WTH Do So Many Russians Support Putin? Ian Garner on Russian Propaganda and the War in Ukraine
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2022
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Do Russians really support Vladimir Putin's aggression and war crimes in Ukraine? On the weekend of April 1st, Western media shared photos and videos of a brutal massacre in Bucha, Ukraine. The gruesome reports prompted a fresh wave of outrage over Russian war crimes. This week saw the first Ukrainian war crimes trial that ended in confession and conviction for a Russian soldier. But Russians in government and outside continue to insist that the Bucha massacre is “fake,” or “Western agenda-setting.” More troubling still are broad Russian civilian calls to annihilate the “sub-human” Ukrainians.
Marc and Dany explore this disturbing trend with Ian Garner on today’s episode. Garner is a historian and a translator of Russian war propaganda. His first book, Stalingrad Lives: Stories of Combat and Survival, was published in 2022.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what |
| 0:22.4 | it's all about. Hi, I'm Daniel Pledka. And I'm Mark Teeson. |
| 0:38.3 | Welcome to our podcast. What the hell is going on? Mark, what the hell is going on? |
| 0:43.3 | Well, what the hell is going on, Danny, is we're talking about Russian public opinion related to Ukraine. |
| 0:51.3 | And what sparked this is there's a professor named Ian Garner who has a very |
| 0:55.9 | interesting Twitter feed, and he's an expert on Russian propaganda. And he has been monitoring |
| 1:01.5 | the social media channels in Russia where they're discussing the events that are taking |
| 1:07.2 | place in Ukraine. After the massacre in Buccia and all the images that came out |
| 1:12.5 | about that, more and more information in detail coming out, they just released a video where they |
| 1:16.7 | showed Russian troops actually taking a group of men out of a house and taking him into the |
| 1:20.9 | field where they shot them. There's more and more evidence. There's a Russian soldier who's pled guilty |
| 1:25.4 | to committing war crimes. So the evidence is mounting. |
| 1:28.7 | But in the Russian social media channels, there was a lot of support for not just denial |
| 1:35.8 | of what happened, but also support for the massacres and saying that they should be doing |
| 1:43.0 | more. |
| 1:43.6 | And it was really quite shocking to watch |
| 1:45.6 | the social media unfold. And Ian documented it and he's here to talk to us about it. |
| 1:50.8 | I think it's very hard for us as Americans to understand this. And it goes to problems that we've |
| 1:57.4 | had in a lot of the conflicts that we've seen, which is that we really do |
| 2:01.6 | tend to think about the world as being full of people who are kind of like us, but just speak |
... |
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