Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/8/22 Max Blumenthal on the Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Max Blumenthal joined Scott on Antiwar Radio to discuss the Neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine that have been enjoying the support of Western governments for years. He also talks about Zelinsky, who was elected on a pro-peace platform which went out the window as soon as he was in power. Instead, he rolled over for the Neo-Nazi group leaders and even floated the idea of bringing nuclear weapons back to Ukraine. Discussed on the show: “How Ukraine’s Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia” (The Grayzone) Director and writer of “Killing Gaza,” Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project and the author Goliath, Republican Gomorrah and The 51 Day War. Follow him on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacific Radio, March 13th, 2022, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome back to the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Enough All right. ready. Time to end the war on terrorism. You'll find my full interview archive. More than 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org. And you can end at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.

And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show. All right, introducing the founder of the gray zone at the gray zone.com. It's Max Blumenthal. He also, of course, is the author of Goliath about Israel and the 51-day war about the 2014 war by Israel against the people of the Gaza Strip, I think it's probably the fairest way to characterize that. And he also, with Dan Coimduced,

what I think is probably the most important documentary about Israel and Palestine that I've ever seen, and there are a few on different subjects, but it really is a masterpiece. I really hope you guys will look at it. It's called Killing Gaza about the 2014 War.

It is just something. else. But anyway, he does a hell of a lot of other journalism on a lot of other very important issues as well. And always controversial too. This one is at the gray zone.com. It's called how Ukraine's Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on the front lines of war with Russia and co-authored with Alexander Rubinstein or Steen, I'm not sure. Welcome back to this show. Max, how are you doing, sir? Good, good to be back. I'll ask you the same thing here that I asked you and Dan Cohen about your documentary about Gaza,

which is, what are a couple of nice Jewish boys like you writing about such a controversial issue and outside of the typical consensus, whether in Israel or the United States here? Well, we are American Jews who are behind this torrent of what would be denounced on Palestine by our official inquisitors of the national consensus as anti-Semitic because we took a position that was highly critical of the state of Israel, Dan Cohen and I, and demonstrated how it was, you know, what what it looked like from the inside, from the inside of the cage in the Gaza Strip to live under apartheid. And here we're taking a position that should be less controversial, me and my Jewish collaborator, Alex Rubinstein, which is that the United States should not be

arming and supporting actual avowed neo-Nazis who have been incorporated into a military, which has been armed to the teeth by the United States. And that, however, is a position that is at this point in time more controversial than criticizing the state of Israel. And you see, you know, in Washington, proudly Jewish journalists whitewashing this issue as they take the popular position of simply standing with Ukraine and demanding that more arms be shipped there. So we've been watching this since 2014. I personally have been against the war in Ukraine since 2014, and I've been writing about this issue of open neo-Nazi influence over the Ukrainian military society and government.

Often against the wishes of many Ukrainians since 2014, and I've come under heavy attack for it. I remember the first time I wrote about this in Alternate, a New York Times editorial appeared calling me one of Putin's puppets, simply for mentioning that this neo-Nazi battalion, known as the Azov Battalion, had been incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard. Yeah, well, I know for a fact that that's true that you've been writing about this since then. I know for a fact that you've been writing about this since before the coup in February 2014, because you and I were retweeting each other the night that they sacked the government buildings on the 22nd of February. And you said, hey, look, they're putting up Confederate flags and Nazi Iron Crosses and swastikas in the city council building. I think it was right there in downtown Kiev that night.

And you already knew what was going on there at that time, as I remember, as we already did. This had been going on for months that protest in the Maidan out there being led by these incredibly, you know, and apparently take one look at them, these extremely dangerous skinhead Nazis, right sector, Svoboda, and then, you know, I guess later we learned the names of all the rest, C-14 and Azov and all the rest of these. But that was all apparent in the streets, and I can vouch for you. I know that you wrote about it then, because I read you. Yeah, C-14, which is the youth wing of the Svoboda Party, which was rallying on the Maidan with John McCain and Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, Democrat, as now Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Newland was handing out cookies. Their youth wing sacked Kiev City Hall, as you said, adorned it with Nazi symbols, literal Third Reich flags. And then when the Barakut, the National Police, the riot police, came in and stormed City Hall to remove them, they took shelter, guess where, in the Canadian embassy, with the full support of the Canadian embassy. This is a neo-Nazi group C-14 that is named after the famous 14 words of the neo-Nazi organizer in the U.S. David Lane about securing the future of the white race for our white children. the Canadian embassy that gave them shelter. This is the same Canadian government that branded its own citizens, Nazis, for protesting mandates.

I think like one Confederate flag was seen there. But this has been happening in the open. Four years after this incident, the C-14 neo-Nazi militia was hired essentially by the Kiev City Council under the new pro-U.S. Maidan regime to carry out pogroms. against families of Roma people who are sleeping under bridges and in and around a train station in Kiev. They carried out this pogrom on camera, pepper spraying and brutalizing with clubs, completely defenseless Roma people in official partnership with the Kiev City Council. And this is documented in my piece with Alex Rubinstein. We've documented it in the past. Sergei Bondar, one of the leaders of that pogrom, went on just weeks later to speak.

speak at the America House in Kiev, which is a meeting center maintained by an NGO funded by the U.S. government. It was connected to the U.S. embassy. And at the time, the U.S. was openly training and arming the Azov Battalion, which is an openly neo-Nazi paramilitary incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, whose founder, Andre Boleski, has said, in writing in 2010 that his mission is to destroy the Semitic Intermension. Those were the exact words he used. This is a group that is photographed with U.S. military trainers, with Nazi wolf's angle symbols on their arms, with uniformed military commanders on their own website. I mean, none of this is hidden. They appear in the field with U.S. light anti-tank weapons.

This has been going on for years, and Congress has even openly debated this issue. It was also in 2018 that the Office of Representative John Conyers, the late Democrat from Michigan, attempted to put a provision in the NDAA to prevent the funding or arming of the Azolv Battalion by the Pentagon. But as we can see right now, they're in the field again with U.S. weapons. All right. Now, hold on just one second. talking with Max Blumenthal, but we've got to stop and raise some money for KPFK. All right, you guys, and it is fun drive time here again at KPFK.

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All right. Now, back to business here. We're talking with Max Blumenthal from the Grey Zone Project about this controversial piece, how Ukraine's Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitary. So we're going to get to the Zelensky angle here in a second. And I know this is stupid. I'll beg your forbearance. but we are in a time of some pale, far-skull imitation of the Red Scare here,

and you brought this up before, it's worth addressing. If the right wing of the Ukrainian nationalists fighting against the Russians in Ukraine right now are a bunch of Hitler-loven Nazis, as you describe them, does that make the Russians a bunch of heroes, Max? Yeah, I mean, I'm not here to endorse anything Russia's doing. It's simply about providing context because Russia doesn't care what we say in the U.S. Russia doesn't care what the anti-war movement says. The American government does care what we think.

And that's why it's waging this massive propaganda campaign to paper over what the U.S. government has been supporting and how the U.S. government, through NATO and through the Pentagon, has incited this conflict and brought 1,000 or so U.S. military trainers to Russia's door. step to work hand in glove with the Ukrainian military and literal neo-Nazi paramilitaries. The conflict has been raging since 2014, and we need to understand what it's about. There are two breakaway republics in the Donbass region, Lugansk and Donetsk, that are majority Russian speaking, that did not want to be part of this new pro-Nado Kiev regime that wanted to remove Russian as an official language that attacked.

the Russian Orthodox Church, which was their faith community, and which had massacred large numbers of Russian speakers, including in a pogrom or just a slaughter in Odessa in 2014, when a group of ethnic Russians started an Occupy-style protest in front of the National Trade Union in Odessa, and they were set upon by fascist thugs weaponized by the Ukrainian intelligence service, the SBU, driven into the trade union, which was then set on fire. And as they jumped out of windows, they either died or were beaten with clubs on camera by these thugs. Incidents like that flowed freely into the fighting in the east where a lot of these ultra-nationalist militants and thugs turned into paramilitary units. And then people in the

Dunbass on the pro-Russian side organized their own. militias. And that fighting has been going on since 2014, leaving 13, 14,000 dead. According to the UN, most of the dead are on the pro-Russian side. And that's really the backdrop for this war. So we have to understand. We're getting the narrative of the Ukrainian side anytime you turn on cable news. If you want to get a Uber, then it asks you to stand with Ukraine or donate to Ukraine. But we have to understand both sides of the issue and make up our minds. And as American right now. We have to know that Vladimir Zelensky, who ran on a peace platform and took a different line than all of the previous presidents, like Petro Poroshenko, who was a nationalist,

hardliner, very pro-war, has become the war president and provides, with his acting background, the perfect public relations vehicle for escalating conflict and turning Ukraine into a new Syria, but on a much greater scale that will flood Europe with migrants and create a catastrophe that we may not have seen since World War I across Europe. He is calling for a no-fly zone. He is demanding that NATO waged conventional war with a nuclear power in Russia. And that's something that even the Biden administration says is going a little too far. So that's who Zelensky is.

And as we illustrated in our piece, Alex Rubinstein and myself, he has gone from, I'm pushing for some kind of negotiation according to the Minsk agreement, which Ukraine consistently, constantly violated, to working with these neo-Nazi units and at least negotiating with them and collaborating with them and being weakened consistently by them and the United States on the other side to the point where the war was kind of becoming inevitable. I can go through specific incidents of him. Sure, go ahead. You know, well, I mean, in December 1st, 2021, Vladimir Zelensky, in an official ceremony in the Ukrainian Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, honored a leader of the neo-fascist battalion right sector, whose nickname is Da Vinci, who has boasted that he keeps, or maybe it was sort of a joke, but he said this to the New York Times, that he has a pet wolf, and he feeds it with the bones of Russian-speaking children. Right sector bears the red and black flag of the UPA, the Ukrainian partisan army that collaborated with Nazi Germany and participated in the pogroms against the ethnic Polish community and participated in the Leviv pogrom, which was one of the worst pogroms against the Ukraine's Jewish community during the Holocaust of Bullets. And Zelensky has held meetings with leaders of C-14 as well as right sector and the Azav-the-Ten. to discuss what will happen in the East.

Will they pull back according to various components of the Minsk Agreement? And each and every time, he backed down to them. He backed down every time. So it doesn't matter if he's Jewish or not. The question is whether he was the man of peace that he campaigned on. Because when he ran for president in 2019, he was campaigning with the support of the Russian-speaking population. I mean, I spoke to several of them.

I spoke to a lawmaker in Crimea at the time, actually, who told me that the only hope was Zelensky. In other words, this was a pro-Russian. At the time, the guy who was in power was the legacy of the coup, but there had been another election. And even though the people of the Donbass had been excluded, this guy was seen as a guy who could bridge the gap between the major factions there. And that was how he got elected.

Exactly. And everyone wanted peace. Russian ethnic Russians wanted peace the Russian population wanted peace the people of Crimea wanted peace who'd been annexed who were pro-Russia Ukrainian majority wanted peace that's what Zelensky was supposed to do

and he proved to be completely hollow and just every bit the actor and not there was real there was really no force he could lean on when it turned out that he was just a puppet for the United States and that the military muscle that he had

to bring to bear were ultra-nationalists. So here he is running around begging NATO to wage direct warfare on a nuclear army and thrust the world into World War III. He's just completely lost at sea. And you could see the steady progression ever since he entered office. Now, who is his funder? Who was Vladimir Zelensky's main patron? He's one of the most corrupt people on the planet. And we should remember that Zelensky campaigned on an anti-corruption ticket as well. Ukraine is the ninth most corrupt country on the planet. And his patron was Igor Kolomoisky, who is a billionaire who had even picked the pocket of other Ukrainian oligarchs. And Kolomoisky himself happens to be Jewish, yet he was the top funder of the neo-Nazi Azav battalion.

Because he just wanted to use it as muscle. I mean, he is used, extremist militias like the IDAR battalion that he funded to take out financial rivals to raid their offices and attack them. That's the kind of environment Zelensky was dealing with. And if you look at the Pandora papers, Kolomoisky funneled something like $30 million into offshore shell accounts controlled by Zelensky's associates to pay for video production. So he was under the control of one of the most corrupt people on Earth who was simultaneously funding the Azov Battalion, the Azov Battalion, which has carried out heinous attacks on migrants, attacked LGBTQ parades in Kiev, assaulted activists, taken over city halls through its National Corps vigilante parade, and openly states that it favors a white reconquista of Europe as part of its ideology and freely parades through Kiev and massive parades upholding banners showing the faces of Nazi war criminals like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukovic. And if you watched MSNBC today, you would have seen a Ukrainian commentator saying that they're naming the Molotov cocktails that they're making Bandera smoothies. So the support for these Nazi collaborators like Bandera is out in the open, but the U.S. media is looking the other way.

All right, it's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton. I'm talking with Max Blumenthal. And now hang on one second for me, Max. We've got to do some fundraising here for KPFK so we can keep doing it. anti-war radio here. And here is how you can pledge to help and donate and support KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. Just go to KPFK.org or call 818-985-5735.

That's 818985-5735. Anybody who donate $75 or more will get a copy of my book enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. So call 818985-5735 to pledge. Let them know you're calling to say. support because of this show. It's anti-war radio on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA. Again, 818985 5735. All right, now back to business here with Max Blumenthal from the gray zone. The reason you support KPFK is for material like this. Now, I got to tell you, Max, I got a speculation here for

you. The New York Times says that the Biden administration had a plan B that even though they really wanted to dissuade Vladimir Putin from making the mistake of invading Ukraine if he would be so foolish as to do so that then they would give him another Afghanistan like the 1980s. And as you mentioned before briefly in another context earlier in the interview, turning it in to something like Syria. And there's even a few quotes of them saying, we don't know how to beat an insurgency, but we sure know how to back one like we did in Afghanistan and we did in Syria. I think that maybe they really wanted this to happen and that's really more like Plan A. And now that I look back at all the

different leaks where these people are bragging about how we're going to give them in Afghanistan, we're going to give them a Syria. There's so many, it's clear that they've been really talking about this for months. And then you look at essentially, everybody can fight me about it later. the reasonable demands of Vladimir Putin that Biden just absolutely would not give into signing on for Ukrainian neutrality and recognition of Crimea and this kind of thing, verification for the lack of missiles being deployed there, et cetera. And then the final straw that's really got me on this, Max, is Zelensky mused. This is not a direct quote, but what he was saying was, eh, maybe we'll get some nukes back in February at the

Munich Security Conference. And Putin should be famously, Putin invoked that as part of his cost of spelly for invasion in his declaration of war. And in fact, even quoted George Bush and said weapons of mass destruction. Quote of Bill Clinton about Kosovo. It's a genocide in Donbass. These were his reasons. And it was funny there because he was being clever and invoking the Bush quote and all that. But then that got me thinking that since obviously no one's going to hand Zelensky a nuke. And he's not going to be able to make one before the Russians invade. So why even say that? And now I think, Max, that they were jerking Putin's chain. And Mr. Genius throat-slitten KGB chess player boy fell for it. And that the CIA, what they really

wanted was to provoke a violent response. They want to try to replicate the Afghan war, Max Blumenthal, the Syrian war in Ukraine this time. What do you think? They're openly saying it. They're openly saying that. You know, it's become a cliche that the U.S. wants to fight this war down to the last Ukrainian. And it's a cliche because cliches tend to be true. That's why they're cliches. The U.S. was openly leaking. The CIA leaked to Yahoo News that it was training hardcore Ukrainian paramilitaries at bases, secret bases inside the U.S. to prepare for an insurgency last year, last winter. So they're already preparing before an invasion. escalations were increasing around Donbass. I mean, two days before Russia's incursion or

operation in Ukraine, I interviewed a foreign fighter, Russell Bentley, inside Donbass, five miles from the front. He said, Russia is going to come in and with massive force and go all the way to Kiev. And I said, are you serious? And he said, yeah, the Ukrainian military has been attacking us all night with grad rockets. They've escalated in a way. We haven't had been rocketed in years, and Russia's not going to tolerate this. So the provocations had been going on for months. And as you mentioned at the Munich Security Conference, Zelensky said that he wanted to shred the Budapest memorandum, which was a 1994 agreement that denuclearized Ukraine in exchange for civilian nuclear facilities supported by the West. So he said, what good was that?

Let's have, I mean, he openly called for the, for nuclearized in Ukraine. And so from the American point of view, imagine if Mexico was given nuclear weapons by Russia and China, right on America's U.S. doorstep. Well, Russia and China were preparing for an insurgency on the U.S. Mexico border. I mean, that's what's happening right now at Russia's doorstep. And, you know, we've seen CIA former agents just fantasized. about this. In the Washington Monthly, there's a guy, I forget his name, who helped reside over the Afghan jihad, Afghan insurgency, arming the Mujahideen, fantasizing about how this could be done

in Ukraine. Today, at the House Intelligence Committee, a Democrat from Illinois, again, I'm forgetting his name, asked Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes about plans for an insurgency, and she said she would discuss that in a closed hearing. So they're definitely preparing for that. When you see them calling for Stinger missiles for more javelin anti-tank missiles, they're not preparing to stymie the Russian assault. What they're preparing for is to escalate and extend Russia's presence at the cost of untold lives in a massive migration crisis that will just crash on the shores of the EU in a way that we didn't even see during the other migration crisis that the West fueled with its insurgency in Syria.

Man, just unbelievable. I mean, think about this. Like, if you're just John Q. Public in his living room right now, aren't you thinking that, well, shouldn't Anthony Blinken, our Secretary of State, be in Geneva right now, trying to negotiate with the Russians for a ceasefire kind of a thing? He's not. And they told, I think, the Post, that, no, we're not talking to them. The generals aren't talking to each other.

And our foreign minister is not talking to their foreign minister. Minister, Max Blumenthal. They want this war. They want to prolong this war. Well, I was just on Capitol Hill just a few hours ago asking members of Congress what they thought of the ban on Russian oil, which is going to send inflation and gas prices and food prices skyrocketing. I saw a Russian official actually warned that gas could go up to oil could go up to $300 a barrel. It's already exploding through the roof like $120. So the American working class is going to be harmed by this. And I saw Representative Rokana from California, who ran on a peace platform from the Progressive Caucus, asked him, you know, is this the price Americans have to pay

for a conflict that is not theirs? And he said, yes, we have to pay the cost of freedom. This is about freedom. He sounded like a Bush-era neocon talking about this war. And this is a guy who was branded as anti-war, as a successor to Bernie Sanders. The only person I could find on Capitol Hill who was critical of this whole program to escalate the conflict and face down Putin at any cost was the libertarian from Kentucky, Thomas Massey, who happened to be one of three out of 438 members of Congress. He was pretty much one of only three to vote against the congressional resolution supporting Ukraine, which also called for military escalation against Belarus, which is not even involved in the conflict. I mean, it was a crazy resolution. It called for military escalation

and he was only one of three members of Congress, zero Democrats, zero members of a squad voted against it. But, you know, credit to Ilhan Omar, who is actually at least questioned the logic of sending flooding Ukraine with weapons. Mark my words, I mean, and he, Mark Scott's words, many, many more people will die than was necessary because of this escalation. And as Americans, Russia doesn't care what we think. We as average Americans, we couldn't stop a Russian invasion, but we can pressure our own government, stop this. And that means defying the propaganda and defying Zelensky, who is calling for World War III with a no-fly zone. Finally, since you brought up the Afghan Mujahideen, the Afghan proxy war.

We're very short on time. Go ahead. Yeah, very quickly. Who are the Mujahideen? Who are the freedom fighters here? That's who we've been talking about the whole time. Who will be the most hardcore fighters? It's the Asov Battalion. It's the C-14 guys. It's the right sector guys. And the U.S. is the hottest with them too. And yeah, I mean, we've seen Syrians on the pro-Ukraine side for several years and from Chechnya and Dagestan who have been affiliated with ISIS. So that's who the U.S. is going to arm and just it's pretty much a no-brainer that that's not good for humanity. Yeah. All right, everybody. That is the great Max Blumenthal, producer of, again, the great documentary, Killing Gaza

and proprietor of this very important journalistic website, the gray zone.com. The latest is how Ukraine's Jewish President Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on the front lines of war with Russia. And thank you again for your time, Max. Thanks a lot, Scott. All right, you guys, and that is anti-war radio for this morning. donate to KPFK, it's 818985-5735, 8189855-5735, or KPFK.org. And I'm at Scott Horton.org and on Twitter at Scott Horton's show.

And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.