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Post by Wayne Hall on May 1, 2022 7:45:15 GMT -5
Some valuable points are made by Jimmy Dore and Aaron Maté in this very well-focused interview:
Let us begin with the statement by United States Colonel Doug MacGregor. It is cited in Jimmy Dore's interview and he vehemently supports it: "I think Zelensky is a puppet and he is putting huge numbers of his own population at unnecessary risk...A neutral Ukraine would be good for us as well as for Russia.... Zelensky is, I think, being told to hang on and try to drag this out, which is tragic for the people that have to live through this."
The notion of Zelensky as "a puppet" is shared by our friends Robert Burrowes and Nigel Utton. Whose puppet? A puppet of NATO? A puppet of the Ukrainian Nazis? NATO is lionizing him, treating him as a hero. The Ukrainian Nazis are threatening to kill him if he does not support their objectives. Which objectives? Killing Russians? Killing Jews? Killing Muslims? Killing Ukrainians?
Aaron Maté adds the following thoughts: "Just imagine if Russia, in Mexico, backed a coup, starting to send billions of dollars worth of weapons to fight a proxy war against US-backed forces with the aim of bleeding the US and then trying to bring Mexico into a hostile military alliance. The US would have bombed and nuked Mexico a long time ago." The demand of keeping Mexico neutral, says Maté, is exactly what the US would expect if, for some reason, Russia was trying to bring Mexico into a hostile military alliance. "But we're not allowed to entertain those thoughts because the US media is simply there to promote the interests of whatever the state line is."
And because the American state line, like the "line" of more or less all states, perhaps, is autistically self-referential. And in the case of the U.S. the state is both global in its reach and afflicted with a "victim complex" against the United Kingdom and against Europe.
Jimmy Dore mentions a dinner he had with an old room-mate who thinks Putin is a madman. "He's going to start a nuclear war." So Putin, it seems, is an extremist too, like the Ukrainian Nazis.
Aaron adds the point: "When you have an insurgency it's always the most extremist people who will shoulder the fight. Ukrainians will be used as cannon fodder. The most extremist elements of Ukrainian society will be empowered. People from around the world are already being encouraged to come there and fight alongside them. But the US will never ultimately come to Ukraine's aid and will leave it to suffer more damage than it has already suffered."
Who are the American (or British) equivalents of the Ukrainian Nazi (or - if you like, extreme nationalist or "far right") extremists? Are they people like Donald Trump (or like the late Margaret Thatcher?) or are they liberal heroes such as the late John Kennedy? This is the way that the economist Martin Armstrong writes about Kennedy in the context of an analogy between the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the present crisis over Ukraine: "Obama had refused to provide military aid to Ukraine....Trump was advised to provide military weapons to Ukraine to prove he was not a puppet of Putin.... What Kennedy did to the Neocons was reject their advice and this resulted in a monumental shift in US-Russian relations. It forced both parties to realize that they needed each other and that confrontation was not the answer. The Neocons disagreed. This probably cost Kennedy his life."
The implication is that Kennedy like fellow Democrat Obama was not an extremist. He was more peace-loving than his neocon Republican rivals and advisors, which is why he "rejected their advice" and embarked on negotiations with the Soviets rather than "bombing and nuking" Cuba, as Aaron Maté postulates the US would have bombed and nuked a hypothetical militarily hostile Mexico. But it appears that Kennedy's rejection of his advisors was actually the direct opposite of what Martin Armstrong implies: what he did was order Khrushchev to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba or else the US would "bomb and nuke", not Cuba but the Soviet Union, massively. He would wipe the USSR off the map. This was a much more extremist reaction than Kennedy's advisors were evidently ready to countenance, and it also shocked and surprised Khrushchev. In both cases the ideology of "nuclear deterrence" seems to have been an inhibiting factor for them. The ideology had a true believer in Khrushchev which is why he had been so enthusiastic (more so than Stalin) in pursuing the massive Soviet nuclear arms buildup that had culminated in his exploding fifty and one hundred megaton hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere. Kennedy was not deterred by the ideology of "nuclear deterrence", which influenced only one side: the weaker side, and impressed above all the civilian masses (and the journalists who feed them and are fed by them). It also helps to explain the respect in which John Kennedy continues to be held not only by most liberals but also by less ideologically-blinkered conservatives.
The game that Kennedy spoiled was not the Cold War game of confrontation with the Soviet Union but the party-political game between Republicans and Democrats, with the Republicans as tough guys and the Democrats as wimps. This was something the parties and the media could not allow to be undermined.
To all appearances the "divide-and-rule" imperative takes priority over everything, including Cold War confrontation. Its use is steadily being generalized. It is present even in the differentiated distribution of immediately deadly and less deadly and possibly in some cases even harmless "vaccinations", splitting the surviving population into enraged or devastated victims on the one hand and confirmed disbelievers in "conspiracy theory" scenarios on the other. All on the basis of their personal experience.
Nuclear weapons play a significant role in maintaining the bipolar party game by means of which the United States, and its world, are governed. They are deplored (mostly) by liberals, who like to emphasize the horrors that would be entailed by using them in war. They are defended more single-mindedly by the conservative right, but also treated with condescending contempt by a minority tendency on the right typified by theoreticians such as John Mueller (Atomic Obsession) or the South African Robin Frost (Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11) who like to emphasize the military uselessness of nuclear weapons and look down their nose at people who are "taken in" by them. And John Mueller would never be invited to address an anti-nuclear peace movement conference any more than Julian Assange would be invited to address a meeting of the Committee on the Present Danger.
When I asked my wife if she knew many people who think that Putin is a madman, she said: "A lot of people think that." I asked her if she thought it herself and she said: "You can't know. He might be a madman." I then asked if that was because he might use his nuclear weapons or is it just the simple fact that Russia HAS nuclear weapons. This was too abstract a question to ask her but it is surely centrally important. It is the issue on which the "non-aligned" European anti-nuclear weapons movement of the eighties was focused and it was deployed as evidence of the hypocrisy of the Soviet Union's World Peace Council anti-nuclear weapons committees. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the "non-aligned" peace groups, to be consistent with their criticism, should have demanded unilateral Soviet nuclear disarmament, just as some of them (e.g. Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) had demanded unilateral British nuclear disarmament. In fact NATO's official policy at that time was for nuclear disarmament of three of the four ex-Soviet republics that housed nuclear weapons, namely Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Why did NATO not demand nuclear disarmament of Russia also? In the New Left Review 189 of 1991 Robin Blackburn writes: "On 3rd September (1991) (Russian President) Yeltsin called for massive reductions in missile stocks and indicated that Russia might take unilateral action to bring their stockpile down to 5 percent of its previous level; meanwhile spokesmen for the new Soviet and Russian governments (this was still prior to the USSR final disintegration) once again pointed to their urgent need for large-scale economic assistance."
Jimmy Dore is not a young man and his room-mate was probably an adult in 1991. Why did this room-mate not demand the abolition of Russia's nuclear arsenal at that time, along with the nuclear weapons of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan? Some of us did raise such a demand.
Wayne Hall
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Post by peleaga on May 3, 2022 16:13:04 GMT -5
"But it appears that Kennedy's rejection of his advisors was actually the direct opposite of what Martin Armstrong implies: what he did was order Khrushchev to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba or else the US would "bomb and nuke", not Cuba but the Soviet Union, massively. He would wipe the USSR off the map. This was a much more extremist reaction than Kennedy's advisors were evidently ready to countenance, and it also shocked and surprised Khrushchev." Wayne, i must disaprove, since the version I know is radically opposed -- while sharing this part of the facts with the version you know. So Kennedy appearantly had hard liner militaries at his back -- remember that McCarhism was not far behind, right -- so he had to appear very determined. But between four eyes (or six, there certainly was some steno :-) ) with Nikita, he asked him what he wants. And Nikita said (like Putin would, these days) -- I want the missiles in Turkey of my back. And Kennedy said "all right", much to the surprize of Nikita. So the deal was stroke, Nikita withdrew and Kennedy kept promess and withdrew the Turkish missiles within the year. While the press was celebrating his success due to being "determined" in his menace. Of course, how do we wanna know ultimately? All I can say is that this version sounds plausible to me. And it does plea for smart negotiation -- which may be behind VERY closed doors -- rather than deterrence!
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Post by Wayne Hall on May 3, 2022 23:01:03 GMT -5
Preda, it is not to be excluded that both elements were present in the negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev. But my aim in writing the article was firstly to make it possible to re-air my grievance over the unseriousness of the non-aligned anti-nuclear weapons movement of the nineteen eighties, which did not act in accordance with their own ideology after the collapse of the Soviet Union but instead lapsed into (continuing) confusion. Likewise I wished to pour some cold water on Martin Armstrong's reading of the Cuban missile crisis, which does nothing to dispel prevalent popular misconceptions (disseminated ad nauseam by the media and mainstream politicians) about the architecture of the American (and therefore global) political system.
Remember also that Nikita was punished for a failure, not praised for a victory, by his own constituency.
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Post by Wayne Hall on May 4, 2022 0:05:53 GMT -5
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Post by Wayne Hall on May 9, 2022 12:23:36 GMT -5
This is a transcript of the whole video.
Jimmy Dore: This is Fox Business. The guy on the right is a colonel from the United States military. And he's going to make a gaffe. And what is the gaffe? He is going to tell the truth. And the guy on the left doesn't know what to do. Because the guy on the right is going to tell them the truth about Ukraine right now. And listen to this:
"The first five days Russian forces I think frankly were too gentle. They've now corrected that. So I should say, another ten days they should be completely over. But the question is: what is it that Zelensky is going to do? The Russians have made it very clear: what they want is a neutral Ukraine. This could have ended days ago if he accepted that. And then they just....."
Jimmy Dore: So he's a colonel from the United States military saying it could have been over a long time ago if Zelensky had just agreed to keep his country neutral. He won't do it. Here we go.... ...borders. But the eastern part of Ukraine is firmly in Russian hands. But again the Russians are not seizing territory. They are destroying Ukrainian forces. That's their focus.
Fox interviewer: Colonel, it sounds like you don't approve of Zelensky's stand.
Colonel: I think Zelensky is a puppet. And he is putting huge numbers of his own population at unnecessary risk. And quite frankly most of what comes out of Ukraine is debunked as lies within 24 to 48 hours. The notions of taking and retaking airfields, all of this is nonsense. It hasn't happened.
Fox Interviewer: He's not a hero? In standing up for himself, and other people? You don't think he's a hero?
Colonel: No I don't. I don't see anything heroic about the man. And I think the most heroic thing he could do right now is to come to terms with reality. Neutralise Ukraine. This is not a bad thing. A neutral Ukraine would be good for us as well as for Russia. It would create the buffer that frankly both sides want. But he is being told, I think, to hang on and try to drag this out, which is tragic for the people that have to live through this.
Fox interviewer: I am inclined to disagree with you, Colonel, but....you know....
Jimmy Dore: What can I do? I can't say I agree with you. I am getting paid by the people that are profiting off this war. So, thank you very much. Appreciate it, Colonel. So there is a colonel telling you that Zelensky is a puppet. Is that guy a leftie? Is this guy a leftie, the colonel from the....? Is he some crazy Putin puppet? Is that who that guy is? Is that guy being paid by the Russians? The guy on Fox Business? Who is from the military? Aaron would you like to react to that? I find it funny watching that guy Varney: "Well, I can't believe you're telling the truth like this. What do you think this is? Tucker Carlson show, asshole? We're at f....ing Fox Business. Go ahead. React to that clip......." .
Aaron: The colonel speaking. His name is Doug MacGregor. I interviewed him back in early January. And he said that Russia was going to invade when people like me were very sceptical of that. So he called it, very accurately. And what he was saying was that Russia is not going to compromise on this core security concern. And that's the security concern that we've been ignoring for decades now. And you know what Jimmy? In response to this argument people will say: "Well, why can't Ukraine join a military alliance? Everyone should have the right to join any military alliance that they want. Right? And in theory that's true but the problem is we live in the real world where countries have spheres of influence and they also have their own legitimate security interests too. And just imagine how the U.S. would react if Russia, in Mexico, backed a coup, started sending billions of dollars worth of weapons to start a proxy war against U.S.-backed forces with the aim of bleeding the U.S., and then trying to bring the U.S. into a hostile military alliance. The U.S. would have bombed and nuked Mexico a long time ago. They never would have allowed it. So. We live in the real world, and what Russia is doing has been predicted for a long time. And the question is: is it worth trying to bring Ukraine, which is a deeply divided country, with many people who identify with Russia and don't want to be a part of NATO, into a hostile military alliance that would in the event of a war would require the U.S. to come to Ukraine's defence, and engage in World War Three. It's a recipe for suicide. And so instead of just accepting the reality that it is insane to try to bring a state on Russia's border into a hostile military alliance - and by the way, they had to go about that by backing a coup because in 2014 when the coup happened, backed by the U.S., Ukrainian public opinion in support of NATO was way less than 50%. In fact there is a former staffer from the National Security Council that I quote in my latest article, and my Substack, who says that the biggest obstacle to Ukrainian membership, in joining NATO, is Ukrainian public opinion itself. So this idea that all Ukrainians have always wanted to join NATO is a fantasy.
Jimmy Dore: That's right.
Aaron: It has increased since 2014, but for a long time the country has been very very divided, and it is still divided. There are still people who don't want to join NATO. So the obvious answer - you have a country that is deeply divided and has people we are supposed to ignore because they go against our hegemonic interests, who don't want to join NATO - the answer is to keep the country neutral. It's a very reasonable demand. It's exactly what the U.S. would expect if for some reason Russia was trying to bring Mexico into a hostile military alliance. But we're not allowed to entertain those thoughts because U.S. media is simply thereto promote the interests of whatever the state line is, and right now the state line is a proxy war and expanding hegemony in Ukraine.
Jimmy Dore: And I just want to back up your point there, I mean buttress that point about how the American media is there just to serve the security state and our imperialism. This is caught by Laila Al-Arian - you retweeted it. "This framing in the New York Times of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that resistance to military occupation and air wars is about rejecting democracy, tells me that 20 years later we haven't learned or reckoned with anything." So she shows a clip from the New York Times and this is how they refer to the wars that we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were naked wars of aggression. Here: "After years of serving in smoldering occupations, trying to spread democracy in places that had only a tepid interest in it...." That's what they call what we were doing. In Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. We were "spreading democracy"!! So that's the New York Times. Today. So that's why that Stuart Varney was freaked out by that colonel. Because this is the bubble they live in. This is the pro-war pro-government pro-Pentagon pro-military-industrial-complex narrative you get from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News. Almost without exception. There are a few, but almost without....
Aaron: If you were to poll a ten-year-old and poll a professional journalist and ask them: "Was the U.S. trying to spread democracy in Iraq and Libya?" I guarantee you the ten-year-old, by a huge margin, would give the correct answer, which the grown adults, the professionals who call themselves journalists, though that's a bastardization of the term, who believe this insanity. And it helps to explain why we're in the situation we are in.
Jimmy Dore: Do you know what is puzzling to me, Aaron? I see this a lot. I see people saying: "I stand with the people of Ukraine", or whatever. And then this person makes a great point: It says: "Why is no-one......" So there it is. They're doing water-colours for Ukraine. Right? Isn't that nice? Hashtag "Pray for Ukraine". So this person says "Why is no-one doing water-colours for Palestine?" Or for Yemen? Or maybe Syria? Somalia? Or....never mind. So that kind of drivers me crazy too. I bring that up. At a time right now we're wagging our finger at Vladimir Putin for illegally invading a country. We're illegally occupying a country very close. It's called Syria. We're occupying it. We occupied another country very close by called Afghanistan for twenty years. For no purpose but to transfer wealth upward to the military-industrial complex. No other....
Aaron: Your point even applies to Ukraine itself. How come no-one was standing with the thousands of Ukrainians in the Donbas who were getting shelled with U.S. support for eight years?
Jimmy Dore: Right. What about those people?
Aaron: When that was happening they just didn't exist. They were unworthy victims, to use Noam Chomsky's term. We couldn't acknowledge them, even though this war has been going on there for eight years, and that is not to minimize the suffering of the more than one million Ukrainian refugees now and the hundreds and possibly thousands of civilians that have been killed by Russia. All that is horrible, and we oppose that, but the point is: you cannot pretend that the war started when Putin invaded. Putin radically escalated it - I think he made a criminal decision - but it's complete denial to reject the existence of 14,000 people inside Ukraine who have died, ever since the U.S. backed a coup and the coup government essentially waged a proxy war against people who didn't want to live under their far-right regime.
Jimmy Dore: And so your point is actually even a better one. Because you don't have to go to Somalia, or Syria, or Yemen. You could go right to Ukraine. What about the people in the Donbas who've been getting shelled for the last eight years. By the Ukraine government. How come you didn't stand with them then? Because you weren't told to by your government. Because you weren't propagandized to stand with those people then. But you are being propagandized to stand with other people now. You still don't stand with the people in the Donbas. They still don't stand with them. So there's a whole group of people in Ukraine you actually don't stand with, and you don't even f...ing know it. But you have been propagandized, which you also don't know. This is my favourite headline. "Biden sells Alaska back to Russia so we can start drilling for oil there again." That's funny.
Hey, this caught me. This guy Jason Stanley. He said: "It's weird when someone wants to kill you and your entire family and you don't have a clear idea who they are or why they hate you so much. That's the situation most Americans are in with Putin. Putin wants to kill us all, even Tucker Carlson."
I thought that the guy was going to say something else. And then he gets to the last two sentences and he ruins it. I thought he was going to say: "That's how it feels to be a Russian today." No. Putin is not invading Mexico. Putin is not flooding the border of Canada with billions of dollars of Stinger missiles. Putin is not overthrowing Canada and installing a hostile government to the United States, and then funding them. And then trying to get them to join a military organization that is against the United States. That is not happening. Yet somehow we're still the victim. Somehow....it's just crazy.
Aaron: Let me quote Adam Schiff again. What he said during Trump's impeachment, back in 2020, January 2020. "The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don't have to fight Russia over here." Ivy League professors like Jason Stanley, who is considered for some reason an expert on fascism, were applauding that effort, were applauding Adam Schiff when he was saying we are using Ukraine to fight Russia over there. There is no Russian politician saying that we are using Canada or Mexico to fight the U.S. over here because Russia isn't doing that. The U.S. has been using, in Adam Schiff's own words, Ukraine as a tool "to fight Russia over there." And these people are projecting their own bloodlust onto Russia. It's these people who support actually a policy of trying to kill Russia. And they're projecting all of their chauvinism onto Putin. And it's easy to do that because Putin is a chauvinist. And he isn't a very .... you know, I wouldn't want to hang out with him. But these people are exactly what they claim to oppose. Exactly.
Jimmy Dore: And do you want to see the people that you're actually in bed with in the Ukraine? You know, when I say that the neo-Nazis are intertwined in their military, that's not hyperbole. So Alan Macleod found this. He said: "Absolutely wild that the official National Guard Twitter account is posting in English about how the infamous Azov battalion is greasing their bullets with pork fat before shooting their Muslim enemies." So this is the video and it was blanked out by Twitter. It said: "This violates the rules." But here's the video. This is their Twitter feed. That is the official Ukraine National Guard's Twitter feed. And it says: "This Tweet has violated the rules of hateful conduct. And the Tweet says they themselves are saying: "Azov fighters of the National Guard greased the bullets with lard against the Kadyrov orcs." I guess that's the Muslims. And then they show a video of them doing it. Do you want to see the video?
So that seems to be some crazy Nazi stuff. They're bragging about it. You don't have to doubt where that came from. It came from their official Twitter account. So even if that video is a hoax they officially endorse it. Again, this evidence is all over the place, stuff like this. They've made Putin out to be a one-dimensional villain. That's it. And they can project, as Karl Jung has taught us, they can project all their darkness onto that person. Just like: "I'm not that. I'm not Putin. Putin is horrible." But what about.....he's fighting Nazis. I just block that out. I say: "That's propaganda." I just block it out. I say: "That's what Putin says." Anyway, I had dinner the other night again with my old room-mate, who is a great guy. And I was trying to tell him that..... He thinks Putin is just a madman. He goes: "I think Putin is nuts. He's a madman. He's going to start a nuclear war." I go: "Do you think he is crazier than Joe Biden?" And he goes: "No." "Well, Joe Biden has got a bigger kill list. I'll tell you that. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia." And he just looked at me like: "What are you talking about?" "What do you think I'm talking about? You know, he's trying to kill Julian Assange. He's been trying to do that for a long time." So, and then I said: "He's in bed with Nazis in Ukraine." And he looked at me and said: "Jimmy, that's what Putin says." I go: "Yeah. Putin also says water is wet. That doesn't mean it's not true because Putin says it." So. Wow, and there they are. I mean that's just .... That is propaganda because nobody is going to sit there and do that all day. So they probably only did that for a few bullets. Anyway, do you know what I mean? That's pro-Nazi propaganda. OK.
Aaron: Yeah and Jimmy when Hillary Clinton talks about arming an insurgency in Ukraine, that's what she's talking about arming.
Jimmy Dore: Yeah.
Aaron: When you have an insurgency it's always the most extremist people who will shoulder the fight. That's what happened in Syria when we were told that we were backing just moderate rebels...
Jimmy Dore: Moderate rebels!
Aaron: As Jake Sullivan, who is now the National Security Advisor, wrote to Hillary Clinton ten years ago: "Al Qaida is on our side here", and that's really who the U.S. was helping to support. Al Qaida and their allies. And the same thing in Ukraine now. Ukrainians will be used as cannon fodder. The most extremist elements of Ukrainian society will be empowered. People from around the world are already being encouraged to come there and fight alongside them. And for what? I mean, look. Putting aside the morality, putting aside NATO, putting aside the 2014 coup, the fact that the U.S. has backed Ukraine in this awful proxy war in the Donbas, just strategically Russia being there on the border with Ukraine, and Russia being the size that it is, has such an overwhelming advantage militarily. So, if your response to that is just to try to bog Russia down in an insurgency, all you're doing is prolonging a conflict that will eventually end with a Russian military victory, essentially using Ukrainians as sacrificial lambs. You're essentially using Ukraine as cannon fodder to bleed Russia a little bit more than you otherwise could. And that's what makes this all the more criminal, that while pretending to care about Ukraine, the U.S. will never ultimately come to its aid and will leave it to suffer even more damage than it has already suffered. So that's why the only answer is: accept that this quest to make Ukraine a proxy on Russia's border is insanity, and give it up, and let Ukraine be neutral. Respect, by the way, the actual agency of the Ukrainian people which, contrary to the propaganda we get in this country, is actually a deeply divided people. Agency does not mean you listen to the people who agree with you. It means you listen to everybody inside Ukraine. And Ukraine for a long time has been saying that it is a divided country, and the only answer to a division is neutrality. And that should be respected right now, and if it's not then more people are just going to die, needlessly, and it's a tragedy.
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