Vladimir Putin to Fareed Zakaria: So, You Want to Debate Me Intellectually?

…by Jonas E. Alexis & Mark Dankof

Fareed Zakaria forgot to learn what Vladimir Putin did to Charlie Rose last year. Rose—bless his heart—tried to engage Putin in an intellectual debate on Syria and Russia’s stand against the United States’ political system, which obviously has abandoned practical reason. Putin really knocked the poor guy out in a second. After the interaction, Putin must have thought:

“Why don’t the masters of this universe give me a serious opponent—a person who is well versed in logical consistency and who is interested in the truth? Why are they sending me people who can’t string two coherent thoughts together? Does that mean that the system itself is really in a bad shape? Is that why Obama and others do not want to debate me? If that is the case, then I am going to win the ideological war by a landslide.”

The masters of this universe sent a new puppet to challenge Putin this year. His name is Fareed Zakaria, the host of CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria GPS, a columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek, and an editor-at-large of Time. George Stephanopoulos said of Zakaria:

“He’s so well versed in politics, and he can’t be pigeonholed. I can’t be sure whenever I turn to him where he’s going to be coming from or what he’s going to say.”[1]

Similarly, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared that Zakaria “has a first-class mind and likes to say things that run against conventional wisdom.”[2] Well, this “first-class mind” ended up supporting arguably the biggest debacle in the twenty-first century so far, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Zakaria said then,

“The place [Iraq] is so dysfunctional… any stirring of the pot is good. America’s involvement in the region is for the good.”[3]

We all know that Iraq is a complete mess now. And when things got really screwed up, Zakaria subtly recanted.

The question before us is this: how did Zakaria approach Vladimir Putin? Obviously he would have been a complete idiot to talk about Iraq or Afghanistan, and obviously Putin would have cut him to pieces within a few seconds on these issues. Instead of talking about perpetual wars, Zakaria asked Putin why he said that Trump was a talented and smart candidate. Things couldn’t get better for Putin!

Putin knew that Trump had previously made positive remarks about him and Russia, so he was obviously returning the favor when he said that Trump was a talented candidate. After declaring that Iraq and Libya were a mess last October, Trump rightly said that Putin was “bombing the hell out of ISIS” in Syria.

That indeed was a positive remark, and no New World Order agent has ever given Putin enough credit for what he has been doing in Syria. Trump obviously messed things up when his announced this on CNN. Bombing the hell out of ISIS? That was the opposite of what New World Order agents were saying!

Putin would have been a complete fool not to praise Trump for that stunning remark. Trump did have some guts to say non-conventional things. (And perhaps Putin would straighten him out on some of his incoherent views if he happens to be president this November.) In response to Zakaria’s question, Putin declared:

“Well, you’re a famous person in our country, not only as a host on a major media corporation but also as an intellectual [Zakaria got his Ph.D. in government from Harvard]. But why are you juggling with what I said? Your ‘journalist’ side is prevailing over your ‘analyst’ side. Let’s examine what I said. I said in passing Trump is a bright candidate. Do you not find it to be so? I do. I do not ascribe any other characteristics to him.

“But what I did note and what I most certainly welcome is that Mr. Trump said he is wanting to restore relations with Russia. What’s bad about that? We all welcome this. Do you not?”

Bang!

Putin’s wasn’t finished. He moved on to pose a fundamental question to Zakaria and to the audience: does the United States politically abide by democratic principles? No sane person can say yes to that question. If the United States were politically democratic, we wouldn’t be having perpetual wars in the Middle East at all because the vast majority of people were and still are against this diabolical enterprise.

But the most fundamental question here is this: how did the United States get into that mess? Perhaps it is time to bring in John Adams to the political discussion here. He predicted that “We have no Constitution which functions in the absence of a moral people.”

In other words, morality, which is another word for practical reason, is the metaphysical ground upon which true democracy is based. Without a solid foundation in morality, democracy is just a relic of the past. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant had enough insight to realize this, and his categorical imperative, which again is rooted and grounded in practical reason, is certainly contrary to the Neoconservative ideology.

Kant would have absolutely rejected that ideology out of hand for the very fact that its apologists are perversely trying to make perpetual wars a universal principle. Perpetual wars, by their very nature, are monsters that always produce immoral acts and behavior in the end. Perpetual wars are also against the just war theory, which was formulated by people like Augustine.

But once the Neocons took over the American foreign policy, they quickly began to beat the American people over the head with phrases like “spreading democracy in Iraq,” “spreading democracy in Afghanistan,” “freeing the Libyan people from oppression,” and on and on it goes. As Jewish Neocon David Horowitz put it in 2013,

“In four years, George Bush has liberated nearly 50 million people in two Islamic countries. He has stopped the filling of mass graves and closed down the torture chambers of an oppressive regime. He has encouraged the Iraqis and the people of Afghanistan to begin a political process that give them rights they have not enjoyed in 5,000 years. How can one not support this war?”[4]

Mark Dankof, isn’t Horowitz articulating an essentially diabolical system here? Shouldn’t this guy be in a mental hospital? And wasn’t Putin right in intellectually humiliating Zakaria?

Dankof: The bottom line answer is Absolutely Yes. Putin provided a tactful but slicing rebuttal of Zakaria and his transparent agenda in the latter’s deliberate distortion of what the Russian President actually said about Donald Trump and his American Presidential candidacy.

This revealing and devastating rebuttal of Zakaria and his role as one of the agents of the New World Order in international media is critically important in understanding the larger landscape of the New World Order attempts to demonize, marginalize, and destabilize Vladimir Putin’s leadership in a post Cold War era.

This effort involves the promotion of absolute falsehood on everything the Western World and the United States publics consume from Zakaria, CNN, and their ilk, ranging from the actual policies governing the LGBT element in Russia to the real truths about Syria, Ukraine, and the NATO deployments in Eastern Europe.

Putin strip searched Zakaria and his handlers in this exchange. Thanks to social media and the Internet, millions more saw this debacle globally than would have been possible a generation ago. And the toxic mixture of intellectual and professional malpractice embodied by the Zakaria types in the Western Global Media Consortiums also serves to expose who is handling them and why.

Putin may well be the finest asset extant at present in confounding the New World Order and continuing its exposure for the benefit of the previously deluded and deceived. His intellectual precision and political shrewdness gives hope not simply to the Russian people, but to nationalists everywhere who seek their own liberation from this insidious menace.

Alexis: I was surprised that the Washington Post, Newsweek, and some of the major news outlets did not subtly and falsely report on this historic event. They probably realized that Zakaria humiliated them. The Wall Street Journal was somewhat fair on this and did not really spin the political beans in their favor.[5]

But it was nice to see how Putin straightened Zakaria out. It was Zakaria who wrote in the Washington Post back in 2014 that Russia’s Putin abandoned “liberal democracy. It is adopting a new system and set of values that are best exemplified by Vladimir Putin’s Russia but are finding echoes in other countries as well.”[6]

Zakaria moved on to argue that Putin was responsible for “illiberal democracy” in much of Europe, most specifically in Hungary, France, and the Netherlands. Putin, Zakaria declared,

“began creating a repressive system of political, economic and social control to maintain his power. As he faced opposition, particularly in the parliamentary elections of 2011, Putin recognized that he needed more than just brute force to defeat his opponents. He needed an ideology of power and began articulating one in speeches, enacting legislation and using his office to convey adherence to a set of values.”[7]

In the same breath, Zakaria incoherently argued that Putin and Erdogan were two sides of the same coin. I wonder if this clown still holds those ridiculous views after the humiliation.

[1] Marion Maneker, “Man of the World,” NY Magazine, April 14, 2003.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] David Horowitz, “Why We Were in Iraq,” FrontPage Magazine, March 20, 2013.

[5] Thomas Grove, “Vladimir Putin Sounds Off on U.S. Presidential Race,” Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2016.

[6] Fareed Zakaria, “The rise of Putinism,” Washington Post, July 31, 2014.

[7] Ibid.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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