Feb. 4, 2023 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the political cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide, as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Welcome back, everybody.
It is Saturday evening, February the 4th.
We are live, and as cold as it is outside, it has been this week, we are red-hot and rolling in the studio as we welcome back our good friend and pillar of our program, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review.
I say pillar because he's one of the top five most interviewed guests.
Anytime we have one of the top five on, I like to make mention of it.
It's a pretty unique collection, and he's back for another Camp Miss broadcast this evening.
He's going to add his expert analysis as we look back on last week's discussion with Paul Craig Roberts about the widening conflict between the United States, NATO, Ukraine, and Russia.
But first, let's let him say hello.
Mark, how are you tonight?
All the way out there in California?
Yes.
Well, luckily, we're in Southern California.
The weather here is much, much nicer as it usually is compared to how you are and how most of the country is.
And yeah, we're doing fine.
We're doing great.
Wow, that's good to hear.
Good to hear, and glad to hear you're doing well.
So I'll share with the audience something that's pretty interesting to me.
And that was we had you scheduled last year for the February 26th, 2002 broadcast.
That was one of four appearances you made on the show last year.
And we planned these things out in advance.
Mark and I will exchange emails and kind of brainstorm on what we're going to talk about.
And we had in mind to talk about a book that had come out entitled Stalin's War, A New History of World War II.
That's by an author by the name of Sean McMeekin.
And we still haven't had time to get to that, but we will.
Because what happened was on February the 24th of last year, Russia entered into Ukraine.
That was the day that marked the onset of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, February 24th of last year.
And it just so happened, by sheer luck, Mark was scheduled to be our guest on the very next program.
Well, we called an audible and we adjusted and we moved to have him provide analysis of that then brand new geopolitical situation.
And Mark, we look back on that.
Now that we are about a year removed from the onset of that event, I was looking back, and I believe you were as well this week, on the remarks that you made a year ago.
They held up very well.
They still do.
Right.
Well, yes, we've had a year now to hear, to see what's been going on.
The points I made back then were, what does this war mean for Americans?
How is it likely to play out?
And what's the background of this conflict?
Why is this conflict taking place?
And I think I gave a pretty solid look at how this whole thing developed.
It shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone given the background, given what had been going on before.
And then I also made the point, and I want to stress this again today.
I have, and I mean it sincerely, great sympathy for Ukrainians and for Russians.
I try to understand the point of view of each one.
I think that's an essential thing in trying to understand history, to put oneself in the shoes of people in other countries and in the past, because that's the only way to really understand the motives and why countries and why leaders and so forth act the way they do.
And I mean that sincerely.
I wish the best both for Ukrainians and for Russians.
And the big and terrible aspect of all of this, and this has now been a point made over and over, is that this war could have and should have been avoided.
And it could have been avoided, especially if the United States, but other countries, but particularly the United States, had acted wisely, had acted with reason in the years leading up to the conflict that the world is now witnessing.
But our leaders didn't.
They ignored Russia and ignored the claims, ignored the concerns that Russia had expressed for years, basically with real arrogance.
Because the central issue that motivated Russia to go in was the great fear, and a legitimate fear, that if Ukraine was part of NATO, it would mean eventually U.S. military bases in Russia aimed at Russia.
And this is something that no Russian leader, not Putin alone, but any Russian leader is going to accept, unless they just basically run up the white flag and say to the United States, whatever you do, we're going to go along with it.
And this point now is widely accepted, I think, by people who are serious analysts of the thing.
More than that, in the past year, the American public has been fed a whole lot of nonsense about the war, about what was going to happen.
It was said over and over that the sanctions imposed by the United States on Russia were going to force it to back down.
We were told that Putin is unhinged, that maybe he's dying of cancer.
We were told that Russian soldiers aren't going to fight.
They're all going to just refuse to fight.
We were told that Russia's on the verge of falling apart.
We're told, and many comparisons were made by American leaders with Zelensky, the president of Ukraine and Ukraine.
We were told, well, it's like an existential struggle.
He was compared to Winston Churchill.
There's just no question.
We've got to support him no matter what.
The good will triumph and so forth.
Well, it hasn't played out that way, as I think anyone who had a deeper, broader understanding of this whole thing could have predicted.
Now, in every war, including in this one, almost everyone miscalculates.
And Putin miscalculated at the beginning too.
Countries do that very often.
But Russia is not Iraq.
Iraq.
Russia is not Afghanistan.
Russia is not Syria.
Russia is an important country with a large population, a lot of resources, and important friends.
And the comparison of many leaders with as if Russia is going to be bowled over the way Saddam Hussein was and Putin's going to be kicked out have proven, of course, very wrong.
Just the opposite has happened.
The American policy is based, our leaders tell us that we had to support Ukraine because we have great sympathy and great understanding for Ukraine's desire for independence and that we are supporting democracy and freedom and this is all good and we just got to take a stand here against this terrible Putin.
Well, the terrible, the awful, tragic irony of this entire conflict is that the country and the people that are being devastated by this war first and foremost are the Ukrainians and Ukraine.
The country is in ruins and it'll take a long time even to recover.
There's something like 10 million of the population, 8 to 10 million of the population of Ukraine, a country of almost 40 million, have fled the country.
They're refugees.
It's estimated that maybe 200,000 Ukrainians have already been killed or died in the conflict.
This is a terrible thing and the people that pay the biggest price for this are the Ukrainian people themselves.
And that should be, and our leaders don't really take that into account.
Let's take a quick break when we come back with the great Mark Weber, ihr.org for the Institute for Historical Review.
We're going to continue to have this discussion, the war in Ukraine one year old this month.
Mark Weber provides the analysis.
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In message one, we said that Satan, the father of lies, John 8, 44, gave the left evil spiritual power the more they use the lies.
The political left today is the beast.
Now the Bible confirms that the dragon gave him, the beast, his power.
Revelation 13, 2.
The extra evil spiritual power that comes from the beast by their lying is what accounts for the string of the leftist criminals in the government that have never yet been prosecuted.
It also explains why American capitalists support communism in the 21st century.
Note 1.
That behavior of capitalists was predicted by Vladimir Lenin, a cell of the beast.
Note 2.
Henry Ford was a capitalist and he would have never gone communist.
The difference between Ford and the present day end-time capitalists is that Ford was born and educated in the kingdom of Christ, 19th century America, the New Jerusalem, Revelation 21.
As I said in a recent speech that I gave, if we were a serious nation with a serious media, Mark Webber, not people like Mark Webber, but...
but Mark Weber himself would anchor his own desk on a Sunday morning current affairs news program, which is why I think we're so grateful.
I'm so grateful to feature him on this program so often, going back 19 years.
It's never been a wasted minute when Mark's on the show, especially when you're talking about issues this important.
And as we said in the opening segment of this hour, February 24th of last year, that's the day that this war kicked off as it currently exists.
And Mark was on with us not more than 48 hours later.
And if you go back and you listen to that interview, he lays out the who, what, where, when, and why, names the names and the issues and the things that you need to understand to understand what is happening over in that part of the world.
And it did hold up well.
Now, I want to quickly recap a couple of the things you said, Mark, in the first segment and as we continued this conversation.
So you mentioned the nonsense voiced in the media over here in the United States and in Western Europe.
Putin's crazy.
He's out of control.
He's going to be overthrown.
Russia is going to collapse.
The soldiers won't fight.
And how disingenuous it was that the U.S. support and involvement in Ukraine is because of their care and concern for the people of the Ukraine who have suffered tremendously as a result of America's presence there going back to 2014.
Now, of course, you mentioned this as well.
There was no care and concern for the Ukrainians who were absolutely being butchered by Joseph Stalin.
No.
You know, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland, I guess some invasions are more or less acceptable than others.
I didn't see America going to war against the USSR when they invaded Finland in the early 1940s.
No, they partnered with the communist tyrant and no care for Ukraine then.
So these are all things that need to be mentioned.
And of course, as the U.S., as brave as it is, seemed to be fighting this terrible conflict down to the last Ukrainian.
Your thoughts on all of that, Mark, as the conversation evolves?
Well, yeah, you're making a lot of very good points.
And one of the interesting things is that these points are now being made more and more openly in Europe.
This is a big aspect of all of this because of the relationship between the United States and NATO or Europe, essentially, especially Germany, France, Britain, Italy, so on and so forth.
NATO is now this big military alliance.
It's been expanded enormously since the end of the Cold War in contrast to why it was set up originally in the first place to oppose the Soviet Union.
Soviet Union is gone.
And NATO has been enormously expanded to include Poland, the Baltic states, other countries.
But just recently, the president of Croatia made exactly these kinds of points.
The Croatian president, he said, and I'm just going to quote him correctly here.
He said, Washington and NATO are waging a proxy war against Russia with the help of Ukraine.
And he made the point that this idea that the sanctions were going to bring down Russia are crazy.
Sanctions don't work very well anyway in bringing down either the communist regime in Cuba, the Iranian government, and so forth.
The application of these sanctions measures didn't work against those countries, and they're certainly not going to work against a country as vast in resources and so forth as Russia.
And he also made the point, even just following up of that.
He said, Croatia is not going to join in this struggle.
He says Croatia is sympathetic to the Ukrainians, but we're not going to get involved in a major war to try to overthrow Russia or attack Russia.
Just today, Putin gave a speech in which he said, of course, this is from his point of view, he's emphasizing that 80 years after World War II, Russians now face the prospect of facing German tanks in Ukraine.
Now, I'm not getting into World War II, although that's a reference point that people make constantly about not only Ukraine, but about almost every conflict.
Everybody, for his own reasons, is comparing it to World War II.
Russia does it from their point of view.
The United States does it from its point of view.
But the big point is that an overwhelming strong consensus across Europe is they don't want a major war.
And the attitude in Europe by Europeans, especially Poles, Germans, Russians, in Eastern Central Europe, is to avoid at all costs another catastrophic war.
And this is a, I've made this point a number of times.
Americans have a very different attitude, generally speaking, towards war, because America has not suffered the consequences of full-on war the way other people have.
Our wars overwhelmingly, they take place far away from the shores of the United States.
We don't have bombs fall on our country.
We wage our wars, in a sense, by proxy.
It's a little bit like playing like a football game.
Win or lose, life goes on in the United States.
Yeah, it'll raise taxes, it'll cause some disruption, and of course for the poor young men and women who get killed in the war, it's a terrible thing.
But we don't see the, we don't have bombs fall.
We don't have our cities destroyed.
And people in Germany, Poland, Japan, China, Russia, they have a very strong, visceral, collective sense of how horrible the consequences of war are.
And that's the, of course, the people who are now suffering the most in this way are Ukrainians.
Whereas Americans tend to look at war in terms of good guys and bad guys.
The good guys should win, and we're going to win the war, supposedly.
Now, that's breaking down because America's record of war over the past 20, 30, 40 years has been a calamitous one.
We go into Iraq or Afghanistan or other countries, and at the end of it all, lots of people are destroyed, lots of people are killed, huge destruction, and at the end of it, you ask, what was it all for?
You know, I still remember the Vietnam War, and we were told that the leaders of South Vietnam, they're like Winston Churchill, we've got to take a stand.
We can't allow the communists to win.
The irony is today the United States has an alliance with the communist government of Vietnam.
We're on good terms with them.
Our stores have lots of products made in Vietnam and imported to the United States.
But so you ask yourself, well, what was it all for?
In Afghanistan, the United States forces were in Afghanistan for 20 years.
We were told that we had to get rid of the terrible Taliban regime there as part of the global war on terrorism, which was proclaimed by President Bush with great fanfare and great solemnity.
And after 20 years, we're out.
The Taliban is back, and life goes on.
But the people who paid the huge price, of course, for this conflict were the people in Afghanistan.
Americans, they turn their attention again to some new conflict.
And that's the terrible aspect, really, one of the terrible aspects of all of this with the Ukraine war today.
In fact, if anything, the country that's on the verge of collapse is Ukraine.
They don't have the resources, the manpower, to fight a war the way Russia has and can.
And just the other day, the Ukrainian government or leading member, he says that this month Russia is going to launch a major offensive.
We don't know exactly what will take place.
We don't know the validity of the thing.
But Russia has far more resources.
Even neutral observers point out that for every fighter-air sortie that Ukraine can mount, Russia can mount 10.
For every thousand rounds of artillery shells, Russia can launch and deploy six or seven or eight times that number.
There's nowhere, it's just a very bad imbalance of power here.
And unless the United States is willing to fight a full-scale war against Russia, this will not play out well for especially Ukraine.
And everywhere across Europe, especially, there's a great deal of pushback on that.
One of the aspects of this that's very interesting to me is that last year, in February, March, April, May, there was a great deal of talk in America about how NATO, the NATO alliance, is now stronger and more united than ever.
And I said, even back in February of last year, I said this conflict may result in the breakdown of NATO.
Yes, yes.
And at the time, that seemed very hard to believe.
But that is now increasingly the case because there's an enormous conflict in Europe in the world between how Europeans feel about this and how America feels about, at least what American policy right now is.
A recent public opinion poll showed that across the continent, something like 80, 70, depending on the country, people believe that the Russia and Ukraine should be compelled to end this war.
And that's increasingly the mood in Europe and very different than the proclaimed goal of the United States today.
When we come back with the current affairs analyst, author, lecturer, historian, Mark Weber, we're going to pick up right there.
Is NATO as secure as it would tell you it is?
We'll find out.
Your daily Liberty Newswire.
You're listening to Liberty News Radio.
USA News.
I'm Rich Johnson.
Fireworks on the House floor ahead of a vote on stripping Minnesota Democrat Ilan Omar of her spot on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
No one who peddles in anti-Semitic activity, behavior, or language should have any right to serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
New York Republican Gregory Lawler, Republicans won Omar off the panel because of anti-Semitic comments she made four years ago, calling it consistent with Democrats who expelled two Republicans from their assignments in the last Congress.
New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had some strong words about one of those members.
I had a member of the Republican caucus threaten my life, and you all and the Republican caucus rewarded him with one of the most prestigious committee assignments in this Congress.
Ocasio-Cortez referring to Arizona's Paul Gosar, who now sits on the House Oversight Committee.
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I am very pleased at the pace and the amount of thoughtful content Mark Webber has been able to deliver to our listening audience, tuned in across the country and around the world tonight, on truly, I think, probably...
probably the biggest matter of concern for our people globally right now.
I want to take just a quick moment.
And I heard during the bottom of the hour commercial break a minute ago, the news break, I should say, that AOC Alexandria Orquesio-Cortez was huffing and puffing about the supposed threat to her life that Paul Gozer had made.
It just goes to show how much performative theater, how fake everything is.
I watched, I watched the entire, as much as I could anyway, the situation when they were voting in Kevin McCarthy, all of those votes.
I was interested in that, so I was watching it.
Alexandria Cortez was sitting on a stool next to Paul Gozer, laughing, tapping him on the shoulder.
It almost looked like she was flirting with him.
I know this isn't what Mark's ought to talk about, but I heard that a moment ago, her feigning outrage that he had threatened her life and how terrible.
Give me a break.
I mean, it's just we, hey, I'll tell you what's not fake is what we're doing here and the serious work that we're doing here with serious guests.
So it makes me all the more thankful that there are people like Mark Weber out there.
Please do support his work at ihr.org.
Serious and honest.
And I just want to say one more thing.
He made mention of a speech that Putin had given earlier this week.
And I do a lot of work in my office.
And if I'm in my office, I'm probably doing one of two things.
I'm either listening to 50s and 60s pop music or watching historical documentaries.
I am enthralled by dates and historical caveats, also maps.
If you put me in front of a world map on a wall, I would be transfixed.
I am.
I have been transfixed for hours.
I love looking at maps.
I love watching these documentaries.
And I was born on June 22nd, which was the, not in the same year, of course, that Operation Barbarossa was launched, but on the same day, nevertheless.
And I believe what Putin was talking about was the capitulation of the German 6th Army, which happened 80 years ago this week.
So that is what we're talking about, what Mark was talking about, rather.
They don't want another war like that.
You know, Americans never seen a Stalingrad, believe me.
And this is what we were talking about, though, before the break.
With regards to NATO, Mark, NATO, the party line with NATO is it's never been stronger, never been more united.
But you were talking about, making the excellent point, about Europeans are very wary about another conflagration on their soil.
And you're saying that across Europe, especially in Germany, people understand that this may not be a beneficial arrangement that NATO has worked out for Europe, and they're beginning to think about it a little differently.
Right.
Well, because across Europe, and particularly the more east one goes, there's a strong consensus that whether one likes the government in Moscow or not, whatever the regime is in Russia, Europeans have to live with Russia.
Russia isn't some little country halfway around the world, halfway around the globe.
Russia is a country of 200s plus million people with enormous resources.
And overwhelmingly, the economies of Russia and of Germany and Central Europe complement each other.
There's a long history of very good relations between Russia and Central Europe, regardless of the form of government, the regime or so forth that exists.
For much of Russian history, Russia was an autocracy.
It was basically top-down.
The Tsar ran everything.
He was sovereign.
Western Europe, Central Europe didn't operate that way.
But that should not and did not prevent relations to be good and mutually beneficial for a long time between Russia and other countries.
In fact, America's relations with Russia have been generally until the Cold War period good relations.
It was Russia, I mean, going to the history of the thing like that.
But the big point is Europeans ask then over and over, where's this war in Ukraine going?
What's the end game?
What's the goal here?
The goal in America seems to be we're going to restore the boundaries of Ukraine back to what they were when the Soviet Union broke up, or we're going to have overthrow the terrible Putin in Russia.
Neither of those things are realistic.
The region of Crimea, which Russia took back in 2014, is going to stay part of Russia.
It's unrealistic, completely unrealistic, to think that Crimea is going back to Ukraine.
It was only given to Ukraine, supposedly, given as a gift, supposedly in the 1950s by Khrushchev.
These boundaries made by the Soviet leaders, Khrushchev, Stalin, and Lenin, are not sacrosanct.
And for the American government to act like we've got to fight and kill people to make sure these boundaries are in place, these artificial boundaries, is crazy.
And most everybody in Europe understands that.
But more than that, they ask, well, yeah, where's this going?
At what point will America say, we, okay, the war has now gone the way?
Because the way it is now, it's going to drag on for a long time with enormous destruction, with no clear goal.
And one of the big reasons why there's such pushback is because American leaders tend to put this conflict and other conflicts in terms of these noble-sounding discussions of democracy, of freedom.
Well, those are open-ended things.
You can fight endless wars for that.
Anyway, those are important aspects of all of this.
Another thing that I wanted to discuss with you, and this was brought up with Paul Craig Roberts last week, and we're going to get into that a little bit more in just a moment, but it's the lack, as he called it, the lack, I called it, and he agreed, the lack of the diversity of opinion.
You're calling it the unanimity of opinion about this war.
U.S. political leaders on both parties, for the most part, the mainstream media, of course, apart from people like Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, the Pauls, Ron and Rand, John Mearsheimer, Douglas McGregor, and a handful of others.
There's precious few voices of sanity and prudence out there.
Whatever happened with the robust anti-war and anti-interventionist forces of both the left and the right that one time at least could have had a hearing on something like this.
Oh, did we lose Mark?
Okay, we'll try to reconnect with Mark.
And if we lost him there on a direct connection, we'll try to get him on the phone.
In fact, you may want to just try to go ahead and get him on the if I'm by.
All right.
Let us know when he comes back.
In any event, you can find out more of Mark's readings and writings at ihr.org as we attempt to get him back.
But yes, when we do come back with Mark, we will pick up on the lack of diversity of opinion.
He did also listen to the interview last week with Paul Craig Roberts.
And are you hearing what's being conveyed on this program right now, ladies and gentlemen?
Why are voices like Mark Weber is being shut out from the mainstream political discourse?
He obviously has such a firm handle on the topic.
And his CV more than enough warrants invitations to current affairs shows.
Accomplished historian, a lecturer, current affairs analyst, an author, educated both in the United States and in Europe.
He holds a master's degree in modern European history.
But no, you'll never hear.
You used to.
From time to time, Mark Weber was brought on to some of the biggest shows, even places like Donahue, if you can believe it, to talk about different matters of historical significance and concern.
But, you know, not just Mark Weber, but even people who had careers in government like Paul Craig Roberts.
You're not hearing from people like Mark and from Paul in the mainstream political discussion.
These are the people that need to be heard.
Obviously, these people have a firm handle and an even-handed and objective handle on the situation.
Mark, sorry for the disconnect there, but we have you back now.
The lack of diversity of opinion.
We have about a minute before the break.
Right, right.
And anyway, I'm just trying to caution that just because there's unanimity by our political leaders and by the media, that doesn't mean at all that they're wise.
Because over and over and over, this unanimity has been proven to be wrong, whether it was in the case of Afghanistan or Iraq and so forth.
And the public in America is deceived, lied to by our political leaders to justify the policies that they push.
And only later, usually at the expense of other people, that they have to learn that this is not true.
And that's the sad aspect of it, because we Americans don't pay the biggest price for these calamitous, these fiascos that we've had overseas.
And that's, again, to go back to that point with this in the case of Ukraine.
It's a very disappointing thing that there used to be in America robust, strong voices of caution about intervention in foreign affairs by both people conservative and liberal.
We're not seeing that in America today.
And even though, as you mentioned, people like John Mersheimer have been, their views have been validated by events, they're still ignored and we continue to listen to the same talking heads that were so wrong about Iraq and about other conflicts.
And they're still giving their advice now about what should be done in Ukraine.
One more segment with Mark Weber, the incomparable Mark Weber, IHR.org, right after this.
Stay tuned, everybody.
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Ladies and gentlemen, are you enjoying Mark Webber's most recent appearance on the broadcast?
I'm sure that you are, judging by the feedback we get every time he is on.
And if you want more, Mark Weber, not just ihr.org, also go to our website.
Just browse the archives.
If you want to have a firm knowledge and understanding of what has caused the situation between Russia and Ukraine to evolve into the conflict that we now see and have been watching for the last year, go back to that aforementioned broadcast, February the 26th of last year with Mark Weber.
It is a great primer.
Now, he was back on again in June of last year for another conversation on the topic.
And then a really fun show last October when Mark took us behind the scenes on a personal trip that he took to a two-week tour of Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Croatia.
That was a lot of fun just to listen to him relay his observations.
Well, they're all there, and they're all evergreen in the broadcast archives.
But let's, with one segment remaining, bring our most current conversation with Mark to a close.
Last week, Mark, we made mention a couple of times already that Paul Craig Roberts, now this was the former Secretary of the Treasury, Assistant Secretary, I should say, a university professor, obviously an economist, and much more than that.
He had some pretty interesting observations, and it's definitely a provocative interview that made you think.
And he was talking about the think tanks and how all of this thing is funded.
And that there's a lack of diversity of opinion because they'd be paid to have an opinion.
Your thoughts on a lot of the things that he covered in that interview?
Anything you'd like to agree or disagree with?
Paul Craig made very good points.
I think he's a little too, you might say, mechanistic or cynical about why in America we don't see even the diversity of opinion that we used to.
And the reason for that, I think, a larger reason, is because as America becomes more and more broken down, well, America increasingly doesn't define itself, and even Americans don't define themselves racially, culturally, religiously.
America is increasingly a kind of a country of individuals, and this is encouraged by our leaders.
And so both in domestic policy and foreign policy, leaders of both parties just push this idea of America as, well, we're for democracy.
We're for freedom.
That's an open-ended thing.
It doesn't really, it's almost impossible to say what that means in real terms.
Most countries and America traditionally had a firm sense of its own identity, and then it could carry out policies based on that identity.
Today we don't even have that identity.
Now this might sound theoretical, but the result is we're far more susceptible to whatever the propaganda of the moment is, whatever the enthusiasm of the moment is.
There's no deeper sense, well, what does this mean for us?
What does this mean for the world?
And we're even more inclined to fall victim to just rhetoric about, well, we've got to do this because we're for freedom, democracy, our democracy, and so forth.
In other words, propaganda is even worse than it used to be.
This happens domestically and foreign affairs.
We're constantly told about the dangers of extremism.
Well, extremism is whatever the media tells you it is.
It isn't based, I mean, views today that are considered extremist were considered normal 30, 40 years ago.
There's no, and that's also in foreign affairs, too, because most people don't have any personal understanding of foreign affairs.
So leaders who tell us we've got to be fighting a global war on terror or we've got to be worried about whether women can vote in Afghanistan or not, those kind of slogans carry weight because they sound supposedly they sound good.
That's a big problem.
A country that doesn't have a firm sense of its own identity anchored in reality is much more susceptible to propaganda.
And that's what we're seeing both in domestic policy and in foreign policy.
That's a big problem.
Anyway, my point is that, and also politicians increasingly, they don't have principles because they don't even have clear identity.
They just go along with whatever the enthusiasm of the moment is.
I mean, no sane Congress in America 50 years ago would have ever voted to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
It's crazy, just on the face of it.
Stupid, really.
But the media tells us to do it, so we do it.
You couldn't have imagined 40, 50 years ago, politicians like Nancy Pelosi kneeling down because of Black Lives Matter and it's all in the media, they just go along with these things.
They don't think, is this even dignified, for heaven's sakes, much less what does it really mean?
But this is increasingly what American politicians do.
They go along with the enthusiasm.
I mean, two years ago, we heard over and over, well, it's time to defund the police.
So they did sort of something like that.
The result is a big increase in crime.
People, they don't have a historical sense or a larger sense of these things, so they go along with whatever the media and the Hollywood and mass media tells us we're supposed to be thinking of the moment.
And the public is confused.
And it's no wonder, as a result of all of this, this enormous breakdown of trust in our institutions and our political leaders because they don't even have any consistency.
You know, President Biden, who's always talking about going to Vietnam in Ukraine and supporting the Ukraine war, he was wrong about the Iraq war, but he's never held accountable.
Nobody cares.
They just go on to some new enthusiasm of the moment without any accountability for how wrong or right they were in the past.
It's all based on sort of a free-floating concern about whatever the enthusiasm and the slogans of the moment happen to be.
Well, Mark, you're exactly right in everything you say.
I would make a comment about Americans having the attention span of goldfish, but even for the ones who are aware, it's almost gotten now as though the establishment is taunting us.
What are you going to do about it?
That's a good question.
What can be done about it?
But an even better question I'd like to ask you right now.
First of all, my inner monologue in my mind is asking rhetorically, if that $100 billion that the United States government has sent to the Ukraine could be audited, I wonder what we would find.
That's just that'd be interesting to talk about.
Well, that's another point, too.
You know, the Pentagon just released a study.
$200 billion of Pentagon Department of Defense hardware has just disappeared.
They've had four attempts to audit the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, and four times they failed.
They can't even account for all this.
Billions and billions, I mean, hundreds of billions, what, a trillion, went into Afghanistan.
There was no accountability on that.
That's just increasingly what happens in America.
Nobody is held accountable, and that's a real feature of American-style democracy.
Politics is ever held accountable.
Out of Afghanistan, what did we get except a withdrawal at the beginning of the biology?
I'm making the bigger point that even as the war is going on in Afghanistan, even as we're involved, hundreds of billions of dollars just sort of disappear.
Nobody knows what happens to them.
That's a bigger point, and ultimately, no one's ever held accountable.
Look, after World War II, leaders in Germany and Japan were executed for actions and policies that our American leaders have carried out.
I'm thinking particularly of George Bush in the Iraq war, which had far less justification.
Anyway, no justification.
He was lying to the public.
His administration was lying to the public.
Nothing happens.
He still gives his talks and he does his things, and he's still an American president.
We just have to give him certain respect and honor.
Well, there's no accountability for this thing.
You could say the same thing about Barack Obama, and I could bring up policies of his.
But that's one of the features of American democracy is that none of these politicians, nobody's ever held accountable, even when they're terribly wrong with horrible consequences for America and the world.
Mark, we have about three minutes left.
An hour with you always goes by fast.
I want to remind people one more time about ihr.org.
Now, when you're there, take a look at the top right-hand corner.
I'm there right now.
We love listening to Mark.
If you want more Mark Weber in the spoken sense, he is now doing a weekly roundup, a podcast with a stream with Frodie Midjord, and it is absolutely fantastic, as you would imagine.
So be sure to check that out.
That's relatively new.
It started last year.
But be sure to check that out.
Frodie, obviously, one of the great spokesmen for our people over in Scandinavia, and then Mark, and you put those two together, and what do you got?
Check it out at iHR.org.
Mark, with about a minute left, the likely outcome, hard to predict, is NATO going to be left standing or Russia?
A couple of things.
I mean, first of all, there's going to be more and more fatigue in America about the Ukraine war as it drags on with no clear outcome.
And that will be not only in America, but also in Europe.
And ever more loudly, you'll hear voices in Europe saying, we've got to bring this thing to a conclusion.
There's got to be some end, even if it's not ideally what any of us would like.
That's going to increase.
And the tension between Washington and New York on the one hand and Europe on the other, that will increase.
We're coming into a new world, really.
A world in which more and more, obviously, the post-war era, dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, but also by the United States, that's coming to an end.
And also, increasingly, we're going to see problems here in this country because America's ability to lecture the world on how it should behave is less and less effective given how unable we are to get our own house in order.
We have so many problems, such discord here in this country that increasingly the world isn't interested in hearing the United States lecture them about how their countries and how the rest of the world ought to be.
So anyway, this is a larger trend.
Now, specifically about the Ukraine war, I think it will end and should end with some sort of compromise.
There'll be something about in eastern Ukraine, some special arrangement.
Maybe parts of it will go to Russia.
Crimea will go to Russia.
And ultimately, it has to be that Ukraine is accepted as, I think, a neutral non-NATO country.
That's, in other words, what Russia demanded basically at the time.
In the first place.
And for good reason.
And we covered all of that in that interview that we've mentioned several times now, about a year ago.
Thank you again, Mark Weber, for your expertise and your deft ability to convey sensible thoughts on a very important topic.
Paul Roberts was saying last week, should have gone for the kill early.
You're saying, very interestingly, I think, that by dragging this thing out, it gives time for public opinion to shift.