For Pacifica Radio, February the 6th, 2022.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of AntiWar.com, and author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, introducing today's guest.
It's Bronco Marchteach.
He writes for Jacobin Magazine, and he's got this really important one here.
The CIA may be breeding Nazi terror in Ukraine.
Oh, you don't say, Bronco.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Hi, great to be back.
All right, so listen, I didn't mention, but I should have mentioned, so that people understand who you are and what you're about.
You wrote a book called Yesterday's Man about Joe Biden.
The first thing that Joe Biden did when he became a senator in 1973 was to attack Richard Nixon for his planned hasty and precipitous withdrawal from Vietnam.
Is that really true?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, Biden was all over the place in the war.
That was just one of these cases where he, you know, licked his finger, put it up in the air, and looked at where the winds were blowing.
And I think he changed his position on that several times.
In the end, he kind of took an anti-war position, ultimately.
But then, of course, in the 80s, when Reagan came to power, he looked at Reagan's popularity, and he said, oh, okay, actually, we need to start being more pro-war, we need to be more pro-intervention.
So he's been all over the map on this.
Yeah, well, he has continued this policy, begun in the Obama government during the Obama administration, and continued through Donald Trump, as we recently learned, to not only arm and train the Ukrainian military and associated right-wing militias in Ukraine, but they've been bringing them back to the United States and training up this new Gladio-type stay-behind program for Ukraine.
Is that right?
Yeah, I mean, according to this Yahoo!
news piece, the idea is for the U.S. and the CIA to train a homegrown insurgency in Ukraine.
Some of the people interviewed don't want to call it that, but others quite outright say that that is exactly what's happening.
And if you looked at some of the rhetoric of Biden and various U.S. officials over the course of this whole Ukraine crisis over the last couple months, it's clear that they've made that threat explicitly.
So that is what's happening.
You're referring to the administration officials saying things like, well, if they do invade, they're going to have a really tough insurgency on their hands and things like that?
Exactly, exactly.
So I think a very thinly-veiled reference to this program that we didn't know existed.
And I think it's also not a coincidence that this starts getting leaked just as these tensions are rising and Biden needs to look tough and needs to try and either threaten Putin or make himself look like he's doing something on this crisis to stand up to him.
But beyond the trouble, the inherent problem of training an insurgency and potentially inflaming a very destructive and deadly war in that country, which would hurt a lot of people that live there but would also possibly destabilize things beyond its borders, there's the fact that, look, Ukraine since the 2014 revolution, which is a very misunderstood event, very complicated and not really well-known in the West, neo-Nazis and other members of the far right in Ukraine have taken on, I would say, new prominence and power in the Ukrainian government and in society.
There's not only paramilitaries wandering through the country, attacking people and doing various bad things, but there's also within Ukraine's law enforcement and military, members of the far right have been incorporated into them.
The Azov Regiment is the one that I mentioned in the piece.
That's probably the most prominent one, and that's an official part of the Ukrainian National Guard, which is a law enforcement agency.
I mean, imagine that.
And there have been various far right members in the government.
But in this case, my concern is bodies like the Azov Regiment and other far right members who we know for a fact have received military training, who have received weapons, and I think it would be incredibly fortuitous, miraculous even, if they did not get the training, the CIA training that I'm talking about here that has been leaked, because the same year this program began, there was a push in Congress to, when they were sending weapons to Ukraine, to ban those weapons and other military training, other resources from going to Azov specifically.
And according to a report from The Nation in 2015 at the time, that ended up being taken out that year because, for some reason, the Pentagon leaned on lawmakers and said, well, maybe we don't want this particular clause in there.
Let's take that out.
So I think, to me, it's a little speculative.
But again, we know for a fact that Azov members have gotten this training.
And so when you add it all up, there is an above-average chance that part of this program is training neo-Nazi violent extremists.
All right, now, a few things there.
But first of all, can we start with what exactly is a Nazi?
Because in the United States of America now, as a guy was pointing out to me on Twitter last night, anybody to the right of Angela Davis is a fascist and a Nazi.
So when you say Nazi, do you really mean it, or you're just being mean to right-wingers, or what?
No, I mean, look, that word has absolutely been overused in a very irresponsible way in the U.S. context, to the point that, as you say, it doesn't mean anything.
It's actually kind of lost the power it had because of the fact that it's just thrown around so recklessly.
But in this case, we are talking about actual, honest-to-God Nazis, people who believe that the white race is superior and should rule the world.
As one example, the former commander of the Azov regiment once said that the historic mission of Ukraine is to, quote, lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival in a crusade against a semi-led intervention.
That's one example, but there's so many more.
These are people who are very much real white supremacists and everything that comes with it.
And so this is not just a political slur.
These are people who very much subscribe to the extremist ideology and would resort to violence to see it enacted.
Yeah.
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All right, now let's get back into this interview of Bronco March Teach.
There was an amendment to ban military aid to Hitler-loving Nazis, and then the Democrats made sure and got rid of that so that they could give that aid to those Hitler-loving Nazis.
And that really happened.
That's one of the last things John Conyers did of note before he got kicked out of the Congress.
Yeah, that's correct, according to what we know, yeah.
They had it in there, and then at the very last second, the Pentagon said, you know, let's take that out.
We don't need that.
I should say, since then, it has been passed again.
But the question is how effective that is, because we know for a fact that there was a piece for the Daily Beast some time ago where they interviewed someone who was a member of the Azov regiment, and he said that, you know, that didn't really matter.
They didn't have any sort of screening program that roots out people like him from getting this stuff.
And, you know, there's actually a report that was done in George Washington University where the author looked at some of the people who, on the Ukrainian government's website, they cite have received NATO training, training in these NATO centers to fight back against any sort of Russian aggression or any other kind of national security threat to Ukraine.
And some of those people are not just Azov but other white supremacists.
And it makes sense from the point of view of the kind of military planners.
Like, if their idea is they want to train an effective fighting force to give Russia a bloody nose or a black eye should they invade or anything else, you want to get the most committed fighters, the most militant fighters, and that tends to be the neo-Nazis who are highly ideological, who are very well organized.
They were very much on the front lines of the 2014 revolution.
It likely would not have succeeded without the far right kind of being at the vanguard, the revolutionary vanguard who was willing to take up weapons and use violence to get their way.
And so from their point of view it makes sense that you want these people in the fold.
Now, the problem is we've seen this story time and time again, what happens when the U.S. funds and trains extremists in a country where thousands of miles from any ordinary American within the borders of the United States, and then decades later what do those people end up doing?
It's not a pretty story, and I worry that this is what's going to happen here as well.
All right, so I don't know, I kind of wonder if people are driving around L.A. on a Sunday morning listening to this and thinking, I just don't know what I'm hearing here.
A leftist describing the liberals and the conservatives as backing literal Nazis in the war in Ukraine when I thought the war in Ukraine was the heroes of Minas Tirith fending off the orcs of the Russian East.
And everyone on Ukraine's side are all a bunch of heroes, and now you're muddying up my narrative here, Bronco.
Well, this is the whole thing, you know.
Look, a violation of national sovereignty, a violation of a country's borders, of course that is outrageous, of course we should oppose it, of course.
But the fact is that the way this narrative is presented, you're absolutely right, it's a simplistic black and white story, it's good versus evil, and the reality is that it's a lot easier to rally people behind if it's a matter of we're stopping the next Hitler, a.k.a.
Putin being the next Hitler, than if it's about, well, we're actually trying to prop up this, let's say, flawed democracy that has far-right people in the halls of power that is highly liberal, that is very authoritarian, and we're doing it as part of a geopolitical to-and-fro because we want to be able to contain Russia in future, we want to have basically dominion, military and strategic dominion over Europe.
That's not quite as romantic a story, I think, to rally people behind.
And so I think people really got to think about this stuff.
I mean, I think if people understood that this is what was happening in Ukraine and this is what the government was potentially...
Not potentially, we know that it is what has been done.
So if we have that in mind, I think it would be a very different public response to this idea of going to war in Ukraine, let alone sending troops and weapons into it.
I mean, at this point, I think Ukraine is now the third biggest recipient of US military aid, right?
I think, actually, the proposal that Biden had put forward initially, which is to sanction Russia if it invades, and it's not even clear that Russia will or has been on the brink of invading at all.
That has been a line pushed exclusively by Washington and the UK.
Meanwhile, pretty much the entirety of the Ukraine political establishment, France, Germany, the EU, all of them have said that a Russian invasion is not imminent.
Well, the Russians have said that too.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so that also calls into question this idea of suddenly rushing $500 million worth of weapons to Ukraine.
So if there's no imminent invasion, why is there this massive giveaway to weapons manufacturers?
And I think that question answers itself, really.
I think the other thing about this that is really dangerous is that we've already seen blowback from this.
And so fueling it has the potential to make it much worse.
The Azov Regiment and Ukraine in general has become kind of a mecca for the global far right.
They go there because, you know, this has been one of the countries, maybe the country where the far right has been most successful in not just shifting politics in their preferred direction policy-wise, but also in terms of actually getting into the sort of structures of power in the government.
And so people go there and they meet Azov, they communicate with them, they'll travel over and they'll get training.
And in fact, there was a report from West Point.
So this is not some sort of little known independent news site.
This is West Point.
This is the US military establishment that looked at what impact Azov and other far right movements in Ukraine had on extremists in the United States.
And they pointed out that a lot of violent extremists in the US and Europe were travelling over there and coming back and then engaging in violence, including the Rise Above movement, which the FBI put in an affidavit that they had gone over there, come back, and then proceeded to engage in all sorts of violent attacks on anti-racist protesters, for instance, at Charlottesville and other events.
There was a man...
Wait, wait, slow down, slow down there.
Sure, sure, sure.
You're saying to me the FBI says that some of the people committing acts of violence on the far right side at Charlottesville had been to Ukraine and back, where they were fighting with Azov?
Exactly.
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Thank you, sir.
Go ahead.
And this is, I want to stress, all of this is, it comes from, you know, the most official establishment sources that you can think of.
All of this is well documented.
The government knows it.
But of course, you know, when you talk about the vast American national security bureaucracy, there's so many of these agencies that are working at cross purposes and often, in fact, that are working to kind of create the very threats that then justify their own existence.
And so we're seeing that with this case, I think, because what is happening is the U.S. is inadvertently fueling white supremacists, extremists in the U.S. and Europe and in my home country of New Zealand where the guy who shut up the Christchurch mosque, he took inspiration from Azov.
He wore a symbol that they wore.
He talked about going to Ukraine.
And in turn, that violence is then used to justify one of the things that I really feared about Biden coming to power, which was Biden's tendency to push for an expanded national security state in the domestic sphere to increase repressive powers of the government to go against, sure, extremists, but also activists of any ideology.
And we're seeing that now where right-wing or far-right extremism is being used by the Biden administration to justify new anti-terrorism powers that kind of expanded domestic war on terror.
And meanwhile, it turns out that Biden's own administration is very much inadvertently or indirectly providing training and advice to these extremists.
It's an absurd and depressing situation.
And again, I think if people understood all this, there would be a very different response to what's going on in Ukraine.
And I think it would be understood very differently.
It's not a battle for democracy and liberal values, but again, part of a geopolitical chess game.
Some of these attacks that are being lodged against people who are speaking out against this kind of U.S. policy, this policy of constant NATO enlargement.
Josh Hawley is one who I disagree with him on many things, but I think actually on this he's completely correct.
And it's been really disgusting to see people use this McCarthyite-slash-Iraq War-era talking point.
Well, oh, if you oppose military escalation or military recklessness, therefore you're actually doing the bidding of this dictator A or dictator B.
That has been a really pernicious and damaging addition to U.S. political discourse ever since 2016 and ever since the Russia-gate fiasco.
And I think a lot of people sort of said, it doesn't matter, this is going to all go away.
But actually, I think we're really seeing the fruit of this now.
Yeah, that's a good point.
A lot of people, maybe not on the left, but on the progressive side, people in Congress who I generally support, like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the like, and Bernie Sanders even, have really taken a back seat in this because I think every incentive is against them speaking out because as soon as they do, MSNBC will call them a Kremlin puppet or whatever, a traitor, and so on and so forth, the same as has been done against Hawley and Tucker Carlson for taking this position.
And so, unfortunately, their voices have been largely absent.
Largely.
Ilhan Omar recently put out a statement.
I saw a great clip of AOC yesterday, in fact.
She says, I think we need to look at the military-industrial complex.
They had to get out of Afghanistan and now they're starved for revenue, and I think that's what's going on here.
Great answer.
Not that that's everything, but good enough.
You know?
No, absolutely.
Well, that's great to hear.
I'm glad to see them weighing in.
I'm pretty sure it was just from yesterday, so yeah.
Yeah, sure.
But the fact that it's taken this long, I think, to put out a statement, I mean, there was actually a piece in the American Prospect maybe last week where they had polling that showed how unpopular and how opposed any sort of military action in Ukraine was among ordinary Americans.
And they got in touch with all of their officers, all of the squad and other progressives, including Sanders and Warren, and I think Sanders gave a kind of boilerplate statement about diplomacy.
Otherwise, they were ignored.
And so, obviously, something has changed, I think, maybe because of this pressure, but the fact that it's taken this long, I think, shows you how dangerous this kind of rhetoric, this McCarthyite rhetoric that you mentioned is because it really creates a disincentive for people to take what I would consider a very reasonable and common sense foreign policy stance.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it can be really intimidating.
People can lose their jobs over things like this depending on what it is.
I mean, for somebody like you or me, take the side of the ayatollah if we have to because the truth is the truth.
Who cares?
But a lot of people are not in a position where they can speak out in that way and especially under this kind of pressure.
But it is, you know, if they say the tragedy and farce thing, this is the dumbest McCarthyism I've ever heard of in my life.
It's just completely ridiculous.
All right, Bronco.
Hang on just one minute for me here.
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Now let's get back into the show with the great Branko Marchteach.
And meanwhile, here's this quote Max Blumenthal tweeted the other day from Evelyn Farkas, who was the Assistant Secretary of Defense under Obama.
And she says to Newsweek, far-right groups are helping to defend Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government needs all the help it can get from its citizens regardless of their ideology.
End quote.
So when she's confronted with, like, hey, we got some real Hitler-loving Nazis here.
She says, she uses the word regardless.
Oh, well.
That's just fine.
Not, well, that's regretful and we'll really have to work hard to marginalize them later or anything like that.
But just, hey, come on in, everybody.
And in fact, if you go back a few years, I'm sure you remember this.
The Intercept had a piece about how America's terrorist mercenaries in Syria were traveling to Ukraine because you had this Chechen contingent in Syria, of course.
So they're bringing other ISIS-type terrorists back to Ukraine with them to link up with the Nazis to fight against the Russians and the Donbass.
You can't make this stuff up, man.
What do you say about that?
Yeah, I mean, the Farkas thing, I did not hear.
But in some ways, I'm actually, I feel like that's progress because if we can actually just kind of get rid of all the grandstanding and the kind of kabuki theater that the entirety of U.S. political discourse is, then okay, let's get down to some realpolitik.
We're willing to support Nazis and other white supremacists because they're on our side.
They're our Nazis.
I mean, I think that's repugnant, but at least then we can actually have a debate, a serious debate, and people can actually know what is going on rather than having this massive game of pretend that we're having to play where we have to talk about the Ukraine fight as if it's something about democracy and liberalism, which it absolutely isn't.
Right.
And, you know, people who lean left, try to remember your Vietnam-era New Left anti-government roots here.
I mean, maybe you like the Civil Rights Act a lot, but that doesn't really lend a bunch of credibility to the people of the FBI and the Justice Department, much less the CIA and the Pentagon.
I mean, these are the same people who lie to you, who lie to all of us about everything.
Why would we presume that they're on the side of innocence and goodness?
Didn't they update you on MSNBC that Russiagate never happened?
It was all a lie, just like Saddam Hussein's alliance with Osama just made up lies to manipulate you.
Why would anyone presume otherwise?
You know?
It's not like the Democrats to a good leftist it ain't like the Democrats are good leftists.
You don't trust them.
They're the Democrats, right?
So, what are we even talking about here?
Yeah, this has been an unfortunate thing.
I mean, I think on my part of the left, it's understood that the FBI is, you know, sure does some legitimate law enforcement stuff, but also has been a very anti-civil liberties agency for its entire career.
Highly, highly political agency.
And that this turn to kind of admiring has been dangerous.
The problem is, I think a lot of liberal people, a lot of well-meaning liberal people who, as you say, watch a lot of MSNBC and, you know, read the New York Times and that kind of thing, I think have been, have swallowed this narrative that the FBI is kind of the defender of norms and liberal democracy in the United States, which, you know, I mean, have a look at what James Comey did before he was fired under Trump, and that should dissuade you from any of these positions.
Yeah, seriously.
And, well, I was born in 76, and they'd done nothing but lie to me my whole life long, from the left and the right, anyone in power, and especially when they're pointing their finger at foreign enemies.
I mean, give me a break.
So, everybody should have been inoculated already.
And frankly, I think a lot of people have.
I think there's an entire new movement on the right.
You know, it's not quite enough to make up for the loss of the one on the left, but there's a new anti-war movement on the right that is just sick and tired of this stuff.
They just can't see it anymore, why America ought to be in charge of every last conflict in the world.
It just doesn't make any sense.
We're way over here in the new world.
We're supposed to dominate Eurasia forever?
How do you make the average guy in the average living room believe that, you know?
You're not going to get any argument from me.
I mean, I think it's bad for the Ukrainians, and I think it's bad for Americans who, you know, potentially could be targets of any sort of extremists that ends up getting training over there.
Yep.
And, you know, we've seen the same thing with Syria, where you had Americans go travel the Turkey into Syria to go fight, and the FBI wasn't even keeping track of who the CIA was sending over there.
And you could have the very same kind of danger here.
And as you said, some Americans who'd been to Ukraine to pal around with the Azov battalion and perhaps fight with them were there in Charlottesville and were part of that riot that broke out there.
So that's, you know, it's just like that first ISIS attack on the Jewish museum in Brussels in 2013.
See?
Told you.
It's already coming back.
And so that only is the portent.
That's only chapter one, you know?
Mm.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, thank you for writing it.
It's so important that you did, and I'm really glad that you're on top of this.
It's such an important article.
You guys got to go look at this.
It's at Jacobin.
That's jacobinmag.com.
The CIA may be breeding Nazi terror in Ukraine.
Yeah.
Very generous may there.
Thank you.
Really appreciate your time on the show again, Bronco.
And I appreciate you having me.
I hope people take all this seriously and really read up about it.
All right, you guys, and that's it for Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
And don't forget the fun drive KPFK.org or call 818-985-5735.
