The Chance for Peace
On August 31, the War in Afghanistan – a war that has been going on for nearly our entire adult lives – came to an end, at least officially. We discuss the ramifications of twenty years of war and how different political entities worldwide are exploiting the situation. We situate Afghanistan in the history of other quagmire wars – Vietnam, Iraq – and revising Eisenhower’s 1953 speech on the military-industrial complex, “A Chance for Peace”, a prescient warning which would today be reviled as radical.
Intro Music: “Holy Ghost” by Good Morning Midnight
Good Morning Midnight:
You could write ten thousand love songs in the spring
Take the next one hundred years to arrange them in a neat pile
At my feet while my head's buried
In the dirt the rain will turn my brain into mud yeah
Like when you told me I made you hurt
It echoes in you like I threw a rock down a dark cave
Just to see how deep
I know I'm no holy ghost but I'm not saying I'm not alone
But I want ya and I need ya
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
And since we are the newscasters of the apocalypse, we always have too much news to cover. On this week's bonus episode, we're going to run early for our Patreon subscribers at the Truth Teller level and higher, so get in on that. And this week, we're going to be discussing Florida Governor Ron DeathSantis and his presidential ambitions, his recent fundraising trip to New Jersey as COVID ravages Florida, and how White supremacy is responsible for the low vaccination rates throughout the deep South, exploding the number of cases.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, tune into that. And since times are very Armageddon-y, we implore you to turn to art because art shifts our energy. Art is an oxygen mask in these times of fire and Republican pollution disinformation. So, a wonderful artist we want to share with you—a song submitted by him—is the opening song you heard, which is ‘Holy Ghost’ by Good Morning Midnight. And this is from the artist: “The whole wonderful mess of Good Morning Midnight is a cacophony in hushed tones.
Andrea Chalupa:
Sole member and mastermind of the project, Iowa City-based Charlie Cacciatore, works with a revolving cast of Iowa City and Midwestern musicians to create songs that are tinged with bits of country twang, dreamy and melodic pop, indie rock guitar magic, and precocious lyricism that could only come from the natural earthiness of a Midwesterner. Listen to their brand-new fourth album, Songs Of Violence at their Bandcamp or wherever you stream your music.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Charlie submitted the following statement. "I chose to submit this song because it came from the heart. I create to chase the muse and follow the bliss. PS, your show has been so helpful for me because it recontextualizes the narrative and approaches issues from a place of personal power in an authentic way." That is right, Charlie! That is exactly what this show is about.
Andrea Chalupa:
I appreciate you seeing that. To chec kout Charlie's music, go to @goodmorningmidnight_music, I believe that would be Instagram, and his website, xxgoodmorningmidnight.bandcamp.com. Thank you, Charlie, for your art. And thank you to all the artists out there doing the Lord's work.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right. So, on with the show. Today, August 31st, is the official end of the war in Afghanistan, a war that's been going on for both all of mine and Andrea's adult life—or almost all of my adult life—and we're going to discuss that more in depth in a second. But first, I want to situate it in context. On August 26th,, I tweeted: "I used to say that it feels like we're living through simultaneous revivals of the worst of US history: The Civil War, the Spanish flu, Gilded Age wealth inequality, World War II-era fascism, Watergate and Iran-Contra corruption, et cetera.” And now, the 'War on Terror' is old enough for us to relive that, too. And then, of course, three days later, we re-lived Hurricane Katrina with Hurricane Ida as a result of climate change and the catastrophes it brings.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I could have added more to that tweet. I could have gone on and on because we're also experiencing the return of the Jim Crow era, the fight for civil rights, the political turmoil of the late 1960s, and so on. It's like America is on its deathbed watching its life flash before its eyes. And it's a very sad place to be. It's a very difficult time to be living in. And if you're tired, this is why. We are very tired as well. I don't have advice as to how to balance all of these catastrophes at once, other than to stop taking out your rage on the most vulnerable people.
Sarah Kendzior:
I talked about this a couple of weeks ago in regards to people living in states… Or now it's all of the country. My state is strangely enough—Missouri—is one where COVID is going down because we got Delta COVID back in May. We're finally on the downward slope, but a lot of, “so-and-so deserves to die” when there are kids under 12 who can't get vaccinated. There are parents nationwide who are very worried about children, worried about immunocompromised people, worried about people who don't have access to vaccines.
Sarah Kendzior:
We are in a really violent, vicious political climate and most of that is on the Right Wing. The people who are being violent in the streets, the people who are attacking doctors, attacking school boards tend to come from that side of the spectrum, often are astroturfed, paid actors, and I mean that quite literally. There have been a lot of reports about people who are aspiring stand-up comedians, aspiring actors and actresses, getting recruited to participate in these protests.
Sarah Kendzior:
They'll show up in some school district being anti-mask, anti-vaccine, threatening people, and we find out they don't live there, they don't have children, and so on and so forth. But I do think that this overwhelming feeling of fear and frustration, I expected it. I said earlier, back in April or May, that I worried that this summer would be a repeat, again, of the Red Summer of 1919, which was the violence that followed—mostly White supremacist violence—that followed the end of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.
Sarah Kendzior:
It basically resulted in everyone getting out of their house and going wild, attacking Black Americans, attacking immigrants, and so on and so forth. And I do think we're in that, although, of course, the pandemic never ended. So, anyway, my point here is, don't yell at kids under 12 in states where folks aren't taking the vaccines. Don't yell at people in these perilous positions. Don't yell at the people who couldn't evacuate in time from Hurricane Ida. I see a lot of that.
Sarah Kendzior:
I see a lot of, "Why don't you just move?" It's like, people don't have money. These are real people, these are their homes. I shouldn't have to explain that to anybody. We're all going through difficult times, so try to go a little easier on each other, if you're just talking about people who are victims of this political climate and not the instigators of it, the Tucker Carlson to the world. Go hard on them. Target the people who make these problems possible.
Sarah Kendzior:
And on that note, among those continuing to make these problems worse are all of the people who will not take action—we're now many months into this administration—on the filibuster, on voting rights and on protecting our ability to have representative democratic government in the future. There's a big protest about this on August 28th. Everyone's busy talking about Afghanistan, but this is the deeper threat that I see lurking underneath.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is the threat that's going to make it impossible for the Democrats to hold the House in 2022, impossible to win in 2024. And there's also this element of like, well, they have it now, and what exactly are they doing? I mean, we're very clear on this show that it can always be worse, and it definitely will be worse under a GOP administration. But we're extremely... I don't even know if we're just... yeah, I'm still disappointed. Even with my incredibly low expectations, I'm still disappointed. And we will continue to critique this administration as well as the ineffectiveness of Democrats in the Senate in particular, also in the House.
Sarah Kendzior:
And just remember what you wanted out of this administration when you voted for it. Remember the promises that they made of accountability, and don't excuse it. Because when you excuse it, another phenomenon happens, which is people end up thinking that the Trump era was not as bad and not as dangerous as it actually was. And they do this because they have this circular logic where they're like, "Well, if Biden is a good guy, if his administration is full of good people, he would have done something about the bad people.
Sarah Kendzior:
He would have done something about these abusive, sadistic criminals who act with utter impunity. He's not doing anything. The FBI is not doing anything. Congress is doing very little. Ergo, the bad people must not have been that bad. I must have imagined it. I must have exaggerated it." And this is how George W. Bush became rehabilitated because people wanted to forgive Obama and his administration for letting them off the hook with their war crimes.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is how history becomes rewritten again and again to favor and excuse the abuses of the powerful. And we cannot do that now. We cannot afford that for our safety, and it's also incredibly disrespectful for everyone who has suffered under these regimes. And it's very relevant, I think, to our discussion of Afghanistan, of this 20-year destructive debacle that has caused so much pain and suffering and has now come to an end.
Sarah Kendzior:
And it's the fault of multiple administrations as well as ones that even came before the war. You need to keep that context in your mind whenever you're examining any atrocity, and you need to keep the impetus to take responsibility on the people who have power now. They might have inherited these problems for somebody else who actually caused them, but it's still their obligation to handle the situation right.
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
Afghanistan is a story of this staggering lack of accountability. It was born out of accountability, and it continued under an utter lack of accountability as I'm about to discuss right now. So, today is August 31st, the final deadline of the US pulling out of Afghanistan. The last US flight left Kabul Airport on Monday our time in the US. According to the Biden administration, a few 100 Americans were left behind. One of those Americans is Charlotte Maxwell-Jones, the founder of Kabul Small Animal Rescue, who is trying to evacuate around 125 people, including her staff and their families, along with 250 animals.
Andrea Chalupa:
Taliban soldiers showed up to her home and demanded that she leave the country, but she refuses to go unless she secures safe passage for her staff, their families and the animals they care for. Her efforts to do this through the US military, despite raising enough funds to charter a private plane, were unsuccessful. To learn more about her efforts and to support their work on the ground, check out Kabul Small Animal Rescue on Facebook and Twitter.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's Kabul Small Animal Rescue. I just want to emphasize again that this American woman, Charlotte Maxwell-Jones, could have gotten out of Afghanistan and chose to stay to help over 100 people and hundreds of animals. The world needs more heroes like her. So, now what are we left with? We have around 122,000 people that have been evacuated from Afghanistan since the Taliban took control of the country on August 14th. Most of them are Afghans and around 6,000 are Americans.
Andrea Chalupa:
RT (Russia Today), Russian state propaganda, posted to social media a clearly photoshopped image of a family of Afghan refugees strapped with weapons. This is the narrative they're going to push heading into the 2022 midterms in the US. The Kremlin will once again weaponize refugees from predominantly Muslim countries to drive out the vote for their allies in authoritarianism, the Republican Party. It's already starting.
Andrea Chalupa:
They did this during EU elections, during Trump, and they'll ramp it up heading into both the midterms and the 2024 presidential election, turning Afghan refugees into "terrifying scapegoats/terrorists." We cannot let them do this and must call it out. Big Tech must be regulated to stop Kremlin and Republican hate from spreading and driving out White fascist terrorism, leading to shootings in mosques, refugee centers, violence and threats against elected officials, normalizing a culture of political violence, also known as fascism.
Andrea Chalupa:
We need to not only ensure the safety of Afghan and other refugees finding homes and resources to start new lives, but we must also keep them safe from Facebook and other tech giants who prioritize profits over people's lives. As we've seen with Kyle Rittenhouse and other White fascist terrorists, social media, if left unchecked, kills. Now, the US predictably lost the war in Afghanistan, a war we were never going to win, a war started by a US President, George W. Bush, who should never have won the 2000 presidential election. And given how the Florida recount was stopped prematurely and was overseen by a corrupt Secretary of State, Kathleen Harris, Bush, like Trump, was an illegitimate president. Like Trump, the illegitimate president destroyed America’s standing in the world and made the world less safe for all people by unleashing preventable terror and tragedy, first with his invasion of Afghanistan, followed by his quick pivot to Iraq. George W. Bush, the illegitimate president who lost the popular vote and may not have won the electoral college—given the corruption of Florida, and the stopped recount, and the weak spine Democrats who pre-surrendered—wasted no time starting not one but two wars during his first term in office. George W. Bush—I will keep saying his name because people keep rehabilitating him as some retired painter—George W. Bush, along with Trump, will go down in history as the worst presidents practically back to back.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, if you're wondering why things are the way they are, and why there's so much pain and suffering in the world, and inaction for so long on climate, you can thank eight years of Bush and four of Trump, and the corporate backed politicians who enabled them. I point this out because no matter how frustrated anyone might be with Biden at this moment… Why am I bringing up Biden, all things considered? Because I have friends with friends in Afghanistan who are very upset right now and I want to honor them by bringing them into this very important conversation about the war and what comes next.
Andrea Chalupa:
And I'm also bringing up Biden because he's the most powerful person in the world, and I am not. Biden can do things I can't. So, I'd like to pressure him so that he moves in a direction that I strongly believe can save lives, and finally, finally, enforce much needed, long denied accountability. Also, as I mentioned, I met with a friend over the weekend who has friends from Afghanistan and she's furious at Biden. She said to me that if he were running for president today, she wouldn't vote for him. She said this out of anger.
Andrea Chalupa:
I pointed out to her that fascism is obviously the worse alternative and no matter how mad we are at the Democrats, or how disappointed, we must unite to keep them in power and expand their majority in the House and the Senate, and especially local offices, where the all-important quality of life issues like education, water, voting rights, health care are decided, and federal laws are carried out—or resisted. My point is, as relieved as you may be feeling about the Afghanistan war being over, and that's a perfectly reasonable response, and Biden is doing the hard-thankless bold work of pulling us out as soon as possible.
Andrea Chalupa:
But please make space to honor the perspectives and lived experiences of people, especially from Central Asia, who struggle with a sense of betrayal and anger and fear. As a Ukrainian American, I'm watching Afghanistan and seeing how the Kremlin is using it to try to demoralize Ukraine, and tell Ukraine that the US will abandon it like it abandoned Afghanistan, and not to count on American support, which is fickle. You may shrug this off, but Ukraine has already seen the US President give Putin his own summit, and allowed Putin's geopolitical weapon, the gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, overseen by Putin's old KGB crony from East Berlin.
Andrea Chalupa:
So far, Ukraine has reason to doubt US support and its struggle against the second most powerful military in the world as Russia currently escalates its invasion of Ukraine, shelling near train tracks in residential areas. That's currently happening right now. Ukraine matters because it's a canary in the coal mine. From Kremlin election hacking to Kremlin disinformation, and Kremlin golden handcuffs to Kremlin cyber warfare, much of the Kremlin aggression, Ukraine has survived so far, has come to the US, which is why Ukraine matters because Ukraine has a lot to teach us. We have so many problems here at home that I'm worried Americans are going to stop caring about what's happening in the rest of the world and forget that we're all connected. Kleptocracy anywhere is kleptocracy everywhere.
Andrea Chalupa:
In the 2016 election, an American pundit who I warned about the Kremlin attack on our election as it was happening, said to me, "American voters don't care about Ukraine." That was, of course, to their own detriment. Know that our struggle against fascism is global. The fascists are aligned and helping each other, empowering each other. In a lawless world, they can escape accountability and stay as rich as they want, stealing from the people, shutting down independent media, kicking out foreign journalists and nonprofits, arresting independent candidates for office, harassing the families of activists.
Andrea Chalupa:
All the things Putin is currently doing now in Russia, ramping up a Soviet terror campaign not seen since Stalin. And all the while praising Stalin, and criminalizing and erasing the history of Stalin’s staggering crimes against humanity. This is the endgame of the Republican Party and its war on critical race theory, which reveals all the ways White supremacy has been destroying lives for generations: Its war on science, its war on vaccines, its war on voting rights, its war on registering people to vote without fear of being arrested.
Andrea Chalupa:
Its war on abortion, its war on journalism, its war on education, health care, human rights, a livable wage, all the social programs that would make life more comfortable and manageable. Because a comfortable and manageable life means people have more time to be informed and engaged citizens, and ensure the health of their democracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
The oppression against a living wage and voting rights go hand in hand. The Republican Party, like Putin's Kremlin, wants an oligarchy and there's no end to how low they'll go to crush anyone who stands in their way. That's why we need a strong opposition in America who understands the urgency, doesn't dance around it, because we're running out of time. America will fall like Afghanistan if we do not secure our elections for 2022.
Andrea Chalupa:
Call your representative in the House and the Senate and demand they ensure the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act are signed into law. All other rights depend on voting rights. Without voting rights, it's game over and nowhere is safe, because fascism knows no borders. Just ask Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, exactly, and I have some thoughts on the war and what the end of it means. But since you brought up Stalin, it made me think of Eisenhower's famous 1953 speech, “The Chance for Peace”. He gave that speech the year that Stalin died, the year that the Korean War was winding up, and he was looking both at the past—at World War II, at Korea and at the future—and at the military industrial complex, and the outer wastefulness, and cruelty, and self-destructive aspect of this for the United States. So, I'm going to read a little bit from this speech. This is a famous speech, so you've probably heard it before.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's worth hearing again in our modern context. Eisenhower sounds like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So, keep in mind, as Andrea just pointed out, how far to the right the GOP has turned and how this was once a mainstream sentiment expressed by a beloved United States conservative General, and this is what Eisenhower had to say: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Sarah Kendzior:
The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one heavy bomber is this: A modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that came with the spring of 1953. This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.
Sarah Kendzior:
It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: Is there no other way the world may live?" So, that's obviously relevant to the present day. It's the kind of broad encompassing sentiment that we don't really see expressed very much in the media, which is really treating the end of the Afghanistan war as a horse race.
Sarah Kendzior:
What does it mean for Biden's approval rating? What does it mean, I don't know, for the rehabilitation of the architects of this war? I'm seeing them getting trotted out and about as pundits, as experts, because they caused the problem and were never punished for it. Honestly, it's very hard for me to watch this play out. I'm very glad that this war is over and I'm not ashamed as an American that America lost this war because I expect-
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, hell no.
Sarah Kendzior:
... America to lose wars. Yeah. I mean, in my lifetime, the only war that we won was the Gulf War in 1991, which was really a prelude to the greater Iraq War, which we lost. It helped set the stage for it, not what our individual troops did, but what the Bush administration did. And then, of course, it was carried out again, through his son. And so, the end of this war is something like... I'm ashamed that we stayed in the war for so long.
Sarah Kendzior:
I feel such overwhelming sadness for the tens of thousands of Afghans who were killed, including the ones who were killed this week through drone strikes. And I'm so sad for the troops that have died. I have friends who are veterans. I have friends who fought in this war. I have friends who are wives of veterans from this war. This is our generation’s war. This is the war that people my age and Andrea's age went to fight. We were in our early 20s, late teens, when 9/11 happened. And so, it's a very... It's an overwhelming feeling.
Sarah Kendzior:
And it's weird for me to see people on television saying, "Ending this war is the worst thing that America has ever done." I've seen some pundits saying that. I'm just like, "What are you talking about?" Everything that came from basically the 21st century, it's like, there was torture, there is utter elite criminal impunity. We had a Kremlin asset in the White House. We've had unbelievable income inequality, stratification, political corruption, white-collar corruption, climate change catastrophes. And people get away with it.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are so many worse things that are happening that are much more, I think, central to the day to day life of Americans and to the dismantling of this nation. And the fact that we have finally entered a war that we shouldn't have been involved in, to the degree that we were... it was wasteful and it's symbolic, I think, of the demise of this country. This country, which I love. This is not a demise I'm rooting for. This is a demise that breaks my heart because of the pain that our government and all of its corporate subsidiaries and masters are inflicting on other countries and inflicting on Americans. Afghans deserved better.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our troops and our veterans deserve better. The American people deserve better. And the architects of this catastrophe deserve worse. And I mean, that's all I basically have got to say on that. I'm sure we're going to be talking about Afghanistan for weeks to come because this isn't quite an ending. The story will go on, the hardship will go on, the suffering will go on, and it's important to not forget that. It's important to not see this as a victory or a loss but as a continuum, and analyze it in that historic context.
Sarah Kendzior:
And try to learn the lessons from it, the lessons that Eisenhower was trying to teach people in 1953, that we didn't learn in any way, shape or form. Since then, we had the quagmire of Vietnam, the quagmire of Iraq, the quagmire of Afghanistan, and a loss in the quality of American life, a loss of hard-won fights that were carried out in the past, fights for voting rights, fights for civil rights. We're losing those rights now. We started to lose them nearly a decade ago with the Supreme Court ruling reversing the VRA, or partially reversing it.
Sarah Kendzior:
Those are the battles we need to wage now. We need to protect ourselves, protect our country. And the end of this war? I don't know. It's the war itself that broke my heart.
Andrea Chalupa:
mmmhmm (affirmative). Very well said. And that's not a very condescending “very well said”. Of course, that was very well said.
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] No, no.
Andrea Chalupa:
But I want to just say that it's infuriating because a lot of the destabilization that's wreaking havoc on our planet is being caused by the terrorist in the Kremlin. And just to see him get away with so much and capitalize on the suffering of so many people...Like, Putin was aligned with the Taliban. Putin had played the most amazing hand. He got his asset, Trump, installed as President. Trump releases 5,000 Taliban fighters, which is extraordinary.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's when it was all over for us. And then, Putin goes on to put bounties on the heads of US soldiers and Putin is pushing and pressuring even Biden to get the hell out of Afghanistan. And now that the world has been watching in horror of what's going on in Afghanistan, as I mentioned, the Kremlin is using that to pressure the US and is escalating its invasion of Ukraine as President Zelenskyy—as we all know from impeachment fame, where he was extorted by Trump, Putin's asset. Trump held back much needed aid for Ukraine, aid that was popular in Congress. It was passed by both parties.
Andrea Chalupa:
And Trump held it up to try to force Zelenskyy to create some sort of scandal against Biden, and instead, that led to his impeachment. So, Zelenskyy is in Washington meeting with Biden at a very, very scary time as Russia ramps up its shelling. I just want to point out that I don't know what's next for Ukraine, and I never thought I would think that way about Biden who oversaw Ukraine policy in the Obama administration. Russia's invasion has been escalating all year.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, if Ukraine falls, the EU is going to see an even more empowered Kremlin on its border destabilizing Europe, which has so far included the Kremlin propping up far-right parties, spreading disinformation, deliberately bombing civilians in Syria to create refugees to flood Europe, to further divide the EU and power the Kremlin's far-right candidates, spread its influence both on social media and through various allegedly dodgy meetings to tip the scales of the extremely close Brexit vote, driven by Putin fanboy, Nigel Farage, who promised Brexit would make Britain great again.
Andrea Chalupa:
And then, went on to campaign for Trump in the US. So, if Ukraine falls, the Kremlin will push its influence deeper into the heart of Europe and you'll likely see more far-right aspiring dictators, like Putin ally, Viktor Orbán, in power and staying in power. Ukraine is defending Europe. There's a lot the world can learn from Ukraine. Their security, their freedom, their independence is our own.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is just common sense. This is something that people should be screaming about because Putin isn't being contained right now. I never ever thought I would get this foreign policy from Biden, and I don't know what is the root of it. One speculation I made to Sarah was that maybe the Havana syndrome, which first emerged in 2016, the fact that the Kremlin has some sort of death ray gun, the US hasn't held the Kremlin responsible for this.
Andrea Chalupa:
They're claiming the jury is still out on who is zapping people's brains and causing brain damage through a microwave gun, but the dozens of targets have been US diplomats and US CIA agents focused on containing Russia. And given that Russia has a very well documented history of sadism, it's pretty obvious that it's Russia. And I just think that maybe the Havana syndrome, this death ray gun by the Kremlin, has been more effective than people are willing to let on.
Andrea Chalupa:
You're talking about the Kremlin having some advanced, futuristic weapon that the US was completely asleep on. Because remember, this happened… The first cases came out in 2016 under Obama's watch, so that means all the years the Kremlin was developing this weapon would have been going on under Obama. So, Obama's whole intelligence agency missed the development and failed to prevent a death ray gun from being in the hands of the Kremlin.
Andrea Chalupa:
Countries hold the most power and can commit genocides, for instance, when they're technologically advanced. The Kremlin very clearly has a technologically advanced weapon on us and I have no doubt given all the cases that have come out in several different countries, including in Vietnam when our vice president was headed to Vietnam, I wouldn't doubt that this is putting a very effective pressure on weakening the Western response to holding the Kremlin accountable.
Andrea Chalupa:
And the US response so far has been very secretive about what this is, and that's been frustrating a lot of the men and women serving our country who are victims of Havana syndrome, who have had brain damage because of it. Sarah and I have a friend who covers Russia, who is very close with one of the victims. He's still in rehab for this, for what he suffered through. So, people want to make jokes about Havana syndrome, "Oh, it's the death ray gun. What are you idiots going on about?" Real people are suffering, still, from this.
Andrea Chalupa:
The emergence of it goes hand in hand with the West backing down from Putin. So, I think just like the nuclear bomb gave the US a major advantage when we first got the bomb and it really solidified the US as the global superpower, I think the Kremlin has really done it for themselves in ensuring its untouchable standing in the world through this God-knows-what-microwave gun that has been creating real damage both on people's lives, the many dozens of victims but also in terms of foreign policy failing to it, American foreign policy, European foreign policy, failing to stand up to the Kremlin and backing down.
Andrea Chalupa:
And following instead a policy of appeasement. You can see that appeasement if you Google Nord Stream 2, which we've talked about a lot on the show, that should have never had been allowed to have gone forward. Basically, it gives the Kremlin leverage over Europe where they can turn off the gas, hiking up gas prices for Europe, limiting gas to Europe during freezing times in winter.
Andrea Chalupa:
And guess what? The Kremlin is doing that currently, limiting Russian gas to the EU to politically pressure it now. All of these things combined, it's very clear that Putin is feeling emboldened. He's feeling emboldened because the West is failing to stand up to him. Meanwhile, the brave Russian men and women who are risking their lives and freedom to stand up to Putin, they're on their own. They're left out on their own. I just want to end by saying, Alexei Navalny bravely returned to Russia and he used that global attention.
Andrea Chalupa:
He risked his life so we could have a moment in the spotlight to say to the world, "Here's a list of eight Russians who are the structure of Putin's financial corruption. This is the money. Sanction these eight people and you go after Putin's money." He risked his life to have that moment to say that to the world, and he's now rotting away in prison and his team of people are either fleeing the country for their lives, or they're being arrested as well. And what did the West do? They completely ignored Alexei Navalny's list of eight.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, exactly. I want to talk a little about why Biden is not responding to the threat of the Kremlin. But first, I just want to remind everyone of exactly how weak the international world order is right now, in large part due to COVID. You see this in the global supply chain but you also see it in raging turmoil in every country over vaccines, over public health, over how to function in society, whether to have masks, what to do about children, overflowing hospitals, emergence of new variants of the virus.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is taking a cumulative toll after 18 months. It was already weak. We already saw right-wing movements on the rise, right-wing movements taking over governments in Poland and Hungary, and Turkey, Brazil, in a lot of countries that used to be more democratic, and respect democratic norms, want to be part of the EU, want to be part of NATO. If you look at Turkey's progression over the last 20 years, that's a definite case in point.
Sarah Kendzior:
One thing that I think brings us home is that, right now, if you look at what's going on in the world, Haiti is in complete chaos. People have a lack of access to basic resources, to water, to food. This is a result of both weather climate change catastrophes and political catastrophes. Lebanon has the same situation. People do not have, again, basic resources; money, food, electricity.
Sarah Kendzior:
Normally, these would both be huge stories. These would be issues, tragedies abroad, that would make headlines here. They're like a footnote in part because of Afghanistan, but also because of COVID, and also because of all of the other catastrophes that I mentioned at the beginning of the show. And so, in the midst of this, you have a predatory mafia state. You have Russia, under Putin, with its network of oligarchs and mafiosos that very successfully managed to nearly break up every alliance that had been holding back, to some degree, its corrupt power before 2016. They made inroads at breaking up NATO.
Sarah Kendzior:
They certainly made inroads of breaking up the EU with the Brexit referendum. And, of course, the question... We know why Trump did nothing about this. It's because they brought him into office. He was a Kremlin asset, a career criminal, someone who had been working with mafia operatives from the former Soviet Union, who helped build up his properties, build up his career, got him out of bankruptcy. I wrote a book on this, Hiding in Plain Sight.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are other people who have written books about different aspects of this, about Deutsche Bank, about the emergence of the Russian mafia in the United States, about the espionage facets, about the corruption of the FBI. I mean, this is a very big story. It's so big that, of course, it raises the question of like, "Why the hell is the Biden administration not acknowledging that it happened, and the National Security ramifications of this?"
Sarah Kendzior:
You know, that we're living in the aftermath of this with gutted institutions, with courts packed with corrupt lackeys. The damage doesn't end when Trump goes away. And instead, we've just seen utter complacency that basically is complicity in this climate. We've seen Merrick Garland refuse to even prosecute the organizers of a coup. We've seen the FBI say, like, "Coup? What coup? I can't find any evidence of a coup. All those guys wearing Trump Civil War January 6 t-shirts that are matching that were storming the Capitol on that day. It’s, you know, clearly completely coincidental because I can't find any evidence to lead credibility to that claim.”
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, it's just so brazen, the lack of accountability and the refusal of acknowledgement. So, you have to say, "Well, why the hell aren't they acknowledging this?" And it's like, because it's transnational organized crime. I mean, this is what I said for years on the show, that the Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. And the Biden administration is simply keeping up the facade.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's keeping up the facade of an actual government that enforces accountability, that puts dangerous anti-American seditious operatives on trial, that brings to the public documentation of atrocities that occurred under the prior administration's watch. That's what we should expect them to do and none of that's been happening. I think some of it is just a matter of hubris and pride. The fact that Trump was able to get into office at all and then do the things that he did with his criminal cohort, many of whom were indicted and then were pardoned, shows how weak our institutions are.
Sarah Kendzior:
It shows how corrupt those institutions are and those institutions were, of course, weak or corrupt under the Obama administration, which had Vice President Joe Biden. So, I think there's an element of that, that to truly look at the story of Donald Trump's rise to power, it involves not just overt complicity from the GOP, the Kremlin and associated organized crime actors, it involves complacency or a willingness to look the other way, or sometimes complicity, and certainly a kind of American exceptionalism-level of arrogance, I think, from the prior administration that allowed all this to happen.
Sarah Kendzior:
And that arrogance is on display, as Andrea noted, with Havana syndrome. Every time there's a situation in the US that sounds like the plot of a Tom Clancy novel, or a dystopian sci-fi novel, the reaction of our respectable pundits-
Andrea Chalupa:
The basics.
Sarah Kendzior:
... and political establishment-
Andrea Chalupa:
The basic class.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, who are way too basic to be making foreign policy is to laugh it off. It's just the inherent mockery that resides in them due to their utter lack of political imagination. And that lack of political imagination helps dig all of our graves. Yes, all of these situations sound insane. They sounded insane five years ago when we watched them happen.
Sarah Kendzior:
It sounded insane that Donald Trump was going to become the President of the United States after a long-documented history of criminality, that was then followed by a reality TV series, that was then followed by him blatantly asking the Kremlin to get his opponent’s emails at a press conference. They flaunted this. They flaunted this criminality. And still, the corporate press laughed this off. Our intelligence agencies apparently didn't feel compelled to act on this threat.
Sarah Kendzior:
And as we've documented on this show many times, it's because a lot of those agencies—and especially law enforcement, the FBI—were in on it. They were helping facilitate it.
Andrea Chalupa:
Just like January 6th.
Sarah Kendzior:
Just like January 6th. And this is not new. There's sometimes people... I don't even know what to call them. They're not quite on the Left, but it's like, they'll recognize these tendencies in all previous administrations. They'll be like, "Yes, Reagan, deeply corrupt. Iran-Contra. BCCI." They'll recognize it under George H.W. Bush. They'll be like, "Yes, former head of the CIA, did terrible things, covered it all up." They'll maybe even acknowledge that Bill Barr was the cover-up General for those two administrations that helped bury those crimes.
Sarah Kendzior:
They'll certainly acknowledge that Clinton did nothing about the crimes of the previous administrations of Reagan and Bush, and they'll definitely acknowledge that he committed some of his own with George W. Bush. They’ll, of course, talk about the lies that led to the war in Iraq and the war crimes that were committed, and the use of torture, and the financial corruption, and Halliburton and Dick Cheney. They'll go on and on, and acknowledge that all this happened.
Sarah Kendzior:
And that, of course, then Obama came in and did not enforce accountability, aided Wall Street, a lot of domestic problems got worse under Obama. We, as I said, saw civil rights erode thanks to the Supreme Court decisions that were not caused by Obama, but happened in that era.
Andrea Chalupa:
Corporate fascism at Standing Rock.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, and the rise of the resurgence of fascism around the world, and also infrastructure hacks, attacks on our technological security, and how that affects our broader national security. That all happened on Obama's watch. And so, everyone will admit, like, yes, there actually is this incredibly long and consistent trail of corruption, deception, cover ups in all these administrations.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then, you get to Trump where it's like, they cannot handle the fact that it's like, you know, Trump is connected to Jeffrey Epstein and not through a plane ride, through a court case where he was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl. Trump was a Kremlin asset. And again, this is not a spurious claim. This is a well-documented fact. Why was Trump a Kremlin asset? It's not because he was a geopolitical genius, it's because he wanted money and power.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is very simple. This should be very easy for people to understand in terms of motivation. They act that because Trump was this sort of caricature of a human being, that he could not have possibly had any self-awareness, any motivation. And this, of course, is something Trump himself cultivates. He covers up his crime with scandals. And it's amazing to me that people who could see through all these previous administrations cannot seem to grasp that Trump was both similar and that he was worse. He was a culmination.
Sarah Kendzior:
And now, we're dealing with the aftermath of that culmination. And we're dealing with the same tactics; with Havana syndrome, with cyber-attacks, with spying, with social media propaganda campaigns, with all of this, and no recourse and no responsibility and no integrity from the Biden administration in terms of really standing up to the threat. Because I think part of standing up to the threat is clarifying that threat to the American public.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I think they're hesitant to do this also because they are afraid of Trump's supporters. And I think it's right to be afraid of people who are violent, who are storming the Capitol and so on, but I think every American—it doesn't matter who you voted for, it doesn't matter what you believe—you deserve to know the truth. You absolutely deserve to know the truth about everything bad every administration has done. And so, Trump voters deserve to know the truth about the Trump administration. It doesn't necessarily mean they'll believe it.
Sarah Kendzior:
But everyone deserves to know. It's a matter of civic integrity. And it's just so... not just disappointing, it's so destructive that they will not pursue these crimes with the urgency that's required right now.
Outro Music: “Holy Ghost” by Good Morning Midnight
Good Morning Midnight:
You could write ten thousand love songs in the spring
Take the next one hundred years to arrange them in a neat pile
At my feet while my head's buried
In the dirt the rain will turn my brain into mud yeah
Like when you told me I made you hurt
It echoes in you like I threw a rock down a dark cave
Just to see how deep
I know I'm no holy ghost but I'm not saying I'm not alone
But I want ya and I need ya
And when I fuck up I am the star scape
I am the dark edge of the universe
And I do fuck up
And when I die I ride the coat tails of the universe
And I do die
In a cabin on a cliff in the mist we can hide every day
In coffee and hash in a balsamic haze
There's no loneliness and there's no pain
There is only the falling rain it's an ideal
But I'm not gonna reach for it I'm gonna leave it
Right where it is like fossils in the woods like poison ivy
Like soft fertile dirt
Like overwhelming pain like your love
And when I fuck up I am the star scape
I am the dark edge of the universe
And I do fuck up
And when I die I ride the coat tails of the universe
And I do die
[Credits]
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Oil Change International, an advocacy group supported with a generous donation from the Greta Thunberg Foundation that exposes the true cost of fossil fuels and facilitates the ongoing transition to clean energy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Afghanistan. Donate @rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate at the Orangutan Project @theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon, it keeps us going. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres, and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York-based firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the Producer level on Patreon and higher, especially the first two who did not get thanked in August. So, we're going to thank you profusely for many weeks to come...