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March 24, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:35
2647 World War 3: The Crimean Crisis - Ukraine, Russia, the European Union and the United States
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Hi everybody, it's DeFan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Back with us is Dr.
Paul Craig Roberts, pretty much the most popular interviewee we've ever had on the show, probably because I talked the least, at least that's my guess.
He was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, a former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, the author of over 10 books, and an elegant and obviously well-researched writer, so I appreciate that.
And we're going to talk a little bit about US foreign policy, but focusing in particular, you've written a lot about the sort of deep history of what's going on In Crimea, which always seems to get portrayed as hand puppets of good and evil, you know, the rebellious freedom fighters versus basically the stormtroopers of the empire in Russia.
But of course, the history is a lot more nuanced.
I wonder if you could help people understand a little bit about where this supposed conflict is coming from.
Okay.
You know, Crimea has been part of Russia since, I think, Catherine the Great in the late 18th century.
It was Russia's warm water port.
So they would have Huron Navy and not be iced in from their northern seaports.
And so prior to the Russians, it was Tardis, and they were descendants of the various Mongolians that had overrun the entirety of Russia at one time in history.
And so Russia took that part back, and it was part of Russia until 1954.
At that time, of course, Ukraine—oh, and let me say, Ukraine also has been part of Russia since, I think, about the time of Catherine the Great.
She conquered whatever that they needed.
And sorry, just for the occasional listener who don't know who Catherine the Great is, that means that Ukraine has been part of Russia for longer than America has been a country.
So that's an important thing to understand.
That's about it, or at least for as long.
And so Ukraine was part of Russia.
And of course, both of them became part of the Soviet Union.
And during the Soviet era, both early with Lenin and later in 1954 with Khrushchev, various Russian territories were stuck out of the Russian Republic and stuck into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.
Now, it didn't make any difference because it was all the same country.
Lenin, I think, put some of the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine, essentially Russian cities.
And Khrushchev in 1954 stuck in Crimea.
Now, no one really knows all these reasons, maybe to sort of please the Ukrainians.
Khrushchev himself was Ukrainian.
He was called the butcher of the Ukraine one time or the other.
And other people say that Khrushchev stuck Crimea into Ukraine in order to water down the pro-Nazi elements in Western Ukraine who had fought for Adolf Hitler against the Soviet Union during World War II. And so that this was some sort of a party calculation that will add some Russian population,
some more Russian population, to counterbalance I'm sorry, I'd like to throw in something as well, too, because when you say fought with Hitler against the communists, I would argue that it was because, of course, in the 1930s, under Stalin's program of collectivized farming, the Ukrainians were suffering mass starvation.
Millions of people died in the Ukraine, just as later they did under Mao in China.
And they were desperate to throw off communism because it literally was starve to death or get rid of the communists.
It wasn't that they were just innately pro-Nazi.
Well, I'm sure the collectivization did stir them up.
But the Ukrainians weren't the only ones to suffer from collectivization.
It wasn't done for the purpose of starving.
It was a policy that failed.
What Stalin was trying to do, and I'm not making any apologies for him, just explaining.
What he was trying to do was implement a Marxist economic system in which there would be no buying and selling.
So the farmers would turn over their food to the authorities, just as the factory workers would turn over their manufactured goods to the authorities, and the authorities then would redistribute these products.
Food would go north to the cities and manufactured Goods would go to the farmlands.
This was a crackpot scheme, but it was based in ideology, like most schemes, even those in the United States and the EU. And it failed.
And of course, it It meant a great threat to Soviet power, particularly in the cities, because that's where their base was and the workers, the proletariat, they were called.
And so to keep the workers from rebelling against the brand new revolution, they really squeezed down on the farmers and essentially just confiscated their food and left them to starve.
So that was That was the way it happened.
It wasn't due to animosity toward Ukrainians.
Well, now, to finish this, when Khrushchev transferred Crimea, he did not transfer Sevastopol, the naval base.
That stayed as a subject to central Soviet governance.
Now, when Soviet Union fell apart, And the deal was made for Ukraine to emerge as an independent country.
Under U.S. pressure, Sevastopol was stuck into Crimea with the rest and transferred to Ukraine.
So the Russians were in an anomalous position.
They had their naval base there, and it was now part of Ukraine.
So they were compensated with a Leaves on the base until the year 2042 were permitted 25,000 troops to be kept there, certain number of fighter aircraft, certain number of tanks and artillery.
It's all specified in the agreement.
And so when it was reported in the Western media that Putin had occupied Ukraine with 16,000 soldiers, it was just a blatant lie.
They were already there.
They're there under the terms of the lease.
It's sort of like saying that the US is now unlawfully It's not an invasion.
It may be considered a slightly long-term occupation to still be there after the Second World War 60, 70 years, but it's not an invasion.
Right.
That's right.
It's the same.
But it would be like, suppose, some difficulty arose between the US and Germany.
And then the newspapers all reported that the 50,000 American troops just now invaded Germany.
It would be a lot.
We're already there.
Where did they come from?
Did they burrow up from the ground?
I mean, yeah.
So they're already...
And of course, Russia needs this.
It's the only...
Is it the only warm water port that they have for their navy?
Of course, for the most of the year, at least certainly for the winter months, Russia is ice-locked and can't do much of a navy unless you count really fast skaters with nunchucks.
So, yeah, I mean, they need that, and that's why they have that agreement in place.
That's right.
It's...
Huge strategic threat to Russia to try to grab that away from them.
But that was the American plan, and the Ukrainian plan, the Ukrainians that the Americans were working with, you know, the Stooges.
The plan was, when the U.S. coup succeeds and the puppets grab Ukraine, that Russia would be evicted from its naval base.
It's part of the policy of hemming in Russia and pushing it back and making it unable to resist American hegemony.
You know, the neoconservatives are very upset that Russia blocked Obama's invasion of Syria.
They're very upset that he blocked the setup of Iran, you know, by working out the arrangement with the Iranians on their nuclear energy program.
So they really want to get rid of Russia's opposition to all the forward thrust of the American empire.
And so that's what the whole thing in Ukraine is about.
It's not about anything else.
The riots were orchestrated by the American finance non-governmental organizations.
Yes, they had some sincere dupes participating, basically people who were being used and didn't have the wits to see it.
Gullible Ukrainians, gullible students.
And yes, the president was corrupt, but so is all the rest of them, and so are the ones that are there now.
So it wasn't about any of those things.
It was about, hey, we're going to bring a direct strategic threat to Russia.
We're going to grab Ukraine.
Put anti-ballistic missile bases in Ukraine on the Russian border and kicked the Russians out of their Black Sea naval base.
So that's what it was all about.
Now, Putin didn't have to do anything because it's a Russian territory and the Russian people there said, we're not going to be part of this.
This is not in particular with the way that the American stooges who had seized power were talking and doing.
You know, the first thing they did, they abolished the use of Russian as an official language.
They introduced bills to arrest anyone who kept both Russian and Ukrainian citizenship.
They destroyed the Russian war memorials.
And as you may have seen today or yesterday, This former president, who was as corrupt as any of the rest of them, and was sentenced to jail, basically, for corruption.
It was so bad, the woman.
Tymoshenko, you know, the one that braids her hair across the top of her head like it's a crown, you know?
Well, she now has been caught on an intercepted phone call using all kinds of profanity and saying she was going to take up a machine gun and kill every one of those bloody Russians, and that they needed to stamp Russia off the face of the earth, this type of thing.
Well, it's not Putin speaking like this.
And so, just to try to pretend that Russia is the source of the problem, you know, it reminds me of, you know, 15 years ago today, I think, was when the Americans and the NATO attacked Yugoslavia, or Serbia, whatever it was at the time.
And they bombed it, and they did all kinds of things.
And of course, then they pointed their finger at the Yugoslavs, who hadn't done anything.
It's the same sort of thing, you know, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Now, from Putin's perspective, I think it could be reasonably argued there are two major provocations that have occurred.
Of course, under Reagan, Reagan part of the dissolution of the Soviet Union involved the promise that NATO was not going to go into Eastern Europe, number one.
And number two, I think, was it 2010 when American military policy changed to permit first strike capability of nuclear weapons?
So if you have people breaking treaties and extending a hostile or at least not friendly military alliance into territory, that was...
I mean, when Hitler went into the Rhineland, it was the same kind of thing in 1938, I think it was.
And so from Putin's standpoint, I mean, America is now pushing, or at least the North American Treaty Organization is pushing Military influence into Eastern Europe, and they have now committed to a policy of the use of nuclear weapons in a first-right capability.
I think that would make most people quite alarmed.
Yes, and I think the Russians have been very low-key.
I mean, these provocations have been going on for two decades.
They didn't just take NATO into Eastern Europe.
They put anti-ballistic missile bases in Poland.
The Americans, or Washington.
Washington fomented color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine.
The one in Georgia succeeded, and Washington established a puppet in Georgia, which was the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, also part of Russia and the Soviet Union, for as long as the United States has existed.
They pried that part away.
And in 2004, they tried the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, but it didn't succeed in the way Washington hoped.
So that's why 10 years later, they've come back with this coup that was completely orchestrated by Washington.
It had really nothing to do with the Ukrainian people.
They were duped and used and paid.
A lot of them paid to go in the streets, others out into the streets based on some kind of idealism, some sort of gullible idealism.
And so what happened in Georgia a few years ago?
The United States and Israel go in, train the Georgian army, equip it, and set it loose on South Ossetia, which is full of Russians.
We were a breakaway province, and peace was being kept there by Russian peacekeepers, and they were sharing duty with Georgian peacekeepers.
Well, that then was an attack directly on Russian troops, on Russian populations, and it brought in the Russian army.
And they made short work of the American-trained army, and could have simply They hung the American puppet president and put the country back into Russia, which is probably where it belongs.
Instead, they settled the issue and withdrew.
So to try to say that they're trying to put the Soviet Union back together, clearly not in Georgia.
They could have.
They had it in their hands, but they withdrew.
And I think the only reason that If the Russian forces would go into Ukraine, the only reason will be that if the Ukrainians, the American stooges, the stooge government,
if they persist in their violent response to the demonstrations by the Russians in the Russian cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, if they put these down with violence, I think you'll see the Russian army come in, because these essentially are Russian territories.
They should not be in the Ukraine.
It's just a quirk of Soviet leadership that put them there.
And they shouldn't be there.
Well, even Gorbachev has said that Crimea should be returned to Russia.
And he was, of course, Reagan's ally towards the end of the Cold War.
And he said, hand it back.
They all speak Russian.
They're all part of Russia.
These artificial lines that have been drawn up are just ridiculous.
It's like the Churchill burp.
You know, when he drew the line across the partition in India in the post-war period, it's like Czechoslovakia, which was the mongrel state created out of First World War or, you know, the current mess that is Iraq.
I mean, just redrawing these lines does not change people's allegiances and minds and hearts and histories.
They tend to go.
I've got so many emails after our last interview, people saying, I am in Crimea and Russian blood, whatever that is.
I mean, vodka, I don't know.
Russian blood flows through my veins and I yearn to return to Mother Russia.
It's insane from a logical standpoint, but these are historical tendencies that you cannot just erase with a pen and a map.
Well, that's right.
It's not just Crimea.
It's Eastern Ukraine and also the rest of Southern Ukraine.
I believe all this at one time was Russian.
All those cities, Kharkov, it's a Russian city, you know, Odessa.
I think Odessa's down in the south.
The Donitz Basin.
All of this, I think, is historically Russian territory now.
I mean, it's been a long time since I did Russian studies.
I have a century go at Oxford, and I may have all this jumbled up.
But I do know that parts of eastern and southern Ukraine remain Russian.
It's the language.
It's the people.
There may be more Ukrainians mixed in those areas with Russians than were present in Crimea, but they're essentially Russian areas, and they're Russian territory historically.
And so if they were going to split off the Ukraine, they should have put those parts back into Russia.
It was a stupid mistake.
But of course, Russia was falling apart, and they had Yeltsin, and he was not a defender of Russian interests.
So that's how it happened.
So now it's dangerous.
It's a very dangerous situation, and it shows that Washington is extremely reckless to take a tinderbox like that and go in and stir it up.
Now, everything was calm enough.
The people were getting along.
The economy is integrated into the Russian economy.
The industrial production was going to Russia.
The naval base produced jobs and income flows, and the Russians were not being aggressive toward the Ukraine.
They let them have their own government, and everything was going along fine, until the Americans go in there and stir it all up.
Now, either you've got no judgment, or you're reckless.
And if you—and if it's—and either one, whether it's a lack of judgment or recklessness, when one nuclear power confronts another nuclear power in such a stupid way, the whole world's at stake.
And so what strikes me as extraordinary is how nonchalant everybody else in the world is about this.
If the aggressiveness of Washington persists in It takes us to the point of war with all the alliances the United States has.
That involves all of Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan.
China would probably line up with the Russians because it realizes it's got the same enemy Russia has.
And the whole world would be up in nuclear Armageddon.
And so people should be criticizing Washington like mad.
They should be protesting in the streets.
They should be screaming and yelling.
Instead, they're lining up with all the lies and all the propaganda.
As they have since the beginning of the Republic.
As you pointed out, there was a brief moment of rationality with the Founding Fathers, and then the brain-dead zombie mob took over and follows the yellow journalists into every war that can be manufactured, like whatever comic strip they can come up with.
You mentioned something that I really wanted to focus on as well, Dr.
Roberts, about the degree to which Crimean independence had been pursued in a perfectly legal, sanctioned manner.
This I've not seen anywhere else reported.
I wonder if you could help people understand the degree to which they did follow UN guidelines, seeking for independence and so on, and the degree to which this lawful Action has been opposed.
And, of course, the U.S. invited, after saying, for heaven's sakes, don't intervene in Crimea, the U.S. invited the Russians to come in and stop the election because, you know, self-determination apparently is a great evil.
That's right.
And Washington was damning Russians for intervening, which they had not done, until the referendum came up.
And then they demanded that the Russians do intervene, stop the vote.
So they didn't, once it looked like There would be self-determination in Crimea.
Washington would stamp that out.
Well, what did they do in Crimea?
They have their own government.
They always have.
All these provinces have these provisional governments, as well as a central government.
And the government there followed precisely the way the United States and NATO divorced Kosovo from Serbia.
They followed the precise UN procedures and the precise procedures specified by the International Court of Justice.
So the first thing they did, they separated from Ukraine.
The government put a vote and separated from Ukraine and became independent.
And then they, in response to the demands of people, they had a referendum in which people would decide, did they want to stay independent or did they want to rejoin Russia?
And all the international observers have said the vote was completely fair, no coercion.
They had an amazing turnout, over 80%, which is unheard of in any Western election, and the vote in favor Of going to Russia was 97%.
So, and of course, the Russians have not replied in kind to the Ukraine.
They've said, in Crimea, all languages are legal.
The Tartar language, the Ukrainian language, the Russian language.
And everyone's a citizen.
And the government represents everybody.
You're all in it.
So, it's a stark contrast with the way the United States and Germany handle Kyiv, where there's no elected government.
There's an appointed government of American stooges, picked by Washington.
And there are these right-wing elements that seem to be armed and organized, that are running around intimidating The so-called official government.
There are videos available of these thugs.
They attack a public prosecutor.
They attack the editor of a TV station because they didn't like his reporting.
They're slapping him around, choking him, ordering him to sign his resignation.
You see the same thugs brandishing AK-47s in front of the faces of the so-called official government, taking his knife out, putting it on the desk.
So, these are thugs.
And the question that we don't yet have an answer to is, did Washington simply overlook that these people were there, or is it working with them?
Well, of course, they make up whatever moral story they want.
I mean, I read this report that the American government said that the Crimean referendum to rejoin Russia was illegitimate because there were a few Russian troops, although they're legally on Crimean soil.
But of course, if you cast your mind back to the elections in Iraq...
When a million Iraqis had been slaughtered as a result of the US invasion, and a million and a half, I think, had fled, and the entire country's infrastructure had been bombed into atoms, that was a grand exercise in democracy.
But of course, when the Crimeans do it with a few Russian soldiers there legitimately, it's a travesty.
I mean, the moral whirly-go-round that goes on with these kinds of communications I mean, again, it's what Orwell said, you know, you simply change the rules, you change the moral narrative, and it's like yesterday, or even this morning, never happened.
And these universal principles that were violated by the morally pious, self-congratulatory mob, which were violated by them in the morning, and now praised by them in the afternoon.
It's almost schizoid.
But anyway, I don't want to make this about my rants about moral religion.
It is quite amazing, because the truth is obvious, and yet, You look at why is all of Western and Eastern Europe lined up with blatant lies?
It has to be money.
They're paid.
When I was a young man, it turned out that my dissertation chairman was appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and he was given the task of winding down the Vietnam War.
And he called me to his office one day.
And I went to see him.
He wanted me to go to Vietnam and take over the aid programs.
And I said, I didn't want to do that.
I turned that down.
But I used the opportunity to question him.
I asked him, how does the United States government get all these other countries always to do what it wants?
He said, money.
I said, oh, you mean foreign aid?
He said, no, no, we just give the leaders bagfuls of money.
We own them.
We buy them.
Now, he didn't approve of this policy.
He was very upset about it.
There was nothing he could do about it.
It worked like that for a long time.
Yeah, didn't they ship to Iraq billions of dollars in sealed plastic crates to just hand out to all the tribal leaders to buy their allegiance in the short run?
I mean, it is a bribe-ocracy.
It's nothing to do with any moral crusade.
Afghanistan as well.
Yes, yes.
Don't you remember there was that news report of the airplane landing to collect $3 billion in cash to fly it out of the country?
And the Americans weren't able to do anything about it because under the various regulations it was legal.
So the government or whoever had just stolen it and sent it off to a bank somewhere.
But I'm sure, Dr.
Roberts, it was all properly accounted for, and the double-entry bookkeeping was put in place to make sure that not a single dollar was lost.
Now, I wonder if we could turn a little bit to...
It's a word that I kind of forgot about.
I mean, I remember studying it when I was doing my master's in the 90s, but this neoconservative.
I mean, these bloodmongers seem hell-bent on sending an infinite butcher's bill to the rest of mankind, and I cannot for the life of me...
Figure out where this violence, addiction, where this bloodlust comes from.
Is it some sort of Christian eschatological blow out the Middle East and bring on the end times?
I mean, what on earth is driving these maniacs in this hegemony fantasy that you can control the outcome of human souls at the point of a gun?
You know, I used to think it was unique to them.
And I explained it as the consequence of the Soviet collapse, because then the neoconservatives concluded that history had chosen America.
You know, that Marx was wrong.
History didn't choose communism or the proletariat.
But history chose American capitalism.
This was the neocon conclusion.
You may remember that book, The End of History.
Yes.
And what that means is, We're the final choice, just like, you know, Marx had an end of history, it's the workers.
And so they seize on this, and the argument is that since we are chosen by history, we must take this to the rest of the world, and therefore Not only are we entitled to hegemony of the world, but we are absolutely obligated to impose it because it's history's decision.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but my family history comes from both sides of the Second World War and the First World War, where significant portions of the entire family tree were wiped out, fighting exactly this kind of Hegelian megalomaniacal fantasy.
That history chooses particular cultures and groups and gives them the right to impose their way of thinking on the rest of the world, no matter how many bodies pile up.
Didn't we fight National Socialism, which was this very ideology?
Didn't we not fight Communism and Fascism, which was this very ideology?
It's so often that we become what we fight and that the spending of these millions of lives ends up with us fueling the turning into the very shadows we turned the light on to get rid of.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I will contain my rants as best I can.
Let's get back to it.
That's exactly true.
You said it better than I could have.
And essentially, the neoconservative have the same ideology as Adolf Hitler.
It's the same.
Americans are uber alice.
But it turns out that this is actually very old in our history.
My latest column is about the Spanish-American War.
I think it was 1898.
And already we had Henry Cabot Lodge asserting American exceptionalism, American empire.
He called it the large agenda.
And it was essentially, well, you know, we're too good just to be in America.
We need an empire.
We've got to go elsewhere.
So that's how they cooked up The war with Spain so they could indulge this bloodlust, this ideology.
And you pointed strip-searched, that there were three women who'd been strip-searched by these sinister Spaniard semi-pirates.
I mean, okay, weapons of mass destruction, it's a scary enough story that you might, if you believe it, believe in a preemptive strike against Saddam Hussein, false though it, of course, turned out to be.
But really?
Women strip-searched?
This is the foundation?
Tell people this story because it blew my mind when I read that.
Yeah, and it's not even true.
No, no, but even if it was true, you go to war because some women got strip-searched?
Well, you know, that was a long time ago, over a hundred years, and the notion of how women had to be treated and everything is quite different, and so...
I mean, we might as well go to war against the TSA. Well, they have better reasons.
Those are true.
Those feel ups actually are.
Whereas this other is a product of Hearst's imagination.
He knew how to get people stirred up, and so he would fit the story to the purpose.
So if we can just end up, you had some very powerful things to say.
We touched on it in the last conversation about the capture of the US media.
I think it's really, really important for people to understand the degree to which The media are the lapdogs of coercive power.
This, as you pointed out under Clinton, this is aggregation of formerly independent media to some degree run by journalists into ad executives and corporate lawyer types into these sort of five Major companies and the degree to which they are dependent on the state for their very licensing and existence.
I think people aren't, oh, you're not going to get that story from the media itself.
And I'd really want to make sure people understand the degree to which they're getting the sort of pravda sanitized version of events.
Well, if you read the war lovers, you'll see that there never was that much of an honest media.
But there was some.
And it was because it was dispersed and buried, and many of the newspapers were owned by families.
And many of these families had traditions of integrity and telling the truth.
But all the prospects of that, that slowly disappeared with time, you know, chains came up.
The inheritance tax forced a lot of families to have to sell the newspapers.
They become public.
They're bought up.
They're put in chains.
But still, there was a varied and independent, to some extent, until the last years of Clinton, when he permitted The five megacorporations to purchase the entire media and concentrate it in five hands.
So now there are huge conglomerates.
There's no independence.
And the value of these massive companies is their federal broadcast licenses.
And so they cannot go against the government without the risk that their broadcast licenses won't be renewed.
Or that the government will encourage and permit one of the other mega firms to take over the one that got out of hand.
And the other consideration is that journalists are no longer part of the executive offices.
It's like you said, they're corporate advertising executives and former government officials.
And their eye is on advertising revenue, so they don't want to upset the corporations any more than they want to upset the government.
So they become mouthpieces for the global corporations and for Washington.
And that's essentially all the U.S. media is.
And increasingly, this is true of the European media.
You know, the British still have a paper or two that It takes exception to the propaganda.
Germany's Der Spiegel magazine has on occasion recently made very strong comments about American imperialism and American control over Germany.
So there are some independent voices in Europe.
But for the most part, they follow Washington's line.
You don't see a lot of people saying, wait a minute, don't get us involved in this.
We don't want this.
They just kind of go along, even if it's clearly not in their interest.
The sanctions that Washington announced on Russia are meaningless.
They don't do anything.
Oh, yeah.
But before they announced that, they gave the impression that they were going to be severe and really hurt the Russian economy.
Well, of course, any such sanction would have completely collapsed the European economy.
And yet, the European leaders, Merkel, the rest of them, went along with the sanctions, even though it meant their GDP. They were all going to go into a depression.
So when you see this kind of blind obedience of allegedly sovereign countries, To Washington.
You know, there's no such thing as an independent government anywhere in Europe.
Yeah, I mean, there's that old phrase that, you know, I serve at the pleasure of the president.
This is true of the media.
I mean, the media is allowed to broadcast at the pleasure of the government, and that is their foundational capital value, is this broadcast license, which can be revoked.
I think they apply for it annually, but basically it could be revoked At any time destroying billions of dollars worth of basically the fundamental asset, throwing thousands of people out of work, and destroying the capacity of the corporations to deliver advertisements to the people, which of course is their major focus.
The media serves at the pleasure of the US government, and this is really important to be aware of when watching anything that they're portraying.
That's right.
You can't believe a word they say.
No, and of course, if they simply reread government press releases, they're never going to be subjected to being sued or, you know, the kind of vetting process that has to go into difficult stories that run counter to someone's particular interests.
So anyway, I don't need to reinforce that more, but I think that is really important to understand that you are seeing an exercise in sort of mass hypnosis propaganda.
You're not seeing an exercise in the honest pursuit of truth.
That's right.
And in the United States investigative journalism is simply disappearing.
Yeah.
It's just not too expensive, too legally risky.
And of course, if you alienate your government contacts, then you lose basically your scoop, your source of information.
Basically, most of what the media does these days is either repeat government propaganda or at least in the economics area, try to read the tea leaves of government intentions.
You know, like they used to pour over Alan Greenspan's pronouncements at the feds trying to figure out what he was actually saying.
I mean, it's like he's the oracle at Delphi or something.
You've got to try and figure out.
What he's trying to say.
I mean, this is prognostication on obscure syllables seems to be the order of the day.
And all the time he was setting up a major financial crisis.
Oh, yes.
One last thing.
One last thing.
Sorry to interrupt.
I wanted to mention, too, was, okay, so if Crimea or the East and Ukraine, I guess Russia is now in the process of annexing it, the fate of Western Ukraine and the IMF and the austerity.
I wonder if you could just touch on that, because I think that's one of the reasons why Crimea is rushing off to be embraced by Russia, because the alternative is having the banksters sink their fangs into the lifeblood of the economy, drain it dry for their profits.
So what is going to face economically Western Ukraine after this process is complete?
Well, the Ukraine is heavily in debt to Western banks.
And so what always happens is the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, they waltz in.
They impose an austerity program on the people of the country and loot it and use the money to pay off the Western banks.
And that's now what will certainly happen to the Western Ukraine.
There's no doubt about it.
It's already started.
The American stooge government already announced that Ukrainian pensions would be cut in half.
In a country with, what, $4,500 US average income per capita?
The pension is nowhere near that high.
Yeah, that's right.
And of course, the IMF always requires that you cut social services, that you throw government workers out of their jobs in order to save money.
In other words, they collapse consumer purchasing power, which is already almost non-existent in Ukraine.
You collapse it further, And of course, consequently, the economy collapses with the absence of purchasing power.
But the country's looted and the money goes to the Western banks.
And what will also happen is the American agribusiness corporations, they will end up with the Ukrainian farmland.
If the Russian cities somehow remain in Ukraine, All those industries will end up in the hands of Americans and Germans.
They won't any longer be Ukrainian.
In other words, it'll become just another puppet state, but more completely puppet state, because the ownership of the productive resources will no longer reside in Ukraine.
So that's what's going to happen.
Now, you see some of the Gullible dupes who were protesting, they now realize that.
And they realize what idiots they were, and they write to me.
And so I'm so sorry I sent you that hate mail.
You were right.
We're doomed.
Yeah, no, to be a truth-teller of any kind on the planet is to have about 10,000 lasers attached to you from people who then switch off the safeties and come shake your hand when they realize the truth.
Well, listen, I could talk all day.
Really, really appreciate the time, of course.
It's great to chat with somebody who has studied some of the history and knows.
Some of the larger forces at play here.
Paulcrackroberts.org also recommend.
It's a challenging read for me because I find the thesis quite exciting, to put it mildly, but your latest book, The Failure of Laissez-Ferre Capitalism, is an engaging read.
It runs counter to some of my free market tendencies, but I'm working to keep an open mind as the thesis develops, but I would certainly recommend that.
We'll put a link to that to be able to purchase that in the Notes for the show, but Dr.
Roberts, thank you again as always so much for your time.
It's a real pleasure.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
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