Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick expose how U.S.-NATO hostility toward Russia—fueled by neoconservative policies since Brzezinski, NATO’s 2008 Ukraine expansion, and $1T+ military budgets—mirrors WWI’s alliance traps, risking nuclear war despite Putin’s restraint. They trace Cold War antagonism to Truman’s betrayal of Soviet WWII sacrifices and link modern conflicts (Ukraine, Iran) to corporate profiteering, from DuPont’s WWI gains to today’s endless wars. With NATO’s proxy funding in Ukraine failing and U.S. elites prioritizing Israel over diplomacy, Stone and Kuznick warn of a cycle of perpetual war unless whistleblowers like Snowden are pardoned and history’s hidden truths—like JFK’s assassination—are exposed. The crisis stems from a militarized elite ignoring alternatives, leaving younger generations disillusioned by miseducation and systemic deception. [Automatically generated summary]
I've been talking about it off and on since 2014, when the Ukraine thing happened.
Yes.
I was saying this is frightfully like there's a lot of elements of World War I, the alliances, the NATO alliance, and the United States' involvement.
And its hatred for Russia is astonishing to me.
Considering the recent history, the last 20 years before that, there was no reason for us.
To pick on Russia and go back to this cold war, neo-cold war that we have.
That's what I don't understand.
And I've been talking to Peter about it.
It defies logic because he says it's the neocons in Washington that started.
And they never left, you know.
They were always there.
Brzezinski from the Carter days.
These are old arguments.
I heard them with my father, who was a conservative, relatively conservative, in New York City back in 1950, that the Russians were going to invade us.
This was very much the feeling, that McCarthy was saying they're in the schools, they're in the churches, they're in the...
And what has Ukraine to do with that distance for us to do this involvement with NATO? This NATO... Also, for me, as a half-European, my mother was French, I spent time in Europe as a kid.
What I've seen is a huge change in Europe.
That's what's terrifying to me.
Why?
The people don't want war, but the EU, which is this political overrider, seems to want war.
and because the leadership in the EU is very elite people who seem to come from the same school factory or whatever they produce by they they seem to think the same way that Russia is going to invade Europe again that we're back to that World War II argument which was nonsense in the first place yes so here you great Russia wants Ukraine and then they're going to go for Poland that's what Kamala Harris said at one point
yes the stupidest statement I've ever heard I think from a political leader just ignorant no education no history what do you think accounts for Big picture, the hostility of NATO and Europe to Russia.
The woman who runs the EU, Ursula, she constantly says these things that are ignorant, ignorant of what's happened in the last 20, 30 years, ignorant of what happened in the 90s in Russia.
She's just, they're not taking this into account.
I talked to Macron at one point and he was, He's a very reasonable man.
I thought he was saying things like, we need more nuclear energy in France.
Right, great.
And now he turns around and he's saying that Putin, he's ready to send French troops into Ukraine.
The British are the worst.
Starmer, this new prime minister, Labour prime minister, you know who he is?
He said, yes, two days ago he said, we have to punish Putin to the maximum.
Because he's relentless.
That's what he said.
We have to punish.
So there's an aspect, a personal thing about Putin.
Like Biden made it personal, saying he's a thug and a murderer.
And Starmer saying he has to be punished.
Putin has to be punished, not Russia.
It's bizarre.
We didn't talk like this back when we were mature back in the 50s, 60s when we talked about Russia as an enemy because we thought it was adversarial.
Yes.
I disagree with that, but we thought so and we acted as such, but we didn't personally insult Khrushchev or Brezhnev.
We've been going after Russia since 1917. We're mad at them.
Well, in World War I, Lenin and Trotsky pulled Russia out of the alliance.
And had the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where they gave away a massive amount of Russia to Germany in order to get peace at that point.
And what does the United States do with the Brits and the Japanese and others?
We send troops into the Soviet Union in 1918. There were 15,000 American troops there.
And Churchill wanted to overthrow the new Soviet government.
He said we should strangle Bolshevism in the cradle.
So this goes way back to them.
We didn't even recognize the Soviet Union until Roosevelt was in power in 1933. And then during the war, they became our ally.
And in fact, they were the ones who won the war in Europe.
But I asked my students, who won the war in Europe?
You know, people grew up believing that the Americans won the war in Europe.
It's not true.
It's not even close to the truth.
We certainly contributed a lot during World War II, but as the Soviets, throughout most of World War II, the U.S. and the Britain were confronting 10 German divisions between the two of us, while the Soviets were confronting more than 200 German divisions on their own.
That's why everybody understood what Kennedy says.
In his great 1963 American University commencement address, what the Soviets suffered in World War II is the equivalent of the entire United States east of Chicago having been wiped out.
You know, so you would think that we would be friendly with them afterwards, and Roosevelt had a vision for that.
In fact, Roosevelt promised Stalin in May of 1942 that we would open up the Second Front before the end of 1942. He asked Stalin to send over Molotov and a trusted general for that meeting in the White House in 1942. And we made that promise.
We don't open up the Second Front until June of 1944. And by that point, we had lost all the diplomatic initiative.
The Soviets were defeating Germany largely on their own with the support of U.S. materiel.
And so they were pushing back the Germans over Central Europe.
And Eastern Europe.
And so the idea that Roosevelt gave away anything at Yalta that the Soviets didn't already have is nonsense.
The Soviets had that area.
And that's 44, 45. Then, unfortunately, Roosevelt died.
And even more unfortunately, Truman became president instead of Henry Wallace, which is another story I hope we can get into, because Oliver and I do a lot about that in Untold History.
And we argue that had Wallace become president on April 12, 1945, instead of Truman, there would have not only been no atomic bombings in World War II, there would have likely been no Cold War.
History could have been so, so different.
But instead, we developed this enmity toward the Soviet Union.
Instead of seeing our allies who suffered so greatly and showing some largesse and generosity, we begin to vilify them after that.
And the crackdown that happens in Eastern Europe doesn't happen immediately.
But it actually starts earlier, because when the Soviet Union collapsed, 1989, 1990, 1991, during that period, we had a chance to actually reach out in a more positive way.
But it's in 1990 that Charles Krauthammer, the neocon theorist, says the Soviet Union has collapsed, says this is America's unipolar moment.
He says we're the only force in the world that can dictate world events.
And he said the unipolar moment is likely to last 30 or 40 years.
It was in 1992 that we've come out with the defense planning guidance, which is a much more elaborate plan of how we're going to dominate the world.
And then in 1997, the Project for New American Century takes shape, and that really fleshes it out much greater.
And they say in that 2000 report that we're not going to be able to rebuild our defenses as quickly as we want unless we have a new Pearl Harbor.
I would have to really study this, but it's just so many questions I have, so many...
This is not the subject today, but it leads to this...
Feeling that there's a cabal or something in Washington that has been there, kind of, a strange ghost-like cabal that goes back to the 60s with Kennedy's murder.
and i don't ask it sounds it sounds like it but it's a strange concept but i you have to think about well we can't assess it because the files are still classified 23 years later we're talking about conspiracies now i mean it all the a lot of the lunatics have come out of the asylum no doubt yes but there's a lot out there in the public that really should be examined and questioned and yes asked and it's that's what's the establishment's freaking out because it's we're overloading it
it's running over the rapports now They can't defend them anymore.
So his hawks wanted to get rid of him for being too weak.
But let me go back to what Oliver's saying, because in October of 1962...
Right after the missile crisis, two weeks later, Khrushchev writes an incredible letter to Kennedy in which he says, from evil some good must come.
Our people have both felt the burning flames of thermonuclear war.
We have to use this now to eliminate every conflict between us that could lead to a new crisis.
And Kennedy and Khrushchev slowly, on Kennedy's part, more rapidly on Khrushchev's, they began working together in 1963. Norman Cousins was the intermediary, and he met with Khrushchev twice.
And made it clear that the United States really did want to have a peaceful reconciliation.
And had Kennedy lived, I mean, his AU commencement address that I mentioned is, I think, the most important presidential address of the 20th century.
From Russia and said, Khrushchev needs some obvious signal that you're serious.
And Norman Cousins actually wrote the first draft.
And then Kennedy took it.
And they didn't let the CIA, the State Department, or the Pentagon even see it beforehand.
Which is why Kennedy was able to...
It was called the Strategy for Peace speech.
And what he says there, among other things, is that the relation between the U.S. and Soviets is tragic.
Why should we be enemies?
Why should we see them as enemies?
What Kennedy could do, and he doesn't have speech, is see the world through the eyes of America's adversaries.
When was the last time we had a leader who could do that?
I mean, Carter maybe for a minute, Obama maybe for a minute, but...
But nobody else.
So what Kennedy says is so relevant to today.
He says to put a nuclear adversary in a position of either suffering a humiliating defeat or using nuclear weapons is either a colossal failure of statesmanship or a collective death wish for humanity, which is exactly what Biden is doing at this point.
Certainly he'd fired Dulles and he'd followed the top people at the CIA, but I think there's a deeper...
People in economic activity also were upset with him because there were changes in the economics of the play.
The Democrats were...
gearing up for the future.
They were gonna win the next election.
That second term was very important.
And they had a third term possibility with Robert Kennedy and a fourth term possibility with Teddy Kennedy.
There was a possibility of another Roosevelt.
That was what's terrifying to the Republicans, I think.
Certainly to my father.
And I think that ties in.
You asked earlier why, you know, why?
And I'm racking my brain, but I go back to my father, who was a stockbroker, a very good one, and he was intellectual.
He wrote about it.
To him, it goes back to World War I again.
To this concept of they changed their system, they broke the rule, the international, the rules-based order was changed because now not only did they break the treaty, no secret treaties was one of the first things they did and all these treaties from World War I came out.
The secret treaties at France, England had signed before the war.
So you see, that came out and the German treaties came out.
But it was economic in the sense that in the United States, we had a lot of strikes going on domestically.
We'd had strikes going on since the 1870s.
There was a worldwide sentiment for revolution in the workers' socialist movement.
It infected France.
It infected England.
I mean, it's well-known.
And Germany was very much moving towards a workers' revolution.
So that was the most scary thing to Woodrow Wilson.
It was, the Russians are going to destabilize the whole world, and Churchill was right there, and he wasn't a leader, but certainly the English felt the same way.
They were the leaders of World War I, so they had a stake in getting rid of Russia.
That's why the Starmer's recent comment the other day about punishing Putin to the maximum.
It's very striking to me.
The British have led the charge against Russia forever.
And then in 1997, Brzezinski lays it out in his book, The Grand Chessboard, which...
Feith and Libby and Hadley were also writing about just at the same time.
And what Brzezinski says in the Grand Chessboard is that if you can separate Ukraine from Russia, then Russia will never be a Eurasian superpower again.
They had a strategy for doing exactly what they did for quite some time before that.
unidentified
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But there is, however, a publication that fights this, that is not propaganda, one that we read every month and have for many years.
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Oliver, you know Putin as well as any American, or you spend at least as much time with him as any living American.
And America was moving away from the capitalist ideal that existed.
I think that plays a huge role coming after World War II, also after World War I. World War I leads to World War II in my mind, but let's jump to World War II. After World War II, they were terrified.
The Republicans were terrified that the Depression would return.
The Depression had been a horrible experience for many Americans.
They were poor.
They had nothing.
They were terrified that it would come again.
So the whole concept started up in the Congress of 1945 with the Republicans...
And the Joint Chiefs, the Air Force wanted 10,000.
Joint Chiefs wanted 3,000, I think it was.
And McNamara said the lowest number we can get away with is 1,000.
But from the Soviet perspective, the United States was already ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 in every category, and now they see us adding 1,000 more ICBMs.
So the Kremlin interpreted it that the U.S. was preparing for a first strike against the Soviet Union, which is part of the reason why they put the missiles into Cuba, to try to offset that, at least to some degree.
But again...
You know, and Kennedy got a briefing on July 20th, 1961, about a secret advanced preemptive strike, nuclear strike, to wipe out the Soviet Union.
And Kennedy walked out of that midway through the briefing, and he's turned to Dean Ruskin and said, and we call ourselves the human race.
Lemnister gave it, and one of the people there said, I think it was Roswell Kilpatrick, says he gave it as if he was talking to kindergartners, and Kennedy was so disgusted with it, and he's thinking behind the idea that we were going to have a preemptive surprise nuclear strike unprovoked against the Soviet Union, but there are military people who were thinking that way, as there are today.
I mean, the Bulletin Atomic Scientists, had an article on August 20th.
There were two interesting articles.
Sanger had one in the New York Times that day saying that the United States is preparing to fight a three-front nuclear war against Russia, China, and North Korea and win that.
And the same day, the bullying atomic scientists came out with an article saying that there are still planners in the Pentagon who believe that we can win a nuclear war and should plan for that.
Nuclear winter, for example, now, the latest studies show that a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, in which 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons would be used, would push 5 million tons of smoke, soot, and debris would push 5 million tons of smoke, soot, and debris into the atmosphere.
It would encircle the stratosphere within two weeks, block the sun's rays from getting to the earth, temperatures would plummet to freezing on the earth, much of the agriculture would be destroyed, and a limited nuclear war of 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons could kill up to 2 billion people.
2 billion.
If there was a...
We don't have 100...
We've got 12,000, and they're not Hiroshima-sized.
Many of them are 7 to 70 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
And so if there was a large-scale use, the cities would burn and would send up so much soot that would block the sun's rays for years, and we might not survive as a species.
The likelihood is that all large life forms would probably die off.
Some people might be able to get under the ground.
You know, we'd have a mind shaft gap like in Strangelove.
And the evidence is really pointing heavily to the neo-fascists there who came in and shot these people from these rooftops that were controlled by the...
Because in 2008, that's when the United States called for Ukraine and Georgia to enter NATO. Right.
And that was clearly crossing Russia's red line.
In fact, our then U.S. ambassador to Russia was William Burns, now the head of the CIA. Burns writes a secret memo back to the White House titled, Nyet means Nyet.
Don't cross Russia's red lines about Ukraine and NATO. And that's where things begin to change.
Putin was furious.
He actually went to the NATO meeting and had been reaching out to the U.S. since 9-11.
I mean, he was the first foreign leader to actually...
Contact the White House and to offer assistance.
And he did help us in Afghanistan originally.
And then what do we do?
In 2002, we abandoned the ABM Treaty.
That was a horrible blow to them.
Then we invade Iraq, which they were totally opposed to.
And so then the relations begin to deteriorate.
I was saying before about Krauthammer, in 2002, he revisits his idea of the unipolar moment, says, I was wrong in 1990, it's not the unipolar moment, it's the unipolar era.
And the U.S. is going to dominate the world for the foreseeable future.
It could be 100 years, not 30 or 40 years.
And that's when the neocons started coming out of the frame.
They started appearing everywhere and saying the importance of American empire, that we're going to change the chessboard.
When Wesley Clark went to the Pentagon...
They told them we had plans to have regime change in seven different countries.
What's interesting, though, is as that was happening and NATO was bombing and Wes Clark was becoming famous and all that, I don't think I heard a single debate in the United States over why we were doing this.
I mean, the Russians were a totally opposite view, and the U.S. was establishing the rules-based international order, which meant instead of going through the United Nations, which they couldn't have gotten it through, they did it...
NATO is not the one, but it's sort of an elitism that has come into being in Europe, an elitism of the leaders coming from a university where they're trained to be leaders, but they all think alike.
That's what surprises me.
Frankly, Farage, whatever he says, he's different.
At least he says something that's different.
Le Pen says something different.
So that's why these people are appealing to people, because they're saying there has to be some peace.
And it's a very controversial movie, which takes a lot of risks.
And Oliver admitted at the time he didn't have all the answers, but he wanted to get the questions out there and make people think about some of these issues.
But at that point, he went from being Hollywood's golden boy to being the conspiracy monger.
I wanted to go back, because in 1948, George Kennan lays it out in a secret memo.
George Kennan, who was the architect of the Cold War, writes a memo that says, we have 6.3% of the world's population, yet we control 50% of the world's wealth.
He said, the challenge before us today is to maintain this position of disparity.
And we're not going to do it with idealistic slogans.
We're going to do it with pure power concepts.
He later regretted that.
He later regretted the Mr. X article.
And he becomes really very, very worried about the threat of nuclear war in his later life.
Because we had strikes in this country, and we were trying to control labor.
And the large corporations were in a deathly struggle with labor.
Up until the end of World War II, Taft-Hartley, that was a big issue.
There were so many strikes during the war, people don't even take that into account.
There was huge strikes in Detroit, cars, steel.
And after the war, it was continuing until Taft-Hartley came along, which allowed them to close down any strike that was dangerous to the national security, I think.
The labor movement was huge in the United States in the 30s.
The formation of the CIO, the organizing of steel.
I mean, all of the big industries were organizing.
And who were the leaders of the organizing?
The communists.
You know, there was a reason why they had to shut down the Communist Party during the quote-unquote McCarthy period.
And McCarthy's a latecomer to McCarthyism, but it starts in 1947. And Truman, according to Clark Clifford, his main domestic policy advisor, they said Truman knew that this was baloney, all this stuff about communist infiltration.
But the Republicans started to attack in 1946. The chair of the Republican Party in 1946 says the choice between republicanism and communism.
And so we're beginning this anti-communist hysteria very, very early after the war.
And then Truman takes the bait and has the loyalty hearings, which leads gradually into McCarthyism.
So first in 1947, first they say that the real threat is the atomic scientists.
But they quickly decide that the one they're going to investigate first is Hollywood.
Right?
So then they have the Hollywood 10 and then all those other hearings that were taking place because they were very concerned even then about people who might influence American thinking.
So, speaking of your cross and then Rubicon, yes, I have crossed it.
But when you came back from interviewing Putin for your documentary, it was released, what was the reaction like in L.A.? People, they don't talk to me publicly.
No, I was doing Snowden in 2013, which was a very brave movie because we were dealing with a man who was exiled, who I thought was a hero and was treated as if he was a traitor.
So I wanted to make that movie.
In making that movie, I had to go to Moscow to finish it, and I met Putin there, and we talked about Snowden first because that was where we met.
And what he said about Snowden, as he says in the movie, it's very true.
If he goes, if he's out, and if Biden gets his wish and all these nutcases want to remove him, take him out, fine, kill him.
But he's not going to solve it.
Russia is Russia.
It's going to stay loyal to what it believes in.
They don't have a democratic vote, but they have a consensus.
If Putin was not doing what the people wanted, he'd be out.
That's the way it works.
It takes maybe a couple of years more, but that's the way Russia works.
If the czar didn't work out, they'd get rid of him.
And they shot him, too.
Remember, that's one of the reasons the Japanese were terrified of the Russians and why they surrendered, because they didn't want the Russians to invade the homeland.
That was a big fear.
But the Russian people are very strong, but they're passive, so they talk in certain ways.
You know, we believe the Moscow crowd, but the Moscow crowd doesn't talk for Russia.
Because today, he just made a statement that the U.S. keeps crossing all of Russia's red lines.
And if they keep doing this, this is going to explode.
I mean, Biden, for a long time, refused to give permission to Ukraine to use the attack on missiles.
And he said that it would be too provocative and could possibly lead to a much broader war between the United States and Russia.
And he refused to do it.
But like he did with every other weapons system, he finally caved in.
And so Ukraine has struck Russia several times now with these attack-m missiles inside of Russia, the long-range army missiles.
And then you got the British stormtrooper, storm shadow missiles.
You got the French missiles, the scout missiles.
The German ones haven't been used yet.
And in response to that, Russia changed this nuclear doctrine and said that they lowered it and said that...
If Russia is attacked by a country with the support of a nuclear power, then they're going to consider that an attack by both countries, meaning the United States and Ukraine, and both countries become legitimate targets for all of Russia's weapons, meaning nuclear weapons.
In fact, Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his speech in Prague in 2009 calling for nuclear abolition, he's the one who put into process the policy of modernizing America's nuclear arsenal.
It was a trade-off with the Senator Kyle from Arizona in order to get them to support the New START Treaty.
And so what does modernizing the delivery systems and the weapons mean?
Making them more efficient and more lethal.
And then Trump doubled down on that in his nuclear posture review in 2018. And so Obama said, we're going to spend a trillion dollars over 30 years to modernize.
Now it's closer to 2 trillion, and we're doing it.
But not only is the United States modernizing, all nine nuclear powers are modernizing their arsenals.
And for the first time, you know, at the peak of the Cold War in 1986, we had about 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world.
We got it down to now 12,000, but for the first time, we're increasing the arsenals.
You know, we've been trying to get rid of these hellish weapons since they were first started.
And initially, even Eisenhower supported giving them to the UN and letting the UN destroy them.
And Eisenhower also was the only president who's openly critical of the U.S. dropping the atomic bombs in 1945. You know, and he criticized it at the time.
What he said, he said when Stimson briefed him at Potsdam that the United States was about to use the atomic bomb, Eisenhower wrote on a couple occasions, he said, I got more and more depressed just listening to him, but I didn't volunteer anything because my war in Europe was over.
Then he asked me what I thought, and I told him I was against it for two reasons.
Number one, the Japanese were already defeated and trying to surrender, and we didn't need to use it.
And number two, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.
The U.S. had eight five-star admirals and generals in 1945. Seven of the eight are officially on the record saying the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both.
And the eighth was Marshall, who said that the Soviet invasion alone would likely leverage the Japanese into surrender by itself.
So they all knew that the atomic bombs weren't necessary.
Truman knew it as well as anybody.
When he went to have lunch with Stalin at Potsdam on July 17th, he goes back and writes in his journal, said Stalin will be in the Jap war by August 15th.
Finny Japs when that occurs.
He writes home to his wife, Bess, the next day.
He said, the Russians are coming in.
We'll end the war a year sooner now.
Think of all the kids who won't be killed.
He knew it.
He refers to the intercepted telegram on July 18th as the telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace.
Well, the original one, they were talking only like 20,000, and then the highest one for the original and only gay exhibit that we could find was 46,000 Americans would be lost.
But in his memoir, Truman says, I was told by Marshall that we could lose a half million American boys in an invasion.
And that deep state is very dangerous because when we started our conversations over three years, it was our partners, the Americans, and I got irritated.
I said, why do you keep saying our partners, the Americans?
They don't express these sentiments at all towards you.
You're considered a murderer by Mr. Biden, and they think you kill people.
You know, that you're some kind of character out of a James Bond spy movie.
They keep talking about KGB, ignoring the fact that George W. Bush, George A.W. Bush, was the head of the CIA. Everybody I know in Russia, everybody I talk to there, says they wanted, they wish we could have friendlier relations with the United States and Russia.
They all feel that way.
You know who fears nuclear weapons, nuclear bombs?
Trump.
Trump said recently, Already says, we have never been closer to World War III than we are today under Joe Biden.
A global conflict between nuclear armed powers would mean death and destruction on a scale unmatched in human history.
That's what Donald Trump said recently.
You know, so he thinks that giving the Ukrainians permission to use the attack ems the way we are is crazy.
Very much this concept of an interesting thing, they go to church, they don't sit at all during the service.
They stand the whole time.
That's serious too, if you're ever going to Sunday school.
We're more Protestant.
We're a divided culture, and there are so many sects.
There's the Jewish sect, there's Arabs, there's this, and we're all into different things.
Some people are atheists, some people don't know, agnostics, this, that.
They feel, the Russians feel, that we have lost touch with Christianity and that we're moving towards more of a satanic culture, and I can understand why, because we have embraced the bomb.
We've embraced regime change, corruption in all these countries.
We believe in the dollar controlling the world.
They don't see hope in our way of life.
They see people who are exhausting themselves competitively and dropping dead.
As Means told you in your interview, we spend more on health than anybody and we die sooner.
Our life expectancy is very low, and our quality of life is not up to the other countries.
Europe is better.
So there is a big question about America.
We see ourselves as a great country, and I think in many ways we are, and I'd like to see it.
But I think our greatness is tied to some humility in the sense of...
What we were fighting for, Abraham Lincoln, in holding the country together, made some of the greatest speeches and a purpose of life.
Well, I've got a lot of friends who are Russian historians and Russian experts.
And my friends in Russia, when we talk about religion, they say after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everybody got baptized, but nobody actually goes to church.
So, I mean, they're religious in a different sense, and it's part of their national identity and heritage, but I'm not sure that they're believers in that way.
And as you were saying, unlike the United States, where we've got Catholics and all kinds of Protestants and Jews and Muslims and Hindus, I mean, they've got much more of an identity that revolves around their religious heritage.
This administration, much like the Biden administration, we were talking about Biden earlier.
And Oliver was surprised by how hawkish Biden is.
Biden's always been a cold warrior and very much of a hawk.
And he came to office with 18 top advisors from the Center for New American Security.
Now, these are the people like Sullivan, who are the China hawks.
Many of them were the people behind the Asia pivot under Hillary Clinton and Obama.
But Ukraine got in the way because there was China who they wanted to go after.
And even Rand has a report saying...
Avoiding a Long War in Ukraine because they wanted to get after China.
Now, the Trump people are also much more hawkish toward China and Iran than they are toward Ukraine.
So I think that my fear is that they'll successfully end Ukraine and then turn their fire elsewhere, except that Trump did invite Xi Jinping to come to the inauguration, and I think it is showing some signs of moderating.
We're just going to have to pay it, keep paying and paying and paying.
We've got to keep it up and somehow he'll make some kind of phony state, you know, like create like a Laos or Vietnam, kind of a half state and keep it alive, spend a lot of taxpayer money and it's a front.
They're spending 25 to 40 percent of their budget on arms.
And now they're doing that again.
So even though in the long and short run, they're thriving economically, unlike Europe, in the long run, it's going to hurt them.
So it's very much in their interest to end this war.
It's in everybody's interest.
If you're pro-Ukrainian, What is the point of it?
For example, after the attack M's were given permission, everybody gave permission, I was watching CNN, and they had Bolton, and they had Stavridis, and Clark, and they all said...
Too little, too late, using the attack, Ems.
It's great that we're doing it, but it's too little, too late.
What these people are saying is they're willing to risk nuclear war over something that they know is not going to make any difference for the Ukrainians anyway.
The Ukraine is losing.
That's the reality.
They can't keep up with Russia.
They're outmanned, they're outgunned, they're outstrategized at this point.
He's got four provinces that they said are incorporated into Russia.
So Luhansk, Donetsk, Curzon, and Zaporizhia.
And he's going to want at least as much of them as his army controls.
He's going to want more, but their bargaining position might be they might give up the parts that they don't control for no arms, no foreign arms and soldiers in Ukraine, no NATO in Ukraine, and a lasting peace.
I don't think they want it.
The West says, oh, it's going to be temporary and then they're going to just start it up again when they're ready.
This has been a terrible war for Russia as well as for Ukraine.
And if you're sympathetic to Ukraine, the last thing you want is going to see this continue because they're only losing more.
They're only in a weaker position.
And not-so-young men are getting killed at incredible numbers.
So if we stop it a year from now, what's going to be different?
Russia's going to have more of Ukraine.
There'll be more Ukrainians dead, more economy destroyed on both sides, more Russians dead.
The Nye Committee hearings in the Senate were an extraordinary moment.
And it was a reaction to World War I. Because while the American, you know, what Wilson said, we want a million volunteers.
Well, he got 73,000.
Because Americans had been watching the World War I in Europe go on for three years.
They saw the trench warfare.
They saw the poison gas.
It was a horrible war.
And so very few Americans wanted a volunteer.
So he had a draft instead.
But afterwards, in the 1920s, going back to Hollywood, they had a lot of fabulous movies about World War I that were passionately anti-war.
Movies like The Big Parade, Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front.
And the novels, almost all the American writers were opposed to the war.
And so the American attitude was very negative about World War I. So in 1934, Gerald Nye proposes these hearings and a new legislation to eliminate all profit from war.
Now these bastards are making enormous amounts of profits.
But when they started to go after Truman, the Democrats got very defensive.
And after Wilson, the Democrats got very defensive.
And they blew up the hearings.
Even Roosevelt was supportive of what they were calling for in 1934. So what were they calling for?
Well, there are various variants on this.
One was to either tax everything above $10,000 once war began, Anything that people earned over $10,000 would be taxed at either 98% or 100%.
Because the DuPonts and the Morgans and Mellons made huge profits out of World War I. Astronomical profits.
And part of the reason why we got involved in the war at all, even though American people did not want to, was because Morgan Banks had lent $2.5 billion to the Allies.
And $100 million to the other side.
And so it was clear which side we were going to get involved in.
But Wilson said when he was criticized, because he ran in 1916 as a peace candidate, the slogan was, we kept America out of the war.
And then in 1917, they changed the slogan to, it's the war to end all wars, or the war to make the world safe for democracy.
But Wilson entered it in large part because he knew that if we didn't, then the U.S. would have no hand in the post-war settlement.
And he said, we have to be in it so that we can shape the post-war world.
And he came up with the League of Nations, which could have been a good idea under certain circumstances.
But his 14 points were very progressive, but the British and French colonialists were not going to accept it.
And as Oliver said before, when the Soviet...
Revolution occurred, one of the first things they did is they broke in and found all the diplomatic papers which showed the secret treaties between Russia, France, and Britain to divide up the Middle East.
You know, the problems we're talking about now trace back to then, to the colonialists who controlled the Middle East.
But this was going on all over the world.
They had this plan.
The Germans wanted to get involved in the war in part because they were latecomers to the empire in Africa.
They felt they'd been frozen out of the empires that the British and French and Dutch and Portuguese all were controlling.
It was a big hit before Salesman, and it was a made-in movie.
But it's about war profiteering.
There are two sons, and the older son goes against the father when he finds out that the father has been making defective parts, and his brother is killed in one of the planes that crashes because they're defective, which happens a lot more now than ever because we have such a corrupt system.
What's interesting, though, is that history now regards anybody who had second thoughts about the First World War and anyone who didn't want to get into another war in Europe in the 30s as pro-Nazi.
That is how they're isolationist, they're pro-Hitler.
And I was an anti-war activist during that period.
But I was in Hanoi in January.
And it's interesting to me because I had Robert McNamara come into my class some years ago.
And McNamara said to my students that he accepts that 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war.
And I've always used that figure because it's mind-boggling.
But when I was in Hanoi, the Vietnamese leaders told me that now the figure that they use It's 5 million Vietnamese.
So the one place that all my students have been is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., which you've been there.
And it's got two walls, 492 feet long, with the names of 58,280 Americans who died.
And the message is, the tragedy of Vietnam, is that 58,280 Americans died, which is part of it.
But if you included the 5 million Vietnamese, The million Cambodians and Laotians, the Americans, the Brits, the Aussies, the Thais, everybody who died, that wall would be more than 10 miles long.
And that would be a fitting tribute to the Vietnam, but it would send a whole different message.
Oliver and I are invited to Okinawa in February by the prefectural government to support the anti-base movement in Okinawa.
Another story we could get into.
But the Okinawa War Memorial has the names of all the Okinawans, the Japanese, the Americans, the Brits, the Aussies, everybody who died there.
And that would be an anti-war memorial.
But the Vietnam Memorial, sadly, as powerful as it is, It's giving the wrong message, and America is always giving the wrong message when it comes to war.
So is it strange for you, we touched at the outset at, and as Oliver put it, the complete inversion of American politics, but you were, you said, an anti-war processor during Vietnam, then you watched the party you voted for become the war party.
But there was a strong element within the Democratic Party of progressive Democrats who were much more anti-war, anti-defense spending, and wanted to use that money instead for health care and education.
Infrastructure and the things that people need that actually help people's lives.
And I can understand why there was a strong reaction.
But the Israeli response, we're talking like, you know, for 9-11, people being ready to do something.
They had already been brutalizing the people in the West Bank.
Gaza had been an open-air prison for years already.
And to the Israeli response is so disproportionate, it's so horrific.
For those of us who have different history and experience with Israel, to see what Israel has turned into now without any, almost no protest against this brutalization of an entire people, whether you consider it genocide or just a slaughter.
It sickens one.
And that's what I found in my students.
And the young people did not vote.
I mean, for the first time, Trump got a majority of young voters.
And, you know, I see with my students, you know what they lack now?
They're very critical.
They're very smart and analytical.
There's no utopianism.
So many of the young people think that the world that they've inherited is all there is going to be.
And they don't have any...
The 60s generation, Oliver and I were part of the 60s generation when you were too young, or not even born, but the 60s generation had a vision of making a better world.
And we would jokingly refer to what we're going to do after the revolution.
But we did have a utopian vision for how human beings could live differently.
Young people now are even much more ready to critique the system at its roots than we were back then.
We were just learning about what it meant to critique the system.
But we had a hope and a belief that the future could be that much better.
And I don't, you know, I think kids now see it, maybe it could be different, but they don't have this kind of burning vision that we could make a better world.
This is the earlier edition, The Untold History of the United States.
You know, this one, the...
2012 edition was about 750 pages.
We put out an updated edition in 2019, and now it's over 900 pages.
People really should read it and watch it, because it's got so much history that people don't know.
I was talking about the ignorance about World War II. Well, I did an anonymous survey with college students, all of whom were A students in high school, and I asked them, how many Americans died in World War II? And the median answer I got was 90,000.
90,000?
They were only up by 300,000, so they were in the ballpark.
I asked them how many Soviets died in World War II. The median answer I got was 100,000.
So they were only 27 million off, right?
These are smart kids, and they knew nothing.
They couldn't understand World War II. They couldn't understand the Cold War.
They couldn't understand what was going on in Ukraine unless they know.
The history.
And so that's why Oliver and I did The Untold History of the United States, to begin filling in those blanks.
Tulsi Gabbard was interviewed by the New York Times in 2019, and they asked her, what, the big article, what podcast do you watch?
She says, I don't want to talk about podcasts, but I just finished watching The Untold History of the United States.
And everybody should watch it, because it fills in those blanks in the history that nobody knows, that we never learn about in this country.
You know, and so...
Fifty years from now?
It depends, really, because it's going on in Japan.
Oliver and I wrote an article after one of our trips in Japan called Partners in Historical Falsification, the United States and Japan.
You know, it's going on in Russia.
I mean, everywhere, people try to sanitize, whitewash their history on the assumption that if people know true history...
Then they're going to rebel and want something different and something better.
Because if anything, history teaches you that what exists now is not what has to exist or what should exist, that human beings can create a much different world.
And that's the lesson of it.
So it's not just to learn the past for the sake of the past, it's to learn the past so you can shape a better future.
He exposed the mass surveillance that was going on of all of us.
It was a wake-up call.
He should be lionized.
Dan Ellsberg was one of my closest friends, and Oliver knows Dan also.
You know, and Dan was facing 115 years in prison for releasing the Pentagon Papers, but he said it was worth doing it, even though he thought there was only little chance it could end the war or affect the end of the war.
He wanted to get out this history, and for that he was vilified and gone after by Nixon.
I mean, that was really the best thing they had on Nixon was the break in the Dan psychiatrist's office and the plans to try to, you know, effectively kill him.
Compromise him.
But Dan ended up, by the end of his life, and what he spent most of his life warning about was the nuclear threat.
And the end of his life he was getting, even the New York Times and everybody else, was treating him much like what he deserved to be treated like, which is a hero.
And I'm hoping that Trump will understand that and pardon Ed Snowden as quickly as possible.