Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/22/24 Daniel McAdams on Color Revolutions, Past and Present

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Scott interviews Daniel McAdams about the Western-backed uprisings in Eastern Europe known as Color Revolutions. McAdams has a lot of experience reporting and analyzing these uprisings. They first talk about the Color Revolution that appears to be happening today in Georgia before digging into McAdam's experience attending the so-called Denim Revolution in Belarus in the early 2000s. They end with a quick discussion about the war in Ukraine. Discussed on the show: Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen Daniel McAdams is the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and the co-host of the Ron Paul Liberty Report. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLMcAdams and read all of his work over at Antiwar.com. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: 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 than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show okay guys on the line i've got the great dan macadams he is of course rom paul's right hand man over there at the rom paul liberty report and the ron paul institute for peace and prosperity and for many years was Dr. Paul's foreign policy advisor in his congressional office

and of course he's great on all of this stuff. Welcome back to the show. Dan, how are you doing, sir? Thanks for having me back, Scott. It's great to be with you again. Very happy to have you here. So, in my upcoming book, if I ever do finish it, man, you're just going to love my treatment of the Rose Revolution of 2003 when old George W. Bush did a coup d'etat and overthrothed that thing over there. But I also have a little bit of a treatment about Georgia in 2022 right before the war broke out.

They're still pushing their luck over there. And now there's sort of a reprise of that going on. So, but I don't know the extent of it, but I know that you're really an expert on Eastern Europe and NATO shenanigans over there in Russia's former sphere of influence, especially and including the caucuses over there. So can you tell us, first of all, like, you know, just who's who and what they're fighting about? Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because there's no denying that NATO and the U.S. and what have you, they would love to open the Southern Front against Russia. And if they can leverage off Georgia into their camp, then it will be a huge victory for them

because they're trying, they're desperate now as they lose in Ukraine and continue to lose in Ukraine, their two things are escalate in Ukraine. And we're seeing a lot of that now. we're seeing, I think Speaker Johnson just said, I'm urging President Biden to give them the green light to strike deep within Russia, okay? That happened today. But at the same time, to cause problems for Russia on its flanks. And I think we saw that with the switch of policy in Armenia over the past, you know, six months to a year. And I think you're seeing that with Georgia now today. And in fact, Georgia is the president of Georgia is literally a foreign agent.

And the issue at hand right now is the so-called transparency bill that came up in parliament and was passed after three readings and vetoed by the president. But there'll be an override by parliament that should come very shortly. So it's the prime minister versus the president, basically. And then so can you tell us about the prime minister? Well, the Prime Minister, I mean, the Georgia Dream Party that brought up this legislation, they have a very large majority in Parliament. I mean, Georgia is always going to be divided in camps. I mean, I followed Georgia. I followed it less recently, but I've been following it now because it's important.

But from the days of Gamska Khoria, who was the first leader of Georgia after the end of Congress. They had, well, you had, of course, a shepherd Nazi who then arrested and put all the gums and cordial people in jail. I actually visited them in a prison in Georgia when I was there many years ago. It's an awful, awful place to be. But nevertheless, it's always going to be very divided. And you have the Georgia Dream Party with a very large majority, and they passed, they put up this bill, a transparency bill. The transparency bill, and I've read the bill. And in fact, I went back and read our FARA bill, our foreign agents registration act bill.

to see yeah and that's a long bill to see how they compare and you know the um the way that is presented in the western media is that this is a russia like law when in fact it tracks pretty equally with our fara bill and essentially all that it says and i read the whole bill all that it says is in georgia if you are an NGO if you are a print media if you are a broadcast media and if you are a website, and more than 20% of your budget comes from a foreign state actor, you must declare that you must make a declaration of that support. And so it's reasonable. It doesn't ban them.

It doesn't fine them. It just says you have to register that you have more than 20% of your budget being paid by a foreign government. Which I would think in the name of transparency, it sounds fairly reasonable. Yeah. Well, is there some deeper implication of how it would take effect? Or that really just is the extent of it. And then if so, what's all the barking about? Well, Georgia has an enormous proportion of quote-unquote NGOs per capita.

And that is, yeah, that is how, you know, you and I, Scott, would both hate the state. But in a way, NGOs are worse. and in a way, foreign-funded NGOs are far worse, because as bad as the state does, at least there's some legitimacy if you have elections. There are some accountability that you have elected. But when you have a foreign-funded, quote-unquote, non-profit pressuring society, pressuring governments, then you have an absolute lack of accountability, hence lancet lack of transparency, which is a real problem. I mean, if you're for democracy, you know, for the sake of the word, let's say that. Your democratic legitimacy comes from the ballot box. It doesn't come

from George Soros. It doesn't come from the International Republican Institute or the National Endowment for Democracy or the, you know, all the different schifungs in Germany. It doesn't come from that. So the, but the reason why they're squealing is that the great champions of the international rules-based order, interestingly enough, they hate transparency. In fact, what's interesting is one of the biggest critics of this transparency bill is transparency international. You think it'd be all for it, you know, because all it does is say, we need transparency. Who's funding our media?

You know, can you imagine America? We'd want to know if the Chinese were funding 50% of Fox News, we'd want to know. I mean, directly funding Fox News. If the Russians were funding NBC, we'd want to know, you know. But all of a sudden, you know, what's good for me is not very good for thee. So transparency international flipped out over it, and they put out a statement back in a couple weeks ago about how terrible this foreign agents bill, as they call it. It's a transparency bill. And I knew this already, but I went and looked up and looked at who funds transparency international. Vast of majority of them is governments. They're funded by the governments. 60% of their budget comes from governments. And the rest of it comes from government NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy, the Schifungs in Germany and elsewhere. So you have this issue of where you're a foreign funded entity and NATO and State Department

as well, calling themselves Transparency International, attacking a government that's actually trying to instill some transparency. You know, that's that's sort of, you know, Western foreign policy in a nutshell. Man. So, okay, a couple of things. First of all, I think it was the Bangladeshis now. I try to give credit for the great turns of phrase that I poach. I'm pretty sure this one comes from the Bangladeshis.

They call the NGOs next-to-government organizations. Yeah, that's good. Which is, yeah, isn't it? It really says so much. And then I think that's where that came from. That's what I read somewhere. I don't know where I read that from anymore. I lost that footnote, but anyway.

And then the other thing is, man, the NGOs, especially in places like Georgia, They wear all their intervention on their sleeve anyway. So much of it is right there on their websites and the NED this and the Republican International Institute and the National Democratic Institute and all of the different Soros organizations and all these things. So if they're flipping out about this level of transparency, when they really do already even boast about so much, I don't even know if you'd call it admitting it, right? Like, they are happy to take credit for all that they do most of the time. It really raises the question of who are they backing that we don't know about? How much is the iceberg below sea level if this is what's apparent right in front of our eyes? And that's a great point, Scott, because, you know, I mean, I did, when I was living in Central Europe,

I did a lot of work on this and a lot of investigation. And a lot of things they do is they have cut out. They have subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. So, you know, by the time you dig through the pile of noodles, it's very difficult to find who's who and what's what. You know, you could be a sub-sub-contractor for the State Department or for the NED or for USAID or something, and because it's sub-sub-sub, then it doesn't have to be listed. So you're absolutely right. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and they don't, they don't hide it very much at all. So, but the other thing that's interesting is you have these press, these press freedom organizations, the international press,

Institute put out a press release attacking this transparency bill. And they said it's terrible because it threatens independent journalists. And I thought, okay, what does that mean? We're talking about foreign government funded media entities. You're not independent. I mean, the Scott Horton show would not be independent if it was underwritten, you know, by the government of Canada or by the government of Taiwan or something, you know. I mean, by definition, you're not an independent journalists if you work for a foreign government or if you're funded by a foreign government you know full stop

seriously uh well and that goes for all the DC and it's funny how much again they just admit it too how they're on the take of all those foreign governments operating in DC it's a yeah we'll look at like the we're all frozen out but they do it with

and to each other yeah I think Brookings is funded by Carter and you probably know better than I do but all of those big think tanks are running definitely funded by big you know a lot of big arab money there as well well hym sabin uh donates for the sabin center at brookings and he's you know rabid lecudnik the guy from the mighty morph and power rangers fortune decided he's going to throw his weight around in that funny what a world i did some to us hey um so now what's going on in the streets there as far as the crowds how big are they claimed to be

how big are they really and is their election coming up i mean as we saw in 2014, you don't really have to have an election to have a color-coded revolution, but it certainly helps. That's how they do it. Most of the time is by either rigging one or complaining so loud after losing one that they get their way anyway. Yeah, I mean, it's difficult. I don't know that there's a simple formula to end, you know, a color revolution when it's in force. And I think the Russians defeated one not long ago and sort of the Belarusians. But Russia used a hell of a lot of force. right we're just we're not going to put up in the full stop and when belarus got into trouble what was like

2018 or something they called in the russian and say hey we need some help putting this down so that is one way to do it i don't know because you know we saw how long it lingered in in ukraine you know they started late 2013 and they were able to ratchet the violence up ratchet and ratchet until early 2014 when you saw the quote-unquote snipers and all sorts of crazy things happening that finally made it overflow so i don't know that it's there yet in Georgia. You know, the, the, the protest as far as I can see, is limited Tbilisi. And what do you have in Tbilisi? Well, it's where all the NGOs are. So you have all the people that are benefiting from this, the last thing they want is for people to know that they literally are foreign agents. And you know what's ironic, Scott, is because is that in one of

these protests, there literally were foreign agents in the crowd directing it. And by that, I mean, the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Estonia, and Iceland were out there in front leading. So It's just, you can't, you can't beat the irony that here are foreign agents in Georgia demonstrating against a foreign agent transparency bill. Man, and you know, the thing about that, I mean, first of all, it's reminiscent of what happened in 2014 where you had all these ambassadors out in the crowd, not just Newland, but a bunch of different European folk as well, especially polls, I guess. And so, I mean, but what does that say, though, right? Like, you don't have to speculate too much to just understand that this. a major operation going on where these national governments came to an

agreement that they were going to send their foreign ministers together to represent them in the protest crowd in this fashion. I mean, that's a big deal before they implemented it. You know what I mean? That's not just they showed up at a protest.

This is something, you know, that's being cooked up by NATO, clearly. Yeah, it's at a high level. Your foreign minister is a pretty high ranking personally and i don't know if you caught this but something really interesting happened uh at least i saw the video just a couple of days ago is that there were a couple of americans that were arrested and their cover story was pretty flimsy yeah i don't did you see that no no i had missed that i have

the nation article and i have the brad pierce article here is yeah it's the best of that brad's good yeah but um it's i saw it on twitter x but basically here there's these i mean they classic spooks to me and he's in the guy said I don't know I don't know what's going on here I I just came to Georgia to do some backpacking and drink some wine and then I got to town and I saw there were some protests so I joined in I don't know they're trying to make it look like I'm was part of the you know some kind of foreign you know foreign spy or something and then they showed the video of him he's in the protest he's violent he's pushing against the cops he's leading others and then they they show a second guy and he says this is so hilarious people are acting like I'm

James Bond or something. I'm just an English teacher here who likes to hang out with his buds. You know, and it's just, it is so classic. It's like out of central casting. Come on, man. You know who you guys are working for? You're over there to fulment the revolution, you know? Yeah, very interesting stuff. I'm

always behind. Where's Romondo when we need him, Dan? Oh, I know. I know. It'd be out there for sure. Yeah. But, you know, and their president is an interesting specimen because she is, again, she is a foreign agent. She is French.

She had never been to Georgia until she was age 30. She doesn't speak Georgian very well, if at all. And in fact, she was France's ambassador to Georgia. So she literally is an agent of the West who is the president of Georgia, which is pretty fascinating to see. And it also just underscores the divide in Georgian society, where you have a pretty patriotic Georgian Dream Party who want this transparency bill

because they see what the NGOs are doing to society, you know, they see what's happening with foreign funded and they're well funded. I mean, these jobs you know, we think over here in the U.S. if you work in the nonprofit sector unless you're really welcome. If you're an honest nonprofit like anti-war.com

and Ron Paul Institute, you're not making big bucks, right? But over there, they're paid Western salaries where Western salaries really actually mean something. So these people have a lot to protect. They want, to protect these cushy jobs they want to be quote part of the west whatever that means um you know that drove the midan as well we want to be part of the west you know you know 10 years later you're all

dead yeah yeah yeah have to team up with a bunch of crazy to the right of the nationalists to get away with it so good luck with that yeah and we saw that i saw that in in belarus of course in the denham revolution where the opposition was extreme nationalist uh you know know just like just like in ukraine i didn't say any nazi symbols there but they were very very hard right um you know what i quote you in the book uh you wrote a great article for antiwar dot com at the time about the denim revolution but i'd be all ears if you just wanted to say whatever's on your mind about how you remember that thing going down this is the failed color-coded coup of 2005 right yeah yeah i was i mean i was there in the middle of it i was in minsk and like it was

It was kind of surreal because everything the mainstream media was reporting was absolutely wrong. And I think I put that in the article that, you know, they were waving flags of denim, you know, in the main square. And I'm literally right there looking around and no one's waving denim. All they are is sort of a bunch of, you know, druggy looking skinheads, gulping down beer and vodka and eating a bunch of food. You know, it was in a lot of Western media there. So it was, it was definitely not as it was being reported. The fix was in on the elections anyway. This was a presidential election there.

And the OSCE already issued its report on the elections before the election happened. So there's that. You know, this election is unfree and unfair. And in fact, I was at a count in one of the constituencies for the elections. And I watched the count very well. And I have to say, I still think, and this has been a long time ago, I still think it's one of the best counts I've ever seen. And I wish we had a system like they had there at the time, which is that representative of every political party running in the election was sitting around a big table. And then you had the electoral commission and his deputy.

And you had other observers. And they were all around the table with a big pile of physical ballots. And they pulled one off the top. And the person from the electoral commission said, this is a vote for so-and-so. And then it went around the table and everyone looked at it. And if they agreed, they put it in a pile for so-and-so. so. And if there was a dispute, then they would discuss it. And you would say that it's such an onerous task. It actually took a very, very short period of time. It was done very fast. And it was

totally, totally transparent. So it was a very good, you know, at least what I saw in the count was very good. But that didn't stop them from trying to overthrow the election at the time. And they came awfully close. Did they now? So talk about that part. Well, They had the media. They controlled the square. I mean, they started from before the election. The night before the election is always a quiet time. And they actually in the main park had a very loud, very hardcore heavy metal conference, a concert, I'm sorry, with all the flags of the opposition parties and the representatives of the opposition parties giving speeches, all illegal according to their election laws. But none of them were broken up by the police. But you had, again, the media on their side. you had a lot of people in the main square and um and uh at the time uh leucoshenko was was was vacillating between the west and the east he wasn't fully in putin's camp as he is now uh so it was um i'd say it was it was a it was a pretty close situation at the time interesting all right so now you mentioned Zoro Bishvili, how do I say it?

Yeah. Some people give the... I'll say, never mind. Yeah, Salome. She's French. She doesn't speak Georgian very well, if at all. And she's an agent of Macron, essentially, you know. People say to me, Scott, how do you get so much work done all the time?

Coffee. It helps keep me from falling asleep. And it tastes really good because I get it from Moondose Artisan Coffee at Moondoseartisan Coffee. Moondos is kind of the anti-starbucks, in that their coffee tastes real good. They have lots of great choices, representing all kinds of regions, blends, and flavors. I'm drinking the Ethiopian presently. Hey, wait, also, do you like saving money on good tasting coffee? Right now, you can get 10% off and help support this show if you just go to Moondoseartisancoffee.com

slash Horton. Find the link and the QR code in the margin at Scott Horton.org. That's Moondoseartisan coffee.com slash Horton. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house, so I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org, so keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war.

All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org, or go to Scotthorton.org Subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Okay, so what's interesting here is I have this quote.

I collect these things like Hot Wheels, you understand? So this one is she told, in 2008, I guess on a bad day, you know, she told the French journal Heteradote, she said, these institutions were the cradle of democratization, notably the Soros Foundation. The NGOs which gravitate around the Soros Foundation, undeniably carried the revolution. However, one cannot end one's analysis with the revolution,

and one clearly sees that afterwards, the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power. And then I go on and list some of the Soros associates who ended up getting important jobs with the Shakashvili regime in 2003 after the Rose Revolution there. That's very interesting. Yeah, so she was the lady that, as you used, said they parachuted her right in to take over the finance ministry i believe it was right

yeah um so this is like a few years later and i guess there's some schism as some personal uh dispute in there that had her kind of uh blabbing her grudge to the media about that but i just like that because it's sort of straight from the horse's mouth kind of a thing that yeah that was really what happened was and that is interesting because you do see that elsewhere in the region i mean I think Eddie Rama, who's had a, you know, 20-some year political career in Albania, I think he came up through the Soros ranks. And so I think you see a lot, and that's one way to gain power, because they probably know deep down there's no legitimacy in the NGOs,

but they use that as a springboard to get into elected office. Yeah. I mean, in my book, I talk about Soros so much that I do kind of feel obligated to say, like, hey, by the way, I'm not really part of this, like, get Soros movement. which in fact I think is probably run by Zionists because they're mad at him because he's not really a Zionist. And that's why they don't like him.

And like whoever might think whatever they want about him, I'm just saying what's true that I found from my research through absolutely reputable journalism. And I don't know what to tell you. Like this guy has been throwing heavy weight around for decades. I mean, he first was intervening in the Ukrainian presidential election in 1994.

for kuchma and has ever since been over there you know well you know um victor orban was was was a scholarship from sorrows back in the 90s uh and so he definitely he's a good spotter of people with a bright future and that's why george sorrows hates victorubon and feed us so much because fides was his bet project um fedes and the s ds the alliance of free democrats in hungary were his big project and fides broke away became more of a nationalist party and they absolutely hate each other but I agree with you too the right wing in America wants to see a Soros

under every rock and that's just intellectual laziness I think yeah but it's funny though because if you're talking about the color code of revolutions and all that well there's a lot of Soros there sorry just I'm not saying he's responsible for everything in the world but he sure does

play a huge role in this and according to his own boasts and his State Department friends and everyone else too it's beyond dispute I mean this is what he does It's his job, self-appointed. And that's why it is so insidious, is that he works so closely with governments, you know, and he does the funding for these groups, and he identifies them, and then state and NED and IRA and, you know,

NDI come along and provide the money and the backing and the training. And, you know, all the great trips abroad, all of the, you know, exposure to American politicians, you know, and I mean, I was watching this like 30 years ago, 35 years ago, and it's hard to believe it's still going on. But I think with this Georgia thing, it reminds us it's definitely still going on. And as you were saying before, with these NGOs, it's the perfect way to, it's the perfect thing to use as a cutout to get around the law, right? That's the whole point of it, is to make it deniable so they can do things that the U.S. government is forbidden by some statute or the other from doing in other people's country. They can't be unelected because they're not elected in the first place. Yeah.

So, I mean, look what happened in Slovakia. The Slovak public was sick of the obsequious, counterproductive policies of the previous government, you know, isolating themselves from a good trading partner in Russia, being part of the war machine. And so they elected Robert Fitso, you know, but you can't, you know, they change. They change governments. You can't do that when it's an NGO because they're better funded and they can't be kicked out. you know remember back when it was um in uh in in in in Croatia uh Franio Tuchman was a was a was a was a right winger and one of the last things he did before he got his own revolution is that he kicked out George Soros so it it definitely has it definitely has its downfall if you want to stay

in power right yeah in my little treatment of that in the book it's all about how they were about to overthrow the guy but then he died anyway like two weeks before the election but then they still got their way and put their guy in there that was one of their first real successes as far as the color-coded template type thing going on i guess the second or third on the list i suppose they hated tuchman for sure well they sure backed him a lot before they didn't yeah exactly that's what happened i mean that's what happened then you're saying right yeah i mean that's what happened to salibarisha in albania i mean he was the favorite he was the golden boy and then he refuse Clinton's request that they that he be that the US be allowed to use an island off of

Albania as a listening post for the Yugoslav war because British it didn't want to be part of the war and as soon as he as soon as he refused that request his days were numbered that's when we had the um then the 90 the 92 and the 96 civil war in albania oh man dan I got to add a paragraph to my book now would you please send me a piece about that Sure. Well, my source from that is a meeting with Salibarisha in 96. So he told me himself what happened. Oh, okay. Wow. Do you have that in writing or I'll just cite this interview then? Yeah, or I'll write it up. Yeah. Okay, that'd be great. I collect these footnotes. You see, I got 4,930 something of them now and counting. God bless you for that because you know what? I've got all these things rattling around in my more and more decrepit brain.

I had done what you've done. You've done us all a huge service by keeping those, keeping track of those things. Yeah. You know what, too, man. At some point, I'm going to have you read, especially the color code of revolution stuff and, and see if it jogs your memory about anything I'm missing because I know that you're been good on this since before I was paying attention to it. Love to see. I can't wait to read it. Playing catch up. We'll see what happens with that. so but yeah uh the listening posting in albania uh you know i got a pretty good treatment of the balkans man i think you'll like it but i don't have that so looking forward to it that's great yeah okay dan let me ask you about the shooting of slovakia's prime minister and i know

this is all caught up in america russia politics but i don't know much more well actually i don't know whether the shooting had anything to do with that or not i do know that slovakia's government is caught right between America and Russia right now, and I don't actually even know if that really plays into this or what. But tell me what's going on, do you think? Well, the shooter's wife is Ukrainian, and apparently she was always hectoring him. Her husband.

You better shoot him. Yeah, I mean, it's really almost that. No, the guy was... The guy was... Yeah, I mean, he was an activist. We called him like a left-wing neocon, I guess, in the U.S., something like that. You know, there's not an exact parallel.

But yeah, he was a political activist. His wife was Ukrainian, and he was furious. Robert Fizzo said, we are actually going to, we're going to side with our neighbor Hungary here. Fizzo and Orban have a good personal relationship, which they didn't actually, many years ago when Fizzo first came on the scene, he was a much different, he was much different cat. But he switched a lot now. He and Orban are good friends. And they both said, look, we don't want to be a part of this war.

We have to have a peace agreement. This is futile. And the craziest thing, and I'm sure you saw this, Scott, is that right after Fitsa was shot, I mean, this was assassination of a head of state. And the mainstream media across the Western world said, well, basically it's his fault because there was a lot of discontent in Slovakia. A lot of people disagreed with them. You know, I mean, you're justifying the attempted assassination of a leader. And, you know, it's all over. Like, it's all over the, you know, the mainstream and financial times, what have you. It's, it's all over the mainstream and financial times, what have you. everywhere this kind of justification for it it's amazing so now the prime minister there in the slovakian system he's really the undisputed leader and the president plays a lesser role or yeah yeah that's that's how it works yeah it's a part of entry system more than a presidential but you know pellegrini is the president he's actually um in ideological agreement with fido so that's um that that often doesn't happen but it strengthens uh it strengthens the government you know a policy when that is the case and it's the case in slovakia right now

um and then so what difference does it make in terms of uh the relationship between american rush if he if he goes uh or bond's way what does that really mean well i think they are slovakia already has with featsu i mean they definitely have and they definitely said no more weapons transferred through slovakia we won't be involved in this we won't and to the point where the will they vote against more weapons we'll see i mean they're their NATO members and EU members will see how much they use their vote, but they've definitely fallen off the camp. I mean,

they've fallen out of the camp. And that's, I think, significant because it could, who knows? I mean, it could indicate a broader shift in Europe. You know, we have, I mean, the UK is hopeless, but we have places like Germany where there's the, there are parties on the right and the left that are actually mostly in agreement, you know, this the Saravagan-X party and you have the ADF. on the right and so you have parties coming up in France you have the Penn's party and a few others

that are similar so you could see a kind of a rise of a backlash we haven't seen it yet but the colonel I think will be in in Hungary and in Salakia yeah man all right so how's the Ukraine war going lately well not too good for Ukraine not too good from for I mean I just saw video yesterday. It was actually heartbreaking. But there were, I think, three or four Ukrainians that had surrendered. And they were interviewed by the Russians. And the guy said, I was pulled up off the street three days ago. They put me in a car. They dropped me in this, in this flipping trench with no instructions, no, no idea what to do. And actually, the other video I saw was a guy, a guy who was alone, same thing, just picked up off the street. No training. Here's a gun. I mean,

they're so desperate for men and women, even, that they're just picking him off the street without any training and throwing him over there. So it's, it's, in terms of humanitarian disaster, it's just awful, a whole generation of men are lost in Ukraine. But in terms of escalation, you're seeing a lot of that. You're seeing, I just mentioned Speaker Johnson talking about the need to facilitate Ukraine missile strikes deep within Russia. I mean, whatever you say about Putin, he's not a bluffer. He may be, you may think he's a good guy, a bad guy, you may be indifferent. He doesn't bluff. He's not like our blowhard politicians, you know, but he's been very specific about this, you know, if Russian territory, i.e. pre-2014 Russian territory is hit with missiles

that are, you know, facilitated by Western sources will strike them in Ukraine and beyond. So, and right after he said that, of course, that's when he brought in the British and the French ambassadors for de Marsh and explained that to them. And right after he did that, they did that as if to punctuate his words, he announced that there would be exercises of the Russian tactical nuclear forces. So he's clearly making his point on this. He doesn't want to see storm shadows coming deep inside of Russia. And, you know, that's going to be the quickest way, you know, to start World War III.

But the neocons, as you know, Scott, they do not have a reverse gear. And they don't know how to back down. You saw Victoria Newland resurfaced somehow on ABC News over the weekend saying, well, this is really unfair that we're not encouraging the Ukrainians to strike deep within Russia. They should be able to do that. It's unfair because Russia's winning, and that's not fair. Yeah, it's completely nuts. And look, you know, it's such a high consequence thing, and it hadn't happened yet,

and it's so easy for us to convince ourselves that mutually sure destruction just protects us, and it always will, and it works well, and so kind of that's the end of that. But the thing is, what we're talking about, missile strikes inside Russia. So you have to look at that through the eyes. of a radar operator who's not looking at a missile. He's looking at a computer screen that represents, you know, that shows blips representing missiles. And what they hope is just a conventional warhead or what they hope is just a Reaper drone at worst or some, you know, Chinese off-the-shelf drone and not a nuclear warhead of some kind.

and never make a mistake and always take the right for granted and give the benefit of the doubt to peace and never panic we're just going to keep shooting missile after missile after missile into Russia and we just know that they will know that come on none of these have H-bombs on them

and so they'll never react as though they might you're willing to bet on that? Yeah exactly well they've already been clear that, you know, F-16s are capable of carrying nuclear weapons. And so they will treat every F-16 as if it may have a nuclear weapon on it. So I think that's pretty clear as well. And they also have hypersonics. They can deliver nuclear weapons at hypersonic speed to the West.

So, I mean, is this really a game we want to play? Yeah, it really is. Well, let me ask you something, man. You've been looking at especially America's relationship with Russia for so long. I mean, it seems this way to me, but it's just kind of a characterization. And so I just wonder whether you agree with it that like they really kind of have or it seems to me like they really have kind of shifted even maybe the meaning in their own mind of mutually assured destruction from we're going to have to sit back here and you're going to have to sit back there and we can't ever ratchet these tensions up so much because of the danger to instead they sort of replace that with well we can do whatever we want because of this assured destruction. And so we're not deterred by your nukes, but you better be deterred by ours. And I'm not sure if that was what the eggheads at the University of Chicago meant when they did their little game theory equation or whatever.

But I think that might be where we're at now. And mostly all thanks to, yeah, I just read a thing this morning in the Washington Times about they think that the Russians have gone ahead and deployed this nuclear weapon in space that's designed to take out all the lower Earth orbit. communication satellites and stuff like that and uh i couldn't help but just think of george w bush pulling out of that abm treaty and starting us down this path 25 years ago you know and how ironic it is and i think you're right it's flipped on its head but at the time when we when we had a belief in mutually short destruction and how it restrained foreign policy that was a time when the soviet union was actively warning as nikita crucev said we will bury you i mean they were actively involved in promoting their system at the destruction of ours. And fast forward to today,

and they're not like that. I mean, you may hate what Putin's done in Ukraine. You may think he's a bad guy. He's an authoritarian. I think that's without question. But nevertheless, Putin is not getting up saying, we will bury the West. We will export our ideology. And it will be, it's the historic inevitability of the triumph of Bolshevism. We don't have that kind of threat. if we had just left him alone and let Ukraine be neutral, we wouldn't even be having this war. They're not an extensionist power. They're not an ideological state like the Soviet Union was. And so even though this, because of that, the threat is ratcheted so far down. As you say, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, at least on our side, has gone way, way up. It's an absolute paradox.

Yeah. So, hey, man, have you read this new book, Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson yet? I have not. I'm afraid to say. I messed up, man, when I read it. I just read it to poach a couple of footnotes for the book, but I didn't write down a bunch of notes to interview her because I'm just stupid. That part of my brain wasn't functioning at the time.

And then also, especially I got to the end and I realized, oh, she has all her footnotes at the end, and they don't have numbers throughout the text. They just have little snippets of the text in the back. So I could have been poaching all kinds of extra footnotes the whole time. Anyway, the thing is,

I don't know if you know the story, but I'll just say for people listening here that the story is she when interviewed secretaries of defense and generals and admirals and strategic air command guys and Ted Postal and

all nuclear weapons scientists he's a missile scientist nuclear weapons scientists of all kinds at the highest level William Perry and Leon Panetta and all of these people and then she wrote a fictional scenario

about how a nuclear war might break out and mostly accidentally and how basically the bottom line is if there's a nuclear war at all it becomes a general nuclear war because the whole premise

of mutually assured destruction is we will unleash everything and if we don't then they'll hit us and so you got to use them or lose them and so in any kind of nuclear confrontation and I don't people understand this or not in any kind of real nuclear confrontation America and Russia both launch all thousand or fifteen hundred missiles that they

have on ready and just go ahead and completely obliterate the northern hemisphere it'd be like a self-inflicted asteroid that killed the dinosaurs on that level that's what we're set to and there's not that many different options for the war that's basically it you got option one two or three and they all lead to total apocalypse yeah you got to use them or you lose them Yeah. And so, you know, who knows what Biden is even capable of conceiving or thinking of when it comes to things like that, you know? And but I know that the Americans often conclude that the other side just doesn't have red lines and we can just do whatever we want. And then the other sides always prove that that's really not right, you know?

Yeah. It's really scary stuff. But it's a compelling case because it's not like fanciful. It's her explaining that like, yeah, pretty much this is how it would be. beat. Wow, I got to get a copy of that. Yeah, yeah, you'll like it. Everybody will. It's really great. And it makes a lot of the points. I have a nuclear war section in my book, and I did poach a couple of footnotes from her, but it's very much along the lines of what I was trying to warn about in this thing, too, that that's really how bad it is. It's like a Mexican standoff. Yeah. But H-bombs, you know, like, man, my arm's getting tired. How long can we sit here and hold guns to each other's heads like this for this long? You know what I mean? Something's got to give at some point, you know?

Exactly. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, I'm sorry. I've already kept you over time, and now I'm just ranting at you. But I love talking to you, and thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all your great insight about what's going on over there, man. Really appreciate you. Thanks so much, Scott's great.

Aren't you guys? That is the great Dan McAdams. He is, of course, with Ron Paul over there at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-host of the Great Liberty Report. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFKFK, 90.7 FM in LA. APSradio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org,

and Libertarian Institute.org.