Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/18/24 Brad Pearce on the CIA’s Activities in Ukraine Before the War

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Scott was joined by Brad Pearce to talk about Ukraine. They discuss the report in the New York Times detailing the CIA’s long-time presence in Ukraine, the stupidity of those in charge of American foreign policy, the absurdity of NATO’s security guarantees, the color revolutions in post-Soviet states and more. Discussed on the show: “The CIA Admits Its Long-Time Presence in Ukraine” (Libertarian Institute) “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” (New York Times) Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War by Volodymyr Ishchenko The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections, and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union by Mark A. MacKinnon Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy by Jonathan Steele Brad Pearce is a writer focused on international relations and politics. He writes at The Wayward Rabbler. Follow him on Twitter @WaywardRabbler This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; 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

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line we've got brad pierce he writes the wayward rabler over there on substack and we also run him at the libertarian institute as well welcome back to the show brad how you do oh i'm doing well thank you for having me back. Yeah, man, very happy to have you here. A very interesting piece. The CIA admits its longtime presence in Ukraine, and this is the big one in the New York Times from a few weeks ago now,

February the 25th, the spy war, how the CIA secretly helps Ukraine fight Putin. So tell me, what'd you learn from the big NYT piece here? Well, you know, it's another classic example of going from you know, saying something is a baseless conspiracy theory to saying, of course, we're doing that, and here's why it's a good thing. In short, they, you know, admitted directly that as soon as the May Don revolution happened, that Ukraine's new spy chief called in the CIA and MI6, and they set up what could only be fairly described as an anti-Russian conspiracy to, you know, use Ukraine as what is described as a beachhead against Russia in the region and to, you know, basically counter Russian influences throughout. So there's really no other way to look at it, but that Ukraine intentionally

threw in with Russia's enemy and worked very hard to make itself a threat to Russia. And of course, the purpose of this article was to guilt people into funding Ukraine more on the grounds of, you know, we cannot abandon them like our erstwhile allies in Afghanistan. But strangely, it got very little notice at all, which I mean, I guess the New York Times is really increasingly irrelevant, more so, even than one would imagine. Yeah. Well, and it's their fault for employing Charlie Savage, the disgusting liar, along with David Sanger,

and formerly Michael Gordon and all of Scott Shane and all the hoaxers of the Rushagate scam and the rest of that. No wonder nobody pays any attention to them. Yeah, well, and it's really funny because, you know, whenever there's like a leak that tells us something we really do need to know, they go on and on about, oh, you're endangering people.

you know, there's these sources and methods you're revealing, you know, Assange is still in prison and, like, their public enemy number one for this. And of course, there was none of that hyming and hawing about this because the CIA very clearly directly invited journalists in to tell them this whole big story that, you know, was supposedly like a secret. It's really an incredible thing. And I, they must have thought that this was going to make everyone want to fund Ukraine more. And they did not realize that by publishing this, they were really, you know agreeing with most of Russia's grievances about Ukraine that they used as a justification for launching their war yeah and and for that matter the Americans who are opposed to this

intervention there so as you say they talk about this going all the way back to 2014 I don't guess they specifically mentioned Brennan's trip to Kiev just after the revolution there but he clearly at the time, I think USA Today revealed it first, and he clearly had agreed with or even possibly ordered them to start what the interim president at that time, and then later Petro Poroshenko called a war on terrorism against the people of the east of their own country. Yeah, and you know what's really been kind of strange about all of this

because I've written some other things about the general premise of how it is that this awful, you know, narrow faction of like pro-Western nationalist pseudo-intellectuals took over this entire large country. And, you know, something that's very strange is that they could not possibly make the kind of horrible neoliberal tech dystopia that they want to turn Ukraine into if they have to incorporate these people into their country that live in the regions that Russia currently controls. So it's hard to come to a different conclusion than that they desire to oppress this part of their population more than they love life itself.

Yeah, well, and here they are losing the entire south and east of the country. The only question at this point in the war is whether the Russians are going to go ahead and take Odessa and the entire southern coast or whether they'll be happy with the four provinces they've already taken. Now, I don't guess you figure that that was the plan that, well, we want rid of these Russians, so we'll just start a war, let Russia take the south and the east. but make it very expensive for them to do so. They must have thought that they were going to get away with it.

You know, I've wondered this whole time whether Ukraine was intentionally used as a sacrificial pawn or whether they actually thought this was going to work. And as ever with government, the evil incompetent matrix is kind of the hardest thing to read about any government action. Yeah, exactly. Stupidity or the plan. Well, it's a stupid plan. That's all.

Yeah, no, it is almost always some combination of both. just a matter of which one is predominant in that specific situation. Yeah. And now you say here that when they created this specialized anti-Russia division, and then again, this goes back, we're not talking about 22. We're talking about 14 just after the bogus so-called Revolution of Dignity, which is absolutely hilarious. But you say that, or the Times story here says that they recruited exclusively young people

born after the fall of the Soviet Union. Did they say why exactly? Oh, yeah. They were like, oh, they didn't want anyone, you know, with dual loyalty to, well, to Russia, but they wanted people only with dual loyalty to, you know, the U.S. and the U.K. But, yeah, they said, I mean, obviously, kind of facetiously, you know, these people don't even know what the USSR was. So they just really wanted people that, you know, had absolutely no connection to it.

And it's kind of strange, you know, it takes a long time to detach. So you have to figure all of those people still went to school educated by people that were, you know, by teachers that were educated under the Soviet Union. You know, all of their parents grew up under it, et cetera. But yeah, it's the main thing that struck me about that is how young that meant they were. That was only like 23 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. So you're running this whole complex operation against, you know, the world's largest country that has the largest nuclear arsenal with a bunch of people that would barely be out of college if, you know, the oldest ones would barely be out of college if they, you know, the oldest ones would barely be out of college if they, went at all. And which is funny, too, because it seems to me, I don't know, like the harder feelings would be among the people who actually did grow up under the Soviet Union, which

was, after all, a totalitarian police state. And I know from members of my family, my wife is from Ukraine, that it's the Soviet Union that they absolutely hated and feared. And Russia of maybe not their favorite, but doesn't compare to the totalitarian monster that was the USSR and its domination of Ukraine up until 1991. Yeah, well, there's several interesting things about that. I mean, one of which is that the older people that were running this obviously had yet lived under the Soviet Union. It's not clear that a bunch of people whose early childhood memories were the post-Soviet

hell era of the 90s that, you know, Ukraine kind of never left would be the best people. for this anyway. So yeah, and no part of that really made that much sense to me. But you know what else is strange about this is that it was all the people that were total in our society at least, it's all the people who were total apologists

for the Soviet Union when it did exist that now claim to hate current Russia because it's communist when, you know, current Russia is not communist. It's all very irrational. Yeah, seriously. Well, and it was funny that Joy Reid famously called Russia a communist country

on MSNBC, revealing that she really didn't have the first clue about the history of the world that she lives in whatsoever. I probably thinks you've got to go west to get there. Yeah, I mean, none of them have any clue about it. And, you know, the other thing that's very frustrating is that, obviously, Ukraine was a full constituent member of the Soviet Union. You know, people from, of Ukrainian descent were in charge of the Soviet Union for more years than people that were fully Russian, you know, though the peoples are very important.

closely linked. So it's all very strange, but you can see that what they've had to do is turn it into something that is solely based on ethnic hatred, such as the New York Times talking about how these men that were presumably in their 50s were, you know, booing that star hockey player because he was a Russian national. Like, why would you trust anyone that immature and ridiculous and full of hate to do a sensitive matter like espionage against Russia? It's an absolute nonsense. Well, and when they say that they really wanted anti-Russia zealots who express a hatred of all Russian speakers, that sounds like just code for Azov Battalion and right sector C-14 type Nazis, no? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly my thought. So yeah, what they came with that, they had a,

they named the division after some, I don't know, like Estonian joke or something about how you would club a fish in the head because it speaks Russian because no Russian speakers can trusted. And it's a, you know, a huge portion of your pre-war population speaks Russian at home. So you're obviously saying that it's anyone that speaks Russia is bad. And, you know, of course, the other thing about this is most people in Ukraine did not historically view Russia as a language of oppression. It was like the language of, you know, social advancement and education and getting good jobs in, you know, engineering and science and stuff like that. So this is really kind of a historic myth that they made up that everyone felt like they were oppressed.

by you know speaking russian at work if they spoke ukrainian at home it's all very a historical yeah and you know i think the soviets did force people to speak russian uh you know in the schools and that kind of thing but essentially they adopted in all the major cities and you know according to my wife is basically just people who for you know were poor peasants out in the countryside who spoke Ukrainian. She's from Odessa and only one of her aunts spoke Ukrainian at all. They all are Russian speakers. Yeah, well, I just reviewed the book towards the abyss by Balotamara Shingo, who's a like a, or he's like a Marxist sociologist from Ukraine that is, you know, very unpopular with the people in charge there. And yeah, he said very much it was viewed as a country

language versus city language and that since the languages are so similar anyway, people did not think that much about speaking one at work and speaking another one at home and i'm sure that if you go you know all the way west to laviv it's different but certainly on the entire southern coast and in the donbass and up to harqueve and i think even in kiev the idea was it was you know the town and country split there well i mean the fact is to manage an enormous empire like the soviet union that has like 100 nationalities in it you simply have to have a unifying language for which people do you know government and business and everything else like that it's a it's just a matter of administering it in a reasonable way like you're not going to have everyone choose like

burriott or something as your national language and now we're also well okay get into exactly what it was that they're doing here because this does include strikes inside russia right Yeah, I mean, basically they were, you know, trying to purge Ukraine of all sorts of Russian influence, but it included them, you know, launching deadly attacks inside the regions in Donbos that were controlled. There was one instance where they went into Crimea and set up what, but they basically described as like defensive, you know, charges on a train station that they were hoping would stay hidden and then they could, you know, set them off at a later time. they tried to land for an offensive action in in Crimea that turned really bloody and apparently greatly upset Joe Biden, who was the one in charge of this as the vice president. So, you know, it all goes deeply back to him in many ways. And I mean, but basically everything spies would do.

They, you know, sent all sorts of intelligence to the U.S. They were deeply involved in everything that is called Russia Gate now and, you know, sending that intelligence to the CIA, which would have been so easy to, fake these, you know, supposed interceptions they had, assuming that the CIA even cared if they were real or not, which they probably didn't. So it's, yeah, it's been all sorts of intel like that. And then also the partnership, you know, had the U.S. helping them target things from as soon as this war began, you know, for all sorts of different attacks. It was really just basically everything that intelligence agencies would coordinate on if they were trying to undermine, you know,

a hostile power that they considered to be an enemy. And now, so what about the wrong? Russians in, do you know if Tos and RT and the rest did big, I told you so's about this and said, of course, see, you gave us no choice, just like we said. You know, I didn't see them mention it that much either. I've really been looking for any response to this, but, you know, so much of what they said, yeah, was right exactly in line with, you know, what Russia said. And obviously, like, it's a completely different question, if any of this justified to this enormous war that's caused a massive amount of human suffering. But what it does show that is the thing that is the most important about this is that they've wanted us to believe that, you know, if Russia's not stopped in Ukraine, that, you know, they're going to roll their tanks to Brussels, like they're a threat to, you know, the Baltics and Finland, and they want to take Poland and all of this other stuff like that. And it shows very directly that Ukraine's government was threatening them, was intentionally threatening them, was seeking to undermine their state, was, you know, doing all sorts of things. And further, was just oppressing ethnic Russians within Ukraine because they hated them. So it really shows that Russia never was a threat to any of the other neighboring nations if they would just behave in a reasonable fashion and, you know, try to have good relations.

You know, people have a really negative view of what they call Finlandization during the Cold War. But you would find that Finland went through the entire Cold War in peace, independent, you know, a free country and everything else. it's kind of weird to act like that turned out badly for them. Yeah, exactly. Same thing with Austria. And you look at the map, Austria's a couple clicks to the west, to Ukraine. Seems like we might have been able to settle for neutrality for Ukraine, but no. Yeah, you know what I keep coming back to is in the really famous Mealian dialogue and Thucydides.

Like the deal that the Millions were asking for was what Russia was demanding of Ukraine. and Athens refused to let them remain neutral and then slaughtered their whole city when they refused to take sides and yeah what Russia wanted Ukraine to do was what the Millians were begging for it's a very interesting comparison

yeah well all right so now you say that the article seems to have failed that you're kind of speculating here but it seems like the thing was put out as a press release what essentially

to say look everybody here's how deep we really are in this thing so stop dragging your feet we're committed here and but that narrative didn't really take off huh no i mean i've not seen this mentioned anywhere at all uh it does not seem to have gotten them any closer to getting the funding the only people that have noticed are all of the people that were already skeptical of our ukraine policy and of course, you know, we all know about what you would call, like, the prior investment trap or the sunk cost fallacy or whatever. Like, that's what they're arguing here is actually no reason to, you know, to continue a bad policy. And for my part, I've been trying to tell Ukraine and its

supporters that they were ultimately going to get abandoned to this whole time. So, you know, I tried to warn them. It was going this direction. I feel like absolutely no guilt about my country ultimately abandoning them. But that's just me. But yeah, it certainly is not going to be. us who opposed this. I mean, it's been so obvious all along. Joe Biden said from the very beginning, we are not putting our army infantry in there. The third infantry division, the 82nd airborne, the U.S. Navy, we're not coming, which is another way of saying protecting Ukraine from Russia is actually not an important American interest. And it also goes to show then, It makes a whole question of bringing them into NATO, you know, obvious controversy here where we're clearly not willing to risk direct war with Russia or not that much of a risk of direct war with Russia over Ukraine.

So if Biden had somehow succeeded in pushing NATO membership through before the war and Russia attacked, then we would have sent the 82nd Airborne and gone to nuclear war then? Or we just said, actually, Article 5 is written pretty vaguely, and you guys are screwed, the same as we're doing right now. Yeah, well, you know, it's kind of funny. Two years ago, Kayakhalis, the Prime Minister of Estonia, admitted that NATO's defense strategy for the Baltics in a major war with Russia is that they will just be occupied with Russia. And then, you know, the U.S. or, you know, NATO will liberate them at a later time, which is crazy. But they're completely indefensible. And yeah, similarly, I just don't know who's going to go there for Ukraine. But, you know, they're kind of getting their own piecemeal ramshackle NATO because several major countries, such as, you know, France, the United Kingdom and Italy have given them, and Canada, for that matter, have given them like basically separate security guarantees or made separate mutual defense packs.

And of course, it's not actually a mutual defense pact between Italy and Ukraine because no one's going to attack Italy and there's no chance Ukraine. would be able to help them if someone did. So it is just a one-way security guarantee. And it's funny because this is exactly what's not funny, but it's exactly what started World War II was that, you know, Poland took this security guarantee from the United Kingdom who was unable to physically access their country to defend them.

And then, you know, Poland acted really arrogantly and unwise because they felt they had the security guarantee from, you know, the world's great empire of the day. And then Poland got, you know, partitioned and completely destroyed and suffered untold horrors. And everyone learned the wrong lesson from this. And I don't know how that's possible, but you know, the only thing about history people know about is World War II and they know all of the wrong things about it. Yeah, the lesson is American, Britain, and France and the Soviet Union should have all ganged up and invaded Germany

as soon as Hitler took Czechoslovakia. Yeah, that's the only, that's their only idea in regards to this. And, you know, quite clearly, I think Poland could have just been more wise in a variety of ways. You really should not take security guarantees from anyone who would be unable and unwilling to defend you. But no one has learned this lesson. Yep. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expandesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you.

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You'll be glad you did. That's Moondosartisan coffee.com. And then, you know, in bringing the Baltics into NATO in the second round there, they really did create, as you're saying, that they admit themselves here that Estonian minister saying, Well, you know, yeah, we would just be occupied and then hope for the best later. Look at a map of where those Baltic states are. How in the world is the United States of America supposed to liberate them? We're going to move our entire army to, you know, France and Germany and then move them through Poland to attack the Russians in the Baltics.

Or we're going to get into a naval war in the Baltic Sea and take that over and land our Marines? We're talking thermonuclear war in that event. Everybody knows that. And they've, you know, as Pat Buchanan warned back in 1999, you bring the Baltics in, now you're leaving Kaliningrad, this extremely important city and naval port that still belongs to the Russians behind NATO lines there, separated from them by Belarus, their ally, but also by Lithuania. yeah i mean it's a it's a crazy thing to do and it's also strange because yeah that's why they've had to build this false narrative that russia is inherently a threat to everyone the reality is that

these baltic states besides you know being like chihuahuas that are so aggressive despite being so tiny uh is that it's actually good for a huge country like russia to have tiny basically harmless countries next to them that have mostly free trade and whatnot there's any number of reasons that it's a good you know to have them just as little harmless buff that everyone agrees are neutral and you know they weren't actually threatened by russia in any way but uh they're i mean they're deranged with hatred there was recently someone in the american conservative uh i don't remember what the article was called but that said it's like a rule that the smaller and weaker and closer to russia these countries are the more relentlessly uh recklessly

aggressive they are towards russia and it yeah it's absolutely like that yeah sounds like something Doug Bondo would say. It wasn't him. It was someone whose name I didn't recognize. But yeah, it was a really, really good quote. Yeah, he always quotes, there's this movie, The Mouse, that roared about this little

make-believe country in Europe that starts a big fight. And, you know, he says, we collect our allies like baseball cards without ever asking whether this does us any good at all to bring these countries who couldn't possibly assist us in any way. You know, they

say about Ukraine and Georgia? Well, they helped us in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yeah, well, thanks for nothing. Yeah, right. You know? What's funny to me about this, too, is that they're always so hostile to Turkey, who's like one of the only members of NATO that's actually legitimately useful in a major armed conflict and, like, has a large army and a willingness to fight and everything. And it's like, you know, NATO's supposed to be a military alliance. It's not like a gentleman's club of westernized liberal democracies or whatever. So, like, either it's a military alliance, in which case Turkey's probably literally the most important member besides the United States or it's not in which case, yeah, let's fill it up with these tiny nations that could

never help us in any way. Yeah. And of course, I mean, if you're just completely one-dimensional in your thinking, then yeah, it makes perfect sense. The larger our nuclear umbrella and the larger our mutual security system and all these things, and the less likely it is that anyone will dare to mess with us. until they do, in which case we have a real problem. You know, you could take it to, you know, gangs in the neighborhood, right? You consolidate all the different branches of the Crips. Now any one of them can get you into a full-scale war with the bloods,

even if you were trying to avoid that, you know? Yeah, it's wildly irresponsible. And, I mean, it's just really another sign of how, I don't know, unsirious and intellectually bankrupt are supposed like elite class are because, you know, for all the problems with like Cold War thinking, there were truly some great minds there. Like, you know, George

Cannon and other people like that setting these policies that at least had a deep understanding of how the world works and, you know, kind of like big ideas and everything. And the people we have running the show now are just absolute idiots that don't kind of even understand what a military alliance is for. They don't understand how deterrence works.

They don't understand how you get tripped into major conflicts that you can't get out of you know just in remandah wrote in 2014 that you know ukraine having exploded you know may bring us into a proxyism or something like that which you know no one can extricate themselves from and that's basically what exactly is happening in this conflict no one knows of a way out of it we've just set up ever more tripwires everyone is arming up it's very much like when everyone knew world war one was coming and they just wanted a little bit more time to build more weapons instead of actually trying to stop it it's uh Right. It's very bleak.

Yeah. Ken and nothing, I'll settle for Robert Gates now. You know, at least he complained that, geez, come on, guys, this isn't just a social club. This is a war guarantee. This is serious business. And they act like it really is, just the name of a cocktail party circuit where all these people get to dress up fancy and have attention paid to them. Yeah, and that's basically what it is, I guess, besides the fact that it could end all of humanity through their idiocy. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and you know, Romando also said in 2014 that it's perfectly fine to break up the Czech Republic and Slovakia. And what's the problem, man?

We broke up the Soviet Union. You say you're against secession. Ron Paul likes to say, well, America's seceded from Great Britain. You got a problem with that? You know, we're all in favor of the Baltics and Ukraine. And Lord knows they've tried three times to overthrow the government of Belarus because they want. to separate Belarus from Russia? Well, why not just separate East and West Ukraine? Yeah, you know it's really funny about that. The Belarus situation is that they want to blame

all of Ukraine's problems on Russia, but Belarus is basically still a communist country and is very close to Russia and has a substantially higher GDP per capita than Ukraine does. So it really, it's basically provably untrue that Russia is the root cause of Ukraine's problems. Yeah, seriously. And, you know, I didn't even know. I've been learning a lot as I'm writing this book about the color code of revolutions. I don't think I even knew about the failed regime change. The white stork conspiracy they called it, the attempt to overthrow the government of Belarus in 2001. And, of course, Bush tried again in 2005 with the denim revolution. And Joe Biden tried. Or, no, I'm sorry, Donald Trump tried his government anyway. I don't know if he was even read in on it. But his government tried in 2020 to overthrow the government of Belarus again.

I mean, forget Ukraine. Think about how important Belarus is to Russia and how far they might go to prevent such a thing if it ever became a real danger, which it really wasn't. But Lord knows, they tried three times. Imagine the Russians, not in a ridiculous MSNBC conspiracy theory, you know, cooked up by the FBI counterintelligence division. But what if Russia had actually tried to overthrow the government of Canada three times? We'd have gone to nuclear war over that. Well, you know, firstly, people always use theoretical examples about what would we do of whoever aligned with Russia. But, you know, the Cuba did align with the USSR and our ruling class has been throwing an impotent fit about it for like 65 years now.

So we know exactly how they would behave. But yeah, regarding Belarus is a funny thing because in 2020, you know, Lukashenko was actually kind of. of trying to have some reprochement with the West and maybe distance himself from Russia a little bit. And then they tried to do a color revolution on him. And then, of course, they just drove him to be closer to Russia than ever. Oh, I need to know more about that. His cozy up to the West in 2020. I don't have that in my book yet. I mean, I think it was Mark Ames that I saw say something about it. But, I mean, it was mostly just, yeah, trying to make relations somewhat better. And, yeah, kind of thaw a little bit and that sort of thing. And that's exactly,

when they, I don't know, decided it was a good time to make their move because regime change, Inc. are very stupid people. Yeah. They are extremely. And, you know, by the way, as long as we're talking about this, I just read the greatest book that I had completely overlooked until very recently, and I just poached a ton of footnotes out of it. It's called The New Cold War by Mark McKinnon, who's, I had read some articles by him about, um, I think probably the Orrin, no, no, I think the Rose Revolution in 2003 in Georgia that he had written for the Toronto Globe and Mail. But he has this excellent book about all the color-coded revolutions up through 2007 that is, and it's funny because he's somehow on the side of the war party in the thing. But he just tells you everything you need to know about their interventions there. It's really, you know, far beyond what I had even realized going back to. who they even did a color coat of revolution against their buddy Tuchman in Croatia, stabbed him in the back.

And then he died anyway, but they were prepared to overthrow their buddy after they had helped him murder so many people. Yeah, you know, another really good thing on this topic was there was a radio war nerd called Death by a Thousand NGOs about Kyrgyzstan, which is one where they really tested out taking a lot of this as far as they could and, like, completely destroyed the country. And there's a lot of talk to you about how really cynical the people that are, you know, are doing this are, whether it's the kind of cynicism where they just don't care or where they've grown, you know, frustrated with how the world works and just have kind of accepted it. But one way or another, these are not, you know, like really optimistic people that think they're doing the right thing.

They just see a business here of opening everything up to international capital and to give a lot of jobs to absolutely useless people with master's degrees, et cetera. And to take any country that they possibly can away from Russia or the danger of Russian influence at all. And I love the war nerd, by the way, Mark Ames is absolute scum. But his buddy Gary Brecher is awesome. Yeah, I don't know. It's just a podcast I listen to sometimes. Regardless, that episode was really an interesting in-depth story about how far they took the whole NGO-color revolution thing in Kyrgyzstan. the person running the country really did not have the personality to oppose them properly, I guess,

and it just has sent the country to like 20 years of hell. Yep. Yeah, and, you know, Romando covered that, and back then I was his editor and the guy filling his articles with all those links and all of that. So we had all covered that in real time at anti-war.com, along with the Orange Revolution, and then the failed Cedar Revolution in 2005, and later the failed Green Revolution in Iran in 09. and the rest. So, um, but I had, I had completely missed Albania, Slovakia, Croatia in the 90s before Serbia, which was, I guess Serbia really kicked off in 2000, really kicked off the color code of revolution era, but there had even been three or four before that.

Yeah, well, and you know, even Slovakia and now, they were like absolutely losing their mind about the premise that, uh, you know, that Fico would take power again and that he wouldn't be hostile to Russia and, you know, that he wants the Ukraine more to end. And he clearly was to an extent radicalized by Medan happening. I think he could see them doing the same thing to him, basically. But it's really funny because his party got 23% of the vote and he's Slovakia's longest serving prime minister. And they were trying to say that, oh, this is Russia interfering in their elections.

This is a massive influence campaign. Like, Russia's the only one that caused this. So do people really think Slovakia's longest serving prime minister getting 23% of the vote in an election is a sign? that you know there's a vast conspiracy he probably just has support from old people you know someone in eastern from eastern europe told me that their view over there is if you get a new guy he'll just start looting the country all over again whereas the old corrupt guy's already done it and doesn't really need to steal anymore and that's probably a big part of why feco still has a

good amount of support in slovakia yeah and like you said lukashenko in belarus as well Jonathan Steele, who wrote a great book about the fall of the Soviet Union called Eternal Russia and is a real expert on that. He had a piece about the denim revolution in 2005 in The Guardian that begins something like, well, what would you expect the approval rating or reelection rate to be for a president who, and then he goes through all the statistics of, you know, extremely low poverty, high growth rate, low tax, taxes, high pensions, and economic stability compared to all of their neighbors, well, you'd expect them to be re-elected in a landslide, which is exactly what's going on. The only reason it's illegitimate is because the Americans don't like him because he's friends with Vladimir Putin, period. Yeah, I mean, that's all there is to it. And it's... And which is why no one showed up for the denim revolution either, you know, a few hundred protesters

out there and then gone. Yeah, and it's increasingly clear that democracy just, means, you know, they're very narrow type of government by incompetent technocrats. Yeah. And loyal to the United States. And if actual democracy decides the other way, well, then the will of the people and the rule of law will just have to burn in hell because George Soros and the NED know better. Democracy means what D.C. wants. Vlodomir Oshenko said near the end of it, he's like, are we really supposed to believe that, you know, a small group of people that mostly know each other working out of Kiev and Lviv, you know, represent a diverse nation of 40 million people.

And it's like, yes, they absolutely want us to believe that this small amount of Western educated hacks that, you know, get paid through the National Endowment for Democracy half the time, you know, are representative of everyone in these large, diverse countries. And of course, most people, yeah, just want their pension to be paid properly. They want their food to be affordable and they want, you know, to be able to heat their homes in the winter. Like most people do not actually want their country to be part of a vast ideological struggle between two nations, which frankly both have pretty bad hypocritical ideologies that no one should be willing to die for. Yeah. Well, and it's so obvious they're lying when, like, for example, Victoria Newland in that famous speech in front of the big Chevron logo in December of 2013 at the, I forgot the name of the group, the American business backed Ukrainian group. there. And she says, oh, when I'm there, I can feel the spirit and the will of the whole of the

people of Ukraine. It's like, you damned liar. I'm talking about 20% at best who want this. And even the Washington Post admitted that like, come on, man. The polls say that at best the country's divided in half on these issues. The whole of the will of the spirit of the people of Ukraine speaking to me. Shut up. up. Yeah, well, the ones that speak to her class of people certainly do. But, I mean, you see this in every country in the world. You know, I write about Africa a lot.

You see it there to all these people that, you know, have been gone to elite schools in the U.S., any school in the U.S. And they've got in with everyone there. They want to be the elites in their own country. And they're the most anglophone. They're the most likely to use Twitter. And so they get out there and people that forget that Twitter is not real life. and that, you know, the majority of people in a country, yeah, are just normal people that want to support their family and have good lives or whatever, really get on the belief that, like, oh, you know, you get Ursula von der Leyen saying, you know, Ukrainians are willing to die for the European perspective. And it's like, okay, that is insane. Like, we should not listen to anyone that would die for whatever you consider the European perspective to be.

Yeah. It reminds me of a quote from Obama about. during the regime change in 2014, where he said, look, it's in America's interest to hear the voice of the people of Ukraine expressing their desire to join this association agreement with the EU. Like, wait, what? It's America's national interest

to hear the aspirations of some people in some country 7,000 miles from here to join an association agreement. agreement with another continent's trade pact? Yeah, well, and of course, yeah, what Putin said about, you know, their economy being really integrated into the former Soviet economies was true. So, you know, there are people in the West that think they can get jobs in, you know, in Europe or whatever. But the people in the East are basically part of old Soviet manufacturing systems that wouldn't really compete in a, you know,

in an open market with Europe, but need to have an open market with the East. And once you, These are like basic economic issues that are very understandable, and they have very little to do with ideology. Yep. And, you know, that's what Eric Margulies said on this show at the time was you got to understand. The far east of the country dominated by, you know, pro-Russians and Russian speakers and so forth. That's where all the heavy industry is, but a lot of is very old and decrepit, and they can't possibly compete with EU finished goods at low prices. and so much lower prices. And so signing this deal with the EU is essentially a promise to completely bankrupt the industrial east of the country.

And then, of course, that was part of the Russians worry as well, that this is going to be an end-run type of a trade deal and that their market was through Ukraine going to be flooded with European Finnish goods that would undermine their own protectionist policies, which I'm against protectionism, but that's their damn business, not mine. Well, yeah, exactly. And once again, it's much, it's much easier to understand, like, oh, like these people worried about their pensions, then not everything is a vast ideological struggle. In fact, not that many things are vast ideological struggles except in the minds of the lunatics destroying the world. Yeah. Well, and there's plenty of that, too. You know, where these people, some of these extremely far right forces in Ukraine are absolutely willing to help. lead the world to hell if it means that they can have a ethnically pure country and all of this stuff as they put it themselves yeah it's very very scary stuff you know they keep saying like only ukraine can make this decision for themselves and all this like absolute hypocritical nonsense about ukraine and it's like okay no if they've chosen national suicide we have to not enable that like we perhaps we can't stop them from doing it i mean we can't obviously but uh we

we shouldn't be funding that that's the wrong thing to do like if someone tells you they want to martyr themselves like are you going to hand them a gun like no just stop it already well and you know look at the potential blowback coming here as well um you know we had this kind of policy in afghanistan we bog the russians down bleed them to bankruptcy and we got al qaeda and the far enemy doctrine out of that mess what did these nazis going to do the ones who hadn't already been blown up. What are they going to do after America's done betraying them? Well, it seems that Ukraine keeps threatening us that they will do acts of terrorism in Europe if we abandon Ukraine. So I guess that. Yeah. And you're referring directly to

statements by Vladimir Zelenskyy, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't have one on hand. But yeah, they keep saying things like this. Like, yeah, if, you know, this war ends here and then you're going to be seeing terrorism in europe and it's against is that like a threat or is that like an earnest warning to try to help us because it sure sounds like the former yeah well and i he might be expressing his own fear there that they're gonna have his ass and as they've threatened him plenty of times before oh yeah he uh i i can't believe his 15 minutes on the world stage has lasted this long but i mean i still expect that it's going to end with him um you know leaving the country and spending the rest of his life, I don't know, haunting TV studios when

they need to do reminiscences about the, you know, early 2020s or something like that. But alternately, yeah, it could end much worse for him. Yeah, we're joking around. It's either Brookings or a bullet. We'll see. Oh, yeah, the old, yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah. All right, man. Well, I'm happy to have you here to review the bad news with us here. I guess to finish up, there was sort of one spin on this thing, too, that you included as a possibility that, you know, rather than maybe arguing the sunk cost that we really better double down now, that instead they're possibly saying we've done everything we can and we've only been able to get this far and maybe now it's time for the Ukrainians to get used to the idea that they're about to get hung out to dry like the Tajik's in every. Afghanistan. Yeah, I mean, that could definitely be one look at it.

The other, you know, another possible perspective is that they know something really, something else really bad is coming out and they think that it's better to get ahead of it. But I think that it is mostly is just begging for funding. You know, our reeling class never takes, they never have an exit strategy. And if an exit miraculously appears, they still never take it. You know, there's countless examples, not ending the war on terror. after killing bin Laden is one of them uh you know COVID not just declaring it over once vaccines were available or you know any number of things like that like they uh they never have an exit strategy

and even if one shows up they don't take it so uh i i kind of doubt that they're preparing they're using it to prepare an exit i think they just thought that people would see this and think like oh the you know Ukrainians are so passionate about this we've come this far we've helped them get to where they are now we need to put more money into it so we you know our credit won't be damaged by abandoning them. But it's like, dude, everyone saw us flee the Kabul embassy by helicopter. I wouldn't, I don't think our credibility was that high when this whole thing in Ukraine began. Yeah, seriously, well, all right, Brad, well, thanks for coming on the show and talking about this with us, man.

Really important stuff and appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you for having me on. All right you guys, that is Brad Pierce. He is the wayward rabler over there on Substack. And you can find this one also at the Liberty. Institute, the CIA admits its long-time presence in Ukraine. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.