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 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 they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, 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, founder and editor of the Grayzone Project.
That's a grayzoneproject.com.
He co-hosts the podcast, Moderate Rebels.
And he wrote the book, Goliath, which is the book on Israel, as well as the 51 Day War, about the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip.
And I demand that you guys watch the documentary that he made with Dan Cohen called Killing Gaza, which is available on Vimeo.
It's so important.
Please look at Killing Gaza.
But that's not what we're talking about today.
Today we're talking about Nazis.
Obama's Ukrainian Nazis.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, man?
Good, good.
Good to be back, Scott.
Hey, you've been good on this since the coup of 2014 there, huh?
Yeah, that was the first time I got called Putin's puppet.
We all did, Max.
We all did.
So let's talk about that.
So in 2004, we had the Orange Revolution.
10 years later, they did it again.
Only this time, they really needed the help of a bunch of Hitler-worshipping, white supremacist Nazis to overthrow the government and install the pro-American faction there.
Right.
The Azov battalion has been really essential in holding the line in eastern Ukraine or in the Donbass region.
And what I did in my latest piece, I've written several pieces on it, most recently the Grayzone Project, but this was for Mint Press.
And what I did was look at the evolution of this movement, but also how it's internationalizing.
And this should be front-page news on The New York Times, because an FBI unsealed indictment has accused the Azov battalion, which has been armed by the U.S.
You called them Obama's Nazis.
They were armed under the Obama administration and are continuing to be armed under the Trump administration.
The FBI indictment has found that they are training and radicalizing American white supremacists.
That's the exact language that the FBI used.
And they recently hosted, earlier this year, a group from Southern California called the Rise Above Movement, who participate in the kind of neo-Nazi alt-right, in kind of mixing it up with Antifa, anti-racist demonstrators at various pro-Trump rallies.
They were indicted for conspiracy to riot.
And what the FBI did was trace their trail across Europe and found that they were training in MMA and participating in political indoctrination with the Azov battalion's new political party, the National Corps, in Kiev.
I looked into this.
I kind of followed the same tracks that the FBI was proceeding along.
And I found that the Azov battalion has a very active and potent international outreach arm, which is hosting a who's who of American and European white nationalists, and is building ties with political parties in the Baltic states and establishing a Trojan horse into NATO itself.
It's just such a shocking story.
And the research, just doing the research was really shocking to me.
And it occurred to me that if these were pro-Russian separatists who are training American white nationalists, this would have been on the front page of the New York Times.
But so far, it's been completely buried in mainstream media.
And even the people who cover white nationalists are basically ignoring this story.
Yeah, I mean, isn't that the case, right?
That anything that's about white supremacy in the Trump era is, you know, perfect fodder for establishment liberal media.
They love any story like that.
And frankly, to take the opportunity to throw in groups that are maybe somewhat right wing, but not that right wing, and go ahead and scapegoat them too.
And just go ahead and give everybody the nth degree.
But oh, all of a sudden, we found some Nazis that we're not interested in.
Like the guys that blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
Oh, all of a sudden, we found some Nazis we don't want to talk about.
Because, of course, it compromises American policy.
Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, the Ukraine is being marketed even after it declared martial law, which we can talk about in a second.
It is a boon to these Nazis.
It's marketed by, you know, the Atlantic Council, the unofficial think tank of NATO in Washington.
It's the front line of freedom.
Ukraine is just too important of a project to too many people from across bipartisan lines in Washington, for them to start talking about the real scope of the Nazi crisis that this country faces.
But, I mean, the Azov battalion effectively forms a state within a state, and it operates under the watch and the patronage of the interior minister of Ukraine, who is in the same party as the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko.
So, this is not a fringe phenomenon anymore.
I mean, I remember back in 2014, there was an attempt by the neocons to kind of deny that there were Nazis on the Maidan.
And you had this embarrassing piece, I think in Politico by Jamie Kirchick, on Putin's imaginary Nazis.
They're just a figment of Russian propaganda.
Well, it turned out that, you know, the Russians were right about the Nazis in the late 1930s, and they were right again this time.
And now you have the Atlantic Council itself, the think tank I mentioned, which basically functions as the unofficial Ukrainian embassy in Washington.
You could even call it that, noting in a blog post that Ukraine has a real Nazi problem, even though this is not an RT headline.
That's an actual headline of an Atlantic Council post.
So, they're forced to acknowledge this.
Actually, last week, the Radio Free Europe reporter in Kiev, Christopher Miller, was live tweeting from a trans rights march in Kiev, where basically 20 gay and trans rights activists tried to march through Kiev and got absolutely brutalized by these Azov-related National Corps members, the C-14 militia, which is another state-sponsored neo-Nazi militia.
And the police just kind of stood by and watched, and let all these activists get pepper sprayed and get their faces bashed in.
And Miller was live tweeting this, and you could tell he was absolutely horrified.
And he watched while a Canadian colleague of his, who was a reporter, got his own face smashed in for trying to take pictures.
So, Western reporters are now getting beat up in the streets of Kiev.
And this guy from Radio Free Europe, who had been dismissing this problem all along, is now forced to reckon with it.
Every ingredient is there.
U.S. law enforcement is warning of blowback.
It's not warning of blowback.
It's confirmed that blowback is taking place, that American white supremacists are going there.
You have a military crisis, possibly a cooked-up crisis, a Gulf of Tonkin-style incident ahead of an election, where the president, Petro Poroshenko, who is polling at 8 percent, and very afraid that his rival, Yulio Tymoshenko, was going to come into power and put him on trial for corruption, has declared martial law, basically canceling elections.
Civil society is officially paralyzed.
And you have Nazis on the rampage.
And all of the local reporters are saying, you know, this is real.
We're not denying this anymore.
And yet you have total silence in Washington.
And 100 bucks will get you a QR code silver commodity disc, or a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think audiobooks at listenandthink.com.
And yes, I take all your digital currencies and all that, too.
So, there you go.
Find out all about that at scotthorton.org.
And patreon.com.
Well, and I mean, what are they going to do at this point?
We tried to warn them before the coup in 2014, that, you know, these guys call themselves social nationalists.
They're not fooling anyone.
They openly, you know, their leadership openly praised the legacy of Adolf Hitler and their forebears in the Galatian SS, who helped the Nazis perpetrate the Holocaust against Jews and Poles, especially in Ukraine during the Second World War there.
They're completely unapologetic about it.
And John McCain's up there sharing the stage with these guys, encouraging them.
And so then they were also really the front line troopers that fought the war against the separatists in the East, who the Russians, you know, by the way, refused to absorb the Donbass and annex it the way that they did the Crimean Peninsula, even though the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine was asking them to do it, did a referendum and asked them to do it.
Some of them, no, but did support their resistance against the new Nazi-backed coup junta there.
And that was, that only really, that whole conflict really built up the Azov battalion even more than before with right sector and all the different groups kind of coming together to fight that war.
The war is the health of the Nazi party of Ukraine.
And then, you know, you talk about Poroshenko at 8%.
I don't know who all is against him and for what all reasons, but I know that, what, a year ago or so, you had a big demonstration of these Nazis letting him know that we overthrew the government before you and we can overthrow you too.
And so, you know, this is the problem with Praetorian guards historically, right?
When you hire a bunch of thugs to enforce your power, you become beholden to them and they become the power over you too.
Yeah, and that goes for, you know, us employing them as our frontline proxy because, you know, the monster comes home eventually.
It's going to be blowback all over again.
So you're exactly right, Scott, that these far-right forces, I mean, far-right is kind of an understatement.
It's kind of, I mean, they make the American alt-right look like the up-with-people brigade.
It's like hardcore neo-Nazis mobilized something like 10,000 people in the streets of Kiev to warn Poroshenko that he abide by their agenda or they will overthrow him.
And they are very concerned with corruption.
That's part of their appeal is that you have a corrupt, technocratic, IMF-imposed government that's sending, you know, billions in loans to offshore, you know, offshoring it to Swiss banks.
And people are upset.
And so that's why the Azov battalion established a national druzhina or a street patrol in Kiev and other cities to, in the words of their neo-Nazi founder, Andrei Boletsky, restore Ukrainian order.
And Poroshenko was simultaneously under a lot of pressure from, you know, from the West, which was his financial feeding tube to crack down on corruption.
And so he established a kind of corruption council, anti-corruption council.
I remember the Atlantic Council was really excited about this.
The problem is that, you know, Poroshenko, in order to balance his interests at home and in the West, appointed a member of the C14 neo-Nazi militia to head that anti-corruption council.
So again, it's a question, it's an issue of the white supremacist or neo-Nazi right in Ukraine establishing a state within a state and exploiting the instability to tighten its control.
The fascist movement in Ukraine is more sophisticated and better armed than any fascist movement anywhere else in the world.
And that has everything to do with the instability that's come since the Maidan.
It has to do with this former kind of street militia called the Patriot of Ukraine, which was a collection of football hooligans and ideological neo-Nazis actually getting militarized, being sent to fight first in Mariupol, in this port city, and then around the Donbass, and being armed by the U.S.
They've shown up in the field with U.S.-supplied rocket launchers, like the PSRL-1.
And they are recently showing up with Israeli arms as well.
They're getting military training because they've been incorporated officially into the Ukrainian military.
And then they're welcoming foreign fighters.
They have an entire kind of inner core of foreign fighters.
And then through the political party, the National Corps, which is, there is an international secretariat led by a hardcore neo-Nazi who is a young woman named Elena Semenyaka.
And they've hosted a series of conferences every year at a club that they control in Kiev called the Reconquista Club.
And these conferences aim to discuss kind of cross-border collaboration between different fascist movements.
And the ultimate goal is what they call the Pan-Europa, or the fascist reconquest of Europe, which in many ways is kind of happening because, you know, the center-left and liberalism itself is sort of discredited through itself, through various means, in Europe.
So they're exploiting the instability of Europe itself, including Western Europe.
But Ukraine here is the base of the fascist reconquest because they are the first fascist group since World War II to actually militarize, to actually control an entire regiment of a military that happens to be armed by the United States.
And you know, for people who just haven't heard of this, I have seen a lot of incredulous reaction to these stories, that it just can't be so, and that kind of thing.
I think one fun way to check is to read up on the Conyers Amendment, where before he was disgraced and run out of Congress for sexual impropriety and so forth, John Conyers had sponsored an amendment that banned American military support or training to any Nazi groups in Ukraine.
And that was passed because, hey, who could argue with that, right?
But then they repealed it because American national interests came and triumphed.
And they said, actually, no, we have a project to train up Nazis right now, old man, and you're getting in the way of it.
And so rather than just ignore or break the law, they went ahead and repealed the amendment.
Repealed the resolution so that the training of the Nazis could go ahead and continue.
And this was reported with a perfectly straight face by the Wall Street Journal and the rest of them.
Yep, yep.
I'm really glad you brought that up because I reported on it at the time, and year after year, that amendment would get stripped out of the final appropriations bill.
It wasn't as if Congress didn't know that we were arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
It's not like I'm just inventing this out of nowhere.
Oh, you're saying, in other words, he didn't, like, kind of sneak it through easily because no one knew the wiser.
He had to really push to get it passed in the first place.
Well, he had to push to get it passed, but it would get passed initially, and then it would get stripped out in the end because the Pentagon would come in and say, hell no.
And when Conyers was forced from Congress, the baton was passed to Ro Khanna, who is, as far as a Democrat goes, pretty anti-war, pretty good on foreign policy.
And I think he has some of the same staff as Conyers.
And they finally got it in without getting it stripped out of the final appropriations bill last year.
And Ro Khanna came under attack from a former Pentagon official who worked in the Bush administration who was put up to it, I don't know how.
And he was called Putin's puppet and a Kremlin asset in The Hill, which is a publication everyone in D.C. reads.
And I know that really upset Representative Khanna, but that's kind of the price he had to pay in Washington for trying to defund and disarm Nazis.
And now we see how consequential the arming of the Nazis is with this unsealed FBI indictment.
Yeah, so get back into that and more of that because I think you talk about in the article, and I think we've seen reports of this since 2014, that various, at least individual or small groups of Nazis from around Europe have been going to Ukraine to hang out and or fight with their friends there.
But what is it with these American groups now?
Well, the Maidan was really seminal for the whole white supremacist or white nationalist movement across the West because it created a split between those who saw Russia as the white nation, the true white nation that was challenging multicultural liberal U.S. hegemony and this new nation, Ukraine, which had risen up from the ashes of the Soviet Union and Russian control and which now had a neo-Nazi battalion embedded in its military.
And it appears to me that the trend is really leading us to look at who's visiting Kiev versus who's following this kind of faded fascist figure, Alexander Dugin, who's kind of considered the pro-Russian white nationalist or traditionalist.
And that really became clear to me in working on this story.
The story starts in Southern California in Huntington Beach with the Rise Above movement, which is kind of like a group of 30 guys who train in MMA as kind of the muscle of the alt-right.
So when they go out and do a rally in Huntington Beach or Berkeley or as we saw in Charlottesville, they get confronted by anti-racists, including Antifa people in masks.
And these guys want to be on the front lines fighting them.
And they're clearly better fighters than Antifa because they're obsessed with MMA.
But they also have an internationalist attitude.
They went to Kiev last year and this year on a series of visits to Europe to celebrate Hitler's birthday in Germany.
And they ultimately wound up at the Reconquista Club in Kiev as guests of Olena Semenyaka, the international secretary of Azov Battalion's national core political party.
They participated in an MMA competition.
Semenyaka said that they were being indoctrinated there and they were learning about the different kind of ideological struggles that Azov was advocating.
And then they came back to the U.S. and were ultimately arrested by the FBI for their involvement in all of these riots across the country.
And so you have this unsealed indictment by the FBI, which is very inconvenient for, I think, the rest of the national security state because it finds that they're funding a group these guys from the Rise Above movement who are causing pretty significant disturbances in U.S. cities but are also connected to, I think, even more hardcore elements like the Atomwaffen-SS division who have these kind of lone wolves who go out and shoot up synagogues.
So it's like a tinderbox.
The FBI indictment's been kind of suppressed.
But what's happening in Europe is very much in the open and very tolerated, not just within Ukraine but within the Baltics.
I have an echo right now, so it's kind of distracting.
But I can get in.
I just turn my mic on so I can just break in here to talk about how, well, and just like in Europe, you have these massive, massive failures of the centrist liberal consensus.
Those who administer the USA administer the EU.
We call them the Clintons and Bushes here.
They have their equivalents over there in Europe.
And these are the failures that we're talking about.
Things like backing Nazis and things like, of course, all of the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iraq Wars II and III and down into Mali.
This is what has caused a massive refugee crisis in Europe.
The centrist consensus of the liberal corporate centrist globalist internationalists who know what to do and claim a monopoly on markets and on democracy and all of these things as they drive those concepts into the ground and leave more and more communists and fascists in their wake.
People moving further and further to the right and left in reaction to the failures of the center.
And so even where maybe most people listening to this might think, eh, we don't have a real Nazi problem in America outside of prisons for the most part and that kind of thing.
It seems to me more like this is a bit of a taste of the way things are going now.
If the failures of the Bushes and the Clintons consensus since the Cold War has led us to Trump so far, what's next?
Yeah, absolutely.
And this is something that this person I've mentioned before who's one of the key ideologues of the Azov movement in Ukraine has said explicitly, Olena Semenyaka, she said in Kiev in December 2016, for the first time in a long period, In other words, in Eastern Europe, where ultra-nationalism is on the rise, people in the West are starting to understand them because of the refugee crisis and because of incidents like the Manchester bombing.
This isn't because there's something inherent in Islam that makes it impossible for people in the West to understand them.
This isn't because there's something inherent in Islam that makes it impossible for Muslim immigrants to interact with Western societies.
It's because of those centrist and center-left and center-right politicians destabilizing the Middle East, bombarding Europe with millions of refugees who don't want to be there, who by and large are peaceful, productive members of society, and also weaponizing jihadist groups that had been dormant in places like Syria and Iraq.
You mentioned Manchester.
That guy had been scooped up by the MI6 and sent off to fight in Libya.
Manchester was just him coming home?
How did he come home?
He came home on a ship piloted by the Royal Navy.
It was perfect.
He was sent on the Rat Line to Libya He fought in Syria as well.
Then he's taken on a Royal Navy ship back to Manchester where this cell had been gestating.
Then he blows up a concert of teenagers which is part of what is driving the whole Brexit debate in the UK.
You have hard borders.
You basically have Europe being destabilized because the Middle East was destabilized and these neo-Nazis in eastern Ukraine are exploiting that.
They're openly saying, we're going to ride anti-refugee resentment to establish a pact of steel that's invoking the alliance between Hitler and Mussolini, between French far-right groups and Ukrainian far-right groups.
It's already happening.
First of all, the ideology of Azov sees the reconquest of Europe through a series of stages.
Olena Semenyaka explains this very clearly.
The first stage is the intermarium.
This was a concept conceived after World War I by the Polish military leader Józef Piłsudski who imagined a confederation of countries along the Baltic and Black Seas because of German aggression.
Poland saw that it was going to be sandwiched.
They wanted an alliance with countries like Hungary, all the way up to Finland.
It never happened.
But after the Maidan, because the nationalists and the so-called traditionalists believed that NATO had failed them and allowed Russia to annex Crimea, it started to be revived.
It wasn't just revived by the Azov intellectuals.
It was revived by Polish President Andrzej Duda when he talks about the Three Seas Initiative.
He's talking about the intermarium.
Duda, by the way, just marched on Poland's Independence Day with something like 5,000 white nationalists and neo-Nazis trailing him in flying flares.
He definitely plays footsie with these elements.
I wrote about an event in Kiev at the Latvian embassy presided over by the Latvian ambassador to celebrate the concept of the intermarium where Semenjaka and a who's who of the neo-Nazi scene in Kiev were welcomed, were treated as honored guests.
The event was kind of engineered by the National Alliance Party of Latvia.
The National Alliance Party is a far-right party that shares many of the same views as the Azov people do.
It is a member of Latvia's governing coalition.
Latvia is a key bulwark in the NATO alliance, and it's a member of the EU.
Basically, what these events do is give the Azov battalion and literal neo-Nazis a Trojan horse in the EU, and they increase the power of the far-right in the Euro-Atlantic community that is so central to the center-left and its power in Europe and Washington.
They're really going about this in a sophisticated way, and they are actually creating their own kind of security and political alliances that work perfectly with the kind of anti-Russian regional alliances that have been conceived by people like Bush and Obama.
Here's the thing, man.
As Pat Buchanan puts it, during the Cold War, the line was drawn at the Elbe River halfway across Germany where the Americans said, You better not cross here.
You better not sack West Berlin, and you better not move into Western Germany or worse.
But you crush the Hungarian revolution or the Prague Spring or Polish solidarity.
Hey, sorry, but that's just too far outside of America's sphere of interest.
We're not going to get into a war with the Soviet Union on the line at literally Russia's western border, at the eastern border of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in the Baltics there.
Including under the Trump administration, which he somehow got a reputation for being anti-NATO, which he never was.
His government, at least Vice President Pence, recently mentioned that they still want to work on integrating and bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO as well, just the same project as it's been since Bush and Obama.
That part of it on slow motion, but still.
And that just means that the margin of error is nothing.
That means that even if the Russians, and I don't think they ever really did have any designs, I don't think they really do have any designs on the Baltics, but it means that in the unlikely event that there's some major skirmish there, And Latvia treated like it's the 51st state that I've got to be willing to trade Austin, Texas for, you know, Tallinn.
That's crazy.
And they act like, well, if we just dominate all of this land, then they'll never try it.
But, I mean, is that how we like to be treated?
You know what I mean?
Does that make sense if you put the shoe on the other foot?
Yeah, I mean, this is classic crossing the Rubicon.
We've crossed the Rubicon, and we now have military assets in Ukraine at Russia's doorstep.
This is so dangerous, especially after the Syrian proxy war has failed and is being rolled back.
The U.S. is going to look for another proxy war.
And, you know, your comments are really timely because what happened this week?
It looks like there was some incident at sea between the Russian Navy and the Ukrainian Navy.
It may have been provoked by Poroshenko.
It certainly benefited him because he was able to call, you know, declare martial law and call off elections where he was certainly going to lose.
But what happened in Washington was more disturbing than I even expected given the small scale of the incident.
I mean, something like 20 Ukrainian sailors were taken captive, and I think they've been released.
But you saw people like Anders Asland, who was one of the Harvard boys who went and looted Russia in the 1990s and is now at the Atlantic Council, actually calling for the U.S. and NATO to send ships to confront the Russian Navy and ensure that shipping lines would stay open.
And shipping lines remain open.
There have been no blockage of shipping lines, but he's essentially calling openly through the major voice of NATO in Washington, one of the most influential think tanks in the city, for World War III.
And that's the result of us drawing the line at Ukraine, which is a red line for Russia and always has been.
Importantly for American politics, too, I made the mistake of looking at Twitter for a second yesterday where Nikki Haley announced that we're going to have a U.N. Security Council meeting first thing tomorrow about this, that all the comments beneath were liberal Democrats accusing Trump of being Putin's puppet and a traitor and we're going to abandon our ally instead of fighting for them like a real man like Obama would forever, et cetera.
I mean, man, it's like some supernatural being just came and took the brains of the liberals and just spun them for a loop and they just don't know which way is up or what is going on.
Yeah, and then they implanted those scrambled brains in the empty head of Nikki Haley.
Seriously, we're there accusing her of being a dove when what we need is action against Russia right now.
Yeah, what kind of action do they want?
I assume they want more sanctions, which actually Germany and France are not interested in doing and the U.K. has really been muted on this.
The U.N. is actually urging the U.S. and Russia to basically Russia and Ukraine to step away from confrontation.
But then you have Trump's opponents looking at any geopolitical incident as an opportunity to score points politically, calling for action, and they can't really define what that action will be.
But it reminds me a lot of the no-fly zone debate around Syria where no one would actually address the consequences of imposing a no-fly zone when you have a country that's honeycombed with Russian military assets, telling Russia you can't fly, telling the Syrian army you can't fly.
And then Joseph Dunford, the head of CENTCOM, comes before Congress and says, well, we can't actually do a no-fly zone, sir, because telling John McCain, who's fulminating at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sorry, sir, we can't do a no-fly zone because that would mean World War III.
And that's exactly the situation we're in again.
How long before something triggers a direct confrontation and not necessarily by mistake?
Such a confrontation would benefit so many people in Washington who've been calling for toughness.
Hey, you guys, if you're good libertarians, go ahead and submit articles to the Libertarian Institute.
Maybe I'll run them.
You can find out all the submission guidelines there at libertarianinstitute.org.
So I did quit Twitter, not because they banned me for a week, but because I've been trying to quit anyway.
I had a lot of book reading done, and now I'm writing another one here.
And so I'm glad to be done with that.
But I am still on Reddit, but it's a private Reddit group.
Tom Woods convinced me to do it.
He wanted me to do Facebook, but it's on Reddit.
Anybody who donates more than $5 a month by way of PayPal or patreon.com slash scotthortonshow or whatever you want, send a check, you get access to the private Reddit group at r slash scotthortonshow.
And we got about 90-something people in there now, and it's a good little group.
And so I spent some time in there if you want to check that out.
And there was the one point where Mike Morrell, the former, I guess, acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said on the Charlie Rose show, we should be killing Russians in Syria for revenge.
And I think it was sort of crickets.
He had it back on the show to clarify, and he reiterated that, yeah, he meant what he said.
But at that point, I mean, basically the deal is you're supposed to only speak in euphemisms.
And in that way, even all the people in on the consensus don't have to really confront what they're talking about and the level of crisis that they're risking.
But once you say killing Russians, then everybody can picture from footage they've seen of hydrogen bombs going off and that actually, you know what, there are more important things in the world than the future of Ukraine, for example.
And this was Hillary Clinton's future CIA director, someone who was not a marginal player.
He was an advisor to her campaign.
And basically what he did was describe what was the standard hybrid warfare strategy that the U.S. and the Gulf states were employing in Syria and which they're substantially employing in Ukraine through outfits like the Azov battalion, which is to kind of drag in Russia or drag in Russia's proxies and to kind of slowly bleed them without losing a single American life.
This was the strategy that Spygnew Brzezinski honed through the Afghan trap in Afghanistan through the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union.
This is the standard blueprint of American warfare and Western warfare that tries to avoid conventional direct confrontation.
I don't think that NATO would do very well in a conventional confrontation with Russia on the European continent because Russia can pour in just so much armor and they're going to be so much more motivated to defend their borders and their frontiers.
But what you get through hybrid warfare is first you have the opportunity for kind of a color revolution.
You gin up some protests.
Some protesters get shot.
Then the human rights groups come and condemn the government.
Then the sanctions come in.
Then if you fail to achieve what Ukraine achieved in the Maidan or there's a situation like where you're fighting over contested territory, then you move to unconventional warfare.
Then you have to arm up your proxies, which is what the U.S. did in Syria.
Then in Syria we have a situation where the unconventional war, the proxy war, completely failed.
It succeeded in creating a refugee crisis.
It succeeded in driving a death toll up to like 250,000 with something like 100,000 dead on the government side.
But it failed to remove Bashar al-Assad.
So what the U.S. has done is transitioned this refugee crisis campaign into a permanent occupation of part of that country.
So you can see how hybrid warfare is the preferred strategy of the U.S.
At the same time, given how the U.S. is able to kind of milk that strategy, it just seems so psychotic to me that people in Washington are still calling for some kind of conventional confrontation with Russia.
I don't know where they think that's going to get them or what the end game is there, but we're hearing that.
Well, and you know, it's really important, too, that for critics like yourself and myself who've been watching this for a long time, people who know about the color-coded revolutions, people who are still mad at George Bush and remember the things he did, for example, people with context can understand that the whole Cold War is America's fault.
I mean, say whatever you want about Putin, all of the worst stuff he's done has been in reaction to the American empire, which is behaving in a way that if the Soviets had won the Cold War and had expanded their military alliance into our hemisphere and into our so-called backyard the way we have done to them, America would have launched the H-bombs at them a long time ago.
What America has done to Russia is absolutely intolerable from their point of view, and any honest person who's not in on it unless they just don't know the first thing about it.
And all they know is, well, the mean old Russians, they stole Hillary Clinton's rightful throne away.
And so I'm really mad at them because now I've got the big orange Cheeto man I don't like, or these kind of narratives.
And so since history just began the other day and Putin started it, then I guess we've got to fight him.
What are we going to do?
Back down?
We can't.
We're number one.
We have to stand up for ourselves and defend ourselves.
And no one is willing to just say, come on, this is all America's fault.
Blame America first because America's guilty.
That's why they call us number one, the superpower.
That means we started it.
That's what it means.
It means we're the global empire, and Russia is all that's left of the former Soviet one.
Yeah, I mean, I think that we're kind of lucky as Americans that we don't have the same history and just the kind of ghosts hovering over us that Europe does.
This is such an emotional issue.
Ignorance is bliss.
I was just actually talking to an anti-war activist in Finland about how hard it is there to mobilize people to realize the danger of joining NATO and how important it is to kind of stay as neutral as possible towards Russia.
It has to do with the history of Russia invading Finland at one point.
A lot of people just can't get over it.
And then a lot of the young people have been kind of captured by NATO's narrative.
We don't have that kind of history here, and so if you watch how the Russia-gate-cooked-up scandal has proceeded, it was so convenient for Democrats, but it's so surface level and evanescent that since the bone-sawing of Jamal Khashoggi, all of a sudden, Adam Schiff is talking about who's going to be the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and was the chief inquisitor of the Russia-gate investigation.
He's talking about investigating Trump's ties to Saudi Arabia, which are real, which actually exist in a real, concrete way.
And that just shows how Russia-gate and Russia was kind of a political football.
At the same time, the Trump administration is moving the new Cold War towards China, which I think a lot of Democrats would be on board with, maybe without the tariffs and the trade war.
But Obama's whole pivot to Asia really set the stage for Trump's hostility to China.
So the U.S. can kind of, I don't see us enjoying warmer ties with Russia in the near future.
Both parties are going to hold on to this doomed alliance with Ukraine.
But at the same time, I don't think we're going to be hearing as much about Russia as we have in the past two years.
And it's just because we don't have that same emotional, historical grievance with Russia that so many European countries do.
The whole thing about Trump being under their control, it's basically sort of a shadow of red-baiting.
It just doesn't work because he's a real estate tycoon from Manhattan, so he doesn't make for a very good commie.
But it's also true that communism is over, but that also just kind of takes away from the narrative rather than adding to it and making him the puppet of right-wing Russia.
It just sort of also detracts from the narrative that there's anything about Russia In the days of communism, there's something to believe in.
But now, what interest would anyone have in selling out to Russia?
I mean, the whole thing is stupid.
I'm surprised it's gone on for a year and a half, honestly.
That narrative, which is just pure McCarthyism without the Cold War, is always going to be there.
And it's going to be wielded at anyone who contravenes the interests of the national security state in any way.
Trump, I think, has been largely a boon for the national security state, but he really scared the hell out of them in his presidential campaign.
And so that narrative was pretty convenient.
And now we see it being used against Jeremy Corbyn and specifically against now his main speech writer, Seamus Milne, who is being accused of thinking like the Kremlin.
He has no Kremlin ties, but the Times of London, which is basically the MI5's favorite paper in London, has this giant spread about Seamus Milne, who is a longtime left-wing Guardian columnist, an opponent of the British national security state and their intelligence services, a critic of NATO.
And he's being accused of just thinking like the Kremlin.
And that's the same criticism that I've received personally on a day-to-day basis because I've gone against the Russiagate narrative.
And I think that's always going to be with us, and it was a narrative that was revived in the Trump era.
It's straightforward McCarthyism, and it will be used to prevent someone rising from within the ranks of the Democratic Party who will take on the war state.
And I think that's really dangerous.
I don't see anyone.
Actually, I do see one person possibly running in 2020 as a Democrat who will start to receive these kinds of attacks and who already has, Tulsi Gabbard.
And if you look at what happened when she criticized Trump over Saudi Arabia and said, Trump, stop being Saudi Arabia's bitch.
If you look at what happened in some elements of the left, which are the co-opted, kind of controlled opposition, foundation-backed elements of the left, Haymarket Books, these kind of places, she came under harsh attack all of a sudden because she had been the only member of Congress currently serving, willing to take on the U.S. proxy war in Syria.
In other words, she was standing up to Saudi Arabia and their American jihad there.
Exactly.
And so she stood up to the Saudi position on Syria, and within the left, within these kind of intellectual left-wing journals like Jacobin, she came under renewed attack and they started calling her an Islamophobe and bringing up votes she had made in the past that I think she's since walked back.
I feel sorry for liberals and progressives now.
I mean, typically the real leftists, I hope typically, real leftists are able to keep their priorities straight, but the partisanship has just turned people so stupid.
I was reading some brilliant article at Truthdig and then in the margin was this glowing review of Max Boot's new book where he takes the most mediocre criticism of the right and just basically moves from one click to the right to one click to the left, basically.
And then there's no mention anywhere in the review that Max Boot himself is the entire worst thing about Republican conservatism in the 21st century.
He didn't just lie us into war with Iraq.
He's been the absolute worst war propagandist, right there with Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer or any of the very worst neocons, including all through the Obama years on Afghanistan surge, on Syria, on Yemen, on Libya, on everything.
Max Boot is the worst person in the world.
But here he's willing to say, you know, the populist right has moved a little bit too far right for my tastes.
And now he's the world's greatest hero to the Truthdig liberals.
And it's just like, who is the editor over there?
How did this get published?
I'm going to ask them because I've been a contributor there.
And, you know, it's overseen by Bob Scheer, who would hate Max Boot, who is one of the most searing critics of Bush.
And I think this is just kind of happening on autopilot.
Like I used to write for Alternet.
They got sold to Raw Story.
And if you look at the site, it looks like a click farm for the American Enterprise Institute.
I mean, it's just shocking.
This is part of the legacy of Russiagate is the kind of ability of the neoconservatives to revive themselves and return to their natural home in the Democratic Party and to co-opt progressive politics.
And you saw Max Boot, who's just this cynical sociopath who believes in nothing, actually exploiting liberal identity politics to do it.
He wrote a piece at Foreign Policy on how he's now acknowledging his white privilege.
I mean, he just sat down probably with some focus group or some consultant and said, what's the best way to revive my image now that the Democrats think Trump is a Russian puppet and agree with me on foreign policy?
And it's to say, I acknowledge my privilege as a white man.
Of course, he doesn't want to talk about the racist wars he helped encourage.
But this really got around in left-wing circles, or I wouldn't call them.
Hey, let's talk about the privilege of white Jewish Zionists in Palestine, Max, or not.
Let's not do that.
I meant Max Boot him, not Max you.
It's very dismaying.
And, you know, back to the Ukraine issue, just, you know, being Jewish is one thing that motivates me to write about the threat of Nazis.
And the Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the World Zionist Organization, the World Jewish Congress, they've been muted on this issue.
And this has been really discouraging.
Well, let me ask you about that, because, I mean, there are a lot of Jews, at least in Odessa, I don't know about all throughout Ukraine, but real Nazis can be a real problem for real Jews on the ground there.
So I know that the Israelis have their politics.
And, you know, in many ways, anti-Semitism out in the world is good for Israel in a way.
They seem to cynically exploit it when there's an anti-Semitic attack in France, for example, and say all French Jews should come to Israel and this kind of thing.
And yet, it seems like, you know, we're talking about not just anti-Semites, but real organized Hitler-loving Nazis here.
What is the Israeli interest in that?
Well, I actually was attacked by the Ukrainian ambassador because I went on The Real News and talked about the fact that Israel is licensing arms sales to Ukraine and the Israeli weapon of choice, the Tavor rifle, you know, if you go through a checkpoint, you'll see all the soldiers carrying a Tavor rifle, has become the Azov battalion's weapon of choice.
So the self-proclaimed Jewish state is arming the only neo-Nazi military regiment in the world and it's doing so knowingly.
And what is the interest there?
I think it has to do partly just with profit.
Israel's number two industry behind diamond finishing is arms sales.
Hey, ethno-nationalists gotta stick together, right?
It's the old transfer agreement again.
Well, yeah, I think there's that as well, which is that Israel's pretty comfortable with parties that have roots in historical Nazism coming to power in Europe because they don't actually care about the fate of Jews in the Diaspora.
And we'd be happy if those Jews left on the strength of a wave of anti-Semitism and moved to Israel because they'd get more people.
But, you know, there are just more cynical interests at play.
150,000 families in Israel, according to the film about the Israeli arms industry, the Lab, are supported by the arms industry.
So they'll sell weapons to anyone.
They've now inked, I think, a big arms deal with Chad, which is not exactly a human rights champion.
And their big market for the future is sub-Saharan Africa, where there are just so many human rights abuses committed, and they're determined to fuel that for the profit of these 150,000 families.
So there's that, and then there's their relationship with the U.S. I mean, we have to remember that in the 80s, when Congress passed the Boland Amendment, which forced the executive, then Ronald Reagan, to put a signature on any covert action.
You know, this is all about Iran-Contra.
The U.S. turned to Israel to arm the Guatemalan military.
Ephraim Rios-Montt was a key U.S. ally committing a genocide against the Mayans in his country and effectively exterminating all political opposition.
And so the Uzi became the weapon of choice for the Guatemalan military.
And Rios-Montt said that the Israeli soldier is our model.
But Israel was just doing it because the U.S. said, look, if you want us to back you against the Arabs, you've got to be our Cold War ally.
So just send these weapons there so Congress won't know.
And I think that's what's been going on in Ukraine.
And helped sell missiles to the Ayatollah during that same operation too, right?
Sure, sure.
I mean, this is happening all over the world and the Pentagon is involved.
So this has to do, I think, with the prohibition on arms to Azov that was passed under the watch of Representative Ro Khanna.
I see.
There you go.
Another little Iran-Contra scam for you there.
All right, listen, I'm sorry I've kept you so long here, but thank you so much.
I'm very glad that I did.
I really appreciate your time as always, Max.
Me too.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Max Blumenthal.
He's at grayzoneproject.com.
His podcast is called Moderate Rebels, haha.
And you've got to read Goliath, really.
You want to learn about Israel?
Read Goliath.
And then The 51 Day War is great and Killing Gaza.
You've got to watch Killing Gaza.
Share it with all the kooks on your email list.
What a great documentary.
Killing Gaza by Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen.
And then find this one at Mint Press News and also at consortiumnews.com.
It's called U.S. Funded Neo-Nazis in Ukraine Mentor U.S. White Supremacists.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
