Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I got Max Blumenthal.
He's the author of Goliath and the 51 Day War.
Also, he did the documentary Killing Gaza with Dan Cohen.
I keep urging you guys to see and you can listen to their interview about it from a few weeks back.
He runs the Grayzone Project with Ben Norton.
That's at grayzoneproject.com.
And they also host a podcast called Moderate Rebels, haha.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Max?
Great to be back.
Good to have you here.
And so you've written this thing about Ukrainian Nazis, the very best Nazis.
And we know that because or else why would America be supporting them?
Yeah, they might be Nazis, but there are Nazis.
So tell us, Congress welcomes an actual fascist as Nazi violence rages in Ukraine.
That's the title of the article here.
And it's about a guy named Andre Peruby came to Washington, D.C.
Who's he and what's he doing?
Well, you can see the video of my confrontation more with his hosts than with Peruby at grayzoneproject.com.
You know, it was treated as this kind of normal event.
And it was actually the second time Peruby had been in Washington.
The last time John McCain was available to receive him.
This time it was just Paul Ryan and some State Department official.
Peruby is the chairman of the Ukrainian Rada in kind of Western speak.
That would be the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament.
And he's the founder of two parties that could be fairly qualified as neo-Nazi.
The Patriot of Ukraine, which is a violent, racist militia, and the Social National Party.
And if the Social National Party sounds like the National Socialist Party, that's because it was directly inspired by that party.
Peruby is unreformed in his views and oversaw the supposed self-defense battalions in the Maidan in 2013, 2014.
His deputy, Vadim Troyan, was the founder of Right Sector.
And these were the black-masked, hardcore ideologues who ultimately went to the east to fight as the Azov Battalion.
The Azov Battalion draws from the ranks of the now defunct Patriot of Ukraine.
And it is classified by not just me, but U.S. Congress as a neo-Nazi militia.
And the U.S. Congress, thanks to the leadership of Representative Ro Khanna, has actually enacted a ban on weapons to this group that until recently the U.S. was arming and training.
And I can talk more about their ideology, but their symbol is the Wolf's Angle, which was a symbol that was on display in Charlottesville along with other symbols that are familiar to Ukrainian neo-Nazis during the, you know, the march and the confrontation that took place last year.
The Wolf's Angle is derived from, you know, SS symbology, as is the Totenkopf, which is worn in a lot of commemorations, Ukrainian nationalist commemorations these days, by veterans of the war or people commemorating veterans of the war that Ukrainian nationalists consider a great fight against Russia and the Soviet Union fought by Nazi collaborators.
So Peruby really represents the mainstreaming of neo-fascism in Ukrainian society and the desire of the U.S. to turn up the heat on Russia and thereby ignoring the fact that, you know, the Speaker of Parliament is someone who founded two neo-Nazi parties.
I mean, I haven't really gotten into specifics yet, but it was just shocking for me to turn up at this event where Peruby was alongside three fellow speakers of Eastern European parliaments from countries that have basically volunteered as NATO bases and to see him be welcomed by the American Foreign Policy Society, which is not, you know, a right wing think tank.
After meeting Paul Ryan in a room full of Hill staffers and media and people who used to work in the Obama administration and for me to get up and ask a question why his hosts were legitimizing the founder of these two neo-Nazi parties when anti-Roma violence is raging across Ukraine, when Roma encampments are being attacked by a state funded neo-Nazi militia called C14.
And it was just a surreal experience because people behaved as though I was some deranged conspiracist and accused me of reciting Russian propaganda.
It was as if this whole history had never taken place and that facts didn't matter.
And so that was the most disturbing component for me of Peruby's visit.
You know, if Richard Spencer had come to town in Washington and was hosted by some member of Congress, there would have been thousands of anti-fascists clad in black outside the Capitol.
In this case, nobody cared.
Yeah.
Well, and we know that a big part of that and almost insurmountable facet of that is that it's a bipartisan situation.
It was Barack Obama's Nazis, Barack Obama's coup d'etat in 2014, the second in 10 years where the Americans overthrew the very same democratically elected guy Yanukovych there.
And then Trump has escalated the policy.
He wasn't just stuck with it, but he's escalated by sending weapons in where Obama refused and sent only non-lethal aid, trucks, which is bad enough, and trainers.
But Trump has actually sent weapons in or at least authorized the sending of weapons.
And so, OK, it's true that the greatest politician ever did the same thing as the worst one ever on this, but that's the way people feel about it.
And so that precludes basically focusing on it when, as you say, this is the kind of thing that would make some great talking points.
Hey, look, you know, actual Nazis, actual proud Hitler loving Nazis.
Yeah.
I mean, it really they really are actual Nazis.
And, you know, part of the narrative of Russiagate is that Trump refused.
I mean, this is not actually what they say, but the Democrats have had been outraged that at the Republican National Convention, the party platform was changed to reverse a call to provide lethal arms to Ukraine.
And this was supposedly evidence of the Russian connection.
It was actually bringing the platform in line with what was established U.S. foreign policy under Obama, which was to honor the Minsk Accords, not provide lethal weapons that would escalate the violence around the Donbass.
Trump eventually caved for whatever reason.
And, you know, his his liaison in Ukraine, Karl Volker, who has been the executive director of the McCain Foundation and is, you know, hardline neoconservative, is the one who really turned the screws on this deal and got the Javelin anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian military.
And the most important point here is that the Azov battalion, this neo-Nazi militia that I mentioned, has been incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
So there's no way that these weapons won't reach them somehow.
So this is indeed a bipartisan project.
And I spoke to Michael Carpenter at this event where Peruby was hosted.
Michael Carpenter was a defense official who was pushing for, you know, more aid to the Ukrainian military under Obama.
He's now the executive director of the Biden Foundation.
He's you know, he was in the State Department before that.
So he's someone who helped preside over the policy that brought these neo-Nazi figures out into the open.
And I asked him, you know, do you think it was legitimate to bring Peruby here, his party?
And I quoted a statement from the Social National Party that Peruby founded in 1995 that it will defend the white race against the degradation of humanity.
And Carpenter just looked in my face, defended Peruby, said he's moderate, and then said that I was just spouting off Russian propaganda.
But, you know, the Atlantic Council, which most of the listeners of your show will know is NATO's think tank in Washington.
It's not really a place where you're going to find a lot of calls for peace.
It's funded by the arms industry.
It's not only funded by NATO, but by Saudi Arabia and Turkey and everyone else.
The Atlantic Council, which employs Michael Carpenter now, actually had to acknowledge that neo-Nazis were rampaging across Ukraine and even killing Roma people, menacing Jews, menacing dissidents, pretty much everyone who doesn't fit into their national, their vision of sort of a pure national project.
Well, and I think most importantly, Max, I mean, they've been threatening the parliament and saying that, you know what, we overthrew the last government.
We can overthrow you, too.
And there's been threats like that from Right Sector and the Azov guys from time to time where they hold these massive demonstrations outside and threaten that, hey, using force to have our way?
Why wouldn't we?
And which is a pretty bold and apparently pretty credible threat.
And, you know, there's a great new piece by Daniel Lazarek Consortium News about this, too, and where he's talking about in the Washington Post.
I think this may be the same thing.
Joshua Cohen, is it, where he's having to admit to a lot of this and saying that, you know, the politicians there, they don't know what to do.
And they would have to really clamp down and have a real bad fight with these guys in order to get rid of them.
But they don't have any other way to get rid of them.
And so they're doing nothing and hoping it'll just kind of go away.
Right.
I mean, I was just going to read the headline of the Atlantic Council's article, which was extremist violence is a real problem in Ukraine.
And no, RT did not write this headline.
So even the Atlantic Council, Michael Michael Carpenter's employers acknowledging that.
But, yeah, you brought up another point, which is that the Azov battalion has actually deployed to Kiev where there aren't pro-Russian separatists.
What are they doing in Kiev?
They are there to, quote unquote, restore national order in their view.
And that speaks to the real overriding ideology.
The Azov battalion's sort of ideological figurehead is Andrei Boletsky.
And he is a proponent of the idea of the Reconquista or the reconquest of Europe by the white races, starting with Ukraine, one of the nations that they consider a pure white nation.
But to drive out, you know, the people in their view who are the intervention, starting with the sort of corrupt technocratic government that's been installed by the West in Kiev.
So this is a first step by installing a national core in Kiev.
There are about 600 men.
The thing is that they're operating, as you said, under the watch of the government.
So Poroshenko's hands are tied.
Arsen Ovakov, who's actually Armenian, he's not even Ukrainian, and he's just sort of a cynical politician, is the real steward of the Azov battalion.
And, you know, as the interior minister, he plays a really key role in Poroshenko's coalition.
He's in the same party as Peruby, which is a mix of ultra nationalists and just down the line centrist, sort of cynical politicians.
But they realize that, you know, if they don't get on the side of the nationalists, they're toast.
Meanwhile, you know, the Azov battalion and these ideologues are gaining strength.
And they're not just attracting Ukrainians.
They're attracting foreign fighters just in the same way that ISIS did.
In 2016, Ukrainian intelligence arrested, probably under pressure from foreign intelligence, a French foreign fighter named Grégoire Montot who had visited an Azov camp, left it with a really fearsome arsenal of explosives and rifles and was on his way back to France to carry out attacks against synagogues and mosques.
So this group actually presents a real threat, not just to Ukraine, but to Europe.
Amnesty International issued a report earlier this year concluding that as long as these ultra nationalist elements are in government and are rampaging across Ukraine, in their words, no one is safe.
Weirdly, that report was never translated out of Ukrainian.
So I had a friend translate it for me.
Well, you know, I mean, the thing of it is, too, is there's kind of a remaining huge unsolved situation.
That's why all this tension, too, is that in reaction, I mean, as you know, of course, in reaction to the coup of 2014, you had and you've referred to this war, you had, you know, the far east of the country declare that they refused to accept the new government there.
It was quickly so-called ratified by an election, but an election that the entire east boycotted and said they refused to recognize the new regime.
The new regime then launched a war against them, as you've mentioned, using these Nazi militias against them as well.
But when the Donbass region, Luhansk and Donetsk, when they asked to be incorporated into Russia for protection, Putin said, yet, forget you, man, you're more trouble than you're worth.
I'll send you some deniable special operations guys to keep you going.
But no, I will not guarantee your independence and you certainly cannot become part of Russia.
So, so much for expansionist, you know, Russia determined on gobbling up all of Eastern Europe.
But besides that point, the U.S. and our allies have really put these people in eastern Ukraine in a really bad position because now they have a government that will not accept their independence based out of Kiev.
And they've dug themselves a real pit in apparently being unwilling to negotiate reentry back into under the control of this regime.
The Russians don't really have their back as far as integrating.
I mean, I don't even know if anyone knows how the economy is doing there, if they have any kind of trade and, and, you know, access still to good food and what have you.
They're kind of landlocked and are not entirely landlocked, but they're separate up there.
And I don't know how much trade they're getting in and out.
Seems like and then so that's kind of the backdrop to all this is this is still an unresolved thing.
We have this, the Minsk two accord that you referred to is basically a ceasefire, but it's not a real resolution.
Right.
And, you know, the ceasefire is consistently broken.
You know, earlier this year I spoke to someone who's been living on the front lines around the Donbass probably since 2016.
And, you know, we don't grasp the depth of the tragedy here, but he would supply me with a series of reports day after day.
And you'd see one village get attacked with rockets and then another village on the other side get attacked.
And you just see these this dizzying array of attacks to the point where you can't keep track anymore of who's violating the ceasefire.
A family festival was attacked with rockets on the Ukrainian side at one point when I was really closely monitoring what was happening in local press.
And we don't even this doesn't even get reported back here.
But it's it drives the political extremism in Ukraine, the frustration and the feeling like this is a sort of a perpetual trench war.
And the fact is that the West is using Ukrainians as kind of cannon fodder for its anti-Russian agenda.
And you've really got that feeling in this room at the Senate heart building, watching Peruby, this veteran demagogue, declare that when he was asked, you know, are sanctions working on Russia, declare that sanctions aren't enough, that Putin only understands the language of force, that we have to use force.
I mean, he was essentially calling for a hot war against Russia.
I suppose many of those on the ultranationalist side or, you know, an ultranationalist ranks are so frustrated with this kind of trench war that they would love to see some, you know, ground support from NATO, which would be a disaster, obviously.
And they'd probably lose.
But this this was the message that Peruby was delivering in Washington.
And it was an extremely dangerous one that his hosts were happy to hear.
He also promised to help stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which in the minds of really anyone in the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in Washington is an existential threat to the U.S. and EU's kind of or the U.S. American control over Europe's economy, because the pipeline would extend from Germany to Russia and really present an alternative path for natural gas to Europe at a time when Europe really needs it.
That is what Peruby was in town to do.
And we forget about the people in the Donbass on both sides who are just dying kind of, you know, every week a few people die.
And we just completely forget about them for this cynical geopolitical game.
But that's what ultimately is driving the extremism.
And as I mentioned, the hardened forces that have come from the Patriot of Ukraine, then gone to the east to fight, are now moving back into Kiev to impose their agenda.
And, you know, they're not attacking.
There's a substantial Jewish community in Kiev.
They're not attacking Jews at this point.
That would really complicate their ability to get the arms and the aid.
You know, the Romani people are dispensable in the eyes of the West.
But, you know, that would be too much.
They are menacing them.
There's vandalism.
And they're naming streets after people who murdered Jews.
Stepan Bandera, who is sort of the nationalist icon of Ukraine, and Roman Shukhevich, who is the founder of the Ukrainian partisan army.
Both of these figures were involved in the extermination of the Jewish community of the city of Lviv.
And it was Andrei Peruby who got the red carpet treatment on Capitol Hill two weeks ago, who was the chairman of the committee in the early 2000s to erect a statue to Stepan Bandera in Lviv.
And now that statue has been erected.
Efrem Zurov from the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation, who is, you know, a figure who sort of dedicated himself to hunting down Nazis and Nazi collaborators, has complained on Twitter that there are more statues to Jew killers in Ukraine than any other place in the world.
But, you know, how often do we hear about that, including from American Jewish, mainstream American Jewish groups or from the World Jewish Congress?
It's a complete cover up.
Yeah, there's been a little bit of that in the Israeli press, where they say, geez, I don't know, guys.
But then I'm sure you're familiar with this new report by Asa Wynn-Stanley.
When you talk about arms sales, that includes the Israelis are selling weapons to this coup junta, which includes these Nazis.
Yeah, well, this this makes a lot of sense.
I mean, since Congress cut off arms, Israel sort of stepped in and we've seen these videos of Azov battalion members with Tavor rifles.
The Tavor rifle is the most distinctive weapon in the Israeli arsenal just because of the way it looks.
It has such a thick stock.
It replaced the Uzi, which is another really distinctively Israeli weapon.
And you've got these Azov guys running around with Israeli weapons.
So it was obvious that Israel was filling the void that the U.S. had maybe left, as they did in Guatemala in the 1980s.
After the Boland Amendment, when Congress actually did a rare piece of intelligence reform and required the executive to put his imprimatur on any covert action, the U.S. immediately went to Israel to get the arms to the fascistic dictator Ephraim Rios-Montt so he could continue to carry out his genocide against the Mayans in Guatemala.
Rios-Montt explicitly credited Israel with helping him win his dirty war.
And I think we've reverted to that model.
And of course Israel isn't above collaborating with Nazis.
It provided support to Klaus Barbie, who was an unreconstructed Nazi ideologue who was involved in Operation Condor to crush communism in South America.
And it worked with the Argentinian Junta.
So we have all these examples of Israel collaborating with neo-Nazis and neo-fascists to serve U.S. interests.
And it's doing it again.
Israeli human rights lawyers had determined that the Defense Department, the Defense Ministry of their country, was shipping weapons to the Ukrainian military.
And they have just issued 40 Israeli human rights figures, human rights lawyers and activists have actually issued a public letter calling on their government to stop arming Ukraine because the arms are going into the hands of a neo-Nazi militia incorporated into the National Guard, which espouses an explicitly white supremacist anti-Semitic ideology.
And it's actually starting to make the rounds in the Israeli press.
Haaretz yesterday, the Israeli sort of liberal paper, published a piece by an author who's writing for some reason under a pseudonym, John Brown, about the letter that was issued by these human rights lawyers and provided a really strong overview of the rise of neo-Nazism in Ukraine.
So I think like this is going to become an unavoidable issue that American Jewish groups are going to have to deal with at some point.
We've seen a few statements here and there, but it's going to become an issue that they won't be able to avoid.
I think partly because of this scandal.
And, you know, the scandal was brought to my attention by Asa Wynn Stanley at Electronic and Defada.
So definitely check out his excellent piece of reporting.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, just to think how easy it is to show with New York Times articles what sounds unbelievable.
That the Congress issued a resolution saying that no money can go to the training of neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine.
And then rather than break the law, they went ahead and repealed that and said, no, you can't again.
Sorry, we didn't mean to obstruct.
And then so that really happened.
That's, it sounds crazy, but it's right there in Plano Black and White in the newspaper of record.
Well, every year they would strip out of the defense appropriations bill a provision restricting arms to Ukrainian military and specifically to Azov Battalion.
It was stripped out every year.
I think this year was the first time that it was kept in.
And Ro Khanna, the member of Congress who really put his weight behind the restriction, was demonized by a former Bush Pentagon official as a Russian agent in the Hill.
So, you know, this is the consequence for trying to restrict U.S. arms to neo-Nazis.
I think this is one of the biggest scandals of our times.
But then again, I thought, you know, providing arms to al-Qaeda and its allies in Syria just over a decade after 9-11 and helping them establish the largest al-Qaeda franchise in the world was a scandal.
But, you know, it's barely even remembered in Washington.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Hezbollah, Hezbollah, Iran, Iran, Iran.
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, no, that's my thing, too.
But, you know, I was actually, someone on Twitter was saying, oh, yeah, no, I'm too sloppy on Ukraine.
And I should point out how Russia is bad all the time, too.
But I never said Russia was good.
What I always say is always the very same thing, which is that all the worst stuff that Russia does is in response to America putting them in that position.
I'm not saying it's justified.
I'm just saying don't pretend we didn't overthrow the government of Ukraine twice in 10 years.
And don't pretend that you didn't know or that you shouldn't have had to know that that's a vital interest of Russia's.
No different than if they overthrew the government of Canada twice in 10 years and then sent a bunch of Nazis to kill a bunch of French Quebeckers who refused to, you know, bow down to the new coup government.
I mean, this is it.
And look, put the shoe on the other foot for a minute like I just did.
And what's the obvious answer?
America would drop H-bombs on Russia before they let Russia overthrow the government of Canada once ever, or even think about it.
Give us a break, please.
And yet, but we can do that to them all day, no matter what.
And then, but I'm supposed to be upset at them for sending in their little green men.
But I'm supposed to omit the fact that America, you know, overthrew this democratically elected government as recognized by all the international recognizers, Jimmy Carter and the EU and all their friends.
Right.
Anyway, it's part of the beauty of imperialism is that the, you know, the U.S. can speak on Ukraine's behalf and portray it as the victim while denying its own role and putting it in that position.
And so, you know, all of the money that went into Ukraine's color revolution in 2004, which brought a very similar government into power.
And then what the U.S. did around the Maidan, all of the, you know, the U.S. meddling, the Western meddling is just, if you talk about it, you're considered kind of a conspiracist in Washington.
Well, you know what?
I'm glad that you mentioned that part of it again about who's the outsiders and who's the insiders and just who's rational and who ain't.
So my audience may recognize this.
I don't know if you do, but I heard this on NPR and I just frantically searched for it and it took me forever to find it, but I found it while we're sitting here talking.
And it's from 2014 and talking about sending arms to, oh, pardon me, February 2015 on All Things Considered, talking about arming the Ukrainians for this fight.
And he's talking with Ivo Daalder, who is the former U.S. ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
And so at one point, Robert Siegel from NPR asks him, what if Russia, they, called Washington and the Ukraine's bluff on this and just said, no, we'll escalate instead of giving in?
What happens next?
And then Daalder, you know, it's a whole paragraph, but abridged, what he says is we'll increase Russian casualties.
And then he says when Russian soldiers die, then the cost and the debate in Moscow and in the rest of Russia will go up.
The debate will go up.
The debate will increase.
I remember that interview.
Yeah.
And you're just supposed to skip a few.
And then, oh, and then the mothers of Russia will demand that rather than, you know, being angry that Americans helped get their sons killed.
Instead, they'll just turn all of their anger on Putin for this, because that's the obvious natural reaction to Russians when they get into wars with foreign powers.
And then, but they just go.
He didn't even finish the sentence.
Right.
He just stops with the debate will go up.
And then you're just supposed to say, oh, yeah.
And then everyone lives happily ever after, after the debate goes up.
Yeah.
I mean, it's this this kind of mentality that goes back to George Kennan of creating a pressure cooker around Russia through, you know, by stirring up a series of catastrophes on its periphery.
And then forcing the debate to go up, which means you demoralize the population and then they put enough pressure on the leader until they, too, have a color revolution.
And who cares about all the instability that we create for the populations around the border?
And the risk of a full scale H-bomb war if, say, there's a regime in Moscow that doesn't want to give in to a color coded revolution.
Yeah.
Well, that, you know, as Lindsey Graham said about North Korea, the war will happen over there.
So it's the same mentality.
But, you know, I also remember in 2014, I wrote a piece for Alternet about the Nazis in the Maidan.
And I was in for Alternet.
OK, it wasn't like I was writing for foreign policy or, you know, some major mainstream publication.
But it was such a threat that I did this, that I was attacked in The New York Times.
I don't remember the name of the person who attacked me.
It was some guy from some pro-NATO Polish think tank.
But it was shocking.
I was attacked as Putin's useful idiot on the pages of The New York Times.
And then I saw a swath of articles.
Jamie Kirchick, the neoconservative operative, wrote a piece in Foreign Policy called Putin's imaginary Nazis.
That the neo-Nazis didn't exist.
They were just a hologram projected by gamma ray out of Putin's brain.
And Timothy Snyder, who back in 2010 in The New York Review of Books had actually written about the danger of Banderism or nostalgia for the Nazi collaborationist period in Ukraine, was now denying that neo-Nazism was real in Ukraine in the same publication.
And these people were taken seriously.
I was called, you know, Putin's useful idiot.
And now here we are, what, four years later, and the Atlantic Council and Radio Free Europe have had to acknowledge that Nazi violence is a real problem in Ukraine and the Azov battalions in Kiev.
And, you know, so this really is a commentary on the foresight or lack thereof of the kind of imperial, you know, the sort of bipartisan imperial consensus in Washington.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, you know, it's interesting, too, because they admitted the truth in foreign policy in the Washington Post back then, too.
Just like with Syria, some of our greatest sources are even David Sanger writing a CIA press release in the New York Times saying, yeah, we're backing these terrorists.
It's working out great.
And they're not sad about it or shy about it at all.
But what doesn't happen, though, even when those paragraphs make it into the stories, usually it doesn't change the narrative from the overall narrative the way they want us to see it.
But there were at least a couple of stories back in 2014, you know, in the early part of 2014, saying, yes, it's true that there are a bunch of Hitler worshipers here, but probably don't worry about it.
Or even, this is alarming and we need to be careful that they don't delegitimize our great new project here, etc.
Yeah, but at the end of the day, we're going to put in a technocrat and it will be a liberal project.
Yeah, we might have a Nazi for Speaker of the Parliament, but come on.
I mean, what damage could he do?
The military prosecutor of Ukraine warned that the country is being drowned in blood by Jews last week.
Then a few days later, we saw news that the Ukrainian parliament hosted a display in the Rada of newspapers by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists 70 or 77 years ago glorifying Hitler.
One of the newspapers on display in the Ukrainian Rada features a loyalty oath to Adolf Hitler.
And, you know, this is just happening right in front of our faces.
Nobody's saying anything.
So it's really it's not just that it was acknowledged here or there and it is getting reported here or there.
It's that it doesn't fit into the news cycle and that if you do try to make enough noise about it, you'll be branded a Russian propagandist.
But overall, there's sort of a vow of silence and a sense of disbelief, because I think, you know, the people who helped plan this and orchestrate this catastrophe, known as the revolution of dignity, are so ashamed of what they've done.
And it's the same thing with Syria.
It's just really embarrassing for anyone in the Obama administration to talk about arming the rebels one billion dollars through Operation Timber Sycamore and the catastrophe it created.
The only criticism that's permitted of the Obama administration in Washington is that it didn't do enough.
And I think, you know, you hear a similar narrative around Ukraine.
Yeah.
Well, and this is the thing, too, is most media people, they don't know anything about this stuff.
They haven't been watching the evolution of the new Cold War for the last 15 years.
Well, they've been driving it.
And, you know, saw the Orange Revolution for what it was, not just a thing that happened, but, you know, as part of systematic purge CIA, NED type regime changes against Russia's friends and what, four or five cases in the Bush years there.
But, you know, people don't even understand really the means to the end here when the point is at least at some future date to bring Ukraine into the NATO military alliance.
And, you know, as Ray McGovern always points out on the show, it's in the WikiLeaks, thanks to Chelsea Manning, the report by, I think it's, I forget which, I think it's Nicholas Burns, but I could be wrong.
Where he's quoting the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, as explaining the title of it is Nyet Means Nyet.
And he's saying this is absolutely a red line.
Don't think we're bluffing.
We will absolutely go to war rather than let you bring Ukraine into the NATO military alliance.
And these people's attitude is, see, that's why we need to do it because they don't want us to.
And so we're being defensive by moving our military alliance all the way right to their border.
And we already have troops, of course, in the Baltics, which leaves them literally only a few hundred miles from Moscow.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's, it's much more serious for Moscow than Syria is.
Ukraine is the most serious situation and that was, it was, it was not understood.
It's almost like it wasn't understood in Washington.
And it's part of the pathology that consumes the bipartisan establishment is that they don't put themselves in other countries' shoes and don't consider what would take place during the Cold War.
The Warsaw Pact had tried to incorporate Mexico.
They don't remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But, you know, Reagan would run around with these conspiratorial presentations on tanks running over land.
If, you know, the Soviet Union could get a base in Nicaragua running over land from Mexico to invade Texas.
You know, this is, this is the reality that Russia faces in the kind of world we've created for them through NATO.
And the consequences for Ukrainian people is terrible.
They're just simply our bullet stoppers, our pawns.
And, you know, that, that, that isn't conveyed either.
But, yeah, you're right.
I think that, you know, the people who have helped, who have not understood how the new Cold War developed, but, you know, who are deeply invested in the Russiagate narrative, I don't think they understand what the hell is going on in Ukraine at all.
Right.
Yeah, and, you know, I guess, you know, it's pretty easy to pick your own country's side against the dastardly foreign enemy.
Although you'd think Americans might be over that by now, as played out as it should be by 2018.
But, you know, at least compared to Al-Qaeda, Russia, I mean, even though it's a shadow of the old Soviet Union, it does, it is still the biggest country in the world.
And if you use your imagination, it could be full of a lot of soldiers.
I don't know.
You know what I mean?
It's not really.
They have a much, much smaller military than they had by, you know, huge, you know, 90% or something compared to what the USSR had.
But they're big enough to take a place, a significant place in one's imagination if they let it run wild.
That much is for sure.
I hear experts, real experts, serious experts, NPR news type experts, all the time talking seriously about the Russian threat to the Baltics and maybe the rest of Eastern Europe.
As though Putin is just waiting for the day that he's going to unleash, you know, secret caves full of tanks and just recreate the entire Soviet empire there.
And that they really think that.
I mean, obviously, they're being paid to pretend to think that, but maybe they really do, too.
I don't know.
Well, it's definitely part of the NATO narrative that's trying to compel these countries to contribute 2% of their GDP to military expenditures.
Which, you know, of course, is a boon to the companies in Texas and Colorado that are going to sell them the weapons.
So there has to be this siege mentality in these countries.
And, you know, Trump is driving it as well by demanding that these countries contribute more and more to NATO.
We're going to hear more and more about that at the upcoming NATO summit.
Well, and he does correctly refer to all these European powers as a bunch of good for nothing freeloaders.
But it makes it sound as, you know, to my ears, nice.
Oh, see, he's threatening to get out of NATO.
But, yeah, no, he's never said that a single time.
He's only just said, Germany, pay more.
That's all.
Yeah, I think, you know, stepping back a little, there isn't a lot of context provided to Americans.
But especially to people, you know, on the left where I am, who are celebrating, you know, the victory of this New York activist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
To understand, you know, what it will take to roll back empire.
And for them, you know, they want to reduce, you know, defense spending so they can contribute to, you know, social services and have their bread and roses.
But, you know, I read an interview with her.
She was being interviewed by Jeremy Scahill for Intercepted, their podcast at The Intercept.
And she was spouting off great power game talking points and really reciting the Russiagate narrative about Russia being aggressive in our election systems and attacking our institutions.
And it was really depressing.
People just don't understand why Russia is doing whatever it's doing.
Why Putin is there.
People on the left certainly don't understand what happened to Russia in the 90s.
How, you know, the Harvard boys under Larry Summers came through and pillaged Russia and handed over its state assets to a bunch of oligarchs and set the stage for Putin.
We don't understand what color revolutions are.
And we tend to celebrate them, you know, particularly people on the left because they see these hopeful young college educated protesters who for some reason have these colorful ponchos.
I don't know who supplied them.
And they're out there calling for, you know, a hopeful future.
So we're supposed to support those color revolutions.
We don't understand how they have destabilized Eastern Europe and hardened Russia.
And then we talk about human rights in Russia.
You know, these wonderful NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy got kicked out of Putin's Russia.
They just want democracy.
We don't understand what they're doing.
So we can't understand how we got to a situation in a new Cold War where our defense budget is at higher levels than after 9-11.
It just keeps going up with total consent.
And so I don't think that this figure, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, really has the context to be an effective socialist leader if she doesn't have the proper understanding of how empire works.
And empire doesn't just work by pouring in American kids from Spokane and Scranton, PA to, you know, Baghdad and Tikrit.
It takes place through NGOs, through soft power.
And that's really what has plagued Russia on its periphery and has gotten us to where we are.
I'll just give one quick example.
This radio station, Romadska, no one knows what it is in the U.S.
In Ukraine, it played a major role in Maidan.
It just cropped up overnight.
And this is how the U.S. really drove Maidan, was through media.
It was funded by the U.S. embassy.
Many of the EU embassies.
And by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of the Intercept.
He contributes hundreds of thousands of dollars to this station, if not millions.
And this station's driving the nationalist narrative.
At the same time, one reporter last week dared to refer to the Azov battalion as neo-Nazis.
And now they're facing a lawsuit and death threats.
So the irony is pretty extreme.
But again, you have the founder of the Intercept funding this Ukrainian nationalist station that played this huge role in the Maidan coup.
And no one's drawing the connection.
Yeah.
Well, and his own guys don't want to criticize him for it either, which is really unfortunate.
They really held their fire about the whole Ukraine situation in 2014.
And you can see why.
Bob Mackey didn't hold his fire.
Robert Mackey was, you know, all for it.
And now he's out there branding everyone who questioned the chemical attack or lack thereof and Duma as a conspiracist.
You know, trashing RT.
They did run actually one good one about – and they had pictures.
It seemed to be a legit story about actual CIA jihadist guys from Syria traveling to Ukraine and helping the Nazis fight in the east.
Under the excuse that they want to kill Russians on the ground instead of just get bombed from the air by them.
Yeah.
There was a jihadist battalion called the Sheikh Mansour Brigade that was active in the east.
Anna Nemtsova actually for the Neocon Daily Beast of all places reported about it.
And they were coming in from Syria from across the Middle East and across Eastern Europe and Dagestan and everywhere else.
After getting trained by ISIS and al-Qaeda and its allies in Syria and they were pouring in to Ukraine to work alongside groups like Azov.
And this again was reported in one of the most anti-Russian outlets in America.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it was good that they at least had that in there.
But yeah, you're right about the – I guess the way people overlook people like Omidyar and these other billionaires who – he's probably recruited into it by the State Department.
They're like, hey, we need some money in a deniable kind of way.
Will they do you a favor back?
That'd be my guess, right?
Absolutely.
This is one of the kings of alternative media and look who he is.
Yeah.
I mean I really increasingly – and I'm not knocking anyone who works for The Intercept.
If they had offered me a job a few years ago, there's no reason I wouldn't have taken it.
But I really see that publication as kind of for him a kind of form of greenwashing everything else he does.
He does believe in transparency.
And so he lists everything that he funds and he's funding groups alongside USAID that are involved in the activity that anyone to the left of John McCain would find heinous.
He's working with USAID and Visa in a campaign to get people in Africa and India off the cash economy and get them to start using electronic transfers to get everyone into debt.
He's pushing privatized charter schools in India.
I mean maybe some of your libertarian listeners might like that.
No, that's fascism, man.
No libertarians support charter schools.
We support the abolition of government intervention in education altogether.
That's different.
OK.
Well, I'm being facetious.
Yeah, I know.
But the point is people who read The Intercept really tend to believe in public schools and this guy funding it.
But what he's really doing around the world is dovetails really closely with the regime change agenda and the neoliberal global agenda.
Well, and back to Cortez for a second here.
I mean how far left do you got to be before you give up American imperialism?
I mean I get it.
The whole progressive ideology is using power to make the world a better place and everything.
But how about we just focus on our own country and stop intervening elsewhere?
Yeah, I mean ultimately.
You shouldn't have to be like a serious communist to break from the liberal consensus on intervention.
You know what I mean?
In other words, she should be better.
She should be better.
I think she's trying to please too many people.
I don't know if she has anyone who's serious about foreign policy in her inner circle on her team.
You should really read the transcript of her interview with Scahill and Intercepted after she won because he asked her a lot of questions about foreign policy.
And she clearly doesn't know what she's talking about.
And so she falls back on the kind of mainstream narrative about great power conflict and Russia gate and Russian oligarchs.
I don't know what she's talking about.
But it must be scary coming into Congress and looking at what happened to Tulsi Gabbard when she actually tried to challenge.
Tulsi Gabbard, not exactly a bread and roses socialist, but someone who's progressive in the Democratic Party.
I've had issues with some of the positions she's taken.
She's not completely anti-intervention either, but she's pretty good on Syria compared to the rest of them, that's for sure.
She tried to challenge the push for regime change in Syria and she was pilloried.
You look at Dennis Kucinich, who did the same.
And when he ran for governor of Ohio, he was mercilessly attacked on that.
So, you know, you look then you look back at Ocasio-Cortez, someone whose main issues are, you know, domestic.
And, you know, why would they stick their neck out on foreign policy?
The fact is you have to on some level.
And, like, I think there's a point, the point where the point that you made, which is just we need to have a non-interventionist foreign policy and start bringing some of this money home is a basic, very simple point she could make.
But when you start getting into Russiagate and you start talking about Russia's aggressiveness in our institutions, you're actually setting the stage for doing the opposite.
The whole reason that narrative was deployed is to drive the massive defense buildup that we're experiencing.
And not just that, but also to pump money into all these phony initiatives like the State Department Global Engagement Center, which is this bloated propaganda arm of the State Department that's literally funding media outlets in Eastern Europe.
I saw a presentation by one of their staffers.
He said we're funding 200 outlets in Eastern Europe.
Some of these are staffed by Americans, could be staffed by Americans.
And, you know, so there's this whole cottage industry of fighting Russian propaganda.
And the great hope of socialism is currently feeding into that narrative.
So really it's a question of who gets to her first.
And I hope it isn't some kind of Shachmanite Trotskyist covert neocon who does so and that she meets some people in Washington who really do have an understanding of empire and how it's hollowing out this country domestically.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you, I don't put too much stock in it.
You know, even like you're saying with Gabbard, she has some major flaws on Palestine and Iran and all kinds of things.
And, you know, Denis Kucinich and Ron Paul, those are two guys that you know you can count on every time.
But I can't think of any other congressman who fit that bill.
Certainly not Ron's son.
No, but it's also a question of someone, what kind of platform they have and who they speak to.
Yeah.
And there was a campaign against Gabbard waged within left wing media by places like Jacobin.
You know, I saw Intercept figures just branding her as essentially a racist because she had some horrible votes in 2015 on Syrian refugees.
She's rolled back that position.
But really to go after her on positions that had nothing to do with Syria just to drive left wing people away from her when she spoke about Syria.
And then, you know, with Ron Paul, you know, he has his base, but he just had this, you know, Twitter controversy.
I wouldn't call it a controversy.
I mean, someone who operates his Twitter account a week ago tweeted something that I would say is objectively racist.
Well, I can tell you, I can tell you for a fact myself, because I know that it was purely an accident.
The guy didn't see the characters at the bottom.
And the moment he did, he went, oops.
And it wasn't Ron.
It was a staffer who did it.
But it was purely mistake.
You know, at best, it was idiotic.
And either way, you know, it just drives people away from what Ron Paul spends most of his energy talking about, which I think would be better.
You know, his anti-intervention position is far better for the masses of brown people around the world than what you hear from the Democratic Party establishment.
And not just consequentially, but, you know, he is a nice guy.
He is a caring guy.
And if you watch his TV show, The Liberty Report that he does with Dan McAdams, I mean, he is absolutely right there among the very best people we have on issues just like what we're talking about.
Ukraine and Syria and all these things.
I mean, he's great.
He writes every week.
If you watch his TV show, you can tell he really cares about this stuff.
Yeah, but you have – you know, I listen to it and I agree with what he's saying about foreign policy.
And then you look at the Ron Paul newsletters or that tweet and anyone on the left looks at it.
That's the Ron Paul they see.
It's a real problem and a tragedy and when – and it helps feed into this narrative, which is really increasingly prevalent of the dangers of the red-brown alliance.
Otherwise known as the centrists if you ask me, but yeah.
Well, you have to be a centrist.
And the only acceptable alliance in Washington is the liberal neocon alliance.
But I have no interest in partnering with anyone who wears a brown.
And look, the reality is what we're really talking about is the danger here, this red-brown alliance, is the anti-authoritarian left and the anti-authoritarian right joining together.
That's what they're afraid of.
The authoritarian left and right together equal the centrist consensus.
Yeah.
Well, exactly on foreign policy at least.
And so you look at an initiative like Mike Lee and Bernie Sanders on Yemen.
Like that's all we're talking about and it creates a deterrent effect in Congress where it's harder to go to war.
When you have sort of an alliance of convenience on foreign policy, Republican and Democrats who are non-interventionist.
It has nothing to do with forging some kind of ideological alliance.
It's really about politics.
And if, you know, I think there's a real fear there of people for different reasons are hostile to American adventurism, getting together on Capitol Hill and actually forming a majority.
That's going to be a real problem for the people who have been making life miserable from Libya to Syria to Iraq to the Sahel to sub-Saharan Africa to now where they're driving a regime change coup in Nicaragua to South America where they're trying to jail all the leftist leaders.
And I wonder how anyone can explain how that's good for average people in the world, you know, who advances a kind of multicultural abolish ICE perspective in the US.
I mean, is there any solidarity?
The whole point is it's good politics to go ahead and be good on this stuff now.
You know, and in fact, the change was made back when Katrina drowned New Orleans in 2005.
And, you know, all of the Rahm Emanuel picked pro-war Democrats lost in 2006.
And the few anti-war insurgent types who got the nomination despite his intervention won their races.
And it's been like that this whole time.
You know, I met a while.
This happens all the time.
But just the other day, I met a very, you know, curmudgeony right winger.
Let's call him who just said, well, I don't know why we got to wage war everywhere and tell the whole world how to live when our own country is so messed up.
This is the same guy who I bet you was a big George Bush booster back when, but is over it now, big time.
And, you know, that that line, that's the thing that Cortez needs to understand is that Schumer ain't your constituency lady.
The people who actually elected you actually care about this and they're going to insist.
And if that ain't the message, if they're not going to insist, then I guess she's just going to turn right into Nancy Pelosi anyway.
Yeah.
And watch Cynthia Nixon will fall into the same trap of, you know, uttering the same line as Chuck Schumer on the key core foreign policy issues.
I think the one place where these sort of progressive celebrity left figures differ from liberals is on Palestine.
And that has to do with this longstanding Palestine solidarity campaign and the fact that Palestinians are essentially powerless.
So they're, you know, in reality, the ultimate victim.
And I'd like to take some responsibility for that.
But, you know, when it comes to talking about current wars, the progressive consensus has only accepted that wars that took place 10 years ago are wrong.
And this is, you know, this really has to do with the failure of any national figure to be able to exist without being attacked as a kind of Russian propagandist.
Because you're ultimately going to have to talk about Russia and China if you want to talk about war and peace.
And the consequences are too high in Washington at this point.
Yeah, it's too bad.
I think a little bit of moral courage would go a long way.
No, I agree.
It's easy.
Just tell the truth.
Give me a break.
You know, I agree.
I think it would mobilize people.
I think a lot of this, the Russiagate that Democrats are pushing, which now is taking the form of branding Glenn Greenwald as a Russian agent.
It's increasingly focused on attacking people on the left, is turning off Democratic voters.
And you're right.
All of those Republicans who came out to vote for Bush after 9-11 have completely tapped out of the neocon unilateral agenda.
They've completely tapped out.
I don't meet anyone around the country, any of these guys who had bumper stickers on their pickup trucks calling to kick their ass and take their gas, who believe in that stuff anymore.
They came out for Trump because of his non-interventionist agenda.
And now Trump's administration is looking like the second coming of Bush's first term.
So it will be really interesting to look at how Trump motivates those people.
I think he'll do it with, you know, the culture war at home.
But there really was a component to the appeal of Trump that had to do with his foreign policy message.
And that's completely gone.
There won't be anyone in 2020 who's speaking to the non-interventionist masses.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
But just like in 2016, it's going to leave a huge opening in that Democratic primary for somebody who's, you know, got the insight enough and the courage enough to exploit it the way that Trump exploited it against Jeb Bush and against Hillary Clinton.
And in the way that Bernie Sanders obviously completely failed to do.
And if only he had the insight to see that he really could get the nomination early enough on, but that he would have to attack Hillary on the wars to get it, he could have done it.
But he held his fire and he lost the nomination and ended up losing the presidency to Donald Trump, his worst nightmare.
Right?
Absolutely.
Unfortunately, he voted for the Libyan intervention.
And I think that was Hillary's weakest point on foreign policy.
And if you can hammer her on bringing slavery back to Africa, you can do a lot of damage in a Democratic primary.
I don't think the void will be filled.
I think you could see like 10 or 20 people on stage in the first Democratic primary debate, none of them breaking from the kind of pro-NATO consensus.
I watched Elizabeth Warren actually lead hearings on bringing Moldova into NATO.
So and she was just so enthusiastic and it was so obvious she was being handled and that she was going to demonstrate her foreign policy chops by bringing this tiny little country into NATO so that our, you know, our American sons will have to fight and die for Moldova.
It was it was absolutely pathetic.
And, you know, her enthusiasm was so overdone.
So, you know, I don't have any hope for her.
I can't think of anyone else who has already broken from the bipartisan consensus in Washington who's a contender.
And, you know, the only thing I'm hopeful about is the possibility of completely trashing Joe Biden every day if he runs.
I don't know if he will, but I kind of hope he does.
So he will finally, finally be scrutinized.
Yeah, boy, he's trouble.
Speaking of the coup in Ukraine, we got his number.
And, you know, with that, we're at an hour, man.
I should let you go.
But thank you, Max, very much for coming on the show.
It's good to talk to you again.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
All right, you guys, that's Max Blumenthal.
He wrote Goliath.
It's a very important book about, well, everything you need to know about Israel and more.
Let's put it that way.
The 51 Day War about the slaughter of 2014.
And that's also the subject of his documentary that he made with Dan Cohen, Killing Gaza.
It's three bucks on Vimeo.
Go and watch it.
Seriously, man, it'll blow your mind for real.
Even if you already know this stuff, you really should look at it.
Killing Gaza.
And then he does the Gray Zone.
That's his project, grayzoneproject.com.
And he hosts the podcast Moderate Rebels with Ben Norton.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com, scotthortonshow, libertarianinstitute.org.
And buy my book, and it's now available in audiobook as well, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter, scotthortonshow.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks, guys.
