Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/26/23 David Swanson on What Russia Could Have Done Instead of Invading Ukraine

Episode Date: January 28, 2023

Scott brings on David Swanson to discuss the war in Ukraine. Scott and many of his guests have spent a lot of time explaining all the ways the U.S. and NATO unnecessarily backed Russia into a corner. But there are, in fact, plenty of things Moscow could have done to address the situation that didn’t involve invading Ukraine—which has only emboldened NATO and destroyed countless lives and livelihoods. Scott and Swanson also discuss the Rage Against the War Machine rally on February 19th in Washington DC where they will both be speaking.  Discussed on the show: “30 Nonviolent Things Russia Could Have Done and 30 Nonviolent Things Ukraine Could Do” (DavidSwanson.org) RageAgainstWar.com David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, radio host, and Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. He is the author of War is a Lie, When the World Outlawed War and Leaving World War II Behind. Find him on Twitter @davidcnswanson. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, January the 26th, 2003. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and editor-of-War.com and editor of the new book, Potter than the Sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons.

You find my full interview archive, more than 5,800 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, and our next guest is the great David Swanson. I've known him since at least the Downing Street memos came out, what, 19 years ago, something like that. And he's just been a great anti-war activist. It's written all kinds of great books, including one criticizing America's participation in World War II, the holiest war. So very happy to have David Swanson back on the show. How are you doing, sir? Terrific, Scott. Great to be with you.

Well, I sure appreciate you joining us today. And I'll only take partial credit because I think they may have already decided to get you. But I told the organizers, you got to get David Swanson for our big anti-war protest at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, February the 19th. And they went and did it. So I'm so glad I get to see you again there. And I'm just very curious, sir. What's your speech going to be about? Well, I don't know.

The event, of course, is called Rage Against the War Machine. And the website is Rage Against War.com. And I'm looking forward to being there. And I expect to do a little raging against the war machine. Of course, I will speak against U.S. warmaking and Russian war making, which will blow some circuit in most human brains, because God knows, I hear every day from millions of people who oppose only one of those two things. Yeah, isn't it strange? I was just on a show the other day where they're, you know, against all-American intervention there, but Russian intervention is perfectly fine. and, you know, they put me on the spot. So, well, what other choice did Vladimir Putin have?

And I came up with three. And then it occurred to me the next morning that, you know, I know who has an answer to this, David Swanson. And, of course, everybody, I asked David Swanson in an email. Hey, do you have any ideas for alternatives that Russia could have resorted to before invasion? He sent me back a list of 30, quite unsurprisingly. So why don't we take us through that a little bit? I think, you know, probably a lot of listeners to this show are pretty familiar with the case for how America pushed the Russians back up against the wall and more or less force them into this situation. And yet Vladimir Putin is his own strong man and he's responsible for his own behavior.

And you seem to think that he did have other choices besides invading eastern Ukraine. like what? Yeah, I wrote an article back in March called 30 nonviolent things Russia could have done and 30 nonviolent things Ukraine could do. And the most bizarre thing, I think, about the position of Russia's saintly innocence, and it had no choice but to oppose NATO by invading Ukraine, is that nothing in the history of NATO has done more to strengthen and build up and enlarge NATO than Russia invading U.S.

Ukraine. So you had to do the thing that NATO wanted you to do, that the Rand Corporation wanted you to do that was going to build up NATO beyond anything NATO on its own could ever dream of accomplishing in order to oppose NATO. It just doesn't make any sense to me. So what could Russia have done instead? Well, those who believe in Russia's tremendous innocence would have to acknowledge that Russia could have tried to communicate its position to the world, most of which did not believe and still don't believe in Russia's innocence. Russia was doing great in the PR machine. Russia was making a mockery of these predictions by the U.S. government day after day that Russia is going to invade Ukraine tomorrow at

five o'clock. Nowhere, not you idiots. They could have gone on mocking and making fun of that rather than doing what the U.S. said they were about to do and making the U.S. predictions just off by a couple of days, they also could have taken a position in favor of the rule of law and the prosecution of the criminal aggressive acts of the United States and NATO and Ukraine. The fact is that Russia and the United States, while they both claim to support the rule of law and the United States claims to be leading a global mission for a rules-based order, are the leading rogue nations on the planet, right? Neither one of them supports the international criminal court. Russia could have signed on to the international criminal court and sought prosecution of

the United States or NATO or Ukraine. Of 18 major human rights treaties in this rules-based order, the United States is partied only five and Russia to only 11, and they both violate the ones there are parties to. They both disregard the UN Charter, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, numerous treaties and laws against war. They both disregard basic disarmament treaties that they could be upholding. They both are outside of the global consensus on the landmines treaty and the arms trade treaty and the cluster munitions and on and they are top dealers of weaponry, both of them, two brutal dictatorships and so-called democracies alike. Neither one of them is supporting the prohibition of nuclear weapons, et cetera.

So Russia could have or the United States could have, and either one of them could do it this minute, taken a position in support of the rule of law in order to speak against the behavior of the other from a position of some standing. And of course, Russia could have used nonviolence, could have looked to the Baltic, states, some of which have programs in place to train unarmed civilian defense teams to defend without weapons against a Russian invasion as they successfully used unarmed nonviolent action to kick the Soviet Union out back in the day. And done the same, Russia could have sent unarmed nonviolent defenders into Donbos. And everyone will be horrified, right, either because

this somehow mysteriously suggests saintly goodness on the part of Ukraine and the United States, or because somebody unarmed and nonviolent might get hurt or killed, which is, of course, considered a horrific tragedy, whereas hundreds of thousands of people getting killed in a war with lots of weapons on both sides is perfectly acceptable. So, you know, there are options, but they require thinking outside the usual box. Yeah. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com, and if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before

everybody else, but not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Hortonshow.substack.com. Hey, y'all, libertosbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute, shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's Libertasbella.com.

Hey, I'll, Scott Horton here for the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org. I'm the director. Then we've got Sheldon Richmond, Kyle Anzalone, Keith Knight, Lori Calhoun, Jim Bovard, Connor, Connor, Conner Freeman, Will Porter, Patrick Murfarlane, and Tommy Salman's on our staff, writing and podcasting. And we've also got a ton of other great writers, too, like Walt are Block, Richard Booth, Boss Split, Kim Robinson, and William Ben Wagonin. We've published eight books so far, including my latest, Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear

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Don't miss out. Free access. ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. And now I really like the point that you make about, you know, yeah, they could have done like they did with all their nonviolent opposition in the Baltic states, which I admit, I mean, it sounds kind of fanciful, but then you added at the end, which is how they forced the Soviet Union out 30 years ago peacefully. So, eh, there's a pretty good precedent for you there. And look, on the deal with the peacekeepers, you know, back in 2018, they, the Russians and

the Americans had both proposed different proposals in the UN Security Council for bringing in baby blue helmet peacekeepers to stand in there. Well, if they had made a huge deal about that one year ago, and so we insist that the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing, let's say, Indians because they're a third party with no real dog in the fight to come in and stand on the deconfliction zone there. That could have solved the problem right there. But I have to tell you, David, that I'm actually surprised that the war has gone on for a year and that the outcry around the world has not been to negotiate some sort of ceasefire and peaceful solution to this thing immediately. And there's eight billion of us in the world. What are we

waiting on? Well, I mean, there's a difference between the United States and the world, right? A lot of people and governments and important people around the world have been clamoring for nearly a year now for a ceasefire and negotiations and compromise and peace. But there are a great many people around the world and obviously in the United States who believe for the most part that the United States and NATO and Ukraine can do no wrong, and that it would be an evil betrayal and treason to the future of the species to settle for anything other than unconditional surrender by Russia. And a significant number of people who believe the exact opposite. Every demand of Russia must be met as a precondition to anything and only absolute total surrender.

by Ukraine and NATO is acceptable. And, you know, and both of those are hurdles to getting to a compromise. And of course, both governments are proposing negotiations with preconditions of damn near everything they want that they know the other side will not accept as preconditions to negotiate. So, but you're absolutely right that Russia could have used the financial weapons that that the U.S. and NATO have been using rather than military, could have insisted on so-called peacekeepers, even unarmed peacekeepers, could have insisted on upholding the Minsk agreement that we now have Western leaders just openly admitting was a ploy to... Well, he did try that, insisting on Minsk?

He tried, but he could have tried more. And again, this is not to say that it's Russia's fault that you've... Ukraine never intended to support the Minsk agreement. It's to say that Russia could have proposed new votes in Crimea and Donbass and observers from the world and insistence on compliance with whatever those votes determined. Everybody's known that Crimea would vote to be part of Russia for decades and would do so again, which is why every objection to the crime of seizing Crimea has never proposed a re-vote. Right, but Putin could have called their bluff and said, let's have a re-vote. You observe it, you know. I'm just saying there are always choices other than bombing people's houses.

Yeah. All right. Now, so let's talk about us, the American people here, because there is a huge partisan kind of shift and divide. War is the great clarifier, but it also makes everything very muddy sometimes, too. So we have this huge challenge ahead of us to get people to come out and make. their voices heard, make their presence known. That just because Anthony Blinken says this is the best policy that we've got doesn't mean that we agree and that we're willing to continue to go along with this. It's a miracle we're even having this conversation after a year of a not even

proxy war, a pseudo-American war with Russia right on their border. David? The incredible thing, I think, is that these wars are waged in the name of democracy. And the whole conversation we're having about opposition to wars and support for wars assumes the exact opposite of democracy, assumes a public that falls in line behind political parties rather than elected representatives who do the bidding of the public. When you have one party kind of sort of pretending to be against a war and you have a certain level of war opposition in the in the public in the country and then you switch to having both big political parties. supporting a war, the opposition ought to go up. We ought to be more opposed. We out to have more of us in the street when we're opposing two parties than when we're opposing one. And when you're dealing with nuclear governments, people with nuclear weapons, risking, you know, for real, not for pretend, as in these, you know, wars against Iraq and so forth, then you ought to have

much more opposition, but people don't think in terms of self-governance and political officials obeying the public. They think just the reverse. And, you know, this is a problem. And of course, the Capitol Hill police didn't side against Donald Trump. They went off and had coffee, where if we, if a handful of us had been there to protest a war, they would have been out in the thousands insisting that we not have posters on sticks because it would be a threat to national security and so forth. So people need to drop the party loyalty to any party and drop the obedience to cable news and get out and show the world that you're for peace if you are for peace. And I know there are going to be rallies in Seattle and San Francisco Bay Area and other places

in solidarity with the big rally in D.C. on February 19th. So check out Rage Against War.com and be there. Yeah, absolutely. I'm really looking forward to it, and I really hope that there's a big turnout. You know, this show is broadcast in Los Angeles, which is pretty far from Washington, D.C. It's just a few hundred bucks on a plane ride, and it's totally worth it.

And I really hope that we can get the turnout, that we have something to show, you know, all across the planet. There are massive protests going on, mostly in the name of economics and COVID lockdown restrictions and this kind of thing, but still massive protests

out in the streets of major western cities for years going on now. So we should be able to do this. There's 300 million of us. We ought to be able to get a few thousand to come and fill up the mall at the Lincoln Memorial

and show the Biden government that we are opposed to this proxy war with Russia. Absolutely. Absolutely. Aren't you guys? Well, listen, find out all the information that you need at rage against war.com and the great David Swanson from Let's Try Democracy at David Swanson. I can't wait to see you there, buddy.

Appreciate you. Thanks, Scott. Same to you. All right, you guys, and that has been anti-war radio for this morning. I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director of anti-war.com, and editor of the new book, Hotter Than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. find my full interview archive more than 5,800 of them now going back to 2003 at

Scott Horton.org and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.