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April 18, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
43:14
War Machine and NATO with Max Blumenthal

Max Blumenthal, editor of the GrayZone, discusses NATO and the War Machine with RFK Jr.

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Hey, everybody.
My guest today is Max Blumenthal, who is the editor-in-chief of The Gray Zone.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including bestselling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The 51-Day War, and The Management of Savagery.
He has produced print articles, an array of publications, many video reports, Several documentaries, including Killing Gaza, Max Blumenthal that founded the Gray Zone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's slate of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
And those are two of the principal preoccupations with this podcast.
The The growth of the military-industrial complex, the domination of our democracy and subversion of our democracy by corporate power, and the coterminous growth of the emerging security state.
And Max Blumenthal has probably done more to challenge some of the reigning orthodox days about the Ukraine crisis, and I really want to I think it's so important now because there really is a kind of a uniformity on Fox and CNN and all the networks about how to interpret the events that are happening in the Ukraine.
I think it's really important.
For Americans to explore other narratives.
And I think you've done a better job than probably any journalist in the country at piercing some of the kind of the easy presumptions about Ukraine.
By asking you this question, Max Blumenthal is the son of a close friend of mine, Sidney Blumenthal.
Sidney Blumenthal is a famous American journalist who's written for the Washington Post, for the Atlantic Monthly, for Vanity Fair, for many, many, many others.
He's been an important figure in American journalism and particularly kind of a liberal icon.
He's worked for the Clinton Global Initiative And I just want to ask you, what does your dad think about the kind of journalism that you're doing, which really challenges some of the key liberal orthodoxies, at least on this particular project, the Ukraine project?
Well, you might be familiar with this, you know, families stick together but don't always agree politically.
I guess I hope you can come on the gray zone at some point for one of our live streams and I can ask you a similar question.
But, you know, my father is anyone else in politics and media, a complex person.
And he always encouraged me to question everything, to be skeptical about everything.
And he has supported me unconditionally as a father.
While we definitely don't agree about a lot of issues where he's aligned himself with Democratic Party or Hillary Clinton, there's some disagreement there.
He did actually Defend me very strongly and was attacked for it harshly in Washington on my book Goliath, which compiled five years of my reporting from inside Israel-Palestine On the Israeli project of apartheid against the Palestinian people where I presented Americans with the real Israel that they didn't know because their corporate media wouldn't present it to them.
And he hosted a book party at my parents' house.
Half of the State Department was there.
You had all sorts of Democratic operatives.
And they were all coming up to me and shaking my hand and saying, thank you for doing this.
The Israel lobby has made our life impossible.
We can't get anything done.
We're sick of them.
Thank you for doing this.
And it's a quiet wink and a nod.
That party was exposed in a neocon publication called The Free Beacon, and he was attacked for providing, I guess, material support for terrorism by buying pizza for the party.
So he has been willing to step up and support me when I've taken controversial stands and support me as a father when we don't agree, which is, I think, what any good parent should I don't expect to agree with my kid, although right now she can barely speak English because she's one year old.
But if you look at his whole career, and you know this, Bobby, my father has also been doing some of the same work that I'm doing now.
He actually edited a book.
The first book he edited, which allowed my parents to buy a little car, the car they had when I was born, was called Government by Gunplay.
And that book investigated the killing of your father and punctured the official narrative.
It investigated, looked into the killing of your uncle and punctured the official narrative.
And my father, in his contribution to the book, looked at the role of the Chicago DA and the FBI in the killing, the assassination of Fred Hampton, and covered COINTELPRO. So that's the same work that we're doing today at the Gray Zone.
Even if you go back into the 80s, you'll find Sidney Blumenthal bylines on Iran-Contra covering the role of the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA cutout in sponsoring Pro-Contra NGOs in Nicaragua, and that's the kind of work we continue to do at the Gray Zone.
You know, I've definitely taken a different trajectory, and that's simply because I've always been encouraged to question everything.
Let's talk about the Ukraine.
I think one of the things that, I mean, one of the key things that you've done is to explore this odd relationship between President Zelensky, who has himself has Jewish roots, and the kind of right-wing There's militarized forces that are tied to all kinds of neo-Nazism that are combating the Russians,
are leading the frontline fighters against the Russians.
And Zelensky, as you point out, has had to make compromises with these groups, probably unwillingly.
But that put him in the same camp as people who are over Nazis, anti-Semitic, and anti-Semitic.
Strong advocates of genocide, particularly against ethnic Russians, really sketchy, horrible people.
So how did that happen?
Yeah, great question.
And I think we need to go back to the Second World War to really understand what's happening in contemporary Ukraine.
During the Second World War, Ukrainian partisans, specifically the Ukrainian Partisan Army, which was led by a figure, Roman Shukhevich, and the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and it had a A hardcore wing called the OUNB. They aligned themselves with Nazi Germany when the Nazi army entered Ukraine and occupied the army.
They wanted to get Russia out, have an independent Ukraine, And they aligned with them not only militarily, but politically, and adopted a Nazi-like, ultra-nationalist ideology, which saw these commanders like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich carry out some of the most horrendous massacres of World War II during the Holocaust of bullets before the kind of industrial final solution.
So the Pogrom of Lviv, the Babi Yar massacre, the massacre of 100,000 ethnic Poles, These were carried out in the most grisly fashion, bullet by bullet, by Ukrainian nationalists who had aligned with Nazi Germany and were working hand in glove with the Nazi SS. After the fall of the Soviet Union, these forces came back.
Their children and grandchildren entered politics in a supposedly free Ukraine, and they were a perfect asset to the United States, just as Syrian jihadists were an asset to the United States or The Afghan Mujahideen in weakening Russia.
They hated Russia passionately.
The US wanted to see a weak Russia in the 1990s.
And throughout the 90s and 2000s, they began entering politics.
The Orange Revolution that we heard about in Ukraine Which developed in the early 2000s, one of these color revolutions, which was sponsored by the CIA. And it's cut out the National Endowment for Democracy, this NGO funded by the US government.
They sponsored all of so many of these nationalist politicians, a figure named Andre Perubi.
He became a major political force in Ukraine as the founder of the Social National Party.
If that sounds like the National Socialist Party, it's because it was inspired by it.
And he also started a militia called the Patriot of Ukraine, which has been seen brutalizing migrants, attacking Roma people, attacking gay rights activists.
And this figure, Andrei Peruby, would eventually rise to Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament.
Under the 2014 Maidan regime, this was another color revolution in 2014 where Ukrainians were encouraged by the United States with personal appearances by the ultra-militarist Senator John McCain and the Democratic Senator Chris Murphy on Maidan Square to carry out a coup and remove the elected President Viktor Yanukovych because Viktor Yanukovych had planned to sign An economic deal with
Russia that would bring cheap gas and lots of exports into the Ukrainian market.
He rejected an EU deal, which would have put Ukraine on hardcore austerity.
And that's what triggered this Maidan revolt.
So if you go back to 20-- - Can I interrupt you for a second? - Yeah. - Yannikovych, it's a complex, complex history.
But Yannikovych basically, when he explains himself, he says that he was, Ukraine was being forced to choose between making a deal with Russia or making a worse deal with the IMF. - Exactly.
Either one of those deals was going to turn the Ukraine into kind of a vassal nation.
And that, you know, he chose to deal with Russia.
I want to go a little further back.
And maybe even complicate the understanding of what happened during World War II. During World War II, the beginning of World War II, there was an international pogrom in the Ukraine and in neighboring Poland and some of the other neighboring countries that exterminated 14 million people between the Soviet Union, between Stalin and Hitler.
And at the beginning of the war, people remember Stalin and Hitler made a pact.
Moscow and Berlin.
And Ukraine was divided in half.
It was called the Ribbentrop-Molotov Act.
And essentially people on the east side, Russia dominated the eastern Ukraine.
Hitler dominated the western Ukraine.
And both of those leaders...
It exterminated people who were not sympathetic to their worldview.
So you were left kind of on the eastern side where the only people who survived one of the greatest purges of humanity in human history were people who tended to be more sympathetic to the German regime.
And in Eastern Ukraine, you were left with people, you know, in a terrible, in massacres that, until 1941, exceeded anything that the Nazis did.
Exterminated, I think, three million people.
They deliberately starved to death three million people.
And the people who tended to survive were people who were sympathetic with the communist regime and were kind of living with the legacy of that division today in the Ukraine.
Is that kind of accurate representation to you?
Well, I want to get to 2014 just in the interest of time.
You know, what I know about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is that Stalin had besieged Churchill and FDR for assistance to directly confront and the French to directly confront Nazi Germany and when they gave him the cold shoulder, this was a pact that allowed him to buy time and there is a lot of resentment.
Not only for historical resentment in Poland, you know, over events like the Katyn massacre that are constantly revived and memorialized by nationalist elements.
And in the Ukraine, they have a narrative about the Holodomor, that it kind of provides national cohesion through the resentment of the Soviet Union and now of Russia and Russian speakers.
And you have a large Russian speaking population In Ukraine, and the tensions boiled over in 2014.
So it's important to understand what happened there, because the war that we're seeing today, it didn't begin today.
It began in 2014, and it began with U.S. encouragement.
The U.S. played the central role in driving these historical tensions to the boiling point.
Victoria Nuland is now the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Ukraine and Russia.
She's the most powerful figure presiding over that portfolio in the State Department.
She's married to Robert Kagan, a hardcore neoconservative who conceived the Project for a New American Century, which you've written about, which calls for unipolar US domination of the world.
And it's enforcement through regime change operations across the Middle East and anywhere where a challenger to total U.S. hegemony arises.
She has worked under Dick Cheney and now works under Joe Biden.
Her career actually in government began under Dick Cheney.
So that's the kind of person you have there.
She was on the Maidan in 2014 in central Kiev, handing out cookies to people demanding the downfall of this government that had just made an economic deal with Russia.
Along with the U.S. ambassador, she was also heard in a phone call leaked, I assume, by the Russians, calling, determining who would Take charge in the new government because it was a U.S. puppet government.
And she was also seen in 2012 at a meeting of, I think, Chevron shareholders or oil industry shareholders boasting that the U.S. had contributed $7 billion since the fall of the Soviet Union to the Ukrainian opposition.
That would take over in 2014.
So you had a coalition in this government Kind of liberal-minded people who wanted to be part of the West and wanted to be like they thought that Kiev would be transformed into Berlin overnight.
Kind of naive people.
Then you had the oligarchs who are funding all of this alongside the United States.
Crooked people like Viktor Pinchuk, who is a big funder of both Clinton and Trump.
People like Igor Kolomoisky, who is Zelensky's top backer.
And then you had the neo-Nazis, like actual neo-Nazis.
Who took over Kiev City Hall, put up swastikas, Confederate flags, all sorts of SS insignia on the walls, and then took shelter when they were driven out by the riot police in guess where?
The Canadian Embassy.
I guess in Canada, you know, you have to drive a truck and protest mandates to qualify.
Maybe the truckers should have just said, we're Ukrainians, and so don't put us under emergency law.
But it was Canada that gave them shelter.
It was the West that was providing them with encouragement, the US specifically.
And they were the muscle that allowed for this regime change operation to take place.
They drove Yanukovych out.
Without them, Although they comprise 10% of the protesters, without these hardcore hooligan neo-Nazi street elements, the Maidan coup would have never taken place, and this new regime that was pro-US would have never come into power.
So what happens next?
What happens next is the Russian-speaking population, which is a minority in Ukraine, comprises about one-third of the population, is targeted by these groups called C-14, right sector.
And in Odessa, Some of those Russian speakers hold a kind of Occupy-style protest.
I believe it was definitely after the removal of Yanukovych, outside the trade union there.
They were set upon by right-sector neo-Nazis, driven into the building.
The building was set on fire.
Many of them died jumping out of the window.
Others were pummeled to death when they tried to escape.
And the Ukrainian Secret Service, the SBU, was completely behind this.
It was obvious.
Over 40 people were massacred.
And then a war erupts in the east, where you have the Donbass region, eastern Ukraine.
Donetsk and Lukonsk are two majority Russian-speaking republics, or they declare themselves to be independent republics, and they organize their own militia, and they go to war.
And the frontline fighters for Ukraine in this War, again, in the East, which has lasted from 2014 to the present and cost over 13,000 lives, mostly on the pro-Russian side, the frontline fighters were the neo-Nazi paramilitaries, specifically the Azov Battalion.
Now, if you're listening to this right now, you can just Google Azov Battalion and find mainstream media reports showing them wearing Nazi symbols like the Wolf's Angle.
That is their official symbol.
The Sonnenrad, the Black Sun, which SS soldiers also wore.
You'll see those patches on their uniforms.
You'll see video of them Sigh-Hailing.
You'll see them leading parades through their political wing, the National Corps, in the center of Kiev.
Huge parades every year honoring Stepan Bandera.
The author of these hideous pogroms and massacres during World War II, the lead Nazi collaborator of the Ukrainian nationalists.
And they led the fight in the Donbass region.
They were incorporated officially into the Ukrainian National Guard, the Azov Battalion.
The interior minister who served until last year, Arsene Avakov, was basically their main patron, providing government money to them and their National Corps, the Azov Battalion.
Further, the top funder of Vladimir Zelensky, who is the hero of the International Press Corps right now, this actor and comedian who became president and is now basically playing his role in NATO Escalation Theater by calling for World War III in the form of a no-fly zone.
This president, this Jewish president, his top funder One of the most corrupt men on the planet, Igor Kolomoisky, who also happens to be Jewish, was also the top funder of the Azov Battalion, as well as several other far-right paramilitaries that he used as his own personal army to attack his financial foes on occasion.
So you have these groups that are completely internalized and absorbed into the Ukrainian state.
And they begin to flex their muscle inside Ukraine.
They have been taking over city halls across Ukraine until they can have their way.
The C-14 neo-Nazi militia has worked with the Kiev City Council in Ukraine.
Removal of the Roma population from train stations and under bridges by waging pogroms of their own.
They were essentially paid by the city to carry out pogroms against Roma people in 2018, and these are on film as well.
The conflict, meanwhile, in the East was constantly escalating.
The Ukrainian leadership, as I mentioned, Perubi, a neo-Nazi himself who was the head of the Ukrainian parliament, Was cheering all of this on.
You had Petro Poroshenko, the predecessor to Zelensky.
He was a war-like kind of nationalist-minded president.
And the Ukrainian population as a whole is becoming exhausted by this.
So is the Russian population.
So are people in Crimea who are majority Russian speakers.
And they come to see Zelensky, this actor and comedian with no political experience, as the great hope of peace.
He campaigns for peace in 2019.
And he wins with the backing of Kolomoisky, who is funding him through all these offshore accounts.
He comes into power, and he was clearly not brave enough to confront these neo-Nazi elements in the East.
He was unable to convince them to pull back, and ultimately unwilling.
And by last year, Zelensky essentially threw in the towel on peace and presented an award to the commander of the neo-Nazi rights sector battalion.
On December 1st, In the Ukrainian parliament, a guy whose nickname is Da Vinci and has boasted to the New York Times that he keeps a pet wolf and feeds at the bones of Russian-speaking children.
The war was pretty much inevitable at that point.
An escalation of the war was inevitable by that point.
And I spoke several weeks ago, two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I spoke to someone named Russell Bentley.
I've interviewed him before.
He is a foreign fighter from Texas who lives in Donetsk, five miles from the front line.
He's a little too old to fight, but he participated in the war and he's a great source of information just because he's there on the pro-Russian side as an American.
And I asked him, what's going to happen?
The U.S. is predicting an invasion.
He told me, The neo-Nazi forces on the other side rocketed us for the first time since 2015 with grad rockets.
Several people are dead.
A school was hit.
Apartment buildings were hit.
They're escalating now.
And the Russian military is going to go in and march to Kiev and mount a campaign of denazification.
This is someone speaking from the pro-Russian perspective.
And I said, it was hard to almost believe that this could actually take place.
48 hours later, he was proven right.
What we leave out is every event that took place up to then, the rejection of the Minsk Agreement peace process, the constant escalation, the constant killing in the East, mostly of the Russian-speaking population that led to this point,
along with the expansion of NATO and the U.S. bringing billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine and 1,000 military trainers Including to train the Azov Battalion, to arm the Azov Battalion, and to encourage the Azov Battalion politically and ideologically.
The United States, Canada, and even Israel have armed these neo-Nazi forces on Russia's doorstep, and it was a clear provocation.
I think there's reasons to believe that elements in the Biden administration welcomed this invasion because now they can empty the tank of sanctions on Russia.
Now they can wage this global struggle with no holds barred against Russia and all its assets.
So it's important to understand this history and context, and you're not going to get it in U.S. corporate media.
One of the interesting anecdotes in your writings are descriptions of how C-14 and the Azov Battalion actually advertise themselves to corporations, to business people, to municipal mayors.
As people will enforce, you know, who will beat up your enemies, who will kill or whatever, that they're basically advertising their services in exchange for money and support.
They will terrorize communities.
Absolutely.
I mean, first of all, C14 appears to have taken its name from the infamous 14 words of the neo-Nazi, the US neo-Nazi leader, David Lane.
14 words are, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.
And they make no secret of their neo-Nazi ideology.
They're proud of it.
But why would, why are they useful?
As you said, they Have openly advertised their services on Facebook for anyone willing to pay to commit spectacular acts of violence against their rivals or anyone who gets in their way.
And Ukraine, the post-Maidan Ukraine, the post-2014 Ukraine, is one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, according to Transparency International, which is a U.S. State Department-funded NGO. They've had so much capital flight from Ukraine through corruption.
The money the IMF dumps in, it goes straight out to Swiss bank accounts and offshore accounts.
The people of Ukraine have suffered a worse migration crisis than any country in recent European history before this war began.
Something like three million people have moved west in search of some economic opportunity since the coup.
The country has just been turned into a despotic free-for-all, and these groups have benefited the most.
So C-14 has also maintained ties with the current Zelensky administration negotiated with them.
He's actually had to sit down with their leader Yevon Karas, who has been, you know, photographed Sig Heiling, who is part of this whole thug operation, in order to try to secure withdrawals of the forces from the east.
And, you know, of course, Karas wouldn't budge, and he's now fighting with his forces in this current war.
You have another guy, Sergei Bandar from C-14, who led the pogrom against Roma People in Kyiv in 2018 with official support.
He spoke just days after that pogrom at a place called America House in Kyiv, which is a U.S. State Department-sponsored meeting house.
So he spoke at a U.S.-funded organization, an open neo-Nazi.
All this has been going on along Under the radar of the U.S. public, local reporters, even U.S. reporters have covered this.
It's not a secret there.
U.S. white nationalists, neo-Nazis from the U.S. have gone to Kiev to train with the Azov battalion.
In fact, a group were actually indicted by the FBI. In, I believe, 2018 from what's called the Rise Above movement in Huntington Beach, California.
These are open white nationalists.
And the FBI in its indictment said they went to train with the Azov Battalion, which is sponsored by the Ukrainian Interior Ministry and is a neo-Nazi group.
So the FBI, the U.S. government knew about it.
That same year, the U.S. Congress finally passed a provision Banning arms to the Azov Battalion.
And of course, that's all been forgotten.
That provision has been shredded as we now see them in the field right now with US and UK made light anti-tank weapons.
Oh, if you read your journalism, if you read Whitney Webb's journalism, if you look at these two really astonishing documentaries that were done by Oliver Stone, one of them, the 2014 documentary,
Ukraine on Fire, And the more recent documentary, you get this kind of shadowy vision of U.S. intelligence agencies, neocon think tanks and leadership and globalists, all kind of conspiring to provoke Putin into invading the Ukraine.
And you think that that's...
How true do you think that that is?
Absolutely.
I mean, there was never any effort put into diplomacy.
Every aspect of the Minsk agreement, which was between the Ukrainian government and the two republics which have declared independence in the East, Donetsk and Luhansk, every aspect of it has been violated by the Ukrainian side again and again and again.
And the population on the pro-Russian side suffered enormously.
Crimea, Majority Russian-speaking area which voted in a resolution in 2014 to join Russia rather than be part of this ultra-nationalist regime based in Kiev that was seeking to strip Russian as one of the official languages of Ukraine, which was waging an open attack on the Russian Orthodox Church.
That population has faced a deliberate campaign of not conventional warfare, but an attempt to starve and drown them by building dams to prevent them from obtaining water.
A deliberate attempt to cause a drought in the Crimea since they joined Russia.
And that dam was bombed one week ago by Russian forces.
So you have every element put in place for a major war to explode.
And John Mearsheimer, one of the most highly regarded international relations professors and academics in the country from the University of Chicago, said in 2014, the United States is putting Ukraine on the primrose path to war.
Everything he said then, everything that the late Professor Stephen Cohen of NYU said at the time has proven nothing short of prophecy.
And these two academics and anyone else who warned about the path to war was demonized and run out of polite society And run out of U.S. media and called a Russian puppet.
They've been proven absolutely right.
Because the neoconservatives who work in Republican and Democratic administrations, who honeycomb the permanent national security state bureaucracy, who burrow from within think tanks on K Street funded by the arms industry, because they wanted their war.
They wanted this escalation.
And what do they want now?
Well, you can see what they're getting right now.
A major, major windfall profit for the arms industry.
Congress just authorized $18 billion in weapons shipments to Ukraine.
What will it go to?
They're not going to stop Russian forces, as far as I can tell.
What they want is a massive insurgency.
They want an Afghan-style insurgency with these neo-Nazi forces as the frontline fighters, just as the jihadists aligned with al-Qaeda We're the so-called moderate rebels and freedom fighters backed by the CIA in Syria.
And what will that do for the Ukrainian people?
It will cause an unprecedented refugee crisis, worse than what we see now, massive bloodshed, the destruction of entire cities.
An endless war, which is great for so many people in Washington and so many people in capitals around the world who exist above humanity in this kind of hovercraft Davos elite.
But for average people on the ground, it is a nightmare.
And why do they want to do it?
For the same reason they wanted to arm the Afghan Mujahideen during the Cold War, just to weaken Russia.
They were willing to create the context for the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
In order to bring down the Soviet Union.
How do I know that?
Because Vignu Brzezinski, who was Carter's NSC director, who conceived this strategy, someone who actually comes from Galicia, his family comes from Galicia in Poland, their land was taken by the Soviet Union.
His life's work was to destroy the Soviet Union.
He was asked in the 2006 interview, after 9-11, by an interviewer, you got 9-11, you got the rise of Al Qaeda, you got the Taliban taking over Afghanistan.
Was it worth it?
And he said, of course it was worth it, because we defeated the Soviet Union and that was good for humanity.
So that's the mentality of these people who studied Brzezinski's global chessboard theory and believe in a unipolar, hegemonic US, despite the fact that such a thing is delusional and destructive.
And the rest of us are paying the cost.
We're paying the cost in gas prices.
We're paying the cost in food prices.
We're paying the cost in inflation.
They don't care.
That's the cost that we have to pay, in their words, for freedom.
You know, Whitney Webb has added another kind of strategic objective for the same group of people, which may be a more powerful impulse, which is the rise of the national security state at home, the obliteration of constitutional rights, of civil liberties, and basically the imposition of a police state.
And she talks about how the jihadists who we funded gave the intelligence agencies and the neocons, etc., the provocation that we needed to pass the Patriot Act and to impose all of these, you know, these impositions of totalitarian controls at home.
And that now the same agencies are funding and encouraging the growth of right-wing global kind of terrorist networks, these right-wing racist anti-Semitic networks, which they're already broadcasting as requiring the need of greater social controls.
Well, we've just seen a steady escalation in social control from 9-11 to the present.
In the constant sense that we must be hysterical and afraid and censorship continues to rise on social media as one aspect of the social control regime.
Victoria Newland, who I spoke about earlier, testified before the Senate two days ago.
And she mentioned that we, referring to the national security state, are working with the tech companies to wipe out false stories and to make sure truth gets into Russia.
So all we have to do is reverse her logic.
They're wiping out any accounts or media that It contradicts or interferes with the official narrative, and they're pumping propaganda into Russia to encourage social revolt there.
And we've constantly heard that the Russians are doing that to us through, like, what, $30,000 of Facebook ads during the 2016 election, that Russia is trying to encourage social friction and chaos in the U.S. But the U.S. openly boasts about what it's doing, spends billions of dollars a year to do it inside Russia, as it boasts about waging an economic war We do hear a lot in our media about the actual real repression that's taking place in Russia now of anti-war protesters or people who criticize the government.
Russia and its leadership and much of the population feel that they are under siege by NATO and the West.
And if you look at a map of military bases and installations, they indeed are.
We don't have that same sense of siege in the US, but our leadership actually feels under siege by its own population.
That's my perspective.
And that's why these social controls are coming in.
That's why RT, the Russian broadcaster, had to be removed.
It's almost impossible to access it online in the US. It was officially banned in the EU. It's not because they're afraid of Russia.
It's because they're afraid of their population accessing a counter-narrative.
It's not about any foreign threat.
The threat is right here.
But the global provocations are also almost beyond dispute.
As you point out, we have nations that have joined former Soviet satellites that have now joined NATO and now host bases and host military operations that are dictated by foreign power, mainly by the United States of America.
We have Zelensky announcing at the Munich Security Conference that He intends to make the Ukraine a nuclear power.
I remember when my uncle was president in 1962, and the Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba, which is 11,000 miles from Washington, D.C., and we're now surrounding Russia with missile bases that are 700 or 800 miles from Moscow, and a lot closer to other key cities.
And then, of course, this war that is being conducted with U.S. support against ethnic Russians, which is a murderous war.
It's a genocidal war against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, in Crimea, in Odessa, and Turkey.
You know, if that were happening in Mexico, if the Mexican government was, you know, making war against U.S. expatriates in, you know, Cabo San Lucas or whatever, And if they were putting Russian missile emplacements on the Mexican border, we would consider that an act of war.
Absolutely.
And that is the most important framing to provide for Americans, along with the framing of the Cuban Missile Crisis that we never learned, and my generation never learned in school.
I had to go read the alternative real history of your uncle's negotiations with Khrushchev to understand why those missiles were even there.
What we learn in the US, the exceptionalist version, is that missiles were placed in Cuba simply because the Soviet Union wanted to destroy us and take over the world.
The reality was the US had placed missiles in Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union and was threatening regime change in Cuba and attempting to assassinate It's leader, Fidel Castro.
So these missiles were placed there for deterrence.
And when they were removed, the Soviet Union ceased threatening the US because it obtained its diplomatic objective.
Which was, you know, no more Bay of Pigs invasions.
No more missiles pointed directly at the Soviet Union.
My uncle removed the Jupiter missile bases in Turkey.
Right.
And pledged not to invade Castro.
Exactly.
And so the Soviet Union collapses.
The U.S. declares victory.
It was not a victory.
It was not a U.S. victory.
And it taunts the Soviet Union.
While it's engaged in negotiations, George H.W. Bush, With Gorbachev, the man who sort of wanted to reform the Soviet Union and didn't understand what was coming next.
And what they told Gorbachev was, we will not expand NATO beyond Germany.
And he took them at their word, which was extremely unfortunate and is why Gorbachev is such an unpopular figure in today's Russia.
He didn't get it in writing.
I assume it was sort of some, he didn't want to lose the confidence of his American partners by forcing them to put it in writing.
But by not putting it in writing, NATO took that as a green light to consistently expand and edge eastward, putting dual-use missile systems and troops on Russian borders, which, as you said, the U.S. would never tolerate in Mexico.
And it wouldn't tolerate in Central America either.
Certainly wouldn't tolerate it in Canada.
That is Russia's frontier.
It is its strategic depth.
And Ukraine was a step too far.
What was placed in Ukraine was billions and billions of dollars of weapons.
And US military trainers.
It was basically NATO-ized, even though it did not officially join NATO. NATO doesn't actually want it to be a member because it's too corrupt and just the system is too broken.
The EU doesn't want Ukraine because then all the Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine could become European citizens.
They don't want them.
They kind of consider them to be just bullet stoppers at this point.
So that's the main reason this war is happening, is NATO expansion.
NATO exists only to threaten Russia, to keep Russia out, to keep Germany, the most powerful country in Europe, weak, and to keep the US in control of Europe.
To make sure Europe is not independent.
That is the purpose of NATO and the secondary purpose is to enrich arms manufacturers and force the American public, everyone watching now if you're an American, to subsidize Europe's social democracies when we have none at home.
Your U.S. tax dollars are paying for Germany's military, offsetting the cost of Germany's own defense So they don't have to pay.
They can sponsor people to have public benefits instead with that money.
Why are we doing that as Americans when we get so few benefits from our own government?
So that's what NATO is.
And I should also mention that since we're talking about neo-Nazis, NATO made a propaganda film a few years ago, I think it was 2017, called The Forrest Brothers.
They promoted it on their official channel.
The Forrest Brothers were a Lithuanian partisan band who were allied with Nazi Germany, carried out pogroms during World War II, and were portrayed as heroes in this documentary promoted by NATO because what NATO has done is absorbed the remnants of Nazi Germany into this alliance With Russia.
In fact, many of NATO's early leaders, NATO had former Nazis as its early leaders.
So the existence of NATO really needs to be called into question.
It exists to perpetuate these wars.
And just one more point I would want to make to illustrate NATO's true purpose.
Is that Vladimir Putin, when he came into office in the Kremlin, he asked if he could join NATO. And this was publicly reported.
Russia had wanted to join NATO and they were kept out because NATO doesn't exist to make Russia a partner.
It exists to maintain Russia as an enemy and to bring us to the point that we're at today.
Mac Blumenthal, thank you for sharing these truths with us.
Thank you for your integrity and your courage and your skill as a journalist.
Thank you very much.
Well, thank you.
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