Here’s the News: Is Ukraine Really The Democracy We’re Told It Is?
As Joe Biden and the Democrats continue to make threats as to why the US must continue to fund Ukraine, members of Congress are now revealing the true reasons behind it. And as Nancy Pelosi says this is about protecting democracy, is Ukraine really the democracy we’re told it is? --💙Support Me Directly HERE: https://rb.rumble.comWATCH me LIVE weekdays on Rumble: https://bit.ly/russellbrand-rumbleReclaim your health at http://twc.health/BRAND, use code BRAND for 10% off at checkout.
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Hello there you awakening wonders, thanks for joining us on our mutual voyage to truth
You see how people now are saying we don't want to fund this war in Ukraine anymore, it's clearly not working, you lied to us from the beginning, you didn't tell us you started it in the first place and that Putin would stop the whole thing if you didn't allow Ukraine to join NATO.
Well, now, because there's a bit more opposition and a recent attempt to get $108 billion failed, you'll see more and more media saying If we do not win this war against Russia, or if Ukraine don't, sorry I don't know why I said we, if Ukraine don't win, you Crane, not we Crane, don't win that war against Russia, Putin will start invading, I don't know, Finland and other NATO members, but is Ukraine really a democracy as we understand democracy anyway?
And is there a set of other reasons for perpetuating this war?
And now that people are opposing the war, whether that's within the institutions of American politics or in the public at large, are they escalating the threat?
We have to stop Putin now.
He's going to invade somewhere else.
He doesn't seem to be doing that.
I mean, he's never invaded anywhere, has he?
Except Ukraine, which he said he would do if you tried to get him in NATO.
Let's have a look at it, try and understand it a little better ourselves, because I tell you I won't tell you the truth.
Joe Biden and the legacy media.
Let's get into it.
Breaking news.
Senate Republicans blocking a bill that includes billions of dollars in aid for Israel and Ukraine, despite dire warnings from the administration that US funding for Ukraine will run out in a matter of weeks.
President Biden tonight also warning, quote, we can't let Putin win.
Can't let him win, can't let him win.
And what the hell is that program gonna be with Antony Blinken and King Charles?
King Charles and Antony Blinken?
Don't watch that.
I believe that any member of Congress who does not support funding for Ukraine is voting for an outcome that will make it easier for Putin to prevail.
Do you see what democracy is here now, in our countries?
Democracy is, do as we tell you, otherwise you're not democratic.
But isn't democracy the freedom to choose via the ballot or other means, That is, a vote against supporting Ukraine is a vote to improve Putin's strategic position.
That's just an inescapable reality.
It's inescapable, we can't escape that reality.
Not by going off the planet, not by setting up some sort of colony under the sea.
There is no escape from that reality.
But actually, you would have to say, what's democracy like in your country lately?
For example, did you get to vote on any of these wars that are going on right now?
And what's democracy like in the Ukraine right now?
I.e.
is it a representation of the kind of liberal democratic values that we sort of all generally understand?
I.e.
Assemblies and councils and judiciary and people voting for X and Y or whatever.
Is that what's happening?
Or are we in some sort of weird crisis time where the word democracy just means centralised, homogenised administration that basically prohibits and limits your power in any way they can and is looking for new ways to limit it every day?
A vote against supplemental funding for Ukraine Get ready for more of that rhetoric in the forthcoming election.
If you vote for anyone, anyone other than Joe Biden, unless we can get someone younger, and let's face it, everyone's younger.
If you vote for anyone other than Joe Biden, I mean Bobby Kennedy, I mean Cornel West, I mean Marianne Williamson, I certainly mean Trump or Vivek or any of those lunatics, then you are voting for Wait, Putin.
It will hurt democracy and help dictators, and we think that that is not the right lesson of history, and that every member, Democrat and Republican, should vote to support this one.
Okay, so democracy is do as I tell you, which essentially is what new technological dictatorships look like.
You're sort of told you're in a democracy, but you don't seem to have very much freedom in it.
Excuse me, isn't that a tyranny?
If you ask that question, that is helping Putin to win.
Here's Chris Murphy escalating the tension on your TV set.
What I know is that the future of the world is at stake.
If we fail, if Republicans don't get reasonable in the next 24 to 48 hours, Russia is going to march into Ukraine, China is going to be given a green light to invade Taiwan.
The world for my children is fundamentally different under that scenario.
The United States security is at risk.
But other threats might include hyperbole, hysterical rhetoric designed to prevent you being able to think straight, and it seems also to continue to legitimize the funding of an unwinnable war.
Unwinnable!
So I don't know why Antony Blinken is using phrases like win-win.
90% of the security assistance we provided has actually been spent here in the United States with our manufacturers, with our production, and that's produced more American jobs, more growth in our own economy.
So this has also been a win-win that we need to continue.
What they mean by that is that it's economically been valuable.
He's essentially there just admitted that the money for the military aid has remained in the US, generating jobs.
That old favourite argument.
If you let the billionaire class continue to make money, you might get a few scraps.
And now a Christmas message from Joe Biden.
Give us more money for our wars, otherwise we're going to start killing your children.
Putin attacks a NATO ally if he keeps going, and then he attacks a NATO ally.
Well, we've committed as a NATO member that we defend every inch of NATO territory.
Now, listen to this.
We're all members of NATO, and there's no way of ever undoing that.
There's no way of sort of saying that NATO might be a thing that we don't need anymore, seeing as how the whole thing was just set up to tackle the Soviet Union, which doesn't exist now.
It's sort of given you all of these premises and promises, but actually we're a very narrow bandwidth of potential options.
We're in NATO.
Could we leave NATO?
Shut up.
And we've said that we're going to protect all NATO territory.
Do we have to do that?
Shut up.
And Putin's definitely going to attack other NATO companies.
Is he though?
Shut up.
So can we have your money or are we going to kill your children?
Bloody hell, yeah.
I mean, if that's the only alternative to a dictatorship, shut up.
Sorry for the Freudian slip where I say company instead of country, but you can see why that mistake might occasionally get made.
Then we'll have something that we don't seek and that we don't have today.
American troops fighting Russian troops.
Do you remember the goody days of 2022 when Joe Biden said, I promise you that we will not escalate tensions with Russia.
We will definitely not have boots on the ground.
That would be World War III for Christ's sake.
All of that kind of rhetoric.
Where's that now?
Where's that just lost, moving endlessly through the cosmos, endless vibrations of lies and nothingness.
Here he is in 2022 saying, we will never deploy troops against Russia.
While I will not send American servicemen to fight in Ukraine, God, it was a long time ago.
I forgot to say service people.
You know, like, what we're confronted with now is, we will deploy troops if you don't do what we tell you.
They've gone from recognising around the time of Vietnam, oh no, American people don't like to see their sons and daughters come home in body bags, to, alright, we can still have wars though, just using technology and drones and foreign folks to fight our proxy wars for us, to, well, if they don't want to fund our wars because they're getting too many alternative perspectives now because of independent media and a vibrant social discourse around important issues, We'll just go back to threatening to kill their children again.
It's a tale as old as time.
We will not fight the Third World War in Ukraine.
So now you've heard some ideological arguments for sustaining the war between Ukraine and Russia.
Putin is a mad demagogue, hell-bent on territorial expansionism across that region into NATO countries.
Countries, not companies.
Countries, damn it.
Why do I keep slipping up around that?
Now we're going to hear from Thomas Massey on Tucker, an alternative take and an alternative motivation, and you, using your consciousness, Biden's budget director, the head of the OMB, sent a letter yesterday to Speaker Mike Johnson, imploring him to spend more money in Ukraine.
complex. They really, really want to help children in Ukraine and they believe in this thing called
democracy. Or they like making money. You just yourself, just using your memory and that,
decide for yourself. Biden's budget director, the head of the OMB, sent a letter yesterday
to Speaker Mike Johnson imploring him to spend more money in Ukraine. And what they said is
they want to revitalise our defence industrial base. That's the new acronym, DIB, for the MIC,
the military industrial complex.
And they sent a list of states that would get money when we spend money on deadly munitions, because they have to be manufactured in Alabama or Ohio or Texas.
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Let's get back to the content.
And so, you know, they're saying the quiet part out loud, that congressmen tend to vote for this stuff because a lot of this federal spending that goes to Ukraine is actually laundered back to the military-industrial complex, and in some ways, not very efficiently, but in some ways it enriches people in their districts and the stockholders, some of whom are congressmen.
Amazing.
Now you see why there is such a requirement for censorship.
Because the way that the media functions now with figures like Tucker on X and other comparable voices, you could just say, do you reckon that these people in Congress owning stocks and shares is influencing them or their ability to say it's improving their local economies in their state?
Do you think that might be a factor?
Other than, of course, this humanitarian motive that we keep hearing so much about on CNN and MSNBC.
That is why censorship laws are so important, because you have to starve the media space of the oxygen of opposition.
That's what's happening.
And believe me, they'll go to extraordinary lengths to shut down dissenting voices.
One person who's probably pretty safe to speak in public is Nancy Pelosi.
Here she is defending Ukrainian democracy.
And now we're going to talk about what What democracy amounts to in the modern world and what's the real threat?
Is it populism, demagoguery, the rise of the right and extremism?
Or is it the fact that centralised authoritarian systems have become so corrupt and inept that something has to challenge them and if it's not going to be true democracy then the floodgates are open for all sorts of new opposition.
If they think they're saving money, they're not.
The Ukrainians have been champions fighting for their democracy and for democracy writ large.
If they were ever to lose, which is unthinkable... Don't think it.
Don't even think it in your mind.
How much control do you need, Nancy, for God's sake?
And we must make sure it doesn't happen.
But if they were ever to lose, can you imagine how expensive it would be to fight Putin in other countries?
It's just something that is unaffordable in terms of democracy.
But if you're just counting dollars, if you're just doing a green eye shade on it.
It's interesting she knows all those phrases, because have you noticed how often Nancy Pelosi invests, shall we say, in tune with the times?
Like, wow, Nancy, it's almost like you were at work regulating big tech companies, then Paul Pelosi made some investments that seem to benefit from some insider knowledge, or green shade dollar bill cute phrases that I've not even heard before.
She got more cash colloquialisms than 50 cents.
It's a false claim to say that you're going to save money.
Is it uncomfortable to hear people talking in financial terms about war?
And doesn't it show you how distracted and deracinated, how separated we've become from the realities of war?
I'm not claiming to know anything about the realities of war, I've never been in one, but to hear the discourse spoken of only in financial terms makes me recognise, hold on a minute, you don't really understand what's going on.
I bet if you sort of went round some of these Ukrainian districts or experienced the Russian lives that have been squandered pursuing what exactly, for whom exactly, So people can be members of NATO so that Raytheon and Lockheed Martin can perpetuate ideas that are beneficial to their bottom line?
To me, if that's what democracy has come to, then we need to look for alternatives.
There is transparency, there is accountability, there is values-based, as well as the dollars, the values-based courage of the Ukrainian people.
There's Nancy Pelosi's perspective on the war, the financial cost-benefit analysis of human lives, Ukrainian human lives, American human lives, presumably there's some sort of exchange rate value there, but we're all outsiders talking about Ukrainian politics, making assumptions about Ukrainian democracy and what Ukrainian people want, based on essentially a propaganda machine headed up by Zelensky, and I've got no reason to suspect that Zelensky's doing anything other than his absolute best, but here's an alternative take from Batali, Klitschko, mayor of Kiev, former heavyweight champion of the world, he's a patriotic guy presumably, so he's here to tell us that Ukrainian democracy is working really well and we should keep funding everything and make sure we preserve this perfect unit of liberal democracy.
Vitaly Klitschko, who's the mayor of Kiev, he's delivered an unprecedented critique of President Volodymyr Zelensky.
who warned that Ukrainians are losing trust in Zelensky, who he says is becoming increasingly autocratic in his presidency,
so much so that he warned that Ukraine could resemble Russia in the near future,
at least politically.
Put aside for a moment the fact that France 24 seems like a news channel
where people have just wandered in off the street and doing the news,
bit like this one I suppose, and sort of recognise that what Klitschko is saying
is that Ukraine is increasingly resembling Russia, so your tax dollars are funding a war between Ukraine and
Russia so that Ukraine don't get taken over by Russia,
meanwhile people in Ukraine are saying that the longer this goes on,
the more Ukraine is looking like Russia.
Money well spent.
But Zelensky is facing criticism from other high-ranking officials in Ukraine, really the first signs of a growing rift in Ukrainian leadership, particularly as the war sort of settles into a stalemate for the foreseeable future.
Some have argued that perhaps striking some kind of peace deal accord or some kind of negotiation with Russia could end the war, but this is something that for the moment Zelensky is vehemently opposed to.
So I'm sure Nancy Pelosi and all those other people that have vested financial interests in perpetuating a war know a lot more about Ukrainian politics and democracy than a Ukrainian politician who says it's not a democracy while he's mayor of Kyiv.
What does this guy know?
He's obviously some sort of conspiracy theorist, Putin apologist, nutbag.
So let's get into Ukrainian democracy.
The Ukrainian democracy that your tax dollars are funding and will continue to fund, and if they don't fund them, well, they're coming for your children next.
What is this?
Bible!
Many thousands have died needlessly in the unnecessary, unwinnable, and increasingly unaffordable war in Ukraine.
What a slogan.
It's unwinnable!
It's unnecessary!
It's unaffordable!
It's the war in Ukraine!
And just to give you some perspective, ringside, here's Vitaly Klitschko!
We're turning our own country into Russia.
Shut up, you!
you get Nancy Pelosi.
Although, in America, more and more, if you vote for anyone other than this, get used to that rhetoric.
Trump's a dictator.
The fact that so many such parties ever existed says something about the level of opposition faced by the Ukrainian nationalist government that came to power after the 2014 revolution.
Then, in May of 2022, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law formally banning all these parties.
President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law.
The list included the opposition platform For Life, which had held fully 10% of the seats in parliament.
Among the 11 banned parties are the Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Progressive Socialist Party of the Ukraine, the Union of Left Forces and the Communist Party of Ukraine.
So that's amazing, isn't it?
They're not at all socialist or left-wing or democratic.
Next you'll be telling me that there's a Nazi battalion fighting in this war and being heavily funded.
Democracies do not ban elections.
But Ukraine has put the democratic process itself on hold since declaring martial war in 2022.
This hiatus was supposed to be temporary.
Hmm, two weeks to flatten the curve.
But it has been repeatedly extended, most recently in July 2023.
As a result of that vote in the Ukrainian parliament, where all opposition parties have been removed, the parliamentary elections scheduled for last month were cancelled.
Presidential elections were scheduled for March 2024, but under current rules, they too will not be held, and Zelensky has stated that now is not the time for elections.
I wonder if Joe Biden likes him.
He's exactly the same.
We don't need primaries in Florida.
I'm not debating anybody.
It'll be bad for democracy.
Democracies do not censor the media, right?
Do we censor the media?
Are we passing censorship laws?
What does democracy mean right now?
Why are we escalating the threat of tyrants and dictators, perhaps to conceal the fact that what we're calling democracy is not exactly that, but a homogenized, somewhat banalized version of digital dictatorship?
In February 2022, the Ukrainian government ordered the nine largest television networks in Ukraine to combine their news operations into a single state-controlled news program called Telemarathon.
Rubbish.
You used to have nine channels.
Yes.
Now you got one channel.
Oh, and it's called Telemarathon.
In April 2022, the National Security Council ordered three independent television channels associated with Zelensky's predecessor taken off the air.
Democracy.
In December 2022, Zelensky signed a law which gave the National Broadcasting Council statutory authority to regulate all print broadcast and Digital media.
That's a lot of authoritarian control for a democracy.
Of course, if you are determined to support Ukraine, and I can understand that you would if you're Ukrainian, or you love anyone that's Ukrainian, or you just hate Russia or whatever, for so many reasons, you might think, yeah, but there's a war.
There's a war on.
And in wartime, you have to legitimise authoritarianism.
And I would say, yes, isn't that interesting, the way we seem to live in this time of perennial crisis, because that does legitimise authoritarianism more broadly.
But do countries that are in wars always ban democracy?
Is that a standard thing?
Perhaps we'll learn more about that in a minute.
This law gave the Ukrainian government the ability to censor and shut down independent platforms such as Google.
It's been harshly criticized by the European Federation of Journalists, which stated that it's incompatible with European Union membership.
Ukraine's own National Union of Journalists called the law the biggest threat to free speech in Ukraine's independent history.
That's weird, isn't it?
They're in the middle of a war with Russia, and the biggest threat to free speech is Ukraine, not Russia.
At this point, there are no independent television stations broadcasting news in Ukraine.
Print and digital media remain heavily censored.
Democracies do not prohibit travel.
Not yet, but get ready for the social credit scores, kids.
When Ukraine declared martial law, men aged 18 to 60 became subject to conscription and were therefore forbidden to leave the country.
Many have nevertheless sought to avoid the war by fleeing abroad.
Those apprehended by the border police are sent to military service.
Those who manage to escape remain mostly in Poland and Germany.
The Ukrainian government has asked the EU to forcibly return them to Ukraine, thus far without success.
Democracy, though.
Democracies do not restrict religious freedom.
In December 2022, Zelensky banned the activities of all religious organisations linked to Russia.
This included Ukraine's largest denomination, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had been closely integrated with the Russian Orthodox Church for more than a thousand years.
In May 2022, the church's synod of bishops, in a historic step, formally voted to sever all ties to Moscow and condemned the Russian Orthodox Church's support for the invasion of Ukraine.
This was not enough for the Ukrainian government.
It increased efforts to ban the Orthodox Oh man, this is not at all good, is it?
Do you not wish you'd known this earlier before, like the last hundred billion dollars or whatever that was sent over?
Like, what is it that we're fighting for here?
Is it possible that the Ukrainian cause is being utilised in order to facilitate projects of dominion and profit within the United States military-industrial complex?
Doesn't that seem a bit more likely now than... Democracy!
After you've heard all of this, and I recognise you'd want a lot of this verified, but it's not good, is it?
If people wish to join this new church, they should certainly be free to do so, but the government in Kiev has been forcing congregations to switch allegiance and seizing the property of those who resist.
Democracy.
The Ukrainian Parliament is now preparing to formally outlaw the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Democracies do not seek to ban a nation's oldest and largest denomination.
No, in fact, that's a clear sign of tyranny, I think, when you start coming for organisations like that and just banning them wholesale.
If this was taking place, imagine, In a country where it's convenient for United States military interests to be bombing it, this would be the list of things that they would give you, innit?
We've got to bomb this lot because of this list of things.
Sorry, which lot?
I'm sorry, I mean the people that this lot are fighting.
We've got to bomb them.
But what about all this?
The information itself is not important.
What's important is our agenda, and we will use the information however we want to.
Democracy.
Finally, we've been hesitant to focus on the far-right complexion of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.
Terms like fascist and neo-Nazi are thrown about far too glibly.
For a deep into dictator month over on Legacy Media in America, you can barely watch the news without them saying, Trump's like Mao, Trump's like Mussolini, Trump's like Hitler, Trump's like Putin.
This doesn't look that democratic, does it?
I want to start using the word fascist.
Yeah, he's a fascist.
Many tendencies like Adolf Hitler.
I said it, throw me off the air.
Yet perhaps we should have been more forthcoming, for there are undeniably authoritarian overtones to the Ukrainian nationalist movement.
You need not take our word for it, simply look up Stefan Bandera or the Azov Brigade and draw your own conclusions about where nationalism ends and racism begins.
To be fair, governments do frequently limit civil liberties in times of crisis.
Our own Patriot Act did that.
President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for Southern sympathisers during the American Civil War, but never cancelled elections.
Neither did Winston Churchill, to whom Zelensky is sometimes compared.
Churchill actually lost the 1945 British election and had to watch Clement Attlee take the final victory lap for World War II.
The catalogue of authoritarian abuses is growing in Ukraine and shows little sign of slowing under the guidance of the West's favourite autocrat, Zelensky.
It has created a state-controlled church, taken control of all television news and banned major opposition parties.
This far exceeds anything that occurred in recent American or British history.
Both of those nations remained fundamentally democratic during war, even a civil war.
This latest cancellation of presidential elections in Ukraine just shows any pretense that we are supporting a functioning democracy.
It also illustrates to me the important fact that we tend to organize information in a way that's convenient to our agenda.
There'll be people that just will go, no, but he's having to do that because of this and because of that because of the other.
Now, this is the side I'm firmly down on.
Whatever is publicly being said by the establishment about the perpetuation of this conflict between Ukraine and Russia, it is ultimately because of US financial interests and globalist interests.
And actually, I'm I'm kind of sick of the type of politics where anyone, from the left or right or anywhere, stands up and says, this is what we should be doing.
I think now, democracy, just say to people, look, there's sort of some justification, it seems, for supporting Ukraine because there's this war in Russia.
How did it start?
God, it's complicated.
We did impede on former Soviet territories in a way that we said that we wouldn't.
Then there was a coup in 2014.
We've got a bunch of biolabs over in Ukraine.
There's some complexity in some of the regions around Don Basque as demonstrated by the allegiances between their
two orthodox churches But anyway, do you want to get involved in that or would
you rather see some money spent on schools and hospitals and generation of jobs
Maybe some sort of new deal for the American people Yeah
Some people might go we want to fund Ukraine and some people might go we want to fund hospitals and schools
And I think we're at this point We can't maintain the idea that there is one
hegemonic space that one party or the uni party of America because I think they're both
Fundamentally the same just moves around the resources of the American people while your standard of life continually
deteriorates Well, our culture becomes more and more nihilistic hollowed
out and empty and we're pretending that these globalist projects are somehow humanitarian
I think that what's needed, not only in Ukraine, but in the United Kingdom, and in the United States of America, is democracy.
Democracy means the people decide the direction of the nation's resources, and the people can make mistakes for themselves, rather than continuing to financially support the mistakes of the elite, particularly when it's evident they're lying to us, and whatever the reasons for their support of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, it doesn't seem to be the support of democracy, because there isn't one.
Well, that's just what I think.
More important than that, though, if you can, please stay free.
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