08/14/14 – Nebojsa Malic – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
Our first guest today is Nebojsa Malic.
He's been writing for AntiWar.com since, I don't know, 1999, I guess, or somewhere right around there.
And he also has a blog of his own, GreyFalcon.blogspot.com, where he covers Central and Balkan and Eastern European issues, primarily moments of transition, is his column, weekly column at AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Nebojsa.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
It's good to be back.
Well, good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And, you know, I'm sorry that I just don't know enough about all the different Balkan wars.
I know a bit more about the Kosovo War of 99, but all the earlier stuff, I hardly know enough to ask you anything about it in any kind of intelligent way, unfortunately.
But maybe someday soon I can.
In fact, I got a new book.
Oh, it's Samuel Z's book.
I just haven't gotten a chance to read it.
Bombs for Peace?
I'm sorry?
Is it Bombs for Peace?
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, I've been reading it.
I haven't finished it yet.
It's just been very busy.
But I'll write a review of it fairly soon.
It's a pretty hard-hitting reading.
OK, good deal.
And I'm sure, well, could you say it'll definitely help inform my perspective on the whole thing?
It's well put together, well sourced, informative.
Yes, indeed.
It's definitely very, very helpful.
It's dense, but it needs to be dense.
It's a lot of events to digest.
Right.
I mean, I need a summer off to just lock myself in an attic like The NeverEnding Story and just get this pile of unread books read.
It's just, it's criminal, this pile of unread books.
It's a horror show.
I'm sorry.
Anyway, we're going to fix this, Nimbosh said.
But right now, let's talk about what's going on in Ukraine.
Even despite Palestine and all hell breaking loose in Iraq, World War III now, and all this stuff, I can't help but think that Putin and Obama got thousands of hydrogen bombs pointed at each other's heads, which means all the rest of us too.
And this is the most important thing on the face of the planet, is America's relationship with Russia.
And of course, as all the listeners of this show already know, that America is ruining everything.
And so anyway, I was just hoping you could give us, first of all, an update on all the most important news out of eastern Ukraine and the war going on there.
And then please, if you could catch us up on all this stupid international politics of it all, and where everybody's out, and the prospects for peace, etc.
Sure.
I'll give it my best.
Well, first of all, it's important to realize that all of these things are interconnected.
It may not look like it at first, but the events in Gaza, the events in Iraq, events in Syria and Egypt, and events in Ukraine, there's a common denominator behind all of them, and I don't have to spell it out to your listeners.
What's going on in Ukraine is, first of all, there's a curious incident of the airliner in the dark.
Well, wait a minute.
Now start with what you're saying there, because obviously a hell of a lot of our Iraq policy has always been completely wrapped up in what Israel wants, and of course, Gaza is part of what Israel wants.
So there's that.
But you want to elaborate about an Israeli role in the Ukraine crisis?
I wasn't referring to Israel, I was referring to the United States government.
Oh, okay.
I thought you were being maybe more specific to the Israelis or the neoconservatives.
No, no, no.
It's the U.S. government that's essentially involved in every single one of these events.
Sure, sure.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
One has to try to figure out what's the common denominator in this and what's the common interest and what are the people in Washington that are calling the shots thinking of doing with all this.
I mean, let's recall that ISIS is actually an offshoot of the Syrian rebels that the U.S. has been sponsoring and arming and funding and backing up with propaganda and so on and so forth.
So, but again, let's get back to Ukraine.
Have you heard any mention in the mainstream American media for the past week or two of the MH17?
No, you haven't.
Why?
Because there's no evidence that the official story pushed in the media a month ago is anything but a completely made up lie.
So that's one thing about the coverage of Ukraine that's very important to notice.
There's no coverage of the plane anymore.
Secondly, the fighting has gotten progressively more brutal.
The army loyal to Kiev and more increasingly so the National Guard and the oligarch owned Nazi battalions that are carrying the fight because the regulars have been savaged in fighting by the militia.
They are becoming increasingly brazen, increasingly aggressive, sending these armored columns that end up falling into militia traps and getting obliterated.
But their objective seems to be to cut off the two major cities held by the militia and to make life in them completely unbearable.
They've already cut off power.
They've already cut off water.
They're firing at chemical plants, hoping to release poison gases and kill as many people as possible.
This is a truly, I mean, this is one of those that checks off every box in the humanitarian catastrophe pretext for war that the West has been using for the past 20 years or so.
And yet we hear no condemnation of it from either the EU or the United States.
Why?
Because their clients are the ones doing the murdering.
Meanwhile, there's talk about sanctions against Russia and there's all this talk about the humanitarian convoy that the Ukrainian government, the government in Kiev rather, has absolutely refused to admit, even though it's been recorded that all of the stuff aboard is civilian supplies, literal humanitarian aid destined for the people who need it.
On the other hand, you've got NATO airlifting military supplies, anything from MREs to night vision goggles to body armor and maybe even weapons and ammunition, because all we see is the planes landing.
We don't actually see what's on board.
So it's fine to send military aid to the people murdering civilians, but it's not okay to send humanitarian aid to the said civilians.
That's aggression in the modern parlance of the Western media.
I'm trying to wrap my brain around this and I've had 20 years of experience of covering these things.
So, you know, I'm obviously, other people's mileage may vary, but this is very difficult for me even to comprehend.
And you've really got a situation in which the Russians' reaction last week to the sanctions, to the blockades, embargoes and threats and attempts to coerce Moscow into essentially, you know, acquiescing to the mass murder of culturally and civilizationally and linguistically Russian people and the imposition of this insane, hateful identity in Ukraine by this handful of Nazis in Kiev was a food embargo.
And essentially now all of these European countries that have been backing the US blindly and following whatever Washington told them to do are screaming in indignation because their entire economies are going down overnight.
They were relying on these exports to Russia of, you know, fish and apples and so on and so forth.
And the Russians said, fine, if you hate us so much, we won't buy your stuff.
That's a perfectly legitimate response.
Don't you agree?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I'm against trade wars as any other libertarian, but let's face it, it's a predictable response anyway.
Well, it's not a justified one.
You know, you hate my guts.
Fine.
I won't do business with you.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the whole thing is going back to the Nazis.
I mean, the thing is, well, I don't know.
I don't want to be patronizing.
This audience is pretty familiar with this story, but it just sounds so unreal that America would use real no fool and Hitler loving Nazis to sack a government and overthrow it in this day and age.
They couldn't find any militias that didn't worship Adolf Hitler for crying out loud, you know?
Well, it would only seem like the unthinkable if you don't know the context of the situation.
Back in 1945, 46, 47, after the collapse of the Third Reich, all of these collaborators and allies of the Nazis, including the 14th Waffen SS division, which was Ukrainian, composed mostly of the forefathers of the present Nazis, ended up in Italy trying to, you know, surrender to the British and the Americans trying to escape the Soviets.
And instead of turning them over, which the Western allies had done for a lot of Russian and other combatants and who ended up in Stalin's prison camps, you know, building ice roads to nowhere, these people were taken in and protected and evacuated and settled in Canada and the US and Britain and Australia.
So this wasn't the first time that the West has helped the Nazis.
Yeah.
Well, hey, they made Reinhard Galen their head of intelligence in the east at the secret tree of Fort Hunt and all that.
Sorry, we got to go to this break, but we'll be right back, everybody, with more of Nebojsa Malic from Antiwar.com and GreyFalcon.blogspot.com.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
It's the show, I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking about talking with Nebojsa Malic about the situation in Ukraine.
And, well, we were, I decided to go back and dwell on the topic of America's support for the Nazis in the putsch in Kiev back, you know, November through February, culminating in the coup of February 21st, 22nd this year.
And then so Nebojsa started talking about post Cold War America's all or, you know, yeah, at the post, the dawn of the Cold War, America became all about the Nazis in a lot of places, repatriated some.
But, you know, I guess from from Western Europe, they repatriated in Eastern Europe.
They tried to recruit them and they've maintained some of these relationships, at least on and off with some of these no fooling Hitler loving Nazis in Eastern Europe this whole time, including Svoboda and right sector Svoboda.
That means freedom.
But that's only because they changed their name from the Social Nationalist Party, which I guess they must have had help from Goebbels grandson naming or something there.
But anyway, so Nebojsa, you take it from there.
I know you weren't done.
Well, when I was mentioning the Ukrainian Nazis that were evacuated in 46, they weren't the only ones.
Obviously, there was among the other Nazis that the West thought it could use in the in the developing Cold War were also people from the so-called independent state of Croatia, which had committed a genocide against the Serbs and the Jews during the war.
And so these people, again, settled in the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, ended up coming back in the 1990s on the wings of freedom and democracy and the great European overthrow of communism and ended up basically recreating the same order that their parents or them themselves in some cases had to escape from after it collapsed with the end of Hitler.
And so this ties into what you mentioned earlier about the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s because there was this whole propaganda machine that wanted to present and spin it as, you know, this this greater Serbian aggression, whatever.
And you see you see the exact same pattern being used in the media now to the point where certain certain US papers and magazines and even radio, for example, the propaganda outfit Radio Liberty is trying to compare Vladimir Putin to Slobodan Milosevic and trying to fit him into this box so that everything corresponds to the narrative of, you know, the noble Croats, Ukrainians, whatever, fighting the evil Russian Serbs, whatever.
And again, this is this is one of those why the Balkans history remains a black hole of political analysis.
People just don't look at it.
I was recently having a very civil, very nice, very productive Facebook discussion with a colleague of mine who mentioned your wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But he didn't mention the Balkans at all.
And I'm like, well, why not?
And he said, oops, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I forgot.
It's like, well, a lot of people forget.
But that's, you know, without it, you this is one of those things if you don't speak about this, you don't mention this.
No, man, I do that all the time.
More politics.
Yeah.
He who must not be named.
Yeah.
I like to do this rap where here's how they lied us into each and every war since 1812.
And then a lot of times, especially because I'll be running out the clock right near the end and I'll skip Bosnia.
Sometimes I completely forget Bosnia and Kosovo all together and go straight to, you know, Iraq, war three.
And Taliban wouldn't give up Osama and all this nonsense and just completely forget the 90s.
I'll talk about maybe the no fly zone bombing in the 90s or completely forget the Balkans.
Well, the antiwar dot com was set up in 95 to to object to the intervention in Bosnia.
And then it really came into its own in 99 when it was chronicling the day by day propaganda in the war against Serbia.
And a lot of people forget about that today because, again, the whole thing has been shoved into into the memory hole.
But, you know, that's the piece of the puzzle that explains what's going on in Ukraine today.
Now, you mentioned prospects for peace.
I'm not an optimist.
I think the only hope at this point is for the Europeans to realize that, you know, obeying orders from Washington is going to destroy them economically, if not physically with the whole hydrogen bomb thing you mentioned.
I mean, there's enough nuclear warheads to obliterate the planet.
And I'm hoping it doesn't come to that.
I'm really hoping it doesn't come to that.
And I'm really hoping that however insane the people in Washington may look on any given day, they're not that insane.
But, you know, given some of the things they've been doing, all bets are off, really.
Yeah, well, you know, I think you're probably right that that's the best hope that we have is that the Germans will just say, sorry, there's just too much business at stake.
We went along with you guys on this for the time being, but now we're done.
But, you know, that'd be a great demonstration of the libertarian values that, you know, the war is stopped by people's realization that peace and trade are much more preferable.
Yeah, well, and look, and here's the thing that for people who aren't too familiar, that they've got to be exposed to here, you know, outright in plain English is that it's just a damned lie that Putin, the right wing ranch of this reactionary nationalist, whatever the hell adjective, is hell bent on reconquering all these Eastern European countries.
And he's starting with Ukraine, as we've talked about.
It was the Americans and their European friends, but primarily the Americans who picked this fight, who supported a Nazi putsch and then came up with this whole nonsense, just like always.
Stop resisting, stop resisting, you know, when it's the Americans who are the imperialists, you know.
Well, it gives me great hope that a patriotic American of some kind, obviously, you know, anonymous because that's the nature of the Internet, actually created one of those memes that's been circulating of, you know, look how aggressive Russia is putting its country right next to all of these bases of ours.
And you see in the photo, in the map, all these NATO and American bases, you know, in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Europe.
And you realize who's the aggressor here?
Who are the people fighting on their own doorstep and who are the people fighting halfway across the world?
I mean, the answer just points to itself.
Yeah.
And now so I'm back to the plane thing here real quick, too, because, boy, talk about a huge big deal that you're right, just kind of disappeared right out of the news and why here it really does seem more likely to me now that it was actually the Kiev government that shot this thing down, maybe not even with a surface terror missile at all, maybe with fighter planes.
And I don't know what to do, but just shrug.
I turn my palms up and shrug and say it seems like the best explanation is they were trying to make it look like the rebels did it.
And that was their motive for doing it in the first place.
Or I guess, you know, people say, I guess, but it was the Russian media who made up this crap about, oh, they were trying to kill Putin and he was flying way up near Poland or something nowhere near there.
So I don't know if I buy that excuse.
There's a lot of misinformation in this day and age just about surrounding just about everything.
But I think the biggest indication that the official story about MH-17 is a damned lie is the fact that, again, there hasn't been any mention of it in the past two weeks.
And, you know, with the air traffic control records being seized by the government of Kiev, with the non-disclosure agreement which was signed two days ago between the government in Kiev and the Dutch and the Belgians and the Australians, for some reason, and the Malaysians, I don't know where the Belgians and the Australians fit in, but the black boxes ended up in Britain, of all places.
Why would you want to hide the information if it's helping your case?
The obvious conclusion is that the revelations don't aren't helping your case, and therefore you're the one with something to cover up.
And therefore your official story is a bunch of BS.
And I'm sorry for running so far ahead and starting speculating instead of just not believing, but I started with not believing.
And that was weeks ago.
And like you're saying, they haven't proven a damn thing.
Go look at Facebook.
What?
Yeah, it's really abysmal when, you know, the government that says we're far more credible than everybody else.
First of all, if you are, you wouldn't be saying it, basically points to Twitter, YouTube videos and Facebook as evidence that have we really come to this?
Well, and, you know, I read a report this morning, it's run at UNS.com, where he quotes a expert investigator on the scene who says this really does look like machine gun fire in this wreckage, not shrapnel from an exploding warhead.
But it looks like, you know, presumably a Vulcan cannon or its equivalent, you know?
Right.
I mean, again, we haven't had any actual evidence presented except for what the Russians have shown.
And the Russians have shown that this was not a rebel missile.
It was not a Russian missile.
It must have been either a Ukrainian aircraft or a Ukrainian anti-air battery pending, depending on what the experts actually establish.
So, again, the official story is BS, which is why it's not in the media anymore.
Yeah.
About Russian intervention here.
I mean, obviously, it's a possibility that the Western really American lie that, oh, look, they're about to invade.
Oh, look, they're about to invade that they've been crying wolf for the last half a year could come true if it ever did.
Of course, I'm still pointing my finger at D.C. for pushing it that far.
Again, I don't believe for a moment that this is all really about Putin's ambition.
He may have his ambitions, but that's not what got us into this mess here.
And so, anyway, I guess I just wonder what you think it would take.
How many people would have to die?
How bad would it have to get?
How bad would the Americans have to be involved in this thing to get the Russians to go ahead and actually invade and take those two provinces in the east in order to keep Kiev and the Americans?
You know, obviously, American special forces and spies are there helping in that kind of thing.
So, you know, just what DEFCON level are we at here?
You know, there's a thousand something dead.
I don't know.
Most of them civilians.
There's a war still going on, but I'm not hearing just like with the plane.
The whole damn crisis has basically disappeared.
There's hardly any analysis whatsoever of the certainly not honest analysis of just how bad it is, just how bad it would have to get for Russia to finally go ahead and be provoked into moving into the east.
And then what?
And all that kind of stuff.
So speculate and predict and talk to me about the future here.
Well, I think that the threshold of intervention has been met repeatedly over the past several months and that what the Russian government has been doing again, this is my speculation, not actual truth.
For all I know is that they've been trying to focus on the strategic level, you know, working with the Chinese, working with the Latin Americans, working with Europe, seeing where Europe stands, because for them, this is an existential issue.
They cannot.
They cannot allow a hostile Ukraine, a Nazi Ukraine, a NATO Ukraine on their doorstep.
This is simply not an option for them.
This is this.
I mean, imagine an Al Qaeda Mexico.
This this or a Russian Canada.
Right.
You know, Russian even better.
I mean, and that's assuming Russians are hostile, which they're not.
They've really bent over backwards over the years to to promote a relationship with the West based on mutual understanding and respect.
But over and over and over.
And, you know, even even some American scholars have admitted this, like Professor Stephen Cohen over and over the West has been, no, we don't want partners.
We have we have servants and victims decide which one are you going to be.
And the Russians will not stand for this.
And so and nobody else should.
Honestly, I don't you know, it's not a question of whether you're big power or small country.
Nobody in the world should have to choose between being a servant and a victim.
That's, you know, especially not vis a vis the United States of America, which ought to stand for freedom, not not this kind of tyranny in the world.
So, you know, again, the threshold of intervention has been met.
It's because the Russians are not marching in with troops because they are trying other things.
They're trying other ways of accomplishing their strategic objectives and regional objectives.
It's incredibly easy to send an army of tanks down to Kiev.
There's nothing to stop them.
But what then?
But what then?
And it's it's it's that particular what then that the Russians are thinking about.
And unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the government in Washington is even bothering with gaming this out.
I think their whole notion is that, you know, if they if they lie enough, if they kill enough, and if they back these Nazis enough, the Russians will fold.
They can't fold and survive.
And this is something that the people here in D.C. need to understand.
No, man.
Well, it doesn't.
Well, I don't know.
And they do kind of right.
Don't they know they can push this thing so far?
And they like seeing people explode and that kind of thing.
But they don't really want to give up their own town of D.C. to the H-bomb, right?
I would imagine so.
I would imagine so.
But, you know, again, there could be a subset of people who think that it's worth risking nuclear war if that means that, you know, they they don't lose.
Let me rephrase it.
If they see the world as they know it coming to an end with the American imperial dominance and the end of petrodollar and everything else and their own, you know, number one spot in the world being endangered, it's entirely possible that some of these people are thinking, well, if I can't have the world, nobody can.
Yeah, Samson option.
And for the sake for the sake of the survival of the human race, we need to get these people out of power pronto.
Right.
Yeah, no, you're right.
I mean, that's what empires do is they follow their leaders.
They just lash out crazily at everybody.
Only they got the technology now to lash us all right out of existence, man.
And I mean, imagine if Gorbachev or somebody like him in his position back in the 1980s and during 1990s thought the same way and figured, OK, well, you know, if I can't have global empire, nobody can.
And I'm just going to push the button just to spite everybody, you know, for all for all the Russians criticized Gorbachev for betraying the Soviet Union and landing them in 10 years of hell, which he did.
He didn't destroy the entire world.
And that's extremely commendable.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, he didn't even use conventional weapons.
He just said, fine, it was beautiful.
He basically said to think that that opportunity, that most beautiful opportunity probably ever to think that the Soviet empire could have come down in such a fashion and then to see the opportunity for peace and long term friendship and relationship.
They're completely blown by the Americans and the Natoists and the rest this whole time.
It's just sick.
It's worse than a crime.
It's a mistake.
And it's a mistake with possibly historical and world ending consequences.
And I hope it doesn't come to that.
But it's really just an atrocity.
All right.
Well, thanks so much for coming back on the show, Nebojsa.
I'm going to talk to you again here soon, I hope.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.
All right.
That's Nebojsa Malik, everybody.
Malik, he writes at antiwar.com weekly moments of transition.
And he's got a great blog, The Gray Falcon, grayfalcon.blogspot.com.
Back in a second.
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