02/28/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, next up.
I mean, first up.
I mean, our guest today is Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His website is EricMargulies.com, spelt like Margolis.
And he also writes for LewRockwell.com and for Unz.com.
That's U-N-Z, Unz.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
Oh, I'm fine.
I'm watching all this fast-breaking news with fascination and trepidation.
All right.
Well, if I remember right, it was last Friday was our last interview.
And it started with, oh, good.
They've worked out some kind of interim deal, and they're going to have some elections.
Yeah, no, I think as soon as the interview was over, the coup d'etat was on.
Why don't you catch us up?
Yes, what looked like a possible settlement negotiated by the EU to Ukraine's ongoing crisis fell apart immediately as militant demonstrators rejected it in Kyiv.
And the then-Ukrainian president, maybe he still is, was ousted, fled for his life from Kyiv.
A new parliament was elected with a new speaker, all part of the militant nationalist Ukrainian movements.
And the rest of Ukraine, the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine said, no way, we're not going to go along with it, and trouble's broken out there now.
It's a very dangerous situation.
Now, I guess one obvious question that jumps out at me is whether, you know, the so-called coalition, whoever they are, the American bankroll types who are taking over the government now, whether they will have the strength to actually exercise monopoly control over the east, or whether they're just going to end up having a sort of de facto autonomy anyway.
How powerful is their national police force?
How powerful is their army?
And can they enforce monopoly state rule over the east, or have they done this too many times and now they're just going to sort of kind of de facto break up anyway?
Well, we just don't know at this point.
The army so far has stayed out of the political turmoil.
Its commander just said a day or two ago that it would not intervene in the fighting, and it would definitely not.
But it would oppose Russian troops if they entered into Ukraine.
But we don't know what the rank and file in the army has to say, because it probably mirrors the same ethnic, cultural, political splits that the rest of the country does.
And meanwhile, while this is going on, Russia has just mobilized 150,000 troops in its western regions within more or less striking distance of Ukraine.
I think this was an inevitable development.
Yanukovych, the deposed president, has showed up in Russia, in Rostov-on-Don, claiming that he was a hard done guy and he's still the president.
Putin, who's playing a very cagey game, had nothing to say on the subject and hasn't even met with him.
He's wildly reviled as a coward and incompetent.
And meanwhile, gangs, heavily armed gangs in Crimea are seizing government buildings and there are reports that they and or some Russian troops have taken positions around Crimea's two main airports.
There's a very strong pro-Russian move in Crimea, which is almost 80 percent ethnic Russian and was only given to Ukraine, which was then a Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev, reportedly when he was drunk.
And so there's no reason for Crimea to be in Ukraine.
It's a very strategic location with its great port at Sevastopol and there the tensions stay.
It's very frightening because what I've been warning about for months and months is that these events are putting the Western powers in Russia on a collision course.
All right.
Now, I'm trying to put myself in Putin's shoes, but I'm not very good at that because I don't know much about being the autocrat of Russia or anything like that.
But I did see this guy.
I don't know his name.
I don't know if he has one, but they said he was I believe they said he was the editor of Foreign Affairs, the Journal of the Council on Foreign Relations.
And so not the neocon wackos, but more of the centrist establishment, although there are some neocon kooks live there like Abrams and Boot and I guess Crystal sometime.
But anyway, this guy didn't seem like much of a neocon.
He was just, you know, a plain old vanilla State Department type or something.
And he was saying, I think to Jon Stewart that, oh, he he he.
Yeah.
While Putin's looking the other way at the Olympics, we're running off with Ukraine.
And aren't we clever in this kind of thing?
And I was thinking that if I was Putin, I might not even waste more than half of a chuckle at that.
And then I might wait these guys out for three or four weeks until their plan falls apart, because what possible influence can America really maintain in Ukraine when it is, in fact, Russia's backyard?
Well, we can we could have a military influence if we want to face a war with Russia, which would be beyond idiotic since we're both nuclear armed powers.
I wrote last year already that if things aren't diplomatically resolved in Ukraine, we could be facing another Cuban missile crisis.
We don't want that.
I'm not ready to die for Kiev or Dnepropetrovsk.
And most Americans, 90 percent of Americans couldn't find Ukraine on a map if their lives depended on it.
But that's the case.
But the other end of this is money.
Ukraine is 44 million people.
It's completely bankrupt.
It's literally down to its last few dollars of reserves.
Putin offered 15 billion to bail him out alone, which is not enough.
But Europe wouldn't even match that offer.
It seems now it's a ping pong game of who can bail out Ukraine better.
But in my view, the Ukrainian finance minister just said that the new government just said that Ukraine would need a minimum of thirty five billion dollars just to keep its head above water.
And who in his right mind would lend money to a country like this that doesn't really have an established government?
That's a chaos.
Nobody knows who's in charge.
And it's filled with, you know, angry, disgruntled people.
So you're facing you having both a political crisis and a financial crisis at the same time.
Right, well, I mean, isn't the easy answer the American taxpayer who and they're not in their right mind, but all they got to do is really all Obama has to do is go ask Janet Yellen for the checkbook and pay off whoever he needs to.
And it'll cost us in the unemployment line later.
But you know, the good the only bright side of this crisis is that Ukraine in 1991 had nuclear weapons as part of the Soviet military and Ukraine got rid of them.
They sold them for money to the Americans.
It's a good thing they don't have them today.
Otherwise, we'd really be worried.
Yeah.
Did you see where Josh Rogan had that thing in the Daily Beast about these Republicans openly saying we wish the Cold War was here because then, you know, everybody knew where everybody stood in all this.
And they didn't really realize that these idiots that their real argument is if the Soviets completely and totally dominated all of Eastern Europe, that would be effective at keeping us from meddling where we don't belong.
But since the Soviets aren't here to stop us here, we are screwing up everything.
That's the complaint.
You know, I've often said that the fall of the Soviet Union unbalanced the world political order.
And Putin said the same thing.
I'm not saying the Soviet Union was a good thing.
It was an evil empire in many ways, but as Reagan called it, but it certainly left the United States with unlimited power.
And we know that unlimited power, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We violated our agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO.
We're right on Russia's doorstep now.
We're trying to take away its historical heartland, Ukraine.
And I'm really concerned.
I mean, Ukraine means an enormous amount to Russia.
It's like a foreign power trying to take Texas away from the United States.
The Russians are going to dig in their heels.
So far, the Russian response has been very measured and reserved.
But emotions are at play here.
Well, so I mean, I guess there is no status quo, really.
It's a fluid situation.
But would you bet on the likelihood of Russian military intervention?
Oh, I'd give it a 50 percent probability.
Jesus.
And the U.S. would then be confronted by an awful decision.
What's it going to do?
OK, big talker.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the president, our president said, you know, war in the Russians, keep your hands off Ukraine or there will be consequences.
Well, OK, big talker.
Here they are.
What are the consequences?
Right.
You know, you're going to go to war.
These Democrats sure are tough guys, aren't they?
Yeah.
So it's dangerous.
There's a looming civil war in Ukraine between the eastern and western portions.
You know, my own view, my Ukrainian friends will skin me alive for saying this.
But I really think Ukraine, probably the ultimate, the best solution to this is a peaceful division of Ukraine into western Ukrainian speaking regions and the eastern, which are totally Russian areas, Russian speaking, historically Russian, and which are completely wired in to Russian industry.
So and to divide the two and let the Russians have the east and let whoever the hell wants and can afford western Ukraine to have it.
Well, you know, one of the things that's going on here, too, I saw and I don't know how representative this is, although accusations sure fly a lot.
But I saw a picture of these Ukrainian brown shirts beating up an old woman, kicking her, and she looked pretty damn old, too.
And it says, well, she was on her way to deliver flowers to the Lenin statue.
And so they were beating her ass.
And so you really have not like in America, where everybody just calls each other names.
You really have to some degree the commies versus the Nazis on the ground there, which means really hard feelings going back to World War Two, who sided with Hitler and who sided with Stalin.
And so how are people like that, you know, when when those are at least, you know, a part of what defines them, if not what they're fighting about today, you know, in terms of policy, they're more fighting about who has the power is all.
But that's who who versus who.
How are you going to have a democracy of compromise with a situation like that?
Right, right.
Got to split them up.
Now, hold it right there.
It's the commercial break.
We got to go out to it.
And we'll be right back with the great Eric Margulies, author of American Raj right after this.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
You can retweet my brilliance at Twitter dot com slash Scott Horton Show if you want.
You also check out Eric Margulies on Twitter at Eric Margulies.
Spell it like Margolis.
I got one commenter who hates it when I say that.
Well, how else are you supposed to spell it like Margulies?
That don't make any sense.
Welcome back.
It's the show.
Now, Eric, all this talk about commies and Nazis, it's it's really bad of me.
It's dumb of me to go out to a break calling people commies and Nazis and then not able to, you know, have it explained what exactly we're talking about here.
Can you fill me in, especially?
And I've seen evidence of the Nazis on the street out there with their SS lightning bolts and their, you know, Hitler's salutes and their iron crosses everywhere.
I don't know.
I guess I saw a couple of swastikas and there are a couple of reports of somebody tried to firebomb a synagogue or a Jewish school or something like that.
I don't really know.
And I don't know too much about who all still loves Lenin and Stalin in Ukraine, but maybe they do.
Can you fill us in on who these people are and why they hate each other so much?
Yes, God.
First thing, starting point is you've got to remember that Stalin in the 1930s murdered between six and seven or eight million Ukrainians by shooting them or starving them to death.
There was widespread cannibalism in the Ukraine.
It was a campaign designed by the Soviet Iceman, whose name was Lazar Kaganovich, to break the spirit of the independent farmers in Ukraine.
So Ukraine suffered mass genocide, a holocaust, in fact, long before anybody ever heard about old Hitler.
We were allied to the same country in World War II that committed this monstrous crime.
Today, unfortunately, everybody's using these terms, fascists, Nazis, commies like that.
But there really aren't many communists left.
Everybody's disillusioned with communism.
And the Russians and the Ukrainian, pro-Soviet Ukrainians, are calling everybody who opposes them a fascist, gangster, bandit, black shirts and that kind of thing, brown shirts.
Yeah, but it's not true.
It is very much exaggerated.
There are some street thugs who you'll find in Kiev and other cities who use Nazi salutes and beat up people.
You also find them in Moscow in great numbers, and you find them in Europe as well.
I mean, these are street hooligans, scum of the gutter, as my mother used to call them.
But they don't dominate the Ukrainian political process.
Most of its leaders are nationalists who want, who desperately want an independent state free from Russia.
They're angry at these guys with bank accounts.
Well, that's different.
But the so-called fascists are not fascists, and they hark back to the Ukrainian resistance movement against the Soviet rule in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
Its leaders were murdered mostly by the Soviet secret police.
They sided for a while with the Germans in 1941 and 42, as did many other European countries.
So the same thing happened in Yugoslavia, Belgium, Holland.
But they were not doing it because they were Nazis, but because they wanted to throw the Russians out.
And at that time, the Germans looked like liberators.
Yeah, well, and that's part of the story of World War II, of all the different peoples, as they're collectively called, stuck between the Nazis and the communists during World War II is, you know, you do what you have to survive under the Nazis.
Then when the Russians show up, you got to explain how come you're still alive, that you must have gotten along with the Nazis while they were here, and then vice versa again when it switches back again.
A lot of innocent people died over stuff like that.
Exactly.
A lot of innocent people died over stuff like that.
We, the United States, collaborated with the biggest mass killers in history, which was the Soviet Union.
Yeah.
Including even after the war with Operation Keelhaul.
Yes.
Man, you want to tell them about that since I brought it up and it's the most horrible thing any American president ever did that I can think of?
This is you're referring to the British handover of the Cossacks?
Well, yeah, Trumans.
Some of them were in the United States, I believe, were drugged up and, you know, tied up and put on ships and sent back to Stalin after the war.
Yes, the British were even worse with this.
Many of the groups fighting the communists, notably the Cossacks, Russian Cossacks and Muslim groups, who had fled to the British and the American lines for safety, and French units fighting for the Germans, were all handed back and they were all shot in great numbers.
Yeah.
Jacob Hornberger has a great, I think, six or seven part series or something all about Keelhaul and I think he counts two million people, something like that, two million prisoners of war handed back to Stalin to be shot.
Where, right, if you surrender, if you're in Stalin's army and you surrender, that's a capital offense.
Whether you've got a rifle in your hand or not, you're not allowed to surrender to the Germans because we're going to kill you anyway, kind of thing.
So each and every one of them that were sent back were all guilty of the capital crime of surrender, basically.
That's correct.
Even Stalin's son was captured and when Stalin heard that he said something like, well, I hope he dies.
So that was the policy.
So we have much to be ashamed of, but we're still overcome by war propaganda.
It's going to take years more for some more truth to emerge.
But so where you have some of these brown shirts running around in the street with their baseball bats and all of that, you wouldn't put too much stock in their rise to power or anything.
These are just, they're the useful street toughs for the coup for now and then they'll melt away or what?
I believe so.
We see the same type of young men in at the barricades in Spain and in Italy and Germany and you name it.
There's just a lump of proletariat of violent people we see them in Paris, too, who are ready to ride.
The French call them casser, breakers.
They're ready to just go and smash things, throw Molotov cocktails.
But the upper echelons of the Ukrainian nationalist movement are not street thugs and are certainly more thoughtful.
It would be wrong to dismiss them as fascists.
All right.
Now, so the Russians already have this giant base, a naval base in Crimea, and I guess their lease expires in 2043 or something like that.
So that's not going anywhere.
I don't know.
What do you expect?
You think Putin is just going to maybe park some more boats there and make it a little bit more difficult for the Americans to really think about trying to push their luck when it comes to Crimea?
I've been, I've toured the whole naval base at Sevastopol.
It's quite fascinating.
It's huge, beautiful, beautiful natural harbor.
And it contains most of the Soviet Black Sea fleet, which is tasked with transiting the Dardanelles and going into the Mediterranean.
So this is their opening to the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, for example.
They have only one other major naval base on the Black Sea, and that's at Novorossiysk.
So this is vital.
This is a vital Russian interest.
The Russians have a lot of ships there.
They have troops.
It's almost, it's an extraterritorial area, sort of like their Guantanamo.
And they've made clear that there's no way that they're going to give up this base.
And I'm convinced that the Russians would fight to defend it.
Well, that Barack Obama, he backs down on everything good he ever said he was going to do, except the Iran talk so far, I guess.
Now, I mean, he backed down in 2009 and 2010 when he could have made it happen, so don't get me wrong.
But he seems to follow through on all his worst stuff most of the time, like surging into Afghanistan or, you know, that kind of thing.
Guantanamo is still open.
But I guess, I don't know, I sort of have faith in his cowardice that he's not going to push his luck here and get himself and the rest of us killed messing with the Russians, right?
Well, I hope so.
That's the only good thing I could ever say about Bill Clinton, too.
He didn't get us into a major war.
But these Republicans in Congress are very warlike.
They are thirsting for the Cold War, as you were saying earlier.
And the thing is, you know, we've got our butts kicked in Afghanistan.
We've lost that war.
We just won't admit it.
We got run out of Iraq.
Al Qaeda, which we were supposed to crush like a gnat, is popping up all over.
So we've had one reverse or defeat after another.
There are a lot of people who are itching.
They want to see us go and bring the Soviets back.
They were fun to fight.
And we're doing that to an extent with Russia.
Putin, however, in Russia, Mr. Putin, former KGB agent, is too clever to fall for these provocations.
And he's being very cautious on what he's doing.
Thank goodness, once again, we see that our fate is more in Putin's hands than it is in Obama's for the moment.
All right.
Very stupid question with only 30 seconds to answer it.
But whatever happened to Prince Bandar?
Speaking of Al Qaeda.
Oh, Bandar is down there grumbling and gnashing his teeth because the U.S. won't more bomb Syria.
I mean, they're saying he's missing or something.
He didn't show up at the big summit in D.C.
Or I forgot.
Well, there's a power struggle going on in Saudi Arabia.
And he's the intelligence chief, too.
So it's more likely he's holed up there chewing beetle nuts and plotting.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
Thanks very much again for your time, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com.
Spelled like Margolis.
LewRockwell.com.
Unz.com.
Unz.com.
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