Jan. 10, 2025 - The Tucker Carlson Show
01:40:53
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Thank you both very much. | ||
| Oliver, how close do you think we are to nuclear war right now? | ||
| That's why I came up here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Or down here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| To tell you I'm scared. | ||
| I'm scared. | ||
| I'm really scared. | ||
| 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... | ||
| But that's just, it was such paranoia. | ||
| And I think you know that now. | ||
| You grew up like conservative, too. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, when did you start to go? | ||
| Well, I am concerned on many things, but I see no reason to be at war with Russia, and I don't know why Russia would be an enemy. | ||
| They're part of the West. | ||
| It's shocking to me, because what Biden did, and I voted for him in 2018, he never talked about changing the Russia policy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He never did, and he never gave us any kind of knowledge or education about what he was thinking. | ||
| But he seems to be... | ||
| All-out coal warrior. | ||
| Everything he's done has been to antagonize him. | ||
| In fact, he called the president of Russia a thug and a murderer before he got elected. | ||
| So he hasn't been very diplomatic. | ||
| No, I would say not. | ||
| About it. | ||
| It must be strange for you to have grown up in the Democratic Party. | ||
| Republican Party. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, right. | |
| But I mean, as an adult. | ||
| To see the party that was the party of peace and reconciliation become the war party. | ||
| Everything has turned around. | ||
| Everything has turned around. | ||
| With Peter, we were talking last night, and Peter is my co-author on Untold History of the United States. | ||
| He taught me a lot of this history because he specializes in it for many years. | ||
| But here we are with this situation where Democrats want war. | ||
| They push war. | ||
| They're pushing the strategy of weakening Russia. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Self-defeating suicidal strategy. | ||
| What's the purpose of it? | ||
| What did they do to us? | ||
| What did they do? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| What did they do to hurt us? | ||
| 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. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's got to be education. | ||
| It's got to be propaganda. | ||
| They believe these things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And here we are insulting them constantly. | ||
| So Biden, I think, is... | ||
| Some people say Blinken has taken control of his mind. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But Anthony Blinken is trained in the Hillary Clinton diplomatic school. | ||
| He was, for many years, he's been under her wing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So has gathered Jake Sullivan. | ||
| Diplomatic is a little strong. | ||
| By diplomacy, it's just, you know, regime change. | ||
| Kill the leader you disagree with. | ||
| Diplomacy is a dirty word now in the United States. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Peter, I'm interested in your perspective. | ||
| Like, why do you think... | ||
| The entire United States, from a position of greater weakness, has, with Europe, pivoted against Russia of all the potential enemies. | ||
| Why Russia? | ||
| What else is new? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That takes place over the next couple of years. | ||
| It's a much gradual process. | ||
| They allowed a good degree of democracy in most of Eastern Europe till really the Truman Doctrine in 1947, really. | ||
| And then after that, then the Cold War is on. | ||
| But Kennedy was the one who saw it differently. | ||
| And we can go into that, too. | ||
| Anyway, I'm giving you a lot of history very, very quickly. | ||
| None of that is surprising, but none of it, I would say, accounts for the shift after the one that Oliver referred to after 2014 at Maidan. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they got that in 2001 with 9-11. | ||
| And so then we invade Afghanistan. | ||
| Then Krauthammer revisited. | ||
| Let me ask you to pause. | ||
| Do you think the people who said that we needed a new Pearl Harbor in order to rebuild, how do you think they felt about 9-11? | ||
| I think they saw it as a tragedy and an opportunity. | ||
| You know, I think they were... | ||
| So you're not suggesting they knew about it? | ||
| No, I'm not suggesting that. | ||
| And Oliver and I... I think it's a mystery. | ||
| In what sense? | ||
| I think it's a mystery. | ||
| I don't think it's solved. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because all the events of 9-11 have not come out. | ||
| No, they haven't. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| That continues in some strange embodiment today. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, there's... | ||
| Well, you were once derided as a conspiracy. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I don't think so anymore. | ||
| But I'm still alive. | ||
| You've lived to see your own vindication. | ||
| Well, yeah, in a sense. | ||
| I mean, I'd love to see Kennedy understood better by the mass because, you know, you still hear this silly, Lee Harvey Oswald did it stuff, you know? | ||
| I mean, allegedly, they never said alleged, you know, alleged killer. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| They always say killer. | ||
| I feel sorry that that happened, but that's a bigger story now. | ||
| It's a bigger story because now it's the world at stake. | ||
| It's not the life of one man. | ||
| He had a vision, as Peter said, of humanizing Russia, bringing them into the world community. | ||
| That was defeated when he was killed. | ||
| That was very badly defeated. | ||
| Khrushchev fell shortly thereafter, the premier of Russia. | ||
| He fell too because he wasn't sufficiently strong with the United States. | ||
| He caved in during the Cuban Missile Crisis. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Can you flesh that out a little bit? | ||
| It was the last big speech he gave before he was murdered. | ||
| It was a great speech. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Well, and Norman Cousins came back. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's what we face right now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So how was that speech received? | ||
| It wasn't as appreciated as it is now. | ||
| It should be read. | ||
| How was it received in Washington? | ||
| Oh, I would think a lot of people didn't like it because they saw him as some kind of idealistic fruitcake. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I really think so. | ||
| 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 that gets back to 1990, NATO expansion. | ||
| 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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This is not something that they've just thought up in 2014. Do you ever feel like you can't trust the things you hear or read? | |
| Like every news source is hollow, distorted, or clearly just propaganda lying to you? | ||
| Well, you're not imagining it. | ||
| If the last few years have proven anything, it's that legacy media exists. | ||
| To distort the truth and to control you, to gatekeep information from the public instead of letting you know what's actually going on. | ||
| They don't want you to know. | ||
| But there is, however, a publication that fights this, that is not propaganda, one that we read every month and have for many years. | ||
| It's called Imprimus. | ||
| It's from Hillsdale College in Michigan. | ||
| Imprimus is a free speech digest that features some of the best minds in the country addressing the questions that actually matter, the ones that are not addressed in the Washington Post or NBC News. | ||
| The best part of it, it is free. | ||
| No cost whatsoever. | ||
| No strings attached. | ||
| They just send it to you. | ||
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| No charge. | ||
| All you gotta do is ask. | ||
| Go to TuckerForHillsdale.com and subscribe for free today. | ||
| That's TuckerForHillsdale.com The only way this stays a democracy is if the citizenry is informed. | ||
| You can't fight tyranny if you don't know what's going on. | ||
| Imprimus helps. | ||
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| Don't wait. | ||
| Sign up now. | ||
| Oliver, you know Putin as well as any American, or you spend at least as much time with him as any living American. | ||
| Characterize what he's like, if you would. | ||
| Yeah, may I finish my point? | ||
| Of course, yes. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| We're talking about why. | ||
| I just feel the economics are crucial to understand in the sense that the fear of the Russian Revolution affecting American workers is gigantic. | ||
| Workers started to emigrate to Russia in the 1920s to work there. | ||
| Conditions were supposed to be better. | ||
| We talk about it in the book. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Turning, winning, they won a lot of seats, right? | ||
| 46, yeah. | ||
| And they're talking about an economy, a war economy all of a sudden, like keeping people at full employment. | ||
| What are we going to do with all these men coming back? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the women have taken their jobs. | ||
| We've got to keep people working. | ||
| So we're going to get into this military business, and that's what we did off and on. | ||
| We did it. | ||
| Through the era up to where Eisenhower says in 1960, you know, he's built the greatest nuclear force and army of all time. | ||
| Because in 1960, we have how many warheads? | ||
| We had 185 ICBMs and the Russians had four. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm talking about in 1960 when Kennedy comes down. | ||
| Then we increase it by a thousand. | ||
| 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 China. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What would that mean to win a nuclear war? | ||
| It's insanity. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything. | ||
| This book is very important because there is no partial victory in this book. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| It's a chain reaction once this thing starts. | ||
| There are so many different aspects to it. | ||
| It's a bureaucracy beyond belief. | ||
| All the names of all the systems we have protecting ourselves. | ||
| One thing... | ||
| It's clockwork. | ||
| It's so rare if it hangs. | ||
| We don't have a fail-safe, is what I'm trying to say. | ||
| We really don't. | ||
| So what does it look like once the chain reaction begins? | ||
| Oh, she describes it beautifully, minute by minute. | ||
| She talks about what's going to happen to you, me, and forget about Los Angeles. | ||
| Forget about New York. | ||
| They're gone. | ||
| The Pentagon has been trying a war game, limited nuclear war for decades. | ||
| And it never ends up in a limited nuclear war. | ||
| I mean, at what point does it stop? | ||
| It always keeps going until everything's gone. | ||
| And the nuclear winner is something we discovered in what year? | ||
| Sagan came up with the idea in the early 80s. | ||
| Early 80s. | ||
| But if anything, and then he got attacked by the Wall Street Journal and others for bad science, which is bullshit. | ||
| But the latest scientific findings are that Sagan and company Downplayed the effects of nuclear winter. | ||
| So what is nuclear winter? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That was the idea in Failsafe. | ||
| Kubrick didn't know anything about Nuclear Winter when he did the movie. | ||
| But he had the underground system being described by the Dr. Strangelove, remember? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| By the way, I did a clip. | ||
| I showed Strangelove to Putin. | ||
| Dr. Strangelove. | ||
| I wanted him to sit through that climax. | ||
| Had he seen it before? | ||
| No, he'd never heard of it, I don't think. | ||
| And he sat through it with me, and it's on film. | ||
| His reaction is, yes, this is very realistic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It could happen, but now our weapons are even much bigger. | ||
| Much bigger. | ||
| Much worse, yeah. | ||
| But he said, yeah, this is realistic. | ||
| Although back in the 60s, we're actually building bigger nuclear weapons than we are today. | ||
| The Russians tested their 50 megaton weapon, the Tsar bomber, and it could have been 100 megatons if they'd wanted to. | ||
| Underground. | ||
| I'm not sure if it was an underground test. | ||
| So what do you think Putin's view of nuclear war is? | ||
| Oh, he knows. | ||
| He's a very realistic man. | ||
| This is serious. | ||
| He doesn't bullshit. | ||
| He talks very straightforwardly, and I think we don't understand that. | ||
| Our language is a little more rhetorical than his. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He's pretty consistent. | ||
| He said this is a red line in Ukraine, and he always has maintained that, and he went to war for it. | ||
| The red line being NATO up against his border. | ||
| The Russian minority in Ukraine. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They moved into Donbass. | ||
| Donbass and Lugansk were the issues at that time. | ||
| Now, that was what was at stake. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They promised, the Ukrainians promised to Minsk one and Minsk two. | ||
| They promised to respect the autonomy of those people. | ||
| They never did. | ||
| They started killing them. | ||
| And there was terrorism. | ||
| Ukraine changed in 14 after Maidan. | ||
| It became truly a dangerous country because they had a lot of zealots in the government. | ||
| They weren't Nazis, but there were a lot of people like that who were working with the Ukrainians and terrifying the Russians. | ||
| I don't know, you saw my movie, Ukraine in Winter. | ||
| It's about that Maidan and how these people got into power. | ||
| That was a violation of the neutrality of Ukraine, which had existed since the end of the Cold War. | ||
| It's a sad story because we wanted it. | ||
| It was our entree. | ||
| Obama said, we want neutrality, we want this and that, we want to have a good relationship. | ||
| And meanwhile, he betrayed it. | ||
| He betrayed it with a... | ||
| Maidan broke into violence. | ||
| I don't know if you know all the details. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| There was a lot of killing of the protesters. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Ukrainian side. | ||
| It's a very sad story. | ||
| Let me take it back just a little bit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And what was on that list? | ||
| Iraq, Iran, Syria. | ||
| Libya, Syria. | ||
| Libya, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you go through... | ||
| Iran, yeah. | ||
| And so that was the game plan. | ||
| What's happening now in Syria was part of a game plan... | ||
| And Iran was the last... | ||
| That they were explicit about. | ||
| Iran is certainly crucial there. | ||
| The biggest prize of all was Iran. | ||
| Sudan, Somalia, they had a lot of different countries we were going to overturn. | ||
| And they had this vision that we could do it. | ||
| On January 5th, 2003, the New York Times Sunday Magazine section, big headline, American Empire, get used to it. | ||
| I mean, they weren't even hiding it. | ||
| They were proud about it at that point until things started to go haywire in Afghanistan and Iraq. | ||
| And then finally... | ||
| And Libya. | ||
| I believe it was a little later. | ||
| And also include Serbia, go back to 99. Well, yeah, the Russians were furious about what happened in Serbia. | ||
| Can I ask, not to digress, but what was the point of the intervention in Serbia, the post-Yugoslav interventions? | ||
| We announced it as we were catching the butchers, the people who were dictators in Serbia. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was our excuse. | ||
| But essentially, it was a much more... | ||
| Important destabilization of... | ||
| We bombed a city in Europe. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Belgrade for 99 days. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| We came into the war and called it... | ||
| It's a complicated war. | ||
| There were two peace treaties. | ||
| Don't have time here to go into it. | ||
| But essentially, we wanted to balkanize Yugoslavia, which we did. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The same way we're going to balkanize Syria now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| This is American policy. | ||
| You divide, conquer, divide, conquer. | ||
| Balkanize it. | ||
| We cut it up into Kosovo was a violation at the deepest level of everything we're talking about. | ||
| We talk about the rules-based order. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They had a referendum that was a little bit shady, and we said they're free. | ||
| They're no longer part of Serbia. | ||
| Kosovo was a gangster state. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can't tell you. | ||
| It's grim, what happened to them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did we? | ||
| Not much, no. | ||
| But in Russia, you would have heard it very, very different. | ||
| Something like 96% of the Russians thought that what was going on there was a war crime. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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... | ||
| On their own. | ||
| Militarily. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And don't forget, in Iraq, when we went in there, Germany, France, and Russia did not join. | ||
| They did not agree with that. | ||
| Schroeder and Chirac. | ||
| It's important because what's happened now is the opposite. | ||
| France and Germany are all four. | ||
| And the UK leading the charge. | ||
| So there's been a change in values. | ||
| And you say, where? | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| But I think there's some kind of... | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is madness. | ||
| And it's why they're the most attacked. | ||
| That's part of it, too. | ||
| The media is in on it. | ||
| And they're very, very critical of people who differ. | ||
| In this country, you've noticed the censorship has gotten far. | ||
| You suffered from it. | ||
| Certainly I suffered from it. | ||
| You're insulated because you have a tenure. | ||
| How many Oscars have you won? | ||
| I won three. | ||
| That was a long time ago. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, but essentially I got cut off because the Putin interviews didn't help me in Hollywood. | ||
| But you'd been cut off before then, I think, hadn't you? | ||
| No, my ability to make films was choked a little. | ||
| After 2000, things changed in the United States because we became the victim. | ||
| We were suddenly the patriotism of the soldiers. | ||
| We started Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down. | ||
| All the films were a different mentality than what I was presenting, which was a reality, I thought, to the American public. | ||
| That this military has to be... | ||
| Why are we doing these military expeditions overseas? | ||
| Like in Vietnam. | ||
| This is what was my main point. | ||
| I kept going at it and going at it. | ||
| And I guess all of a sudden it became okay. | ||
| But the people never voted. | ||
| There was no candidate. | ||
| There was no election that said, I'm against any empire. | ||
| I want to bring it back like back in William Jennings Bryan's back in 1898. I don't want empire. | ||
| We never got the choice. | ||
| We swallowed it. | ||
| Let me give a different timeline on Oliver's history that I see. | ||
| I mean, Oliver was walking on water in Hollywood with Platoon, Wall Street, born on the 4th of July. | ||
| And then he made JFK. And then everything changed. | ||
| And they started attacking. | ||
| JFK, seven, eight months before the film was produced. | ||
| I remember. | ||
| Based on a stolen first draft of the script at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times. | ||
| Watching the post, all that. | ||
| They were all going after him. | ||
| And a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| 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 remember it very well. | ||
| And the late-night comics, who are always tools of the existing order, jumped in. | ||
| But why do you think that film and that topic, I mean... | ||
| Because Americans had already disagreed with the Warren Commission. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And even before Oliver's movie came out, the overwhelming majority of Americans didn't think that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. | ||
| They didn't from the very beginning find that credible at all. | ||
| In fact, four of the seven members of the Warren Commission didn't think that or thought that there was likely a second gun. | ||
| Nor Robert Kennedy, nor Lyndon Johnson. | ||
| Connolly. | ||
| Jackie Kennedy. | ||
| So many people. | ||
| Hale Boggs. | ||
| Fidel Castro, Charles de Gaulle, various British leaders, Harold Macmillan. | ||
| Did you ever talk to Castro? | ||
| You knew Castro. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| What did he say about it? | ||
| He was so sad because he really was like Kennedy and he was hoping for a deal. | ||
| They were in backdoor negotiations. | ||
| Kennedy understood the Cuban Revolution and he said eloquent about it. | ||
| He understood why the people were... | ||
| Cuba had been the most corrupt island in the American empire in the Caribbean since the Platinum in 2001. But a lot of this is economic. | ||
| Let's not lose sight of that. | ||
| You see, what they got after World War II was an economic empire, which was working. | ||
| People were investing in the war economy, and they were prosperous. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But you saw the budgets grew and grew and grew. | ||
| Here we are now with a trillion dollar defense budget, right? | ||
| Which is insane because we have how many bases abroad? | ||
| 800 bases? | ||
| That was never the intention of Eisenhower or any of those people to control the world, to dominate every place in the world. | ||
| This is Asia and Europe. | ||
| And South America. | ||
| This is a gigantic empire. | ||
| Do you realize how busy they are every day trying to run this thing? | ||
| Everything is coming. | ||
| Personally, I believe there's an invasion coming up. | ||
| It's either going to be Iran, or I hope not. | ||
| Israel is a proxy army for us. | ||
| Certainly Trump supports them, and you know that. | ||
| Trump is very zealous about Israel. | ||
| Scary. | ||
| But also, don't overlook Venezuela, which is still one of the richest countries in the world with all its oil. | ||
| Some people believe that is an easy target for Trump to knock off. | ||
| I pray not, because it's going to be a battle. | ||
| But this doesn't end, is what I'm saying. | ||
| They plot every day. | ||
| Imagine the world map. | ||
| You've got the China challenge, right? | ||
| Sending ships constantly stating our supremacy, right, in the seas, freedom of the seas. | ||
| Freedom of navigation. | ||
| And China... | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I mean, I understand economically. | ||
| Take it on. | ||
| Be competitive with China. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But we can be economically friendly. | ||
| In other words, we can be competitors. | ||
| I don't see why we can't be in business together, as with Russia. | ||
| Russia was a capitalist country. | ||
| It's no longer a communist country. | ||
| So as much as we hate communism, it doesn't make sense to antagonize Russia. | ||
| They can be our partners in climate change in so many ways. | ||
| Their nuclear energy industry is one of the best in the world, as is China. | ||
| They can teach us. | ||
| We can build SMRs in quantity if we wanted to. | ||
| We can really solve climate change. | ||
| We don't have to sit here victims of it. | ||
| But this is all, this is Kennedy thinking. | ||
| This is what we need. | ||
| We need leadership. | ||
| We need a de Gaulle, somebody who has a vision of the world. | ||
| Trump, to some degree, has a vision. | ||
| Oliver's stressing the economic roots of all this. | ||
| I do, yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he lived to over 100 years old. | ||
| In 97, he condemned Clinton. | ||
| Condemned the NATO expansion, for sure. | ||
| In 99, Clinton expanded NATO. Yeah. | ||
| And Kennan was horrified. | ||
| Horrified. | ||
| So we were in a meeting here at TCN the other day, and I looked around the room, and every other person had a kind of ruddy vitality. | ||
| Pink cheeks, alertness, bright eyes. | ||
| Full mental acuity and a cheerfulness you could almost smell. | ||
| And I asked, why does everyone look so good? | ||
| And part of the answer, of course, is they like what we do for a living. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| We think it's important. | ||
| But another reason everyone looks so good is because they'd all had a great night sleep. | ||
| I'm not making this up. | ||
| Almost everybody here uses a new sleep technology from a company called 8Sleep. | ||
| They sent it to us, and everyone here loves it. | ||
| It's called The Pod. | ||
| It's a high-tech mattress cover, effectively, that you add to your existing bed. | ||
| You don't need a new bed or anything like that. | ||
| You just throw this over what you have. | ||
| What it does is adjust the temperature of your bed, warmer or cooler, depending on what you want. | ||
| And it maintains an ideal sleeping environment all night long. | ||
| So I didn't know this, but as you progress through different phases of sleep, your body's needs change. | ||
| And eight sleep automatically keeps things exactly where they should be in the sweet spot through the entire night. | ||
| It's been proven to increase the quality of your sleep, the amount you sleep, every night. | ||
| It improves your recovery time from physical exertion, and it may even improve your cognitive performance and enhance your overall health. | ||
| It seems to be doing that in our office. | ||
| So it learns and adapts to your sleep patterns over time and automatically adjusts temperatures throughout the night through each phase of sleep. | ||
| And it does this independently for each sleeper on either side of the bed. | ||
| That's pretty cool. | ||
| So you can sleep well and feel much better and be more effective the next morning as we are here. | ||
| Try it for yourself. | ||
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| Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Tucker. | ||
| Better sleep today. | ||
| And look great in your morning meetings, as our guys do. | ||
| But you're arguing that it's more than just economics that are driving us. | ||
| Economics, it's geopolitics, it's military ideological domination. | ||
| I don't think it's an either or. | ||
| Some people make that mistake and say it's this or it's that. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of different people involved in planning this, and they're motivated by different things. | ||
| No, I say that was the original reason we were antagonistic to Russia. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It wasn't military. | ||
| It was economic. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But in the 30s, that's what motivated Roosevelt's turn to the left. | ||
| So the Cold War comes out of economics, too. | ||
| It's very much so. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And Hollywood was a hotbed of leftists. | ||
| Kind of an irony, though, that Oliver Stone, after winning three Oscars, would be excommunicated from Hollywood by the same people for thought crimes. | ||
| I didn't get excommunicated yet. | ||
| Please, don't. | ||
| You would be even... | ||
| Vigorously criticized is a little strange. | ||
| No, it's very hard for me. | ||
| I mean, a military-type theme, these kind of things I'm talking about with you, I couldn't do this as a movie now. | ||
| I could do the Putin interviews because that was a documentary. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I could do nuclear energy because I cared about that. | ||
| That was a documentary, pro-nuclear energy. | ||
| So I'm interested in ideas, but in terms of drama, I have to curb it. | ||
| I can't go to where my imagination wants to go. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, they say to you, they never tell you the truth. | ||
| They tell you too controversial, too political, too this, too that. | ||
| You know, I don't think I've lost my touch, but I have to live with it. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I live with it. | ||
| I'm writing a book, another book. | ||
| I wrote a book or a memoir, a first part of my life. | ||
| I'm going to write another one from 40 on, from the age of 40 to wherever I am now. | ||
| Filmmakers left in Hollywood who can take on the biggest questions, like the power of the insulator. | ||
| Oppenheimer is an interesting movie. | ||
| I liked it as a movie. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| There are some flaws in it, you know. | ||
| The big flaw being that Truman is honestly pictured knocking Oppenheimer. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| That's a great scene in the movie. | ||
| But what's ignored in the film is, for example, General Groves. | ||
| Leslie Groves is one of the most anti-communist generals we ever had. | ||
| A total cold warrior from beginning to end. | ||
| He said, quote, the quotes in the book, from the beginning, the Manhattan Project was created to address the Russian Empire. | ||
| You know the line? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Nothing more. | ||
| It was not about Japan. | ||
| It was about Russia. | ||
| He says, from two weeks after the time I was appointed to head the Manhattan Project, I treated it as if the Soviets were the enemy. | ||
| And the project was directed in that way. | ||
| So the bombing of Japan was really aimed as a message to the Soviets. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| The Russians were in the war at that time. | ||
| We knew that Japan was finished, but we had to keep going in those crucial few days to establish the weapon. | ||
| And Leslie Groves, I mean, Matt Damon played him. | ||
| Very good performance, but I don't know. | ||
| That's not Leslie Groves. | ||
| It's not Leslie Groves. | ||
| That's the most warm and fuzzy Leslie Groves you're ever going to see. | ||
| And it doesn't go into the issue of whether, why we, Oppenheimer, I don't know. | ||
| I'm sure Oppenheimer. | ||
| Got an inkling of it later, no? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| At the time. | ||
| Yeah, but he said that when he testified, he said, we didn't know beans about the military situation. | ||
| We didn't know that Japan could have been made to surrender without using the bomb. | ||
| So Oppenheimer later effectively apologized for supporting the use of the bomb. | ||
| And then he got into trouble. | ||
| And then he opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. | ||
| Once you cross the Rubicon, you have to cross. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's always behind closed doors, right? | ||
| Did you hesitate before doing it? | ||
| Not really, because it was fascinating. | ||
| New material my producer set up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He didn't like what Snowden did. | ||
| No. | ||
| And he would have punished him probably the same way, but he understood the mechanics of it. | ||
| Meanwhile, we got to know each other and my producer said, let's do an interview with him because he's a crucial figure right now. | ||
| Yeah, we didn't know what was coming. | ||
| We didn't know about the coup at that point. | ||
| So we set up these interviews and we were talking. | ||
| The coup had just happened at that point, so he was upset. | ||
| And I, as an American, didn't really know the situation, so I was treating it like, you know, Ukraine, okay, what's the big deal? | ||
| I mean, it's another one of the countries like Georgia, I thought. | ||
| Yeah, it's still a Warsaw Pact country. | ||
| And he looked at me, no, it's not a big deal for us, Mr. Stone. | ||
| And he explained in the movie, what? | ||
| I think he says that on tape. | ||
| And I understand Ukraine better and better, but at first I didn't. | ||
| I talked to Ukrainians. | ||
| It was evident. | ||
| I mean, it was coming. | ||
| This thing is very dangerous. | ||
| It was a firecracker from 2014 on because it was a violation at the heart of the Soviet Empire, of the Russian Empire. | ||
| That underbelly is where the invasions happened. | ||
| So it seems like we're relying now on Putin's restraint. | ||
| It's not just him, it's Russia. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a bigger consensus. | ||
| But you're making an important point, though, that we are, in many ways, dependent on Putin's restraint at this point. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And so far, then how did Russia respond? | ||
| With the Ereshnik missile, this brand new hypersonic medium-range missile. | ||
| And it was devastating because it goes at 10 times the speed of sound, and it's a hypersonic missile, and they can't be shot down. | ||
| And they've used it once so far, but there's some warnings that they could take out Kiev, or at least the leadership there. | ||
| They could hit the base in Poland, wherever they want. | ||
| So just for some context, what is the difference between the bomb, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, And the current nuclear arsenal. | ||
| How much more advanced are nuclear weapons now? | ||
| They are so much more advanced. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They knew that the Japanese were defeated. | ||
| And if there had been an invasion, what was the estimate of casualties, the original one from Marshall? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a myth. | ||
| But this is where kids are taught in schools. | ||
| And then Bush brought it up to... | ||
| H.W. Bush said, millions, we could lose millions. | ||
| A tough calculating decision by Truman. | ||
| These presidents... | ||
| Right, the retroactive justification. | ||
| So do you think that, you know, you said the world's nuclear arsenal has dramatically declined. | ||
| That's going to be increasing now. | ||
| But do you think that decline is, of course, at the end of the Soviet Empire in 91? | ||
| Do you think that all of those warheads were accounted for? | ||
| Are we certain that they were destroyed? | ||
| I don't have any evidence that they weren't. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, but I mean, I've heard speculation about that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But I don't know that there are any out there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Breaking news. | |
| Trump intends to nominate Kash Patel to serve as the FBI director. | ||
| The level of corruption in Washington, D.C. was not... | ||
| Wholly new to me, but I also didn't expect it at that level. | ||
| Is it your expectation, though, that Kash Patel will pursue investigations against your political enemies? | ||
| If they were crooked, if they did something wrong, if they have broken the law. | ||
| Comey, the former Deputy Attorney General of the Department of Justice, literally hijacked the system of justice. | ||
| And at the time, of course, we didn't know this, but he was running, rushing it. | ||
| They went after me, you know. | ||
| They went after me and I did nothing wrong. | ||
| Here's the thing that I think people need to understand. | ||
|
unidentified
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Man, the information operation is not Mockingbird. | |
| It's everybody. | ||
| How much do you think Putin worries about nuclear war? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| I can't tell you. | ||
| I mean, he's a cool customer, as you know. | ||
| He's seen a lot. | ||
| He's been there for 23 years. | ||
| I mean, he knows every world leader. | ||
| He's seen six American presidents come and go. | ||
| I would say he qualifies as a statesman and a wise man. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we don't pay any attention to him. | ||
| We should. | ||
| We should respect him. | ||
| He has the experience. | ||
| He understands the American system, how it sends new leaders in and they change the policies all the time. | ||
| But he thinks there is a deep state. | ||
| That deep state. | ||
| In the United States. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what he has to deal with. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I haven't heard an American president say anything like that since Kennedy. | ||
| Sure, so you said, you're talking about Russia, you said it is a Christian culture. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| They're a strong Christian culture. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But he was a very strong Christian. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Very strong sense of God. | ||
| And that, you know, the grapes of wrath are marching on. | ||
| So you think that Russia sees this as a conflict between a Christian culture and a secular culture? | ||
| Ours being a secular culture? | ||
| I think some people do, yeah. | ||
| Putin goes to church, but he's not an evangelist or anything like that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, it's interesting, but you're asked. | ||
| They fundamentally have to be respected. | ||
| People who really study Russian culture love it. | ||
| I saw Americans over there, they love it. | ||
| They read the literature, they understand the culture, they speak Russian. | ||
| You have a Russian background. | ||
| You told me your story. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The whole concept of what Rome, I mean, Rome moved east. | ||
| The new Rome. | ||
| And that they were the inheritors of our empire. | ||
| And that's where they fought the Turks and all that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All these conflicts. | ||
| But it's interesting what's going on with Ukraine because they changed the rules in the church. | ||
| They formed a new church. | ||
| They're no longer an Orthodox Russian. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, they don't have religious freedom there. | ||
| And they're accusing the Russians of distorting their religion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's very strange. | ||
| So Ukraine is also... | ||
| It's a religious battle, too. | ||
| They changed everything Russian. | ||
| Do you know that Zelensky didn't even speak Ukrainian? | ||
| He learned it quickly. | ||
| So they really banned the language. | ||
| They really went against Russia. | ||
| They tried to root it out. | ||
| Some people hated Russians, and they turned it into a campaign like Hitler, a Hitler campaign of genocide. | ||
| Against Russia. | ||
| Against Russia, yeah. | ||
| That war in Donbass started in 2014, 15. Yes. | ||
| Maybe 16, but it got worse and worse. | ||
| And it was in 22, when the thing blew up, they were on the verge of invading Donbass. | ||
| They had 100,000 troops on the border, Ukrainian troops, well-trained by the Americans. | ||
| With all our work there, our CIA, our advisors, we had really trained that Ukrainian army. | ||
| That was a deliberate manipulation. | ||
| We did not abide by the treaty. | ||
| The treaty was intended to make an interim peace. | ||
| But as Merkel said, the Ukrainians saw it as a way to use the time to build up their army. | ||
| Hollande also said that. | ||
| To reconquer Donbass. | ||
| That's what they wanted to do. | ||
| And they would have killed a lot more people. | ||
| How do you suppose... | ||
| The incoming Trump administration can fix this. | ||
| Well, he announces everything so that Biden is countermoving him on every regard. | ||
| It's very dangerous. | ||
| You can't say what you're going to do in a new administration, especially this one. | ||
| Right? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I mean, how do you... | ||
| I don't know how... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's economic with Trump, that's what I think. | ||
| Well, and transactional. | ||
| So it's possible we're not going to go that way. | ||
| That's the only hope we have, to make a deal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Make a deal with Iran. | ||
| What would that look like? | ||
| We're going to have to inherit Ukraine. | ||
| 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. | ||
| A front for what? | ||
| NATO, in a way, but, you know, they won't... | ||
| Ukraine has to say NATO free. | ||
| It does. | ||
| And so does Georgia. | ||
| Otherwise, it's going to be... | ||
| The Russians won't accept that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They have to understand, why is NATO even alive? | ||
| I mean, it was a defensive alliance. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| We formed NATO because the Russians were going to invade Europe. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| 1949. That's basically it. | ||
| They never invaded Europe. | ||
| They never could. | ||
| They never had the intention to... | ||
| And Mr... | ||
| As I said to you earlier, Kamala Harris said something so stupid, like the moment they win in Ukraine, they're going to march into Poland. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| That's what the whole foreign policy establishment is saying that. | ||
| And I agree with Oliver, it's nuts. | ||
| Do they believe it, do you think? | ||
| They can't even defeat Ukraine. | ||
| They want to take on NATO? I mean, this makes no logical sense at all. | ||
| And for Putin, Ukraine has a special meaning and special history for Russia. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, and it doesn't want... | ||
| Poland or Romania? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| He's not at all that way. | ||
| He didn't do anything like that. | ||
| He was in office for 23 years. | ||
| What did he do? | ||
| Very little in terms of expansion. | ||
| It was just their borders, their security. | ||
| That's what it's about, their security. | ||
| Let me thrive. | ||
| Let me build up my country economically. | ||
| Let me do this. | ||
| And that's what he did with Russia. | ||
| Russia did very well. | ||
| Up until the war. | ||
| This idea that he wants to recreate the Soviet Empire, he said, anyone who doesn't miss the Soviet Union has no heart. | ||
| Anyone who wants to recreate it has no brain. | ||
| It's a good line. | ||
| But they are hurting their own economy again by this massive expansion of arms production. | ||
| That's what brought them down in the 80s, really. | ||
| 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. | ||
| In the settlement, do you think it's as simple as telling... | ||
| The Russians know NATO? That'll end it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Putin wants a little bit more than that right now. | ||
| Oh, he wants to keep what he earned. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's going to keep... | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is a horrible war for everybody. | ||
| America was fine with that. | ||
| That's what they said, weaken Russia, weaken Russia. | ||
| Yeah, weaken Russia. | ||
| And build up our armaments industry. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The big five, the military contractors, are doing great. | ||
| So there was a point in American history when the Congress considered banning war profiteering. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When did that happen? | ||
| 1934. 1934. Gerald Nye. | ||
| Yeah, it was a great committee. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that's such an obvious idea that your national industry shouldn't get rich from war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it sets up an incentive for those same industries to lobby for war, which is what we do now. | ||
| It's a self-evidently good idea, it seems to me. | ||
| What happened to it? | ||
| Well, then they started to go after Wilson because it was a bipartisan effort on the committee. | ||
| It had front-page headlines. | ||
| Who was Gerald Nye? | ||
| Gerald Nye was a senator from... | ||
| Midwest. | ||
| Yeah, Midwest. | ||
| Midwest Republican. | ||
| Progressive. | ||
| There were a lot of progressive anti-war Republicans during World War I and then afterwards, in the 20s and 30s. | ||
| They've been libeled ever since. | ||
| Robert LaFollette is one of the greats, but there were a lot of them then. | ||
| And they were in strictly isolation. | ||
| William Borough was one of the leaders from Idaho. | ||
| Henry Wallace was from Iowa. | ||
| Right, Henry Wallace from Iowa. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, Wilson wouldn't meet with Ho Chi Minh from Vietnam. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Famous story, yeah. | ||
| There's an interesting play by Arthur Miller, his first play, All My Sons. | ||
| You ever see it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, they made it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They have crashes of this new F-35. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's the biggest boondoggle of all time. | ||
| So it seems like this, and that play had a huge impact. | ||
| It was Broadway, 1945, six. | ||
| You know, that was, that's part of the reality of war is that people make money with it and that people knew that then at that level. | ||
| And it goes on and on. | ||
| But it's gotten worse. | ||
| The profiteering. | ||
| Gerald Nye should come out of the fucking woodwork now and investigate. | ||
| Another play that Oliver knows that also is critical of war profiteering was Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets. | ||
| You know, he's also got various episodes about condemning the war profiteering. | ||
| But they failed to get control of the system in 1934, and no one's tried since. | ||
| They came close, and it was overwhelmingly popular at the time. | ||
| And then the Democrats reacted to the allegations against Wilson getting us into the war. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair characterization? | ||
| You know, the kids don't even know about World War I. That's really ancient history. | ||
| They hardly know about Vietnam. | ||
| Oliver fought in Vietnam. | ||
| Oliver volunteered for combat in Vietnam. | ||
| Probably the only person to drop out of Yale and volunteer for combat in Vietnam in history. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No? | |
| I think there are others. | ||
| Oh, maybe. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, what happened? | ||
| What caused that inversion? | ||
| Well... | ||
| The United States, foreign policy has been bipartisan throughout the Cold War, really. | ||
| And so both parties have been war parties. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it's become this group think now. | ||
| And even progressive Democrats, who are my friends, sound so hawkish these days that I don't recognize them. | ||
| And the odd thing, so we have this reversal. | ||
| Trump ran as the anti-war candidate. | ||
| Trump ran as the pro-labor candidate. | ||
| You know, it makes no sense to those of us who grew up. | ||
| I was never... | ||
| I'm a Democrat, but I usually voted for the Democrats because they were more progressive than the Republicans. | ||
| But at this point, you've got two war parties, although there's a stronger faction in the Republican Party at this moment. | ||
| Who are at least making sense about the nuclear threat and about Ukraine. | ||
| But what caused that? | ||
| How did Liz Cheney wind up campaigning with Kamala Harris? | ||
| And it backfired and it was stupid. | ||
| And you know, what really hurt Kamala with the young people was the unquestioning support for Israel. | ||
| I saw with my students. | ||
| They despised the Democrats. | ||
| Gaza is the big issue for this generation. | ||
| And they see it every day, or they were seeing it at least for a while on television. | ||
| And the stories, you know, every day they were digging out babies from under the rubble. | ||
| It was horrible to watch. | ||
| And it was worse. | ||
| If you traveled in other parts of the world, they were even more graphic and explicit than they were in the United States. | ||
| This is what my kids were watching. | ||
| My students were watching. | ||
| And they were so disgusted with the Democrats for keep on feeding this Israeli war. | ||
| I mean, I would say that most of my students were pretty horrified by the October 7th attack that Hamas made. | ||
| And I know I felt very strongly, too. | ||
| Me, too. | ||
| I mean, you know, I know that they were badly treated for a long time, the Palestinians. | ||
| But what happened on October 7th is unacceptable, unforgivable. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| 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 it wasn't just young men, young women also. | ||
| Well, people like me followed Robert Kennedy, too. | ||
| I followed Robert to Trump's camp. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not that I was... | ||
| Robert was... | ||
| I was the medium. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I like what he's saying, and I hope he does it. | ||
| I hope he achieves it. | ||
| Whether Trump keeps his word with him, we'll see. | ||
| I think he will. | ||
| Do you know others in Hollywood who did the same? | ||
| Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who went with Kennedy. | ||
| I think a lot. | ||
| To Trump? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Did they talk about it? | ||
| They voted for Kennedy so their vote canceled out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they were not going to... | ||
| In California, Kennedy was on the ballot. | ||
| He asked all his people to vote. | ||
| In swing states for Trump. | ||
| Anyway, I like people who are shaking up the system, who are asking questions. | ||
| And the media is very, very hard on these people. | ||
| Very hard. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's like dissent is not allowed anymore. | ||
| This is not the American way. | ||
| Do you think he'll be able to do it? | ||
| Trump will be able to bring reform? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| If he's willing to break with some of the pharma companies, and that's going to be hard because of money, but who knows how it works. | ||
| Trump's an idiosyncratic candidate. | ||
| He knows that he is. | ||
| I don't think he's a one-shot. | ||
| I think Vance will inherit, and people like that, they will inherit that. | ||
| What do you think of Vance? | ||
| Well, I think he'll do what Trump wants. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's important. | ||
| There's got to be some change. | ||
| If there's no change in this world, America cannot continue on this course. | ||
| It cannot. | ||
| And it knows it. | ||
| It knows it in its gut. | ||
| You know it. | ||
| I do know it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But change is good. | ||
| Change is good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that informed everything we did. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, last question that you both, I think, can answer in an informed way. | ||
| I'll start with you, Peter. | ||
| History and its uses. | ||
| It does seem like we're in a moment where people are at least open to reassessing their interpretations of what happened. | ||
| Particularly in the last 100 years, the 20th century. | ||
| Do you think that 50 years from now, our grandkids will be reading a different version of history? | ||
| 50 years from now? | ||
| Well, if I should start with Oliver, my book. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Of course, it's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and that's what Oliver and I... The most reliable guidepost to the future. | |
| So, I mean, do you think... | ||
| We were talking about JFK, and when it came out 30 years ago, you were roundly mocked. | ||
| You were no longer mocked. | ||
| People see it as likely, at the very least. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| It seems that way. | ||
| They much more accept it, yeah. | ||
| But that was the critics. | ||
| The public loved that movie. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| Yeah, it did well. | ||
| It did very well, surprisingly well. | ||
| And it led to the Assassination Records Review Board. | ||
| A three-hour, six-minute movie. | ||
| It led to the Assassination Records Review Board, which is why so many documents have been released. | ||
| Which is why I did this documentary that I want you to see. | ||
| Revisited. | ||
| This is about the Assassination Records Review Board. | ||
| They did good work. | ||
| They didn't do everything, but they did some very good work and brought out new facts that are in this. | ||
| So why are the intel agencies still holding on? | ||
| Trump had a shot in 2016, and he blew it. | ||
| He got pressure. | ||
| From Pompeo? | ||
| From Pompeo and those guys. | ||
| And then Biden killed it. | ||
| And Biden knew what he was doing. | ||
| This is a very bad action he did. | ||
| He's undercutting Congress, but they've been doing that for years anyway. | ||
| So why? | ||
| Why are they so intent on keeping that information? | ||
| Well, there's obviously some bullshit in there. | ||
| Yeah, obviously. | ||
| I mean, I'm not saying there are those who killed them names, but we should know more about those CIA guys. | ||
| There's files on them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What was Angleton up to? | ||
| That's a big deal. | ||
| James Angleton, the counterterrorist chief. | ||
| What was Phillips, Dave Phillips, David Phillips up to? | ||
| He was a very important factor in the Latin American operation. | ||
| Guatemala Ah, he was the handler for Oswald, and Clay Shaw is in there. | ||
| There's a bunch of people that are, oh, the fellow for Joanides, the Morley's chasing, George Joanides, he's dirty all the way. | ||
| He was in from the beginning, and they covered it up at the time. | ||
| They brought him back as a witness for the HSCA. Anyway. | ||
| Oh, and Harvey. | ||
| Bill Harvey. | ||
| I think he needs to be checked out. | ||
| If you had to guess as to why they're holding these documents 60 odd years later, what would it be? | ||
| You know, they declare everything a secret. | ||
| Everything, practically. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It's standard now. | ||
| Massive classification. | ||
| We need more transparency. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's a habit. | ||
| It's like a dog peeing on a hydrant. | ||
| You know, it just goes on and on and on. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| If there's names and stuff, they redact it. | ||
| They redact it. | ||
| So, I'm not looking to government, but I'm looking to honesty. | ||
| That's what I'm looking for. | ||
| And these bureaucrats in the government, how do they feel? | ||
| What do they feel about their lives? | ||
| Are they working for us or are they working for secrecy? | ||
| The people have not been dealt with honestly. | ||
| And we know that. | ||
| I think Americans know that. | ||
| I think Americans are very cynical about the government. | ||
| Which is part of the reason why we're hoping that Trump will pardon... | ||
| Ed Snowden and Julian Assange. | ||
| Yeah, good point. | ||
| Oliver made a great movie about Snowden. | ||
| You've met with Snowden. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What he did was a great service to America. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And Julian Assange. | ||
| And Julian Assange, yeah. | ||
| Well, he has. | ||
| Sanchez at least, you know, got some measure of freedom at this point. | ||
| He was commuted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He pleaded on one charge. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But he can't come here. | ||
| Gentlemen, thank you both very much. |
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