March 4, 2022 - David Icke
19:39
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| This week on Right Now, journalist, writer and activist Eva Bartlett is on the line from Russia, talking about the escalating situation in Ukraine. | |
| Stand in the Park UK founder Sophia Rose tells us about the organisation's first anniversary. | |
| Investigative journalist David Clues tells us about being banned from speaking out in Scotland. | |
| And we showcase the latest work from Alice the journalist, who documented last weekend's | |
| Freedom Rally in London. | |
| So, let's go. | |
| Hello, and welcome to Right Now Live. | |
| The coin flip from Rona to Russia has been seamless, hasn't it? | |
| It's been seamless because nothing changes apart from the enemy. | |
| Whether a virus or a Vladimir, the desired outcomes are exactly the same. | |
| Mass fear, submission, economic deprivation which leads to state dependence, the dismantling of freedoms and mass censorship. | |
| And what's most embarrassing is that people will ask for it. | |
| They'll even demand it. What the conflict also does is make people look the other way. | |
| Pfizer's damning safety data being released would always have gone under-reported by the cult-owned media, but even more so now. | |
| Quick, look over there. | |
| Whatever is happening in Ukraine, and there are many narratives and many players in the game, it just reeks... | |
| Of March 2020. | |
| The unreliable data, the spreading of falsely attributed footage, all feeding a carefully scripted storyline to manipulate the minds of the public. | |
| The same governments and mainstream media propagandists that have provably lied to you for two years are now telling you what's happening in Eastern Europe. | |
| When you're all gonna die of a virus exited stage left, you're all gonna die in a nuclear war, entered stage right. | |
| Now, the history of Russia and Ukraine is complex. | |
| Of course it is. The history of everywhere is complex. | |
| And in every conflict, manufactured or otherwise, it's the innocents that suffer. | |
| The empathy-deleted rulers wouldn't have that any other way. | |
| I do have a question, though, for those that have replaced their blue heart with a Ukrainian flag on Twitter. | |
| The celebs that are pushing the virtuous hashtags. | |
| All the governments, institutions, corporations that have moved as one to cripple Russia as a punishment for invading. | |
| Where were you when the US was bombing innocents? | |
| The UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia in Yemen. | |
| Now this isn't a whataboutism or belittling what may be happening. | |
| It's purely asking the question because to me it doesn't look like you actually care about human rights or the lives of the innocent. | |
| It looks like you care about who you perceive to be violating them. | |
| First tonight, journalist, writer and human rights activist Eva Bartlett. | |
| She joins us from Russia. | |
| Eva sprung to prominence covering the war against Syria and has also reported from the front line in Gaza. | |
| Her stance has made her unpopular with a few of the Western media, so we thought we'd invite her onto the show to give us her take on Russia-Ukraine, as we don't believe we're being told by the official channels the definite truth. | |
| Eva, welcome to Right Now. | |
| So, without being massively vague, what is going on at the moment? | |
| Well, since the coup in Ukraine in 2014, which saw far-right neo-Nazi powers come to power in Ukraine, which saw for the next eight years not only the repression of the Ukrainian people, journalists, people who spoke out, people who didn't like this This neo-Nazi type government, but also for the past eight years, the shelling of the people of Donbas, who are Russian speaking, identify culturally as Russian. | |
| And when they saw the crimes that were happening in Kiev and later in Odessa, where 42 people were massacred, at least 42, that's the minimum number. | |
| In the fire in the trade house, which was deliberately, this was a deliberate massacre and it still has not been investigated by Ukrainian authorities. | |
| When the people in the Donbass saw that, Donbass being Eastern Ukraine, they said, we don't want that coming to us. | |
| We want to be autonomous. | |
| And since that point, the Ukrainian forces, again with neo-Nazi forces in them, neo-Nazi battalions, have been shelling relentlessly the people of Donbas. | |
| So this has been going on for eight years, and we haven't heard any Western condemnation of that, of the thousands of civilians in the Donbas who have been killed. | |
| But now, suddenly, when Russia decides, okay, enough is enough, Russia has For years, pushed for a diplomatic resolution to the issue of the Donbass and Ukraine. | |
| And in fact, I think it was 2019, Russia put forth, I can't remember the exact term, a bill, a process to denazify Ukraine. | |
| Ukraine and the US did not agree with that. | |
| So that's one notable point. | |
| The West has been supporting these neo-Nazis in Ukraine, including Canada. | |
| Right now, there's a whole lot of outcry about Russia having currently waged an operation in Ukraine to denazify Ukraine, but the people who are crying I mean, the general public, I get the sense that, number one, they don't have any idea that the Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi battalions have been warring upon the people of the Donbass, killing them, including children, shooting at schools, targeting civilian infrastructure. | |
| And number two, I guess they're just simply not aware of these neo-Nazi factions within Ukraine, because I don't see how any logical, rational, empathetic person could ever support what's happening in Ukraine. | |
| Well, I think the fact is the mainstream media, as you've pointed out there, they don't report this. | |
| So what you've said there, that doesn't come on our screens here in the UK at all. | |
| No, in 2019, and I must say on my own dime as I do all my reporting, I went to the Donbass for just under three weeks and I went to frontline areas. | |
| I went to villages that were 500 meters from these Ukrainian forces and that were being shelled on a nightly basis and also during the day. | |
| And I spoke with the remaining residents and those were generally the ones I met were elderly who had nowhere to go, no means of fleeing the area. | |
| So they were subject To the daily and nightly shelling and heavy machine gun firing of the Ukrainian forces. | |
| And, you know, this is not being reported. | |
| And also, for people who aren't aware, in like 2014 or 2015, there were accords signed in Minsk, and these prohibited the use of heavy weaponry from either side. | |
| And Ukraine has continually and consistently violated that. | |
| By using heavy weapons against the people of the Donbass. | |
| In one village I went to, I spoke with the village administrator, I think her position was, who told me they haven't known a moment's peace since this began. | |
| None of the truce accords ever reached that village. | |
| It's called Zaitsebo if people want to look it up. | |
| And she was just stressing, you know, like she sees firsthand what's happening because she taught herself to drive so she could go there to the place that's just been targeted. | |
| And document it because nobody else is doing that except for, of course, local journalists. | |
| And she said, essentially, they're taking apart the houses one by one. | |
| They do a line of houses, then they go to the next street and they destroy them. | |
| And when I was there, I saw a house that was still smoldering from an attack two days ago. | |
| It was completely gutted. And these are regions, there are people still living and they're being attacked by Ukrainian forces. | |
| And the body that was mandated to document it, the OSCE, It turns a blind eye to these war crimes of Ukraine. | |
| Does Russia have a legal right to do? | |
| I mean, it's funny when people talk about the legality of war and dropping bombs and stuff. | |
| It just seems like a crazy argument to have and a legal one. | |
| But is there a legal right for their invasion? | |
| Well, I think I would really encourage people to look at the writings of Dmitry Orlov, because he made that case. | |
| And unfortunately, I can't dredge up the legal talk off the top of my head. | |
| But I think one of the main points would be that Ukraine itself is not a sovereign nation. | |
| When there was a coup d'etat that instilled a puppet government that basically acts on the requests of the West, and when there are neo-Nazi battalions running around the country again, Torturing, killing Ukrainian civilians, as well as shelling on the people of the Donbass. | |
| And I think the other argument that would be made is that the people of the Donbass, many of them are Russian citizens now. | |
| In the subsequent years from the coup d'état, they were given the option to become Russian citizens. | |
| That doesn't mean the territories are part of Russia, but many of them are actual Russian citizens. | |
| So Russia does have an obligation to defend them. | |
| If I may, Gareth, if I may, I just want to point out a blinding hypocrisy, which I'm sure you're very aware of. | |
| But, you know, did America and its allies have a legal right to invade Iraq? | |
| Do they have a legal right to bomb the hell out of Libya or Syria? | |
| Do they have a legal right to occupy Syria? | |
| They are occupying Syria. | |
| You know, they're stealing its gas. | |
| They've been attacking, not ISIS, they've been attacking civilian infrastructure. | |
| Look at the city of Raqqa. | |
| It was decimated by US and allied bombings. | |
| So, you know, if we're going to talk about legalities, we have to look first and foremost at what America's been doing around the world for decades. | |
| Oh, absolutely. I heard something on the radio the other day where they were talking about 16 children being killed in the Ukraine and there was all this massive outpouring and outcry and you had all the celebrity blue ticks jumping on it. | |
| And of course it's horrific, of course it's horrific. | |
| But I then harked back to 2014 with 2,500 children being massacred in Gaza and the media being completely silent on it. | |
| And, in fact, labelling you an anti-Semite if you called it out. | |
| So you're absolutely right. The hypocrisy is astounding. | |
| And that's why, to me, it feels almost... | |
| It's bigger than Russia-Ukraine, in terms of the media. | |
| Certainly here in the UK, the Covid situation and Russia-Ukraine, they sound, obviously, completely separate, but in some way they're connected, because here, at least, the media has replaced the virus As to be feared. | |
| With Vladimir Putin, he is now the new virus. | |
| It's gone from virus to Vladimir. | |
| Is that something that you think is intentional, that actually the two are maybe connected? | |
| I mean, I definitely see the shift that you're talking about. | |
| I mean, I see it online mostly because where I live, I haven't been subject to the kind of brainwashing and constant fear porn that I know my family and friends in the West have been. | |
| So I do see the shift online. | |
| For me, as I was saying to you off air when we were chatting, it's hard for me to definitively say this is an intentional shift because there are real issues here. | |
| There are real issues of the people of the Donbas being terrorized by the Ukrainian army and being killed by the Ukrainian army. | |
| There are real issues of Ukrainian civilians themselves not wanting to live under the rule of this current regime. | |
| So it's, you know, I think you can argue perhaps that a situation is being taken advantage of, and this situation is real, but the media is shifting its focus from the COVID narrative to this. | |
| And just, I also would like to touch on something you mentioned, you know, the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza. | |
| Again, if we want to talk about war crimes, and you did mention at the beginning that I spent time in Gaza. | |
| I lived there for three years. I was there during two wars. | |
| And I'm intimately familiar with war crimes, that is Israeli war crimes. | |
| Israel used white phosphorus on the trapped civilians of Gaza who live in a very tiny space and had nowhere to hide. | |
| And they used it on a shelter where a UN school where displaced Palestinians were sheltering. | |
| And Israeli soldiers point blank assassinated children and babies. | |
| These are all documentable crimes. | |
| So, you know, again, if we want to talk about war crimes, There are a litany of crimes of the US, of Israel, that should have the same media outrage that we're seeing now, but never have. | |
| And so I would just encourage people, don't take my word for it. | |
| You know, do some research. | |
| Look at a variety of sources aside from the mainstream media and ask, you know, why is it that you're being told to care only about one side? | |
| And are there other parties in this that you should actually be a little bit concerned about? | |
| Because there are definitely. And also, you know, from my experience in Syria, there's a lot of war propaganda. | |
| There's a lot of manufactured stories that just simply are not true. | |
| Photos being taken from other places, other countries, other years, and being put out there in the media, both on social media and by corporate media like the BBC, and feeding the general public a narrative that isn't true. | |
| I was going to ask, I was actually going to touch on that next, was the fake images. | |
| Because there's been so many of them. | |
| And also here in the UK now you can't get RT. So RT and Sputnik are gone. | |
| They're not on the television. They've been taken off a Freeview. | |
| There wasn't even an announcement of that. | |
| They just deleted them from Freeview. | |
| You can't get them on the internet now. | |
| And so that, to me, is very strange. | |
| If you're selling this idea of, you know, we're a free, liberal, Western democracy, and you're silencing any information coming out the other side, while at the same time you're peddling misinformation constantly. | |
| I mean, I've seen videos that were Russia bombing the Ukraine. | |
| It was a video game. | |
| Yes. I believe some Spanish media ran that. | |
| And I've seen photos that were from other countries and alleged to be Ukraine under Russia's bombing. | |
| There was an image put out, I don't know by which publication, but if you check on Off Guardian, they did a kind of series of Seven fake news stories regarding this situation. | |
| One of them was an image, sorry, of destroyed vehicles, I believe. | |
| And it was alleged that the Ukrainian forces had destroyed Russian vehicles. | |
| But in fact, these were vehicles in Syria. | |
| I believe that they were targeted by Turkey. | |
| So yeah, there's definitely a lot of deliberate misinformation put out there. | |
| I think, as we were saying, when we're chatting offline to confuse people, But also to incriminate certain parties, particularly Russia. | |
| I was just looking at my notes. | |
| I wanted to mention one important thing or a couple more important things as to why now is Russia taking the action to We don't hear about the increase of NATO threats and provocations. | |
| We don't hear about NATO's presence in countries bordering Russia. | |
| We don't hear that in February, President Zelenskyy wanted to make Sorry, he announced that he wanted to make Ukraine a nuclear power in violation of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. | |
| And I must admit, here, these notes I'm reading from a Corbett report, recent report that I would highly encourage people to look at. | |
| Because he makes a number of points, like, you want to talk about war, where do we start? | |
| Do we start with Russia's operation in Ukraine? | |
| Do we start with these events I've just cited? | |
| Do we start with the eight years of warring on Donbas? | |
| Do we start with the coup d'etat? | |
| He makes very good points. | |
| And again, this is in contrast to the media hype that we're being exposed to now, that suddenly, out of nowhere, Russia, this big evil empire, is invading the innocent government of Ukraine. | |
| Do you know what else they're saying here? | |
| I don't know if you're hearing about it there, that Putin's only doing it because he's lost his mind because of COVID. That was actually a front page article in the British media, that he had COVID, it's driven him mad, and that's why he's doing it. | |
| You know, you don't have to like Putin, but watch his interviews and you will see that he's very measured in his speech, and nothing he says is by accident. | |
| Nothing he says is offhand. | |
| It's very deliberated. | |
| And so if you were to watch his speech, and I would encourage you to, you can find them not only on RT, but just on YouTube or whatever, or on my wall, you will see that his words are very calculated. | |
| And you can clearly see these are not the words of a madman. | |
| That doesn't mean you have to agree with him or like him, but certainly if you watch him and come away with the thought that he's a madman, then I think your sense of perception is off. | |
| I think also if you think he's a madman, or at least if the perception is out there that he's a madman, then that fear of he could just go mad and press the red button and destroy is in people's minds, isn't it? | |
| And that's probably part of the idea. | |
| That is a constant media tactic we've seen over and over again. | |
| We saw it with Syria. | |
| The cartoonish, literally cartoonish, you'd see caricatures of President Assad Looking like a monster with baby's blood dripping off his mouth or something like that. | |
| And that's one of the things the media does first and foremost when they're, because the media is working lockstep with these Western governments that want to achieve something, whether it's propping up this neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine or vilifying Russia or vilifying Syria in order to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria. | |
| The first thing, among the first things they do is to vilify the leadership to the most ridiculous point And ad nauseum so that the Western public who generally don't have time to research, maybe don't know where to look to find more accurate sources, they start without even thinking about it. | |
| Just this concept of this guy's a ruthless dictator who just loves to chemical weapon his civilians, his people, becomes embedded in people's minds, you know, without even knowing it. | |
| Yeah, and it just suddenly becomes fact. | |
| Thank you so much for coming on, Eva. | |
| People didn't know this stuff about the Donbass. | |
| Maybe some of the people that watch this show would have known about it, but other people that will see these clips on social media and further afield won't have known any of that because we don't get told it. | |
| And so that was the whole point with getting you on, obviously. | |
| Thank you. And if you wouldn't mind maybe linking to my Mint Press article, because it does have a lot more information than I was able to express in this short period. | |
| And also, more importantly, it has interviews with people, the very affected people who are under the bombs of Ukraine. | |
| Now, this was from 2019, but it's still very apt right now. | |
| Of course. We will add that along the bottom so that people watching this can see that. | |
| Okay. Thanks so much for having me on, Gareth. | |
| It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for your time. |
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