BEING HUMAN

It is the 716th day of the full-scale russian war and of bloodshed that does not stop. A few words on the poisonous appeal of propaganda and on what happens when putin’s narratives are normalised. What we watched was a long and tedious monologue full of lies and historical falsehoods rather than an interview. Do you suppose Tucker Carlson asked putin why he ordered the bombing of Mariupol, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and hundreds of other cities and towns, and why so many civilians have died in two years of this war?

In that sit-down, putin claimed that Poland had provoked Hitler into invading, which places the blame for starting the Second World War on Poland itself. The twisted logic mirrors exactly how he justifies his own invasion of Ukraine, and Carlson accepted the assertion without a blink, with an “Of course.”

“…instead of Danzig, a city appeared. Gdansk. Hitler asked them to give it up peacefully…” (Tucker Carlson: “Of course!”)

“…the Poles refused…”

“…the Poles got too cocky and forced Hitler to start World War II with them. Why did the Second World War begin with Poland on 1 September 1939? It turned out to be uncooperative.”

Putin drew the parallel between Poland in 1939 and Ukraine in 2022 himself, and in doing so he placed himself in Hitler’s position without apparently noticing. I hope that particular passage survives into the clip shown to Carlson’s American audience. Do not be taken in by any claim that Ukraine bears responsibility for this war, whether in 2014 or in 2022, since such claims are lies. Putin alone began this invasion, out of russian and Soviet imperial ambition, and no amount of diplomacy will work until he abandons those plans of conquest. Like Hitler, he assigns the blame to his victims, while the fault sits with the aggressors and with everyone who supports them, actively or by keeping quiet.

“Would you interview Bin Laden after 9/11 as if he were a normal, respectable political leader? What if he did 9/11 every day for two years? That is like saying the devil also has the right to be heard,” asks Andrii Murzin, a professor at Kyiv Theological Seminary.

Imagine brutality on the scale of 9/11 unleashed daily for two straight years, and you have the level of suffering putin has inflicted on Ukraine since 2014 and again since 2022. Giving him a platform to justify this invasion amounts to permission to spread his falsehoods further. The only people who gain anything from two hours of his deceit are the specialised analysts who read his moods and his phrasing for military intelligence, since they know that when he speaks of respect he feels contempt, that when he promises not to attack an assault is coming, and that when he professes to want peace he intends mass death. For an ordinary viewer, nothing good comes of listening to any of it. Putin has earned unconditional condemnation for his atrocities, and amplifying his propaganda simply widens his capacity to deceive.

Free speech protects controversial opinion, and it was never meant to protect the spread of verifiable falsehood. In this interview putin used his platform to distort facts deliberately in service of his agenda, and broadcasting a disproven lie about Poland starting the Second World War crosses from free expression into demonising propaganda. Societies place reasonable limits on speech precisely to prevent deliberate deception, and handing a brutal dictator a megaphone for dishonest narratives goes past those limits. Whatever one thinks about censorship, the moral difference between protecting controversial speech and enabling propaganda has to be acknowledged, and above all by people who consider themselves part of the Church.

Tetyana Drotenko, a Ukrainian volunteer in the United States who has supported many humanitarian projects in Ukraine during this war, says that “Tucker platformed and amplified this genocide-supporting propaganda to the Western world and is applauded for it by his fans here in the US. What interesting times.”

The interview also emboldened parts of America’s far-right MAGA movement, which differs little in substance from the Russian World ideology (make russia great again, essentially), to admire putin even while he kills civilians openly and on a massive scale. Despite the lies running through it, the interview strengthened fringe support for the invasion, and instead of exposing his distortions it gave them legitimacy and reach among authoritarians. Media figures have to be held accountable for normalising such deceptions, particularly when those deceptions feed atrocities that are still happening, since no viewership figure justifies propagandising for a tyrant who revels in war crimes.

Watching and commenting on even a few parts of this manipulative “interview” was an ugly experience, and I have no wish to see more of it, since it repeats the same delusional rhetoric putin has been producing since his Munich speech in 2007. As a Ukrainian whose life has been torn up by his war crimes, watching this dictator’s self-justifications feels immoral and it feels traumatic. We cannot impartially debate the words of a man who revels in slaughtering our people.

“How would a Jewish person who lived through the Holocaust feel about being asked to critique Hitler’s speeches? From the perspective of a privileged Western Christian, analysing such propaganda may look reasonable,” says Roman Soloviy, chairman of the Eastern European Institute of Theology in Lviv and regional editor for Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia at Langham Literature.

For those of us in Ukraine, whose lives have been directly wrecked by this invasion and by these war crimes, it feels utterly immoral. I hope this gives some insight into why Ukrainians are morally revolted by the idea of examining putin’s lies at leisure. We will not humour them or debate them while our blood is still on the streets.

Our Mission has not changed, whatever russian propaganda does.

Peace be with you.

Taras Dyatlik and the iROAD team (Roman Soloviy, Helga Marchak, Kseniia Trofymchuk and others)