Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to 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 had.
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 name, say it 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, introducing Max Blumenthal.
He is the author of Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, and the 51 Day War, Ruin and Resistance in Gaza.
And with Dan Cohen, he made this documentary, Killing Gaza, which I really think you guys ought to take a look at.
It cost, what, three bucks, I think, to rent on Vimeo.
And it's really worth looking at.
I really hope you will, Killing Gaza.
But anyway, this time we're talking about the NED, this article, Inside America's Meddling Machine.
Oh, it's a documentary, too, I should say, a video.
Inside America's Meddling Machine, the U.S.-funded group that interferes in elections around the globe.
Welcome back to the show, Max.
How are you doing?
Great to be back, Scott.
Good to have you here.
So, well, first of all, what's the NED?
Ned sounds kind of nice.
Yeah, it sounds like Ned Flanders, you know, a neighbor who wears a Christmassy sweater and comes over and brings, you know, fruitcake and human rights to your house.
And lets you borrow his tools indefinitely.
Yeah.
And, you know, NED actually stands for the National Endowment for Democracy, which also sounds nice.
It makes you think of, like, endowments like public radio and democracy.
We all like democracy.
But what the National Endowment for Democracy does in practice is extremely destabilizing and nefarious.
I went to a gathering of the National Endowment for Democracy this June on Capitol Hill, and it gave me access to their directors and personnel, as well as the people they fund, particularly in Korea.
And you can watch that at grayzoneproject.com, or it's pinned to my Twitter profile right now, at Max Blumenthal.
It's about a 22-minute mini-documentary.
And basically what I found at this event confirmed everything I've written before about the National Endowment for Democracy, which is that it is mainly the arm of the U.S. government in the form of a soft power NGO for encouraging and stimulating regime change in countries that refuse to bow to the American agenda of, you know, open free markets for American corporations and U.S. aid and pretty much countries being unable to form their own independent policies.
So what I looked at was, you know, one of the biggest targets of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is North Korea.
I went to an awards ceremony, and people who are being awarded at the ceremony were the Korean defectors and so-called human rights activists and opposition media figures who are being funded to encourage regime change in North Korea, either by going to Congress with very inflammatory human rights reports, pumping shortwave broadcasts into North Korea, or simply being defectors and saying, you know, I suffered at the hands of the North Korean regime, and here I am to appear at the Trump State of the Union as one such defector at the ceremony did.
What was interesting was that that award ceremony was held on the day that Donald Trump met with Kim Jong-un to push forward peace talks that were very popular, not just in the north of Korea, but in South Korea, among over 80 percent of South Koreans, because this was about reunification and reconciliation and their families coming back together.
So this U.S. government-funded group, NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, was undermining another U.S. government initiative by the elected president.
And I found that very interesting.
And then in my mini-doc, I show how the NED has been active in other parts of the world, sowing instability and basically undermining efforts at peace.
Well, let's stick with Korea for a moment here.
Yeah.
If people wanted, if what we were talking about was democracy and liberty as opposed to compliance with the American empire's agenda one way or another, then it seems like anyone would have to conclude that a new open policy toward North Korea and burying the hatchet and having a final peace agreement for the last war back in 1950 through 53 there, and letting the families reunite and all of these things that are happening now, that that would be the best way to achieve that, right?
Just like when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping took over and declared to get rich is glorious, the standard of living of the people of China went from caveman level starvation status to, well, certainly a hell of a lot better than that for the vast majority of them.
And so, not that they have democracy there, but at the same time, the Communist Party has a lot more limits on its authority than it used to have because of the relative wealth of the people there.
And so, on the other hand is what?
The idea that, well, we should just blockade Mao's China and even Deng's China until the government falls, that we should just keep listening to the same people who've been telling us that Kim Il-sung and then Kim Jong-il and now Kim Jong-un's government is on its last legs and is about to fall any day now if only we don't negotiate and deal with them.
It seems like such a corrupt argument at this point to even make that having a hawkish policy is somehow leading, is on the way to, in any way is incompatible with exporting freedom and democracy or even the slightest improvement of the standard of living and of rights protected there in North Korea.
I mean, on the face of it, it's ridiculous, especially by now in 2018.
Who's buying this?
No, I completely agree.
And I would just make two quick points on that, which is that at this NED award ceremony, it was very clear that there was an acknowledgement that the tide was kind of, the tide was turning and that the U.S. government, and it wasn't just Trump.
I've actually talked to some people who've been involved on the periphery of Trump's Korea policy, and they recognize that North Korea is not going to fall as a result of sanctions and embargoing it and basically putting it in this diplomatic cage and that Koreans simply want this.
They simply want to come together and negotiate.
We should let them do it.
Obviously, the problem is that ever since the Korean War, which has never ended, there's no cessation of hostilities agreement.
South Korea has been the base of the archipelago of U.S. military bases around the world, and now you have something like 50,000 to 70,000 U.S. military personnel there.
I remember I actually went there earlier this year, and my flight to and from there, on that flight, I was probably the only person who wasn't military or intelligence on the flight.
I mean, it was just insane how linked in the U.S. military is to South Korea.
It's caused a lot of social problems in South Korea as well.
So there's this dawning within the U.S. government, and that's a big threat to the National Endowment for Democracy.
They thrive off of hostility towards these countries because that's when they get the budget to come in and start funding the so-called human rights activists and opposition media.
At this event, Carl Gershman, who is the founder of the National Endowment for Democracy and is a veteran neoconservative operative, actually had to reassure the grantees that the money would continue to roll in from the U.S. government regardless of what happens with this peace summit.
But they were clearly worried about peace breaking out.
And the second point I would make is just that one of the reasons that North Korea is not going to collapse, which many people in the Trump administration recognize and people out of government recognize and which the NED refuses to recognize, is because of the strength of China and China's rising power.
And so the NED is moving—it's directing a lot more resources than it ever has into attacking and undermining China.
And one of the things it's doing is trying to pump up this story—we have a piece at the Grayzone Project right now about it—about Uyghur Muslims who live in the Shenzhen semi-autonomous province in western China being interned in so-called reeducation camps.
There's this claim, and if you just Google Uyghur Muslims right now, you'll find it in U.S. media and British media, that one million Uyghurs, which is one-tenth of the entire Uyghur population of the Shenzhen province, are being held in internment camps by the Chinese authorities.
And really the only source on this is the World Uyghur Congress, which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, whose director I interviewed at this award ceremony, and Radio Free Asia, which is an arm of the U.S. Voice of America broadcasting system.
There haven't been any real other sources.
And so this is really part of the coming war with China.
Which just goes to show—by the way, I mean, sorry for the interruption in the brackets here—but you can't round up a million people, even in deepest, darkest China, without word getting out to somebody other than Radio Free Europe or whatever it is here.
Yeah.
Well, I'm not denying that Uyghur Muslims face discrimination at the hands of the Chinese authorities, but you would think in this day and age with cell phones and satellite imagery that we would have at least had some testimony and some images, even satellite images of these camps where a million people are being held.
I mean, that's a lot of people.
It's too big of a fact to be so thinly sourced.
Come on.
Yeah.
I mean, there are 600,000 people in Washington, D.C.
So you basically have a gigantic city of people, and we've never seen it, and we haven't even heard one on-the-record testimony from the camps.
So everyone is relying on the National Endowment for Democracy and its affiliates for claims that have been unconfirmed but which are reported as indisputable facts by who's who of mainstream media.
Again, I just think this is another influence operation aimed at turning the heat up on China, and part of the reason they want to do that is frustration over North Korea.
And so, by the way, back to that meeting that you went to in June, what exactly was the agenda there?
Dispersing money to various dissident groups and propagandists mostly, is that it?
Or what else?
Yeah.
I mean, basically giving them awards, bringing members of Congress to the ceremony to basically make them feel like they're advancing human rights.
And you have people like Ed Royce on the Republican side, who's the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House, and you had Nancy Pelosi there, who's the minority leader.
Was there an agenda to, like, we have to stop Trump and this Singapore deal, and this is the worst thing ever, and what are we going to do about it?
Was it that bad?
Absolutely.
I mean, watch my documentary.
Basically, they were on order.
Sorry, I just read the article.
I didn't get a chance to look at the footage there.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I'm just speaking to your audience.
I mean, take a look at the documentary and you'll hear really inflammatory but typical rhetoric from Nancy Pelosi about how North Koreans are shot in the street because they took one corncob too many.
Just bizarre statements like that, which were kind of direct.
I could see that happening in America.
I don't know.
Maybe it could happen in North Korea.
People get shot for a lot less than that in the USA, I know.
I've heard pretty many reports.
I heard about a kid who was shot after he shoplifted some Skittles from a convenience store.
I think his name was Michael Brown.
Yeah, I think I heard that.
Anyway, I mean, basically they couldn't mention Trump on stage.
They couldn't come out and say, Donald Trump, tear down this wall or whatever, or don't tear down this wall.
But it was all about Trump, and I would go around asking, are you saying that you're opposed to this peace summit?
Down to the low-level operatives of the NED become extremely frightened, and it was as if they were on orders not to mention the elephant in the room, which is that this whole summit, this whole award ceremony was planned as a kind of counterpoint to what Donald Trump was doing.
And it really reinforces the perception that there is a deep state that's working against anything Donald Trump tries to do that diverges from the Washington consensus, if the NED is really the definition of the deep state.
Yeah, well, and I keep repeating myself about this in all different interviews, but it's worth bringing up where the Korea experts from the Center for Strategic and International Security, whichever it is, CSIS, immediately were saying at the time, quite blatantly, that if there's really a peace deal to end the conflict in Korea, then that would deprive us of our reason for having troops there.
This is absolutely a self-licking ice cream cone.
And then sometimes others had said that, look, to be perfectly honest, what's going on here is that these troops aren't really there for North Korea.
They're there for China, but they're there in the name of North Korea, and don't take that away from us, which really goes to show me, you think about the level of nuclear brinksmanship from last year, fire and fury and nuclear buttons and intercontinental ballistic missile tests, that they would rather have that level of nuclear war brinksmanship?
That could, between Kim and Trump, if any two leaders of Korea and America could get out of control, it would be these two to get into a conflict.
And they still prefer that because it's an excuse to keep infantry on the ground there.
Yeah, completely.
… towards the peace summit in hopes that North Korea would start to dismantle some of its nuclear apparatus.
Josh Rogin, The Washington Post columnist, who's like the neoconstantographer in Washington, he's obviously never been to war or seen a war or covered a war, but he loves pumping up war.
He went on Twitter and complained that Trump is destroying our security architecture.
I love that term, security architecture, because it really refers to the global archipelago of military bases.
And basically, Rogin was channeling the anxiety within Washington's national security, the national security state of the country, that they'll lose this bulwark, not just for confronting North Korea, but as you said, Scott, confronting China over the whole South China Sea and the entire Pacific Rim.
And it's also absurd.
But then you have CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has always kind of set U.S.-Korea policy and made sure that it was extremely hostile.
They helped really push Obama into the failed strategic patience model, where basically we just sit on our hands, do nothing, and wait for North Korea to collapse, which obviously failed.
And CSIS is funded not just by the arms industry, it's funded by Samsung, which is a major South Korean company that is involved with the right-wing parties in South Korea.
And so you have all of the people benefiting from conflict really getting anxious.
And so what the NED does, where they come in, is on the human rights question, because they're responsible for generating testimony about concentration camps in North Korea.
They bring all the defectors in.
The defectors are paid $860,000 by South Korean intelligence, which incentivizes false testimony, as I show in my documentary that I made with Thomas Hedges.
And it basically helps reinforce the war footing, but with a narrative that appeals to liberal Americans who aren't generally interested in war and respond more to fuzzy human rights rhetoric.
Right.
And boy, are they susceptible to that kind of thing.
Yeah, it's like the White Helmet, Banna Al-Abid.
There's a North Korean defector who's just like Banna Al-Abid.
Her name is Yeonmi Park, and she's sort of the celebrity defector of North Korea.
And she has been promoted heavily by groups affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy after being discredited.
And she's changed her testimony again and again.
And she reappeared in The New York Times to compare Kim Jong-un to Hitler in a viral video around the same time as the Trump-Kim peace summit.
So all of these figures are just clearly being weaponized against peace, and many of them are just actual frauds.
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Alright, so now let's talk about libertarians and trotskyites for a minute here.
First of all, you bring up the shockmanites, the Social Democrats USA, and how back when in Ronald Reagan's day this mattered.
Carl Gershman, and you name another one of the founders of the NED who also was a shockmanite there.
Can you talk a little bit about why that matters?
Oh yeah.
And it matters today still.
Especially if you're on the left and you are trying to challenge these regime change operations.
You're going to have like a hornet's nest of trotskyists just undermining everything you do.
They're still out there.
Max Schachtman was the foreign policy secretary for Leon Trotsky.
Schachtman, after Trotsky's death or killing, went on to be a major supporter of the U.S. in the Cold War.
And he believed that the U.S. was the best vehicle for the kind of worldwide revolution that Trotsky believed in.
He became such a fervent opponent of the Soviet Union and believed that the Soviet Union was not enacting socialism.
He turned towards the U.S., supported the U.S. in the Korean War.
And Schachtmanite Trotskyism became influential through the Social Democrats Party USA, which was formed after a split in the Socialist Party.
And so you had the neocons kind of taking over this party, or the proto-neocons.
Carl Gershman, who is the founder of the National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded under Reagan in 1983.
Also Alan Weinstein, who you mentioned.
Gene Kirkpatrick, I think, was involved in this crowd.
Right.
Who was Reagan's U.N. secretary.
Joshua Maravchik.
Joshua Maravchik, also known in Washington as Joshua Aparatchik.
That's funny, I hadn't heard that.
Yeah.
And what these people aim to do is be Aparatchiks.
They get into mid-level managerial positions around the State Department and in labor unions.
So the AFL-CIO is actually a big vehicle for CIA soft power in the developing world, in the global south, in preventing the rise of communist and socialist labor unions and breaking union drives that are led by communists.
It's about weakening labor unions so that U.S. corporations can spread their tentacles globally.
And so you have all of these Shachmanite Trotskyist figures in the mid-level positions directing this policy.
They burrow within the architecture and you don't know who they are.
I mean, Gershman is obviously, to me, is the most prominent figure still involved in it.
He is involved with this group that very few Americans know about, which has a lot of influence on American foreign policy.
As far as the libertarians go, I mean, I think obviously you're libertarian.
The Libertarian Institute wouldn't agree with these kind of corporate libertarians who are getting involved in the human rights industry.
I mentioned a North Korean defector named Yeonmi Park.
She's the celebrity defector.
She lives in the U.S. now.
She's been backed up by the Atlas Foundation and this network which is involved with Reason magazine.
And she also has been a media fellow of the Oslo Freedom Forum and the Human Rights Foundation, which are headed by another self-identified libertarian named Thor Halvorsen, who I think I would identify more as a neocon.
But basically these people are, these libertarians are, define themselves in opposition to socialism in any form.
And so they work in the human rights industry and try to get involved in it just to attack socialist governments, whether it's Venezuela or North Korea or China, which I think is oriented more around a model of state capitalism.
And they use those governments as kind of a counterpoint to the utopian capitalist society that we currently live in in the U.S. where we have stagnant wages despite 4 percent growth.
But I think the more principled libertarians look at this and they say we're throwing billions of dollars away into groups, not just like the NED but also USAID and all of these state department initiatives.
And it goes nowhere, creates instability, and we could easily bring this money back home.
Well, and I think it's important for libertarians who see easily that, well, first of all, we believe in universal rights, but locally enforced, as Murray Rothbard said.
We ought to always be suspicious of any group of American libertarians who think promoting liberty, quote unquote, or even policies that we would agree with in foreign countries and using the U.S. empire as their vehicle for their evangelism, even for better economics, that kind of thing, that that is all very suspicious and suspect on its face, that we should obviously have nothing to do with anything like that.
Because as we already established at the beginning of this interview, when they say democracy or free markets, what they mean is compliance with America's goals.
Just like that article at FAIR the other day about when they say regime, they mean a government America doesn't control.
So we spread democracy to the Middle East.
We don't spread it to Saudi Arabia, where they're loyal sock puppets of ours.
We spread it to Iraq and Syria and hopefully, quote unquote, one day Iran, where they already have a pseudo-republic like we do.
But anyway, they're not compliant with our goals and with what our government dictates to them.
And so they're a regime that needs democratizing.
Any of us could see through that.
And any libertarian who would get on board for that kind of thing is pretty shameful and suspect.
We did see some of this when, as you mentioned in the article, the coup in 2014, which the NED was involved in in Ukraine, how those of us libertarians who explained what was going on there were actually attacked by some of these Eastern European libertarian groups as being Putin's puppets and that kind of typical thing.
I mean, and you're vindicated.
But in many cases where you see a regime change operation take place, the goal isn't to foster democracy or to, you know, it is to open markets.
But under the watch of somebody like Augusto Pinochet, I really think that's kind of the model that's been safest and most successful for the American national security state.
And they replaced Salvador Allende with Pinochet and then brought in the Chicago boys who were basically going to lower inflation rates and open up the country to investment under the watch of an authoritarian strongman.
And that's actually what took place in Russia in 1996, where Yeltsin was essentially installed with the help of the National Endowment for Democracy in swinging an election.
U.S. advisers were brought in who had worked on, you know, Governor Pete Wilson's campaigns to humanize Yeltsin, who was, you know, about as exciting as watching paint dry.
Plus, he was like a hardcore alcoholic who was rapidly decaying.
And he managed to win and continue the looting of what were once Soviet state assets, took millions of people off their pensions, and three to five million people simply died.
And it was a crime on the same level as Vietnam under the watch of these democracy promotion agencies.
And Yeltsin ruled like a strongman.
He even shelled his own parliament.
And far more journalists were killed during the Yeltsin era than under Putin, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
So you have to look at consequences as well, whether it's from a libertarian perspective or a progressive perspective.
The consequences of regime change are almost always negative.
And usually they lessen the freedoms that people had previously enjoyed, which should also include, you know, economic freedom to have a health care plan.
Well, and so, I mean, especially you look at the case of Yeltsin, who appointed Putin.
I mean, he handed the presidency to Putin New Year's 2000, when it was like three months from the next election.
And so basically, you know, made sure that Putin would take power there.
Talk about blowback from that.
And now, by the way, and I don't think this is in your article, so I'm just putting you on the spot here.
But do you happen to know about influence in the Russian elections of 2011, when Hillary Clinton was at least, you know, inciting against Putinist factions?
And I know that there were protests that were, you know, suspicious looking to me.
And I think even that Putin is on the record complaining about this.
But I wonder if you know more.
Yeah.
I wouldn't be able to directly point the finger, but the 2011 protests, which were, that was kind of the birth of Alexei Navalny, who is sort of the de facto Russian opposition leader that the U.S. likes, even though he himself is a xenophobic ultranationalist.
You know, that's when the U.S. really thought, OK, this is the moment when we can actually trigger a color revolution in Russia.
And that's when you saw around that time Michael McFaul come in as the U.S. ambassador to Russia.
And there's this really, I find it amusing.
McFaul, you know, describes it in his really boring new memoir, which is getting promoted all over Washington, as like the most traumatic moment that any diplomat in America has ever faced, where he invited a who's who of Russian opposition leaders to the U.S. embassy to meet.
So he could kind of get them motivated for the color revolution, because the U.S. thought this was their moment.
There are these protests that caught Putin on his back foot in St. Petersburg and Moscow among the urban middle class.
And the Russian media was waiting to film these opposition leaders and considered this really offensive, given the history of relations with the U.S., going back to the 90s, but all the way back to the Midnight War after World War I.
And, you know, McFaul was basically shamed out of his job.
But, you know, you have to imagine what would happen if the Russian ambassador was doing this in the U.S. and was bringing in, you know, the leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, Occupy, and, you know.
Well, and that's the accusation, right, is that they bought some Facebook ads like that and it turned our entire democracy upside down.
Right.
But Michael McFaul was doing something so much more nakedly and so much more directly, which was bringing in any opposition leader who would meet with him.
And then he was basically giving them instructions on how to foment a color revolution against Putin, as the U.S. did everywhere from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine.
And so in 2015, basically Putin had had enough and he banned the National Endowment for Democracy.
And I think we're going to see other countries start to ban this group in the future.
I asked Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who just defeated a coup, a very violent coup, which was encouraged.
Wait, hold that story for a second, because I want to stick with Russia and NED for one more minute here.
Is Carl Gershman, right at the dawn of the Maiden Revolution in the fall of 2013, it took a few months to actually complete the coup.
But right then he wrote a thing for the Washington Post where he threatened regime change in Russia and said, you know, basically, if you don't like it, what's going on in Ukraine, just wait, see what we have in store for you, so to speak.
Yeah, I had totally forgotten about that.
I'm glad you brought it up.
This is amazing.
In the Washington Post, Carl Gershman called for regime change in Russia.
You know, we always hear about it in the smaller countries, but he just thundered this call for Putin to be replaced and said that's the ultimate goal.
And actually there was another op-ed that Gershman wrote, I think a month or two before the Maidan coup in Ukraine, where he said that, you know, if the government of Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev is going to reject this association agreement with the EU, then we should just go ahead and remove him.
Next thing you know, protests erupt and he's out of there.
So, I mean, Putin was like, get the hell out of here.
Yeah, I mean, people really should recognize why from the Russian point of view that is a credible threat.
Because there was, you know, they did this all through the Bush years and, you know, the precedent set with Iraq was sort of, well, now anything less than Iraq is not even worth your attention kind of thing, right?
And marching the 3rd Infantry Division in there the way Bush Jr. did.
And so during that whole period of time, they did color revolutions in Serbia, in Ukraine twice, ultimately in 2004 and 2014.
But in the Bush years, they did Tajikistan.
They tried to do Lebanon.
Remember the Cedar Revolution there?
And I'm forgetting one in the Balkans somewhere, something.
There are one or two more on the list there of this entire outbreak of color-coded revolutions.
So, you talk about the NED in Russia and, you know, I guess we're both pleading kind of ignorance on actual money and involvement.
But certainly, as you say, with the American ambassador over there stirring up these groups inside Russia and having a real track record in recent years of pulling these things off, you could see why they would take that pretty seriously.
I mean, imagine, as you were saying, put the shoe on the other foot if they were doing that to us.
Holy crap.
Yeah, and the U.S. doesn't even try to hide its fingerprints in these color revolutions.
They're directing them at every step of the way.
And, you know, it's not just Eastern Europe.
It's Latin America.
It's Southeast Asia.
This is one of the key U.S. weapons of warfare.
Gene Sharp is kind of the intellectual author of the color revolution.
And he worked with a former military intelligence officer named Robert Helvey, and together they conceived this doctrine of nonviolence as a weapon of warfare.
They created a pretty sophisticated film about the first successful color revolution in Serbia to remove Milosevic, who was seeking to stay in power after the NATO bombing campaign broke up Yugoslavia.
And it's called Otpor, O-T-P-O-R.
You can watch it on Vimeo.
Martin Sheen is the narrator.
And they describe how what they did in Serbia was fully directed by U.S. government agencies from behind the scenes using Gene Sharp's model of nonviolence as a weapon of warfare.
And Helvey says this is, you know, the future of warfare and counterinsurgency, obviously by the U.S., and the ultimate target was Russia.
Serbia was, you know, a Russian ally, and it was a key bulwark of Russian soft power in the Balkans.
And so Milosevic is driven out.
You know, things aren't looking so great in the Balkans right now, and the economic picture isn't so good.
And this is what Putin emerged in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference to denounce, not just the Iraq War, but the U.S. seeking to act unilaterally through these color revolutions and causing a lot of instability on his frontiers.
And he basically said, you know, I've had enough.
John McCain is sitting in the front row.
He's looking at—he's glowering at Putin.
He's really upset.
And this was really the beginning of the new Cold War.
And I think you have to look at these color revolutions as well as the model of using protest as a form of warfare to understand the clash between Russia and the U.S. today.
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Well, and so now to switch gears down to Latin America and sort of back to the libertarian role in this.
I mean, from a real libertarian perspective, such as held by me, we can see how there's no libertarianism to choose from in any of these contests in Latin America.
It's always been a very right wing elite versus Marxist guerrillas most of the time.
And then there's been the Hugo Chavez model there for a short time in just the last 20 years, I guess.
But so it's easy to see why the right wing groups would always just claim freedom and capitalism and why that might sound good to a lot of libertarians and why they may actually have, as I was saying before, economics in mind that we would prefer is still the furthest thing from that.
It's a giant leap to the idea that we ought to be involved in intervening in other people's countries in that way.
Certainly when we means the U.S. government or any of its auxiliaries like this.
But also when it means, you know, these creepy NGOs like the Atlas Network that, you know, who knows what all work they're doing and how good some of it is.
But is basically, you know, seemingly being used to support the government's line here, which is, as you're describing, a very right wing corporate line, not a libertarian one really at all.
But so that being said, I mean, I could see why anyone to the right of Maduro or Ortega would want to see a government different from theirs right now.
And so that doesn't discount American meddling and I'm all open to hear it.
But and, you know, I really wish I knew a lot more about the current situation in Nicaragua to talk about that with you.
I'm afraid I didn't get a chance.
I saw your report, but I didn't get a chance to look at it yet.
But so that to me is sort of the setup.
That's kind of the background for the contest, you know, as I see them from a libertarian point of view down in Latin America.
Yeah, I mean, I'll talk briefly about Nicaragua because I got to get off soon, but I mean, I would be happy to come back and do an entire show on it.
And I think this is a really complex picture that can't be understood just through, you know, looking at a contest between capitalism and Marxist Marxism Leninism.
Nicaragua has a mixed economy.
There was a tripartite agreement that Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista movement, had agreed on with the private business community and unions to set economic policy together.
And the economy was growing at a rate of 4 or 5 percent every year.
He was reelected with a strong majority two years ago.
He was elected several times.
And there had been kind of a consensus in support of this economic model, which was not, you know, hardcore socialism.
And it's because, you know, the Soviet Union is gone.
He doesn't have a patron from a socialist state.
There was a lot of help coming in from Venezuela, which helped reduce poverty dramatically.
It helped eliminate malnutrition.
It helped eliminate illiteracy.
Women's participation in Nicaragua, according to the World Bank, is the highest in the Americas.
And these programs that Ortega had put into place, like Zero Hunger, had benefited poor rural women while the business community was able to operate freely and openly.
The National Endowment for Democracy has been very active in trying to fuel opposition to Ortega, simply because the Sandinistas present a threat to U.S. goals, not just in Nicaragua but across Latin America, because they are a progressive workers' movement that does have socialist and anti-imperialist underpinnings.
And they're an inspiration across Latin America.
And the U.S. would prefer to have a figure like Ortega's predecessor, Enrique Bolaños, who is a neoliberal technocrat who did nothing towards poverty reduction and relied on U.S. NGOs, basically outsourced it to the whole NGO class.
And so all these people in Washington who work with USAID—I just debated one of them, Mary Ellsberg, at The Real News, and you should definitely watch that to really see the contrasting narratives.
They basically got to come into Nicaragua and pretend that they were the white saviors and the Sandinistas and the actual people of Nicaragua, the regular people, were marginalized.
So Washington prefers that model.
It doesn't like what's going on now.
But just to the point, we were talking about Russia and the clash with Russia.
I think the clash came to a head with the Magnitsky Act, which were these sanctions on Putin's inner circle on the basis of what I consider this giant fraud perpetrated by Bill Browder, this hedge funder.
We can talk about that separately.
The Magnitsky sanctions have been expanded into the global Magnitsky sanctions.
And so what the U.S. started doing is sanctioning members of Maduro's inner circle in Venezuela.
Then they sanctioned people in Ortega's inner circle in Nicaragua, and the business community started to become afraid that they would be sanctioned, too, for doing business with anyone connected to the Nicaraguan government.
And the business community lined up with the church and a lot of the opposition elements that had been getting funding from these U.S. soft power groups like the NED.
And they essentially staged a coup attempt this April against Daniel Ortega, which took a very violent form.
And you saw people who had previously been allies of his government standing on the other side of the national dialogue calling for regime change.
And a lot of that has to do with the application of sanctions in the Magnitsky Act.
So basically what my point is, is it's not so simple that you don't have a government running around expropriating everyone's property in Nicaragua.
And the economic picture, unlike Venezuela, had previously been very good.
Now, thanks to this coup, which has cost the country $500 million, you have growth basically going from 5 percent to 0 percent.
And a country that was not contributing to the migration crisis, like Honduras or El Salvador, suddenly is having a massive outflow of its population because their jobs have evaporated.
A little bit more blowback there, as we were talking about before.
Exactly.
I mean, we have to look at the consequences.
And the consequences in Venezuela are extreme as well.
One of the biggest migration crises in South American history.
And a lot of this does have to do with sanctions driving inflation.
This is never mentioned.
I think fairness and accuracy in reporting has a good report on how sanctions is never, ever mentioned when we talk about Venezuela's economic picture.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it certainly is part of the fact that I had a discussion with Ted Galen Carpenter from Cato about that and the role that the sanctions play in their crisis, which is hardly the decisive role.
But it is certainly part of it.
So, on Nicaragua, I'm falling down on the job because I just don't know enough about it.
But I know that there are a lot of accusations against Daniel Ortega and the way he's been handling things up to and including what you're calling this coup attempt here.
But I really don't know enough about it.
So, it's, I guess, pretty weak to just ask you to argue the other side.
So, what of the accusations of his mismanagement and locking everything down and hiring gangs to go around killing protesters and this kind of stuff?
I know a little bit.
I've read a little of it.
Well, again, I just did a debate.
I just had a debate at The Real News.
It's up on the website now with Mary Ellsberg, who's kind of this gatekeeper of the Nicaraguan opposition's narrative in Washington.
And I would encourage everyone to watch that just so you can see me go back and forth with someone who presents the narrative, which is really the consensus mainstream media narrative right now, which is that Daniel Ortega is this crazy dictator who's murdering everyone.
I'll make a few quick points on that.
We've heard that there are over 300 deaths of protesters.
That's totally false.
All of the deaths were conflated.
All of the deaths that occurred between April 18th and July at the height of these protests, and they weren't really just protests, they were also just extremely violent attacks, were conflated.
You have suicides, car accidents, bystanders being killed, conflated with protesters and opposition militants being killed, and Sandinistas being killed, murdered, lynched, tortured and burned to death.
You have about the same number of opposition people and Sandinistas being killed.
The actual number of deaths is 197 that occurred in these protests.
So the death count's been totally manipulated to drive sanctions, which the U.S. government would like to pass, which will put an embargo around Nicaragua and take that country back to the 1980s.
These sanctions are being crafted by the top Cuban-American neocons in Congress, Ileana Ross-Lehtinen, Marco Rubio, and the Miami lobby.
Ortega is accused of being a dictator, but he's consistently reelected in free and fair elections.
He's accused of dictatorial mismanagement, but the economy, as I mentioned, has been doing extremely well.
He's brought electricity and healthcare into the countryside through the Sandinista movement.
There have been so many gains that I've witnessed because I actually spent extensive periods in Nicaragua before Ortega was in power, and roads that weren't there before have been built.
I remember living with a family and we'd have to wait for two hours a day for the water to turn on because under the previous governments, the water had been privatized and the electricity had been sold to a Spanish company.
So the electricity was coming on like just eight hours a day, 10 hours a day.
Electricity is regular now.
This is kind of what people want.
And the Supreme Court is loyal to Ortega, so he's being attacked for having a Supreme Court filled with loyalists.
The Supreme Court right now in the U.S. is loyal to the Republican Party, and I think if Trump is reelected, it will become increasingly loyal.
So this is kind of what happens when you're in power.
Beyond that, the accusations of using paramilitaries are absolutely true.
The Sandinistas did use paramilitaries and they did kill people.
But what we have to recognize as well is that the opposition set up roadblocks across the country for over two months and crushed the country's economy.
Four hundred truckers were basically held hostage in the city of Hinotepe.
The roadblocks were set up around police stations and police stations were attacked.
Many people, an 11-year-old girl was raped at a roadblock.
A female police officer was kidnapped at a roadblock and raped for three days.
I interviewed the wife of another police officer who was an unarmed cop who was just a community police officer who was dragged to the roadblock in the city of Messiah and burned on camera, burned to death on camera.
Many people have been extorted at these roadblocks.
Basically, large parts of the country were held hostage and Sandinistas were taken out of their homes, lynched, beaten.
I interviewed so many of them and we never hear about this.
And basically it was like a campaign of terror that – and it led much of the country to turn against what they had previously seen as kind of a protest movement when it turned this violent.
There was a national dialogue.
And during the national dialogue, Ortega was forced to agree to a term that the police would stay in their stations.
And he said that he hoped that this would lead to a reduction in violence because the police wouldn't be on the street.
They wouldn't be stirring things up.
But the opposition took advantage of that to actually besiege police stations, to attack police stations and then to attack Sandinistas who are defenseless.
And that's when the paramilitaries really came out with people organizing themselves.
They put on masks.
They took what weapons they had and they went out and fought the people at the roadblocks.
They took back the universities, which had been overtaken by the opposition and ransacked.
And I always just say, ask Americans what they think they would do if they faced a similar situation where armed gangs had taken over entire parts of their cities and were holding people hostage and the government couldn't provide services.
There was no law and order.
What would they ask their government to do if universities had been taken over by armed gangs and students couldn't go to class?
What would they ask their government to do?
People have no idea what Nicaragua went through.
And Ortega right now is in a tough situation because the economy is battered.
People are leaving.
Many people are upset about what happened.
I think the opposition has basically committed political suicide by turning towards this model of violent roadblocks and terrorizing people.
This was not a peaceful protest movement.
And in many ways, it's similar to Syria, except we didn't see the U.S. come in and arm the opposition.
If that had taken place, we would have seen 100,000 deaths.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
It's not too late for that.
Anyway, cross your fingers.
That is what Ileana Ros-Lehtinen says.
She wants the Contras back.
And, you know, we're not going to hear about it in our mainstream media, but this would be a catastrophe for Central America and, you know, the United States.
Whether you're a progressive or you're on the right and you want to protect the borders, I don't think anyone wants people coming over the border with nothing, who are totally defenseless and vulnerable, coming in waves as we saw after what we did in Honduras.
And that was totally our making, what we did in Honduras, supporting a coup that led to the child migration crisis.
And that was Hillary Clinton.
She's on her watch.
And then the children come up, the child migrants, and she says, send them back.
So we need to look at the origins of these catastrophes.
Yeah, it's not like all these people were just born wanting to live in the USA one day.
They've had to flee their homes for reasons a lot to do with our drug wars and our politics here.
Yeah, they're coming here to get our great health care, which we have to pay $1,000 a month.
They want Obamacare.
Yeah, exactly.
I bet.
They want the IRS to tell them, sorry, you don't get any.
Oh, thanks a lot for raising my price and forbidding me from participating in the market at all.
I love it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I bet that is why they're coming.
It must be it.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with the drug war.
Let's not look at that.
It has nothing to do with sanctions.
And it has nothing to do with our democracy promotion.
It's just people want to experience the American dream.
And they're doing so well here.
Yeah.
So anyway, on that note, I would just encourage people to check out my work on Nicaragua at grayzoneproject.com.
I'll be publishing more.
I'm actually going to do a documentary about the coup with Thomas Hedges and my mini doc on the National Endowment for Democracy, which does deal with Latin America as well as China, Russia, and Korea is up there right now.
All right.
Yeah.
Grayzoneproject.com.
This one is Inside America's Meddling Machine.
The U.S. funded group that interferes in elections around the globe.
And I see there are three or four about Nicaragua in the left-hand margin.
So everybody check that out at grayzoneproject.com.
And that's Max Blumenthal, author of Goliath, the 51 Day War, and also co-director or something like that of the great documentary Killing Gaza.
You have to take a look at that too.
Thanks again, Max.
Appreciate it.
Thanks.
And that is at killinggaza.com.
Yeah.
There you go.
Very good.
All right.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Bye.
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