Tucker, Putin & Navalny

Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin was an embarrassment in an otherwise stellar career. Even more so after the death of Putin opposition leader Alexei Navalny on February 16th. Alexei Navalny has tragically died at the age of 47 in a former gulag labor camp just ten miles north of the Arctic Circle. His crime or crimes? I won’t lie to you and even dignify the false charges by repeating those heinous trumped up charges in this blog. They are politically motivated. 

It seems I am on a jag of sorts and Russia is the topic. Last week, I discussed Russia and as I almost had the finishing touches completed on a post about Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin, the death of Alexei Navalny was announced. With just about one month left before the Russian Presidential election there are so many things going on it has my head spinning.

We have the Interview. We are marking the 2nd anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the death of a Putin opposition leader. None of this seems accidental. Let’s start with Tucker Carlson. For a man with a history degree, he let Vladimir Putin get far afield of historical facts without a redirect. Putin’s views on Poland, Hitler and WWII were delusional. 

It crossed my mind, as Vladimir Putin droned on and on, that Tucker did not interrupt the dictator because he was afraid he might go to jail in a place like Navalny was just in. Maybe he was afraid of being tortured and tormented as Navalny was. Did he know enough Russian history to understand that? I refuse to refer to Putin as the President in this post because I believe Russian elections don’t count for much. 

A short time before his death, Alexei Navalny said that the elections were rigged and he called on the Russian people to arrive noon at the polls on March 17th to do a protest vote. Simply take your ballot and leave with it, he said. Or, vote for anyone else but Putin, he suggested. What if every Russian wrote in Navalny on their ballot. What would happen? A simple review of Russian history teaches the possibilities

Tucker Carlson gave a brutal dictator the podium to spew lies and propaganda to a large audience. This at a time where Putin is not free to travel in the West due to the possibility of being arrested as a war criminal. No problem, Tucker will get your message out for you. Tucker Carlson fawned over Russian subways and supermarket prices without the scrutiny that would have served to unmask the dirty little secrets beneath the facade. His interview was not journalism it was propaganda at its’ best. This was not the Tucker that I once knew. Has he traded sides? If it walks like a duck, it might just be a duck.Tucker’s interview sounded like any other RT ( Russia Today TV network) report. 

To recap, Tucker Carlson gave Vladimir Putin a chance to defend his invasion of Ukraine to a huge world audience without any opposition from the usually competitive and feisty debater. He laughed at Putin’s jokes like a besotted teenager. While the dust was settling from that train wreck of an Interview, the cars were arriving at one of the remote Russian prisons in the Arctic Circle that Alexander Solzhenitsyn so palpably described, to disable the cameras and do the dirty deed of killing Navalny. 

The 1,162 year history of Russia that Putin forgot to mention was the total eclipse of freedoms’ light and the brutal repression of opposition that has without abatement continued to haunt and revisit the Russian people on a periodic basis. A long line of people have died hideously in a place devoid of light, warmth or hope. Millions of people have died the way Alexei Navalny has and that was the ugly elephant in the room with Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin. 

Stalin would sign death orders on the opposition every night before bed. It was like a little night cap before sleep. As Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin, he had already ordered Navalny’s death as he has with so many others. The Putin Death count is in the thousands. I think he planned this interview for three reasons. 1. To rally the Russian people to continue their support of the war. 2. To divide the West with the ultimate goal being the withdrawal of support for Ukraine. 3. For re-election purposes.

Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020, just four years ago. There is a reason substances such as these are banned by international consensus, they induce terrible symptoms and often result in painful death or lasting physical ramifications. Navalny faced the choice of staying in the west or returning to Russia. One of the rules of exile from Russia is that your influence and contribution will be cancelled. 

Navalny wanted change to happen and had amassed the organization to be able to promote change within Russia. He could never do that from the outside. He went back knowing that Putin wanted him dead. To many people, he went like a lamb to the slaughter. A lamb sacrificed for the possibility of freedom. What will happen next? In a now famous video that Navalny filmed in 2021 when he left Germany to return to Russia, he said, “My message if I am killed is very simple, don’t give up!”

Christian Housewife reviews “I.S.S.”

It was a last minute decision to go to the movies on a Thursday night, but maybe I needed the distraction. I had my eyes glued to the computer screen far too long this week leading to a bout of what I call “computer eyes,” a condition that means you need to be forcibly removed from in front of your computer screen. Although going to the movies was probably not the best treatment for this, it was a good way to relax after a busy week.

The topic intrigued me. “I.S.S.” stands for International Space Station. It is a small budget movie with a limited release in Canada and the U.S.A. It was the last day on the big screen in my neighborhood. Wow, since when did going to the big screen cost less than streaming?  Note to self, this is a good deal!

The premise of the story couldn’t be more timely: a group of Americans and Russians aboard an International Space Station must cope with the outbreak of WWIII. The movie opens with a reminder of one of the original goals of the space station which was the belief in improving international relations at the end of the Cold War. 

Scientists cooperating for the benefit of mankind was idealistically considered an achievable goal. Scientists, were considered the epitome of rationalism and civilization, or so it was thought and some still believe. One of the Russian scientists Weronika seems to mirror this point to an incoming American scientist Kira, who is beginning her first voyage aboard the space station. 

Weronika highlights the view from space and notes there are no national boundaries from above. As the movie continues, she expresses her view of scientists having a vaunted societal role. Weronika is also in a romance with Gordon, one of the American team members of the I.S.S. This establishes her as a character more inclined towards a globalist point of view.

The Russian team also has two apparatchik characters ready to serve the motherland. In true classical Russian literary tradition, one of the men appears to have no remorse, while the other was a tortured individual. Each of the men had a little bit of “The Brothers Karamazov” characterizations within them.

As far as the American team, there is the now required gay character that Hollywood demands, and two other men who seem to have very little in common. Perhaps, this mirrors the emotional and spiritual U.S. civil war that is always part of the background noise these days. As the movie goes on, the Americans seem more self-motivated rather than motivated to do their countries bidding. I’d say the story reflects the truth that we are all sinners regardless of what nation we hail from.

But, when the story opens, the mood is one of cordiality and cooperation. The international team raises a toast to celebrate their upcoming mission together. However, cracks soon emerge due to cultural traditions and mindsets that would mock the notion of true unity.

Then, one of the characters catches a glimpse from space of the earth and what she thinks is a volcanic eruption. When the color of the earth from above turns into flames, it is then that the team realizes that the world is at war. Specifically, Russia and the United States are at war and the I.S.S. now has strategic importance. Before they lose all communications with earth, (that will happen when the weapons of modern warfare are poised and ready to shut off the electronic grid), each country tells their people to take the spaceship over by whatever means necessary. 

Everything begins to fall apart immediately and each person has to decide quickly what they believe and who’s on their side. There are surprising twists and turns and changing loyalties. Are the three Russian crew members all one big happy family, are the Americans? The answer is no. The close quarters and the conditions of zero gravity make you wonder how the hardships of their physical state and the vulnerability of being on a space station would factor into the story line. All of that is part of the taut storyline.One thing that I can say is that any notion, that I had as a child of wanting to be an astronaut, were quickly ended when the movie depicted how truly difficult those conditions are. 

The situational ethics of this movie, reminds me of my college philosophy class and brings up many of those old questions. This alone makes the film well worth watching if you can get it. Some of the questions that come to mind are how this story would play out if one of the Russians and one of the Americans were Christians? What if I, an American, and you, fill in your nationality, were both Christians and aboard a space station when WWIII broke out? How would the shared bond that we have as believers factor in?  As Christians, we understand the difference between right and wrong, through God’s grace and a study of the Bible. We know that we must follow God and that there are rules for godly living. Can we just go along when someone tells us to do something “by whatever means necessary?” We all know the answer to that is “no.”

Then the question of whether I could actually imagine the world in a large scale war came to mind. It is shocking to think that it was not difficult to imagine that at all. In fact, the world seems dangerously close to some sort of disaster. It could be with China and Taiwan. China and the Philippians are mixing it up over International waters and Philippine territory. The disaster could be between North Korea and almost anyone. Seriously, that guy is unstable and is liable to fire his missiles and start a war with anyone.  Russia and the Ukraine. As I began writing this the NATO Alliance had just scrambled some F-16 fighters over to Poland because Putin got a little closer to bringing Europe into this. 

Then there is the Middle East. What can I say? Iran is out of control and the whole world seems to be going along with that. Not that I expected anything else. First, the Obama and then the Biden Administration did everything possible to destabilize the region. They shifted the balance of power dramatically towards the Iranian regime and hence its’ proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi’s. China and Russia are with Iran too. “Show me your friends and I’ll show you, yourself.”

Practically the whole world is against Israel. Isn’t that crazy. It’s just a little piece of land and it is a small tribe of people. Why, why, why do they seem to be so worthy of all this hatred and violence? If you answered the Bible predicted it, you are correct. Or, if you answered because they are God’s chosen people, you are correct. If you answered Satan has a vested interest in getting rid of them, then you are correct. God Almighty calls the Jews the “apple of his eye.” God describes Israel as his land and he instructs not to divide his land (even if the current man in the U.S. Presidential office says otherwise)

Joe Biden recently used a profanity to describe the current President of Israel. However, in my mind, I wondered if his recent spate of bad language, he also called President Trump a similar name, has more to do with his advancing neurologic impairment than anything else. 

So going back to the movie, imagining a situation where there is a worldwide conflagration is not all that hard to do. What will people choose to do if the whole world seems to have gone mad? In the astronauts race for survival, I imagined my own race for survival. The desire to get out of even a desperate situation alive is instinctual. But, what will we all do to survive? What have we done? That is our ethics and it shows where we are in relationship to God.

This movie does not make anyone a hero. And in the end, the characters become less Russian, and less American as they are humbled and broken by the situation they are in. It becomes more about the humanity that we share and the sinners that we are. It seems symbolic that in the end, one Russian and one American leave the failing ship together. They are fast heading back to earth and to the unknown fate that must lie ahead. 

P.S. True unity with one another comes through our faith in God through his son Jesus. With that comes an understanding of right from wrong, which leads to the basis of what our relationship with one another should be.

NEXT WEEK: Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin