03/03/14 – Brendan O’Neill – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager who provides his subscribers with a very real window into his investments, updating them on every move he makes in the markets.
Right now, Mike's anticipating a bear and is dumping all his stocks while the getting is good, investing instead in gold and the commodities.
Protect your assets and learn the wise ways of the markets, wallstreetwindow.com.
And check out Mike Swanson's great contribution to the history of the rise of the American empire and the war state, available at scotthorton.org slash Amazon.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, live here on the Liberty Express, three to five Eastern time every weekday.
My website is scotthorton.org.
Keep all my interview archives.
There are more than 3000 of them now, going back to 2003, scotthorton.org.
And our next guest is Brendan O'Neill from spikedonline.com.
Two very important articles in question here.
Ukraine.
This isn't a revolution.
It's regime change.
And currently, it is the West, not Russia, that has behaved recklessly in Ukraine.
Welcome back to the show.
Brendan, how are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks, Scott.
Good, good.
I appreciate you joining us today.
So tell me about this Ukraine thing.
I know you got a lot to say.
Yeah.
I think the key problem at the moment is that we are just getting so much skewed reporting here in the West, which is giving a very distorted picture of what's happening.
So we've been told that, for example, that this is a popular liberal revolution against the dictator that has been backed by Russia.
But none of that adds up.
Because if you look at the uprising itself in Ukraine, it wasn't especially popular.
It certainly wasn't very liberal.
And we now know that there were far right and even anti-Semitic elements amongst the protesters in Kiev.
And far from ousting a dictator, in fact, the person it ousted, Viktor Yanukovych, was elected in a free and fair election in 2010 by around 13 million Ukrainians.
So we have this really peculiar situation where the West is actually cheering the throwing out of an elected leader, and Russia, which is assumed to be undemocratic, is expressing concern about the ousting of that democratic leader.
So the events on the ground are actually very topsy-turvy in comparison to what we're being told in the media.
And what's great about it, if there's anything great about it, is the complete and total and obvious lack of dissonance in the mind of any of these hairdos, these so-called anchors and newsmen on TV talking about all this stuff.
Nazis in the street with SS lightning bolts?
Maybe I heard of that, but you know what?
I'm just going to pretend I never heard of that.
American intervention all over the place, Victoria Nuland caught on tape talking all about America's plans for the future, which just happened to be the guy that ended up becoming the new prime minister, becoming the new prime minister, and this kind of thing.
You know what?
Let's just pretend the history began on Saturday when the Russians started moving into Crimea.
Why not?
I think, yeah, absolutely.
And I think what it shows is that whenever there is a kind of a hint of the Cold War returning, everyone just kind of dumps their critical faculties, you know, both the right and also sections of the left are so desperate for a return of the Cold War, for a return of that kind of neat divide between West and East, that they are willing to sacrifice any kind of critical thinking.
And so you now have a situation where, you know, Western politicians are normally extremely angsty about the rise of far-right groups in Eastern Europe, but in this instance, where we have a new interim government in Ukraine that has got anti-Semitic elements at the very top, in that instance, they're willing to turn a blind eye and even to celebrate that new government.
You know, the left is normally quite critical of Western-fueled regime change in the Third World, but in this instance, where we have a very clear case of the European Union and Washington facilitating an undemocratic regime change, lots of the left are not being critical of that.
So I think we can see how as soon as Russia is involved in something, as soon as there is a hint of, you know, this is a great battle between the good West and the bad East, people accept it too easily and they don't ask awkward questions.
And I think there are a lot of awkward questions to ask about how Yanukovych was thrown out of power and how the new government was implemented in his place.
All right.
Well, and I want to ask you, though, before we get to all that, because I want to hear all what you've got to say about that, but what do you think is behind all this other than just they hate Russians?
Because I know there are a lot of professional Russian haters in all the foreign policy establishments of the West, and they all need, you know, Exxon and Lockheed funding for their think tanks and that kind of thing.
But is it just the pipelines they want to cut Russia out of the pipelines, or is there anything more to it than that?
I think it actually speaks to a real immaturity amongst the Western diplomatic circles today, a kind of inability to see the potential consequences their actions are going to have.
And so I think a lot of the intervention in Ukraine was actually quite thoughtless.
So when you had John McCain, for example, who actually went to the protest camps in Kiev and did this speech to them and said, yours is a just cause, you must keep on fighting against this evil regime.
Or, you know, the German foreign minister also visited the camps and told them to keep on fighting.
I think that was a really kind of thoughtless, almost self-defeating interventionism, because what it did is it bolstered the protesters.
It made them think that they were the legitimate government of Ukraine, effectively.
It isolated Yanukovych, and it tipped Ukraine over the edge into violence, effectively, by internationalizing a local conflict and intensifying a local conflict.
And now we have European politicians and American politicians saying, oh, my God, Ukraine is becoming this violent, unpredictable place, when in fact they did a huge amount to push it into that situation.
So I think there's a great deal of idiocy in Western foreign policy circles today.
And one thing I'm particularly concerned about in relation to Western foreign policy is how it now seems to be devoted so much to goading Russia, to kind of antagonizing Russia.
You can see that through Ukraine.
You could see it during the Georgia war in 2008, when America was very much on side with Georgian forces and was arming them and training them.
You can see it in the way in which America has talked about building anti-missile radar systems in the Czech Republic, Poland, possibly Georgia, possibly Ukraine.
There is this attempt by the West to kind of surround Russia with these hostile states and these hostile republics.
And so if Russia feels paranoid and if Russia feels quite angry, it's not really surprising, because Western foreign policy is taking this extremely strange, weird kind of violence spoken anti-Russian approach.
Well, you know, I talked with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst about this, and he said, come on, you know, for anyone who, you know, studies this kind of thing for a living for the U.S. government, they had to have known, or how could they not have known that this was a bridge too far?
Another one of these orange revolutions in Ukraine.
The Russians canceled the coup last time.
That's how Yanukovych was in the position to be overthrown this time again.
And by that, I just mean they waited it out.
They waited the American intervention out.
Their guy ended up being reelected again.
Now America is trying to do a coup again.
But what do they think is going to happen?
That Vladimir Putin is really just going to not do a thing?
In fact, I keep mentioning this because I just can't get over it.
They had the editor of Foreign Affairs went on the Colbert Report and was giggling about how, yeah, we had Putin so distracted with the Olympics that we're running off with Ukraine now.
Like, come on.
Really?
Is that what you think?
He's going to cancel your big plans, doofus, you know?
It's crazy because I think, you know, in the past, foreign policy, the foreign policy establishment has always done terrible things.
It's always launched terrible invasions and destabilized countries.
But at least in the past, the Western foreign policy establishment had some understanding of history and some understanding of local tensions and the possible consequences of stirring those tensions up and making them worse.
It had a policy of trying to contain conflict and pursue its interests in a rational manner.
What we have today is an ahistorical, quite stupid, quite historically illiterate foreign policy establishment, which doesn't think through the consequences of its actions.
So they can, you know, they see protests in Ukraine.
And instead of saying, let's take a step back from this and let's see how the country deals with it.
Instead, they all go there and they say to these protesters, which include far right elements and anti-Semites, they say to them, yours is a just cause.
Keep on fighting.
Go harder.
Go further.
And they don't think about the consequences that that will have inside Ukraine, in Crimea and in Russia itself.
So there's a real dangerous short termism, you know, this desire to look big and important on the world stage by seeming to support democratic uprising without thinking about whether that uprising is really democratic and what the consequences might be of stoking it up.
Well, and now at this point, the Russians have gone in and cancelled the coup, at least as far as Crimea goes, with actual boots on the ground, which is what really counts, of course.
And the question for now is, you know, whether, I guess, you know, whether you think the West will provoke it or not, one way or the other, whether the Russians are going to go further and maybe break off eastern Ukraine.
What do you think of the chances of that?
Oh, and by the way, you have very little time to answer that question.
Well, I think that may well happen, but I think Russia is fundamentally a status quo power.
It wants to maintain the status quo, whereas the West is becoming an extremely reckless, risky actor.
And that's the real tension.
The West doesn't think through what it does.
And Russia is just pretty keen to fortify its borders and keep things as they are.
All right.
Hold on right there, everybody.
It's Brendan O'Neill from SpikedOnline.com.
We're talking about American and Western intervention in Ukraine and the blowback, which came quick.
And we'll be right back after this.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
Some stock market investors are making money hand over fist, while others sit on the sidelines afraid of the dangers.
Are you looking for answers?
Before you invest one dollar, I'd like you to take the time to watch this new video from Martin Weiss at MoneyInMarkets.com.
That video names the seven riskiest and four safest major stocks in America.
Learn from the experts and invest wisely.
Go to Crisis16.com.
That's Crisis16.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the line with Brendan O'Neill from SpikedOnline.com.
And we're talking about American and European intervention in Ukraine.
You know what?
Just for argument's sake, Brendan, I was wondering, would you help me go through the evidences of American and Western intervention leading to not just the blowback from the Russians, but leading up to Yanukovych fleeing town and all of that?
And then I want to talk about the various right-wing nationalists involved and even neo-Nazis and so forth.
But apparently, it's funny, you know, for anybody paying attention, this is just, yeah, okay.
This whole thing happened in front of my eyes.
But then, all of a sudden, you realize that, you know, they're denying that the Americans had anything to do with this, at least with their silence.
They're denying that anything happened before Saturday over there that any Americans need to know about.
So we had, first of all, of course, there's the leaked video, I don't know leaked by who, but there's video of Victoria Nuland talking about funneling $5 billion into Ukraine over I'm not exactly certain what period of time.
But then, also, there's her conversation that was leaked, plotting who should take over next, just happens to be the people who are taking over right now.
And then, of course, you know, as you mentioned, going over there, Nuland and McCain both going over there and egging the protesters on, et cetera, like that.
But what else do you know, NED, USAID, CIA, or, oh, of course, there was the thing, one more thing.
In Der Spiegel, they talked about how these billionaires got some phone calls about how, hey, if you don't want sanctions on your money that's sitting in accounts outside of the country, it's time for you to give up support for Yanukovych.
And that was what, you know, took the power out from beneath him and his own party of regents and led to, you know, like Nixon's own Republicans kicking him out of D.C. kind of a thing there.
Yeah, I think what's really interesting, there's a real double standard in the language.
So whenever Russia does anything in relation to Ukraine, it's referred to as meddling, you know, an unacceptable attack on Ukrainian sovereignty.
But whenever a Western government does something, it's called mediation.
It's called democracy talks.
It's called trying to rescue Ukraine rather than interfering Ukraine.
So there's a real double standard, which means lots of people are confused about who is meddling in this country and who has been meddling in it over the past three months.
The way I see it is that the protests themselves were triggered by a kind of standoff between the EU and Russia over the future of Ukraine, where the EU was saying to Ukraine, you must sign up to this new trade deal.
You must agree to reform.
You must do as we tell you in Brussels.
And then Ukraine, the Ukrainian leader, decided to go with Russia instead of with the EU.
And that gave rise to the protests.
And then what happens after the protests start is that lots of Western politicians start to intervene very explicitly in Ukrainian affairs, firstly by visiting the camps and telling them to carry on fighting, which, to my mind, is a severe interference in other states' affairs.
They also started to have high-level talks with representatives of the protesters.
So, for example, Angela Merkel in Germany had talks with some of the leaders of the opposition, talked about how they could set up a new government.
And it's in the same week that she does that that the violence flared up a couple of weeks ago when there was some serious violence in Kiev.
It's exactly at that moment because what Yanukovych recognizes is that his time is up.
He has been completely delegitimized by a Western campaign of demonization, where everyone treats him as a dictator.
And his successors have effectively been picked by Merkel, by John Kerry, by others in the West who said, you will be the next government to all these various oppositional forces.
So it's all that form of intervention, that kind of underhand intervention and that explicit goading of the protesters, which isolated Yanukovych and left him effectively with little choice but to try to assert his authority.
And he tried to assert his authority with violence.
And so I think at every stage, from the start of the protest to the inflaming of the protest to the descent into actual violence on the streets, it was all exacerbated by explicit Western intervention to determine the future of Ukraine.
Yeah, but Yanukovych was a terrible guy.
I saw it on TV.
Very terrible.
I must say, I'm no fan of Yanukovych.
And I'm sure he's an unpleasant politician, as lots of politicians in Europe are.
But the fact is that he was elected in a free and fair election in 2010.
He got around 13 million people's votes.
And then that was in the presidential elections in 2010.
And then in the parliamentary elections in 2012, his party also got the highest number of votes.
So this is a situation where a politician and his party, who have been elected pretty convincingly twice over the past four years, have now been pushed aside by a section of the Ukrainian population, not a majority by any stretch of the imagination, a section of the Ukrainian population cheered on by Washington and Brussels.
So the next time Washington or Brussels talk about the lack of democracy in the third world or tyrannical movements in the third world that override people's democratic rights, I think we should laugh in their face, because they have just spent the past three months conniving with the ousting of a democratically elected leader.
And in the process, they have set an extraordinarily dangerous precedent where now everyone in Eastern Europe and elsewhere knows that if they take to the streets and stay on the streets and kick up a fuss, they can override the democratic will of their own nation by getting the West on their side and getting the West to help them get rid of a leader that they don't like.
It's a really dangerous, undemocratic precedent that has been set here by Washington and Brussels.
They bided their time, the Russians, after 2004, but now doing the same kind of scam again here, the Westerners have escalated the level of pushback from the Russians.
So that's a brand new precedent set, too.
Maybe they'll see fit to cancel America's will in Estonia or Latvia next time.
And then what are we going to do about that?
But we're the ones who, our side, we're the ones who escalated it to this point.
Absolutely.
And what I think is remarkable about the events recently is actually that Russia took a step back, certainly over the past three months, while the protests were taking place and while they were being stirred up by Western politicians, Russia actually stood back and observed events.
And that is why Yanukovych was relatively easily thrown out of power, because he didn't actually have the massive military backing of evil Russia, as lots of the Western media reports would have us believe.
So I think what's happening now is that Russia is fairly desperately trying to fortify its own borders.
There's a very long border with Ukraine.
It's trying to protect its interests in Crimea, which historically has been an extremely important place for Russia.
And it's responding to what it sees as provocation and pressure from the West.
So I would say that the image that we are given, which is that Russia is the aggressor here, Russia is the expansionist empire, Russia is trying to conquer Europe, and the West is trying to hold it back, is actually the opposite of the truth.
What's happening is that the West is venturing further east, is trying to determine the fates of all these eastern countries, and it's Russia that's trying its best to hold that back.
So I think we are being given the polar opposite of what's happening on the ground.
Yeah, pretty much with everything these people say.
Well, certainly in America, I know that's your experience in the UK, too.
And here's the other thing, you know, you talk about, you know, next time the precedent set and all of that.
That's if there is a next time.
I got the Secretary of State on TV talking about all options are on the table.
They're so used to threatening the nuke-less Iranians that way, that John Kerry is talking about that, that way, talking that way about the Russians, and even he said, well, nobody wants to see a military option.
What?
Russia better start doing the right thing.
Wait, what?
And said, you know, all options has meant even, you know, historically speaking, that means including nuclear first strikes.
I mean, that's all options is including nuke first strikes.
Who are these people?
And how did I get stuck in this dimension with them where everything is on?
It's extraordinary.
And to think that this has come, this has come about over three months, effectively.
You know, three months ago, you had the start of some protests in Ukraine by a few angry, largely middle class urbanites in Kiev.
And three months down the line, it's become this huge standoff between Washington and Moscow.
And I think that speaks to the way in which Western foreign policy is now so out of control.
It is so unanchored.
It is so kind of reckless.
And you have a situation where it just takes all these actions, it ousts governments and replaces them with friendly governments that it handpicked.
And it just doesn't sit down, take a breath and think to itself, is this a wise thing to do?
Is this going to increase global stability or is it going to make things more unstable?
And so we have we now have a situation where, as you say, America is posturing against Russia in a very warlike fashion.
Russia is expressing extreme anger with Merkel and Washington.
And you have this huge global tension brought about by a handful of protesters in Ukraine who were then backed foolishly by the West.
It's crazy that we've got to this situation in such a short period of time.
And I wasn't able to see all of it, but Samantha Power, the UN ambassador, gave a talk there and the crawl at the bottom of the page was new sanctions against Russia.
I mean, this is just such bad news.
There's no reason in the world that has to be this way, except for these numbskulls in charge here.
Well, Samantha Power is a good example of the new foreign policy establishment I'm talking about, because what you have in Samantha Power is just a historically illiterate moral poser who thinks that the international stage is basically a platform from which she can make grand speeches and seem like a purposeful individual.
And that's what the foreign policy establishment in the West is now made up of, these very infantile people who don't know their history, who don't understand politics, who don't understand how international affairs work.
So they think nothing of taking to a lectern and making bombastic speeches about what they see as evil foreign countries.
They don't think through consequences, they don't think through what their behavior is going to result in.
And we know that Samantha Power really pressured Obama to take action in Libya, and that ended absolutely disastrously for the Libyan people and for America.
And for her personal reasons, as reported by Michael Hastings, too.
Just like you said.
I'm sorry, we've got to go.
We're out of time.
Thank you so much for your time.
I appreciate it, Brendan.
Thanks, Scott.
That's great.
Brendan O'Neill, everybody.
SpikedOnline.com.
We'll be right back.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds.
But you can fight back.
The Tenth Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is OffNow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
We've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to OffNow.org, print out that model legislation, and get to work nullifying the NSA.
The hero Edward Snowden has risked everything to give us this chance.
Let's take it.
OffNow.org.
On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first-ever National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Geraldi McGovern, Kutowsky, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alison Ware of If Americans Knew, and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research, Middle East Policy.
That's the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship.
Friday, March the 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
NatSummit.org.
Man, you need some new stickers for the back of your truck.
Scott Horton here for LibertyStickers.com.
Aren't you sick and tired of everyone else being wrong about everything all the time?
Well, now you can tell them all what's right with some stickers from LibertyStickers.com.
At LibertyStickers.com, they're against everything, so you know they're good on your issue, too.
Whether it's the wars, police, state, gun laws, the left and right of the president, LibertyStickers.com has hundreds of choices so you can find just the right words to express your opposition and contempt for those who would violate your rights.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.