Judging Freedom - Matt Hoh: Principle and Sacrifice Confront Genocide

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Matt Hoh: Principle and Sacrifice Confront GenocideSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, February 27th, 2024. Matt Ho joins us now. Matt, a pleasure as always, my dear friend. Just the other day, there was a tragic event outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., where an active duty airman immolated himself by covering himself with some flammable liquid and starting it on fire, and he killed himself and issued beforehand very serious statements condemning the United States genocide in Gaza. The United States supported genocide in Gaza. Since his death, we have seen, courtesy of our intrepid friend Max Blumenthal, a copy of his orders, here it is, directing preparedness and immediate compliance to fly to the Middle East when ordered. And if you look at the date, you'll see it's back in November. I obviously recognize that suicide is a horrific event and obviously indicates a serious mental imbalance. However, are you

surprised at the bubble Aaron Bushnell burst and at the response from thousands of civilians and military to what he did? I think this reaction, Judge, and again, thank you for having me back on as always. This reaction is just, and it's appropriate, we should be honoring and respecting what Aaron Bushnell chose to do, even if we don't fully understand why he chose that specific action. Self-immolation has a long history. It goes back thousands of years, particularly in Eastern traditions. And people recall, of course, say the Buddhist monks who burned themselves in protest of the Vietnamese governments that we were supporting back in the early 60s. So this connection to American imperial warfare is also present in the use of self-immolation.

But the response to what Aaron Bushnell did, again, I think is just inappropriate. And I think his sacrifice should be utilized as others, not to emulate by any means, but as a source of motivation or inspiration. What Aaron Bushnell was going through, Judge, was what a lot of American service members and veterans go through, this realization that they may have joined the American military thinking that they were going to be wearing the white hat, but what they come to realize is that they are wearing a black hat. And Aaron Bushnell just felt that he could no longer continue to wear that black hat. And for him, the option of self-immolation was the way that he thought best to express his complete resistance to the idea of being complicit in the genocide in Gaza. is there more of an urge for members of the military,

active duty members of the military, to express disenchantment with the direction and the use of the military by political leadership when the military is 100% volunteer as it is now, as opposed to when it is largely filled with draftees, as was the case in Vietnam. Well, you know, it's interesting if you look at what's called the GI resistance to the Vietnam War, which was one of the very key, if not the most important aspect of the overall resistance in the U.S. to the Vietnam War. If you look at that GI resistance, a lot of it was led by

those who have volunteered for the war. So what happens is that those who go into the military thinking they're doing the right thing, those who are stepping forward and say, yes, I want to go forward. I want to protect my country. I want to defend our freedoms and liberties, I want to keep our country safe. Well, it's to them the great shock then, the moral injury of realizing that they are being betrayed, that they are not protecting their country, or they are not protecting our freedoms and liberties. Their actions are not keeping Americans safe, but rather often the opposite, that their actions are counterproductive and wrong, and that they are not serving the interests of the United States, but they're serving the political, the economic, and the financial interests of the American empire, and very often doing things that harm and bring great suffering onto others. So I think that burst bubble that you spoke about in terms of the

public perception, Bushnell's self-immolation, how that burst a bubble, but also too, you have to understand what his own bubble was burst. And so many other American servicemen and veterans who have had these realizations of betrayal, this very real trauma of moral injury. And that's what, of course, drives a lot of veteran suicide, particularly combat veteran suicide, is the guilt. It's the shame. It's the regret. It's the fact that you transgressed. You took part in something that violated your ethical, your religious, your moral boundaries. You did wrong. And that type of moral injury is grave. It's severe. And according, that's injury is grave. It's severe.

And, you know, according, that's just my opinion and not just someone who dealt with it, because that's what drove my suicidality after taking part in these wars. But based upon the literature we have about with all the research being done by universities and the Veterans Administration, as well as in other countries, that moral injury, that guilt, that shame, that regret is what is the chief driver in combat veteran suicide. And you saw that occurring with Aaron Bushnell. He realized he was complicit and he was no longer going to do it. Suppose Bushnell's means was not fatal. What would become of him? I mean, stated differently, what happens when members of active duty military say, the boss is crazy. They want us to engage in genocide. I'm not going to do it. Before he's actually ordered to do it. Well, you know, the United States Army, or should I say the Pentagon, was very smart during the Iraq and Afghan war. There were tens of thousands of desertions within the U.S. military during that period, and it was hardly talkedS. military during that period.

And it was hardly talked about. It was hardly mentioned. The United States military just what's called administratively separated those service members. So rather than going out, putting out an APB, you know, getting county sheriffs to try and find these deserters, what they did was they just administratively separated them because they didn't want the controversy. They didn't want the attention. They didn't want the public attention on the fact that tens of thousands of American service members were saying, I'm not taking part in these wars. I'm not going to serve any longer, right? So they kept it out of the eye of the public. They kept the press away

from it. They kept it from any high profile court marshals. And I think that's what, and I don't know what Bushnell's particulars were, his circumstances were. I don't know if he had orders to go to Israel or not, but say he had, if he had chosen then to refuse orders, he would have then had a court-martial, which would have also brought public attention on his refusal to accept those orders, his refusal of orders. So what the Pentagon has done over the last couple of decades has been very savvy. It's been smart in a public relations regard in terms of trying to minimize any attention dissent from within the ranks gets. Again, what they've done with deserters and people who've refused orders is basically just administratively separated them and try to keep it as quiet as possible because they don't want people to realize that American service members and veterans are against this war, against those wars, which we know to be the case. They also don't want one of these trials with an articulate defense lawyer listening from the mouth of the defendant and others, the horrors of war and genocide.

That's the last thing the government wants in an environment that the government can't control. I have a lot of questions for you involving Ukraine. But before we do, over the weekend, Prime Minister Netanyahu actually made a statement on one of the talk shows in which he inexplicably claimed the Israeli military is being careful in its targets. Yeah, it is careful to target every human being it can in Gaza. Does anybody take that? It aggravates me, forgive me for getting angry. Does anybody take that seriously? Well, what's disturbing is in that speech he gives, he quotes a gentleman who is at West Point, a former army officer named John Spencer, who is the head of the Urban Warfare Institute or Urban Warfare Center at West Point.

And this person, John Spencer, supposedly argues that no army in the history of mankind has gone to more lengths, have gone to greater lengths than the Israeli army to protect civilians. Well, that is just absolutely untrue. Exactly. And the thing about that that should be so concerning, Judge, is that that person runs the Urban Warfare Center at West Point. And teaches West Point cadets. Exactly. And teaches West Point cadets. have authored reports that have criticized, that have pointed out that the United States Army has a culture of lying, right? And so this is how you can have a circumstance like we see,

where all these people line up and support something that they know is wrong. All these people line up and they agree to go along with this great, bright, shining lie that somehow what Israel is doing is self-defense and not genocide. I mean, the amount of people involved in supporting Israel's genocide, its ethnic cleansing from the American side is massive. And those who go along with it, who were then enabled by people like this person at West Point who makes this claim that then there's really prime minister trumpets. Well, this is what Aaron Bushnell was up against. This is what he saw. And this is what pushed him to do such an extreme act because he knew that nothing else would matter. And I mean, so being around all, being in that complicity

and just having that dissonance of knowing what you're seeing, of what your lying eyes are telling you basically, because what you're being told is that, no, this isn't genocide. These aren't war crimes. You know, that this is a different case than, so I mean, this, what Netanyahu was saying,

of course, was completely absurd, completely untrue as someone who took part in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I have a lot of criticism for what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. We ruined millions of lives, but we did not carry out a genocidal rampage like the Israelis are carrying out in Gaza. But the fact that you have people who are part of the American military establishment going along with this assertion that the Israelis are protecting civilians. I mean, this is just, this just shows the degree of corruption, the degree of moral and intellectual dishonesty that is present, not just within the U.S. government, but specifically within the U.S. military. I specifically within the U.S. military. I smiled when you said bright, shining light. And you know why? Because I have a library. I'm surrounded right now by four or five thousand books. Somewhere in here is an autographed copy

of Neil Sheehan's masterpiece, Bright, Shining Light, which, of of course is a dissection of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. If my arm was about three feet longer, Judge, I could reach my copy. And I tell people when they want to know what books should I read to understand the Iraq and Afghan wars, I always

tell them two books. One, A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Shahan, and the other, The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, both of which are books about Vietnam. But if you read those books, you will understand the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I read Halberstam's other book, The Making of a Quagmire, just as good as The Best and the the brightest, a little less political. The president of the United States, I don't know if we have this, Chris, where Joe Biden refers to Putin's thugs killing Navalny. Is that one of our clips?

Maybe you can tell. Okay, we don't have that one of our clips? Maybe you can tell. Okay, we don't have that one. Joe Biden has said that Alexei Navalny was killed by Putin's thugs. This morning, the head of Ukraine Intel, the general who's in charge of Ukraine Intel, said, sorry to disappoint you. Mr. Navalny died of a blood clot. Should we expect the president of the United States to apologize to the president of Russia? Right. If Budanov, who's the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, GUR, is saying this, then it has to be true. Because if someone like him, if such a figure in Ukraine, whose whole purpose every day is to, of course, demonize

their enemy, even in hyperbolic, exaggerative terms that he uses. If he's saying that Navalny's death was from a natural cause, from a blood clot, then that's most likely what it was, because why would this person say anything that would come to the aid or the assistance or the benefit of Vladimir Putin and Russia? It also matches up with reports that are coming out that nothing's been verified, that supposedly Navalny was part of a prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia and that exchange was imminent, as well as the timing of all this. Why would Vladimir Putin and his people decide to murder Alex Navalny right before the elections, right before their most recent successes in Ukraine, right after the triumph of that massive interview he did with Tucker Carlson, where he had hundreds and hundreds of millions of people watching.

And while Navalny is in a maximum security prison in the Arctic Circle, 2,000 miles from Moscow. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. I mean, you can make the case, Judge, of course, that maybe his health wasn't as good as it should have been because he was in a prison in the Arctic Circle. I mean, certainly there's all that. But this triumph thing of

Navalny, one thing I've noticed on my news aggregator, my Apple News feed, his death for almost a full week was the top story among American media. I mean, it shows you the level, and not saying anything about Navalny himself, but just shows you the level of the American propaganda operation, the American propaganda effort, not just by the U.S. government, but by their allied mainstream media partners. Oh, but you'll have to search long and hard for this piece about the head of Ukraine, Intel, saying it was a blood clot. Here's number eight, Chris. Here's Victoria Nuland repeating the statements that her boss, the president, made about Putin personally being responsible for Navalny's death, as well as the other stuff that she likes to ruminate about. Ukraine, as we saw in the news, has been forced to withdraw from Avdeevka. Kharkiv, one of Ukraine's proudest eastern city, a Russian-speaking city,

is bombarded daily in an effort to disable it. And Ukraine's economy is still fragile, with almost 100 percent of tax revenues going to defense now. Vladimir Putin, in addition to planning anti-satellite weapons in space and bearing responsibility for the death of his most popular opponent, Alexei Navalny, thinks he can wait Ukraine out, and he thinks he can wait out all of us. We need to prove him wrong. She is such a liar. Kharkiv, one of Ukraine's proudest eastern cities, a Russian-speaking city, is being bombarded. She's right. By the Ukrainians, it's being bombarded, not by the Russians. The depravity, Judge, the monsters that we have in our leadership, in any sane and decent government, someone like Victoria Nuland would have been fired after her stint in Vice President Cheney's office 20 years ago because of her role in the Iraq war. She would have been in prison for it if we really truly were a decent society, let alone a society that functioned under a rule of

law or under a constitution that meant anything. But here you have her 20 years later, one catastrophe, one horror show after another overseas, one failed American effort overseas after another. And she's still in these positions saying these boldface lies, saying these half-truths, saying these myth-truths. It's just so, again, it comes back to the corruption within our own system, the corruption within the American political establishment, within our government, within our foreign policy circles that allow for the success of someone who is just characteristically, whose defining trait is moral and intellectual dishonesty. But that's, you know, and unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be getting any better, right? I mean, it seems that if you want to climb to the top in our system,

these are the traits you should possess, is this willingness to be morally and intellectually dishonest, whether you actually are that or not. At the risk of raising your blood pressure, my dear friend, here she is again, number nine, Chris, claiming as a result of all the American aid, it's hard for me to say this with a straight face, to Ukraine, the United States of America is now safer. Without sending a single U.S. soldier into combat and investing less than one-tenth of one year's defense budget of the United States, we have helped Ukraine destroy 50% of Russia's ground combat power, 50%, and 20% of its vaunted Black Sea fleet. Ukraine has taken off the battlefield 21 naval ships, 102 Russian aircraft, and 2,700 Russian tanks. By every measure, Ukraine's bravery and

strength, its resilience resilience has made the United States safer too. I would invite her to debate my dear friend, Captain Matthew Ho, and I will moderate the debate. She won't accept it because she wouldn't think I'd be fair, but I would love for you to take her on as to how she could possibly make that argument, Matt, that somehow the United States is safer. We are poorer. And Ukrainian men, half a million of them, not 31,000, 80 billion dollars a year on an unwinnable war that risks escalating into a nuclear conflict. And that's not hyperbole. That's a real risk. All for the sake of Victoria Nuland's ideology, for her ego, for proving her legacy correct. And what I'd really like to see more than a debate between myself and her is just to see how the families of the Ukrainians whose

sons have been killed in this war react to such things. To hear so cleanly and so clearly from the likes of Victoria Nuland, and not just from her, from all manners and all aspects of American officials, both in the executive and the legislative branch, who tout this, that this is a good investment, that we're spending really good money. Look, we're spending all this money. We've destroyed all these Russians. Most of that money goes back into the American military industrial complex. So our corporations are making money off of this. And the only thing that's happening is that Ukrainians are getting killed for it, right? I mean, how would those Ukrainian households where they've got the portraits of dead sons and fathers and brothers over their mantles,

where they're sitting there, these young men, not even young men, because we know the average age in Ukraine who are fighting right now is 43. These men who are missing their arms, their legs, who are dealing with the psychological trauma of these wars, what is their reception to that hearing how they were so clearly, they've been so clearly depicted as pawns in an effort by the United States to one, enrich its defense contractors, enrich its merchants of death, and two, to weaken Russia in a proxy war by using the men of Ukraine as completely expendable pawns in a meat grinder. Let me show you now how dangerous Victoria Nuland is, because this nonsense that she is preaching is catching. Number 11, Chris, here's the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, talking about the feasibility

and probability of troops on the ground, French troops on the ground in Ukraine. There is no consensus today to send ground troops in an official, endorsed and sanctioned manner, but in dynamic terms, nothing should be ruled out. But in dynamic terms, nothing should be ruled out. Similar attitudes on the part of the Prime Minister of Great Britain, even though they don't have much of an army. Similar attitude on the part of the Prime Minister of Poland. Colonel McGregor reporting there is probably a secret agreement between Poland and Ukraine. So you are correct when you warn, I think, and there's a lot of evidence for this,

of the coming of a world war. Joe Biden's losing to Donald Trump. When all else fails, they take you to war. Would he take us to World War III if he thought that would be necessary to get him reelected? I don't know if you can answer that, but there's certainly evidence for it. There certainly is. And this could happen in a manner that would be lightning fast. Say the Ukrainian army collapses, which is possible. Some would say it's likely. And the Russians move quickly through central Ukraine, heading towards Western Ukraine, would say the Romanians and the Poles move forward into Ukraine to block the Russian advance. But you've also seen these bilateral security agreements signed between Germany, France, and the UK with Ukraine, and supposedly more of these agreements are coming between other nations and Ukraine.

And they're pretty meek in terms of, they're not saying, these agreements are coming between other nations and Ukraine. And they're pretty meek in terms of they're not saying, these agreements don't say that they will send forces to fight. They just basically reiterate what these nations have already done in terms of in the future, we will continue to send weapons and money to Ukraine to fight Russia. But the rhetoric is there. And the fact that lines are not being drawn and the lines that are there are very vague. You have Macron saying things like, you know, it's not ruled out that we may send forces to Ukraine. And certainly Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, had been much more aggressive, talking about sending a British expeditionary force, which of course, if you understand that

term, it makes you recall the First and Second World Wars, where the British called the troops they put into continental Europe an Expeditionary Force, the BEF. But as you said, Judge, the Brits, you could put the entire British Army into where the Giants and Jets play at the Meadowlands. That's how big the British Army is. It's about 76,000 men right now, men and women right now. I mean, so their ability to actually go and fight, but that doesn't matter because your point being is correct. Would that bring the U.S. into the war? And I don't envision that the Brits or the French or the Germans or the Poles will put troops in the front lines with the Ukrainians. What I think would happen, God help us, this does because this is bad enough, that they would put troops into the reserve areas so that the NATO troops that would go into Ukraine

would fill in in the support roles. And then those Ukrainian troops that are in support roles, they could then go to the front lines, which of course just means more Ukrainian men being used as pawns in this meat grinder. But the danger is that what happens if any of those troops, any of those European troops, those NATO troops get killed? What's the response going to be? And the same thing too, if you're staging from Germany, from Poland, from Romania to support combat operations into Ukraine, well, the Russians have been clear about this. That makes those positions in Poland and Romania, Germany, wherever, targets. That makes them targets that need to be countered.

So we can see very quickly how the escalation of this would build and how would the American Congress act, how would an American president act if our ally who is, you know, who are who've proven so loyal, who are so sympathetic, who are such sycophants as the British are? What will we do if they lost troops in Ukraine? We just stand idly by. see this escalate. I mean, it doesn't take much imagination to see how this could just branch off onto paths of just really, really dangerous, you know, dangerous circumstances leading to things that we just don't want to contemplate. Because once you start going up that ladder of escalation, you know, there's no way to go either, but to continue to go up or to come down it. And no one in NATO, you're not seeing any of our leaders in Western Europe or the United States giving us the confidence that if that escalation started occurring, that they would have the wisdom and the political courage to go back down that ladder of escalation.

The CIA leaks to the New York Times that it has 12 of its bases in Ukraine. Well, that means the Russian intel knows where they are. It leaks that it is helping guide Ukrainians to send offensive ammunition into Russia. The weaponry is built by the United States. The ammunition is American. The guidance systems are American. The people helping them do it are American CIA. Is the United States waging war on Russia? Yes, it is. It is. I mean, it's clear when you see what we just saw from Victoria Nuland. And again, we've heard that from many, many others throughout the American government, both in Congress and in the executive branch, that the purpose of this war, and this was stated early on, Secretary of Defense Austin said this in April of 2022, that the purpose of the war was to weaken

Russia. And you've seen throughout, not just the US, but the West, this idea that this war, the use again of Ukraine as a proxy, would be what is needed to cause a destabilization in Russia to bring about regime change. The idea that Russia would be involved in this war, it would just bleed out economically, it would cause mass trauma in terms of the Russian markets. And then that discontent among the people would bring the Russian government down. We've seen completely the opposite. We've seen a Russian economy that is very strong. The Russians obviously prepared their economy very well for this war. But we've also seen the support for both the war and for the Russian government remain constant these last two years.

So this theory, basically, that they had, that they would use the Ukrainians to weaken Russia, basically, you know, a form of war, not a form of war, a war, has just proven not just to have not worked, but has been catastrophic for the Ukrainian people. It's brought us again to this risk of escalation, which where we're facing the dangers of a world war, but also too, it's been counterproductive because it has actually strengthened Russia. It's strengthened Russia's ties with other nations abroad. And it's further isolated the United States and its client states and its vassal states in Europe. Matt Ho, thank you very much. Great, great analysis on top of your game as always. Much appreciated. I hope you'll come back again with us next week.

Thanks, Judge. Of course, my friend. Coming up at three o'clock Eastern, a conversation about similar things with somewhat of her eye on the target of the spokesperson for the State Department over the weekend, Karen Kwiatkowski. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm