True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 205: Ukraine (with Ames) Part 1
Aired: 2022-02-07
Duration: 01:25:57


=== Welcome to the Edge (10:11) ===

[00:00:00]  There's Snow Cold Open.
[00:00:01]  There's no cold cold open.
[00:00:02]  Listen today.
[00:00:02]  There's no cold open.
[00:00:03]  Listen.
[00:00:04]  Uh-huh.
[00:00:05]  We just podcasted.
[00:00:06]  Yeah.
[00:00:07]  People say that.
[00:00:08]  We just recorded.
[00:00:09]  Yeah, we just recorded our radio show.
[00:00:11]  Our radio show, our internet radio show for three and a half hours.
[00:00:16]  Yes.
[00:00:18]  So first of all, fuck you.
[00:00:21]  Second of all, you're welcome.
[00:00:23]  Yeah, my name is Brace, the little Russian boy.
[00:00:55]  What?
[00:00:55]  You don't like it, man?
[00:00:56]  Oh, my God.
[00:00:58]  You did that.
[00:00:58]  You've done it already, and you liked it so much the first time you brought it back.
[00:01:01]  Well, it's my Russian accent.
[00:01:04]  Wait.
[00:01:07]  Don't say that's Polish.
[00:01:09]  No, no, no, no.
[00:01:16]  That's Polish.
[00:01:17]  That's hello in Polish.
[00:01:19]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:20]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:21]  My name is Brace, the number one Polish rights activist in America.
[00:01:27]  And we have with us here Jung Chomsky editing out every single Z when Liz tries to talk in her incomprehensible long screeds in Polish.
[00:01:39]  And the podcast is called True Anon.
[00:01:40]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:41]  Hi.
[00:01:42]  We got a two-part banger for you because everyone's like, oh, I don't understand.
[00:01:51]  What is going on with Ukraine?
[00:01:53]  Oh, I'm too stupid to know.
[00:01:56]  I need a Splaner.
[00:01:58]  I need a Splaner.
[00:02:00]  Well, bitch.
[00:02:01]  Uh-huh.
[00:02:02]  Here it is.
[00:02:03]  We got fucking three hours all about Ukraine.
[00:02:07]  We have two Jews in a poll here to tell you about Ukraine.
[00:02:12]  Look, hey, we know.
[00:02:13]  Uh-huh.
[00:02:14]  And you know what?
[00:02:15]  We do.
[00:02:15]  Here it is.
[00:02:27]  All right, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:02:30]  Our training exercises are complete.
[00:02:33]  The Stinger missiles are in place.
[00:02:36]  Our helicopters are grounded and our ground crews are smoking a little bit of CBD, which let me start that over again.
[00:02:45]  No, no, no, no.
[00:02:46]  Just keep it going.
[00:02:47]  All right.
[00:02:47]  Our ground crews are smoking CBD.
[00:02:50]  And I want you guys all to know that the peace process in Ukraine, which Truanon is, of course, leading the charge here, is sponsored.
[00:02:58]  Is sponsored by Smoke Well CBD, which is the answer to all of these problems.
[00:03:03]  And these people going crazy over there.
[00:03:06]  Oh, I want to go.
[00:03:07]  Oh, I want a little country.
[00:03:08]  Oh, I want my own little country.
[00:03:10]  You know what you want?
[00:03:11]  You know what you need?
[00:03:12]  You need a hit of a CBD pen.
[00:03:14]  Anyways, welcome to Mark Ames.
[00:03:17]  We have him here emerging from a cloud of CBD smoke to tell us all.
[00:03:22]  Yeah.
[00:03:24]  What is Ukraine?
[00:03:26]  Mark, welcome to the show.
[00:03:28]  Oh, so great to be back on with you guys.
[00:03:30]  It's so nice to have you back.
[00:03:32]  Oh, thanks, man.
[00:03:33]  Thanks.
[00:03:33]  I really appreciate it.
[00:03:34]  I loved that last time, and I was always happy to be on again.
[00:03:37]  Well, unfortunately, the war nerd, I mean, Gary Bretcher, aka John Dolan, has been captured by partisans in Montenegro and is being tortured as we speak.
[00:03:46]  His injuries have only gotten more obscure and profane.
[00:03:51]  He's currently been flayed.
[00:03:52]  And so he was brought to a secret lab and installed with titanium rods.
[00:04:03]  So he might be coming back for some big action.
[00:04:05]  They're going to strap him to an F1 track in Baku.
[00:04:09]  Yeah.
[00:04:09]  That's my peace plan for Ukraine.
[00:04:11]  Just what they need is a giant brand new F1 track.
[00:04:15]  And that's how we'll welcome them into the international community.
[00:04:20]  Yes.
[00:04:22]  Mark, we have you here today because you lived near Ukraine for a while.
[00:04:28]  Oh, Liz.
[00:04:29]  Yeah.
[00:04:29]  Liz and I were wondering.
[00:04:31]  We've been texting all week about this.
[00:04:33]  What's Ukraine?
[00:04:35]  Bryce, you mean the Ukraine?
[00:04:37]  I don't know what that is.
[00:04:39]  That sounds like a damn thing.
[00:04:39]  If you want to annoy them, call it the Ukraine.
[00:04:41]  I mean, you know, again, Ukraine, Ukraine, Krai means the edge.
[00:04:46]  U means near.
[00:04:48]  So it is of or near the border or the edge.
[00:04:51]  So it's basically the borderland of greater Russia.
[00:04:55]  That's what it basically means.
[00:04:57]  And then, of course, the question is: was Russia, I mean, Russia was born in Kiev.
[00:05:02]  Yeah.
[00:05:03]  You know, however much these myths and realities matter, but you know, that's that is where it was born, Ruth's.
[00:05:10]  So, um, and at some point, I don't know why.
[00:05:13]  I'm, I'm not a Ukraine expert, so I'm not sure why it became Ukraine.
[00:05:17]  I don't know why Ukrainian nationalists accept that name for their country, you know, and themselves.
[00:05:23]  Now that I think of it, why do they why do they agree to call themselves where we're on the border of Russia?
[00:05:31]  It's actually, I was reading this and Victoria Newland wrote a really good piece for the Council on Foreign Relations in 2007.
[00:05:38]  And it's actually named after the guitarist of U2, The Edge.
[00:05:46]  So it's actually technically his, it's called a principality.
[00:05:50]  He is the, he's the leader of it.
[00:05:53]  And so they've named the country after him.
[00:05:55]  In the name of, God, man, I was thinking that is, I mean, when I think of the crimes of Gen X, my gen, that you too becoming big is pretty high up there on crimes of my shouldn't happen.
[00:06:09]  Yeah.
[00:06:10]  So Ukraine has not been a country for very long.
[00:06:13]  No, it was first of all, it was divided for a long time.
[00:06:20]  I mean, it was part of this empire and that empire, the Polish-Lithuanian empire.
[00:06:27]  Classic, fantastic empire, by the way.
[00:06:30]  Yes.
[00:06:30]  Interesting empire.
[00:06:31]  Yes.
[00:06:32]  First king who didn't know how to read.
[00:06:35]  Hey.
[00:06:38]  And then Western Ukraine was under the Austro-Hungarian Empire for a long time.
[00:06:45]  Let's say, I don't know, at least a couple hundred years.
[00:06:47]  I've been to, I don't know if you have, Bryce, but I've been to, I went to Lvov long time ago.
[00:06:54]  Not just Kiev.
[00:06:55]  Okay.
[00:06:56]  So Lvov, which is the, it's kind of the heart of Ukrainian nationalism and fascism and all that, used to be a Jewish city, used to be a primarily Jewish and Polish city.
[00:07:05]  Ukrainians were actually a minority in that city because they were mostly peasants outside of the cities.
[00:07:12]  And they were the Poles and the Jews were exterminated by the Nazis and the Ukrainians nationalists.
[00:07:21]  Yeah.
[00:07:22]  Ugly stuff.
[00:07:23]  So, and I guess you talked about a lot of this stuff on your Bandaristan episode.
[00:07:29]  I'm doing the plug for you.
[00:07:32]  No, we'll definitely link to it because we have a lot of the early kind of Ukrainian history and how a lot of the like really gruesome, gruesome nationalism that emerges out of that or Nazism.
[00:07:41]  I don't even know what's the fascism.
[00:07:44]  It's all of it, all three.
[00:07:45]  I think it's like Ustasha, which is which is, you know, which is no better than the Nazis.
[00:07:50]  They're just less competent.
[00:07:52]  But if you know about, you know, the Ustasha, they were very consciously, I think, you know, formed along kind of Ustasha lines, similar.
[00:07:59]  Yeah.
[00:08:00]  I agree.
[00:08:00]  I mean, it's, there's a, I read an interesting book sort of about the sub-factions, not sub-factions, like, but the kind of offshoots of these like fascist movements in World War II or pre-World War II and then into the post-war years.
[00:08:13]  And like, yeah, there's a lot more.
[00:08:15]  I think that the Ukrainian nationalists had a lot more in common with like the Ustashi than they had with the actual Nazis in terms of, not in terms of like anti-Semitism, which they had plenty in common, but just in terms of, yeah, competence and organization and things like that.
[00:08:30]  Because, you know, the Germans were obviously very, let's say, patriotic towards their vision of Germany.
[00:08:38]  But these sort of various like, I guess, native nationalist movements that you found tended to be a lot more focused on bloodletting than like actually power building.
[00:08:49]  Running things.
[00:08:50]  Yes.
[00:08:51]  The trains not running on top.
[00:08:53]  Yeah.
[00:08:54]  Less bureaucratic, more just like, yeah, brutal violence.
[00:08:58]  Yes.
[00:08:59]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:09:01]  Yeah, I think one thing that's important, I don't know, kind of important for what we might talk about today is just this one particular episode from that whole OUN Ukrainian fascist Bandera movement, which is in 1941.
[00:09:15]  I mean, I just keep thinking this is important because of how ubiquitous this became.
[00:09:20]  In April, I believe it was in 1941, the OUN under Bandera in Nazi-occupied Krakow, just before Barbarossa, passed a resolution, or maybe he decreed it because he was the Führer, that from now on, the salute for Ukraine would be Slava Ukraine Heroim Slava.
[00:09:39]  Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes.
[00:09:42]  And you've probably seen every mainstream pundit, hack, politician saying, we stand with Ukraine, Slavo Ukraine, glory to Ukraine, you know, and so on.
[00:09:52]  And I remember the first time I tried kind of talking about that in public, I got attacked by, well, in this foreign policy like list group, I got attacked by one of Bellingcat's big research guys.
[00:10:07]  He said, he said, this is just, you know, you're making this up and it's completely out of nowhere.

=== Mainstream Punditry Critique (02:11) ===

[00:10:11]  And you're either being, you know, obtuse or being like deliberately dishonest.
[00:10:17]  And then I just voted for him the actual research and, you know, footnotes and so on.
[00:10:23]  And he just went quiet and got really angry and left the group.
[00:10:26]  Yeah.
[00:10:26]  Yeah.
[00:10:27]  But that's just the fact.
[00:10:28]  So yeah, every time you see people doing that, it's basically, it's based on Heil Hitler's Z Kyle.
[00:10:33]  It's the same, you know, cadence.
[00:10:36]  Yeah.
[00:10:36]  And you'll see it all the time now.
[00:10:38]  Like if you start looking for it, it's like one of those things where now that you know it, you're going to see it everywhere because it actually is everywhere.
[00:10:43]  Yep.
[00:10:44]  And I guess the other thing to keep in mind here is that throughout the Cold War, I mean, look, the U.S., UK, but let's say the U.S., NATO, you know, cultivated, well, didn't cultivate, nurtured and financed and everything they could possibly do extreme Ukrainian nationalism in order to subvert the Soviet Union.
[00:11:06]  And that lived on and it didn't end.
[00:11:08]  I mean, these programs, you know, they were so deeply entrenched by the 80s and 90s that they really lived on.
[00:11:18]  But you could put in heating rods and turn this up a lot more when it started mattering more or kind of just keep it on a low simmer when it didn't matter as much, but you didn't want to necessarily upset them.
[00:11:29]  Well, I mean, too, there was also a wide variety of sort of recast resistance groups, usually former, in fact, almost always former Nazi collaborators in both the Baltic countries, Poland, and especially in Ukraine, that the U.S. financed and they would sort of reinsert or like try to infiltrate them by the bucket loads.
[00:11:55]  And, you know, that's one thing that I think it's in part of like the Smiley, the George Smiley series.
[00:12:01]  They talk about how they would infiltrate all these guys in a Latvia and they get picked up right away.
[00:12:06]  But that really did happen.
[00:12:08]  And it wasn't necessarily because of like a double agent at MI6, although there were quite a few of those too.
[00:12:14]  But it was because these people, I mean, they were basically brutal killers.
[00:12:19]  I mean, they really resemble the soldier of fortune types that you'd see in Africa.

=== Voting for Sovereignty (14:57) ===

[00:12:23]  And in the case of people like King Zog, they're often one and the same.
[00:12:28]  Yep.
[00:12:28]  No, absolutely.
[00:12:29]  They all, every single one of them, I don't know how many hundreds or thousands we airdropped in in the 40s, maybe to the early 50s, but literally every single one was captured and killed or vanished one way or another.
[00:12:46]  Every single one.
[00:12:48]  Right.
[00:12:49]  And anyway, let's kind of fast forward a little bit to the sort of late perestroika period.
[00:12:57]  It's funny, Rukh, I don't know if you've heard of Rukh.
[00:13:00]  Ruch was a big, was like this big umbrella organization of Ukrainian nationalists that I think Christia Freeland, you know, the Canadian foreign minister who's loved her grandpa.
[00:13:11]  Oh, oh, yeah, her lovely, lovely, kind and generous grandfather.
[00:13:17]  Yeah, yeah, which is who she thinks about.
[00:13:18]  Yeah, yeah, journalists.
[00:13:20]  So for those who might not know, the Canadian foreign minister's grandfather was a pretty, I mean, just barefaced Nazi collaborator and published a pro-Nazi newspaper, like a Nazi newspaper.
[00:13:37]  Yeah, took it over from a Jewish publisher who was exterminated.
[00:13:40]  Yes.
[00:13:41]  And took it over and turned it into, you know, the great leader Hitler is killing more Jews today.
[00:13:46]  Hooray.
[00:13:47]  But there's still more Jews yet to find.
[00:13:49]  Like, that's basically all it was.
[00:13:50]  Yeah.
[00:13:50]  Yeah.
[00:13:52]  And she would tweet out, you know, on double genocide, you know, these people pushed this double genocide theory, which is essentially Holocaust revisionism, that people killed by communism, it was just as bad as people killed by the Nazis.
[00:14:09]  Like on this day, I'm thinking about, you know, my lovely grandfather, Mykola Chomiak and yeah, or Mikhailo Chomiak.
[00:14:19]  And then it all came out.
[00:14:21]  Yeah.
[00:14:21]  And thanks to some communist activists, Ukrainian communist activists, young guys in Canada out of this stuff.
[00:14:29]  And at first it was denounced as Russian disinformation, of course, and people were afraid to even publish it.
[00:14:36]  And then eventually it was admitted, but it was sold as, well, it's true, but even true stuff is Russian disinformation.
[00:14:43]  Yes.
[00:14:43]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:45]  Something that we've learned in the past six or seven years.
[00:14:48]  Oh, yeah.
[00:14:48]  Yeah.
[00:14:49]  So she's got this organization.
[00:14:52]  So Ruk and, you know, Christia Freeland got involved in that.
[00:14:54]  Rukh, oddly enough, was set up with pressure from Gorbachev because Gorbachev was a complete fucking idiot.
[00:15:01]  Yes.
[00:15:02]  I highly recommend to people to read, if you can, this book, Collapse by Vladislav Zubuk, which just came out about Gorbachev.
[00:15:09]  It's pretty shocking how much of a 10-dimensional idiot Gorbachev was.
[00:15:15]  Good indeed.
[00:15:16]  He's the chewing on permanent donkey of the day.
[00:15:20]  Totally.
[00:15:21]  And he thought it would be a good idea to have local intellectuals who, you know, he overestimated involved in nationalism and kind of a counterbalance to the communists because he didn't understand that nationalism was a real thing.
[00:15:36]  He probably to this day doesn't understand it.
[00:15:40]  And as that started heating up, the Russians in the east of the country in Crimea started freaking out and thinking these guys want to go free and we know about them because we know the Bandera story.
[00:15:50]  And so we want to join with Russia.
[00:15:52]  So as early as January 1991, Crimea held, there are a lot of referendums going around in the very end of the Soviet Union time, all this sort of independence and sovereignty referendums.
[00:16:02]  One of those was held in Crimea, 1991.
[00:16:05]  91% voted for sovereignty from Ukraine.
[00:16:08]  There was another referendum, I don't know, a couple of years later where they voted sovereignty and to join Russia.
[00:16:15]  Same in the Donbass area, just primarily Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.
[00:16:24]  So this is not, you know, this is nothing new and it's certainly nothing invented by Russia, even if Russia is exploiting it in their ongoing battles with NATO.
[00:16:37]  Yeah, I think there is like some, the way sometimes this is presented in the Western press, especially the situation in Crimea, is that like all of the like Crimea basically wasn't really anything anyone knew about or was like a real place up until like 2014, basically, or like 2012.
[00:16:53]  And then suddenly like just a handful of people decided that they wanted to like, that they liked Russia more than Ukraine, but they're like crazy people.
[00:17:02]  That's kind of how it's presented in the Western press, as opposed to this like very long-standing.
[00:17:08]  I mean, there's just like a ton of ethnically Russian, like ethnically Russian speakers, like Russians in Ukraine.
[00:17:15]  Like you said, there's just like, there's just a major population.
[00:17:17]  It's, it's, like you said, a borderland.
[00:17:19]  Well, the thing too with Crimea is that you can look at like the defections from the Ukrainian Navy in 2014 when Russia took over Crimea.
[00:17:27]  And it was like, I mean, it was something like 75% of the people just defected.
[00:17:33]  And I'm sorry, I don't think all of those people were just like, oh, I'm offered 200 rubles and like a new gaming piece.
[00:17:40]  Well, they also like took a, they were like, wait, I'm sorry.
[00:17:43]  We, Ukraine has a navy?
[00:17:44]  And they're like, oh, we're going with the Russians.
[00:17:46]  Well, yeah.
[00:17:47]  I mean, yeah, well, it's like literally like they had to get now.
[00:17:51]  Ukraine's Navy is run by like the G team or something.
[00:17:55]  Like it's really, it's nothing.
[00:17:57]  Anytime, anytime a nation starts saying that they're focusing on a mosquito fleet means that, no, no, you're fucked.
[00:18:04]  And they're like, we don't even, we just need a navy to pretend to have a naval.
[00:18:09]  You got to have one.
[00:18:09]  You have a coastal.
[00:18:11]  So we're just going to have like eight speedboats.
[00:18:13]  How else are we going to impress?
[00:18:14]  RPG on it.
[00:18:15]  Yeah.
[00:18:15]  Exactly.
[00:18:17]  So it was, it was led by the communist leader at the time, Lena Kravchuk, independence.
[00:18:22]  So, but it's helpful to remember in March 1991, 71% of Ukrainians voted for sovereignty but to remain part of the USSR or whatever the USSR was becoming.
[00:18:36]  July 1991, Bush gives his famous Chicken Kiev speech.
[00:18:40]  It was named that, I think, by William Sapphire because he was trying to tell the Ukrainians, don't leave it.
[00:18:45]  I mean, I think Bush and those people, they didn't believe up until the very end, like this, like Gates and the CIA people didn't believe that Gorbachev was anything but Stalin in a Western suit.
[00:18:57]  They were just sure at some point there was going to be like a Prague spring, you know, 1968 crushing of tanks.
[00:19:05]  Yeah.
[00:19:05]  And so they didn't want the Ukrainians to like screw it up just yet.
[00:19:10]  And then a month later was that failed, incredibly poorly done, failed Gikachepa coup in August 1991.
[00:19:17]  And after that, it was all over.
[00:19:19]  Yeah.
[00:19:19]  And that was over.
[00:19:20]  And Ukraine was led by Lena Kravchuk, who had been against total independence up until really that summer.
[00:19:28]  And, and it, you know, if it wasn't for Boris Yeltsin, who was kind of the opposite of Gorbachev.
[00:19:35]  He was all about power and muscling and taking chances and seizing power and seizing moments.
[00:19:44]  If it wasn't for Yeltsin and kind of Russian nationalism that Yeltsin, like Russian anti-communist nationalism that Yeltsin kind of rode in on, I don't think like, I don't think the majority of Ukrainians would have really been serious about.
[00:20:00]  Um, independence at that time, except in the west, which has always been a hotbed of you know, you can call it nationalism, you can call it Nazi adjacentism, you know yes, anyway.
[00:20:12]  So so they go independent.
[00:20:14]  The first president, Leonid Kravchuk, the ex-communist president.
[00:20:17]  He's now like the hero of the Ukrainian diaspora, which is very Nazi, adjacent and the west and so and the western part of Ukraine and but things are going really badly in Ukraine.
[00:20:29]  So they have an election um, and uh, he go, he's going against Leonid Kuchma, who's from kind of the center center, slightly east of the country, but Kuchma's, you know, he campaigns on being much more friendly with Russia, much closer to Russia um, as well as pro-market reforms, but Russia was kind of the center of all that at the time.
[00:20:52]  Yeah, and oddly, and he wins and funny enough, and let me call this up real quickly, um, who's his, who is Leonid Kuchma's biggest backer?
[00:21:00]  And this is important because Kuchma later becomes, basically he's Yanukovych's main sponsor and he was later seen as the Yanukovich guy.
[00:21:11]  Yeah, this is my favorite guy who I mean we got to do at least one or two episodes on him because a lot of people don't know that much about him as much as his name is thrown around, but that would be George Soros.
[00:21:22]  Yes yes yes exactly, you know, it's funny.
[00:21:25]  I was actually thinking that the other day Liz, we got to do some Soros, yeah people yeah, because there's a.
[00:21:29]  There's a.
[00:21:30]  Yeah, he's a fascinating guy who it's impossible to brilliant man, because it's impossible to google him without just like ending up in some kind of flat earth facebook group or whatever.
[00:21:42]  I mean he's just clogged all the pipes and you can't.
[00:21:45]  It's so funny because he's done so much horrible bullshit yeah, but so much wrong.
[00:21:50]  There's also just an insane amount of just disinformation out there about him.
[00:21:54]  Yeah, that it like, like Liz said, clogs the pipes so you can't actually get to the good stuff.
[00:21:59]  Yeah, it would be brilliant if he was behind every Nazi.
[00:22:02]  You know what?
[00:22:03]  I would not put it past him, considering how much my man loves uh, you know a false flag.
[00:22:09]  Yes, interesting that the Polish person thinks the Jews so wily here.
[00:22:17]  I just want to read this a little bit here from a 1995 profile of Soros.
[00:22:21]  And it's all about Soros basically meddling in and practically controlling domestic politics in like half of Eastern European countries.
[00:22:31]  Last May, so that would be 1994, Leonid Kuchma came to the United States and paid Soros a visit.
[00:22:36]  He was at the time a candidate for president of Ukraine.
[00:22:39]  Soros was so excited by his conversation with somebody.
[00:22:42]  He called somebody in Bucharest and put Kuchma on the phone to relay the outcome of their meeting.
[00:22:47]  Kuchma was rated an outsider in a large field of candidates, but in early July, he won an upset victory.
[00:22:53]  Soros says he had nothing to do with the victory.
[00:22:56]  However, Evelyn Herfkins of the World Bank says the bank cannot support election campaigns of reformers in the Ukraine.
[00:23:03]  Soros did.
[00:23:05]  Interesting.
[00:23:07]  So even the World Bank said, yeah, Soros put him there and probably did things.
[00:23:13]  I mean, look, they all did each other favors and one person is private, so he can't be FOIA the same way another semi-private organization can versus the government.
[00:23:22]  And that's how that shit kind of works.
[00:23:24]  And they all profit off it personally.
[00:23:28]  Anyway, so 1999, Kuchma runs again.
[00:23:31]  So he was the pro-Russia candidate in 94 and he wins.
[00:23:35]  99, he runs as the pro-West candidate, and he's against the pro-Russian Communist Party, which is very Communist Party at this time.
[00:23:45]  It's just, it's very marginalized.
[00:23:47]  So it's like, it's a fake election, pretty much.
[00:23:51]  But he still lost in all the only places he lost were in basically Donbas and Crimea and maybe one or two other provinces because of Russian, right?
[00:24:00]  Next year, Kuchma, this is when he starts becoming the bad guy.
[00:24:03]  Later, this is outed.
[00:24:05]  Somebody leaks tapes of it.
[00:24:07]  Kuchma calling up and saying he wanted this journalist, Gheorghi Gungadze, who was an investigative journalist and a pest.
[00:24:14]  He wanted him taken care of.
[00:24:16]  And that was released.
[00:24:17]  And this matters because Gungadze disappeared.
[00:24:20]  And then shortly afterwards, his headless torso, mutilated torso, was found in the river.
[00:24:25]  That created huge protests and kind of was the beginning of every orange revolution and color revolution.
[00:24:33]  And so Kuchma then made sure to send Ukrainian forces to Iraq to get on the good side of Bush.
[00:24:40]  Coalition of the Willy.
[00:24:42]  Yep, yep, yep.
[00:24:44]  And then it's weird.
[00:24:45]  They ended up in Krakow.
[00:24:49]  They killed thousands of people.
[00:24:51]  It's before they realized where they were.
[00:24:53]  It was crazy.
[00:24:54]  They were just doing what they, yeah.
[00:24:56]  Yeah.
[00:24:59]  Muscle memory.
[00:25:00]  Yeah.
[00:25:01]  You mentioned the Orin Revolution.
[00:25:04]  That's kind of like, we didn't talk about the Orange Revolution.
[00:25:08]  I'm trying to think.
[00:25:08]  We talked a little bit about Maidan when we had Abby Martin on.
[00:25:13]  Last year, I believe we had it on when we were discussing the kind of incoming Biden administration, kind of like a little preview to the horrors of the foreign policy establishment.
[00:25:22]  But the orange revolution, like you said, this kind of kicks off this way.
[00:25:26]  I mean, this is in the first wave of what is called the color revolutions that kind of sweep through Eastern and Central Europe.
[00:25:35]  Now we, you know, some people kind of I would say that universities in the U.S. still teach these as very much spur of the moment, you know, the people rising up, spontaneous, democratic, the cries of the people yearning to be free.
[00:25:53]  But when we say color revolution, what we mean is that actually it's Western backed.
[00:25:58]  And the idea is that, you know, the West comes in, they've been there for a couple of years, usually via NGOs or other kind of partnerships.
[00:26:06]  Civil society groups, civil society groups.
[00:26:08]  Yeah.
[00:26:09]  Sometimes like they are fronting their own there.
[00:26:13]  Sometimes they're just backing like, you know, domestic groups or university groups or whatever in different countries.
[00:26:19]  And they use that as a pretext to kind of drum up, you know, like fake, I don't know how else to say it.
[00:26:28]  It's just like it's fake democratic support for their preferred candidates or, you know, fake democratic support to give pretext for new elections or, you know, overturning an election or something, something to that effect.
[00:26:44]  Well, and what it's kind of evilly brilliant.
[00:26:47]  I mean, look, they tap into genuine grievances.
[00:26:50]  Otherwise, it wouldn't really go anywhere.
[00:26:52]  Right.
[00:26:52]  But they, but they're selective about it.
[00:26:54]  If you want something, you've got the infrastructure there and then you just turn the heat up and it can work.
[00:26:59]  And if you're getting what you want, you keep it on simmer and no revolution is going to happen.
[00:27:04]  But, you know, civil, what is civil society in these countries?
[00:27:07]  I mean, you know, it's starting to become, it's nice to see that finally this whole notion of civil society, at least on some parts of it, is finally starting to become a dirty word.
[00:27:17]  Like when you hear that word, you know something stinky is going on.
[00:27:20]  Yes, absolutely.

=== Elites Pretending to Represent (08:06) ===

[00:27:21]  But back to that.
[00:27:22]  You know, that people are remembering that it's like the third, you know, the little, the third part of, you know, the governance, really.
[00:27:30]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:27:31]  I mean, what, what is it?
[00:27:32]  It's essentially, it's essentially elites, local elites, usually younger, you know, college educated from good families who join.
[00:27:41]  And civil society is basically funded by wealthy, by Western governments, Western oligarchs, and local oligarchs who want to be in, you know, in cahoots with Western oligarchs and the whole globalized system.
[00:27:56]  That's who funds most of it.
[00:27:58]  So they are not represent, but they get to pretend that they represent the people.
[00:28:03]  Yes.
[00:28:03]  And they never represent the people.
[00:28:05]  They might, some of them might do good things, environmental, whatever, but they're not.
[00:28:11]  It's actually anti-democratic when you think about it because absolutely, yeah, they talk about civil society now as if it represents the people, not even like elections or anything.
[00:28:19]  It's like, well, civil society is for or against this.
[00:28:22]  What does that mean?
[00:28:23]  It means NGOs funded by the rich and powerful.
[00:28:26]  Yeah, you mentioned Soros, and you know, people probably have heard of Open Society.
[00:28:31]  That's like one of his biggest, he's got a billion organizations himself.
[00:28:35]  Um, but Open Society is, of course, like one of the largest.
[00:28:39]  And when you see that little logo on the step and repeat at the little banquet you're going to or whatever, you know, take heed.
[00:28:48]  You know, what's funny about Soros is the left in this country up until I don't know, maybe, maybe around Obama's time, the left was pretty openly, as I remember, maybe like the more kind of harder left or something, but even like the Amy Goodman left, I guess what I want to say, were very open about talking about Soros and all of the damage he was doing in the developing world and former communist countries.
[00:29:12]  It was, I mean, that's where most of this was coming from.
[00:29:16]  And then kind of the LaRouche right, you know, La Rouch started glomming onto him.
[00:29:21]  But the left didn't really care about that back then because it was also true.
[00:29:25]  And, you know, to be honest, like for me, when Yash and I kind of got that scoop that we got screwed on about the Tea Party backed by the COVID, it was obvious to us when we saw the first thing started.
[00:29:36]  We're like, well, this looks like some oligarch thing from Russia.
[00:29:40]  You know, like these things don't spontaneously happen.
[00:29:43]  And, and, you know, now that's like, I think it's a lot more widely held.
[00:29:47]  But for us, coming from Russia, it was just easier to see.
[00:29:50]  And from the stuff Soros did.
[00:29:53]  I mean, in 2003, I was in Georgia, the Rose Revolution.
[00:29:56]  So that was just before the orange one.
[00:29:58]  This is like, well, rose colored.
[00:30:00]  Yeah.
[00:30:01]  Right.
[00:30:01]  And Soros was big behind that.
[00:30:05]  I mean, he was the major funder of it, I would say, along with like the NED and some of those groups.
[00:30:10]  Well, Pierre Omidyar gets involved in a lot of this stuff as well.
[00:30:15]  Especially in Ukraine later on.
[00:30:16]  Exactly.
[00:30:17]  So the Orange Revolution, basically what happens, Kuchma, who went from being pro-Russian to then pro-West and getting all his support from the West in 2004, he couldn't run again.
[00:30:28]  So he backs Yanukovych, his prime minister.
[00:30:31]  And that again, now they're back on the pro-Russian side.
[00:30:34]  Kuchma's son-in-law, Viktor Pinchuk, is now like the number one or two oligarch in Ukraine.
[00:30:39]  He backs Yanukovych and the pro-Russian side.
[00:30:42]  Why is that name important?
[00:30:43]  Because later he becomes a major funder of the Maidan Revolution.
[00:30:47]  He's with the West and he's a big fund, a huge funder of the Clinton Foundation.
[00:30:51]  These guys just go back and forth over and over, right?
[00:30:54]  BPD ass politicians in this country.
[00:30:57]  Yeah.
[00:30:58]  They always spread all over the entrance too.
[00:31:01]  I don't know.
[00:31:01]  I'm so fucked up.
[00:31:02]  I'm crazy.
[00:31:03]  I don't know.
[00:31:06]  So, yeah, so the protests were huge.
[00:31:08]  The grievances were real.
[00:31:10]  I mean, look, there was a lot of enormous amount of corruption.
[00:31:15]  Kuchmo didn't quite really get what he was getting into.
[00:31:18]  I mean, the U.S. says you got to let these civil, if you crack down on U.S. civil society groups, you become an enemy.
[00:31:23]  So you got to let them be there.
[00:31:24]  But if you let them grow there, then you're screwing yourself.
[00:31:28]  So you're looking at the right.
[00:31:30]  Look at Belarus, but look at Belarus, Russia, and Hungary.
[00:31:33]  I mean, I have no love for any of the leaders of those countries, but honest, like, you know, it was taken sort of as like they were doing this kind of like fascist move by cracking down on Western-backed NGOs and civil society organizations when, in fact, it's one of the most rational things you can do because those groups are there for a very specific purpose.
[00:31:56]  That's practically stationing troops in your country.
[00:31:59]  I mean, that is what it is.
[00:32:01]  Absolutely.
[00:32:02]  They are not there.
[00:32:05]  And when people sort of bleat about this kind of stuff, it belies like the most sort of like simplistic, childlike view about how American power projection works.
[00:32:15]  America does not have these groups in Russia because they are so concerned about gay rights in Russia or, you know, or, you know, parliamentary whatever in fucking Hungary.
[00:32:26]  No, they are there so that if we ever need to maybe make a little change in scenery or, you know, maybe twist things around a little bit, we can do that.
[00:32:36]  It's power projection, plain and simple.
[00:32:38]  It has nothing to do with the causes that they purportedly, you know, fight for or against.
[00:32:44]  I mean, look, the leaders in our country, like the centrist SLACOR establishment, were saying that Russia buying Facebook, you know, buff Bernie memes was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor.
[00:32:58]  So can you imagine if Russia had like 50 NGOs monitoring our elections, you know, buying friends everywhere, promoting whatever their version of NATO is, you know, that they have with Kazakhstan?
[00:33:11]  Like it's just, it's stalling.
[00:33:12]  It's really ridiculous.
[00:33:14]  Yeah.
[00:33:15]  And you have to be, you know, there's just, people are just so naive out here about how it works.
[00:33:21]  You just, it's, it is.
[00:33:23]  Well, I mean, look, America's greatest export and what they bank on at home is propaganda.
[00:33:30]  I mean, there's so the U.S. propaganda machine is so fucking strong.
[00:33:34]  It's so, so strong.
[00:33:36]  And that's on top of, you know, whatever kind of like whatever other Zizekian trash can we're all eating from.
[00:33:43]  Ideology.
[00:33:45]  But on top of that, you know, and we, you know, we can talk about this when we talk about, you know, current, you know, possible conflicts with the U.S. and Russia and Russia, but like even critics of America buy America's own bullshit to a certain degree.
[00:34:02]  And it's real difficult to like break out of.
[00:34:04]  It's really, really powerful stuff.
[00:34:06]  And it's really, even with the internet, it is still difficult to find people.
[00:34:12]  I mean, try to find information that's reliable about what's going on in China.
[00:34:15]  You really have to dig and vet and kind of look at like 18 different, like at least for me, it's like I collage together like 18 different sources of people who are all over the place to try to then figure out what's going on outside of Western, the kind of like Western frame.
[00:34:34]  It's just, it's so difficult.
[00:34:36]  Yeah, no, it's so important.
[00:34:38]  John and I have talked about a lot.
[00:34:39]  Like if you are going to research something, and we see this all the time researching shows, and if, and if you're going along kind of a path that is very much in line with the Acela corridor, DC thinking, Google is like a smooth flowing river.
[00:34:54]  You're going to find everything right away.
[00:34:56]  Boom, If you're looking for, wait a minute, you know, you're, you're taking a skeptical view, you're trying to find, you notice something's wrong with that narrative, and then you try Googling.
[00:35:07]  I mean, it's like, it is really hard to navigate, really hard to find.
[00:35:12]  And you have to put in way more work to do it.
[00:35:25]  But anyways, so yeah, so getting back to this.

=== Ukrainian Language Flashpoint (14:57) ===

[00:35:27]  So these huge Orange Revolution protests, heavily backed by, again, all these American NGOs, I mean, particularly really, again, the National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute, and so on and so forth.
[00:35:43]  Along with, I remember hearing at the time, it was one of the major U.S. marketing firms.
[00:35:49]  I mean, look, they branded Orange.
[00:35:51]  I mean, it was so branded.
[00:35:52]  It was so good.
[00:35:53]  And it was brilliant.
[00:35:54]  I think it was either Burson Marsteller or one of the many groups under the WPP umbrella.
[00:36:02]  But the branding was just amazing on it.
[00:36:07]  And eventually what's so who are the leaders of it?
[00:36:10]  There was Viktor Yushchenko, who came from the far west, an old kind of nationalist family.
[00:36:14]  And his wife was a diaspora Ukrainian nationalist, American, actually.
[00:36:20]  He was the central banker and a prime minister.
[00:36:22]  And then he was the guy who ran as the head of the Orange Revolution.
[00:36:25]  He was the one poisoned with dioxin.
[00:36:27]  Remember, his face was poisoned.
[00:36:29]  I remember that probably by his.
[00:36:30]  He looked all fucked up.
[00:36:31]  Yeah, very fucked up.
[00:36:33]  It was blamed on Russia.
[00:36:35]  It's always possible, but Ukrainian, it's way more likely it was done by, you know, internal Ukrainian, their rivals, the rivals.
[00:36:44]  Yanukovych.
[00:36:45]  You know, Yanukovych was like Jocelyn.
[00:36:48]  Yeah.
[00:36:48]  Yanukovych is like a convicted rapist, if I remember right.
[00:36:52]  I mean, just an actual goon, you know, and not particularly smart either, but pliant for the whole Donetsk Mafia people.
[00:37:03]  So anyway, The election is ruled by all these NGO election monitors.
[00:37:10]  Yanukovych wins by a few points in the first round.
[00:37:13]  We say it was, you know, not free and fair.
[00:37:16]  And basically, as far as I can tell, we tell the oligarchs that back Yanukovych, you have two choices.
[00:37:22]  Either your life is going to become hell and you're only going to be able to travel between Ukraine and Russia, and we're going to sanction all your offshore money.
[00:37:31]  Or, you know, you come over on our side and you'll be able to be rich and fly wherever you want.
[00:37:38]  And I think that's where Pinchuk first started becoming a pro-Western oligarch.
[00:37:42]  So they redid the election and Yushinko won and with Yulia Timoshenko.
[00:37:47]  You remember the beautiful province?
[00:37:48]  Oh, yeah.
[00:37:50]  Do I, Mark?
[00:37:52]  Think of who you're talking to.
[00:37:54]  Why do you think I went to Ukraine, Mark?
[00:37:57]  Oh, my God.
[00:37:58]  It was too late.
[00:37:59]  I'm searching, brother.
[00:38:01]  I found her.
[00:38:02]  Now I'm just, I got to get her away from me, if you know what I mean.
[00:38:07]  But, you know, we can continue.
[00:38:11]  So Yushinko and Timoshenko, the two pro-Western, anti-Russian nationalists, are already falling out within a year.
[00:38:21]  And Yanukovych already is brought in as prime minister of Yushchenko.
[00:38:26]  Yeah, they have got like four or five guys they could just go to, and it's just like a rotating, it's like musical chairs.
[00:38:33]  And they don't know what to do.
[00:38:34]  Well, look what happened when they tried a new guy with Zowinski.
[00:38:39]  I mean, can we use the expression gogal-esque yet?
[00:38:42]  Yeah, yes.
[00:38:43]  Yeah, So, so, right.
[00:38:47]  So then, so Yanukovych, you know, the international evil bad guy is in with the Orange Revolution leader.
[00:38:54]  Timoshenko genuinely does become Kremlin friendly, believe it or not.
[00:38:59]  Like she starts hanging out with Putin.
[00:39:03]  And one thing that Yanukovych and Yushchenko bond in is their mutual absolute hatred for Timoshenko.
[00:39:10]  And they work together eventually to get her jailed.
[00:39:12]  And she later isn't released until the Maidan Revolution.
[00:39:15]  Yeah.
[00:39:16]  I remember that worst day of my life.
[00:39:19]  The text I got that day.
[00:39:22]  2010 is the next election.
[00:39:24]  So, you know, you had this election in 2005 and the pro-Western guy wins.
[00:39:30]  Who win against the evil, bad, anti-democracy, autocratic, you know, pro-Russian guy, Yanukovych?
[00:39:36]  Who wins in 2010?
[00:39:37]  Yanukovych.
[00:39:38]  He actually beats Timoshenko and then later jails her.
[00:39:42]  But in the first round of the election, when all the people can, all the candidates run, you know, Yushenko is one of the guys who runs.
[00:39:49]  And he comes in fifth place.
[00:39:50]  This is how much that pro-Western, U.S.-backed, we're going forward, you know, how much of a failure was.
[00:39:57]  He came in fifth place with 5% of the vote.
[00:40:00]  Yanukovych wins.
[00:40:01]  So now everyone's all in a really bad mood because it makes the West look bad.
[00:40:05]  It makes Western Ukraine look bad.
[00:40:07]  Yasha Monk freaking out.
[00:40:10]  He's like, he's like got four new books out about the democratic backslide or whatever the fuck is these books about.
[00:40:21]  One thing Yushinko does when he's a lame duck is he rams through.
[00:40:25]  Well, one thing he does is he officially announces that Stepan Bandera is an official state hero.
[00:40:30]  That's right.
[00:40:31]  It elevates him.
[00:40:32]  And actually back then.
[00:40:33]  Now time to Google who that is.
[00:40:36]  Oh, I'm so this guy?
[00:40:42]  And actually, that's probably the last time the EU and people in the West said, wait a minute, that's a little bit too far for us.
[00:40:50]  That's a little, you know.
[00:40:52]  Yeah, you just tripped it off.
[00:40:54]  A little more subtle than that.
[00:40:56]  Yeah.
[00:40:56]  Yeah.
[00:40:57]  And he also pushed through, as I recall, language laws that were like, basically, everyone has to speak, you know, Western Ukrainian.
[00:41:06]  We can't speak Russian anymore.
[00:41:07]  Well, that's a big thing with Ukraine is that there is a huge language difference.
[00:41:12]  I mean, to a, listen, to a Jew like me, Ukrainian looks the same as a Russian.
[00:41:17]  I'm sorry.
[00:41:18]  You both look like you're going to kill me.
[00:41:20]  But the language difference in Ukraine there is pretty stark, especially when you compare an East to the West.
[00:41:28]  And the Ukrainization, it's a really difficult word to pronounce.
[00:41:32]  I feel like there should be another couple syllables in there, but the Ukrainianization of the language has been a big flashpoint.
[00:41:41]  And so it was like sort of minority language rights.
[00:41:45]  And language rights are, you know, I think in America, a lot of people don't really think about it that much, but language rights can be really, important.
[00:41:54]  I mean, if you look at the Kurds in Turkey, one of the biggest flashpoints there with their struggles against the central government, besides obviously all the other stuff, is language rights and the sort of the Turkification of the language.
[00:42:05]  And this happens throughout like basically a lot of different countries that have a sizable or even sort of smaller minority language is if the central government basically tries to make a uniform language or in more scenarios like in Turkey, ban the minority language, that can cause, I mean, it's a huge flashpoint.
[00:42:25]  Absolutely.
[00:42:26]  And the West would back the minority language rights on the theory of we, you know, we demand minority rights because suppressing language is like a violation of human rights.
[00:42:38]  If that were, you, you know, could be instrumentalized to weaken arrival.
[00:42:44]  But in this case, actually, we want it suppressed to weaken arrival.
[00:42:48]  So we back it.
[00:42:49]  But when Yanukovych came to power, he changed the law in 2012 so that Russia became a second language.
[00:42:56]  That was one of the things he campaigned on.
[00:42:58]  But that really galvanized the nationalists in a big way.
[00:43:03]  I think it was in that 2012 election that Svoboda, which is the straight-up fascist party, won like 10, 15% of the vote and had a huge presence in the parliament then, and then played a front role in the Maidan Revolution two years later.
[00:43:19]  Right.
[00:43:19]  So just zipping through here, trying to get zip through 2013, there's a big sort of struggle here.
[00:43:26]  EU and the West want Yanukovych to sign this free trade agreement with the EU, but it would be very punitive.
[00:43:35]  It would mean opening up all kinds of markets.
[00:43:39]  It would mean destroying Ukrainian industry or whatever was left.
[00:43:45]  But still, the EU wouldn't let in Ukraine's.
[00:43:47]  I mean, it was very one-sided and very punitive, but it was a way of maybe buying off Ukraine.
[00:43:56]  And, you know, it would get a lot of Ukrainian cheap labor.
[00:43:59]  It would let the Europeans buy up a lot of shit in Ukraine.
[00:44:03]  And then on the other side, Putin was putting together this as a counterweight, a Eurasia union and offered all kinds of like massive sweeteners so that if you join the Eurasia Union, Ukraine would get billions of dollars, all kinds of very favorable trade deals and so on.
[00:44:24]  Funny enough, Paul Manafort's whole thing was trying to get Yanukovych to go with the EU.
[00:44:29]  Sure.
[00:44:30]  Paul Manafort.
[00:44:30]  My God, that's another story.
[00:44:32]  Yeah.
[00:44:34]  Yeah, this is when the like West's kind of thirst for opening up Ukraine and, you know, I don't know.
[00:44:43]  Maybe you disagree.
[00:44:44]  Ukraine's natural resources are not.
[00:44:46]  It's not as yeah, I wouldn't say it's as bountiful as maybe some people would assume, considering how it's always in the news.
[00:44:56]  And so people are like, oh, no blood for oil or whatever.
[00:44:59]  Corn and ruins.
[00:45:00]  Yeah, but I will say that the West kind of beginning, well, we'll get to, you know, Maidan, but, you know, when that, you know, finally goes through, the West really deindustrializes Ukraine kind of like at an unprecedented scale and completely like all of all of its kind of manufacturing sector has just been completely depleted and ruined.
[00:45:24]  And it was actually pretty strong.
[00:45:26]  This is something I think we've talked about, particularly with like, like, you know, it was building a lot of like tanks.
[00:45:32]  It was building a lot of airplanes.
[00:45:36]  Yeah.
[00:45:36]  It was kind of a, yeah, rockets, all Soviet.
[00:45:39]  There was a bunch of old, really strong, of course.
[00:45:42]  Everyone knows strong engineering from the Soviets.
[00:45:46]  But the West really came in, privatized all that, and then deindustrialized it very, very quickly.
[00:45:54]  So it's really not a kind of like, you know, natural resource issue so much as, you know, strategic and then, you know, greedy, greedy, greedy.
[00:46:02]  Yeah.
[00:46:03]  In the east, the pro-Russian parts is where the wealth was.
[00:46:06]  And it was very dominated by very, very scary, powerful oligarchs like Rinot Akhmiatov.
[00:46:13]  These are guys who survived like we hear about the sort of the Russian, you know, organized crime slash oligarch wars of the 90s.
[00:46:22]  And it's, it was very rough in that area.
[00:46:24]  It was a very wealthy area.
[00:46:26]  It's now all divided up and, you know, and a lot of it's been ruined.
[00:46:32]  But yeah, no, it's, and Western Ukraine has tons of land.
[00:46:35]  I mean, what is, what does the West want from Ukraine in that sense?
[00:46:40]  I mean, what are its, what are its valuable sort of resources aside from like, yeah, pipes and steel and some of that stuff.
[00:46:48]  But land, agricultural land, they're really trying.
[00:46:54]  USAID has programs, NGOs that they fund to try to get people to favor selling land to foreigners.
[00:47:02]  I mean, basically what the Germans wanted when they went in in 1918 and 1941, they wanted that land.
[00:47:08]  And, well, you can't make slave labor, directly slave labor out of Ukrainians, but you can make.
[00:47:16]  Yeah, they tried.
[00:47:17]  So instead, you can make them completely cheap, exploited, zero rights labor, which is kind of what they are now.
[00:47:23]  I mean, millions have left the country.
[00:47:25]  I think the population has declined from something like, I don't know, 42, 45 million to about 32 million.
[00:47:32]  I mean, I know, I know Ukrainians who have left the country.
[00:47:37]  Like people I know have moved to get, because you can't get paid.
[00:47:41]  One of the guys I know was, you know, he had a job that would probably net him like, you know, six figures in America and was likely, I mean, I think he was getting paid as much as like a McDonald's worker in a medical split.
[00:47:51]  Yeah.
[00:47:51]  And I think the average Ukrainian makes about 200, 200, maybe if they're lucky up to 300 a month now.
[00:47:58]  By the way, Ukraine's GDP has never fully recovered from where it was in 1990 before the Soviet Union collapsed.
[00:48:05]  One of the few republics that hasn't.
[00:48:07]  But there was one guy who came to Ukraine and made riches.
[00:48:15]  I can't really understand why everybody else isn't rich.
[00:48:17]  I mean, he was paid a fortune.
[00:48:20]  He was paid, I think, something like 4,000 times the average wage a month.
[00:48:26]  And he happens to be the son of our president, Hunter Biden, right?
[00:48:30]  Really?
[00:48:31]  Oh, yeah, we did.
[00:48:32]  We did an episode on that too.
[00:48:33]  I know you did.
[00:48:34]  It was a great episode.
[00:48:35]  Yeah.
[00:48:37]  Isn't that fun?
[00:48:38]  I mean, it's so hard.
[00:48:39]  It's so weird to think that we're talking about Ukraine all the time and literally no one is saying, you know, the president's son made tons of money from a corrupt oligarch there.
[00:48:50]  And the same oligarch actually also funded the Atlantic Council, which has come up with all the Biden's plans.
[00:48:56]  Mark, I'm sorry.
[00:48:58]  This is just Nazi problem.
[00:48:59]  This is Russian propaganda.
[00:49:00]  This is ridiculous.
[00:49:02]  It's true, but it's Russian propaganda.
[00:49:04]  Yeah.
[00:49:06]  So anyway, so literally the minute this happens that he announces they're not going, that Yanukovych announces they're not going with the EU deal and they're going with the Russian deal instead.
[00:49:19]  Immediately a pre-planned protest is set up, led by Ole Rybachuk.
[00:49:26]  Very close to the U.S. Embassy.
[00:49:28]  I remember going through WikiLeaks cables, very close.
[00:49:31]  He was a point man.
[00:49:32]  Well, he was a big operator in the Orange Revolution.
[00:49:36]  He has deep intelligence ties.
[00:49:39]  Very close to the U.S. Embassy.
[00:49:40]  He did a lot of work for them trying to convince Ukrainians that they want to go and setting up like NGOs and workshops to try to make NATO popular there.
[00:49:49]  It's been long been a big, big priority of the U.S. Embassy is selling NATO.
[00:49:56]  And it's never been popular there.
[00:49:58]  Never.
[00:49:59]  Even with war against Russia, I think the most you can get maybe now, but they don't want to put it to a referendum, not the NATO supporters, is it maybe has gone up to about 50-50 at this point.
[00:50:12]  Maybe, but it's going back down again.
[00:50:15]  But it was always in the 20 to 30% range of support, basically all in the far west, in the old Austro-Hungarian Bendera part of the country.

=== Putin's Poorly Executed Oligarch Takeover Attempt (05:39) ===

[00:50:24]  But yeah, so they set up Rybachuk's NGO.
[00:50:31]  It was, he had two major NGOs, New Citizen and Center UA.
[00:50:37]  And I wrote about this way back in early 2014 because I looked up who funded it.
[00:50:42]  And it turned out the major funders of Rybachuk who set up, according to Financial Times, like these were the guys who set up the Maidan revolution back in November, the day it started.
[00:50:56]  Yes, these two NGOs.
[00:50:57]  It was Pierre Omidyar, publisher The Intercept, and the guy who bought and then eventually shut down the Snowden NSA files, and USAID with a bit of money from a Soros cutout.
[00:51:11]  But it was mostly just USAID NED and Pierre Omidyar.
[00:51:15]  So that's the thing is like, is with this, like, you know, I've made a few references on the show to Pierre Omidyar and his opportunities he took in Ukraine.
[00:51:27]  But this is, I mean, it's, it's, it's sort of, you know, you can just see like a one-to-one correlation here with like money goes in and then revolution kind of happens here.
[00:51:38]  And it's sort of astounding that like, you know, these Western Aligned private citizens are basically funding what turns out to be a revolution that topples what is, I mean, legally a democratically elected president.
[00:51:52]  You know, I have no illusions about the state of democracy in Ukraine then or now.
[00:51:59]  But, you know, going by the standards with which we are judging many of our allies.
[00:52:05]  Uh, democratically elected president they, they take him out.
[00:52:08]  You know what it essentially turns out to be, basically a coup.
[00:52:11]  Yep um, you know, the leader has to flee the country and uh yeah it's, it's this, this guy.
[00:52:17]  But no, he changed his tune.
[00:52:19]  Now he's, he's like a left, he's like a left, left-wing guy, he plays like uh, privacy and yeah yeah, exactly.
[00:52:25]  I also want to say too that, for as much as you know uh, you know, we mentioned Usaid, Omidyar Soros, these guys, we it would be remiss if we didn't mention New Land, Samantha Power yes uh, Tony Blinken I, these repugnant.
[00:52:41]  All these guys um, you know, in official capacity, basically are there on the ground making sure that things don't go awry.
[00:52:52]  And you know, depending on what angle you're looking at, things do go awry.
[00:52:55]  They're like, use different rooms on your armband.
[00:52:58]  Well, awry meaning yeah, they would probably say it went awry now, but I think they were pretty, pretty happy with how things went.
[00:53:06]  Oh yeah, totally I.
[00:53:07]  Yeah no, Vicky Newland was going around giving out cookies.
[00:53:10]  Um, Mccain was sharing the stage with the head of, oh, my god, I forgot about John Mccain.
[00:53:16]  Yeah Mccain, which is, I wish, oh god yeah, still the guy.
[00:53:20]  The Vietnamese got to torture him.
[00:53:22]  Dude, imagine if you're the Vietnamese guy who like up Mccain's arm forever.
[00:53:26]  It's like, it's like 2006.
[00:53:29]  You're just like.
[00:53:29]  This is so like.
[00:53:30]  I want the name of the Vietnamese guy who saved him and kept the crowd away.
[00:53:34]  Yeah, we should kill that guy.
[00:53:38]  Remember when Trump was like if you were a better pilot, you wouldn't have crashed?
[00:53:43]  I gotta say that was so incredible.
[00:53:45]  He's like, oh yeah, I like the soldiers who didn't get captured.
[00:53:48]  Like yeah, me too.
[00:53:49]  That's also.
[00:53:50]  Trump pointed out that the Pow thing, the Pow Mia thing, is totally fake, a total myth, even though those flags are posted at every fucking I know goddamn post office in America.
[00:54:01]  Yeah yeah, get waiting for New York State, everywhere.
[00:54:04]  Exactly what Pow are you talking about?
[00:54:07]  Who they don't know because they're Mia, they're Mi.
[00:54:10]  Wait, what was that?
[00:54:12]  Bo Grits?
[00:54:13]  What is in charge of the post office?
[00:54:16]  I forgot ridiculous.
[00:54:17]  The Pow Mi thing is A Is A Man, we're not going to go find those MIAs.
[00:54:23]  It was a marketing scheme to sell t-shirts and now it's at the fucking post office.
[00:54:28]  Drives me crazy.
[00:54:30]  Don't get captured, moron.
[00:54:32]  Okay, so Maidan is another color revolution.
[00:54:52]  Yes.
[00:54:52]  It's 2014.
[00:54:53]  It's in full swing.
[00:54:55]  Yeah.
[00:54:56]  And suddenly out of nowhere, a bunch of fascists appear.
[00:54:59]  No, well, yeah, I would say this, though, because I had a friend who wrote for, he now works for like one of the big agencies, but back then, not ages, I mean, like, you know, Bloomberg or whatever.
[00:55:11]  News agency.
[00:55:12]  News agency, yeah.
[00:55:14]  Who went for my newspaper, The Exile.
[00:55:17]  He went and covered the Orange Revolution.
[00:55:19]  He was very sympathetic.
[00:55:20]  He'd lived there.
[00:55:21]  You know, you can under, it's, it's easy to be sympathetic with this unless you have a lot of foresight into where it's going to go.
[00:55:29]  Because, you know, the people on the other side are kind of like openly corrupt.
[00:55:33]  And the people who are being used, who think they might get something out of it, are all decent, largely like younger, decent people are like, screw this guy.
[00:55:41]  Like Yanukovych was obscenely corrupt.
[00:55:44]  And he pissed off a lot of the oligarchs by trying to centralize the corruption essentially too much for their taste.
[00:55:53]  Kind of like trying to do a Putin thing, but where you get control over the oligarchs, but in a very, very poorly done way.

=== Tolerating Corruption (02:45) ===

[00:56:03]  And anyway, in a country that's not unified like Russia.
[00:56:08]  Mr. Yanukovych, you are no Vladimir Putin, sir.
[00:56:11]  You are no Putin.
[00:56:12]  I knew Vladimir Putin and you, sir, are no Putin.
[00:56:16]  And he was, I mean, he had alienated even a lot of the sort of the pro-Russian regions base there, especially among wealthier people and organized crime leaders and so on.
[00:56:29]  He really had alienated a lot and no one was excited about him anymore.
[00:56:33]  And that's the thing about these color revolutions.
[00:56:35]  They take advantage of that.
[00:56:36]  It's not the principle.
[00:56:38]  It's like, well, we can tap into this grievance to try to get what we want, which is we know that if we, Russia's becoming more and more powerful, it's becoming more and more of a problem for American hegemony.
[00:56:49]  And since the 90s, America can never get over the fact that they had total global hegemony, you know, by December 31st, 1999.
[00:56:59]  And the world should always be that way.
[00:57:01]  And it can't handle anything else.
[00:57:02]  It's like a junkie chasing his first shot over and over again.
[00:57:06]  It's like, man, it wasn't.
[00:57:07]  I remember how sick it was in like 95.
[00:57:10]  Shit was going so good.
[00:57:12]  It was so good.
[00:57:13]  And now it's like, dude, I think U.S. foreign policy still acts that way.
[00:57:17]  Everyone still wants 1999.
[00:57:20]  They're like, man, the best years of everyone's life was the Clinton years.
[00:57:24]  Yep, me too.
[00:57:25]  Nine years old, I was fucking, I was just getting a DD.
[00:57:29]  I was getting some modules.
[00:57:31]  Like, it was, things were going so good.
[00:57:35]  School wasn't hard enough for me to fail at yet.
[00:57:37]  Like, it was tonight.
[00:57:39]  We're going to intervene.
[00:57:41]  I wasn't involved in the planning and carrying out of the attacks upon the World Trade Center.
[00:57:46]  Like, that hadn't happened yet.
[00:57:48]  It was, yeah.
[00:57:49]  99 was good.
[00:57:50]  But even that was a moment still.
[00:57:52]  Like, it just, it took a while.
[00:57:53]  This, this slowly collapsing, slowly, slowly collapsing empire took a while.
[00:57:58]  But, and part of that, that collapse is the complete inability, unlike weirdly enough in the kind of the 70s, this complete inability to come to grips with any reality anymore and just say, no, we want it to be like this year.
[00:58:11]  And we're going to pretend no matter what's happening that it is that year and just what?
[00:58:16]  Just go along with it.
[00:58:18]  But anyway, so they were very open that, you know, if they could permanently peel Ukraine away from Russia rather than it being a border state, right?
[00:58:30]  And going back and forth and so on.
[00:58:32]  Like Russia was all right with Ukraine even being playing ball with the West, playing both sides, even being more pro-Western.
[00:58:44]  So long as they weren't actually in NATO, then they could deal with it.

=== Ukraine's Subversion Under Radar (15:22) ===

[00:58:49]  You know, they could deal with the situation.
[00:58:50]  They were tolerating it.
[00:58:51]  Yes, tolerating it, doing all their best to fight under sort of under the radar, doing their own subversion things and so on and so forth.
[00:59:01]  But that was a struggle that was still didn't need any kind of overt war struggle.
[00:59:06]  That was a struggle they were still willing to kind of battle with.
[00:59:09]  So long as we weren't talking about bringing Ukraine in NATO.
[00:59:14]  And the West knew that it was going to be hard to get to get them in NATO.
[00:59:18]  And you were going to need a much more radically pro-Western, so to speak.
[00:59:27]  You need some people that were much, much more radical.
[00:59:31]  And some motivated.
[00:59:33]  Very motivated.
[00:59:34]  The types that really believe in something.
[00:59:37]  Yes.
[00:59:38]  And will fight for types of the end.
[00:59:40]  Yeah.
[00:59:41]  Some people were saying are insane fascists.
[00:59:44]  Yes.
[00:59:44]  Yeah.
[00:59:44]  And who were the two leaders?
[00:59:46]  So the Maidan revolution was on the Maidan Square in the center of Kyiv.
[00:59:50]  But Maidan Square had this thing called the Maidan Self-Defense Committee.
[00:59:55]  Yes.
[00:59:55]  Which was the heart of it all, the heart of everything.
[00:59:58]  They had all these, you know, as an anarcho-syndicalist, I get down there and I see all these cool black and red flags.
[01:00:05]  And I'm like, wow, Nestor Machno's back.
[01:00:08]  Our moments are the workers are rising up.
[01:00:11]  But then I noticed that they were using RPKs on full auto on gypsies.
[01:00:17]  And I was like, this isn't, I don't remember reading about this in any panic connect or whatever.
[01:00:22]  You know, this is really confusing to me.
[01:00:26]  Yep.
[01:00:27]  So the two head, the head of it was Andrei Parubi.
[01:00:30]  He was the founder of the Social National Party, which became Svoboda.
[01:00:35]  And he has a book I've read a little bit of in translation because Ukrainian is just different.
[01:00:41]  It's closer to Polish as far as I can tell and parts of it than Russia.
[01:00:45]  So mostly Zs?
[01:00:48]  Yeah, and just kind of like consonants together and weird I's, you know, here and there.
[01:00:54]  But he wrote a book called View from the Right.
[01:00:59]  And that meant that the right wing.
[01:01:01]  And on the cover, he's in this like 30 side.
[01:01:04]  These people love cosplaying for real, right?
[01:01:07]  So he's in an actual 30s style, what you would see in an old photo of a fascist then with like a holster strap going over the shoulder and a gun, breeches and boots and a big Wolfsangle, huge Wolfsangle flag behind him.
[01:01:22]  And it's all about how we have to, the white nation is under threat from Russians who are Mongols and Asiatic and Europe, you know, that Ukraine is the border actually for the white race.
[01:01:35]  I'm sorry, man.
[01:01:36]  I'm sorry.
[01:01:37]  I'm sorry.
[01:01:38]  Let's rewind a little bit here.
[01:01:40]  First of all, Ukrainians aren't white.
[01:01:43]  They're not white.
[01:01:44]  You're not white.
[01:01:46]  My view of white, I'm making Whoopi Goldberg look like she is the inventor of critical race theory because my thing is that I go by the Nazi definition of white when it suits me, which is mostly to say that if you're Slavic, you aren't white.
[01:02:05]  You ain't it.
[01:02:06]  You're like a B white.
[01:02:08]  Like you're like a you're like a B tier white.
[01:02:10]  You're white in the fact that like, you know, I don't know, your skin is white, but like you're not like, you're not an Uber mensch.
[01:02:20]  You're just a regular mensch.
[01:02:22]  If Whoopi had any real balls, she would have sparked a national conversation on whether or not Ukrainians were white.
[01:02:28]  Just like throw it out there, see what happens.
[01:02:31]  Get in the men.
[01:02:32]  Here's the thing too with Whoopi.
[01:02:34]  Goldberg, not her last name, but I support it.
[01:02:37]  Yes.
[01:02:38]  Yeah.
[01:02:38]  Her mom made her change her last name to Goldberg to sound Jewish.
[01:02:41]  Wow.
[01:02:42]  Which is really interesting.
[01:02:44]  Which is crazy because that's actually, that is a Ukrainian last name.
[01:02:48]  It's a traditional Ukrainian last name.
[01:02:51]  Shlomo Goldberg.
[01:02:53]  Yeah.
[01:02:54]  All right.
[01:02:54]  So you've got to.
[01:02:55]  So Perubi was the head of the self-defense and Dmitro Yarosh, the head of right sector you were talking about from black and red flags was the deputy commander.
[01:03:03]  And so you have these actual Nazis, neo-fascists.
[01:03:08]  I mean, I don't think we should split here.
[01:03:10]  Let's just call them neo-Nazis.
[01:03:11]  I'm probably just going to refer to them as Nazis.
[01:03:14]  They love the Nazis and they want to be like them.
[01:03:18]  And people in Perubi's party, like they, right after the Maidan Revolution succeeded and they took power, is like the new minister from his party, the new minister of maybe information or culture, one of those two, like he was filmed going into a main TV station that the scene is Russia-friendly, screaming about the Moscow Moscow Moscow.
[01:03:43]  It basically means kite.
[01:03:46]  Moscow is like kite for Russians.
[01:03:50]  Wait, I'm sorry.
[01:03:50]  Yeah.
[01:03:52]  They think like Moscow and the Jews are the same thing.
[01:03:56]  Yes.
[01:03:57]  Because you know what?
[01:03:58]  I'll take it.
[01:03:59]  Yeah.
[01:04:00]  Russians are Russians are Jews.
[01:04:02]  Yes.
[01:04:02]  It's because they think communism is a Russian, which is Asiatic, Jewish, which and Jews are Asiatic conspiracy to control the white race.
[01:04:14]  I mean, I mean, it's like half true.
[01:04:18]  I think it would be good for you guys, but yeah, I mean, it seems like, I don't know, what's wrong with that?
[01:04:24]  You guys are out of control.
[01:04:25]  Look at Ukraine.
[01:04:27]  So as this Maidan revolution doesn't go away, and this friend of mine from the exile who went there and checked it out like about a month before it actually turned overtly violent, he went there and I was like, so how is it?
[01:04:38]  Because even I was kind of like, I knew what Yanukovych was like.
[01:04:42]  And I remembered kind of the Orange Revolution stuff.
[01:04:44]  And I just hated those people pretty deeply.
[01:04:47]  And I was like, so, you know, good guys, bad guys, you know, what did you see?
[01:04:51]  Are the goons attacking them?
[01:04:53]  More corny than anything.
[01:04:54]  And he said, no, and he answered, he goes, dude, the people in the Maidan Square are nothing like the people in the Orange Revolution, which was like this happy, positive Burson Marsteller with, you know, marketing balloons.
[01:05:07]  These were all criminals.
[01:05:10]  I mean, who are the Nazis?
[01:05:11]  Hooligans.
[01:05:12]  Yeah, the Nazis are, you know, football hooligans, criminals.
[01:05:16]  They're private armies that work for oligarchs to take over factories, to protect their factories, to bully people.
[01:05:24]  And they're working for the security services or factions of the security services because everything is factionalized.
[01:05:31]  You know, when I was there in Odessa, a friend of mine was walking me around, a friend, actually, he's from, I think, Donetsk, but he had to, he moved.
[01:05:41]  And he was saying, like, yeah, like sort of prior to, I guess, the modern incarnation where they really heavily entered politics, like the kind of people who were like members of right sector and as of and all these groups were football hooligans, like they were criminals.
[01:05:58]  Like, I mean, football hooliganism gets really extreme in some countries.
[01:06:02]  So even though, I don't know, for those who've read Among the Thugs, I mean, it can get pretty extreme in Britain as well, but they're more politicized in other countries.
[01:06:10]  Right.
[01:06:11]  That's a fantastic book, by the way.
[01:06:12]  I really, really, I don't know.
[01:06:13]  I recommend it highly.
[01:06:15]  I mean, in Brazil, that's basically Bolsonaro's like, I mean, street squad.
[01:06:19]  Muscle.
[01:06:20]  Exactly.
[01:06:20]  And so, you know, a lot of the times football hooligans, like it sounds, even though that is like a pretty, I mean, especially Europeans, that can evoke a pretty violent, scary image or whatever.
[01:06:30]  You know, like, oh, these crazy guys are drunk on lager.
[01:06:33]  In a lot of these countries, I mean, they basically serve the, you know, their stormtroopers for whatever political party or criminal organization wants to hire them.
[01:06:43]  Which is always so funny because in soccer itself, it's like the only sport where you actually get an advantage by rolling around crying, pretending like you've been injured.
[01:06:53]  Oh, no, my leg hurts.
[01:06:55]  Oh, I got into so much muscle.
[01:06:58]  It's so out of control.
[01:06:59]  Here's the thing.
[01:07:00]  Use your hand, moron.
[01:07:01]  I can't believe none of these people have ever thought about this.
[01:07:03]  Just use your hand to hit the ball.
[01:07:05]  You can't do that.
[01:07:06]  Yeah.
[01:07:07]  Yes, you can.
[01:07:08]  They just don't know that.
[01:07:10]  It's like a whole dog can't play basketball thing.
[01:07:13]  Nobody's just tried it before.
[01:07:14]  They think Airbud has tried it and has done it too well.
[01:07:18]  Yeah.
[01:07:19]  I'm saying they need to be an Airbud for soccer, unless that's what Airbud was about.
[01:07:23]  But I'm assuming basketball in the air.
[01:07:26]  Yeah.
[01:07:26]  No, I think Airbud had a soccer one.
[01:07:29]  Okay.
[01:07:29]  Why don't you all try, bud with our CBD sponsor?
[01:07:33]  Yeah, so Mark.
[01:07:34]  So getting back to it.
[01:07:35]  So like in the lead up to it, there are these various violent acts.
[01:07:39]  Yes.
[01:07:40]  In hindsight, I went back through the record later and looked like literally every guy, there were one or two people killed.
[01:07:45]  Every single one of them was a fascist.
[01:07:47]  Somebody was beaten up.
[01:07:49]  There were people who staged things.
[01:07:50]  There was a guy who staged his own crucifixion and said that Yanukovych's goons did it.
[01:07:55]  And it turned out like later after the revolution, he had done it to himself.
[01:07:59]  You know, there was like a woman famously watching.
[01:08:02]  So Yanukovych was making people self-harm, Mark, and you think that's fine.
[01:08:06]  There was like a woman during the actual bloody days.
[01:08:09]  She had famously like made sure she was filmed running around with like blood on her and she was a nurse.
[01:08:13]  And later it turned out, I'm saying the Ukrainians themselves in post-Maidan Ukraine ruled.
[01:08:18]  She had faked it, the whole thing.
[01:08:20]  There was a lot of that.
[01:08:21]  There were a lot of people killed, apparently 100 people killed on that day.
[01:08:26]  But I got to say, first of all, it didn't make a whole lot of sense because all this blew up into overt violence right after the US, EU, Russia, they all kind of cobbled together a deal.
[01:08:41]  Yes.
[01:08:41]  Where it was clear.
[01:08:42]  Yeah, it was clear like Yanukovych, like these guys weren't going to go away.
[01:08:45]  Yanukovych was going to have to leave.
[01:08:47]  This was not democratic.
[01:08:49]  I mean, polls, there was a poll in the Washington Post right around this time that showed that maybe about 40% of Ukrainians supported the Maidan people.
[01:08:58]  This is just before the actual overall.
[01:09:00]  Of course, a poll in the Washington Post would say that they would say that, yeah.
[01:09:05]  Just kidding.
[01:09:06]  But and then right after that deal, I think Yanukovych then agreed, okay, he was going to stand down.
[01:09:12]  There would be elections in a year.
[01:09:14]  And, you know, the fascists and basically their sponsors in the West kind of understood now or never is our moment because in a year these guys can do a whole lot of things.
[01:09:23]  You have to go with the momentum and just bust through that deal or else you're just never going to have another chance.
[01:09:30]  Here's a little Belden program tip for you all out here.
[01:09:33]  I have said before: if you ever take over a country in a coalition with other political parties, make sure that your political party gets the post of interior minister.
[01:09:41]  Yes.
[01:09:42]  My other thing here is that if you are in a Maidan-type situation, a kinetic situation involving possible forthcoming elections, say no to the elections, say that they're going to be rigged, say that you can't participate in them and force the hand, basically, make the person leave right there.
[01:10:00]  Because you don't want to wait.
[01:10:01]  A lot can happen in a year.
[01:10:02]  You don't want to wait for those elections.
[01:10:04]  And frankly, you don't want to wait for those fucking polls to come out.
[01:10:07]  I think some powerful people were paying attention to the Belden Plan.
[01:10:10]  Yeah.
[01:10:11]  Well, at the time, I was.
[01:10:13]  The Belden Plan has some good backers.
[01:10:15]  Yeah, I got pretty strong backers.
[01:10:19]  The only program backed by all female-type oligarchs who are strong, powerful, unmarried women who are part of the Belden harem.
[01:10:31]  But yeah, so it's going on.
[01:10:34]  They decided we're not doing this election.
[01:10:36]  It's somehow, for some reason, gunfire started breaking out.
[01:10:42]  Right.
[01:10:42]  And it looked like, you know, all of us were kind of trained to assume, well, these guys would shoot.
[01:10:48]  And I mean, these guys, Yanukovych's Berkut goons and Tatushki and so on.
[01:10:54]  And let me just say, it is really hard to know now, but there is a lot of evidence that it was a false flag operation, at least in part.
[01:11:08]  And that means some of the fascists who were running this, and, you know, unless you think fascists are too decent in principled to do something like that, actual fascists, you know, it's, you have to understand, you have to accept the possibility that it is real.
[01:11:25]  And there's precedent for this.
[01:11:28]  I mean, in other neighboring countries, let's say.
[01:11:32]  So Western-backed Yeltsin in 1993.
[01:11:35]  He had a parliament that was not going for his reform program.
[01:11:40]  Then he abolished, he did a coup in October, September, October 93.
[01:11:44]  He abolished parliament.
[01:11:46]  It was illegal.
[01:11:46]  The constitutional courts, it's illegal.
[01:11:48]  He abolished the constitutional court.
[01:11:50]  West totally backed him.
[01:11:53]  They hit out the opposition hit out there and was protesting, but they weren't taking the bait really.
[01:12:01]  And then suddenly, on this one day, a lot of people that protesters hadn't seen before kind of took over a march and attacked, started attacking different places.
[01:12:13]  And others who were with the protesters thought it was organic and went along with it.
[01:12:18]  But even at the time, the New York Times said it was pretty clear, like the provocative, there were provocateurs, Yeltsin, yes, provocatsia, whatever.
[01:12:30]  So, in the case of Maidan, what you're saying is that the kind of reports about the gunfire, about snipers, about all of this kind of like flashbang that was happening, that itself pretty clear was an inside job false flag.
[01:12:44]  I would say, I mean, I don't know for sure, but I'd say there's a lot of evidence.
[01:12:48]  I believe it because it's happened in other places before, and I don't see why it wouldn't.
[01:12:53]  And there's just a lot of evidence.
[01:12:54]  I mean, number one, there's not been a single person prosecuted for it in Ukraine, right?
[01:12:59]  Ukraine could have prosecuted them.
[01:13:01]  They had trials, trials were shut down.
[01:13:04]  There have been some trials that are ongoing where actually information proven the other side that there were false flag weirdnesses going on.
[01:13:13]  That's come out in a lot of trials, but no one in the West, this is an ongoing, ongoing reported in Ukraine, in the Ukrainian press.
[01:13:21]  Ukrainian press, despite all of the real violence that they faced since the Maidan revolution, the pro-Western government came to power.
[01:13:29]  They face enormous violence, blacklists, people get killed, beaten up, forced out of the country.
[01:13:34]  But nevertheless, it is a pretty lively, it's extremely ballsy and very lively media.
[01:13:39]  And they're on this.
[01:13:40]  It's only the West that won't talk about it.
[01:13:42]  And you are a bad person.
[01:13:44]  You're a weirdo if you even bring it up.
[01:13:47]  BBC did run something.
[01:13:48]  So this is the only, anytime people say it's a conspiracy theory, because there is a Russian, I'm sorry, a Ukrainian-Canadian researcher who has been like, this guy knows every detail about it and knows how many, you know, can like demonstrate any number of shots that were definitely fired from the Maidan side, hitting protesters and hitting Yanukovych's people.

=== Keeping Power Through Disinformation (10:12) ===

[01:14:12]  But there was a BBC report a year later that interviewed a guy who was with the protesters and talked about how he was ordered to shoot Yanukovych's people to start something.
[01:14:27]  Yeah, you've seen it.
[01:14:28]  So there is a mainstream element to it.
[01:14:31]  Yeah, go ahead, Brace.
[01:14:32]  And you want to know?
[01:14:32]  I mean, yeah, there is, I mean, just to what you're saying right then, there is literally a BBC report.
[01:14:38]  I think it's like, what is it, like 15 minutes long about precisely what you're saying right now.
[01:14:45]  And more to what you're saying, like, you know, unless you believe that these people are good people who would never do such a thing, the people behind these protests, the actual leaders that we're talking about, you know, the people behind right sector, Svoboda, all of these groups believe in the two most murderous ideologies of the 20th century.
[01:15:03]  Not necessarily in terms of numbers, but in terms of ideas.
[01:15:06]  And that would be fascism and liberal democracy.
[01:15:09]  And so these people.
[01:15:11]  I mean, they want it and they're going to stop at nothing.
[01:15:15]  These people were fighting the opening stages and firing the opening salvos of a civil war here.
[01:15:20]  Yep.
[01:15:20]  And you have to look at what was the outcome of these shootings.
[01:15:27]  Did they get what they wanted out of this?
[01:15:30]  Absolutely they did.
[01:15:31]  Yeah.
[01:15:31]  You know, and so obviously, like, I agree.
[01:15:34]  Like, I don't know what the fuck happened.
[01:15:36]  You know, what was Yanukovych going to gain from it?
[01:15:38]  Exactly.
[01:15:39]  Yeah.
[01:15:40]  Like, like, he did, he had, he was so wishy-washy himself, so corrupt and so wishy-washy.
[01:15:46]  Like, what would he gain from it, especially after cobbling together a deal?
[01:15:51]  He wasn't going to be able to do a giant nationwide clampdown.
[01:15:54]  There were armed people all over the country.
[01:15:56]  I remember from Lvov at this time, like, there were reports of people bringing in artillery that they'd raided from like local national guard units.
[01:16:04]  And nobody really supported Yanukovych, as I said, not until he was overthrown and people realized what was taking its place.
[01:16:10]  Yeah.
[01:16:11]  Were people in the east of the country really galvanized in a big way to be against whatever the revolution was?
[01:16:19]  Generally, I think people were just tired of everything and didn't see much to support about Yanukovych.
[01:16:24]  It's just odd.
[01:16:25]  But I did bring up, you know, I think a lot of people know about the famous Vicki Newland phone call where she's talking about what government we are basically deciding.
[01:16:35]  I mean, again, talk about meddling.
[01:16:37]  You got Newland on the sally.
[01:16:39]  Yeah.
[01:16:40]  Who was going to be the leader?
[01:16:42]  And it's like, well, it's not going to be Klitschko.
[01:16:44]  He's the current mayor of Kiev and he was like a big, he was the boxer guy.
[01:16:48]  Yes.
[01:16:48]  It's not going to be Klitschko.
[01:16:50]  We're going to keep him on deck for later.
[01:16:51]  You know, it's going to be Potashenko and Yatsenyuk Yats, who winds up becoming the interim leader and so on.
[01:16:58]  And it's just, they're so naked about it.
[01:17:00]  But anyway, everyone knows about that phone call, which was taped either by Russia and released either by Russian intelligence or a faction of Ukrainian intelligence.
[01:17:09]  No one disputes it where she said, fuck the EU.
[01:17:12]  And they're like, we're not sure the EU is going to go in.
[01:17:13]  And she says, fuck the EU.
[01:17:15]  I support her on that.
[01:17:16]  Yes, very much so.
[01:17:17]  I know.
[01:17:17]  That was the coolest thing she said.
[01:17:18]  Very much so.
[01:17:19]  Yeah.
[01:17:20]  But she also, there was not she, there was also another call leaked right around that time.
[01:17:29]  Maybe like a couple of days later.
[01:17:31]  Same thing posted on YouTube.
[01:17:34]  And it is a conversation between Estonia's foreign minister and the EU's basically like their head of foreign affairs, Kathy Ashton.
[01:17:43]  And he's in this call and he's going over with her basically the political situation is mostly kind of boring stuff.
[01:17:52]  And his talk with this woman who was like a very she was kind of a hero of Midon.
[01:17:56]  She was a nurse.
[01:17:57]  She was a medical person.
[01:17:58]  I think she was, they wanted her to be a health minister after the Midan Revolution.
[01:18:03]  I can't remember if she actually did it or not.
[01:18:06]  And they were talking about what she was saying was going on there.
[01:18:10]  And then at some point, the Estonian foreign minister says, yeah, and there's some other disturbing stuff that was said here that I'm not really sure how to deal with right now.
[01:18:23]  I don't know.
[01:18:24]  Do you want to play a little bit of it?
[01:18:26]  Young Chomsky, let's roll clip.
[01:18:28]  It was quite disturbing.
[01:18:30]  The same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides among policemen and people from the streets that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides.
[01:18:45]  Gollaps, yeah.
[01:18:47]  So that, and then she also showed me some photos.
[01:18:50]  She said that has medical doctor, she can, you know, say that it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets.
[01:18:57]  And it's really disturbing that now the new coalition that they don't want to investigate what exactly happened.
[01:19:05]  So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers, it was not Kovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition.
[01:19:16]  My God.
[01:19:18]  I'm sorry, listeners.
[01:19:20]  I listened to the clip.
[01:19:21]  I've heard the clip before.
[01:19:22]  I listened to the clip earlier.
[01:19:23]  Frankly, we did not just play the clip for ourselves right then.
[01:19:26]  We've already heard it.
[01:19:26]  So that's how pretending to react.
[01:19:29]  That's some great acting.
[01:19:30]  That's crazy.
[01:19:31]  My God.
[01:19:34]  This is crazy.
[01:19:37]  Yeah, I mean, that seems pretty bald.
[01:19:39]  I mean, again, like, there's always a lot of rumors.
[01:19:41]  And, you know, it's very, you know, as somebody who has been in, let's say, kinetic environments before, there's always a lot of, you know, information can be difficult to actually get to the center of until the dust has settled.
[01:19:54]  But frankly, the dust never really settled with this.
[01:19:57]  You know, it does seem really likely.
[01:20:00]  And I'm not just saying that because I don't like a lot of the groups involved in this.
[01:20:04]  Like, it really, I mean, frankly, yeah, I think they shot other protesters.
[01:20:10]  I thought it was so interesting that everybody accepted the Newland tape.
[01:20:16]  You know, they're like, well, it's Russian disinformation to leak true tapes.
[01:20:19]  With this one, it just broke people's brains at the time because this was like, this was confirmation, not just that Russian disinformation was right, but like the darkest, darkest Russian disinformation conspiracy, or what they think was a Russian disinformation conspiracy theory, like the most extreme one was right.
[01:20:39]  Here you have this minister saying all these people were shot by the protester side, by our side, and also saying, and this turned out to be true, that she's saying this is never going to be investigated and no one's ever going to be prosecuted for this because all of it was done.
[01:20:56]  Because the EU and the West, the people who weren't in on it, not all the, I'm sure somebody in the EU and the West knew, but all the people who weren't in on it just assumed what they're being told in the press is right.
[01:21:08]  And that turned out to be true, though.
[01:21:10]  Her prediction that no one was going to be prosecuted because it was an inside job, a false flag, that turned out to be true to this day.
[01:21:21]  So I feel like, you know, the evidence is there.
[01:21:24]  It's pretty, it's very compelling.
[01:21:25]  I'd say, I mean, I'd say, yes, it definitely happened.
[01:21:28]  Yeah.
[01:21:29]  You know, I mean, people would say that, you know, Putin set up, blew up Moscow apartment buildings to start the Chitchin War.
[01:21:38]  And everybody who's like mainstream believes that's that conspiracy theory.
[01:21:43]  And it may be true.
[01:21:44]  I think there's, I think there's a lot of evidence to it.
[01:21:46]  I don't think that was Putin so much.
[01:21:48]  That was Yeltsin and the Yeltsin family.
[01:21:50]  They needed a war to save themselves because Yeltsin was dying.
[01:21:55]  He couldn't be president again.
[01:21:57]  And Putin looked like he was the guy.
[01:21:58]  Putin may or may not have been part of that, but that was when the Yeltsin family, as they call it, ruled the country backed by us.
[01:22:06]  And I think there's very strong evidence that they did that.
[01:22:09]  That's what people do to keep power or to gain power.
[01:22:12]  Like, let's not be children here.
[01:22:14]  You know, they do nasty things to get power.
[01:22:17]  Well, there's also, I mean, you got to consider the fact that they could be sacrificing these people to Dasbog.
[01:22:25]  It's an ancient God that their people used to worship by combining their flesh with metal and sending their soul to the afterlife.
[01:22:31]  So, you know, to birth a new nation.
[01:22:34]  I mean, could be.
[01:22:35]  Frankly, I don't think that angle has been explored enough.
[01:22:37]  No, I think you're, I mean, they're called the heavenly hundred in Ukraine.
[01:22:42]  They've totally been like a python, whatever the freaking well.
[01:22:47]  I mean, so one of the main, the main book I've read on Bandera is a book that's called the Bandera cult.
[01:22:54]  And there is a sort of tendency towards veneration and worship in this particular way that I think that like people in the West that we sort of take for granted all these like statues and pictures of George Washington and sort of the founders of the nation.
[01:23:11]  But there is this very like there's this closeness that's missing from that that a lot of people I think in this region have to some of the sort of venerated martyrs that they have.
[01:23:22]  So I mean, yeah, yeah.
[01:23:23]  No, I totally agree.
[01:23:25]  And I think, you know, it's important to know that whatever we think and whatever Westerners think about what happened on my dawn, which was a coup Against an unpop against a corrupt and unpopular president.
[01:23:39]  Um, whatever we think and whatever myths we've told ourselves about it, like Ukrainians know what went on, yeah, and have their ideas, and it's not a popular coup anymore, revolution at all.
[01:23:50]  And Russians know what went on, so we can tell ourselves any fairy tales we want to, and we do.
[01:23:56]  And probably a lot of those fairy tales really are just about us and keeping us, you know, keeping the home country up for uh um empire.
[01:24:06]  But like, they know what the hell went on.
[01:24:08]  Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you think that Ukraine ended in 2014, you're unfortunately correct.
[01:24:14]  Russia deployed small-scale thermonuclear weapons and annihilated the country rather than give back one inch.
[01:24:22]  I don't even know what give back.
[01:24:23]  I'm lying here.

=== People Put Nudes on Finsta (01:32) ===

[01:24:24]  No, we have a part two that's coming up.
[01:24:26]  Very shortly.
[01:24:28]  Oh, Liz, part one left me on the seat of my pants.
[01:24:46]  What happens next time?
[01:24:48]  Does Russia invade?
[01:24:49]  Is there, do they make another Ukraine?
[01:24:52]  Is what how come how come there isn't a white sea?
[01:24:56]  Like, what?
[01:24:57]  What are they talking about here?
[01:24:58]  Is it so crazy?
[01:25:00]  Oh, I love that episode so much.
[01:25:02]  That's so, that's that's like the kind of comments I was thinking of like under my pseudonyms when we all the yeah, yeah, all the other, um, all your Finstas.
[01:25:12]  My, my, what is a Finsta?
[01:25:14]  That's a private Instagram.
[01:25:16]  Isn't that just in your Instagram?
[01:25:19]  No, who is a public Instagram unless you're a big booty uh Latina?
[01:25:25]  Well, they also have what a Fince A Finsta.
[01:25:28]  Yeah.
[01:25:28]  Oh, so that's like nudes.
[01:25:31]  People put nudes on Instagram.
[01:25:34]  Like a picture of your naked body.
[01:25:36]  Yeah, people be crazy.
[01:25:38]  Why would you ever do that?
[01:25:41]  We've got part two coming up.
[01:25:43]  So sit tight.
[01:25:44]  I'm Liz.
[01:25:45]  My name is Brace.
[01:25:47]  And of course, we have with us here nude Instagram model, Young Chomsky producing.
[01:25:51]  And the podcast is called Truan.
[01:25:54]  Well, see you next time.
[01:25:56]  Bye-bye.