Media Gets Failed “Wagner Coup” in Russia Completely Wrong, Zelensky Suspends Elections, & Journalist Lev Golinkin Exposes Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Militias | SYSTEM UPDATE #107
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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.
As a programming note, tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, the city council of our city will award my late husband, David Miranda, the Pedro Ernesto Medal, which is the highest honor a resident of the city can receive.
David's political career began there in that building, and I will accept the award for him and with our children tomorrow night, which means there will be no system update episode tomorrow night.
We will be back at our regular time on Thursday, 7 p.m.
Eastern, right here on Rebel.
Tonight, we are constantly told by Joe Biden and most other Western officials that the war in Ukraine, as I said, about every war the United States has fought over the last 20 years, is a righteous battle between democracy on the one hand and autocracy on the other.
There has always been a very strained claim when it comes to this war given that the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has long engaged in classic authoritarianism and even despotism.
That includes ordering opposition television stations shut down a year before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Banning opposition parties and even ordering the country's oldest church, the Russian Orthodox Church, to close certain of its churches based on suspicions of loyalties to the Russian government.
But Zelensky's tyrannical streak just reached a new high or a new low.
He announced that he is canceling all elections, including the one that would select the Ukrainian president, until the war in Ukraine is over, meaning he has declared himself president of that country indefinitely.
Every Western country supporting Ukraine says this war is likely to go on for years, which means that Zelensky will remain in power, presumably without any kind of democratic accountability.
That is a very odd action from someone claiming to the world to be defending democracy.
He is, in essence, arguing that he must destroy Ukrainian democracy in order to save it.
We'll examine the implications for this as the Biden administration today yet again announced another massive aid package to send to that country to fuel the proxy war the U.S.
is fighting against Russia using Ukraine as its proxy.
Then shortly before we went on the air on Friday night, the leader of the Russian mercenary battalion, Wagner Group, led by a very wealthy Yevgeny Prokhorin, began marching toward Moscow.
In his speech, Prokhorin ranted against the defense minister, whom he long accused of negligence and other sins in the conduct of the war.
Within hours of this very complex event, in the middle of the fog of war, carried out by all sorts of sketchy characters of all types with all kinds of mysterious motives, numerous Western commentators began issuing definitive pronouncements about exactly what was happening and what would happen, all of which just so coincidentally aligned with their long-held views about the war in Ukraine.
Some even said in some of the most viral social media posts that were seen by and endorsed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, that Putin and his closest associates had already fled Moscow on private jets, panicked about what they said was the imminent coup against the Kremlin.
As always, when everything collapsed just 18 hours later, they all moved on and said nothing had happened.
But we'll review how real disinformation works and who those are who are responsible for its dissemination.
Finally, one of the journalists most informed about the war in Ukraine is the Ukrainian-American journalist Lev Galenkin.
He has been covering the war for years, often as a lone voice in the pages of The Nation, The New York Times, CNN, and other outlets.
We'll speak to him tonight about the latest developments there, and in particular the concern he has long harbored that the very significant presence of real Nazis Not the kind who wear MAGA hats, but the kind whose ideology explicitly aligns with Adolf Hitler's defining view have been constantly whitewashed by the Western press because Western governments led by the U.S.
want to fund and arm those Nazi battalions.
We'll talk to him about this, about the cynical exploitation of anti-Semitism accusations in this war and in general, and much more.
He's always worth listening to and we're genuinely excited for his debut appearance on our program.
As we do every Tuesday and Thursday night, as soon as we're done here with our one-hour live show on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions, comment on your feedback as part of that interactive program.
To obtain access to our aftershow, simply sign up as a member of our Locals community.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The United States is a country of endless wars.
There's really no denying that.
In our lifetimes, the United States has been in constant warfare.
The only exception was supposed to be this decade under the Clinton administration and the first Bush administration, when we were told with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, we would receive all the benefits of the peace dividend.
And yet that didn't happen.
The defense budgets continued to increase under President Clinton and then the first Bush presidency.
Both of those presidents found all sorts of reasons to go to war, including back with Saddam Hussein, as well as with, in Yugoslavia, the war in which we intervened there, and all sorts of other smaller wars that continuously justified this increasing defense budget.
And then right away, when the second George Bush was elected, who ran on a platform of ushering in a more humble foreign policy, one that involved less and less wars, The 9-11 attack happened nine months after his inauguration, and all the people who had long wanted to march into Iraq to change the government of that country for some reason, used the 9-11 attack as a pretext to do so, and the United States was at war for the next 20 years.
And when finally that war ended, With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, where as you probably recall, Joe Biden incinerated a family of 10 innocent people with a drone on his way out for good measure.
Virtually six months later, not even, the US had a brand new war, an endless war, one that's incredibly expensive to fight and that feeds the arm industry, which is the war in Ukraine.
One of the things, one of the only things that ties together all of those wars, beyond the fact that it's the CIA that expands in authority and budgets and that the arms industry profits greatly at the expense of the American taxpayer, it's a massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayer to the arms industry, One of the few commonalities among all those wars, going back in fact to the Cold War with things like the war in Vietnam, is the justification is always the same.
The propagandistic framework offered by the U.S.
government through the corporate media and its allies in the corporate media never changes.
The argument always is that these wars are not only necessary for national security but morally justified.
And the reason they're morally justified is because the United States believes in democracy and wants to defend people and liberate them from despotism and ensure that they enjoy the fruits of democratic life the way we in the United States enjoy it.
Now obviously one immediate question is why is that the role of the United States government to go around the world changing the governments of other countries to bring a form of democracy or a form of government that they may or may not want?
That was the justification offered for the horrific and decade-plus war in Vietnam that ended the life of almost 60,000 American soldiers who died in the jungles of Vietnam and millions of Vietnamese civilians as well.
We were told that we were there to bring democracy to the people of Vietnam, to ensure that they were not subject to despotism, even though The South Vietnamese government, who was our ally, was anything but democratic.
They were incredibly autocratic.
And historians almost unanimously will acknowledge the fact that the vast majority, or the majority at least, of people in Vietnam wanted and preferred the rule of Ho Chi Minh to the South Vietnamese autocrats that we were trying to impose on them.
So even if you did believe that it was somehow the duty of the U.S.
government to sacrifice the lives of its citizens and to spend billions of dollars to change the government of Vietnam all the way on the other side of the world and find it so threatening that one small country in Asia wanted an experiment with communism or whatever form of government they decided they wanted to try, even if you believe that it was the role of the U.S.
government The foundational claim never made sense because our allies that we were fighting with and whom we were defending were anything but democratic.
And that was, of course, the same argument used for Iraq.
We were going to liberate the Iraqi people from the evils of Saddam Hussein, who had long been a partner himself of the United States.
We were told that about Libya and the reason we needed to engage in a regime change war there to free the Libyan people from Muammar Gaddafi, even though the idea that Democrats were going to take over Libya and rule it like some Jeffersonian republic was preposterous, but that was the justification given that as well.
The same justification was given for the CIA covert regime change war in Syria, where we were fighting on the side of Al Qaeda and ISIS, trying to change the government of Syria, and yet we were constantly told we were bringing democracy to the Syrian people, even though Assad, like Qaddafi, had long been a US ally.
It was the claim in Afghanistan.
You probably remember that Laura Bush in 2001, George Bush's wife, wrote an article, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times claiming that we had to go and fight the Taliban in Afghanistan because we needed to go and defend women's rights in Afghanistan.
This is always the argument.
The neocons wanted to go into Iran, change the government in Iran.
We were told the same thing there.
We were bringing democracy to the Iranian people.
And now this is the argument that is constantly invoked by Joe Biden because, about the war in Ukraine, because a population wants to feel good about the wars its money is being used to prosecute.
People want to know and think that the wars that they are now a part of and that their government is helping to fuel has some righteous cause, has some just cause, specifically that we're trying to free the world, bring democracy everywhere, even though at the very same time Many of the world's most repressive and despotic regimes, such as the one in Saudi Arabia, such as the one in Egypt, and many others, are among our closest allies, the closest allies of the US government.
Somehow, Joe Biden and before him Trump and Obama and then before him George Bush can pick up the phone and send huge amounts of money and troops or weapons to the most despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and in the next minute look into the camera and say we are fighting these wars for democracy.
Trump was the only president who never pretended that, which is one of the reasons why he was so hated.
He refused that propagandistic framework.
He said, why should the role of the United States government be to control other governments around the world?
We should be focused and set on the lives of our own people and let those governments and their people and those countries take care of who their own governments are.
But every other president was required and eagerly affirmed The propaganda framework that the reason we go to war is to help liberate people around the world.
As preposterous as it is, that is what ends up helping to sell each and every new war.
And that is exactly the argument being invoked and has been invoked from the beginning by Joe Biden to justify what now seems to be this endless proxy war in Ukraine.
Here on March 1st, 2022, just a week or so after Russia first invaded Ukraine and Joe Biden wanted to side with the Ukrainians and send arms, he cast it, as you see on the screen, as the quote, battle between democracy and autocracy.
That was the phrase from his State of the Union speech, his first one.
He was so excited to have a new war, and he was able to justify this new war on the grounds that we were fighting for democracy.
Quote, President Biden says Putin, quote, will pay even more for Ukraine invasion, but mentions no other foreign policy priorities.
That was the only foreign policy priority that he mentioned in that State of the Union Address, and it was justified on the grounds that we were there to side with democracy in the war against autocracy.
Now as I said, that has always been a very difficult claim to maintain given that Vladimir Zelensky is anything but an avatar of democracy.
He has a long line, as we're about to show you, of despotic actions, including some that took place well before the Russian invasion.
But that despotic posture has achieved all new heights when he just announced this week that there would be no elections in this beautiful and lovely democracy that we are defending in Ukraine until this war is finally concluded whenever that might be 2025, 2029, 2032.
He is the president indefinitely without any democratic mandate for as long as this war goes on.
Listen to what he said.
Next year,選��.
This is a global question.
If we win, there will be no military time, no war.
Elections must be held at a time when there is no war, according to the law.
- - So for those listening in the podcast form who didn't see the subtitles, he's essentially saying, Ukraine is under martial law, Elections are things that happen only in peacetime.
Because Ukraine is at war, there will be no elections.
And there will be no elections until that war is concluded.
Now, I've seen already, of course, many people defending Zelensky's decision to cancel all elections, or in other words, to kill Ukrainian democracy as a means of saving it.
On the grounds that, of course, when a nation is at war, you can't have elections.
But look at the history of the United States, which fought a civil war, a devastating civil war, that killed a lot more people than the war in Ukraine is killing, that destabilized the United States greatly, and we still had elections.
Look at both World Wars, including World War II, where the United States was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.
We didn't cancel any elections.
We didn't have presidents declaring themselves indefinitely in power on the grounds that we're under martial law and we can't have elections while we're at war, only in peacetime.
After 9-11, when the country was attacked and its major institutions of power targeted and 3,000 Americans were killed, We still had our midterm elections the following year, just about a year later.
Nobody ever suggested that we should cancel elections, except for one person.
He's the only instance I can recall of a major politician suggesting that wartime should result in the cancellation of elections.
And as soon as he said it, everyone from across the political spectrum, including his own party, Denounced it.
That was Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor, famously, of New York when the 9-11 attacks took place.
And two weeks later, a little bit more than two weeks later, here you see the CNN headline, Giuliani wants to delay his departure as mayor.
He was already term limited out of office.
There was an election scheduled and he wanted to delay that election on the grounds that the United States is now at war.
Quote, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's plan to delay his successor's inauguration was designed to please both sides in the debate over whether he should stay on as mayor after his term runs out, he said Friday.
While he doesn't support changing the term limits law that bar him from serving a third consecutive term, Giuliani said the month and a half between election day and the inauguration is simply not long enough for a new mayor to slide into the role during this troubled period.
Quote, when I became mayor, I thought the transition period I had was too short, a month and a half.
And at that time, I was facing a fiscal crisis, not the kind of crisis they have now, he told the syndicated radio program I Miss in the Morning.
Under the best of circumstances, it takes about three to four months to really get government started, he said.
Now, the fact that he just invented out of whole cost some new rule that he wanted to impose that had no basis in the law, that the period between the election and the inauguration was too short, and that in particular it's far too short during wartime, even when the World Trade Center was still in rumbles, and Americans were very traumatized By the 9-11 attack, I lived in New York at this time.
I remember how deeply affected especially residents of New York City were.
The width of those bodies underneath the rubble.
Stayed in the air for at least a week if not longer.
Everywhere you went for a month or two months there were signs at every corner.
So many signs packing and covering every street post of faces of people who were quote-unquote missing posted by their desperate family members hoping against hope that they weren't dead beneath the rubble but instead were somehow lost or in a hospital somewhere.
It was Definitely, in terms of a public event, the most traumatizing that Americans have faced in this lifetime.
Probably nothing compares to it other than Pearl Harbor.
And yet, Rudy Giuliani's suggestion was instantly mauled as completely undemocratic.
And so, Zelensky tried suggesting that this is somehow some sort of widely recognized rule that in wartime you postpone elections.
Even in the UK and in countries that were being bombed and occupied by the Nazis during World War II, elections often continued.
Now, if this were a unique, isolated circumstance, one might say, well, maybe Zelensky was speaking impetuously, or prematurely, or with emotion.
But this is a long history of despotic behavior and authoritarian gestures that he is responsible for that makes it clear that he has this despotic posture while the United States insists over and over that we're there to fight for and defend democracy.
In December of 2022, as Reuters reported, Ukraine was preparing a law that would allow the government under Zelensky to ban affiliated churches of the Russian Orthodox Church, the oldest church in that region, the oldest church in Ukraine.
Which many Ukrainians, 43 million in fact, considered themselves members of.
He wanted to shut down churches based solely on his unilateral and unreviewable decree that those churches somehow were affiliated with Russia, usually because they speak Russian in their services.
That is not a very democratic mentality, one that seeks to close old churches to which many people in that country have allegiance on the grounds that somehow they are disloyal to the government with no trial, just a decree.
In March of 2022, just a week after the Russian invasion, there you see from the Guardian Zelensky suspended 11 political parties that he claims have ties to Russia.
Quote, Ukraine suspends 11 political parties with links to Russia.
The country's National Security and Defense Council took the decision to ban the parties from any political activity.
Most of the parties affected were small, but one of them, the Opposition Platform for Life, has 44 seats in the 450-seat Ukrainian parliament.
In other words, a party that has 10% of the representation in Congress was banned, just banned, shut, prohibited, made illegal by presidential decree.
Quote, the activities of those politicians aimed at division or collusion will not succeed but will receive a harsh response, Zelensky said in a video address on Sunday.
Therefore, the National Security and Defense Council decided, given the full-scale war unleashed by Russia and the political ties that a number of political structures have with this state, to suspend any activity of a number of political parties for the period of martial law, the Ukrainian leader added.
Now, even if you want to defend full-scale martial law during wartime, Which, if you do, it's pretty difficult to simultaneously maintain that we're there because we're fighting for democracy.
That's always been the question since the start of this war.
What is the United States' interest in this war?
Why are we spending tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars depleting our own weapons stockpile, risking escalation and even nuclear war, getting to the point that even Joe Biden says we're the closest Time to nuclear, the closest point to nuclear annihilation since at any moment since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
What is the reason, the motive, the interest for the United States to be this involved in this war and continuously fuel it?
And not just fuel it, but according to the then Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, Affirmatively blocking any attempts at diplomacy to resolve the war as though we want it to continue, which is clearly the case when it comes to the US government and the British government.
So the question has always been, what is the reason?
And so they have to give a reason.
And the reason has been because we're there to fight democracy at the same time that Solinsky is cancelling elections, closing churches, and banning opposition parties.
So if you're inclined to defend that on the grounds that there's a war, take note of the fact that in February of 2021, more than a year prior to the Russian invasion, before the Russian invasion, as you see from the German news outlet, Deutschwald, The Ukrainian government banned TV stations that it claimed were pro-Russian.
We can put that headline on the screen.
Ukraine bans pro-Russian TV stations.
And the article read, again, this is 2021, February of 2021, more than a year before the Russian invasion, quote, three pro-Russian TV channels have gone up the air in Kiev after pro-Western president Vladimir Zelensky signed a Ukrainian Security Council decree imposing sanctions for five years on eight media and TV companies.
The Kiev stations affected were Zik, News 1, and 112 Ukraine.
Their broadcasts were only available Tuesday night via the video hosting platform YouTube reported the Russian news agency TASS.
It identified the channel's owner as Taras Kozak, a lawmaker and member of the pro-Russian opposition platform For Life Party, quoting him as describing Zelensky's move as a quote, act of blatant censorship.
That is what that is, right?
By definition, it's an act of blatant censorship.
Then we have this NPR report from July of 2022.
Headline, Zelensky has consolidated Ukraine's TV outlets and dissolved rival political parties.
So he has control, complete control over the media in Ukraine.
He shut down all the opposition parties, all the opposition TV outlets, all the ones that were critics of his government, and shut down key rival political parties.
He has full authoritarian, totalitarian control over that government, over that country.
This is the country, the government, we're told we're defending in order to save democracy.
Here's what that NPR report said, quote, President Zelensky has consolidated all TV platforms in Ukraine into one state broadcast and restricted political rivals.
Political opponents fear such civil liberty constraints could continue.
Now, again, if you want to justify the US proxy war in Ukraine on some kind of national security ground, which honestly I can't conceive of what it would be, I believe the real reason that there is so much bipartisan support within the establishment wings of both political parties, which there absolutely is yet again.
We're always told how the two parties can never get along, how they're at each other's throats, how they're so radically different.
And yet time after time after time after time on the most critical foreign policy questions and questions of imperialism and war, the two parties completely coalesce and align.
Nancy Pelosi and AOC have exactly the same view, exactly the same view as Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.
The only dissent one finds within the American political establishment Is a few dozen members of Congress in the Senate from the Republican Party who are generally more aligned with the populist right-wing of the Republican Party.
Josh Hawley and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
There were roughly 70 votes against the $40 billion authorization that the Congress approved in May of last year.
Every single Democrat voted yes.
The overwhelming majority of the Republican establishment voted yes.
And the question becomes, what is the reason?
Why is this happening?
What is their goal?
And my belief is that the reason Republican establishment figures like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio are so supportive of Joe Biden's war policy in Ukraine is because that pro-war wing of the Republican Party is reflexively jingoistic.
By which I mean, every time there's a proposed war, That the United States might fight and identify some bad foreign enemy that we're supposed to go to war with every single time.
That wing of the Republican Party, the establishment wing of the Republican Party, automatically wants to go to war, bomb those countries, kill people, remove their governments.
Every single war of the last 20 years that has been proposed to fight or that the United States did fight, Lindsey Graham was a cheerleader for.
Whether there's a Democrat or a Republican president, it doesn't matter.
To the extent he's critical, it's always on the grounds that we should be escalating the war even further.
But otherwise, he's very supportive of the war itself, like the Republican Party is in general.
And that's the reason I believe they are, is because they just immediately, reflexively see the world as the United States being so inherently good that anything it does, including bombing other countries, killing other people, invading other countries, changing governments, cuing governments, is intrinsically a positive.
Obviously they're funded as well by arms dealers and the military-industrial complex.
They're very closely linked to the U.S.
security state, the CIA, the Pentagon.
Those are their allies, the people with whom they most empathize and with whom they're most ideologically aligned.
But that's the reason I think it's a strange thing to have a country fighting so many wars.
And by the way, this war is very controversial in most countries around the world.
Outside of Western Europe.
It is not the case that this is some sort of unanimous view that Russia is the clearly wrong party and that we should be funding a proxy war in Ukraine.
In fact, much of the world is now rebelling against this and running into the arms of the Chinese because they see an opportunity to finally free themselves of American hegemony.
And yet, while it's so controversial all around the world, the parties in Washington are like this.
They don't have a single inch of Difference.
In every single presidential candidate running, the 10 or 12 announced major presidential candidates in both political parties also support Joe Biden's war policy, with the exception of RFK Jr., Donald Trump, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
It remains to be seen what Ron DeSantis' position is.
He has kind of signaled vaguely that he doesn't think we should be this involved, but he sometimes walks it back.
He's confined himself to very quick hits on cable news where it's very difficult to probe with any degree of precision or detail what his views are.
We put in a request to have a sit-down interview with him in Florida.
I would fly there.
I would sit down with him to talk in depth about his views on foreign policy generally, on civil liberties, on the CIA, the FBI, and the war in Ukraine.
But so far, he has not agreed to do that with me or with anybody who wants to ask questions from that perspective.
So it's hard to put him into a particular category.
But everybody else who has manifested clearly, other than R.K.
Jr., Trump, and Vivek, are in favor of this war.
So that's how much this consensus is solidified.
And the only argument they can offer when asked is that we need to defend democracy, which is the same justification given for every war.
And that makes very little sense in this case.
Now, I wanted to just, before we talk to our guest tonight, who I'm excited to get to, I wanted to review what happened on Friday night into Saturday morning in Ukraine, and particularly in Russia, where the Wagner Group and its mercenary leader essentially declared war on Not so much the Kremlin or Vladimir Putin, but on the Defense Ministry.
And for a very short time they seem to be marching toward Moscow, a group of 25,000 soldiers.
Ian, I'll just read the Politico article for you to kind of review the events because it was a couple days ago now here.
This is a pretty straightforward review from Politico on June 24th entitled Wagner rebels career towards showdown with Putin.
I think that means Kareen towards showdown with Putin as they push to Moscow.
Moscow mayor says, quote, counterterrorism operation declared in the city and that the situation is, quote, complicated.
Again, this was as the conflict was unfolding.
Quote, mercenaries from the Wagner Group of embattled warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, some of them speeding along the highway to Moscow on Saturday, looked set for imminent clashes with troops loyal to President Vladimir Putin, who warned the rebellion risk pushing Russia into civil war.
Furious over the Kremlin's bungled invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin seized key strategic footholds in southern Russia on Saturday, most significantly the major city of Rostov, while an unclear number of the forces were making a dash up the main highway to the capital.
Russian government forces also appeared to shell the southern city of Varzhan on Saturday in an attempt to combat the Wagner insurrection, which is snowballing into one of the gravest threats to Putin's 25-year rule.
It is clear from how close Wagner's troops are to Moscow.
It is far from clear how close they are to Moscow.
But the governor of Lipetsk, some 400 kilometers south of the capital, has reported the mercenary convoy passing through, and authorities there said they were carving ditches in the road with diggers to slow the Wagner forces.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Somnov warned a, quote, counter-terrorist operation has been declared in Moscow, the situation is complicated, and added that That Monday would not be a regular working day telling people to avoid traveling around the city.
No.
What happened is this all started to unfold maybe 90 minutes or two hours before we went on the air live on Friday night.
And we had planned a show to report on the pretty devastating revelations from two IRS whistleblowers about the way the Justice Department had politicized the criminal investigation to Hunter Biden to protect Hunter Biden from more serious charges than the two misdemeanor charges to which he was permitted to plead guilty, ensuring he wouldn't spend a day in prison.
As well as the revelations that implicate Joe Biden in these deals, a pretty significant story.
And I heard this, these events, but I decided I didn't want to go on the air live and start pontificating about them given how unclear and uncertain everything was.
It was a very hazy picture in the middle of a war zone on the other side of the world between actors whose motives are totally unclear, And it seemed to me laughable to claim that a force of 25,000 men could possibly pose a threat to the Kremlin, one of the most fortified places on the planet.
You're talking about a Russian army filled with hundreds of thousands of highly trained troops, including one stationed in Moscow, one of the most militarized governments in the world.
It was a little bit more credible to me than the idea that a thousand boomers from Facebook who like Donald Trump and yet never waved a weapon or brandished a weapon inside the Capitol on January 6 posed a threat to the most powerful government in the history of the planet, the United States.
It was more credible than that, I guess, but it seemed preposterous to me that this was a genuine threat.
And yet immediately the people who love the war in Ukraine, Started pontificating that this was some grave threat to Moscow, spreading all sorts of information about, as we're about to show you.
And when I got off the air, and especially that next morning, I saw a huge number of people demanding to know why I hadn't yet spoken about this, as though I was trying to avoid something.
What would I be avoiding?
Why would any of this implicate me personally at all?
My view is about the US role in the proxy war in Ukraine.
I'm not on Russia's side or Ukraine's side in this war.
My argument is that the US has no legitimate role there and we're making everything worse by fueling this war and ensuring that Ukraine gets more and more destroyed.
But this is the mindset of the social media and internet age.
You're supposed to pontificate definitively about events where there's no clarity involved.
You're supposed to just speculate aimlessly.
As opposed to waiting for clarity to emerge and trying to do reporting so that you can actually inform people rather than mislead them about what is taking place.
The same exact thing happened to David Sachs, who is the Silicon Valley investor and host of the very popular All In podcast, one of the top, I think, 20 podcasts in the country.
And he has been an outspoken opponent of the US proxy war in Ukraine.
He is not on Russia's side.
He's not on Ukraine's side.
He just is against our involvement in that war.
And you see here a tweet that he highlighted on the day that it was happening.
June 23rd, waiting to hear how this is a disaster for Ukraine from David Sachs.
Now by this point, the very next day...
Prigozhin announced that he was tucking tail and retreating, going to Belarus, where he had been offered some sort of provisionary or temporary asylum.
We'll see what the nature of that really is.
And that the troops he had assembled were returning back to Ukraine, that the whole situation had been diffused without the need for any further violence.
And every pronouncement about how Putin was leaving Moscow because he knew his rule was finally unraveling, how Russia had been plunged into a civil war, all proved to be false because nobody wanted to wait to actually get clarity on the situation.
And there you see David Sachs saying, funny how so many people who were demanding to know my opinion yesterday and now they've all gone silent because the coup dissipated almost more quickly than the January 6th one did.
It lasted a little longer than three hours, but not that much longer.
And the same exact thing happened to me.
It was amazing.
I woke up Saturday morning and all I saw, especially when we posted clips of the reporting we did on the IRS whistleblowers and the revelations they brought forward about the President of the United States, Was all sorts of supporters of the war in Ukraine claiming that the only reason I did my show on the IRS whistleblowers was because I wanted to somehow distract from this incredibly significant moment that somehow implicated me personally that I was desperate to avoid.
Because as always, the implicit theory, and this is true for every war, Is that if you oppose the policy, the war policy of the United States government, if you oppose the desire on the part of American leaders to involve itself in a war, you are automatically on the side of whatever the country or government is that people want the United States to go attack.
Everybody opposed to the Vietnam War was accused of being a communist agent on the side of Ho Chi Minh.
People opposed to the invasion of Iraq were called Saddam apologists or Al Qaeda sympathizers.
Anybody opposing the CIA regime change war in Syria was called pro-Assad.
You are pro-Gaddafi if you oppose the US regime.
That's the tactic in every single case.
That's standard neocon propaganda.
And so here, if you oppose the US war, the US role in the war in Ukraine, you automatically get accused of being a Kremlin agent.
That's not news.
We've documented that many times.
Just like if you were somebody myself or anyone who questioned the CIA fabricated theory about a scandal about Russiagate, you were also accused of being a Kremlin agent.
It's just pure McCarthyism.
Looking for Russian agents under every bed.
Anyone who dissents from U.S. government policy or wars is a traitor is on the other side.
And that was the mindset as though I'm a Russian government sympathizer somehow wanting to conceal the news about this civil war in Russia.
And here's just one example.
And I found it so notable because of who this person is.
He calls himself the Romanian liberal.
And he uses, on his Twitter bio, the red rose, which is the symbol of socialism.
So he's not just a Democrat.
He's not just a liberal.
This guy is a rebel.
He's a revolutionary.
He's a socialist.
There you see his bio.
He calls himself a liberal socialist.
He has the little red rose there.
He's a vegan, an honorary lesbian.
And you can see from his bio how radical he is.
This is a real radical.
He has a little liberal socialist there.
And so this was his response to our show's posting of the video that we did about the IRS whistleblower and the things that he proved about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
He wrote, quote, I know you are.
How are you so out of touch with the world that what concerns you most at this moment is Hunter Biden's dick pics?
Now, Now, the fact that self-professed leftists have no idea what the stories about the laptop reveal and what the IRS have said about Joe Biden's participation, corrupt participation in these deals the fact that self-professed leftists have no idea what the stories about the laptop reveal and what the IRS have said about Joe Biden's participation, corrupt participation
They consider themselves radicals as threats to establishment power and yet they're servants of the Democratic Party.
They have no idea what the Hunter Biden case is even about because the only corporate media outlets to which they listen don't tell them.
So they think the only thing on the Hunter Biden laptop are, as he called them, dick pics.
He also is somebody who...
Doesn't care about the fact that the CIA and the corporate media united before the election to lie about that laptop, to call it Russian disinformation, because very few people on the mainstream left care any longer about the CIA, don't see the CIA as malevolent, and don't see the corporate media as malevolent either, and they're incredibly supportive of every War proposed by the United States and NATO.
He's angry that I wasn't talking about what turned out to be nothing in Russia and was instead talking about the Hunter Biden situation as well.
And he wanted me that night, Friday night, to go on the air and I guess admit that Putin was on the verge of being deposed.
And so representative of so many of these leftists and what they've become, if you look at polling data, Democrats are the ones overwhelmingly who hold in high regard the CIA, the FBI, and the Homeland Security Department because they revere the U.S.
security state.
They revere NATO and the U.S.
military-industrial complex.
Foreign policy barely exists in liberal discourse anymore.
It's not on the radar.
Now, As I said, the disinformation that disseminated almost instantly was almost impossible to even keep track of.
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, recommended as, quote, the best coverage of the situation I've seen so far, this report from Mario Newfall.
And that had every claim about how you see here, coup updates, Putin reportedly leaves Moscow.
This is the tweet that was recommended as the best coverage on Twitter.
Putin reportedly leaves Moscow.
Machine gun positions around Moscow.
Vagner convoy heads to Moscow as the coup continues.
Here's the latest updates.
Worries about the Russian nuclear warheads moved to Belarus weeks ago.
Wagner forces continue their advance to Moscow with limited strikes by the Russian Air Force.
Reports of Putin and other officials leaving Moscow and heading to St.
Petersburg based on the movement of military VIP aircrafts.
TASS, which is government controlled media outlet, reported that Putin is headed to St. Petersburg, but Putin's press secretary refuted these reports.
It is very unusual and rare to see such a disconnect between TASS and the Kremlin.
None of this turned out to be true.
And it was self-evidently unconvincing, and it spread everywhere.
Here is the Washington Post's neoconservative columnist, Jennifer Rubin, who, like so many of them, used to be a hardcore supporter of the Republican Party.
She was so enamored of Mitt Romney, people thought that he ought to take out a restraining order against her.
Now, of course, she loves Joe Biden, is a hardcore Democrat, and here she's saying, quote, can you imagine If our resolve in Ukraine leads not only to the survival of Ukraine, but the triumph and demise of Putin, thank God Trump and his GOP enablers have egg on their faces.
Most of the Republican Party supports the war in Ukraine, so the Republican Party wouldn't have eggs on their faces.
But implicitly, she was actually rooting for the Wagner Group, which is, whatever you think of Vladimir Putin, infinitely more fanatical.
In all the ways that the West hates Putin, the idea that it would somehow be a welcome development of the Wagner Group, executed a coup against Vladimir Putin and ascended to power in Russia and was in control of the world's largest nuclear arsenal, these people are completely out of their minds.
As I was saying earlier, the reason why Republicans support this war is this reflexive jingoism.
The reason Democrats support this war is because they hate Putin so much because they still blame him for Hillary Clinton's 2016 defeat to Donald Trump, which they regard as the most apocalyptic moment in the history of the United States.
And that's why so many of them were rooting for the Wagner Group, which is a crypto-fascist organization Everything about Putin is true of the Wagner Group too, a thousand times, but they're so addicted to this anti-Putin narrative that they were cheering for this mercenary group, this crazed, unhinged mercenary group to take over power in Moscow.
Here from the New York Post that evening as well, Vladimir Putin reportedly flees Moscow as Wagner forces advance in Russia.
The Atlantic, which is ground zero for every kind of disinformation under the neocon liar Jeffrey Goldberg, written by his fellow neocon liar Ann Applebaum, who, like Jeffrey Goldberg, has cheered every American war with lies over the last 20 years, has a headline in The Atlantic that night, Russia slides into civil war.
Is Putin facing his Tsar Nicholas II moment?
She wrote, For months, years really, Putin has blamed all of his country's troubles on outsiders, America, Europe, NATO.
He concealed the weaknesses of his country and its army behind a facade of bluster, arrogance, and appeals to a phony quote, right Christian nationalism for foreign audiences and appeals to imperialist patriotism for domestic consumption.
Now he is facing a movement that lives according to the true values of the modern Russian military and indeed of modern Russia.
There are some precedents for this moment.
In 1905, the Russian fleet's disastrous performance in a war with Japan helped inspire a failed revolution.
In 1917, angry soldiers came home from World War I and launched another more famous revolution.
Putin alluded to that moment in his brief television appearance this morning.
At that moment, he said, quote, arguments behind the army's back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe leading to the destruction of the army and the state.
What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Tsar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side.
He was wrong.
Just this constant tsunami of lies and disinformation that these people spread everywhere.
While claiming to be the guardians of the truth and fighting disinformation to the point they want the power to censor other people's views on the grounds that those other people spread disinformation.
We could go on all night showing you just how much propaganda immediately came pouring forth.
Suggesting that he was really in danger, Vladimir Putin was.
And now the narrative is that he proved how weak he was Because he negotiated with the Wagner Group and its leader.
That is a real illustrative moment that people in the United States, people in the West, think it's weakness when you can resolve conflicts without the use of violence and force.
He was able to persuade several of the leaders of this treason To leave voluntarily, to retreat voluntarily, without having that country spread into nuclear war or into a civil conflict.
That's a sign of strength, not weakness.
The main perpetrator was Michael McFaul, as always, Obama's former ambassador to Russia, who was all over the news, even though He was guilty of all sorts of information.
Before we bring on our guest, I just want to show you this one tweet that he wrote.
Here you see on June 24th, the morning of it, Putin was clear in his speech just now.
He has ordered his army and others to destroy Wagner and Burgosin.
So there's going to be a big fight.
Russians will be killing Russians, probably in large numbers.
Unless Purgosian surrenders, which of course is exactly what he did.
And yet, on Jen Psaki's program, on every MSNBC and CNN show, it was the same roster of all the warmongers who have been lying the country into war.
There you see the tweet inside with Jen Psaki.
Her guests are Michael McFaul, Admiral, this Admiral, I forget his name, Ann Applebaum, Elise Slotkin, Ben Rhodes, David Rumnick, just the same group of people.
Who get put on these corporate outlets over and over to propagandize on behalf of Warren have been doing so for 20 years no matter how much they get caught lying and spreading disinformation it never Prejudices or jeopardizes their standing in any way because the role of the corporate media is to propagandize and lie to the public on behalf of the US security state and on behalf of our war policies.
Now, as I said, we could show you incredible amounts of disinformation that spread everywhere from these members of the corporate media, but I think we've given you a good taste of how quickly it emerged.
So instead, we're going to go ahead and end the segment here.
And right after this short word that helps support our show and enables, in fact, our show to be on the air, we're going to talk to Lev Glonkin about his journalism in his childhood home of Ukraine and the latest developments there from somebody who actually thinks critically about these matters.
We'll be with him right after this.
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Well, Evgenkin is a Ukrainian-American journalist who has reported for years on Ukraine.
He is the author of the book Backpack, a Bear in Eight Crates of Vodka, a Memoir of Soviet Ukraine.
His reporting and analysis have amazingly appeared in the New York Times, CNN, and The Nation, and many other magazines and newspapers, and we are genuinely thrilled to welcome him to his System Update debut.
Lev, good evening.
It's great to see you.
I'm really thrilled to have you here.
I don't hear lab, so maybe we can fix...
Lev, are you there?
Good evening.
Now I can actually hear you.
Yes, yes, we have everything resolved.
So thanks so much for being here.
Before we get into some specific issues that you've been working on and that I'm interested in hearing your analysis for, just talk a little bit about what your background is.
You're obviously very interested in Ukraine.
You're specifically interested in the issue of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and the way it's been wielded and exploited and part of this debate.
What accounts for that interest?
I come from Eastern Ukraine.
I came to America as a political refugee from Soviet anti-Semitism.
I am particularly grateful to how American Jewish groups have fought to get us out of the Soviet Union, which is also why I'm so disturbed at how American Jewish groups today are being passive, to put it lightly, when it comes to Ukrainian far-right
You know, I think a lot about how this war is ultimately going to end, because it's one of the real mysteries on the one hand, the Ukrainian position and the American position is that this war cannot end with any cessation of Ukrainian territory to the Russians, and largely that includes even Crimea, which the Russians have been governing since 2014.
And one possible solution seems to me based on the Kosovo model or precedent, which Putin warned at the time would be a destabilizing precedent.
But it has become the precedent where you hold a fair and free referendum, both in eastern Ukraine and in Crimea, to determine whether the people of those regions want to be part of The central government in Kiev, whether they prefer to be under the rule of Moscow or whether they want to be independent provinces the way that Kosovo is now recognized by many countries around the world as being.
What is your view about that potential solution and do you have a sense, obviously things might have changed with this war, for what the people in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine where you're from actually think about that question?
The answer is, I mean, even Zelensky came to power talking about how we should have a referendum, but these people's opinion doesn't count, just like it doesn't count for the people who have the churches that are considered the wrong type of church.
So, you know, for a fact, let's take Crimea, that's a very easy one.
Everybody from the Washington Post onward acknowledges that they do not want to rejoin Ukraine.
For the people who are driving this war, it doesn't really matter.
The main nationalist groups driving this war, they want Ukraine Congress.
They don't care about the Eastern Ukrainians.
They've been committing war crimes against them since 2014.
So it's not that they particularly care about their lives or their choices.
Zelensky came promising, you know, thinking we should do a referendum, but he was quickly taught otherwise.
And now with the war to a moot point.
So I don't think it's I don't think these people's opinions could even be... I mean, in a country where people go after you for being in the wrong church, how can you trust people to say the truth?
When you really trust people to say, oh yeah, I don't like this government.
I mean, they're not idiots.
So how do you envision this war ultimately ending?
Because it seems almost impossible to believe that Putin and the Kremlin would ever accept being expelled from eastern Ukraine, let alone from Crimea.
And it seems pretty clear that the position of the West, and I believe it when they say it, is that under no circumstances can this war end until Ukraine wins back all the territory in eastern Ukraine that Russia is currently occupying, as well as Crimea.
So what potential resolution do you see for this war?
None.
For the foreseeable future, none.
The best I can see is it becoming a frozen conflict again, which is really what it was between 2015 and 2021.
So, the far right in Zelensky's surroundings is not going to accept any settlement with Russia for anything.
So, it's a moot point saying whether he's going to negotiate.
I mean, the best I can see is some cessation of hostilities and the front remaining frozen where it is.
That's really the only solution I can see here.
So one of the points that you've most emphasized in your reporting and in your writing over the past year and a half almost now is the whitewashing by the West of the existence of Nazism, and I mean like real deal Nazism, not the kind that kind of word gets tossed around in the United States for conservatives or people who vote for Donald Trump.
I mean people who explicitly identify with the ideology of the Nazi Party, with Adolf Hitler, who have kind of a Cultural or generational allegiance to Nazi Germany.
And obviously the leading example, but not the only one, is the Aesop Battalion, where for a decade the Western press just openly spoke about how the Aesop Battalion was a Nazi group, how much we warned the West of the dangers of having weapons fall into their hands.
Facebook had a rule prohibiting anyone from praising the Aesop Battalion on the grounds that it was a hate group.
And then overnight, The media completely changed its narrative.
The Azov battalion was transformed from a Nazi group into a kind of heroic group of freedom fighters.
Facebook created an exemption to their policy that says you're allowed to praise Azov even though we still consider them a hate group until the war is over.
What do you make of how quickly that changed and what is the real danger of the presence of Nazism in Ukraine?
The whitewashing has been so rampant and so blatant that, I mean, this is like North Korea state media type levels.
I was one of the first ones to warn about Azov's danger back in 2014, and for a while people didn't believe the few of us who were talking about Azov, but then very quickly Azov kept growing as they kept attacking LGBT groups, as they kept attacking Roma, as they kept recruiting neo-Nazis worldwide.
It got to the point where you really couldn't say that they don't exist, you couldn't really downplay them.
From 2017 about onward, every Western institution that you could think of was aligned on the fact that Azov is a problem.
And then overnight, we've gone and we just said, no, it's fine.
This group that we've reported for years and years is a neo-Nazi organization suddenly stopping being neo-Nazi.
And in order for the Western media to do that, They resorted to just lies and disinformation to the point where, I mean, I was stunned at just how simplistic and also just how brazen it was.
It was basically three or four people who were propagandists who said that suddenly Azov stopped being neo-Nazi.
And even though the person who was in charge of it What's filmed came from a group called the White Voice Club, came from a group that was far-right, was a member of the original neo-Nazi battalion.
Despite all of that, Western media just dropped all semblance of just a basic, I'm not even saying journalistic ethics, it's just common sense.
And they just started lying, saying that these people who you see before your eyes have suddenly and magically transformed.
And what's the most Despicable part of it is this is the same people who also say that every time Marjorie Taylor Greene sneezes, it's the second coming of Hitler.
So you have you have these people who are just, on one hand, cannot stop talking about it.
On the other hand, they're just ignoring literal neo-Nazis.
And just a quick point.
This has nothing to do with helping Ukraine.
You could arm Ukraine to the gills if you want.
You could put even billions more to Ukraine.
You don't have to support the small percentage of the neo-Nazis.
This is a choice that we can support Ukraine without it, but we are choosing over and over and over to feature, to whitewash, to celebrate, to invite on campus, to invite to Congress the neo-Nazis.
We could invite other members of the Ukrainian army, there's plenty of others, but we're going with the neo-Nazis.
It's a choice that America is making.
One of the, a lot of this is steeped in a lot of history, a lot of complex history in that region, a lot of it has to do with World War II and the fallout from that, the way in which the Soviet Union dominated that region for so long.
Of course, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
A lot of times when you see Ukrainian officials being interviewed on CNN or BBC, they have pictures on the wall of a person who's a national hero in Ukraine, at least in parts of Ukraine, Stepan Bandera.
And for a long time it was at least controversial to describe him as being this nationalistic hero, whereas now it seems to, with this war, have become almost like a consensus in the Ukrainian ruling class to speak of him this way.
There was an ambassador to Germany who defended Stepan Bandera and then he had to be removed from the post because he was a little sensitive to praise actual Nazis in Germany, but he then became, he got promoted to become Deputy Prime Minister to Zelensky after that controversy.
Talk about who Stepan Bandera is and the role that he plays in Ukrainian iconography.
Yeah, when people say Ukraine likes Stepan Bandera, that's wrong.
He's a hero in the western parts of Ukraine, the parts that allied themselves with the Nazis, the heartland of Ukrainian ultranationalism.
Saying that Ukraine loves Stepan Bandera is kind of like saying America loves Robert E. Lee.
It's wrong.
It's a certain percentage of the public, a very specific percentage.
But after the Maidan uprising, they've inflicted that worship, the Bandera cult, over the entire country.
So, I mean, the vast majority of Ukrainians have families who were lost fighting the Nazis.
So Bandera, to them, the Nazi collaborate, the one whose troops supported Hitler, these people do not worship Bandera.
But again, in the Western media, their opinions are just unignored.
Their uncomfortable opinions of millions and millions of people, for whom Bandera is a criminal, for whom Bandera is a monster, is ignored.
And they're saying, well, Ukrainians worship him.
So first of all, it's not Ukrainians.
It's Western Ukrainians who just happen to now have the hold over the government.
And secondly, it's people say, people engage in Holocaust distortion, which is exactly what this is.
Western media has engaged in outright Holocaust distortion.
They're saying, Stepan Bandera, Nazi collaborator or hero?
Those are actual articles that were printed out, including by Israeli papers, as if there is a question.
First of all, there's no question that he was a Nazi collaborator.
His troops murdered tens of thousands of Jews and 70,000 to 100,000 Poles in ways that Hannibal Lecter would consider excessive.
OK, they say that they fought Russia.
They weren't very good at fighting Russia or anybody aren't.
What they were good at is committing war crimes.
And these people are now, if this was with any other Holocaust perpetrator, because there is nationalism rising all across Europe.
The difference is Jewish groups condemn it when it's anybody other than Stepan Bandera.
Well, that's what I wanted to ask you.
So you mentioned these Jewish groups.
Of course, when you hear things like this, that there's a Nazi collaborator who's being treated as a national hero in a country as important as Ukraine by the ruling class, as you said, the people whose power is centered in Western Ukraine, there are groups led by the Anti-Defamation League that are the kind of self-anointed leaders in denouncing this and saying,
You know, we denounce these neo-Nazi groups and don't think they should be supported, and they did exactly that when it came to the Azov Battalion in reports and in public pronouncements, including at least as recently as 2019, where they said that the Azov Battalion is a very dangerous Nazi group.
And yet you never hear from them at all when it comes to the fact that we are now arming and aligning ourselves with these very same Nazi elements in Ukraine.
What is going on with the ADL and what does that illustrate about these groups that are kind of the self-anointed guardians of pro-Jewish discourse?
Well, to me, the most telling thing about the ADL is that about a month ago, six weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article about the prevalence of Nazi symbols and imagery among the Ukrainian army.
And when they asked the Anti-Defamation League about a Ukrainian soldier who had a patch, a patch with a neo-Nazi symbol that the ADL perfectly fully knows it's a popular neo-Nazi symbol.
And the patch was also from a Hate group band, a band that is very much involved with the far-right.
So this band uses this fact specifically because that's kind of their thing.
And I was stunned because the AEL has for years gone after Spotify for having hate music.
They've gone after Amazon and other places for selling merchandise that's hate groups.
I mean, they're very serious about this.
They say, this is dangerous.
This is a proliferation of Nazism.
This is a normalization of Nazism.
Lives are at stake.
And suddenly you had the ADL tell the New York Times that we can't make any real inferences about this soldier just based on the patch, and it's a patch of a band.
Which is just incredible to suddenly have this amount of open-mindedness, shall I say, in the face of something that should raise every red flag.
And the other thing is mostly just the silence.
The silence of Jewish groups, and not just ADL, in general.
You know, I've chronicled how neo-Nazis from Azov have been brought to the Hill to meet with Congress.
You know, Mark Hamill was participating in a YouTube conversation where they had a far-right flag.
If these people had anything to do with, if this was any other type of Nazis or Nazi collaborators, these people, Mark Hamill would be on his knees in the Holocaust Museum you know doing the work and begging for forgiveness okay and the silence of these groups is just so painful of of these people who who set themselves up as arbiters of anti-semitism
and then you know last thing i'll say is the state department said that the u.s state department said roger waters having a nazi costume hold on i I want to ask you about the Roger Waters episode and what that reveals, because I do find it so interesting.
And so I want to just kind of lay the foundation for that for people who aren't familiar with the controversy.
And just to note, the issue of Nazi insignias and Nazi symbols among heralded Ukrainian fighters and the like became so significant that even the New York Times finally was forced to confront it.
They ran this article on June 5th, so just a couple weeks ago, with the headline, Nazi symbols on Ukraine's front lines highlight 40 issues of history and they essentially seem to have framed this, there you see the The headline in the sub-headline makes clear what the framing of the article is, which is, the troops' use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.
So the concern seems to be not that the US and the West is placing very sophisticated offensive weapons in the hands of actual Nazi battalions, Whereas, as you say, in the U.S., any person who is even in any kind of proximity to Donald Trump is instantly accused of being a Nazi.
They want to censor them.
They want to criminalize them.
They think they should be removed from Congress.
But then they confront real Nazis, like the real deal Nazis, and they want to arm them.
And it's gotten so significant that even the New York Times finally ran a news story, albeit with the kind of concern not that we're arming Nazis, but that this helps Putin's propaganda.
So let me ask you about—go ahead, I want to hear your thoughts on that.
Of course, Russia is the most—this is the most idiotic dichotomy that they have.
Russia reports on everything bad about America because Russia wants America to look bad.
We are its opponent.
Russia loves talking about racism in America.
They've done that since the Soviet times.
They love, love, love talk about racism in America, highlighting it.
My childhood was raised about stories of how they subjugated the Native Americans.
You know, it's just part of Russian propaganda.
According to this logic, anybody who talks about racism in America is giving fuel to Russian propaganda.
That's how idiotic this is.
You know, the problem with killing George Floyd is not killing George Floyd.
It's a fact that kind of the optics are going to make it real good for the Kremlin.
OK, it's the most absurd nonsense.
It's a problem in America.
It's good for Russian propaganda.
So if we don't want to give in to Russian propaganda, we should be running cat videos 24-7.
Okay, instead of talking about problems in America.
That's how stupid and that's how dangerous this paradigm is.
Yeah, I mean, anything that you say that somehow aligns with the Russian view of the world, even if it's true, for example, opposing U.S.
war policy or saying that the U.S.
invaded Iraq unjustifiably and killed a lot of people, that's something also Russia wants to play up.
Somehow you then become a Russian propagandist for doing nothing more than criticizing your own government.
Of course, that was the smear tactic for 50 years throughout the Cold War.
That was the defining McCarthyite strategy, which was to depict every dissident to U.S.
war policy of being A Kremlin agent is very much alive, more so now than ever.
And that's a good segue into this episode that you alluded to, which was the renowned Pink Floyd rock star Roger Waters has been controversial in the West for a long time, largely because of his harsh criticisms of the government of Israel and its occupation of Palestine.
But he has also become And this has clearly increased significantly the hostility toward him, one of the most vocal voices condemning the U.S.
and NATO war posture, and Ukraine blaming the U.S.
for provoking the war, for suggesting that the U.S.
and NATO are purposely making the war far worse, and that has made him a target of all kinds of smear campaigns, and now in Germany there's a criminal investigation That has been opened up because in Germany he did something that he's been doing for many years, which is as part of the performance that he does of various songs from The Wall, the famous film that was based on a Pink Floyd album, that is about a fascist dictator who becomes insane.
He dresses as the fascist dictator in order to mock and denounce him.
It's a satire, a parody of fascism, and they pretended, the police in Berlin did, to think that he was somehow promoting Nazism or Dressed in a Nazi uniform as a way of advancing Nazism, which they said is a violation of the criminal law in Germany.
There's now this police investigation here in Brazil.
Roger Waters is scheduled to come and perform live shows in October.
The Justice Minister of Brazil warned that they would send the federal police to his shows and if he promotes Nazism, he'll be arrested on the spot because it's also a crime in Brazil to do that.
And yet you are pretty indignant about the posture of the U.S.
State Department on this question, about which weighed in, about the German government when it comes to this issue of accusing with the most bad faith possible Roger Waters of promoting Nazism.
What is your view on that episode?
One of the biggest, most amazing feats of propaganda has been Germany's claim that they are sorry about the Holocaust and indeed so sorry that they will be at the forefront of Holocaust remembrance and they will crack down on anything to do with the Holocaust, anything that desecrates Holocaust memory.
That is a lie.
Germany is filled, as I've shown in, I've reported for CNN and for The Forward, Germany is filled with streets, with hospitals, with universities, with a concert hall.
I'm talking about dozens, not dozens, hundreds, okay?
This is a map that I put there, okay?
And this is not all of them, this is just some.
These are things that honor literal Nazis, members of the Nazi party, including people who are convicted in Nuremberg, which is the war criminal, which is a war tribunal at the end of World War Two to go after the Nazis.
So this, this is people who are irredeemable.
Okay.
These are people who had hundreds of thousands of concentration camp slaves, people who, people who just enable the Holocaust in the German war machine.
So, Roger Waters, if he wanted to, could go to a concert hall in Germany that's named after, that has a statue of a literal convicted war criminal in Nuremberg.
That, according to Germany, is not a problem.
That is not a glorification of Nazism.
However, Roger Waters wearing a costume, that becomes dangerous.
So, the notion that Germany cares about this is a lie, and it's a brilliant, brilliant lie that they pulled off.
The country is covered with glorification of literal Nazis and war criminals.
And the fact that the US State Department felt the need to speak out on this when they were remaining silent on so many other things.
For example, they said nothing about the New York Times articles.
Two New York Times articles came out about neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
Okay, this is the country that we're arming.
This is the country that is getting billions and billions of dollars in weapons.
And somehow the State Department, which can't sleep at night because of Roger Waters and his costume, didn't see the need to issue any statements when it comes to what's going on with the country that we're funding.
So it's this atrocious hypocrisy from the people whose job it is, supposedly, to warn about it.
And the hardest thing about it, too, is I talk to Jews in America all the time.
People Don't believe anything unless the Jewish organizations, the watchdogs, the State Department, the people whose job it is to sound the alarm, these people who've taken upon themselves the mantle of being the arbiters of what is anti-Semitism and what is not.
People don't believe anything unless they endorse it.
Right.
not only are they appeasing anti-Semitism, they're making it impossible for other people to actually speak out against this.
Because the assumption is, of course, if Ukraine had neo-Nazis, the State Department would say something, you know?
Surely. - Right, you would think.
I mean, and I think what this really reveals is that right now, the single most important foreign policy objective in the United States, in the West writ large, without question, is fueling this war in Ukraine for whatever motives people have in wanting to do that.
And as a result, anybody who becomes a prominent opponent of that war policy is the target of smear campaigns and character assassination attempts, the likes of which I really have not seen since the Early days following the 9-11 attack when the climate was so repressive where you couldn't even utter a syllable of dissent, it really reminds me of that.
That's obviously what happened here with Roger Waters, the reason they wanted to turn him into a supporter of Nazism with the most bad faith interpretation of a show.
And it's also the reason I appreciate your work so much because I know that doing reporting like this, that kind of cuts against the narrative.
not even necessarily opposing the U.S. war posture in Ukraine, but just kind of pointing out some of the propaganda and the falsities embedded in it is not an easy task.
It subjects you to a lot of attacks.
I appreciate the fact that you're able to maintain access to these mainstream outlets where this stuff is rarely heard, CNN, The New York Times, and other outlets that continue to publish your reporting.
And I really appreciate you doing that, and you're taking the time to come and talk to us on our show tonight.
I've been hoping to have you on for a long time.
I'm glad we finally made it work and we'll definitely have you back on in the future and I hope everybody follows your work as well.
It's very informed and important and courageous.
I'm honored to do this and thank you so much because you've helped keep me sane for a long time.
Because for a long time it was you and just a few others who were saying that.
Yeah, I appreciate your work a lot.
Thank you very much.
Have a great evening and we will talk to you shortly.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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