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March 4, 2022 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
22:54
Putin Escalates Atrocities In Ukraine

This is an abbreviated version of our weekly Patreon show. To access the full-episode and support the pod, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest events in Ukraine as Putin's poorly trained soldiers and faulty equipment stalls his attempt to take over Ukraine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates-Axton, and I am glad to announce that Nick Halseman is back, so you don't have to listen to me ramble and stall and talk to myself.
It's good to have you back, Nick.
It's good to be back, Jared.
Thank you for making me feel welcome.
Well, I gotta tell you, you know, it was really weird, the timing of you being gone.
Considering I basically had to sum up the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war as you had gone and try and give some historical background to it.
I was left really wondering how you'd felt about it and luckily there was a lot more that happened since then for people who haven't already.
Go back and check out Nick and I did a live stream on Tuesday night after President Joe Biden's State of the Union.
We'll talk a little bit about that tonight just to get everybody on the same page, but that is out there.
We get into Ukraine quite a bit.
But yeah, I was wondering how you felt about this thing and since then it has, it's just gotten worse, man.
Yeah, and we should just say that you can watch that live show on our Patreon page at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
That's where you go and you can hang out with us in the middle of this stuff if we're impromptu, you know, live streams and Q&As and such.
Just to get everybody on the same page where we are right now, The war in Ukraine has escalated as we kind of expected that it would.
Of course, Vladimir Putin's designs to take over Ukraine in just a few days, almost in a lightning strike, a blitzkrieg, if you will, have been thwarted so far by a combination of Ukrainian resistance and a bunch of Russians who just do not want to do this.
And there's evidence mounting that they're sabotaging their own efforts.
They're taking down their own vehicles.
They're messing this thing up.
They simply do not want to be there.
But regardless, Vladimir Putin is continuing with his plans.
Emmanuel Macron, who apparently spoke with Putin for about an hour and a half, had a message for the Western world.
And basically, it's that it will get worse unless Ukraine agrees to its terms.
That's not going to happen as long as the current regime is in place in Ukraine.
Maybe if they assassinated Zelensky and replaced him with a puppet, maybe perhaps you would have some sort of a ceasefire.
But I have to tell you, I don't think the insurgency is going to stop, which means that, Nick, we're in for some really awful tragedy coming down the pike.
Yeah, if ever we thought that we live in a global world order where people behave and that there are consequences for your actions, there aren't.
And maybe there never were.
Okay, so I know you were out for part of this week, and I hope for your sake and the people you love's sake that you weren't reading these news articles and punditry essays that were coming out.
Monday, and I knew it was coming, Nick.
I felt so sick about it because I knew over the weekend that it was coming on Monday.
And then of course I open it up and of course there's one article or another about the Western world has answered the call.
You know, everybody who said that the neoliberal global order was gonna buckle and collapse, which by the way, that's exactly what I said and is exactly what's actually happening.
All these articles are like, look at these sanctions.
Look at all these, look at all these monuments in the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag.
This is proof that the neoliberal world order works.
Well, guess what, assholes?
This is proof that there are problems.
And this thing is continuing.
It doesn't matter how many sanctions you levy.
It doesn't matter how many monuments you light up with the colors.
It doesn't matter how much cable news pays attention to this thing.
It's just getting worse.
You mentioned supply lines and equipment failures.
Independent of any kind of sabotage, there's some amazing threads out there from Americans who are in the military who might not, maybe they shouldn't even be sharing the information they have, right?
It's something to talk about.
Whether or not they should be sharing these things.
But like they're analyzing the photos and they're realizing like I just read and I can't get over how fascinating it was is that they're explaining why so many of these vehicles wheels are shredding and one of the reasons is that because the way their inflation system works or the tires you have to move these vehicles like once a month Otherwise, you know, whatever, they fall apart.
And so, the evidence they keep seeing is like, one guy was saying these vehicles probably hadn't been moved for like a year.
And they're so corrupt and so mismanaged in the military itself that like nobody knows this.
Nobody is doing this.
No one has, you know, they don't have to do this.
They reduced the conscription to one year.
So now, from two years to one year, so now, like, you know, people are going in, they barely get trained and they're out.
So you have no, like, sort of, you know, chain of command or in the sense that, you know, people have been there for a long time are, you know, career soldiers and know how to do this shit.
So part of me was looking at this, like, kind of hoping that this would be a thing that would really, you know, get the Russians stuck in the mud.
So on that note, and this is important, so if people haven't heard this already, the solo episode that I recorded on Tuesday's podcast talked about the Crimean War.
And the Crimean War is this moment where Russia, again, fucked around and found out.
And this was one of those situations where Russia believed it was this invincible, undefeatable military machine.
And I have to tell you that in places like this, particularly where you either have an authoritarian in control, a dictator in control, they rely on a story.
Right.
And Vladimir Putin has relied on the story, which is that he is all knowing, all seeing, he has control over everything.
And as a result, Russia is still this magnificent military.
Everything is just absolutely just a machine that's going to roll over and destroy people.
In this case, we're finding out that that that isn't what's happening.
You have a military that wasn't prepared for this, but also, more importantly, you have a military that's not interested in this.
You know, we were talking about this before we started recording.
It's basically like almost family members fighting family members at this point.
They keep saying they look like us.
We don't know what we're supposed to be doing here.
We don't know why we're doing this.
So you have people sabotaging, you have people who aren't fighting as hard as they necessarily could.
But then also, here's the larger problem here.
Vladimir Putin did not do a good job of convincing His people, why they should be doing this.
And, you know, we're really lucky in that regard.
Because whenever you take a look at history, and you find the really effective movements in history, what you find are charismatic leaders.
You find leaders who clothe themselves in a religious mythology.
We were talking about this, I believe, on Tuesday night.
We were talking about Adolf Hitler, right?
When Adolf Hitler was rising in the Nazi party, he turned himself into a messiah.
He turned himself into a savior who was going to lead Germany.
He took over the churches.
He took over all this stuff.
And sure, Putin has used religion for his own means, but he didn't transmit a nationalist mythology to all these people.
He talks about And we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute.
But he really looked down on the people so much that he was like, ah, they'll go along with anything.
The military will go along with anything.
He didn't go through the process of indoctrinating people into this.
In fact, he's surrounded by people who don't respect him.
They fear him, right?
It's a bunch of people who think at any moment he might kill them.
It doesn't mean that they'll go with him into battle.
It doesn't mean they'll sacrifice their lives.
Now, all of this is to say that this is one of the reasons why things have happened the way that they are.
But let's bring up something very important.
Russia is rolling out weaponry that doesn't care about ideology.
We're talking about cluster bombs.
We're talking about vacuum bombs.
We're talking about weird, bizarre, new, heat-based technology that will literally suck the air out of your lungs.
We're talking about war crimes, right?
That doesn't care if Vladimir Putin made a good case to the people.
That's where this is going.
We've already seen war crimes committed.
We're about to see war crimes committed on a massive scale by a dictator who is frustrated that his plans haven't been carried out in the way that he wanted them carried out.
There's a difference between people and weapons.
And in this case, he failed with the people, but the weapons are there.
And we're going to see some real tragic scenes start to roll out.
Right.
That's the irony is that, you know, had this gone smoother for Russia in the initial few days, they wouldn't be, he wouldn't have felt basically embarrassed, right?
This is out of embarrassment that he's now going to have to put his quote unquote foot down.
And I mean, we've already seen it.
The bloodletting would have happened behind the scenes.
Okay.
Right.
Like you would have had people purged, you would have had people liquidated, you would have had assassinations and executions, but it would have happened away from the eye of the camera, away from the eye of the world.
In this case you're exactly right.
It's going to be video upon video upon video of neighborhoods being set aflame.
Yeah, and we're seeing that already.
We're seeing eight-story apartment buildings just being completely taken out.
These are all civilian targets.
I'm not even sure.
They might not have enough accuracy to know exactly where these missiles are flying to.
I really don't have a lot of faith in any of the training that these Russian soldiers have at all.
Have you heard the conspiracy theories?
Have you heard what the Russian propaganda line is that's circulating?
No, tell me.
So, and I know it shouldn't shock anybody, but the far right in America and in Europe believes that Vladimir Putin is a faultless, benevolent leader who's doing this to protect himself.
And we'll get more into that here in just a minute.
But basically what's being said, and this is really insidious shit, it is.
Is that every building that's being exploded is either a globalist hideout, because of course that's one of the lies, but also that he's targeting bioweapons labs.
that are cooking up the next pandemic the next world destroying pandemic and that what we have been experiencing with COVID is being cooked up in these bioweapons labs in Ukraine or it's of course chemical weapons or you name it but the the lie is that every place that gets blown up is in some way some sort of a malevolent Headquarters.
That's the lie that is circulating with the FAR right now.
Well, you know, obviously we know, we recognize that, right?
Because that happens in another part of the world, namely in Palestine, where they will level buildings that they insist also have, you know, terrorists doing their own stuff in those buildings.
And they do it on purpose amongst all the civilians.
Now, I'm willing to believe that that's true in Palestine, and that the Palestinians do that.
Yeah, I'm not buying that, but we can disagree on that.
Okay.
Well, either way.
And then, you know, but whatever.
But what's interesting is that they can then say, well, look, Israel does it, so it has to be okay.
You don't have a problem when they do it, so why do you have a problem when the Russians are doing it now?
And it kind of shuts you up to some degree, where you're like, well, frankly, it would shut me up, because whoever would tell me that would be so crazy that there's nothing to discuss.
At that point?
Well, I'll just say very quickly, and this is a good point to bring up early in this conversation, because we're going to talk about some other things, too, where this is important.
We live in a dichotomous world, and everything has been so shrunk down and crunched down that you have to be on one side of something or the other, right?
And we're seeing that in terms of the ideology, left, center, right, you name it.
And people are getting all these things wrong because they're so dedicated to dichotomous positions.
I'll tell you something very, very quickly, which is, I think that the West has really screwed up in all of this, but that doesn't mean that Vladimir Putin should do this, right?
Those are two things that you can both raise your eyebrow at and say, this whole thing still sucks and is awful and isn't at all okay.
And so in this case, what you were saying in terms of like what's happening in Palestine, I think that's a crime.
I think what's happening in Syria is a crime.
I think that we have to stop with this black and white.
This part is good.
This part's OK.
And we've talked about this before so much, which is this thing where we have to make excuses for things that we know are wrong.
Like just because the United States of America invaded Iraq doesn't make the invasion of Ukraine okay.
Both of those things are terrible.
Both of those things are war crimes.
Both of those things are deplorable.
And we have to get to the point where I think we can have something more nuanced and real, you know.
Well, the thought that hit me earlier today was that I cannot believe that we're basically right back in 1960, where John F. Kennedy goes out and says, we're going to be the police for democracies across the world, and we're going to protect people who are under attack, right?
And that sort of laid out a whole, you know, Pax Americana notion across the world for a long, long time.
Obviously, there's issues with that, and we saw what the CIA did with that kind of free reign for a long time.
And we're now right back at the same moment where we have to figure out, well, are we the police for people who want to be free and live in a democracy, or are we not?
Or are we only the police for, like, you know, a couple people that we like or that look like us?
You know, this is a real issue here.
And, you know, part of me feels like it's like, well, what are we supposed to do at this point?
Because I get it.
If we try and intervene, you know, the alternative of that, or the result of that, is terrible.
And the end of the world, probably, right?
Did you see the Sean Hannity quote?
Did you see what he said?
I did, but remind me what I just saw.
So, by the way, for people who don't know, I mean, Sean Hannity is... He's what we like to call a heavy intellect.
I mean, just... Mensa member Sean Hannity, just...
I mean, I'm impressed he could ever wear a hat with that head full of brains that that fella's got.
Well, it's the beautiful hair.
Yo, it's incredible.
And listen, sarcasm aside, one of the most open secrets in the world is that Sean Hannity is a dullard.
I mean, just, and always has been, has no idea what he's talking about at any given time.
I don't know if you've seen anything from his show recently, but he's got like 16 lapel pins.
It's incredible.
But so Sean Hannity comes out and he's like, you know, this convoy that's heading towards Kiev, we should just bomb it and pretend that it wasn't us.
Don't take credit for it, yeah.
He's basically saying, you know, they would never know that it was us.
How could they ever know it was us?
And in all of this, I got to tell you, the really disturbing thing, and for anybody who hasn't listened to our coverage of the State of the Union, The Western powers are pinned in right now based on their own rules and their own definitions and the world that they created.
Joe Biden, in that speech and what he's been saying over the past couple of weeks or last week, I guess last week, has more or less just been like, let's let's get back to normal, folks.
You know, this is a thing that's going to happen.
And and it's really disgusting because it's like a corporation.
It's like a corporation that takes advantage of people of color or that exploits slave labor.
Meanwhile, it throws up a Ukrainian flag picture on its Twitter profile.
It's public relations.
They want this thing to end as quickly as possible so that the business of the world can continue on.
You know, they would much rather there wasn't a bunch of suffering and war crimes and all of this stuff.
The West is pinned in by their own bullshit.
But as they're watching this, they're like, let's get done with this so we can get back to the business.
And that's the really disturbing part in all of this is the desire for it to just be over so we don't have to be confronted with it.
What do you make of all these, you know, think pieces that discuss Putin and that basically the text is?
You think he's not going to do it.
He will do it.
Right.
I keep seeing that and it keeps trying to convince us like, oh, he is going to launch nuclear weapons.
Don't worry if he threatens he'll do it.
He will do it.
And I'm now I'm trying to wonder exactly what the motivation of those articles are, because if he's going to do it anyway, right, then it almost doesn't matter if we intervene or not.
And what would I mean?
Is he really going to be like a wing of a American fighter?
So, here's the thing, and I've been thinking about this a lot.
thought we could.
Game on.
Is that what it's going to be?
Or do we have to now?
I mean, do you expect us?
Should we be intervening right now and stopping the Russians from getting into Ukraine?
So here's the thing.
And I've been thinking about this a lot.
The only way I can answer that is by saying that I reject the premise.
I reject the dichotomy that...
They either intervene or they don't because they've created a scenario that I had no business being a part of.
I wasn't part of NATO.
I wasn't part of creating the article.
I didn't create this world order.
It's a bad situation.
And I got to tell you.
Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of structures.
You know what I mean?
So the invasion of Ukraine, it's almost like somebody saying, if you step over this line, we're going to have a fight.
And the person steps up to the line and reaches over and slaps you in the face.
I'm like, I'm not over the line.
I'm not over the line, right?
And it's a really awful thing that's occurred here because When we create structures of power, and we're going to talk about NATO here in just a second because we got to get into this thing.
This is like one of the bigger debates that's happening.
When you create structures of power, what you end up doing is you're trying to create stability, but stability is absolutely impossible.
There's no ability whatsoever to have a permanent, stable regime, particularly in a capitalist environment.
Vladimir Putin is probably the richest man in the world.
And Russia is not only incredibly wealthy, but they're secretly wealthy.
They have control of oil, they have control of God knows how much hidden wealth that's all throughout the world.
As that concentrated wealth takes place, Nick, why wouldn't they go after the world order?
Why wouldn't they test it?
He's just going to die with all of that money?
No, he believes himself to be a historical actor.
And what you look at when you look at history, prior to World War I, the people who created the world order prior to that, they're like, this is going to last forever!
This is too good!
We're all on the same page.
And then all of a sudden Germany becomes a nation and they're like, we want something.
And it just goes all to hell.
And then, by the time you get to World War II, they think, with the Treaty of Versailles, that they've created something permanent.
All of a sudden, Germany is like, we don't accept this.
We move forward.
In all of this, I think when people say that Putin is being serious, and that we need to take him seriously, which is something that I keep trying to tell people as well, it's about reframing the context of this.
Because so many of these people writing these think pieces Nick, I don't know how else to say it.
They're lost in a dream.
They really truly think that all of these rules and all of these structures will outlive them.
Because they rely on them.
Because they're wealthy.
They come from privilege.
They're part of the larger apparatus.
And I think people who say, hey, he's serious about this, are trying to say, you need to rethink how to approach this.
Because simply seizing a yacht, and by the way, I'm all for seizing those yachts.
Get them all.
Get all them yachts, right?
But just seizing yachts and just putting sanctions out there, we've already seen, they're not going to stop this.
They're more public relations than they are anything else.
Yeah, I mean, it's a concept to me that I've been trying to wrap my head around in the notion of, you know, is NATO expansion, quote-unquote expansion, the equivalent from Russia's perspective of an incursion?
Right?
Is it like, you know, if if NATO, if if Ukraine joins NATO, Is that basically the same thing to Putin as a military incursion on his land?
Because we know he basically considers Ukraine part of Russia, because he wants to go back to Alexander the Great, right?
He wants to bring Russia, the great Russian Empire back.
This is not the Soviet Union stuff he's looking for.
He wants to bring back, you know, the Empire.
It's a combination of the things.
So his background with Alexander Dugin is a combination of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
They wanted both.
Alexander Dugin, I gotta tell you, man, is so bizarre.
He starts this movement, which they call National Bolshevism, which is a combination of Nazism and Bolshevism, which I don't know if everyone is paying attention at home.
Those two things led to millions of deaths, right?
They don't get along.
The left and the right do not get along.
He created that.
It's this amalgamation of it.
So he does.
He wants the Russian Empire and he also wants the Soviet Union together.
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