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May 30, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:21:50
Absurd Media Struggles to Discern Who Is Worst: Trump, DeSantis, Putin, or Literal Hitler. Plus: Obscene Double Standards for Russian/Belarusian Athletes on Ukraine War | SYSTEM UPDATE #90

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Good evening, it's Monday, May 29th.
Happy Memorial Day and welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, was Hitler really so bad after all?
That seems to be the question being continuously posed, at least implicitly, sometimes explicitly, by the U.S.
corporate media.
Ever since Trump's presidential campaign began to be viable in early 2016, equating Trump to Hitler has become increasingly common, even obligatory.
Despite the small fact that Trump has never actually done nor advocated any of the things that have made us understand Hitler to be a singularly evil historical actor, things like attempting to exterminate entire races of people, to eliminating any forms of even minimal dissent, to launching an aggressive war of conquest that led to the Second World War, the deaths of tens of millions of people, indiscriminate air bombing of civilians in large metropolitan areas, and ultimately
Little things that are Hitler signatures act and ultimately the use of the first nuclear weapons in Japan Those are little things that are Hitler signatures acts that Trump never Stated or implied that he'd favored let alone actually did during four years in power nonetheless that Trump is literally Hitler Became a very common theme in the most mainstream sectors of liberal corporate media Far more than I actually even recalled as I realized when we prepared the material for this evening's program
The tactical problem for the media in branding Trump a white supremacist and then a fascist and even the new Hitler was obvious at the time.
The latest Republican presidential candidate always must be described as worse than the prior one, the worst in history.
Hence the rehabilitation of Mitt Romney, John McCain, even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in order to declare Trump an unprecedented evil.
As Jed Zolani put it today regarding a clip from an MSNBC show that convened a panel to announce that DeSantis is even more dangerous than Trump, i.e.
the new Hitler, quote, think about Mehdi Hassan's show like entertainment instead of education.
The sequel has to be scarier than the original.
Why else are people watch?
But once you branded someone the new Hitler, where do you go from there when it's time to say that they are even worse now than before or that their successor is worse?
The media is giving us its answer.
They are literally worse than Hitler, these new people are.
Or, the converse must also be true.
Hitler is better, more moral, less evil, than the 2020-2024 version of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and anyone else liberal media employees seek to demonize, including Vladimir Putin.
They can't help themselves, and as a result, they are doing something that Jewish groups formed after the Holocaust have always regarded as uniquely dangerous.
They are trivializing the threat of Hitler and of Nazis by elevating him and them from a singular evil into just another ordinary bad guy.
Someone who actually deserves credit sometimes for not going as far as Trump, DeSantis, Putin, or whomever they need to villainize.
Now some of this is just the deranged mentality of failing TV and newspaper outlets desperate for ratings and clicks.
If you're just in an ordinary political battle that's not very interesting, if you're fighting to protect the country from new Hitler, that's exciting.
But it also captures a vital truth about the liberal intelligentsia in the United States.
They do not believe they are engaged in ordinary political battle, but rather a world historic, unprecedented fight against a singular, worse than evil Hitler.
And for that reason, they have come to believe, often explicitly stated, that anything and everything they do in the name of advancing their cause is justified by the indisputably noble and morally paramount nature of their battle.
And that mentality is another defining characteristic of Adolf Hitler.
Then there is a brand new standard being created for Russian and Belarusian professional athletes, namely that they are morally responsible for the acts of their own governments, to the point that they should be banned from competing in athletic competitions, or are required to issue statements denouncing their own government as a condition for earning their livelihood, or, as is now happening right this minute at the French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament held in Paris, they can play but not have their nationality mentioned or their national flag displayed.
The International Soccer League, FIFA, banned Russia from global competition and continues to ban them to this day.
To call this a double standard is to be unfair to double standards.
American and British athletes have traveled the world for decades, including when their governments were engaged in some of the most egregious and destructive wars of aggression, from the invasion of Iraq to bombing multiple countries under President Obama, and were never banned.
from any athletic competition nor told they bore responsibility for those acts or were required to denounce them.
That China is currently engaged right now in a genocide against the Uyghurs or that the Saudi regime was responsible for the brutal murder of a journalist is gospel in the West.
Yet Chinese and Saudi athletes are free to play and play under their own flag with no similar obligations imposed.
It's particularly bizarre to simultaneously assert on the one hand that Russia and Belarus are totalitarian regimes where any dissidents are instantly murdered or imprisoned, and then on the other, telling individual athletes from those countries that they somehow bear responsibility for their government's actions as though they live in a democracy or have the responsibility to denounce it, even while they and their family continue to live in that country.
This is a lot more than about tennis or athletes or professional sports.
It's about how the Western press manufactures propaganda in seemingly innocuous ways.
It's about how so many propagandistic precepts are absorbed, even by those of us seeking to be critically minded, because it's made to be pervasive in the culture and in the ether.
And it raises very profound questions about how we see ourselves and our own obligations to abide by the moral obligations we so joyously and self-righteously and endlessly seek to impose on others.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
For decades, since really the end of World War II, one of the central missions of Jewish groups and other groups dedicated to memorializing the Holocaust and ensuring one of the central missions of Jewish groups and other groups dedicated to memorializing the Holocaust and ensuring that it never repeated was to avoid what they called a trivialization of both Adolf Hitler and Nazism on
And yet, over the last several decades, we've seen this trivialization happening.
Often while those groups cheered in all sorts of ways.
Anti-Semitism has often become a tool that is attached to the foreheads of anybody who expresses ideas that the liberal elite sectors of media and politics disagree with, including but not only criticism of Israel, making that term that used to be and should be a very serious accusation become less and less credible the more casually and manipulatively and cynically it's tossed about.
But the same is true for Nazism and Adolf Hitler.
We had been taught since childhood that Adolf Hitler was not just another bad dictator, not just another immoral leader who initiated a war of aggression, that he was a singular evil, that he was somebody who had reached a new level of villainy, somebody who we were supposed to regard as existing essentially in a category unto himself.
And it wasn't hard to see why.
Given the historical consensus that one of the central projects of Adolf Hitler was not only to launch an international war of conquest, but to exterminate an entire race of people from the planet.
And yet it has been truly stunning to watch that long-standing convention be aggressively eroded in the name of first stopping Donald Trump and now stopping essentially anybody who comes into the radar screen and becomes a target of elite liberal media discourse.
That Trump is essentially, or not even essentially but literally, the new incarnation of Adolf Hitler, as bad as Hitler, essentially the same as Hitler, became a theme so pervasive in liberal media that it is almost impossible to overstate.
As I said, I had actually forgotten How commonplace this assertion became once it became clear that Trump stood a real chance to become president and then after he was elected.
To say that Trump was Hitler, Trump is Hitler, Trump is Hitler over and over and over again was something that became so commonplace.
I think that's the reason I had forgotten how common it was that we became inured to hearing it because it was everywhere.
Even though, as I said, kind of seems important that Trump never actually engaged in or even advocated all of the defining evils of Adolf Hitler.
And yet, Democrats and liberals and establishment Republicans devoted to destroying Trump and his movement didn't care about any of that.
They were more than happy to playfully use Adolf Hitler like it was their little toy, similar to the way That liberal discourse now uses terms like white supremacy or white supremacist and fascist to be applied to anybody who questions any part of liberal dogma.
Even the most piecemeal or mainstream questioning of liberal orthodoxy results in those maximalist claims.
If you question whether or not 70-year-olds should be taught in public schools that perhaps they're non-binary, or question whether or not trans women can fairly compete in professional sports, or any other dissent from liberal dogma, suddenly you are essentially somebody who advocates genocide.
You are a fascist.
These terms have become utterly stripped of all their meaning.
And it's particularly dangerous to do that to Nazism and Adolf Hitler, not because it was intended to be shielded as a historical analog.
The value of things like the Nuremberg trials and memorializing what happened during World War II was precisely that we ought to learn the lessons of history and be aware of similar dangers.
That's not what's happening.
It's become a plaything in liberal discourse.
And the problem for them is that now that they want to essentially say that Trump is even worse than he was in 2016, or that Ron DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump, Once you start with the premise that Trump was literally Hitler in 2016, where does that take you?
It necessarily must mean, if Trump is worse than he was before when he was Hitler, or that Ron DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump who is Hitler, that those figures are more dangerous than Hitler, or, to put it another way, Hitler was better than they were.
There were things about Hitler that either were commendable that aren't true for Trump and Ron DeSantis or that there are certain kinds of moral evils that Hitler refrained from doing that Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump actually do.
We heard this explicitly at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine where some of the most influential public voices in US foreign policy began arguing to the point they had to apologize That, well, at least Adolf Hitler never did things like extinguish ethnic-speaking Germans the way Putin is seeking to do to ethnic-speaking Russians.
Once you put yourself into this mindset, That you are really battling the new Hitler or worse than Hitler.
It not only means you become rhetorically deranged, but I think it's an extraordinarily dangerous mentality to convince yourself that you are fighting a world historic battle against a singular, unique, and unprecedented evil.
Because what that means is that anything and everything you do Censoring dissenting voices, disseminating disinformation campaigns, hiding the truth journalistically, all becomes justified.
In the name of stopping this unprecedented evil.
And that's why I think this is so worth discussing.
Not so much because of the rhetorical embarrassment that they place themselves in, though that is worth looking at, but because of the underlying mentality that both causes it and that it then creates.
So let me just show you a few of the examples that, as I say, made me realize as we put the show together that this comparison was actually much more common than I realized.
Maybe I realized at the time but then I recall it being.
So here you see Reuters from September 6, 2018.
There's the headline, Michael Moore compares Trump to Hitler in a new documentary.
Quote, filmmaker Michael Moore compares U.S. President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler in his provocative new documentary, Fahrenheit 11.9, that got its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday to a sold-out audience.
The documentary examines the forces Moore believes contributed to Trump's election victory in November 2016, drawing parallels with the rise of Hitler in the 1930s Germany.
Now, this was two years into the Trump presidency when he did this.
Which is even more excusable than doing it during the campaign when you're not actually certain what Trump is going to do with power.
This is two years into the Trump presidency.
There were no concentration camps set up.
There were no efforts to exterminate entire races of people.
Trump was the first American president in decades.
I know so many people hate to hear it, but it's nonetheless true.
Not to involve the United States in a new war.
Not to start a new war.
He inherited some, but he didn't start any new wars.
Starting new wars, aggressive wars, is kind of fundamental to Hitler being Hitler.
In fact, the Nuremberg Trials called aggressive war the kingpin crime, the kind that enabled all of the other subsequent crimes that made Adolf Hitler a war criminal in the eyes of that tribunal.
Donald Trump had none of that and yet Michael Moore still compared him to Adolf Hitler two years into his presidency with very little controversy as I recall.
But it was by far, Michael Moore was by far not the only person to do that here in the Washington Post in September of 2016.
So just a couple of months before the 2016 election, there you see the title, New York Times Book Review.
Okay, the New York Times-Hitler book review sure reads like a thinly-veiled Trump comparison.
Quote, in the New York Times, Michiko Takatani, and here you see the New York Times book review, there it is on the screen that this Washington Post article is referring to, and here's what the Post says about it.
Quote, in the New York Times, Michiko Takatani, the longtime book reviewer for the New York Times, reviewed a new book about Adolf Hitler titled Hitler Ascent, 1889-1939.
To many observers, though, it read like a bit more than a book review.
It read like a comparison between Hitler and Donald Trump.
It's true that the review didn't name Trump, or even allude to the 2016 U.S.
presidential race, but it came across to more than a few readers as an intentional point-by-point comparison of Hitler's rise and Trump's.
And it's not hard to see why.
From the headline quote, In Hitler, an Ascent from Dunderhead to Demagogue, to the conclusion 1,300 words later, nearly everything about Kakutani says about Volker Ulrich's book, Reflects long-standing warnings by some about how Trump shouldn't be dismissed as some sideshow and that history shows where this can lead.
So that's the Washington Post and the New York Times in case you think it's only confined to marginalized clowns like Michael Moore.
Here from the Huffington Post after a campaign rally where Donald Trump asked his audience to take a pledge to support him Seems like a pretty innocuous act to me.
It's very common in a political rally to urge supporters to pledge their loyalty to the cause, to do everything possible to elect the leader.
This is common language, unless you put a Nazi prism on it, as of course they did.
There's the headline, quote, this Donald Trump rally looks like a scene from Nazi Germany.
So here the comparison, of course, is not only to Donald Trump being Hitler, but Trump supporters Being Nazis, quote, it is getting way too scary.
Donald Trump's ascent to the top of the Republican presidential candidate heap has been increasingly likened to the rise of Adolf Hitler.
And that was true, it was.
As both men have used racist rhetoric and blamed select groups of minorities for many of the country's problems.
Is that all it takes to be Adolf Hitler these days?
Using what the Huffington Post believes is racist rhetoric and blaming select groups of minorities for many of the country's problems?
That is something that every politician has been doing for time immemorial.
Including in the United States, including in both political parties.
And now suddenly that became sufficient to justify equating Donald Trump to at least the 20th century's singular evil according to a consensus of historians.
Here from ABC News in December of 2015, quote, Donald Trump shrugs off Hitler comparisons is the Headline there, he prefers to cite FDR in defending his plan to bar Muslims from the United States.
As you may recall, Trump during the 2016 campaign said that there should be a ban from certain Muslim countries, not on Muslims, from certain Muslim countries to enter the United States until we can figure out what's going on.
His words, that became mischaracterized as a ban on all Muslims, which it never was.
And then that got used to say that this was something akin to the Holocaust.
Quote, Donald Trump's plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States has prompted a comparison to Adolf Hitler, but that hasn't given the GOP presidential frontrunner any pause.
Asked whether, quote, increasingly being compared to Hitler is cause for concern, Trump told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos today that he instead finds comfort in what he sees as his proposal's similarity to the work of a previous US president.
No, because what I'm doing is no different than FDR, Trump said during a phone interview this morning, presumably referring to FDR's mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II with no due process.
Something that was done not in terms of an immigration policy to govern who can and cannot come into the United States from certain countries, but instead rounding up huge numbers of people inside the United States based solely on their ethnicity, American citizens, and putting them into camps during World War II.
That to me seems like a lot more Hitler-like than anything Donald Trump ever imagined doing.
Let me just show you a couple videos so you can get a sense for just how pervasive this really was and for often how unhinged it really was.
So here is a CNN segment from July of 2021.
So again, now we're into the Biden administration.
You've had Trump in office for four years.
No concentration camps, no wars of aggression, none of the things that we've just went over as kind of important to being in Hitler's category.
And yet, listen to what, not even Carl Bernstein, but I forget his name, I don't really need to know his name.
If someone in the control room knows, you can tell me and I'll say it, but it doesn't really matter.
He's just some interchangeable CNN host who nobody watches.
Listen to what he said.
In all its derangement, terror, and horror. - Just one more quote so people know exactly what Carl and Dan are talking about here.
General Milley on the big lie and what Trump was saying about the election, the lies.
He says, this is a Reichstag moment, Milley told aides, the gospel of the Fuhrer.
The Reichstag moment refers to Adolf Hitler using the burning of the German parliament basically to seize all power in Germany, suspend habeas corpus, suspend civil rights.
A coup, more or less, of sorts there.
What is he even talking about?
Trump's proposed suspending habeas corpus or banning all rights.
And what does the Reichstag fire have to do with a three hour riot on January 6th?
But this is the kind of unhinged rhetoric we get.
Now, I just want to, it's possible that I misrecalled or misstated Trump's proposed 2016 The policy itself ended up being banning immigrants from, I believe it was six or eight Muslim-majority countries.
But maybe I'm misremembering.
Maybe he did actually want to ban all Muslims.
We're going to check on that.
But even so, again, there's a gigantic universal difference between immigration policy designed to ban immigration from certain countries...
We have that right now where certain countries have priority and other countries are subjected to more rigorous scrutiny and the Holocaust.
But we'll check on that just in the sake of accuracy.
Now, here is a video from Bill Maher where he just outright says that he thinks Trump is like Hitler and you can listen to him do that.
Donald Trump is a dangerous man with the things that he has been saying.
So I had one of Hitler's speeches translated into English and I think this tells us a lot about where Donald Trump is getting his ideas.
Look at this Hitler speech and we've translated it for you.
Thank you!
Thank you!
We're gonna make Germany great again!
That I can tell you!
Believe me!
So when people ask why you support Donald Trump, you just tell them.
He's going to take our economy from here to here.
I don't like that.
He's not some cautious politician.
He says what I'm thinking.
I don't know what it is.
I just like the guy.
A message from Racists for Donald Trump.
So again, you can see here that it wasn't just that they were comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, this was from March of 2016, but also continuously Trump supporters to Nazis and white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
You saw there all Trump supporters depicted there were white.
Now withstanding the fact that the rather inconvenient fact that Trump has done better with non-white voters than any Republican candidate in a long time.
He won Texas in 2020 almost entirely because of a huge surge of support among Latino voters who apparently don't see Trump's immigration policies the same way as a lot of immigrant groups who purport to speak on behalf of all Latinos.
These are You know, East Coast college graduates who majored in liberal arts majors and who now purport to speak on behalf of Latino working class people who continue to vote in larger and larger numbers for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
So just to clarify, the 2016 position of Donald Trump was originally in that statement he issued to ban all Muslims from the United States.
The policy that he ended up implementing was to ban immigrants from seven specific Muslim-majority countries.
So there you have it.
That was just a partial sampling of how often this rhetoric was invoked of comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Here we have the problem.
Here from the Washington Post on May 24th, so just a few days ago, is an article that reads, quote, that is headlined, The Deepening Radicalization of Donald J. Trump.
Watch how the former president's positions and rhetoric have grown more confrontational and extreme as he seeks a second term.
So if Donald Trump in 2016 was Adolf Hitler, and Donald Trump is now worse and more radical and more extreme than he was even back in 2016, that must necessarily mean he's now evolved to be worse than Hitler.
Or that Hitler is better than Donald Trump.
So Hitler's kind of rising on the chart through history, rising in the rankings by virtue of this attempt to constantly assert that all sorts of people, as we're going to show you, are worse than Hitler.
It's an extremely dangerous rhetorical device, an extremely dangerous historical framework to constantly impose And obviously, four years from now, in 2028, when there's other Republican candidates, or maybe it'll be Ron DeSantis, they're going to have to keep going and going and going because that's what they always do.
We're going to get to the point where we're going to hear that half the Republican Party or half the country Is worse than Hitler that, again, conversely, Hitler is up here in terms of moral weight and ethical constraints and Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis and Vladimir Putin and tons of other people who are on the target list of the liberal media is down here.
The Washington Post article to support that claim reads, quote, On this and a host of subjects, from sexual assault to foreign and domestic policy, Trump's positions have become even more extreme.
His tone more confrontational, his accounts less tethered to a reality, according to a Washington Post review of Trump's speeches and interviews with former aides.
When he was at times ambiguous or equivocal, he's now brazenly defiant.
Now, in addition to claiming that Trump is worse than before when he was acquainted to Adolf Hitler, we also have the increasingly common theme that Ron DeSantis is even worse than and specifically more dangerous than Donald Trump.
In other words, Ron DeSantis is worse than and more dangerous than Adolf Hitler.
It's necessarily the logical implication of this assertion.
And again, you see it all over the media.
Here from the Huffington Post, just from last week, no one is more dangerous for the White House than Ron DeSantis, including Donald Trump.
Quote, imagine Trump, but with a stalwart dedication to legislation that moves the country in a direction that should terrify most reasonable human beings.
Enter Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Which legislation that Ron DeSantis has advocated or has overseen the implementation of is comparable to Nazism or what Adolf Hitler did and that should terrify citizens everywhere?
I understand that people disagree with some of Ron DeSantis' legislation.
That's reasonable.
There are culture war debates that the country is split on and he's on one side and of course other people would be on the other.
That's commonplace.
That's true of Democratic Party candidates as well.
But to say that he's more dangerous and he's terrifying?
What is the basis for that?
The NAACP issued an advisory warning for non-white people for Florida.
That's how much they're trifling with these concepts.
I'm not even going to make an argument for why that's preposterous.
Huge numbers of black voters and Latino voters voted for Ron DeSantis twice for governor.
And yet the NAACP, again, a group of East Coast elites who have very little in common with the black working class or other non-white members of the working class who purport to speak on their behalf nonetheless, are issuing statements that bear no resemblance to reality.
And in the process of doing so, are completely, really harming themselves.
They're watering down and rendering laughable concepts that actually ought to be taken seriously.
Here from MSNBC, April 2022.
And again, they read from the same script, so these are just a small sampling.
The headline there, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a far more dangerous politician than Donald Trump.
Like Trump, DeSantis' time in office would be marked by attempts to pit Americans against one another.
But unlike Trump, DeSantis has the proven ability to follow through.
Pit Americans against one another?
Hillary Clinton in 2016 said that a large chunk of Trump supporters, namely 25 or 30 or 35% of the country, were irredeemably deplorable.
Irredeemably deplorable.
It is the official position of the Democratic Party that anyone who doesn't vote for them is racist and fascist and white supremacist.
Joe Biden famously or notoriously told the host of The Breakfast Club, Charlemagne, that if he had any questions at all about whether he wanted to vote for Joe Biden, that meant that Charlemagne isn't even black.
Pitting the country against one another, if that's enough to make you a terrifying Hitler-esque figure, Which politicians don't do that?
Here is from this MSNBC article, quote, Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, and quite possibly the most dangerous figure in American politics.
The most dangerous figure in American politics.
While it's hard to imagine any politician wrestling that title away from Donald Trump, And yes, it should be hard to imagine any politician wrestling that title away from Donald Trump since we spent six years, as I just showed you, hearing that Trump is the new Hitler.
DeSantis manages.
He brings something to the table that Trump lacks.
His ability to translate political vindictiveness, cruelty, and demagoguery into policy results.
Now it isn't only Ron DeSantis and Trump's current iteration in 2024 that are said to be worse than the Hitlerian version of Trump in 2016.
As I indicated, that also became a tactic used by lots of liberal elites to try and claim that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was like anything we've seen, including during World War II, was somehow vastly more dangerous than the Nazi march through Western Europe.
And in order to do that, they actually started explicitly praising Adolf Hitler, which is where all of this leads.
Here is Michael McFaul, the long time, not the long time, but the former ambassador to Russia for the United States under President Obama who's now become one of the most deranged and hawkish pro-war voices when it comes to Ukraine.
He was on Rachel Maddow's show and listened to what he said as he tried to claim that Putin is worse than Hitler and in doing so actually went out of his way to praise Hitler for having some constraints that Putin lacks.
One of the Russian journalists said, you know, there's one difference between Hitler when he was coming in and Putin.
Hitler didn't kill ethnic Germans.
He didn't kill German-speaking people.
That's a very, I think people need to remember that when we're talking about cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and Kiev, there are large populations there, you know, up to a third and sometimes as much to a half.
First of all, it wasn't even true.
Of course there were German-speaking or ethnic German who died as a result of Hitler's advance through Czechoslovakia and through Poland and through other parts of Western Europe.
Even if it were true, what moral relevance does that have?
And how do you not have an instinctive aversion to going out of your way to praise Hitler or to suggest that Hitler somehow had ethical constraints that Vladimir Putin lacks?
Again, whenever you think of the invasion of Ukraine, it's far more comparable to the U.S.
invasion of Iraq than it is to anything that made Hitler Hitler during World War II.
And in fact, I would say that, and I've made this argument before, that there's a big, big difference between sending your troops into a neighboring country over the border that is the most sensitive part of your border, that the West has been very actively engaged in running and manipulating and putting weapons into and flooding with lethal arms,
Then packing up your entire military and going to the other part of the world, all the way across the other part of the world to invade and occupy and destroy a country that has never once threatened to attack you, let alone have the ability to do so.
I've said from the very beginning that I believe Russia's war and invasion of Ukraine is not legally or morally justified and I had Norman Finkelstein on my show who yelled at me for that saying the logical conclusion of observing that there were provocative acts by the West going all the way up to the Russian border with all sorts of
Interference on the part of the US and NATO necessarily justifies the invasion and anyone like me or Aaron Maté or others who's afraid to say that who still maintains that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is unjustifiable as either being a coward or morally inconsistent.
That's what Norman Finkelstein told me.
I think you heard that argument, but I do actually believe that the Russian invasion was unjustified.
I don't think the Conditions were met, ethically or legally, to justify a military invasion of a sovereign country like this.
But it is far more alike what the Americans did in, and the British and the Australians, did in Iraq than it is to anything that Adolf Hitler did, and yet you have these voices so casually Going out of their way to downplay Hitler's evil in order to take whoever they want to villainize and make them worse than Hitler.
It is a deranged discourse.
It's a historical discourse and it's a very dangerous discourse because these are the people who really do believe that they are in power now to do anything and everything Because of the nature of the enemy that they're fighting.
That is the Sam Harris video that went viralized that we've shown you many times.
The reason it went viralized is because Sam Harris enunciated what their actual mentality is when justifying the lies that were told in the censorship that was invoked around the Hunter Biden laptop and the stories and reporting that came from that right before the election, which was the evil we're fighting is so much worse.
It's in a different level.
It's Hitlerian.
Not saying Sam Harris said that, but that's what he said.
Conceptually, that the evil is so much worse than anything else that we could ever do to stop it, that anything we can do to stop it is morally justified and even obligatory.
That is the mentality, the driving mentality of the coalition that has emerged, the union of power centers that has emerged in the name of stopping Trump.
The U.S.
Security State, Democratic Party.
Wall Street and Silicon Valley that back the Democratic Party against Trump and his movement, or anything that is perceived to be that, like they perceive Ron DeSantis for the moment as being the corporate media.
That is the axis that has assembled, and their driving impetus is that the nature of the evil they are fighting means they're justified to do anything and everything, and I think that as I said, is a defining attribute of Adolf Hitler, and it's what makes that coalition so remarkably dangerous.
So we're going to move on to a separate topic that may seem a little bit uncharacteristic for this show since it involves professional sports and activities and events taking place within it.
And to say that this show doesn't typically report on or cover professional sports I think is quite an understatement.
I am, however, a tennis fan.
I've talked about this before.
I was actually going to do a documentary on someone who is one of my childhood heroes, Martina Navratilova, the Czechoslovakian tennis player who escaped Czechoslovakia when she was 18 to defect to the United States because she didn't want to live under and became an outspoken dissonant in all sorts of ways, and it didn't end up working out, but tennis is something that has been an interest of mine since I was young.
I still follow it, and that's what has kind of animated my interest in this, but it goes so far beyond tennis, so far beyond professional sports.
It really provides a window into the ways in which we're propagandized, often without realizing it because it seems trivial.
Oh, it's just about sports, and yet it enters our brain and plays a major role by design in shaping how we understand the world.
But it also has a lot to do with the question of how we see ourselves in the world and whether we believe we're obliged to adhere to the moral tenets and the moral obligations we seek to impose on others.
So the immediate news event that raises this topic is there is currently a tennis tournament being held in Paris called Roland-Garros, so the French Open.
It is one of four Grand Slam tennis tournaments held every year.
The Grand Slams are the most important tennis tournaments in terms of financial reward, in terms of points and rankings.
The world media descends upon The four Grand Slams together is the Australian Open in the beginning of the year.
About a month later, Wimbledon, and then the U.S. Open in September in New York.
So it's Australia, Paris, London, and New York.
So it's designed to bring a lot of attention to the world.
Tennis is actually the fourth most popular sport in the world.
There are hundreds of millions of people who follow it all around the world.
And the role that most tournaments have adopted, including the French Open, currently being played, is that Russian and Belarusian tennis players are permitted to participate in the tournament, but they are considered to be neutral players.
And that really doesn't have much pragmatic effect except an absurd one, which is when they are announced, their country cannot be identified in any way, nor can their flag be displayed next to the name the way it's typical for tennis tournaments. nor can their flag be displayed next to the name Because one of the appeals of professional tennis is that it has always been a global sport, an international sport.
It has become increasingly Globalized increasingly international no longer based just in Western Europe in the United States, but Asia it is skyrocketing popularity Latin America has always been a continent that has produced a lot of good tennis players But Asia is where it's growing the most but even in Africa and the Middle East there's a lot of growth as well And so that's part of the appeal
are the different players and the cultures they're from, and it creates a lot of conflict and drama and different ways of playing tennis, and it's always been one of the things most interesting about tennis, but this new rule is that Russian and Belarusian players are prohibited from being identified in any way as representing their countries, even though every single but this new rule is that Russian and Belarusian players are prohibited from being identified in any way as representing their countries, even though every So let's just take a look at one of the ways in which this manifests.
Here is a small portion of the draw from the first round of Roland-Garros.
This is from the men's draw, and here you see, because some of the best players in the world are from...
Russia.
Both men and women.
That has always been the case.
Russia has always been a very strong country when it comes to tennis, or at least over the last 30 years.
So one of the Russian players is the world number two player.
There you see him.
His name is Daniil Medvedev.
He won the US Open in 2022.
But what you'll notice is His flag is missing.
So here you see a player from Brazil, who he's playing.
There's the Brazilian flag.
Here's an American player, Francis Tiaffi, who also has an American flag.
And then here's another Russian player, and you'll see that his flag is missing.
So this seems like a kind of absurd, petty, and trivial way to punish them.
The same is true on their scoreboard.
Their flag is not permitted to be shown.
Now, one of the interesting parts about that is that they are the only countries who suffer this ban because apparently the war in Ukraine is the only crime taking place in the world that is sufficient to justify this sort of stigma.
So here from the woman's draw.
You see a Russian player, two Russian players actually here are about to play each other, including the 2022 French Open finalist, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, who is here, and both of these Russian players are without their flag.
Here's an American player, Lauren Davis, and then here is a Chinese player that she's playing, and there's the Chinese flag.
So if you Speak to any human rights group in the West.
If you speak to any Western journalist in the West, they will tell you that China currently is involved in a genocide, one of the world's greatest crimes against humanity, against the Uyghurs who are in prison and concentration camps.
And who are essentially being treated the way the Nazis treated Jews and other minorities during World War II, or the way FDR treated Japanese Americans, except the intention, as the word genocide implies, is to eliminate the Uyghurs, who are Muslim, from China.
This is not a view I hold, but this is a view that is so gospel that people who dispute it, people who try and suggest that genocide is an inaccurate word are immediately castigated as being a mouthpiece for Beijing.
So the fact that China is currently engaged in genocide is a assumed fact in the West.
So why is it that the Chinese flag is permitted?
Why can Chinese players Play under their flag, whereas Russian players cannot.
What is the answer to that?
Saudi Arabia doesn't have very many players who play at the professional level in tennis, nor does Egypt, but they have some.
And both of those countries also are allowed to play under their flag, even though Saudi Arabia is responsible for all kinds of the worst crimes, including the devastation of Yemen, Iran, another country that we're told is one of the worst human rights abusers in the world, is a country that is permitted to have their players play at the international sports level under their flag.
It's a sanction only for Russian and Belarusian players.
And even if you want to say it's only for countries that Launch wars and the question becomes Saudi Arabia, which is actually engaged in a war in Yemen that has brought the country to the brink of one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades.
How is that?
What moral standards here can explain this?
Now, back in 2003, That was, of course, the year that the United States and the UK invaded Iraq, went all the way to the other side of the world to invade Iraq, and did so with greater brutality than anything Russia has done in Ukraine.
I know we're not supposed to say that, but it's absolutely true.
You may recall the strategy of the United States when it invaded Iraq was shock and awe.
There were explosions all over Baghdad.
And the war crimes committed in Iraq were revealed by WikiLeaks during the 2010 publications.
There are parts of Iraq where children have all sorts of birth defects because of the weapons that were used in various places in Iraq during the war.
The atrocities committed by coalition forces as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I believe was the name given to that war, were Ample.
And yet here in 2003, here's the draw, the same draw that I showed you for Roland Garros in, right now, but this is the Roland Garros 2003 men's draw.
And here you see numerous American players.
Here's a player named Brian Vahale, who was an American player.
There you see him and his flag, the American flag.
Here is Andy Roddick.
Who was a top American player, the top American player during this time.
Here he is his opponent, the British player, Greg Rusetsky.
Here's another British player, I don't know his name, but he had his British flag flying proudly next to his name.
So if the standard is, if your country is involved in a war of aggression, you should either be banned from participating or denied the right to fly under your own flag.
Why was that not done to any of these players?
If we look at the 2004 women's draw from Roland Garros, here's Serena Williams, the American player.
Here's Venus Williams, Lindy Davenport, Jennifer Capriati.
Shonda Rubin, all kinds of other American players, Lisa Raymond.
I don't believe there were any British players who were in the top 32.
These are the seeds, but there were plenty of British players playing and all of them were allowed to fly under their flag as well.
Why?
Why were American and British players during the war in Iraq permitted to play under their national flag whereas Russian and Belarusian players are barred?
Now, It isn't just that they're denied playing under their flag.
In 2022, Wimbledon, the oldest and for some the most prestigious tennis tournament, actually banned Russian and Belarusian players from participating in the tournament.
The whole point of these tennis tournaments is that the world's best players go, and so whoever wins proves themselves to have accomplished a huge achievement in their sport, the one they worked for their entire lives because they've beaten all their other competitors.
And yet, Wimbledon Simply banned Russian and Belarusian players from participating in Wimbledon, even though many of the top players were banned.
There you see the NPR headline, Wimbledon bans Russian and Belarusian players, including number two, Daniil Medvedev.
And this is the article explaining their rationale.
Quote, tennis officials have banned Russian and Belarusian players from competing at Wimbledon this year, citing the, quote, unjustified and unprecedented military aggression in Ukraine.
Let me just focus on this.
Phrase the quote unjustified and unprecedented military aggression in Ukraine.
In what conceivable world do British people have the right to characterize the war in Ukraine, the invasion of Ukraine as being unprecedented military aggression when the British were a major part of the invasion force in Iraq, or at least as major as they can be given that they are a collapsed empire and an irrelevant country.
But they did as much as they could under Tony Blair.
Tony Blair, of course, unlike Vladimir Putin, is not considered to be a war criminal by the International Court at The Hague.
He's free to travel, so is George Bush and Dick Cheney, whereas Vladimir Putin is not.
So this phrase here, That Wimbledon used, citing their own government's policy, that this is unprecedented military aggression in Ukraine is exactly why I thought this story was worth covering.
Think about the level of delusion necessary to call the war in Ukraine an unprecedented military aggression when, less than 20 years later or earlier, your country, under a Labour government, Went to the other side of the world and invaded and occupied and destroyed a country that had never even conceivably once threatened the United Kingdom.
But that is the delusion that is driving all of this and the reason I think it's worth looking into.
Quote, the All-England Lawn Tennis Club and the Committee of Management of the Championships announced Wednesday that they had made the decision based on government guidance
Regarding sporting events and after considering their duties to the players, their community and the broader UK public, quote, given the profile of the championships in the United Kingdom and around the world, it is our responsibility to play our part in the widespread efforts of government, industry, sporting and creative institutions to limit Russia's global influence to the strongest means possible, they wrote.
The ban makes Wimbledon one of the first tennis events to suspend players from the two countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in February and excludes several highly ranked players from competition.
Those include Men's World No.
2 Daniil Medvedev of Russia and Women's World No.
4 Ariana Sabalenka of Belarus.
There are four Russian men in the top 30, including two in the top 10 and two Belarusian women in the top 20.
The Guardian notes some Russian athletes have spoken out against the war.
Several Russian players have notably protested the war on the world stage.
A day after Russia first invaded, Andrey Rublev, one of the top ten men's players from Russia, wrote, quote, no war, please, on one of the court-side cameras.
Anastasia Pavluchenko, Russia's top-ranked women player, spoke out about the war in a since-deleted tweet in which she wrote that, quote, personal ambitions or political motives cannot justify violence.
Medvedev has also called for peace.
He said last month that he hoped to continue playing on the world stage.
Now, tennis wasn't the only sport that has banned Russia, as I indicated.
Here from the New York Times Magazine, you see the headline from February 2022, Russia banned from international soccer, including World Cup qualifiers.
Now at Wimbledon, the tournament allowed Chinese players.
There was no other ban on any other country, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia.
Or any other country that is engaged in all kinds of horrific repression around the world, only Russia and Belarus and Belarusian players.
And again, needless to say, in 2020 and 2003, there was no ban on American or British players either.
Now, one of the policies that had been considered before they actually imposed the ban was requiring these players sign a loyalty oath denouncing their own country.
Here from Reuters in March of 2022, You see the title Medvedev Wimbledon hopes could hinge on political assurance.
U.S.
Open champion Daniil Medvedev may have to provide assurances that he does not support Russian President Vladimir Putin if he is to compete at this year's Wimbledon, British Sports Minister Nigel Huddleston said on Tuesday.
Huddleston said he would not be comfortable with a, quote, Russian athlete flying the Russian flag and winning the grass court Grand Slam in London.
Huddleston said many athletes have multiple or dual citizenships and would be willing to compete as, quote, Quote, we need some potential assurances that they are not supporters of Putin and we are considering what requirements we may need to try and get those assurances along those lines.
Can you even conceive of requiring Andy Roddick in 2003 to sign a loyalty oath saying he does not support George Bush and dictating of the war in Iraq as a condition for playing?
No one conceived of that.
No one thought of it.
Why?
Because these are tournaments run by Russians, by the West rather.
Nobody in the Western media suggested that should be the case.
And this shows you how propaganda is used.
This idea that what the Russians are doing is unprecedented, requires all these extreme measures that are never applied to anybody else ever, is how propaganda functions.
Constantly embedding into your head The idea that what Russia is doing is unheard of.
Not only to make you hate Russia, but also to make you think that your own governments don't do that.
Even though, of course they do.
Now, one of the ironies of what Wimbledon did Well, there were several ironies.
To their credit, both the men and the women's tennis tour has a rule that says that all tennis tournaments must be open to all players, regardless of nationality.
Roughly 10 years ago, there was an Israeli player, Shahir Per, and there was a tournament that was held in the United Arab Emirates, whose official policy is that Israel does not exist as a country, and so they banned her from playing.
And as a result, the Women's Tour imposed massive fines on them, required them to pay her a significant amount of money, and warned that they would lose their credentials as a tournament if they did not make their tournament open to all players.
And their argument was, well, the Israelis have a brutal policy of aggression against Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank.
And they said, we don't care.
The principle is that tennis tournaments have to be open to all athletes.
Athletes are not responsible for the policies of their government.
And yet that was exactly what was denied here.
And the irony of it was that the reason the British government wanted Wimbledon to ban Russian and Belarusian players was because they did not want royalty, British royalty, specifically the wife of Prince William, Princess Kate, to have to present the trophy to a Russian player.
And so that's one of the reasons they were banned.
Now, as it turns out, the winner of the 2022 Wimbledon tournament was a Russian woman, Elena Rebekina.
She was born in Moscow.
She lived in Moscow her whole life.
Her family lives in Moscow.
But in 2018, just four years before winning Wimbledon, while all Russian and Belarusian players were banned, She had decided that she would start to play for Kazakhstan because the Russian Federation didn't value her very much because there were a lot of other players they valued more.
And as a result, she, even though she's Russian in every way, played for Kazakhstan and so Princess Kate had to give the Wimbledon trophy to a Russian player.
Here from the Australian newspaper The Age, there you see the headline quote, Open season on Russian players misses the point.
Quote, these same players didn't play at Wimbledon in 2022 due to the All-American Club's fears that Vladimir Putin might use a victory by a Russian player as a platform for propaganda.
That strategy didn't work, though, given the ladies' champion, Kazakhstan's Elena Rybakina, was born in Russia and played under that country's flag until 2018.
In the end, did the All-England Club's decision to ban Russia and all Russian players change anything at all?
Of course not.
That's because the point wasn't to change anything.
The point was to drum into your head, even if you're not paying attention to tennis, the idea that what Putin is doing, what Russia is doing, is unprecedented.
That's something only Russia does, not our countries.
Not anyone in the West.
That is why this is so significant.
Now, here's the New York Times report on Rybakina winning, and there you see the headline, Rybakina, who was born and raised in Russia, started representing Kazakhstan after the Russian Tennis Federation gave up on her.
She beat Ons Jabor.
In the final, and here's what the article says.
Quote, there was no way anyone could have known four years ago when the Russian born and raised Elena Rabikina decided to play tennis for Kazakhstan that the move would pay off as fortuitously as it did in the summer of 2022.
Rabikina beat Onyshkabur to win the Wimbledon singles title Saturday 3-6-6-2-6-2.
Given the native Russian the sport's most prestigious championship a little more than two months, After tournament organizers barred players from representing Russia from participating.
Rybakina, who began representing Kazakhstan four years ago after the former Soviet Republic agreed to fund her career, overpowered Jabor, who faltered and succumbed to inconsistency after taking an early lead.
Tall and long and powerful with one of the most dangerous serves in the game.
She was born in Russia and lived there until she became an adult.
Her parents still live in Russia.
After turning 18, she received this opportunity to Kazakhstan.
Organizers made the move at the behest of the British government and royal family.
The Duchess of Cambridge traditionally hands the trophy to the winner of Wimbledon.
Few in Britain wanted to see her giving it to a Russian.
Now, this year, Wimbledon decided to reverse its policy, one so deeply embedded in principles, and allow Russian and Belarusian players to play in Wimbledon.
at her post-match news conference, Ravikina said her English was not quite good enough to understand the question.
The only time during 30 minutes of questioning she made that claim.
Now, this year, Wimbledon decided to reverse its policy, one so deeply embedded in principle that allow Russian and Belarusian players to play in Wimbledon.
The reason is because no other tournament followed the example of Wimbledon.
Wimbledon ended up humiliating itself and reducing itself to a glorified exhibition because the men and women's tour decided not to allow any points to be awarded to the players.
They won money but they didn't award points.
And so Elena Rybakina won this tournament and yet didn't even move up in the rankings.
She played the rest of the year on outside courts.
None of the traditional benefits that come from winning Wimbledon because Wimbledon had reduced itself to a joke of a tournament.
She wasn't a real winner.
She didn't have to play against the best players in the world.
And so now Wimbledon is reversing itself.
After the British made their typically pompous showing of how principled this was, how devoted they are to stopping the war in Russia, not because the war in Ukraine, not because they had a change of heart, but because they were threatened with large monetary fines.
In fact, they paid a significant fine last year for this violation of the Tories' rules, and they were threatened with losing their credentials.
For all future tournaments, unless they did so, so here you see the Guardian.
Wimbledon allows Russian and Belarusian players back into the tournament.
Now, it isn't just that these Russian and Belarusian players are being banned or preposterously not allowed to play under their flag or that they have to sign oaths denouncing their own government.
They are being, in every press conference they appear at, required, demanded, hectored to denounce their own government, even though we're constantly told that Russia and Belarus are among the most repressive regimes in the world.
How is it that you can claim on the one hand that individual athletes have a responsibility to denounce their own government or that they have a responsibility to speak out against the war because that will help stop the war, but on the other claim that their governments are uniquely repressive?
You're actually asking them to put themselves and their families in danger as a condition to earn their livelihood.
These are people who have worked their entire lives to play tennis for 10 years to earn an income.
And they're being told by Western institutions and the Western media that they have a singular obligation to denounce their own government in a way that no American player has ever been told, or British player has ever been told, or any Chinese player now is being told for the crimes of their governments.
Let me show you a couple of videos in press conferences where two Belarusian women in particular were hectored, essentially, condemned Where they were told they were responsible for their government's actions and listen to how they responded.
So first this is Victoria Azarenka at the Australian Open in January of 2022.
She was a former number one player.
She won the Australian Open twice.
She's been at the top of the game for a long time.
She's from Belarus.
She lives in the United States now.
And listen to this journalist trying to demand of her her speaking out against her own government.
I don't know what you guys want us to do.
About it.
Like, talk about it.
I don't know what's the goal here that is continuously brought up and these incidents that, in my opinion, have nothing to do with players, but somehow you keep dragging players into it.
So, what's the goal here?
I think you should ask yourself that question, not me.
Sorry, just to clarify on that though, does it frustrate you that, particularly last night for example, there was a clear pro-Russian demonstration happening within the grounds of the tournament, that these people are coming and using the Australian Open as a platform for these kind of demonstrations?
Does that frustrate you?
Whatever the answer I'm going to give it to you right now, it's going to be turned whichever way you want to turn it to.
So, does it bother me?
What bothers me is there's real things that's going on in the world and I don't know, are you a politician?
Are you?
Are you covering politics?
Yes, and I'm a sports, and I'm an athlete, and you're asking me about things that maybe somebody says are in my control, but I don't believe that.
So, I don't know what you want me to answer.
And if it's a provocative question, then, you know, you can spin the story however you want.
First of all, you can tell this is somebody dealing with the Western press for a long time.
Because she understands what just utterly immoral, unscrupulous people they are.
She's saying, it doesn't matter what I say, you're going to spin your story however you want.
You already have your story written and you just want me to feed into it.
But can you imagine?
An American or British athlete being asked to account for their own government's behavior this way, it's essentially telling people that civilians are now morally responsible or ethically responsible for the wars that their governments fight.
That was Osama Bin Laden's justification.
For 9-11 and specifically for why 9-11 justifiably, in his view, targeted civilian infrastructure and killed a lot of civilians, he said, because it's not George Bush and Dick Cheney who are doing this.
It's the American people who voted for George Bush and Dick Cheney and not just voted for them in the first place, but reelected them even after they invaded Iraq and bombed all of these countries.
And so civilians bear responsibility for the acts of their government and can be held responsible.
That's what this framework is imposing on these players.
And in this case, it's even less justifiable.
I mean, it's never justifiable to suggest that civilians are responsible for their own government's acts, because the reality is Americans really don't have much say at all, despite the voting, on what their governments do.
Just look at Victoria Nuland.
She worked at the Clinton administration and then she was Dick Cheney's primary foreign policy advisor and then she ran Eastern European Affairs and Ukraine under Hillary Clinton and John Kerry's State Department during the Obama administration and now she's back to running Ukraine under Biden.
The only time you get her out of office is when Donald Trump was elected.
We showed you Fiona Hill, the speech she gave about how the rest of the world perceives the United States.
She's worked in almost every administration, including the Trump administration.
There's this permanent continuity of foreign policy, no matter who you vote for.
But at least in theory, when it comes to democracy, there's some relationship between the acts of the government and the population.
And that was Osama bin Laden's argument.
That's what they're using.
But in this case, We're talking about Russia and Belarus, which are not democracies.
So to claim on the one hand that these are oppressive countries and on the other tell these individual athletes that they somehow bear responsibility for the acts of their government is an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
But if you want to do it, why doesn't it apply to American and British athletes?
Why doesn't it apply to Chinese athletes?
Or any number of other countries around the world?
In the Australian Open, that same tournament, the player that ended up winning was Ariana Sabalenka, who is a Belarusian player.
She was banned from Wimbledon the prior year, which shows you what Wimbledon to itself.
She's obviously one of the best players in the world.
She just won the Grand Slam in the first Grand Slam of the year.
Who knows what would have happened had she been able to play in Wimbledon six months earlier.
And here she was being asked with the trophy beside her after she just won the Australian Open, the pinnacle of her career achievement.
Does missing Wimbledon make this any sweeter for you?
You have to remember as well the age of these athletes.
These are not 40, 50, 60-year-old people.
She's 24 years old.
And yet here's the Western press essentially insisting she bears responsibility for what Belarus is doing in Ukraine.
Did missing Wimbledon make this any sweeter for you, that this victory comes and you're able to play a slam and win a slam like this in this kind of fashion?
I mean, missing the Wimbledon was really tough for me.
It was a tough moment for me, but I played in the US Open after and it's not about Wimbledon right now.
It's just about the hard work I've done.
Yeah, it's just about the hard work I've done.
Okay, James?
Irene, you said on Friday that if you won, you'd say what it was like to win as a neutral athlete, so I'm asking that question again, I guess.
Is it strange to win it and not have your flag somewhere and not have BLR after your name on the trophy?
Does that take anything away from it?
Sorry, I don't understand the question.
You're not allowed to have Belarus anywhere in the stadium.
I wonder if that takes anything away from what you've achieved and whether that will make it different back home at all.
Well, I think everyone still knows that I'm a Belarusian player.
And that's it.
So there you have the trophy.
It has every country of every winner, including United States, when the United States was invading and bombing all kinds of countries.
And there you kind of see her snickering.
But here's a video even more, I think, pernicious.
She played her first-round match against a Ukrainian player at the French Open just yesterday, and she won her match.
And the Ukrainian player opted not to shake her hand, which I think is fine as a symbolic gesture.
And the French crowd booed the Ukrainian player for not shaking her hand, which is traditional in tennis.
After the match is over, the two players shake hands.
It's very unusual for a player not to shake hands.
So she wasn't just asked about this.
I really want you to listen to the mentality of this reporter who confronted her and the hostility With which she did it because, again, you see how commonplace this is and it's the selectivity of this moral framework that I find so striking.
So listen to how she was confronted after her first round win at this tournament in France.
Arina, at Roland-Garros, you may become the world number one.
As the world number one, you should be a role model.
I think you are already a role model for many people, for many tennis players in the world.
And this world number one is a very difficult status.
And what is your message to the world?
Because meanwhile, This situation with Ukrainian players shows that you're twisting it as if Ukrainians hate you.
But they do not say that they hate you.
The only thing they want to know from you is either you condemn the war or you support the war.
This is the only thing that Ukrainian players want to hear and you're avoiding this question.
You're coming up with different answers.
So, you say it's politics even though missiles launched from Belarus does not choose if it's a politician or tennis player.
So, what is your message to world number one and how can you sort it out with Ukrainian players that there is no more words hate or something like that?
Thank you.
First of all, I'm not saying that they are saying they hate me.
You did, you did many times.
No, but listen, first of all, when I get the question about Ukrainians, they ask me like, so you know that they hate you?
Like, not personally or politically, they're asking the question.
So I'm answering the question that if they hate me, like, I don't feel anything like that.
About the war situation, I said it many, many times.
Nobody in this world, Russian athletes or Belarusian athletes, support the war.
Nobody.
How can we support the war?
Nobody.
Normal people will never support it.
Why we have to go loud and say that things that's like this is like one plus one it's two you know it's it's of course we don't support war and if it could affect anyhow the war make like if we could like stop it we would do it but unfortunately it's not in our hands that the main question that's the the part about Ukrainians the secondly as the world number one what's my message Okay, let's get back to the country.
I'm from a small country, from Belarus, who was working really hard to get to this level.
And this is the message to a lot of young athletes who are from small countries, who don't have...
Enough money who is just from the small countries that they can do well in this sport and that they have to work hard and believe in themselves and they can do whatever they want to.
This is my main message is work number one and I like I don't know if I'm a role model for a lot of people or, as I said, there's going to be people who don't like me, there's going to be people who like me.
So I'm focusing on people who like me and who want me to be the best.
I want to show my best tennis.
I want people to enjoy tennis matches, to enjoy my matches.
So this is my message.
To bring the joy for people.
I don't know.
We have time for a couple more questions about the match.
We're going to do right here, one and two.
All right, so I think it's pretty striking.
I mean, these are pretty eloquent answers, but also I think they illustrate just the absurdity of trying to suggest that these young athletes have responsibility for Their government's conduct for all the reasons that I said, but I don't actually think it's about any of that.
What I think it actually is about is Western media outlets and Western institutions and individual Western citizens know the acts of aggression and the acts of evil their own governments have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate.
And when you feel In some way implicated, morally or ethically, one of the things you try and do is go around searching for people who you think can be worse to judge other people, to tell other people that they are worse than you.
So I think that's an individual motive, but I think the collective motive is to propagandize all of us just through this continuous repetition, ceremonial repetition, ritualistic repetition, rhetorical repetition.
Over and over, we're somehow always told That we are exempt from any of these characterizations, from any of this moral responsibility.
The very idea that the phrase were criminal, which is currently officially now applied to Vladimir Putin, could ever be applied to an American leader, it's something that just doesn't compute within the framework that has been implanted in our brains.
It's just not something that's recognizable.
We're criminals are for other countries, not for us.
It's the same with tyranny and repression.
When you look at actual tyranny and actual repression in the United States and all the hallmarks of it, of censorship and the U.S.
security state being deployed against dissidents and people being punished without due process, or President Obama proclaiming the right to target for drone assassination American citizens without due process as he did in Yemen,
For a lot of people, including people who find those policies anathema to what we're supposed to believe, it's still a bridge too far to say that we are a repressive country, or a tyrannical country, or have characteristics of despotism, because these are words we're taught since birth to believe cannot apply to us, inherently do not apply to us, and only apply to other countries.
And one of the reasons that I highlighted that Fiona Hill speech on Friday, and if you haven't had a chance to see it, I really encourage you to at least read the speech where her point was, look, I don't agree with it, but the rest of the world is starting to realize that they now have the power to reject American hypocrisy, this idea that the Americans have gone around the world punishing other countries for doing what the United States government constantly does, and sees Ukraine as this opportunity because the US has so weakened itself.
Through this endless drowning in these wars that consume all of our resources and produce nothing.
We were in Afghanistan for 20 years only to leave and have the Taliban march right back in.
That this is exactly the sort of thing that the world has now come to realize only in the United States or in the UK.
Would it make sense, moral sense or intellectual sense or rational sense, for the British or the Americans to call the Russian invasion of Ukraine an unprecedented act of aggression, given the conduct of the United States and the UK for decades now, including very recent history?
The very same people Who invaded Iraq are calling this invasion of Ukraine a border war, a border dispute, an unprecedented act of aggression.
And all of this is constantly designed to reinforce in our minds the fact that we somehow always remain morally superior, no matter what our actions are, no matter how identical that they are.
But this new kind of In addition, this new layer of this moral framework that says, which necessarily is required to treat these athletes in this way, that it isn't just the Russian government or the Belarusian government that is to be condemned, but the Russian people and the Belarusian people.
This is rhetoric we've been hearing so much of, of what Russians have in their DNA and that sort of thing.
It is a very dangerous framework.
Because if you are a citizen of the United States, you do not want to be held responsible for the acts of your government.
And yet, this is the moral standard that's being imposed.
So this seems like a tennis story, or in the case of FIFA, a sports story.
And of course, on some level, it is.
But I think the fact that it seems culturally insignificant, that it seems confined to sports, actually is what makes it so pernicious.
That this political messaging infiltrates Every single sector of our lives, even when you're not on guard because you think you're listening to tennis discourse or soccer discourse, this messaging is being constantly implanted and reified and fortified.
And it comes from almost every angle.
And I think that's the reason why it's somehow sometimes worth just stopping and taking a look at something that seems kind of off the beaten path, like a tennis league or how athletic league is treating its citizens to see just how pervasive this propaganda is.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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