NATO is a Red Herring
Welcome back to another week of us anxiously anticipating a European land war while contending with rising autocracy at home! We start out by analyzing the Trump crime cult’s destruction of federal records, contemplate who in the admin may have been responsible, and put it in the context of the nationwide book bannings and assault on collective memory. Sarah also gives the backstory into the strange circumstances that launched career criminal coverup guy Bill Barr into the Attorney General position in 1991.
Andrea then answers the questions that are on everyone’s mind: Are we headed for World War III thanks to Putin escalating his invasion of Ukraine? What does Putin really want? Why do certain political pundits not understand that the Soviet Union no longer exists and why do those pundits still have jobs? This episode is a Gaslit Nation History Lesson on Russian colonialism, the origins of NATO, the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact states, the infiltration of Western Europe by oligarchs during the Iraq War era, the struggles of dissidents from post-Soviet dictatorships, and the propaganda tactics that people use to distort information about all this and more!
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Tom Burgis:
If you are a kleptocracy, if you're a wildly corrupt regime like the one that controls Kazakhstan, you need two things to retain control over the years and to carry on looting. You need repression at home and you need a facade of legitimacy to allow you to conduct your corrupt business internationally. Now, repression at home, we can see that the Kazakh regime has that. 10 years ago in Zhanaozen, which is one of the sites of protests now, the security forces of the regime opened fire on a peaceful protest there and then they used monstrous techniques to torture the survivors into submission. Shortly after that, President Nazarbayev—the overlord of this kleptocracy, the president—he turned up in Cambridge to give a speech and he had to spin this massacre. Now, who did he turn to? He turned to the master of Western political communications, Tony Blair.
Tom Burgis:
There are plenty of other political consultants who have worked for the Kazakh regime. At the same time, they appreciate that a regime based on violence is fragile, right? So they need someone to store some of that loot that's protected by the rule of law and can't be snatched by some passing revolution. So the London property market is good for that; hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kazakh regime there, top law firms to defend any challenges to their rights, top reputation management, law firms like Schillings and others to deal with any pesky journalists, private intelligence firms in Mayfair at their disposal to pursue their enemies in Europe. In short, if you want the full suite service to support a kleptocracy, you come to London to find it.
[intro theme]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestsellers, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight, and of the upcoming book, They Knew, available for pre-order now.
Andrea Chalupa:
I am Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, a film that the Kremlin does not want you to see because, as they shut down a screening in Moscow and then banned the organization, Memorial, that is essential to preserving historical truths for victims of Soviet atrocities. So, go see it.
Sarah Kendzior:
And as you may have guessed, this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
And our Patreon bonus, available for listeners at the Truth Teller level and higher on Patreon, is another Q&A where Sarah and I answer questions, anything and everything, questions submitted by listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher. It's a wonderful way for us to come together with our community and get a sense of what's keeping everyone up at night. And a lot of questions are coming in about World War III, Putin's crisis hostage situation that could unleash mass casualties, a mass refugee crisis in Europe, in the heart of Europe. So if you want to listen to that, we also answered a lot of questions about Merrick Garland, the DOJ, and Republican fascism and where that's headed. So sign up today, support the show, submit your questions, and you can do that through the Gaslit Nation Patreon.
Sarah Kendzior:
Alright, and our opening clip today was an interview with kleptocracy expert, Tom Burgis, the latest British author to be sued by oligarchs from the former Soviet Union who are exploiting the United Kingdom's legal system in order to prevent the truth from being known. Burgis is the author of the book, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World. The lawsuit against him follows a similar one against Catherine Belton, the author of the book, Putin’s People, and it follows the legal attacks by corrupt Brexiteers against investigative journalist, Carole Cadwalladr. Gaslit Nation extends our solidarity and support to our peers across the pond.
Sarah Kendzior:
Now we're going to talk about all the horrible things happening here, right here, in the US. So, you may have heard that Trump's goon squad took 15 boxes of White House records from the White House down to Florida and shredded them. And I’m saying “goon squad” here because I doubt Trump did this himself, because I doubt that Trump wrote things down. The reason that Trump does not write things down is because Trump is a career mobster and mobsters do not keep records. I have some theories on what did happen, which I will share with you in a second.
Sarah Kendzior:
But first a little summary of what has ensued, from NBC News. They say, “The records agency said it believes Trump still has more records that need to be turned over and that Trump's representatives have informed NARA that they are continuing to search for additional presidential records that belong to the National Archives. The agency revealed last week that Trump had torn up numerous documents when he was president that were supposed to have been preserved.” And this is another quote from the National Archives spokesperson: “As has been reported in the press since 2018, White House records management officials during the Trump administration recovered and taped together some of the torn up records.” So, who is behind this very illegal activity? And this is illegal. This is purposeful. Please ignore Maggie Haberman and others from the New York Times who are trying to make it as if this is some sort of accidental thing, like the papers just fell into a shredder.
Sarah Kendzior:
They were misplaced in his “hasty exit,” I believe, is what they're actually saying. Of course, this is purposeful. This is typical mafia tactics. This is also typical mafia state tactics. And that's where I'm going to get into what I think is going on here. My guess is that whatever was in those boxes was destroyed to protect people who still have some belief that there is rule of law in America and that they themselves may not be above it. They may actually be vulnerable. That is not the way that Trump views himself at all. He does not feel threatened in the slightest. I mean, why would he feel threatened? Merrick Garland is in charge of the investigation. Anyway, my guess is that Mike Pence and maybe various members of the Department of Defense, you know, the heads of the Department of Defense that rotated like a series of Spinal Tap drummers, people like that are the ones concerned about what may be in those records.
Sarah Kendzior:
These are people who put on a veneer of respectability but will engage in corruption, nonetheless, and who are also not quite in the inner circle of Trump's crime cult. I do not think, on that note, that the shredder in question was Bill Barr because he is a career coverup guy going all the way back to his days as George H.W. Bush's attorney general. Barr likely was smart enough to cover things up as he went along. He knows better than to leave a shredded paper trail. And I'm going to tell you a little story about Bill Barr. Lots of attempted rehabilitations of Bill Barr going around. We have warned you numerous times to not rehabilitate this guy who is a career criminal accomplice. We warned you about that when he was nominated and a bunch of DOJ alumni developed selective amnesia and seemed to have forgotten his entire role in our government, which was terrible.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is, as we've reminded you, the guy who William Sapphire thought was too extreme. He called him “the coverup general”. He was like, You can't let Bill Barr in the government, he's gonna go crazy, he's gonna do all these things. William Sapphire, ultra conservative, thought that Bill Barr is too much. And you can go and look through our archives and find lots of things about what Bill Barr did under the Trump administration, what he did under other administrations. I want to just tell you a little story about how Bill Barr became the attorney general for George H.W. Bush in 1991 in the first place, because it's an interesting story and we haven't really touched on it much on this show. So, within a 24-hour period in the month of April, 1991—specifically on April 4th and April 5th—two US senators were killed in plane crashes.
Sarah Kendzior:
Those senators were John Tower and John Heinz, both of whom happened to be investigating Iran Contra and other crimes of the Reagan administration. Tower was in fact leading the committee that was pursuing that investigation. Both of these US senators died in crashes within 24 hours of each other. This is the only time, to my knowledge, that this has ever happened in US history. I'm not sure we really have a 24 hour period in which two senators died from anything at all, much less two in a plane crash, so that's interesting. The crashes had enormous consequences for the political system in the United States and especially for the DOJ and the coverup of a decade of crimes. So this is what happened: After the death of Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz, George H.W. Bush's attorney general, Dick Thornburgh, decides that he doesn't want to be the attorney general anymore because he wants to run for Heinz’s seat in Pennsylvania.
Sarah Kendzior:
So he announces his resignation. Then there's a little subplot here going on where Heinz’s widow, Teresa Heinz, goes on to date and then marry John Kerry, then Senator of Massachusetts and then the head of the Kerry Committee which was investigating drug running in Iran Contra. They produced a very large report over, I think, 1100 pages. This is another investigation whose results were ignored in real time, much like the Mueller Report and other reports we see today. There is a longer story involved with that. I'll tell you that story some other time, but I will say that the journalist who ended up looking into the Kerry Committee report a decade later in the mid 1990s, Gary Webb, died of a “suicide” and the suicide involved two gunshots to the head. So anyway, Dick Thornburgh was out as the attorney general and that meant that the deputy attorney general got to be the attorney general. And that was Bill Barr. That is the story of how Bill Barr ended up as attorney general and ended up in a position to cover up a multitude of crimes, including not only Iran Contra, but BCCI which is basically like the Deutsche Bank of its time, the Inslaw Promis software surveillance scandal, which is tied to the FBI, the DOJ, and to Robert Maxwell and the criminal Maxwell family—that's a wormhole you don't wanna get trapped in—and he covered up many other abhorrent things that “legal experts” pretend not to know anything about. So had there not been those two plane crashes, who knows, maybe he would've just stayed in the deputy position.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's interesting to look back at what the reaction was in 1991 when a 41-year-old Bill Barr became the attorney general. Looking at an article from the New York Times where it says, “Bush nominates deputy as head of Justice Department” and it has some quotes, including from…I'll just read you these quotes: “Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., who as chairman of the Senate judiciary committee will preside over Mr. Barr's confirmation hearings, said only that he was pleased that Mr. Bush has ‘moved to fill this important post.’ Representative Charles E. Schumer, a Brooklyn Democrat who is Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice, called Mr. Barr ‘a capable attorney general.’” So, maybe some damning with faint praise there. I just think it's very interesting, as a child of the ‘80s, that we are still dealing with the exact same people who were in positions of power when I was in third grade or fourth grade or middle school. The fact that these are the folks quoted in the article—one is now the president, one is now the head of the Senate, Bill Barr, of course, went and became Trump's attorney general again, worked as a Republican coverup guy again. One of the reasons this interests me is because we have obviously a very deep level of corruption at the Department of Justice, a very deep level of corruption throughout multiple administrations, obviously much worse on the Republican side but also there on the Democratic side.
Sarah Kendzior:
Among the things the Democrats did was fail to hold the dirty Republicans accountable, failed to conduct investigations, failed to gut out the rot. And when that happens, you don't want new people getting involved. You need to be with people who will keep those secrets, you need to have an insular circle. And now we have an insular geriatric circle because everybody who was present for the enormous amount of crimes that the Reagan administration committed, many of which are basically memory holed to some extent, they don't want anybody looking into that because you were either involved or you were a witness who failed to do your job and failed to hold people accountable. This also is something that explains what's going on with Merrick Garland and his multiple failures previously in the Department of Justice that linger on until today.
Sarah Kendzior:
So, that was a story about Bill Barr’s rise to power that's for the archives themselves. You can hear from this little anecdote about Bill Barr that having accurate archives is very important, and so the shredding of the National Record is in this sense—at least this is what it seems like to me—yet another example of a smaller crime burying a larger crime. And in this case, the larger crime is the crimes that Trump carried out in plain sight, the crimes that Trump has already confessed to. It's obviously bad when you lose documentation. The fact that there's a brazen act of destruction of that documentation and that that's minimized in the press is also ominous, but I have a kind of suspicion here that it would be beneficial for the Trump crime cult if people were to go on a hunt for the “mystery files”, the shredded files, while the evidence of guilt is right there in front of your eyes. It was there on your television on January 6th. It was on your television when Trump confessed to obstruction of justice.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's detailed in a multitude of federal reports, most notably the Mueller Report which the DOJ still refuses to act on. In short, the destruction of documents is alarming, but it is minor compared only to the lack of repercussions for overtly committed crimes and what I see as the real danger that lies in the future of document destruction, which I think will be digital. I may go into this more in another episode because I've been talking for too long, but when I look at paper records and how easily they're destroyed, you know, my thought is as we move increasingly into online records, online books, online media, my guess is that what the tactics of future autocratic regimes in the United States are going to be is not to destroy the records, not to delete them, but to rewrite them, to try to use the legitimacy of the reputation of the person who originally wrote them, you know, say…Well, Mueller doesn't have that legitimacy, but you know, pick someone in Congress you actually respect.
Sarah Kendzior:
Now imagine 20 years from now there's some sort of report from them praising the Trump administration, saying they’re innocent of crime, saying all the things that this administration wants you to believe, all the things it puts in propaganda. I could easily imagine a situation in which digital archives are written in this way—this is what George Orwell imagined—in which people were constantly rewriting the truth of the present in order to obliterate the past and make it easier for the autocrats to create the future. And, of course, when he was writing those sorts of, you know, his imaginings of what the future was going to be, there was no internet. There was no easy way of rewriting people's words. There was no easy way of conducting mass deletion. When Soviets would oust people from photos, it was quite an effort.
Sarah Kendzior:
They didn't have Photoshop, they didn't have smartphones. They had to very carefully trim the borders of the people they wanted to disappear from history. That's not true anymore. We're in danger of that. I sometimes look at my own work and I wonder, you know, people ask me sometimes, Are you afraid you're gonna get banned like so many authors are getting banned nowadays? I'm less afraid of being banned than being rewritten, than having a book called Hiding in Plain Sight written by me—you know, a New York Times bestseller, something that may be of interest 10-20 years from now—and having it filled with words that I did not write, thoughts I did not think, beliefs I do not hold. That would be a more powerful form of censoring the original story. And so keep an eye out on all of this. Keep an eye out on archives in general, whether they are physical paper documents or digital archives. The future is not looking good not only because of the reality of the future, but also because the imagined one. We won't even have control over the interpretation of the past necessarily, so do your part, do your documentation, pay attention and write things down.
Andrea Chalupa:
Speaking of writing things down so we can preserve truth, we are going to enter what is unfortunately becoming a regular segment here at Gaslit Nation, which is fact checking the Putin crisis. There's a lot of misinformation out there, people unintentionally getting their facts wrong, getting the context all wrong and the history wrong. And there is, of course, rampant disinformation where people are intentionally getting the facts wrong to serve some insidious agenda. So we’re going to subtweet now all the bad takes out there and keep people's names out of it because some include our friends. <laughs> Oh man.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our frenemies.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our frenemies. No-
Sarah Kendzior:
Our cold warriors in the Twitter Cold War.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. But we just want to ground people in what they should be paying attention to and cut through all the noise and this way, you have x-ray vision on the Putin crisis and how it's going to likely unfold and sort of the major players and so forth. So this week’s segment is called, “NATO is a Red Herring”. That, of course, is a nod to one of our favorite films here at Gaslit Nation which is a brilliant comedy about corruption, about the trans-national crime syndicate, a film otherwise known as Clue where, I think it was Col. Mustard who famously said…Or no, was it Ms. Peacock?
Sarah Kendzior:
It was a guy, I think, I don't know.
Andrea Chalupa:
It was Mr. Green. “Communism was a red herring.” Anyway, Sarah's about to correct me on that. <laughs> So this week's segment on fact checking the Putin crisis is called “NATO is a Red Herring”. So let's start there. So what's going on with the latest here? There's an estimated 130,000 Russian troops built up around Ukraine in key spots, including just a 50 minute drive from Kyiv to the Belarus border. Putin has a bunch of his troops in his proxy state, Belarus. When will he likely pull the trigger? The US has stopped calling it an imminent invasion, but keeps saying so in so many words, saying that Putin is getting housing for soldiers, Putin is bringing in medical needs for soldiers, the sort of movement you would see to sustain a long term invasion. This could also be part of a greater bluff because Putin has created a massive hostage crisis where he is trying to force his demands, his demands that are absolutely unrealistic and unnecessary.
Andrea Chalupa:
So what is this really about? I mean, no one can say for sure but it's pretty obvious if you've been following Putin for a long time. This is a guy that's all about Putin. Yes, he's been very clear about the Soviet Union collapse being a huge mistake. He's vilified the players that were responsible for that, like Gorbachev. He has brought his KGB strongman way of seeing the world and treating internal/external enemies, which has created a crisis—a domestic crisis—in Russia. There's a demographic crisis there because Putin is killing Russia from within. He's zapping and depriving the world of Russian greatness at a time when we need all minds on deck to help us meet the growing challenges of the 21st century. Putin is a king of death sitting on top of a pile of bones.
Andrea Chalupa:
His war against humanity began first and foremost against the Russian people. He consolidated power through the atrocities of his war against Chechnya—a region inside Russia—and there's been reporting about how he justified that war through mysterious bombings of buildings inside Moscow that he blamed on Chechen terrorists, that’s how he’s justified his hostilities there. That would be very much in the realm of how he operates. Putin's war machine, which considers propaganda as an important weapon, has created all sorts of…literally produced fake news with actors staging all sorts of interviews. Fake actors; a woman talking about her child being crucified, another woman allegedly playing several different characters on Russian state propaganda. So there's a whole history of the Kremlin staging these sort of false flag actor characters to justify the Kremlin's ongoing aggression against Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
There's a great Ukrainian based organization that calls out a lot of these literally fake news segments created by the Kremlin's propaganda machine. That organization is called Stopfake. It's all about stopping the Kremlin's fakes and they call out a lot of these actor-generated fake news stories. I'm pointing this out that there's a long history here because the American press was gobsmacked by the US government coming out and claiming that they were getting ahead of the Kremlin unleashing some fake video, another fake new segment produced by the Kremlin's propaganda machine to justify a false flag event inside Russia that would justify, of course, the escalation of Putin’s invasion. The American press seemed very confused by this. They said, Well, what's your source? The US pushed back saying, We can't reveal our sources. And the Americans were, you know, a lot of people, even credible people that I trust on a lot of different issues were doubting this because they simply did not know that Russia has been doing this for years already.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you've been watching Ukraine closely, if you’ve been following groups like Stopfake closely, you would know that the Kremlin generating a fake video to justify a false flag event is what they've already been doing. It's pretty average for them. Right? And so good on the US for coming out with that to get ahead of that. I have no doubt that it's true because, again, it's pretty run of the mill for Putin’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine. So that's first and foremost so people, be aware of that. So, what does Putin ultimately want? I know we're not mind readers and a lot of people are trying to say he wants to bring back the Soviet Union, he wants respect, he didn't like the last episode of the Seinfeld finale. Like, you know what I mean?
Sarah Kendzior:
<laughs>
Andrea Chalupa:
There's all sorts of motivations put to Putin, but it's just, what does any dictator want? They want to die in power. How do you die in power when you are keeping a country like Russia hostage and you have all these young kids coming up who do not like you no matter what you do to try to get them to like you? This whole TikTok generation hates your guts. You try to get some rapper inside Russia to release a pro Putin music video and it becomes the most hated, the most disliked, most thumbs down music video in Russian YouTube history, right? So Putin sees the writing on the wall to some extent that the Russian people—who he fears the most—have had it with his nonsense, right? Because there's no future for them. There's a brain drain crisis.
Andrea Chalupa:
As I mentioned, there's a demographic crisis. You have a closing of the Russian mind. He cannot step down because he's made too many enemies and they'll off him, and a new top dog will come in and seize all that wealth for himself or somebody will come in. So he just wants to die in power. That's all. And so he has to create this war to try to distract everyone, keep people on their toes, and stay in power and push back against global democratic alliance from holding him accountable for all the aggression he undertakes to try to stay in power. Imagine if Putin took all this energy he's spending on his imperialist ambitions to destabilize not only internationally but domestically, imagine if he focused all time and attention and money and resources on the Russian people. That would be a game changer for that country.
Andrea Chalupa:
That would be a game changer for the world, right? Because we wouldn't have to deal with him anymore. He would be focused on helping the Russian people. And that's what he is not doing. He's robbing them blind instead. So that brings me to another narrative that I've heard out there with some well-meaning takes that are overlooked, a lot of facts. There's one terrible take out there that the Russian people are okay with this because that's just who they are. They essentially have a slave/enslaved mentality. Well, that's not the Russian people I know and that I've met either going there or traveling to various countries. In fact, since this crisis has escalated, there's been thousands of Russian intellectuals who have signed their names to a letter saying, Please do not do this.
Andrea Chalupa:
You have one of the country’s leading filmmakers who said to Putin's face, “What are you doing? Please focus on the youth of today.” There's been a lot of outspoken dissent by a lot of Russians, thousands of Russians who have high profiles, and they're able to do that and live because they don't have any political power because Putin deprives them of political power. That's why they're essentially not a threat. If they were tenaciously running for office, that would be a different story, but a lot of these people are cultural figures and intellectuals and so forth.
Sarah Kendzior:
I just wanna say one thing in response to that is that this “slave mentality” excuse is the same one that imperialists and dictators, including Russia itself, always use to justify abhorrent actions. This is something that the ethnically Russian Soviets would say about central Asia when they took it over and made it part of the Soviet union, you know, that these are “uneducated, ignorant people that are stuck in a slave mentality and need to be enlightened,” or that there's a natural inclination to authoritarianism.
Sarah Kendzior:
You see this said in the West about Russians, about Chinese people, again, about—if you know where central Asia is—about people living in long standing, entrenched dictatorships like Uzbekistan or Tajikistan or Turkmenistan or whatnot. They think that this must be, somehow, the natural order of things, that people just don't want freedom, they don't want justice, instead of, say, they live under a brutal and repressive government that would never allow them these things and that if they fought for them would respond with extreme violence. And so, you know, people often don't protest. They stay quiet. They try to protect themselves, protect their family. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're in favor of what's going on.
Sarah Kendzior:
And you certainly see that, like, once a dictator leaves—you're seeing this right now in Kazakhstan—you're see seeing the de-Nazarbayevication, if that's a word. The longstanding dictator of Kazakhstan who was there since the late Soviet period, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is gone. He officially resigned but he still had such influence that the capital was renamed after him recently. It's now been, you know, unnamed after him and they're kind of ridding the country of his prestige and influence, taking down the statues and trying, you know, they still have a dictatorship. It's not like the broad structural conditions have improved here, but the personality cult is gone. You would've never really known this though in Kazakhstan under Nazarbayev. There were sporadic protests, particularly—I think the clip that we used in the beginning mentioned this—in Zhanaozen in 2010, but they were notable because they were so rare.
Sarah Kendzior:
It’s difficult to know what people living in an authoritarian regime are thinking because expressing their thoughts publicly can get them killed. And so whenever you see anyone using this kind of terminology, like, Oh, they have a personality inclined to authoritarianism, a slave of mentality, they're thoughtless people, that is the language of imperialism. That is the language of dictators. It is absolute bullshit from a social science perspective, from a moral perspective, from any perspective. So disregard that rhetoric and definitely disregard it when you hear Kremlin officials perhaps using that about Ukraine saying, Hey, I think they want it, the Ukrainians want it. I mean, that is what they said with Crimea. That was how they justified it is they didn't think it was such a big deal, just the West making a big deal out of it. That was not what actually happened, but again, you're living under people who have no qualms about using brutal force.
Andrea Chalupa:
Anybody that pushes that enslaved mentality—and it doesn't matter how connected they are to Russia, how long they've spent in Russia, the language, whether they speak the language or not, or how big of an expert they are in Russia—that's a privileged opinion. To come out with that enslaved mentality trope is a privileged perspective. And Orwell called this out when he was doing the same work of calling out all sorts of disinformation and gaslighting. Orwell said that totalitarianism is completely incomprehensible to people in the West. There's nothing inherent about anybody that they would just accept to be enslaved, to be in a hostage situation. Fear is contagious. Fear can cover the light of any human being, any society, but the light remains.
Andrea Chalupa:
And I know that from studying a lot of resistance movements and studying some of the darkest chapters of Russian imperialism during the Soviet period. So people have to never, ever, ever, ever, ever take away agency from the men and women who are in countries like Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus and elsewhere, in China. I think that's extremely important to understand. And just as an example of this, as we talk a lot about on the show, there are massive grassroots resistance movements from Russia, Belarus and, of course, Ukraine, and they work together. They help each other wherever they are. There's coordination. And it's extremely important because the Russian grassroots activists I've talked to see themselves as keeping the flame of democracy alive for whenever Russia's ready. And so do the Ukrainian activists. They see themselves as helping Russians keep that blame of democracy alive for when that moment will finally come again for Russia.
Andrea Chalupa:
Also, you've had all sorts of Russian activists over the years point to Russia's own constitution to remind Putin’s thugs of their rights. You had one of the original members of Pussy Riot, when she was arrested, she became an expert on law inside the prison system. And then you have a Russian artist, a wonderful eccentric who lit the door of the FSB on fire in Moscow and was arrested. His passion for why he did that was so strong. And the statement he released when he lit the door of the FSB on fire—remember, Putin was the head of the FSB and this Russian artist lit it on fire—his statement for why he did that read like Orwell writing about Stalin's Soviet Union; all the terror, all of the political persecution, the death of the country. His passion—this Russian artist's passion—was so strong that he convinced his own prosecutor to come to his side, right?
Andrea Chalupa:
This Russian prosecutor was so blown away by this young artist and his convictions and some greater truths that he was like, Okay, I'm gonna stop working for the regime and I'm gonna start working for you. So have faith in the Russian people and our shared humanity no matter where you are, no matter where you're listening to this in the world, and never, ever, ever deprive them of agency by falling for the traps of this enslavement mentality that pundits like to throw around, or “the chess board pieces”, or “It's a NATO Kremlin Cold War” nonsense, right? Keep it on the ground level. They're just like us in terms of wanting our freedom, wanting to raise our families in safety and be left alone and watch what we want and read what we want and go where we want in a free world. They're just like us. Okay?
Andrea Chalupa:
And just to drive that point home of there being a very strong beating heart of resistance going back a very long time in Russian culture, Leo Tolstoy wrote a major call to action of non-violent resistance in a book called The Kingdom of God is Within You. It is a beautiful testament to the power of non-violent resistance that went on to influence Gandhi. Gandhi credits Tolstoy’s book as one of the main books that influenced his work in taking on the British monarchy. And Gandhi and Tolstoy struck up a friendship that lasted years over letters where Tolstoy guided and supported his work. Okay? This great Russian writer. And that book would also go on to influence the civil rights movement as well. Okay? So one of the greatest resistance guides, one of the greatest resistance manuals ever written was written by a Russian.
Andrea Chalupa:
And even during the Terror—Stalin's Great Terror—you had a lot of extraordinary Russian artists working privately in the dark to keep truth alive, no matter what. You had tremendous artists who were seeing their friends disappear, and yet they kept creating art and kept capturing the violence of that moment through their art. Their souls refused to be silenced. That's a universal truth. That exists in all of us. Never forget that. One example I want to give—because I love this writer so much—is Mikhail Bulgakov who, of course, wrote The Master and Margarita. He went insane because of Stalin's Terror, seeing his friends disappear. Stalin used to like to torment him personally by calling him up at his house personally, which drove him mad. Bulgakov was writing what would become essentially a Soviet Alice in Wonderland, where the devil comes to Moscow and messes with all the atheists and runs amok.
Andrea Chalupa:
And there's a great big ball in hell and it's a lot of fun and naked people flying in the sky. It's a fantastical, magical novel. I discovered it from friends in Ukraine who are obsessed with it. Bulgakov wrote that in private and he was so terrified of what Stalin was doing to all the artists around him that he burned it one night. And instead of just leaving it there, he wrote the entire novel from heart. He just had to have that novel exist, no matter the risk it took. And he slowly went insane. And his wife, miraculously, his wife and muse who inspired the novel, who is the Margarita in the title of The Master and Margarita, his wife got the novel out into the world as a testament to their enduring love. So that's what humanity is. Humanity is a love story and that love story transcends all types of borders and governments and political affiliations and chess pieces. Never forget that. And just ground yourself as you're trying to parse through what's really happening and what the stakes are and what matters and what we should be doing. It's the human angle that always comes first.
Andrea Chalupa:
Let's go down to brass tacks again with NATO. So, Putin's trying to make this all about NATO which, of course, it's not because Ukraine, as we keep saying on the show, won't be a NATO member, certainly not any time soon, and in order to get a new member into NATO, you need unanimous consent, meaning every single country inside NATO has to approve of a new membership. Well, you're not going to get that at all because Hungary is a NATO member and Hungary would, of course, veto Ukraine becoming a member. Hungary has a strongman who is closely aligned with Putin. Hungary enjoys a lot of cheap gas from Russia, which is reportedly five times cheaper than market value.
Andrea Chalupa:
Hungary has been doing an all out assault on civil rights against LGBTQ people, against the independence of the judiciary, against journalists, against academia. Hungary has become a poster child of how to attack democracy, which is why Orbán’s Hungary is so popular right now among the Fox News set, especially Tucker Carlson, and there's going to be some sort of CPAC-affiliated conference there this coming March uniting the far-right movement. Orbán and Putin just met. They spat off a bunch of propaganda against Ukraine. Orbán also had a shocking meeting with the President of the United States inside the White House, which was a sign of the decline of democracy in America that that would happen. Of course, that president was Trump and Orbán reportedly badmouthed Ukraine, spouted all the usual Kremlin talking points against Ukraine to Trump. So Hungary not in a million years would let Ukraine become a member of NATO. They would veto that. So would, likely, Germany.
Andrea Chalupa:
The current chancellor of Germany, his party has a long history of being Russian-friendly, Kremlin-friendly, even during all these years of aggression. Even though he's tried to sort of walk a finer line on that, Germany would most likely veto Ukraine's membership as well. So would France.
Sarah Kendizor:
And Poland.
Andrea Chalupa:
Poland, this government, even though it's a Trumpian government that is ideologically aligned with this gaslighting male patriarchal traditional family value set, which is launching a war against abortion and LGBTQ rights and women's rights and so forth, Poland is still staunchly anti Kremlin, given that the Kremlin killed off its intelligentsia at the Katyn massacre.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Honestly, I'd be curious what they would do because they have a direct history of being, you know, conquered for over a century out of existence and then treated as a Warsaw Pact satellite state with none of their sovereignty or freedom intact, but it's been wild and abhorrent to see the alliance of Poland with all of these right-wing governments. Although it's been shocking and horrible to see Hungary as well, and all these other countries that were forced into the Warsaw Pact reverting into the kind of autocratic countries that they were before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's just jarring.
Sarah Kendzior:
These are countries I visited in the late ‘90s when I was a college student and they were newly independent, and there was a sense of vulnerability and gratitude and kind of, you know, a sense of hope for the future. And it's shocking to revisit them now. I was in Hungary in 2017 meeting with some professors and stuff from Hungary and I remember one was crying just about what had happened to her country that had been through so much, that had overcome so much, and was reverting backward. And she was one of the people targeted in all of these attacks on intellectuals and journalists and independent thinkers and whatnot. But yeah, this, all of this, it's such a tragedy and it's so awful to see the way that it's conveyed often in the Western media where the individual histories of these countries aren't known, their prior uprisings in the Soviet period are not necessarily well known.
Sarah Kendzior:
And there's this sort of collective shrug like, Oh, it's, it's just Ukraine, it's just Hungary. It's just this this status that anyone…You kind of know this if you grow up as a hyphenated American, which European countries are thought of as important, especially in the 1980s and before the Soviet Union collapsed. It was always implied that the Eastern European, or what it was called, Eastern Europe—it’s really central Europe—back then were just somehow less important, less intellectual, less worthy of, “No, they could be taken by the Soviets, they could be taken over and, you know, what does it even matter? What did they have to offer the world anyway?” There's still some of that arrogance and condescending attitude left now even after 30 years of independence and sovereignty.
Sarah Kendzior:
I see it expressed all over the political spectrum and I would just say, please do your homework, do your reading. Maybe we'll put together a list of works and history books about different countries so that you understand what is at stake here. Anyway, go on. I know you have a lot to say.
Andrea Chalupa:
Another NATO member, France, would likely veto Ukraine's membership into NATO. France enjoys a lot of Russian oligarch money in its territory. Several Russian oligarchs and their families have properties in France. You have Macron who is up for reelection in April paying a visit to Moscow, which really seemed like a campaign stop for Macron because he has been the target in the past, when he first came to power, of Russian disinformation driving the yellow jackets movement against Macron, which was, you know, a lot of riots in the streets against rising prices. And Russia was fanning those flames through disinformation.
Andrea Chalupa:
So Macron has his own skin to worry about in going to France and standing side by side with Putin while Putin spouts off all sorts of conspiracy theory propaganda. Macron just stands there and Macron also drops a very insulting term as a possible solution on the table for the Putin crisis, which is known as Finlandization. I don't even know, how do you say it? It's Finlandization.
Sarah Kendzior:
We're just making up all sorts of words on this show. We've got denazarbayevication. <laughs>
Andrea Chalupa:
<laughs> Finlandization. It’s “Finland” with “ization” at the end and it's considered by many Fins as derogative.
Sarah Kendzior:
Derogatory, you mean?
Andrea Chalupa:
Sarah and I just learned to speak and then we just launched a podcast.
Sarah Kendzior:
<laughs> Yes, yes.
Andrea Chalupa:
So it's a derogatory term and what it means and the history of it is that Finland, being the weaker nation against Russian imperialism in the form of the Soviet Union, Finland which has a history of suffering, Russian aggression, Finland, of course, had a war with the Soviet Union and was invaded.
Andrea Chalupa:
So Finland agreed to be neutral on world affairs. It would remain neutral in the Cold War in exchange for maintaining its political independence and the Soviet Union agreed to this and it lasted throughout the Cold War period. And it didn't stop until the Soviet Union collapsed. And you might think, well, that's not such a bad thing, Ukraine can just remain neutral. But what that does is it takes away Ukraine's agency. Once again, Ukraine is a sovereign nation. It should be free to do any sorts of alliances and take whatever stands it wants in terms of its own foreign policy, right? It shouldn't be forced into neutrality with a gun against its head. That's what Finland was forced to do. And not only that, the psychology of that is destructive because what do you think happened over time? You had the media, the elites in Finland, parroting Soviet talking points. You had books being banned, films being banned that were considered anti Soviet.
Andrea Chalupa:
So during that whole period, you had all of this self censorship that permeated Finnish society that benefited the Soviet Union. And as soon as the Soviet Union was gone, it all went away. It collapsed, right? And now that period is seen as a dark period, a period of a mental colonialization by Russia against the Finnish people at the time. Also, there was an economic price because due to this policy, Finland couldn't benefit from the Marshall Plan funding because it was a neutral nation, so it missed out on that. So no to that. No to Finlandization. If you see anybody promoting that, it's Russian colonialism by another name. So keep that in mind. That's very important. And that's something that Macron, who just cares about saving his own skin at the upcoming April election because his mandates and things with the pandemic are facing all sorts of grassroots and disinformation pressures like they are in any pocket of the world today. So he wants to make sure he gets in without a lot of headache from Russian active measures and disinformation campaigns against him so he is playing nicely with Putin. That's all this is about.
Andrea Chalupa:
And a funny story here, just to show you how weak the spine is in France when it comes to standing up to Kremlin aggression in recent years: Sarkozy, who came to power as Sarkozy the American, he was going to embrace bringing America and France back together again and he was gonna be like an American president for France. He was spouting off about human rights for Russia, calling out the pressures against journalists and opposition leaders in Russia and so forth, and then he had a meeting with Putin and when they came out of the meeting, Sarkozy looked like a deer in the headlights. There's been all sorts of speculation of, What did Putins say to Sarkozy in that meeting that would have Sarkozy coming out white in the face like he just saw a ghost?
Andrea Chalupa:
What eventually happened over the years is that Sarkozy the American turned into Sarkozy the Putinite. He suddenly started making campaign stops in Moscow around the same time as Le Pen, whose party financially depended on Russian support, her far-right party or Trumpian party. He was kissing the ring—Putin's ring—in Moscow, symbolically. He was spouting off all sorts of Kremlin talking points. He just went full on in the other direction. It was like he was bought off or threatened. Something had happened to Sarkozy to make him flip so greatly. And amazingly, when he did make that transformation to the dark side, Sarkozy also got caught committing acts of corruption which landed him a three-year prison sentence. Right? So if you go to the dark side with Putin—either you’re paid off or you're threatened or both—you slip. You start slipping and your life falls apart. Sarkozy is a warning of that. So Macron needs to be very careful with the line he walks with wanting to be this young leader of a new Europe, being open to all sides and open-minded, but not going so far in the direction of Putinism that you lose your soul, you lose your way.
Sarah Kendzior:
There really needs to be a more comprehensive look at European leaders who, while George W. Bush was president, while the Iraq War was going on, basically became Putin oligarch lackeys, because there are so many. There's Gerhard Schröder, who was in power at that time. There's Sarkozy. There's Tony Blair. Before, when you were referencing Putin and the Kremlin and their long term plans, the infiltration of oligarchy into places like London, into Western governments, you know, the merger of mafia tactics or just literally mafias and white-collar crime and state corruption that we've referenced before on the show (Mueller made a speech about it in 2011), that was really peaking between, I don't know, I would say like 2005 and 2010, which also coincided with the global financial collapse.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm sure people probably have investigated this to some degree. So much is paywalled now, but it's like, you know, take a historical look. Look at what these leaders were doing at that time, at the public face they showed the world and what they ended up doing later, or being revealed as doing later, because it's so incredibly nefarious. And it's really ominous, I think, that we just see the same figures again and again. And all of these people who are supposed to be representing their country, protecting its sovereignty, protecting its public safety and so on are so easily bought off and corrupted.
Andrea Chalupa:
Mmmhmm <affirmative>. Another talking point you're going to hear is especially from activists on the far left and the far right talking about, “Oh, it's all NATO's fault. NATO expanded east. NATO made promises to Russia they wouldn't go up to the Russian border.” Well, let me just say this. The Eastern European nations that suffered greatly under Russian occupation over the years—mass trauma, mass death—the ones that got into NATO right away, they've been fine. They've been pretty much unscathed. The Eastern European nations that suffered greatly under Russian occupation, that suffered mass death, mass trauma, that did not get into NATO, a lot of them have frozen conflicts. Look at Georgia, Moldova and now Ukraine. They’ve all had Russian occupation in pockets of their countries, frozen conflicts there that are done to coerce them into the Kremlin sphere of influence, are done to internally destabilize them politically and economically to make them undesirable as economic investments because they have these frozen conflicts there.
Andrea Chalupa:
So that's a sign that NATO works and that's a sign that it's the history of Russian colonialism—brutal, genocidal Russian colonialism—that has driven NATO expansion, not NATO. And there were no formal promises, formal promises in writing agreements, ever made between NATO and Russia that NATO would not expand east to Russia's borders. There were maybe some conversations with Gorbachev at one point, but there's nothing in writing, formalized, a big old agreement that was broken ever by NATO. But, there were several agreements between Russia and Ukraine to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and security and peace between the two nations, several agreements that were broken by Russia with Putin's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, including one that you must be aware of as you follow this story, as it unfolds, and that is called the Budapest Memorandum where Ukraine gave up having the third largest arsenal in the world of nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the US and the United Kingdom. Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for guarantees of security from three great nations.
Andrea Chalupa:
One of those nations has invaded it and continues to invade it. Do you think that would've happened if Ukraine had given up its nukes? Do you think if Ukraine was a nuclear power…And keep in mind Russia takes nuclear war very seriously. It does all types of saber rattling nuclear war drills. It currently is going to hold one soon. It normally has one in the fall. It's gonna move up sooner to any day now because it wants to scare us even more, right? So Putin leverages his power of being a nuclear nation. He robbed that power of Ukraine with the false promises of security guarantees, right? That was a formalized agreement that the Kremlin broke and is continuing to break, and it's one of many agreements that Russia has made with Ukraine over the years.
Andrea Chalupa:
So throw that in people's faces when they try to blame this all on NATO. Again, NATO, this is not about NATO. NATO is the red herring. If you listen to Ukrainian journalists, who are the real experts here, this is not about NATO. This is just about one small-minded little man, desperate to cling to power, desperate to cling to power because he's killing his own country and more and more people hate him there. He's determined to die as one of the richest men in the world and die in power. He's just a modern day Ozymandias from that Shelly poem. That's all he is. This isn't complicated. Dictators aren't creative in terms of, you know, how they are. The other thing you have to keep in mind, the New York Times report recently came out about the conspiracy theorists in the Kremlin, a bunch of Michael Flynns running around the Kremlin using all sorts of genocidal language to describe Ukrainians and saying that the West allows humans and animals to marry each other, you know, stuff that sounds just batshit crazy.
Andrea Chalupa:
People excuse that sometimes as Russian active measures, putting out a dog whistle to try to attract far-right conspiracy theorists and try to consolidate a global movement of conspiracy theorists to destabilize democracies and bring in totalitarianism through the rampant disinformation campaigns, because Putin uses actual conspiracy theories to wage war. He tries to fund, or funds, all sorts of anti-vaccine anti-mandate movements. He's created all sorts of crises through the spreading of conspiracy theories through his troll bots and elsewhere. And as we keep saying on the show, Russian state TV is like Fox News on acid. It's just genocidal language against Ukraine and its enemies and all sorts of war threats and saber rattling, and currently a lot of Tucker Carlson clips that they like to celebrate there. So understand that this isn't an act. These guys, as hypocritical as they are, as much as they wage war through their conspiracy theories to their propaganda machine against the West, yes, they hide their money in the west.
Andrea Chalupa:
They vacation abroad in the West. They send their kids to school in the West. So, yes, it is hypocritical, but these do believe their own xenophobic rants, beacuse a lot of these conspiracies, the basis of them is like a racial superiority and ethnic superiority and a lot of white pundits especially miss this because they don't see Russia today through a decolonized lens. Russia historically and even in recent years has, even though you've had various rulers from various regions, like Stalin was Georgian as they like to point out, but there is this sort of Russia First mentality as sort of being the superior and Ukraine is being the little brother even though Ukraine, culturally, is several centuries older than of what would become Russia. There's discrimination against people from across Eastern Europe and inside Russia. There was a wonderful BBC documentary on the hate groups fueled by Putinism, that Putin launched some nationalist march that became a neo-Nazi march.
Andrea Chalupa:
The BBC sent a Black reporter there to cover this. At first, he was laughing at how absurd all the open racism was and the chauvinism and all of it. And the more time he spent there, it was just really getting to him and he had to leave. He had to leave some interviews because they're just too disturbing. It's the same sort of white supremacy and white male patriarchy and traditionalist family values and book banning that goes against any inconvenient truths in their history that exists with the Far Right in America. It's mirrored ideologies, right? That's why they're so united. So just like in the US, we have our own conspiracy theorists that are off the wall disturbing, so does Russia and they exist inside the Kremlin and they're driving a lot of decisions.
Andrea Chalupa:
It doesn't mean they're all like that, certainly. There are pragmatic people in the Kremlin. There are technocrats in the Kremlin, but you cannot underestimate the danger of having conspiracy theorists at the helm of this crisis right now, that are driving this crisis. It is self-destructive for Russia to try to occupy Ukraine. That is incredibly self-destructive, but they might go ahead and do it because they are dealing—as Angela Merkel said of Putin—on another planet. Right? I'm just bringing up this point to just to say, Do not underestimate the danger of the conspiracy theorists in the Kremlin and what might be driving that. A final point I want to say: Again, the Far Left especially likes to point out that Ukraine has a Nazi problem. Let me tell you, if I could choose to have America's Nazi crisis or Britain's Nazi crisis or Ukraine's Nazi crisis, I would choose Ukraine because the fundamental difference is that Ukraine's Nazi crisis…You know, Ukraine, like anywhere else in the world, like Canada, has a far-right element that's dangerous, that resorts to political violence, but in Ukraine they don't wield political power like they do in the United States of America where we had actual Nazis like Steve Bannon bring actual Nazi Donald Trump to power, where they brought in actual Nazi Stephen Miller to oversee a deliberately sadistic immigration crisis that led to loss of life and sexual victimization, exploitation of countless children and men and women. Okay? So America's Nazi crisis dwarfs Ukraine's Nazi crisis. Keep in mind that Ukraine is a multicultural society with a vibrant Jewish history going back several centuries and a city, Uman, that is a Jewish pilgrimage site. You had Jewish people that were instrumental organizers of Ukraine's popular uprising known as Euromaidan. You had Jewish Ukrainians who were fighting against Putin's invasion. For a minute there, you had a Jewish prime minister and a Jewish president in Ukraine, the only country outside Israel ever to have that.
Andrea Chalupa
And currently the president of Ukraine is Jewish. So it's like the far right element, as dangerous as it is, as important as it is to monitor it and draw attention to it and put daylight on it, dear Lord, it's like, if I woke up tomorrow with Ukraine's Far Right crisis in this country, I could sleep at night because we'd no longer have America's Far Right crisis, which is taking over our local election offices, which is pushing the Big Lie, which is banning books, which has taken over the Supreme Court. Right? So we have a much greater crisis here. Don't fall into that whole broad stroke paint Ukraine as a Nazi nation propaganda because that is the dominant narrative against Ukraine on Kremlin state TV. They refer to Ukraine as Nazis and blah, blah, blah, blah. So don't fall into that.
Andrea Chalupa:
A lot of that narrative is being pushed, unfortunately, by pundits and activists on the Far Left trying to justify zero intervention whatsoever to help Ukraine, not even intervention in the form of sanctions against Putin. I just had to point that one out. So I think that's everything. This has been another addition of fact checking Putin’s crisis. And again, this specific segment was called “NATO is a Red Herring” because, like I said, this is not about NATO. There's a chorus of voices pointing this out. And the question we're gonna answer that we got in this week's Q&A from our listeners on Patreon is, When will Putin invade? This is just a prediction. I think he's going to wait until the Olympics are over. I don't think he's gonna do anything to disrupt the 1936 Olympics in China because if Putin should pull the trigger and escalate his invasion, what's going to happen? Who's going to be his financial lifeline, his master? China. right? The West is going to cut him off. That's gonna be a big hit, but then China will bail him out.
Andrea Chalupa:
So Putin, in the ultimate self-own, is going to turn Russia into a dependent state on China should he do this invasion. So he's not going to off China by stealing all the attention away with a horrifying invasion. So I think he's going to wait until March. I think his invasion will coincide to be around the anniversary of his invasion of Crimea, which happened in March, 2014. I think that's a date to look out for. If you have an authoritarian regime like China that's manhandling a Dutch journalist on live television because they don't think the background of where he's filming is pretty enough, then how do you think China would react if Putin steals all the thunder? So yeah, China's kind of a winner here in some ways, because…Well, we talked a lot about it in this week's bonus episode so you can listen to that there. This has been another segment and unfortunately we'll have to have another one and another one as the weeks go by.
[outro theme music, roll 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:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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