…because he was off the air, I watched his Club Random this morning, where he “interviewed” Oliver Stone. I put “interviewed” in quotes because IMO Maher is a very poor interviewer of right-wing conspiracy nutballs, whom he enjoys inviting to Club Random, and they enjoy accepting probably because he mostly tosses softballs to RFK jr, Ted Cruz, Jordan Peterson et al. He treated Stone no differently, but Stone is to my mind a different sort of nutball. Many of his films–Wall Street, Platoon, Salvador for starters–I find powerful, skillfully told, and convincing in their underlying thesis. Even JFK, whose thesis I find not quite convincing and whose evidence is a bit loopy, appeals to me, and I do share with Stone certain suspicions about the “Oswald done it by hisself” thesis he opposes so forcefully there.
So Maher let him rattle on and on and on and on , having no factual knowledge to keep him on the rails, especially about Putin and Russia, which Stone seems to be the world’s biggest fan-boy of. Poor peace-loving Vladimir, misunderstood by the world, nobly striving to restore to the suffering Russian people their rightful place in the world and a shred of human dignity, etc etc etc, which goes against the grain of all my own thinking and prejudices about Putin, Russia, Ukraine, NATO, and about 12 other entangled subjects. So here’s my question: is Stone simply a nutball?
Forget about JFK and assorted other conspiracies for the moment. Is there any basis to his largely incoherent gibbering about Putin? Are my prejudices preventing me from taking him seriously and forcing me to dismiss him entirely, or is there something there that I’m not seeing that would justify some of Putin’s actions, which I tend to categorize as evil, twisted, duplicitous, misguided, self-serving, uber-nationalistic, and oh yeah did I mention evil? Is there any good side to Putin’s policies that I am stubbornly refusing to grant? Does anything Stone argues about Putin’s virtues make any sense to you?
That statement doesn’t make a lot of sense. As I’ve said before, Maher is respectful to his guests, and that includes letting them talk when they have something to say. And it doesn’t take “factual knowledge” anyway to prevent an interview from going off-track – just an ability to change the subject.
If that’s what Stone said or implied, then the answer is “yes” – flat-out nutball. For some conflicts there is sometimes an easy judgment about who is objectively in the right – the Nazi territorial invasions of WW 2 and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine being two examples. Anyone who actually believes the quoted bit, and who lives in a western nation where truthful news is readily available, is objectively a deluded nutball, whether it’s Stone or anyone else. Putin is an all-out ruthless imperialist in foreign policy just as he’s a dictator on domestic policy and a propagandist on both. As the dictator of an unstable nuclear power with ruthless imperialist ambitions and an intransigent belief that Ukraine has no right to exist, Putin is one of the most dangerous people on earth.
I’m not familiar with Stone, but yes, Putin is evil. And yes, I’d rank him as not just one of the most dangerous men in the world, but the most dangerous.
That’s not a matter of “respect” for the guest, it’s enabling.
Putin is only “evil” if you think that a leader who shuts down dissent by imprisoning his critics or having them murdered, and who attempts to re-create an empire by threatening and invading his neighbors is evil. Otherwise, he’s a misunderstood nice guy who rides horsies.
Like Maher, Stone is delighted to be viewed as a contrarian because he thinks that makes him stand out from the crowd and attracts the worship of a sizable crowd of similar contrarians. It’s good business. The degree to which he believes the nonsense he spouts is a matter of debate.
Well, as Stone tells it, Putin felt threatened by NATO’s encroachments on his borders, saber-rattling, propping up of anti-Russia regimes, so naturally he wanted to push back against this raw aggression.
Is there a grain of truth to this? Or just BS out of OS?
Just BS. Not out of OS originally but I’m not surprised he swallowed it.
NATO didn’t encroach on Russia’s borders. NATO exists because Russia threatens its neighbors. So those neighbors resist Russian aggression by joining a defensive military alliance. The Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine show that trying to remain neutral doesn’t work. Putin doesn’t invade countries because they provoked him; he invades countries just because he can. And Putin hates NATO because it prevents him from invading some countries he would otherwise be able to invade.
Oliver Stone is a weak-minded nutball. A kneejerk reaction of assuming America is always wrong is just as stupid as a kneejerk reaction of assuming America is always right. Neither position involves any thinking.
Any political movement large enough to have more than a handful of nuts supporting it will have a justifying narrative. Nazism did, Stalin’s purges did, Mao’s Cultural Revolution did, the Khmer Rouge did. So it isn’t really a matter of having some grievances real or imagined to excuse conquest and murder, the real question is why anyone in the west would buy into them.
In the case of support for Putin I don’t really know, except maybe the whole Hunter Biden influence peddling thing has led the paranoid-right to conclude that if the Bidens support Ukraine, Ukraine must be in the wrong.
This is standard Kremlin propaganda for international consumption. Poor set-upon Russia.
Standard Kremlin propaganda for internal consumption has a much different emphasis. It’s all about how Russia is inherently the righteous imperial power of the region, how Ukrainians are really, deep down inside, just odd Russians who must be liberated from pernicious Western influence while simultaneously uncultured barbarian “hohols” (a Russian slur for Ukrainians referring to the stereotypical Cossack topnot hairstyle) who owe everything they are to Catherine the Great and Potempkin for lifting them up out of the mud. This is similar to their view of the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles, except in those cases they don’t pretend cultural brotherhood as much as they do with Ukrainians.
The internal Russian rationale for war does include the idea that they are fighting NATO, but the primary basis is much more simple: that Russia has an imperial entitlement to Ukraine.
All of this is just propaganda as well, albeit propaganda that appears to resonate with a lot of Russians. The truth of the matter is that Vladimir Putin does what he thinks is best for Vladimir Putin. He seems to have miscalculated in this case, but that’s the real reason Russia invaded Ukraine. Putin thought it would be good for Putin.
Putin has been pursuing the establishment of a “Greater Russia”: reclaiming lands which were under Russian control during the Russian Empire, and/or the Soviet Union, in an effort to recapture the glory of Russia’s past, and re-establish Russia as one of the world’s great powers.
That policy necessitates taking, by force, lands which now belong to other sovereign nations. Some of those nations have joined NATO, and others are seeking to join NATO, specifically to keep Putin’s Russia from absorbing them.
In this case, the “raw aggression” consists of NATO, and the West, saying, “no, we aren’t just going to stand by and let you retake all of Eastern Europe.”
Edit: @Gorsnak 's post covers much of the same internal Russian motivations as mine, but they said it more eloquently.
Thanks, all, for confirming my reading of Stone’s ramblings. I find Maher culpable for inviting rightwingers onto his show without having any ability, or much interest, when they start spouting their talking points, and the episode with Stone was among the most egregious examples.
Stone couldn’t even formulate a coherent sentence at several points. He’d begin a sentence, stop, start again, stop, start a third entirely different sentence, none of which made sense, and Maher would allow his statements to stand unchallenged. Occasionally, Maher would say something like “I disagree” but provide no substance to support his disagreements. One awful example was allowing Stone to maintain that the GOP was not populated by Putin-enablers, citing “Mike” McConnell as an old-school Russia-hating Cold Warrior, without acknowledging the many GOP senators who are treacherously friendly to Putin. It doesn’t take much knowledge to refute that point, but Maher just let it go. I wonder if he’s merely lazy, or actually a useful idiot to Putin.
FWIW, I was impressed by this reply to a question on Quora which makes a good case that Russia is fundamentally and perhaps even irredeemably unwestern in its outlook and political culture: https://qr.ae/pKMLFH
Russia is and has always been so poor because the forces of cultural evolution have molded it that way - and Russia has reached the climax of its own evolutionary path and is perfect just as what it is. Just like the jellyfish attained the evolutionary perfection already in the Ediacaran era 600 million years ago, the Russian societal apparatus attained its evolutionary perfection already in the era of Peter I the Great, and it has proven astonishingly immune to any attempts to reform it anyhow.
The one thing about Russia that seems perversely true to me throughout its history is that a large number of Russian citizens, whether Czarist, Soviet, or current, seem to accept that its leaders will be fabulously wealthy despite millions of subsistence-level Russians and millions more barely above that level.
In the West, we seem to barely tolerate that status quo, and most western cultures have ameliorated it to a large degree compared with the Russian status quo.
“To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her — because of her backwardness, because of her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity.”
I’m currently reading Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha. And she made an interesting point about how some western observers look at the Putin regime as a failed democracy; that implies that Putin was trying to maintain democracy in Russia and had to assume dictatorial powers when democracy was unable to keep the country going. But Dawisha says this is a false image. She says set Putin out to become a dictator and he views the elimination of democracy in Russia as a success not a failure. Going back to the Soviet era, Putin was part of a KGB faction that worked on undermining Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
It goes way beyond Hunter Biden. That the Biden Administration supports Ukraine is reason enough for them to embrace Russia’s version of events and oppose aid to Ukraine, plus Trump’s admiration for Putin rubs off on them as well.
It’s such an amazing flip-flop from Cold War days.
