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top of the heap to third world status in one generation

Gry

Gry

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Veteran
An interview between the gentleman Oliver Stone
selected as a writer on JFK Revisited, and Dave Emory.
Hope you will find some of what is said to be educational,
informative, or useful. I post this, as it offers
insight, and perspective that is seldom available.

"I would submit that our democracy had it brain's blown all over the back of a limousine in Dallas Texas on November 22 1963"
Dave Emory Spitfirelist.com

Interview #1 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1031.mp3


Interview #2 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1032.mp3


Interview #3 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1033.mp3


Interview #4 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1034.mp3


Interview #5 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1035.mp3


Interview #6 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1036.mp3


Interview #7 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1037.mp3


Interview #8 with Jim DiEugenio About “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1038.mp3


Interview #9 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1040.mp3


Interview #10 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1041.mp3


Interview #11 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1042.mp3


Interview #12 with Jim DiEugenio About Destiny Betrayed
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1043.mp3


Interview #13 with Jim DiEugenio About “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1044.mp3


Interview #14 with Jim DiEugenio About “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1045.mp3


Interview #15 with Jim DiEugenio About “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1046.mp3


Interview #15 with Jim DiEugenio About “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1046.mp3


Interview #16 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1047.mp3


Interview #17 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1048.mp3


Interview #18 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1049.mp3


Interview #19 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1050.mp3


Interview #20 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1051.mp3


Interview #21 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1052.mp3


Interview #22 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1053.mp3


Interviews #23 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1054.mp3


Interviews #24 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1055.mp3


Interviews #25 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”
https://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/1000_1099/f-1056.mp3
 
Gry

Gry

Well-known member
Veteran
Scholars’ Circle – Ukraine invaded on orders from President Putin of Russia – February 27, 2022

Russia attacked Ukraine this week. What does this mean for the region and the world? What are the international reactions to this invasion? What should be the international response?
https://www.scholarscircle.org/wp-content/uploads/interviews/scholarscircleinsighters_20220226.mp3 [ dur: 58mins. ]
 
Gry

Gry

Well-known member
Veteran
“Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that don't have brains enough to be honest.”
― Benjamin Franklin

Always found Franklin to be one of my favorites. The man did and gave us so much.

Find it sad that many of out current republican brethern do not seem to have the same sense of appreciation for his legacy. We see frequent and repeated republican attacks on the Post Office, and on Library's.

Would like to thank and credit Tudo for having brought this quote to my attention.
 
Gry

Gry

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Want Teenagers to Read Important Books? Ban Them.

https://www.laprogressive.com/getting-teenagers-excited-to-read/

When I was a young teenager near the middle of the last century, I asked the high school librarian if I could borrow J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Why did I want to read it? she asked. I lied and told her my parents told me it was excellent literature.

The real reason I wanted to read The Catcher in the Rye was it had been banned from the library. I knew the librarian kept one copy behind her desk, and I was determined to get it. She reluctantly handed it to me. I read it voraciously.

There’s no better way to get a teenager to read a book than to ban it.

Which is why it was so clever of the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board to vote to remove Maus from its eighth grade curriculum. Maus is a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that conveys the horrors of the Holocaust in cartoon form. The board cited “objectionable language” and nudity.

Before the board made its decision, teenagers in McMinn County probably weren’t particularly eager to read about the Holocaust, even in the form of a graphic novel. But now that Maus has been banned for objectionable language and nudity, I bet they’re wildly trading whatever threadbare copies they can get their hands on.
Since it was banned, half the teenagers in America seem to have bought Maus (or insisted their parents do). Two weeks ago, the book wasn’t even in the top 1,000 of Amazon’s bestseller list. Now it’s hovering around number 1.

Way to go, McMinn County school board! Get teenagers all over America excited to read about the Holocaust!

Even the McMinn County school board has been outdone by the Matanuska-Susitna school board in Palmer, Alaska, which presumably had a more serious problem on its hands than getting teenagers excited to read about the Holocaust. It couldn’t even get them to read the great novels of American literature.

So the Matanuska-Susitna school board voted 5 to 2 to ban Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Brilliant! I bet nearly every teenager in Palmer, Alaska is now deep into these books. They’re probably having intense discussions about them online late at night, away from their parents and other snooping adults. “Why do you think Ellison called himself ‘invisible?’” “How did Angelou come up with those amazing metaphors?” “Why did Daisy Buchanan reject Jay Gatsby?” “Wait! Gotta go! My parents are right outside my room! Call back in 20 minutes!”

The Great Gatsby was required reading when I went to high school. I admit I never read it. Had it been banned, I probably would have devoured it.

Beginning last fall, at least 16 school districts in a half-dozen states have demanded school libraries ban Out of Darkness. It’s a young adult novel about a love affair between two teenagers, a Mexican American girl and Black boy, set against the backdrop of the 1937 natural gas explosion at a New London, Texas plant that claimed nearly 300 lives. The book received lots of favorable reviews and literary rewards, but only a handful of teenagers read before it was banned. Now, it’s hot.

It’s the cleverest marketing strategy I’ve ever seen. Publishers must be clamoring to have school districts ban their books. (Why haven’t my books been banned, dammit?


An influential group called “No Left Turn” is partly responsible. Just take a look at their website of books “used to spread radical and racist ideologies to students.” (Here’s the link) You can bet teenagers across America are now lining up to read them.

Robert Reich
 
Gry

Gry

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Posted as Socialist propaganda :

Oppose the US-NATO drive to war with Russia in Ukraine!

Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International

14 February 2022
1. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site unequivocally oppose the reckless drive of Washington and its NATO allies to instigate a war with Russia, using the fraudulent claim of an imminent invasion of Ukraine as a pretext. The Biden administration has concocted a transparently absurd “the Russians are coming” narrative that is devoid of credible facts and defies all political logic.
2. The claims of imminent war come exclusively from the United States and NATO. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made no statement that even hints that these are his intentions. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denies that a Russian invasion is “imminent” and has repeatedly urged the US and NATO to stop inciting panic.
3. The US government’s mind-numbing propaganda is dished out to the public by a spineless media whose brainless talking heads ask no questions and present as absolute truth the daily scripts prepared for them by the US military and intelligence agencies. The “weapons of mass destruction” lie that justified the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq has been forgotten. Not a single critical question or voice of anti-war opposition is allowed access to the mass media. Mere allegations are presented as proof of what is alleged. As one Biden administration spokesman declared at a recent press briefing, a government statement does not require corroborating evidence. The statement is, by itself, sufficient evidence because it has been made by the government.

4. According to the CIA-scripted media fairytale, peace-loving America and NATO are reacting to the sudden threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the escalating confrontation is the outcome of months of intense preparations by the United States and NATO. Within the last eight months, Washington deployed 10,000 US troops to its base in Alexandropoulis in Greece, conducted DEFENDER-Europe 21 in preparation for combat in the Balkan and Black Sea regions, and held the largest Sea Breeze operation ever conducted in the Black Sea.

5. As with all US and NATO wars, the conflict over Ukraine is being readied with hypocritical posturing. In this case, the Russian annexation of Crimea and its support of separatist forces in eastern Ukraine—both of which developed in response to the 2014 regime-change putsch organized by the United States and Germany—are presented as gross violations of Ukrainian sovereignty.

6. The US and NATO proclaim the sanctity of state borders. But their professed devotion to this principle flies in the face of their repeated violation and rearrangement of state borders during the past 30 years. The United States and NATO had no respect for self-determination in Yugoslavia, which was destroyed in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The recognition of Croatian independence by the US and Germany set the stage for a decade of ethnic conflict that cost tens of thousands of lives. In 1999, the US-led NATO coalition bombed Serbia for 78 consecutive days in support of the secession of Kosovo province, whose independence was established under the control of a government consisting of drug lords.

7. The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and overthrew its government. This was followed in March 2003 with an even more flagrant violation of international law: The invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of its government. During the bloody US occupation of Iraq, Antony Blinken, now secretary of state, proposed a tripartite division of the country. Similar plans were drawn up for Libya for the US-NATO assault in 2011, which resulted in the overthrow of its government and the murder of its president—a bloody crime that was greeted by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as an occasion for jokes and laughter. This intervention was followed by the US bombing of Syria, which continues to this day.

8. Washington’s professed concern for Ukrainian democracy is no less deceitful and hypocritical than its devotion to Ukrainian self-determination. The government in Kiev, which derives its existence from the US-backed overthrow of an elected government, rules on behalf of an oligarchic kleptocracy responsible for suppressing the Ukrainian working class. The social forces on which Zelensky relies, including various paramilitary organizations and far-right groupings, bear the historical stench of fascism.

Blah blah blah , not a comment about the other locations Putin has taken in the past few months.

There is a great deal more of this content, as I look over it, I find my self amazed at how very similar it does sound to the claims of the supporters of the most spoiled man on earth, our former president.

This content is not even two weeks old. Some claims hold water, some don't: The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site unequivocally oppose the reckless drive of Washington and its NATO allies to instigate a war with Russia, using the fraudulent claim of an imminent invasion of Ukraine as a pretext. The Biden administration has concocted a transparently absurd “the Russians are coming” narrative that is devoid of credible facts and defies all political logic.


https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/202.../pers-f14.html
 
Gry

Gry

Well-known member
Veteran
Millionaire· Slaid Cleaves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX1uKxngj-8



Millionaire
David Olney

I started out with one lone dollar
gambled with a man and I won me another
bought me a gun and I robbed my brother
I'm bad but I don't care boys
gonna be a millionaire

I hopped on a ship and I sailed on the waves
dealt in rum and I dealt in slaves
Left my captain in a watery grave
I'm bad but I don't care boys,
gonna be a millionaire

Chorus:
How many of you want to see me dead
How many of you want to have my head
how many of you just live your lives
wishing you were me, boys
wishing you were me

I married rich a pretty little wife
brought her misery ev'ry day of her life
she slit her wrist with a silver knife
but you can't blame that on me boys
the money belongs to me

I found myself in a good position
to buy myself a cheap politician
bought myself a big election
that's just how it went boys
now I own a president

Chorus

When you say your prayers down on your knees
ask the Lord to forgive you please
if it crosses your mind say one for me
cause I know where I'm bound boys
I know where I'm bound

Repeat First Verse
 
Gry

Gry

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Thom Hartmann reveals how Big Brother is watching you

Syndicated talk show host and bestselling author Thom Hartmann returns with a new book, “The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy.” Hartmann shows how “the goal of those who violate privacy and use surveillance is almost always social control and behavior modification.” Multiple examples reveal how government and corporations track online activity and use that data to gain political power and profits.

Hartmann spoke with The Seattle Times ahead of an upcoming Town Hall Seattle event supporting his book slated for March 10.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You write that trust-based governments require high transparency, accountability and engaged citizens. Isn’t education also necessary?

Yes, absolutely education is essential. Specifically, civics education explains how government works and how citizens can interact with it. For example, Finland teaches its youth media literacy to help them become citizens to question the material they receive through the media intelligently. Our country needs to do the same thing.

How was the Patriot Act that passed in the wake of 9/11 used to persuade citizens to forfeit privacy?

For many years, right-wingers wanted to pass intrusive Big Brother laws, but they met resistance from other right-wingers who feared the government spying on them. The 9/11 attack so magnified the perception of a threat from radical Islamism that the loss of personal freedom wasn’t as significant. We now have a vast police agency that is difficult to oppose now that it is established as the new normal. It’s the same model that authoritarian strongman states use.

When corporations secretly gather data on consumer spending habits, are they working against the American free-enterprise system?

Businesses used to dominate markets through geography, brand or low prices, but now the use of data allows for noncompetitive dominance, which cripples the market economy. Industries in health care, airlines and internet service providers are all controlled by monopolies. It is anti-capitalism at its worse, being more of a real threat than communism.

Describe how conspicuous surveillance of people modifies their behavior and results in social cooling, which can destroy our democracy.

Social cooling, coined by Tijmen Schep, is behaviorism 101. When people are aware of being watched, they change their behavior. But, unfortunately, it’s the reverse of how government should be accountable to its citizens.

Security researchers say a foreign cyberattack could knock out our country’s power grid. Yet Republicans blocked President Obama’s requirement that businesses harden their cybercapabilities to protect “essential infrastructures.” What was their logic?

Their excuse that “we shouldn’t impose more rules on business.” It wasn’t ideological; it was politics. They openly wanted to sabotage Barack Obama, our first Black president. Businesses violate and endanger our country’s national security interests by not protecting their cybernetwork that provides critical domestic services. Cyberwar is now the preferred weapon over nuclear weapons.

Can you explain why President Trump fired his cybersecurity coordinator when Russia was hacking our computer network?

I believe he was in the pocket of oligarchs. And, it’s not just Russian oligarchs Trump has been doing business with for years. It’s creditable that Trump had allowed them to use his real estate empire to launder their illegal money. Real estate is one of the known best ways to do that. Trump eliminating the U.S. cybersecurity coordinator cripples the most aggressive nation fighting international money laundering.

Google co-founder Eric Schmidt said that the No. 1 threat from cyberattacks is distributing disinformation because it is low cost and high value. Is there evidence that those attacks have begun?

Of course, the 2016 election with evidence of all the trolls that Mueller found. However, that is low-hanging fruit. Another more visible instance demonstrates the power of disinformation to wreak havoc. One Sunday in the autumn of 2020, small towns across the country, like Klamath Falls, Oregon, saw people gathering in their downtowns with shovels, axes and shotguns. They were convinced that buses rented by George Soros were on their way filled with Black antifa rioters to pillage their towns.

China has developed and uses a social credit score for each person, restricting their access to services and travel. Could the use of facial recognition technology lead the U.S. down that road?

Easily, the technology is in place right now. Although at this time, our government is not exerting social control like China. We use it for police activities to find criminals, not to enforce political conformity like we see throughout the Mideast or in places like Singapore.

What is the public interest in limiting social media giants like YouTube and Facebook from applying algorithms to direct users to websites that promote disinformation?

If your business model is based on damaging the U.S., like promoting disinformation, then you have no business being in business. There need to be restrictions on how far companies can go using algorithms. As a first step, we must at least make them transparent because transparency is the mother of democracy.

How does the government get around laws that forbid it from spying on U.S. residents?

A nongovernment entity can get around the laws that government must meet. For instance, The New York Times recently reported how billionaire CIA contractor Eric Prince created a private spy company, employed by Trumper politicians to do surveillance on democrats, unfriendly republicans and political activists to damage them. And the government directly hires companies to do things it cannot legally pursue. For example, half of the Pentagon’s operations and intelligence budget now goes to private corporations.

https://www.seattletimes.com/entert...g+02-27-22_2_27_2022&utm_term=Registered User
 
armedoldhippy

armedoldhippy

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the excuse that they are only using it to find criminals is criminal itself. experts in the field say facial recognition programs mis-identify most dark skin humans. do they "really" all look alike?🙄 at this moment, Tennessee is having serious problems with a license plate reading system because the new plates they are issuing are dark blue. they are going to have to issue new lighter plates or give up that invasive little "toy". now taking bets on which way they jump...
 
armedoldhippy

armedoldhippy

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Gry said:
“Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that don't have brains enough to be honest.”
― Benjamin Franklin
We see frequent and repeated republican attacks on the Post Office, and on Library's.
Click to expand...
the former makes it easier to vote, and the latter educates the citizens & exposes them to new ideas. the GOP despises both of those concepts to it's very core now.
 
Three Berries

Three Berries

Active member
Voting should not be easy. It should be consider a sacred right. The whole they're too stupid to get an ID is total BS and really marginalizes the ones fraudsters proclaim to protect. All it does is give a vast reserve of votes to manipulate. How many minority votes get changed? Do Dems in their Dem cities really like what's going on enough to maintain the Dem leaderships?

One vote per citizen, on the same day and on paper.
 
Microbeman

Microbeman

The Logical Gardener
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Three Berries said:
Voting should not be easy. It should be consider a sacred right. The whole they're too stupid to get an ID is total BS and really marginalizes the ones fraudsters proclaim to protect. All it does is give a vast reserve of votes to manipulate. How many minority votes get changed? Do Dems in their Dem cities really like what's going on enough to maintain the Dem leaderships?

One vote per citizen, on the same day and on paper.
Click to expand...

So military cannot vote then? Those people in other countries and shut-ins must be allowed to vote by mail.
I think ID is a good thing but it must be standardized. Not; a gun license okay but not a student ID etc. There also needs to be a way to get ID without a certified birth certificate. In many regions, this is not possible or very expensive. I do not agree with the one day thing. It should be open over several days. Why treat people like cattle at the slaughterhouse?
 
Cannavore

Cannavore

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Three Berries said:
Voting should not be easy. It should be consider a sacred right. The whole they're too stupid to get an ID is total BS and really marginalizes the ones fraudsters proclaim to protect. All it does is give a vast reserve of votes to manipulate. How many minority votes get changed? Do Dems in their Dem cities really like what's going on enough to maintain the Dem leaderships?

One vote per citizen, on the same day and on paper.
Click to expand...

troglodyte opinion
 
armedoldhippy

armedoldhippy

Well-known member
Veteran
Cannavore said:
troglodyte opinion
Click to expand...

quit going easy on him. you should be ashamed, insulting troglodytes like that, lol...we'll leave out that many minorities don't own cars and/or have suspended licenses from over-policing, many work low-paid menial jobs, and can't get off (or can't AFFORD to be off) to vote on a certain day. plus, the GOP consistently balks at making election day a national holiday so people CAN go vote. having everyone eligible to vote actually voting is sure as hell NOT what the GOP wants to have happen... true, it SHOULD be a sacred right. why does the GOP work so hard at denying folks the opportunity to use that "sacred right" ? anyone?
 
Three Berries

Three Berries

Active member
Microbeman said:
So military cannot vote then? Those people in other countries and shut-ins must be allowed to vote by mail.
I think ID is a good thing but it must be standardized. Not; a gun license okay but not a student ID etc. There also needs to be a way to get ID without a certified birth certificate. In many regions, this is not possible or very expensive. I do not agree with the one day thing. It should be open over several days. Why treat people like cattle at the slaughterhouse?
Click to expand...

There would be mail in for military or approved excuses. One day and they cannot manipulate the data.

You should make the effort to vote. If you will be absentee then an absentee ballot. But it must be returned by voting day.
 
Three Berries

Three Berries

Active member
You fuks got nothing but insults. Gonna be a hard time ahead as insults don't do much but make you look stupid. But we need stupid people in the world.
 
Gry

Gry

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‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes


Putin is trying to take down the entire world order, the veteran Russia watcher said in an interview. But there are ways even ordinary Americans can fight back.

For many people, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has felt like a series of “He can’t be doing this” moments. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has launched the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. It is, quite literally, mind-boggling.

That’s why I reached out to Fiona Hill, one of America’s most clear-eyed Russia experts, someone who has studied Putin for decades, worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations and has a reputation for truth-telling, earned when she testified during impeachment hearings for her former boss, President Donald Trump.

I wanted to know what she’s been thinking as she’s watched the extraordinary footage of Russian tanks rolling across international borders, what she thinks Putin has in mind and what insights she can offer into his motivations and objectives.

Hill spent many years studying history, and in our conversation, she repeatedly traced how long arcs and trends of European history are converging on Ukraine right now. We are already, she said, in the middle of a third World War, whether we’ve fully grasped it or not.

“Sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again,” Hill told me. Those old historical patterns include Western businesses who fail to see how they help build a tyrant’s war chest, admirers enamored of an autocrat’s “strength” and politicians’ tendency to point fingers inward for political gain instead of working together for their nation’s security.

But at the same time, Hill says it’s not too late to turn Putin back, and it’s a job not just for the Ukrainians or for NATO — it’s a job that ordinary Westerners and companies can assist in important ways once they grasp what’s at stake.

“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”

There’s lots of danger ahead, she warned. Putin is increasingly operating emotionally and likely to use all the weapons at his disposal, including nuclear ones. It’s important not to have any illusions — but equally important not to lose hope.
“Every time you think, ’No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would,” Hill said. “And he wants us to know that, of course. It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared…. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.”

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Maura Reynolds: You’ve been a Putin watcher for a long time, and you’ve written one of the best biographies of Putin. When you’ve been watching him over the past week, what have you been seeing that other people might be missing?

Fiona Hill: Putin is usually more cynical and calculated than he came across in his most recent speeches. There’s evident visceral emotion in things that he said in the past few weeks justifying the war in Ukraine. The pretext is completely flimsy and almost nonsensical for anybody who’s not in the echo chamber or the bubble of propaganda in Russia itself. I mean, demanding to the Ukrainian military that they essentially overthrow their own government or lay down their arms and surrender because they are being commanded by a bunch of drug-addled Nazi fascists? There’s just no sense to that. It beggars the imagination.
“Every time you think, ‘No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.”​

Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”

This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin. He spotlighted this during the performance of the National Security Council meeting, where it became very clear that this was his decision. He was in a way taking full responsibility for war, and even the heads of his security and intelligence services looked like they’ve been thrown off guard by how fast things were moving.

Reynolds: So Putin is being driven by emotion right now, not by some kind of logical plan?

Hill: I think there’s been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007 when he put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. And then within a year in 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture.

Back then I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO Open Door declaration. One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive Russian military action, not just confined to the annexation of Crimea, but some much larger action taken against Ukraine along with Georgia. And of course, four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership. But we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this potential outcome and our relations with Russia.

Reynolds: Do you think Putin’s current goal is reconstituting the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, or something different?

Hill: It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.

Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.

I’ve kind of quipped about this but I also worry about it in all seriousness — that Putin’s been down in the archives of the Kremlin during Covid looking through old maps and treaties and all the different borders that Russia has had over the centuries. He’s said, repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times. And in his speeches, he’s gone after various former Russian and Soviet leaders, he’s gone after Lenin and he’s gone after the communists, because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into the fold again like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin’s view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.

Reynolds: Dominance in what way?

Hill: It doesn’t mean that he’s going to annex all of them and make them part of the Russian Federation like they’ve done with Crimea. You can establish dominance by marginalizing regional countries, by making sure that their leaders are completely dependent on Moscow, either by Moscow practically appointing them through rigged elections or ensuring they are tethered to Russian economic and political and security networks. You can see this now across the former Soviet space.

We’ve seen pressure being put on Kazakhstan to reorient itself back toward Russia, instead of balancing between Russia and China, and the West. And just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act, Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.

But amid all this, Ukraine was the country that got away. And what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.” He’s basically told us that. He might leave behind some rump statelets. When we look at old maps of Europe — probably the maps he’s been looking at — you find all kinds of strange entities, like the Sanjak of Novi Pazar in the Balkans. I used to think, what the hell is that? These are all little places that have dependency on a bigger power and were created to prevent the formation of larger viable states in contested regions. Basically, if Vladimir Putin has his way, Ukraine is not going to exist as the modern-day Ukraine of the last 30 years.

Reynolds: How far into Ukraine do you think Putin is going to go?

Hill: At this juncture, if he can, he’s going to go all the way. Before this last week, he had multiple different options to choose from. He’d given himself the option of being able to go in in full force as he’s doing now, but he could also have focused on retaking the rest of the administrative territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. He could have seized the Sea of Azov, which he’s probably going to do anyway, and then joined up the Donetsk and Luhansk regions with Crimea as well as the lands in between and all the way down to Odessa. In fact, Putin initially tried this in 2014 — to create “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” but that failed when local support for joining Russia didn’t materialize.

Now, if he can, he is going to take the whole country. We have to face up to this fact. Although we haven’t seen the full Russian invasion force deployed yet, he’s certainly got the troops to move into the whole country.

Reynolds: You say he has an adequate number of troops to move in, but does he have enough to occupy the whole country?

Hill: If there is serious resistance, he may not have sufficient force to take the country for a protracted period. It also may be that he doesn’t want to occupy the whole country, that he wants to break it up, maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it as rump statelets or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying that I know exactly what’s going on in his head. And he may even suggest other parts of Ukraine get absorbed by adjacent countries.

In 2015, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was at the Munich Security Conference after the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. And he talked about Ukraine not being a country, saying pointedly that there are many minority groups in Ukraine — there are Poles and there are Romanians, there are Hungarians and Russians. And he goes on essentially almost inviting the rest of Europe to divide Ukraine up.

So what Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but really to divide it up. He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other places where there’s a division of the country between the officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces on the other. That’s something that Putin could definitely live with — a fractured, shattered Ukraine with different bits being in different statuses.

Reynolds: So step by step, in ways that we haven’t always appreciated in the West, Putin has brought back a lot of these countries that were independent after the Soviet collapse back under his umbrella. The only country that has so far evaded Putin’s grip has been Ukraine.

Hill: Ukraine, correct. Because it’s bigger and because of its strategic location. That’s what Russia wants to ensure, or Putin wants to ensure, that Ukraine like the other countries, has no other option than subjugation to Russia.

Reynolds: How much of what we’re seeing now is tied to Putin’s own electoral schedule? He seized Crimea in 2014, and that helped to boost his ratings and ensure his future reelection. He’s got another election coming up in 2024. Is any of this tied to that?

Hill: I think it is. In 2020, Putin had the Russian Constitution amended so that he could stay on until 2036, another set of two six-year terms. He’s going to be 84 then. But in 2024, he has to re-legitimate himself by standing for election. The only real contender might have been Alexei Navalny, and they’ve put him in a penal colony. Putin has rolled up all the potential opposition and resistance, so one would think it would be a cakewalk for him in 2024. But the way it works with Russian elections, he actually has to put on a convincing show that demonstrates that he’s immensely popular and he’s got the affirmation of all the population.

Behind the scenes it’s fairly clear that there’s a lot of apathy in the system, that many people support Putin because there’s no one else. People who don’t support him at all will probably not turn out to vote. The last time that his brand got stale, it was before the annexation of Crimea. That put him back on the top of the charts in terms of his ratings.

It may not just be the presidential calendar, the electoral calendar. He’s going to be 70 in October. And 70 you know, in the larger scheme of things, is not that old. There are plenty of politicians out there that are way over 70.

Reynolds: But it’s old for Russians.

Hill: It’s old for Russians. And Putin’s not looking so great, he’s been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about having back issues. Even if it’s not something worse than that, it could be that he’s taking high doses of steroids, or there may be something else. There seems to be an urgency for this that may be also driven by personal factors.

He may have a sense that time is marching on — it’s 22 years, after all, and the likelihood after that kind of time of a Russian leader leaving voluntarily or through elections is pretty slim. Most leaders leave either like Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko thought that he might leave, as the result of massive protests, or they die in office.
The only other person who has been Russian leader in modern times longer than Putin is Stalin, and Stalin died in office.

Reynolds: Putin came to power after a series of operations that many have seen as a kind of false flag — bombings of buildings around Russia that killed Russian citizens, hundreds of them, followed by a war in Chechnya. That led to Putin coming to power as a wartime president. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 also came at a difficult time for Putin. Now we’re seeing another big military operation less than two years before he needs to stand for election again. Am I wrong to see that pattern?

Hill: No, I don’t think you are. There’s definitely a pattern here. Part of Putin’s persona as president is that he is a ruthless tough guy, the strong man who is the champion and protector of Russia. And that’s why Russia needs him. If all was peaceful and quiet, why would you need Vladimir Putin? If you think of other wartime leaders — Winston Churchill comes to mind — in peacetime, Winston Churchill got voted out of office.

Reynolds: Speaking of Chechnya, I have been thinking that this is the largest ground military operation that Russia has fought since Chechnya. What did we learn about the Russian military then that’s relevant now?

Hill: It’s very important, that you bring this point up because people are saying Ukraine is the largest military operation in Europe since World War II. The first largest military action in Europe since World War II was actually in Chechnya, because Chechnya is part of Russia. This was a devastating conflict that dragged on for years, with two rounds of war after a brief truce, and tens of thousands of military and civilian casualties. The regional capital of Grozny was leveled. The casualties were predominantly ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. The Chechens fought back, and this became a military debacle on Russia’s own soil. Analysts called it “the nadir of the Russian army.” After NATO’s intervention in the Balkan wars in the same timeframe in the 1990s, Moscow even worried that NATO might intervene.

Reynolds: What have we learned about NATO in the last two months?

Hill: In many respects, not good things, initially. Although now we see a significant rallying of the political and diplomatic forces, serious consultations and a spur to action in response to bolster NATO’s military defenses.

But we also need to think about it this way. We have had a long-term policy failure going back to the end of the Cold War in terms of thinking about how to manage NATO’s relations with Russia to minimize risk. NATO is a like a massive insurer, a protector of national security for Europe and the United States. After the end of the Cold War, we still thought that we had the best insurance for the hazards we could face — flood, fire etc. — but for a discounted premium. We didn’t take adequate steps to address and reduce the various risks. We can now see that that we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s negative response to successive expansions. Think about Swiss Re or AIG or Lloyds of London — when the hazard was massive, like during Hurricane Katrina or the global financial crisis in 2008, those insurance companies got into major trouble. They and their clients found themselves underwater. And this is kind of what NATO members are learning now.

Reynolds: And then there’s the nuclear element. Many people have thought that we’d never see a large ground war in Europe or a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, because it could quickly escalate into a nuclear conflict. How close are we getting to that?

Hill: Well, we’re right there. Basically, what President Putin has said quite explicitly in recent days is that if anybody interferes in Ukraine, they will be met with a response that they’ve “never had in [their] history.” And he has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. So he’s making it very clear that nuclear is on the table.

Putin tried to warn Trump about this, but I don’t think Trump figured out what he was saying. In one of the last meetings between Putin and Trump when I was there, Putin was making the point that: “Well you know, Donald, we have these hypersonic missiles.” And Trump was saying, “Well, we will get them too.” Putin was saying, “Well, yes, you will get them eventually, but we’ve got them first.” There was a menace in this exchange. Putin was putting us on notice that if push came to shove in some confrontational environment that the nuclear option would be on the table.


Reynolds: Do you really think he’ll use a nuclear weapon?

Hill: The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.
The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.
So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.
It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared. That’s exactly what he wants us to be. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.

Reynolds: So how do we deal with it? Are sanctions enough?

Hill: Well, we can’t just deal with it as the United States on our own. First of all, this has to be an international response.

Reynolds: Larger than NATO?

Hill: It has to be larger than NATO. Now I’m not saying that that means an international military response that’s larger than NATO, but the push back has to be international.
We first have to think about what Vladimir Putin has done and the nature of what we’re facing. People don’t want to talk about Adolf Hitler and World War II, but I’m going to talk about it. Obviously the major element when you talk about World War II, which is overwhelming, is the Holocaust and the absolute decimation of the Jewish population of Europe, as well as the Roma-Sinti people.
But let’s focus here on the territorial expansionism of Germany, what Germany did under Hitler in that period: seizure of the Sudetenland and the Anschluss or annexation of Austria, all on the basis that they were German speakers. The invasion of Poland. The treaty with the Soviet Union, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, that also enabled the Soviet Union to take portions of Poland but then became a prelude to Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Invasions of France and all of the countries surrounding Germany, including Denmark and further afield to Norway. Germany eventually engaged in a burst of massive territorial expansion and occupation. Eventually the Soviet Union fought back. Vladimir Putin’s own family suffered during the siege of Leningrad, and yet here is Vladimir Putin doing exactly the same thing.

Reynolds: So, similar to Hitler, he’s using a sense of massive historical grievance combined with a veneer of protecting Russians and a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have independent countries in order to fuel territorial ambitions?

Hill: Correct. And he’s blaming others, for why this has happened, and getting us to blame ourselves.
If people look back to the history of World War II, there were an awful lot of people around Europe who became Nazi German sympathizers before the invasion of Poland. In the United Kingdom, there was a whole host of British politicians who admired Hitler’s strength and his power, for doing what Great Powers do, before the horrors of the Blitz and the Holocaust finally penetrated.

Reynolds: And you see this now.

Hill: You totally see it. Unfortunately, we have politicians and public figures in the United States and around Europe who have embraced the idea that Russia was wronged by NATO and that Putin is a strong, powerful man and has the right to do what he’s doing: Because Ukraine is somehow not worthy of independence, because it’s either Russia’s historical lands or Ukrainians are Russians, or the Ukrainian leaders are — this is what Putin says — “drug addled, fascist Nazis” or whatever labels he wants to apply here.
So sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again. The other thing to think about in this larger historic context is how much the German business community helped facilitate the rise of Hitler. Right now, everyone who has been doing business in Russia or buying Russian gas and oil has contributed to Putin’s war chest. Our investments are not just boosting business profits, or Russia’s sovereign wealth funds and its longer-term development. They now are literally the fuel for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Just like people didn’t want their money invested in South Africa during apartheid, do you really want to have your money invested in Russia during Russia’s brutal invasion and subjugation and carving up of Ukraine?

Reynolds: I gather you think that sanctions leveled by the government are inadequate to address this much larger threat?

Hill: Absolutely. Sanctions are not going to be enough. You need to have a major international response, where governments decide on their own accord that they can’t do business with Russia for a period of time until this is resolved. We need a temporary suspension of business activity with Russia. Just as we wouldn’t be having a full-blown diplomatic negotiation for anything but a ceasefire and withdrawal while Ukraine is still being actively invaded, so it’s the same thing with business. Right now you’re fueling the invasion of Ukraine. So what we need is a suspension of business activity with Russia until Moscow ceases hostilities and withdraws its troops.


Reynolds: So ordinary companies…

Hill: Ordinary companies should make a decision. This is the epitome of “ESG” that companies are saying is their priority right now — upholding standards of good Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance. Just like people didn’t want their money invested in South Africa during apartheid, do you really want to have your money invested in Russia during Russia’s brutal invasion and subjugation and carving up of Ukraine?
If Western companies, their pension plans or mutual funds, are invested in Russia they should pull out. Any people who are sitting on the boards of major Russian companies should resign immediately. Not every Russian company is tied to the Kremlin, but many major Russian companies absolutely are, and everyone knows it. If we look back to Germany in the runup to the Second World War, it was the major German enterprises that were being used in support of the war. And we’re seeing exactly the same thing now. Russia would not be able to afford this war were it not for the fact that oil and gas prices are ratcheting up. They’ve got enough in the war chest for now. But over the longer term, this will not be sustainable without the investment that comes into Russia and all of the Russian commodities, not just oil and gas, that are being purchased on world markets. And, our international allies, like Saudi Arabia, should be increasing oil production right now as a temporary offset. Right now, they are also indirectly funding war in Ukraine by keeping oil prices high.
This has to be an international response to push Russia to stop its military action. India abstained in the United Nations, and you can see that other countries are feeling discomforted and hoping this might go away. This is not going to go away, and it could be “you next” — because Putin is setting a precedent for countries to return to the type of behavior that sparked the two great wars which were a free-for-all over territory. Putin is saying, “Throughout history borders have changed. Who cares?”

Reynolds: And you do not think he will necessarily stop at Ukraine?

Hill: Of course he won’t. Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force. Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this. Yes, there may be countries like China and others who might think that this is permissible, but overall, most countries have benefited from the current international system in terms of trade and economic growth, from investment and an interdependent globalized world. This is pretty much the end of this. That’s what Russia has done.


Reynolds: He’s blown up the rules-based international order.

Hill: Exactly. What stops a lot of people from pulling out of Russia even temporarily is, they will say, “Well, the Chinese will just step in.” This is what every investor always tells me. “If I get out, someone else will move in.” I’m not sure that Russian businesspeople want to wake up one morning and find out the only investors in the Russian economy are Chinese, because then Russia becomes the periphery of China, the Chinese hinterlands, and not another great power that’s operating in tandem with China.

Reynolds: The more we talk, the more we’re using World War II analogies. There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.

Hill: We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.
All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.
But this is also a full-spectrum information war, and what happens in a Russian “all-of-society” war, you soften up the enemy. You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to Russia, and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war. I mean he has got swathes of the Republican Party — and not just them, some on the left, as well as on the right — masses of the U.S. public saying, “Good on you, Vladimir Putin,” or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S. for this outcome. This is exactly what a Russian information war and psychological operation is geared towards. He’s been carefully seeding this terrain as well. We’ve been at war, for a very long time. I’ve been saying this for years.

Reynolds: So just as the world didn’t see Hitler coming, we failed to see Putin coming?

Hill: We shouldn’t have. He’s been around for 22 years now, and he has been coming to this point since 2008. I don’t think that he initially set off to do all of this, by the way, but the attitudes towards Ukraine and the feelings that all Ukraine belongs to Russia, the feelings of loss, they’ve all been there and building up.
What Russia is doing is asserting that “might makes right.” Of course, yes, we’ve also made terrible mistakes. But no one ever has the right to completely destroy another country — Putin’s opened up a door in Europe that we thought we’d closed after World War II.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...=pocket-newtab
 
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