11/11/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's libertarian foreign policy, mostly.
Sometimes I talk about how much I hate cops, too, but pretty much it's just about the wars there.
Coming up, Charlotte Silver on the conviction of Rasmia Odeh.
Unbelievable.
I mean, predictable enough, but still unbelievable.
But as you may know, Sunday was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall.
I remember, I guess I was whatever, how old was I, 13, 12, 13, something.
I remember watching with my dad on TV as the Cold War ended.
It was really something else.
I remember appreciating at the time what a big deal it was.
I was raised to think that the Soviet Union would last forever.
You, too, right?
Probably.
Well, I got Eric Margulies on the line.
Of course, he knows the story.
He was there covering the dang thing 25 years ago today.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm just fine, thank you.
I've been reveling in the recollections of this momentous event 25 years ago.
There's so little good news in world news that when something like this happens, it's memorable.
Now, draw me a picture, for the kiddos, of just what was the Soviet Empire anyway?
The Soviet Empire had been created after World War II.
It was the product of the Red Army advancing into Eastern Europe, defeating the Germans.
When the ceasefire came in 1945, the Russians held half of Eastern Europe, and the Western powers held the other half.
By Eastern Europe, I mean also Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, etc.
And the Russian-occupied zone in Germany, that was called East Germany, that became the German Communist East Germany.
Anyway, the Russians set up client governments across Eastern Europe.
In all Eastern European countries, they were all fellow Soviet Socialist Republics.
And on top of this, there was the KGB, Soviet KGB, watching everybody.
And there was the Red Army in the form of the Warsaw Pact, which was their version of NATO.
And the Warsaw Pact brought together all these countries under Soviet military command.
So that was Eastern Europe, that was the Iron Curtain, and it was very much a Soviet dependency.
Now, I remember in sixth grade, I asked my teacher, I am confused.
Because I'm hearing all about how West Berlin is a free city, and there's this wall, of course, which I guess is in the east of the city.
And that must be the border of Germany, the line between east and west.
And yet, I'm looking at the map, and Berlin is entirely inside East Germany.
So what gives?
And her answer was, that's like asking why Austin is in Texas.
And so, of course, she was a government school teacher and couldn't even understand the question, because she was such an idiot.
But of course, it is a good question for my little sixth grade brain to come up with.
Why the hell is this western German city wholly surrounded by eastern Germany?
And what was this Berlin Wall anyway, Eric?
Well, there was the German border, and then there was the inner German border that separated communists from non-communist Germany.
What happened as a result, when the fighting ended in 1945, the western powers were close to Berlin.
And the agreement they made with the Soviets was that there would be the American zone in west, which later became western Berlin, west Berlin, Soviet zone, French zone, and British zone.
So Berlin was divided up.
Vienna was similarly divided.
But Berlin was, I don't know, 138 kilometers or something like that inside East Germany.
But there were transit routes to the west, and it was part of the post-Cold War architecture.
But West Berlin was still surrounded by the communists, and moving in and out was always dicey.
All right.
So, yeah, it was a complicated situation there.
And, again, when I was a kid, this era of the Cold War, we watched propaganda films all the time about people in East Germany and in East Berlin trying to escape to the west, either into West Berlin or into West Germany itself by hot air balloon or whatever they could do.
We watched that kind of thing all the time.
And, yeah, I was just a kid, but I was very interested in not getting nuked.
So I was interested in the whole Cold War thing, even very young.
And then the whole thing fell apart right in front of my eyes.
And this would be a good time for me to mention your great article here.
It's at unz.com.
It's also, of course, at ericmargulise.com.
But here at unz.com, it's called Eddie Chevy, Gorby, and the Fall of the Wall.
That's Edward Shevard.
Did I say that correctly?
Yes, yes.
Yeah, your Georgian is excellent.
So go ahead and tell us who is he, Eddie Chevy.
Edward Shevardnadze was the Soviet foreign minister.
To this day, he's very little known in the west and hugely unappreciated.
He was Gorbachev's most important ally in developing Glasnost and Perestroika, which was a total reform and the undermining of the Soviet system.
Shevardnadze was the KGB chief in the Republic of Georgia in the Soviet Union, a very unlikely person to become a liberal reformer.
But he sure did.
And between Gorby and Shevardnadze, who we used to call Chevy Eddie or Eddie Chevy, they completely changed the nature of the Soviet Union.
And the most important thing was that when push came to shove, that is when the revolts broke out in Eastern Europe against Soviet domination, and in the Baltic states as well, the communist hierarchy was demanding that they send in the army and the KGB and shoot the demonstrators down in the streets.
And Shevardnadze and Gorbachev refused to do this.
And by refusing to do this, as I said, they probably averted World War Three, because if they had sent the Red Army into action, the U.S. would surely have gotten involved.
And at the time, as I wrote in my article, there were, I think, 328,000 crack Soviet troops based in East Germany alone with thousands of tanks.
I see what you mean, though, that when they put down the Hungarian revolt and that kind of thing, but if they were putting down a general revolt across Eastern Europe, then at that point, what would have happened?
Reagan would have started launching nukes at them?
I don't think so, but I think that U.S. forces based in West Berlin and along the border might have gotten involved in the fighting.
And the fighting got out of control, and then the Red Army would have said, well, to hell with it, just move west.
And the general belief at the time was that the group of Soviet forces, Germany, to which I was just referring, could reach Antwerp and Rotterdam within about eight days of kicking off the attack.
And these were the main supply bases for NATO in Europe.
And then miracle of miracles, they just didn't do a damn thing.
I remember, too, all the East Germans flooding through, I guess the first gate they opened was Hungary, right?
That's right.
And then it was just on from there, and then it was like a friggin' miracle.
It's unbelievable, even looking back on it 25 years ago and barely remembering it, because I was just a little kid at the time and all that.
Imagine a third of the world under a totalitarian empire, and it just, eh, poof, falls apart.
Just collapsed, like a rotten tree.
Well, you know, the Soviet Union was rotten from the inside.
Its economy was on the rocks.
They'd spent much, much money on military, much too little on modernizing the economy.
The whole thing was held together by fear.
It just didn't work.
It had its good sides, but by and large, it was really an empire of fear.
Evil empire, as old Reagan said back then.
Now we have new empires.
All right, well, so when we get back from this break, Eric, we're going to talk about what happened since then.
Okay.
And what can be done about it, because it's a lot of bad news.
It's the heroic Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, and this great article at UNZ.com.
Eddie Chevy, Gorby, and the Fall of the Wall.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Talking about the end of the Cold War, the end of the Soviet Union with Eric Margulies.
Those two aren't exactly the same thing.
The Soviet Union came later in Christmas 1991.
And, you know, when all this stuff is breaking out with Ukraine, Eric, I interviewed Jack Matlock a couple of times, actually, the second to last ambassador to the Soviet Union.
And he proudly invokes all the efforts of the Bush senior administration to convince Moscow to hold on to Ukraine and Belarus and to keep the USSR intact, even as the rump USSR.
But they didn't go with that.
They went ahead and let them go and raise the old red, white and blue Russian flag up.
And that was officially the end of the Soviet Union in any sense at that point.
But the Republicans tried to stop them from doing that.
And he does invoke a bit of the truth in the chicken Kiev speech where Bush senior said, now, don't go resorting to suicidal nationalism.
You know, like maybe that was Bush senior's word to the Nazis that don't get yourselves killed because we're not coming to help you if you're going to really fight the Russians at this point.
Something like that.
But anyway, what do you make of all of that?
Well, Scott, we saw at the same time Margaret Thatcher calling up Gorbachev in Moscow, pleading with him not to allow the reunification of Germany.
Oh, right.
That's in here, too.
Right.
I skipped that on the reread.
And French President Francois Mitterrand also, not as strongly, but also suggested that it would be unwise to allow the reunification of Germany.
Why?
Well, you know, there's the traditional European rivalries and jealousies, particularly on the part of England.
The British to this day cannot accept that Germany is a stronger and more important country.
But for the states, too, you know, all these politicians, they had a love of the status quo and lived with it for decades.
And they didn't want the status quo changed because, you know, who knows who would know what was going to come out of it?
So that's what they were doing.
But at the same time, there were certain power circles in the U.S.
They were very happy to see Russia on the rocks and the Soviet Union on the rocks and see its constituent parts, particularly Central Asia and the Caucasus, breaking away.
Yeah, can't stop kicking them while they're down.
Now, you know, what's funny about this is, you know, back in the 1990s.
Well, I never was a right winger, but I'd read the New American all the time, the John Birchers.
And so my conspiracy theory of the whole thing was that they're working on and there were some indications of this.
Not all of them made up that there were at least parts of the foreign policy establishment that talked about this from time to time, that it was that we should work on a line with Russia, bring them into NATO in order to him in China and also to to go to war together against so-called radical Islam in South Asia.
And now that would I thought that was what the New World Order meant was eventual alliance with Russia, not just pretending to offer them a hand and kicking them while they're down the way they've been doing instead.
But I guess I mean, well, once Cheney came to power, I saw through that.
I should have been over it by 1999 when Clinton bombed bombed Serbia to to break off Kosovo there.
But but anyway, it seems like things sure have gone the other way.
And they've just it's still just the Cheneyite foreign policy is I don't know to what end to humiliate them.
I mean, I understand they want to dominate as much of Eastern Europe as they can, and they've done a pretty good job of that.
But at this point, it seems like I don't know what their motive is anymore, unless they believe their own hype that Putin is the aggressive threat against them, which is right, because that's ridiculous.
They do.
Well, you know, the Republican right has been craving a major demon for a long time.
And now they they have obviously found it in Putin.
But I was covering Moscow as the Soviet Union was collapsing.
This is two years after the Berlin Wall fell.
And I it was a crazy period.
What I saw, Scott, was that I was the first Western journalist ever to go into the KGB headquarters in Moscow and interview two senior two senior KGB generals who were running the place to lieutenant generals.
And what they told me flabbergasted me, which was that they said the Communist Party's become no rotten.
It's lost its way, no longer represents Russia.
And we know what's going on.
We are going to house the Communist Party.
And that's really what happened.
It was an anti-communist revolt from where they never expected, which was inside the Kremlin and inside the KGB and inside Russia.
So the Congress was behind perestroika and glasnost and the entire thing.
Yes.
Well, largely, yes.
Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, Yakovlev, they were all fed up with they were anti-communists.
They were Russian nationalists, but they were anti-communist.
Communists are ruining our country.
They've screwed everything up.
We've got to argue with that.
We got out.
We've got to oust them.
And so they did.
And then but then Gorbachev's mistake was that once the central power and the reign of fear was broken, the links that held the Soviet Union together began to snap.
And the only way to retain the union in one piece was the use of force.
And he wouldn't do that.
Something that I must add, our Western leaders have never hesitated to do.
And we continue using force all the time.
Yeah, of course.
Well, and now so how ignorant was I?
I mean, there was some talk when they're about they created a NATO Russia council and there was talk about bringing Russia into NATO there for a while in the 90s, wasn't there?
Well, there was talk, but it was mostly hot air because Russia.
NATO is for Russia.
That's what it's really about.
There's no common strategic interest, except possibly against China.
But now, thanks to the clever policy of the Obama administration, we have driven Russia and China into each other's arms.
Yeah.
Well, instead of working with the Russians against Islamic state types, we're more apt to use Islamic state types against Russia.
That's correct.
So we have a very bungling policy, which is driven by short-term imperatives rather than any kind of longer view.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so, well, hell, we're about out of time here, but the violence has picked back up on both sides there in eastern Ukraine.
How dangerous is this situation?
Really, obviously, TV coverage is no measure of just how serious it is one way or the other.
I've been writing since last December.
It's exceptionally dangerous.
We have all the makings of World War III here.
You know, the U.S.'s, the Western powers have increased air patrols along the Baltic and naval patrols in the Black Sea, and they're overflying Ukraine.
The Ukrainians who are losing the war, that is the right-wing regime in Ukraine, backed by the neocons in Washington, appears to be losing.
So its way out is to provoke a war between the Russians and the U.S. to try and come out winners in this thing.
Ukraine is an absolutely unmitigated mess.
It's a totally failed state.
And as I've been saying, too, whoever wins Ukraine will be the loser, because it's $60 billion in debt, and it's just a big black hole.
All right, Eric.
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking with us about this important subject and on this important anniversary.
There is some good in it, right?
Cheers to you.
It's somewhere.
Right.
Take care.
That's the great Eric Margulies, everybody.ericmargulies.com, unz.com, unzunz.com.
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