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May 23, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

28:11

A Veteran For Peace with Bruce Gagnon

Bruce Gagnon discusses war and peace in this episode. Bruce Gagnon is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He was a co-founder of the Global Network when it was created in 1992. For more info visit: https://space4peace.org/

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	Hey everybody, my guest today is Bruce Gagnon, who I would, I guess I'd describe you, Bruce, as a, I guess in the broader level, as a peace activist.
	He is a veteran of many, many, many battles, and particularly he has focused on the weaponization of the space.
	He's the coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
	He was co-founder of that network in 1992, and he's the state coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice.
	He's worked on space issues for over 35 years.
	In 1987, he organized the largest peace protest in Florida history at Cape Canaveral.
	He was the organizer of the Cancel Cassini campaign against NASA, where they were going to put 72 pounds of plutonium into space.
	And he has been...
	Given the award as having most censored articles of the year on several years from Project Censored, I have also won that award a couple of times myself, including in 2005 and more recently as well.
	I'm really happy to have you here.
	And I want to get your take on the Ukraine.
	One of the things that I'm doing on this show is really, you know, I don't have a position on the Ukraine.
	I don't have a position on the Ukraine.
	But what really offends me is that there is no debate happening and no debate is permissible.
	And this is the same thing that happened during the Iraq war between 2001 and 2003, during, you know, when we had this kind of orchestrated hysteria that was all directed towards going to war, a preemptive war against Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with a preemptive war against Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do He had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks, but the neocons in Congress and in the White House wanted a war and they got a war.
	And today I look around the world and I see a lot of villains around the world, not just Vladimir Putin, but I see villains in Saudi Arabia who are killing hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen.
	I see atrocities occurring in Somalia, in Ethiopia.
	Many, many other hotspots in the world.
	And I have to wonder about whether all the things that were being told on the actual media, where there's no debate, there's no difference of opinion, everybody is operating within the same guardrails, whether it's CNN or Fox News.
	And so I've been inviting people onto this show.
	Who have different takes.
	And I really wanted to hear from you, Bruce, because you've spent a lot of years studying Vladimir Putin and this whole issue.
	So can you kind of summarize what your read on the current crisis is?
	Well, I think it's two things that jump out to me.
	Number one is climate change.
	Because of climate change, Russia, you know, has the largest land border with the Arctic.
	And as the Arctic ice melts, guess what?
	Here's oil.
	Drill, baby, drill.
	And it's no question that the United States and the West have been fighting resource wars for a long time now.
	And Russia really has the world's largest resource base.
	They're the largest country in the world.
	The day that Putin began this military operation, as he calls it, that very same day, U.S. and NATO began a war game called Cold Response.
	Right on the Norway-Russia border.
	No coincidence, I'm convinced.
	So that's number one.
	I think the U.S. wants to balkanize, break up Russia into smaller pieces.
	The Rand Corporation did a report in 2019 where they laid it all out.
	Saying that we can use Ukraine as a tool to destabilize, to create internal problems for Russia that will lead to the balkanization, like the US did in Yugoslavia, US and NATO did in Yugoslavia in 1999.
	The second reason is because of the growing effort by the Global South Russia, China, India, Brazil, many other countries to create a multipolar world, where it's not just US king of the hill, standing at the top, running everything, dictating terms, setting the rules.
	One day they say this is the new rule of the road and another day they change it.
	Nobody really knows what's going on, you know, from Washington.
	So the U.S., I think, recognizes it has a small window of opportunity left to try to break down that effort to create a multipolar world.
	And they've declared it openly now.
	We hear it from the White House that they want regime change in Moscow.
	And then they say, and then we're on to China after that.
	And they want the same thing in China, in Beijing.
	So I think those are the two things driving this.
	I've been following this story in Ukraine since late 2013, the lead up to the coup that happened in early 2014.
	I watched literally in real time on videos.
	And I've been following it daily ever since.
	I've been to Russia three times, then I went to the Donbass, the border area right next to the Russian border, eastern Ukraine.
	And I went to Lugansk and Donetsk and really learned a lot during that time.
	So I'm convinced that this whole operation by the United States and NATO is an intentional process to create a war.
	To enrich the military-industrial complex, we see that just this past week, President Biden asked for $33 billion more for the war, and now the Congress gives them $40 billion.
	At the same time, we can't have Medicare for all.
	Congress says, where will the money come from to pay for that?
	We can't have the alleviation of stupidity.
	We're dealing with climate crisis in any significant way.
	And the infrastructure of the country has fallen apart.
	So all of this to me indicates that there's something afoot.
	was immediately after the U.S. installed coup in 2014.
	One of the first things the new right-wing government did that was backed by the muscle of the neo-Nazis that come from western Ukraine, the first thing they did was to declare the speaking of Russian in Ukraine illegal.
	The people in eastern Ukraine Again, Russian ethnic right along the Russian border began holding peaceful marches and referendum campaigns where they said we want a federated Ukraine.
	They weren't saying we want to be part of Russia, we want to be separatists or anything else.
	We want a federated Ukraine where we can decide on our own language and we can elect our own local officials, our mayors, things like that, rather than have them appointed by Kiev.
	And so immediately as they were doing that, the Nazi death squads, as I call them, came eastward.
	You're talking about the Azov, Italian basically.
	And the right sector, there's several different elements of these neo-Nazis.
	And over the years now, over eight years, they've killed 14,000 people.
	And they've wounded 34,000 people.
	And so during these eight years...
	Mainly the ethnic Russians in Donbass and around Odessa.
	That's correct.
	That's absolutely right.
	And so during these years.
	And by the way, Putin, whether you believe or not, says that the reason that he has come into the Ukraine is to stop ethnic cleansing against ethnic Russians in the eastern Ukraine. says that the reason that he has come into the Is to stop ethnic cleansing against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
	He has said that he has no ambition to take over all of Ukraine.
	The Western story is that he is on a war of aggression to reintegrate Ukraine back into the Soviet Union.
	And so those are the two different stories.
	And I, you know, again, I'm taking note that those are the stories.
	You're right about that.
	But I have to say that if you look at 2014 to today, what you see consistently...
	Is Putin and the Russian government, Lavrov, the foreign minister, working so hard to talk to Europe, talk to the United States, to get them to restrain these death squads that have been coming, that have been trained.
	I have a friend whose son is in the U.S., Special Forces stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado.
	And he told me that his son and their units were sent to Western Ukraine to train Ukrainian soldiers.
	Well, he was sent there two times.
	What we know is that during World War II, When Hitler's army swept into the Soviet Union, they came through Ukraine, and a guy by the name of Stefan Bandera, one of the nationalists from western Ukraine, put on a Nazi uniform, and his supporters joined the Nazis, and they helped kill tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, and Russian ethnics.
	And so in Western Ukraine, there's long been this history of support of Hitler and the Nazis.
	And so they're still there today.
	It's still a reality.
	In fact, again, one of the other things that the new government did after the coup...
	And 2014 was to name Stefan Bandera one of the heroes of the nation.
	I just heard yesterday on national public radio that Russia's claims that there are Nazis in Ukraine is wrong.
	It's false.
	There are none.
	Well, the evidence is overwhelming.
	And before the last couple of years anyway, the mainstream media was covering that, that there were indeed Nazis there.
	So anyway, back to what I was trying to say was that Putin and Lavrov have been working hard for years to try to get the West to to do several things.
	Number one is stop NATO expansion.
	After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Gorbachev was promised that NATO would not expand eastward.
	And it was during the Bill Clinton administration that he started What he called NATO enhancement that is now on steroids today.
	NATO war games coming right up to the doorstep of Russia.
	Let me interrupt you because the promise that you're talking about was a promise that was made by George Bush when he was president.
	to Mikhail Gorbachev, who was about to dismantle the old Soviet Union and wanted, before he started that process, wanted a promise from George Bush that George Bush would not expand NATO into those former Soviet vassal states. wanted a promise from George Bush that George Bush would And Bush made the statement famously that NATO would not move one inch to the east.
	And today, as a result of the process that was begun during the Glenn administration, NATO is now in 13 countries that are part of the former Soviet Union.
	And has nuclear weapons, I believe, and some of them are missiles, at least.
	That's right.
	And so those are two issues that are really important to Russia.
	A third one is the United States has built missile launch facilities in Romania and Poland that can fire first-strike attack nuclear-capable cruise missiles into Russia in a very short period of time.
	Essentially, a Cuban missile crisis in reverse.
	How is Russia to respond to that?
	And when NATO has these war games, both up in the Nordic region, especially up in Norway, again bordering Russia, and in Eastern Europe, coming up to the Russian borders, After they leave, after the US-NATO leave, they leave a lot of hardware at weapons depots that have been built in Poland and in Norway.
	So Russia sees this massive escalation and preparation for war right on their doorstep.
	Now, how would the United States respond if Russia or China were doing the equivalent and putting bases in Mexico or Canada?
	We'd go ballistic.
	What if they were holding war games right upon our borders?
	We would go ballistic.
	But when we do it to them, number one, they're not supposed to say anything about it.
	And number two, the American people don't hardly know anything about it at all.
	It's not reported in the corporate media.
	So over these last eight years, Russia has been doing all kinds of shuttle diplomacy.
	They helped institute the Minsk agreements, an agreement that Ukraine signed, saying they would pull back their troops away from the Russian border, away from the Russian ethnic region of the Donbass.
	They would allow for federated Ukraine in Lugansk and Donetsk, in those areas.
	And they have never implemented those Minsk agreements whatsoever.
	They've essentially been ripped up and torn.
	There was Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, neither of them ever implemented.
	In fact, it's kind of well known that the Nazis told Zelenskyy Soon after he was elected, he ran on a campaign where he said he wanted to end the war.
	That's why he got most of his votes out of the Russian ethnic region.
	They were happy to hear somebody say that from in the government.
	But the Nazis threatened Zelensky with his life.
	By war, what do you mean?
	Do you mean the war by...
	Western Ukraine militarized groups against the ethnic Russians in the Donbass of the Civil War.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So Zelensky was threatened.
	So there we go.
	And so if you had to assign blame, how much would you assign to Putin and how much would you assign to the West?
	Well, let's imagine you're Putin for a moment.
	You've been doing everything you can diplomatically, and it's been very public.
	I think anybody that has followed this at all has to acknowledge that Putin was meeting with Western European leaders over and over and over again, talking to him on the phone, talking to Biden.
	Lavrov was doing shuttle diplomacy like crazy.
	They didn't want a war.
	They didn't want it, but they knew it was coming.
	Let's face it, they could read the writing on the wall.
	They read that Rand A study that I referred to earlier that lays the whole plan out.
	It was again published in 2019.
	I think that they did everything they could.
	I mean, I know some people in the peace movement say, well, why did Putin invade?
	Why didn't he just talk?
	Why didn't he just diplomatically try to resolve this?
	Well, they haven't been following the situation so closely and they don't know that he did.
	He's been trying this even before the coup in 2014 in Kiev.
	The 2007 Munich Security Conference that Putin went to, a very famous one, you can find the video on YouTube, where he essentially pleads with the West.
	Give us security agreements.
	Let's return to negotiations for treaties.
	The United States had pulled out of the ABM Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
	They pulled out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the INF Treaty.
	He said, let's return to these treaties.
	Let's have stable relations.
	Stop NATO expansion.
	We can all get along.
	And sitting in the audience was John McCain, And some other American leaders, and they were smirking at him.
	The camera zoomed in on the Americans there, and they were smirking at Putin.
	And his pleas were ignored all the way back to 2007.
	So I think this thing has been in motion for a long time, this balkanization, this breakup of Russia.
	Because they want their resources.
	They want their oil.
	They want their natural gas.
	They want their minerals.
	They want their timber.
	And they don't want such a big, strong country around to stand up to the United States.
	Well, people who, in the mainstream media, many of our leaders who are trying to do the right thing, we assume, what they will say is that Putin was fomenting A separatist movement in the Ukraine dressing Russian troops as if they were Ukrainian military or putting them in civilian clothes and fomenting a revolution and
	provoking the government in Kiev to retaliate in order to bring peace back to the to Dombas.
	How do you respond to that?
	Well, after the coup in 2014, again, Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Piat, the famous phone call where they said, F the EU, we're going to install who we want to install in the new government.
	After that coup, the new government said the speaking of Russian was illegal.
	People came out and started having these peaceful marches and they were holding these referendum campaigns.
	They were attacked by these Nazis.
	That's very, I mean, it's all on YouTube.
	I mean, it's all there.
	But anyway, it was the coal miners.
	There's coal mining region in the Donbass, right along the Russian border.
	It was the coal miners.
	It was electricians.
	It was teachers.
	It was musicians that came out and formed a militia.
	And they would stop these tanks that were coming in from the Ukrainian government.
	Sometimes the troops, the Ukrainian troops, weren't Nazis.
	They were just regular soldiers.
	Armed Forces.
	And they were from the Donbass.
	And they'd say, oh, we don't want to attack our own people.
	And so they would turn over to them their tanks, their rifle, you know, their machine guns, etc., etc.
	And this is how the republics first began to get weapons to safeguard their families who were being attacked.
	By the Nazis over time.
	I've always called it a self-defense forces in the Donbass.
	They were literally protecting themselves, their families, their communities, and soon the Nazis were shelling with U.S. and NATO weapon systems, with U.S.-NATO training, U.S.-NATO advisors, clearly deeply involved in the operation on the part of the Kiev government.
	And they were just trying to protect their communities and their families.
	So I think the story is pretty simple if one is willing to look at it.
	I think, Bruce, it's really important to me to have dissident voices like yours, to have a different side of the story.
	Because the story that we're hearing now, the mainstream media, is very, very different.
	And again, I'm not taking a position on it, but I do take a position that we should hear every side and we should hear voices like yours.
	Here's what I don't like.
	The people who are explaining U.S. policy to the American public, almost all of the people that you see on CNN and on Fox News who are supposedly military experts and security experts are working for the companies and are not identified as such.
	Like Boeing, like Lockheed, like General Dynamics, and the other big companies that are making billions and billions of dollars from this conflict.
	When Congress voted $40 billion, To go to this conflict, that money goes to the Ukraine and then bounces right back and goes to these military contractors in the U.S. whose employees are the people that you see on CNN acting as experts explaining the whole conflict to the public.
	They did the same thing during the Iraq War.
	And they gave us a war that at that point was the worst public foreign policy blunder in American history.
	I guess Vietnam probably is a rival, but the Iraq war was outrageous.
	And today we're seeing all of the same ingredients and that worries me a lot.
	Well, just think of our own Secretary of Defense in the United States, Lloyd Austin, was on the board of Raytheon before President Biden picked him to be the, you know, head of DOD. But, you know, you mentioned the media.
	Let's face it, in the last few years, we've seen repeatedly that That the media runs a particular line on various issues of concern to the nation.
	And anyone that stands outside of those lines, anyone that has an alternative voice, is demonized, is bounced off social media.
	And that's where we are today.
	So what I see happening when it comes to the Ukraine war is very similar to what we've been experiencing on other issues in the last few years.
	I don't see much difference.
	You either play along with the line that comes out of Washington Or you are demonized as well.
	So that's where we are.
	And I hope that the American people are figuring it out.
	I've seen polling the last few days that say that increasingly high percentages of the American people do not support this U.S. war.
	And they, you know, people are not stupid when they hear that Congress just appropriated $40 billion to give To Ukraine, which is losing in this war.
	I know we hear on the media that they're kicking Russia's ass, but it's not true.
	You know, when that money could be used to deal with real serious issues we have in this country, I think people understand that.
	They see the writing on the wall.
	They saw what happened 20 years in Afghanistan.
	Yeah, and what I think people are beginning to understand that they are paying for the war, we are paying for the war, and we're paying for it because that $40 billion, which the U.S. government does not have, they borrow that money from the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve prints more money, and And we get 8.5% inflation.
	That inflation, which is eating into the wealth of every middle class and working class American, is the tax that you are paying to finance General Dynamics and Raytheon and Boeing and all these other companies who are making billions on this war.
	You are paying for it.
	You're paying for it, not in a direct tax.
	Through inflation, which is a tax on the poor and the middle class.
	Exactly.
	And Europe, which is now being told that they have to buy U.S. fracked gas, LNG gas, that's going to be shipped overseas at a much higher cost.
	So the Europeans are being forced by the United States not to...
	Yeah, you know, it's crazy.
	And so their economy is going to crash.
	We shut down.
	It's the same thing.
	The oil companies drove the Iraq war, and here we are.
	We're shutting down the oil and gas supplies from Russia and creating new markets for U.S. oil and gas manufacturers.
	And, you know, anybody who says they're concerned about climate, you know, this is a climate crime.
	It's all about making these companies, the oil companies and military industrial companies, richer.
	They're driving foreign policy like they always have, and We need to hear, you know, it doesn't mean that Putin is a good guy.
	There's a lot of bad guys in the world.
	The king in Saudi Arabia picked up a U.S. journalist with a bone saw in a premeditated murder.
	In Saudi Arabia, they behead people every Tuesday in a big parking lot behind the Great Mosque in Riyadh, and they have had an undeclared war against Yemen, where they've killed 350,000 people.
	If you want to look for villains in the world, there's villains all over the place, and they're doing bad things.
	And the question is, Why do we get involved in some of these controversies?
	Why is the U.S. the police person of the world?
	Why do we have to hollow out our middle class to pay for foreign wars?
	And it's a question I think every American needs to ask.
	And I deeply, deeply appreciate your courage at taking a dissident view on this, Bruce.
	Tell our listeners where they can follow you and how they can support you.
	Thank you.
	Our website is spaceforpeace.org.
	And I have a popular blog called Organizing Notes, N-O-T-E-S. I hope maybe you can put the link in the description of the podcast.
	It's kind of like my organizing diary, where every day I'm posting things that I learn and And that I find out about everything that's going on today.
	I guess I would like to maybe conclude with the words of Martin Luther King, who was demonized when he came out against the Vietnam War.
	He said at the time, That the United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
	And I don't see anything different today.
	We're spending literally, when you add up all the various pots of gold, the Department of Energy, that's where the nuclear weapons money is put.
	So when you add up all these pots of gold, the US is spending a trillion dollars a year on the military.
	Well, Russia is spending the equivalent of What France and Germany spend, around $65 billion a year.
	Now, Russia might be able to fight a war in Ukraine on $65 billion a year, but there's no way in the world that they're going to be able to go out and take over all of Europe, as is claimed all the time by the corporate media.
	Russia has a smaller economy than California, so the idea that they're this huge global threat that's going to take over Europe is really a fantasy.
	Anyway, Bruce, thank you so much for everything that you do, and thank you for joining us.
	Thank you.

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