All of that is irrelevant, however. Finally, someone has brought the other key decision maker into the western consciousness. Nothing ever happens in life until there is a conversation. Is it too much to hope that this is the conversation that starts to bring this war to an end?Murray Lytle P.Eng, is a former member of the National Energy Board