Chomsky and Ellsberg on the Present Danger [in Russia/Ukrain

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"Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles" - Chomsky and Ellsberg pt 2/2
theAnalysis-news
Mar 20, 2023 #antiwar #protests #PaulJay

Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg continue their discussion about how to avoid nuclear war.



Transcript

0:00
Noam Chomsky Well, let me
0:07
shift gears a little bit. You've had more experience than anybody I know of with
0:17
trying to protest the race to nuclear war over these years.
0:25
Daniel Ellsberg It's not because anyone actually wanted a nuclear war other than, and I don't say this as a joke, General Curtis LeMay, I think,
0:35
did want it earlier than later because it was going to be harder later. In the earlier years,
0:41
he had a few acolytes, but really almost nobody else and nobody now. I'll bet there's nobody now
0:47
who wants a two-sided nuclear war. Noam Chomsky Let me rephrase the drift towards nuclear war, whether you want it or not.
0:58
What do you get from this experience about the ways to proceed that are effective, those that
1:07
aren't effective in trying to arrest the drift that is inexorable? It's just going to keep going
1:15
one step after another up the escalation ladder. China is going to react in some way, I presume,
1:23
to the Aukus deal, nuclear submarines off its shores, to the station of B-52s permanently
1:32
in Darwin, Guam, and maybe expanding in the Philippines to the economic war. How do you stop--
1:43
what are the best ways to proceed to try to prevent this continual step towards what could
1:52
turn out well to be a determined nuclear war? While the conception in planning circles is,
2:00
well, we can keep calibrating it, keep gaining step-by-step, degrading Russia, undermining China,
2:09
moving forward, more provocations, but somehow we can keep it under control. What is the way
2:17
to get people to understand this? Let me just bring one fact into this,
2:23
which is shattering, in my opinion. I think maybe I've mentioned this. The
2:29
Pew polling centers just did a study a couple of weeks ago of the issues that Americans find
2:41
urgent-- how do they rank a couple of dozen issues in terms of urgency? They didn't even ask about
2:50
nuclear weapons. It's considered so low a priority that they don't even raise the question.
2:57
Daniel Ellsberg As I think, you know, Noam, we've discussed this. I don't know the answer to that question. I would say that the things we've done and Noam, you know,
3:08
when it comes to [inaudible 00:03:08] understanding to oppose these things,
3:20
you've been at that much longer, and you've done it all over the world. You gave me the understanding that I've worked with for the last half-century and more. No one has influenced
3:30
my thinking and my understanding of the world, no one more than you. As I've told you before,
3:38
there's been others that definitely have been my teachers for years: Doug Dowd, Peter Dale Scott,
3:47
Tom Riffer, my former student, that you know, who's been my mentor now for the last 20 years,
3:53
and 20 years before that. But you, above all. I was just looking at this book because I thought
4:02
there was a quote in it-- just a few minutes ago American Power of the New Mandarins. I'm going to have to, in my remaining time here, this is one of the books I want to reread. I just started
4:13
looking for it for what I thought was a particular quote, which turns out to be a theme in the book,
4:20
which runs all through it. The phrase that I was looking for that I remembered was,
4:27
"our leaders act, and our people act. It's unquestioned. It's unchallenged.
4:33
As if he had a right to determine the institution, governing powers, and the police." It's an
4:42
imperial latitude of; that wasn't a word that you emphasized. The fact that we acted,
4:48
if we had the right to intervene, to invade and occupy, to threaten all these things.
4:54
I came back in '67. I just looked at it when this book came out. This is a later copy. It
5:01
was in '67 and '69. I don't think I read it as soon as I got back, but I read that, and I said,
5:10
right, right. The question of right to do this. I'd been in the government a dozen
5:18
years by that time, including the Marines. I'd never heard any mention, anyone mention that
5:23
consideration-- to have a right. Could it be that we don't have a right to some things? Well, it's
5:29
not as though people claimed they had a right. This question just didn't arise, as you pointed out. They act as if they do, and that's not only the leaders. That goes, as you say, unchallenged,
5:41
not only by the elites but by the people. When I was reading this, my first reaction was
5:49
the old one-- when I learned what was going on in Vietnam, it was two years there, visiting 6-38 of
5:58
the 43 provinces. I came back in the '60s, having been all over Vietnam. I reassessed,
6:06
for example, that the public did not understand that this was a never-ending stalemate. It was
6:16
clearly a stalemate. Well, one reason they just said LBJ had explicitly in writing, that is,
6:24
the White House forbidden the use of the word stalemate. It was taboo. Progress, progress,
6:32
and so forth, no stalemate. So my message was very [inaudible 00:06:33] to other people, like assistant secretaries of state, like Robert McNamara himself, Secretary of Defense, who agreed
6:43
with me, by the way. In fact, they pretty much all agreed with me, but they didn't say it. We are
6:48
stalemated in '67. And actually, the Tet Offensive didn't change that so much. It never changed until
6:56
the end, pretty much. Okay, relevance to right now, of course. Of course, it's a stalemate there
7:03
now, as European World War I was in 1916. I've just read a very interesting book. You've
7:12
probably read it, or maybe not. It's by Philip Zelikow called The Road Less Traveled;
7:19
I think it's called. It's about the fact that the leaders with Woodrow Wilson,
7:25
[inaudible 00:07:24], Germany, the French, and the British all understood that the war then was
7:31
stalemated a trench line from one side of Europe to the other. Had we moved at all for negotiation,
7:40
and they considered it, and then they were over. I said, no, one more offensive right now
7:50
because each side believes that it will make some progress with another offensive. Now, I believe,
7:57
as in Europe, they will find they will fail on both of those, or we'll see. I don't think it'll
8:03
be any decisive thing. Will there be another chance then, after they failed in the spring,
8:09
to negotiate in the way that, as you know, Zelenskyy was ready to negotiate a year ago
8:17
in April? Hardly anybody knows this. The mainstream press never refers to it. Yes,
8:24
both Putin and Zelenskyy had their representatives in Iran, I think it was; not Iran, Istanbul,
8:31
and under Turkish auspices, and had an agreement with Boris Johnson flying over from England to
8:38
say, "we do not agree to concessions at this point, to compromises, to a ceasefire. The war
8:48
must go on." And then he quoted, he says, "the US agrees with me." The US confirmed that. Now,
8:55
whatever the complexities and the complicity on both sides that got us into this situation,
9:03
there were delusions on both sides. Obviously, Putin had the delusion that it was going to be
9:11
a cakewalk. That is what you used to hear about Iraq. Remember that war? Iraq was going to be a cakewalk. The Gulf War was-- Putin obviously thought it was going to be a cakewalk here,
9:20
and he was wrong. He wasn't wrong alone. Everybody had delusions. This is what's going to happen.
9:28
It'll go very quickly, and the US will get most of the benefits I've spoken of. Arms
9:35
sales will go up. NATO will go up. This is not an unwelcome thought, I think, to American leaders, but they weren't looking at a war like this because no one was.
9:46
Who in the world predicted a year ago that this is where we'd be now, with 100,000 losses on
9:52
both sides? I think no one expected that. So delusions go into it. But as in World War I,
10:00
the delusions are shown wrong within a month or two. You know, the trench lines developed in
10:06
Europe. The machine gun showed what it could do. Putin even knew within a month that his delusion,
10:16
widely shared, was wrong. At that point, for the US to discourage compromise,
10:24
negotiations, and discussion, to avoid where we are now with the risk of nuclear war looking at us
10:31
was a historic war crime, a crime against humanity. It was-- I'm not letting Putin off the
10:38
hook here either. Apparently, he had some-- facing the reality to draw back to pre-24th positions,
10:49
which I don't think are in the cards anymore. After the 100,000 loss on each side, what leader
10:56
side is going to say, "true, we made a mistake. I'm terribly sorry. I'm calling this off." Nobody
11:05
has ever done that. I don't think-- it's going to be very hard. Is the public demanding it?
11:13
I thought in '67, if the [inaudible 00:11:14] only knew how stalemated we were, if LBJ knew. What
11:21
I found out is he did know, and he'd known all along. So that wasn't good enough. So I thought,
11:29
well, maybe if I inform the public that the executive branch has always known not that the war
11:37
could not be won, but the Joint Chiefs always said stupidly that it could be won, and the Pentagon
11:45
Papers are full of that. They were always saying, let's escalate. If you just do what we want, like in the current case, Crimea, sure. We can let go of Donbas. I don't know what they're hearing
11:58
on the Russian side. Kyiv, why not? So they were all saying it could be won, but not at what the
12:06
president was willing to do. What the president shows consciously was an escalating stalemate
12:12
that would postpone and avert him from ever having to say, we're out. We lost. It was wrong.
12:22
Well, right now, what I found then telling didn't do the job. A lot of them knew it,
12:28
but they wouldn't say it. They were afraid of being called names, as is happening now with anybody who describes negotiation. They're being called appeasers,
12:39
weak, weak on aggression. There is aggression here. We're awarding the aggressor. Words like
12:49
that-- you're weak on communism. We don't have communism anymore, but we have Russia back.
12:56
They've always wanted China back when it was built up enough to be a real threat because we need a
13:03
threat, an indispensable threat, an enemy. The problem is, though, another part of the
13:11
problem is if the people only knew, and here's where I've had an unease about
13:18
some of the things that even you have said, Noam, continuously, I think I've said this,
13:24
that the people don't want to do this. They don't want tyranny. They don't want torture.
13:29
They don't want aggression. They don't want an invasion. That's true, they don't want it,
13:35
but they're easily persuaded that it's the right thing to do. Humans, I have to say, not just
13:42
Americans, are so suggesting that they're leaders with enormous thrones, and as you've described in
13:50
American Power, with the media, Congress putting it out, bought by the oil companies, bought by the
13:58
arms industries, this need of enemies. Humans, I think, have a flaw here. They're not necessarily
14:06
aggressive by nature, but they can easily be persuaded that they are in danger from these other
14:13
people. Quote, "other". Not like us. Different language. Different culture. Different-- they
14:19
are enemies. They threaten. They're apprehensive. We have to go kill them. And so that is a problem
14:26
in human nature. It makes it very hard to avert the Democrats who profit from this enemy concept
14:40
and the war concept. It is in their interest to fool people, and it's not that hard to do.
14:49
Now you've been at this, as I say, much longer than me. What do you conclude? Everything was
14:56
tried, but it hasn't worked yet. More of the same. Something new. I'm asking you.
15:03
Noam Chomsky I wouldn't exactly say it hasn't worked. It's had its effect, as you pointed out. Although the anti-war movement in the '60s was
15:17
way too late, it did get to the point where it may very well have prevented Nixon from using nuclear
15:26
weapons. That's not a small movement. Daniel Ellsberg No, no, definitely. As an insider, I can say it definitely kept a ceiling on the violence,
15:35
which could have been far greater if the president had done what the Joint Chiefs
15:40
wanted him to do and recommended. A major reason why he didn't do that was the understanding of
15:46
the anti-war movement and the pressure of the anti-war movement. That was very important. That saved millions of lives. It didn't end the war, but it saved millions of lives.
15:54
Noam Chomsky And then it continues. When you get to the 1980s,
16:00
look at 1981 or so. As if Reagan or his advisors were trying to pretty much duplicate what Kennedy
16:10
had done 20 years earlier-- White Paper about the communists taking over the world, we got
16:16
to go to war in Central America, and so on. Well, there was so much. In the '60s, nothing happened.
16:22
Nobody paid any attention. In the '80s, there was such an outburst of protest from popular groups,
16:31
church groups, and others that they had to back off. It was horrible enough what they
16:36
did in Central America, but it wasn't Vietnam. You go to the war and invasion of Iraq. First
16:45
time in history that there's been a huge protest against the war before it was officially launched.
16:54
Well, I think it probably put some constraints on what they were able to do and was, again,
17:00
horrible enough. It could have been worse. Let's take a look right now--
17:06
just to add to the cheery aspect of all of this. Let's take the Middle East. January, just last
17:16
month, the United States and Israel carried out their largest joint military exercises ever,
17:24
planning for an attack on Iran. The US ambassador to Israel informed them that you can do whatever
17:36
you like. We'll have your back. Are they planning for a war against Iran? Well, suppose they do.
17:46
It's kind of like Russia. Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, but they can react. They can send missiles to destroy the major energy sources of the world in
17:58
northeast/south Saudi Arabia. It's well within the reach of their missiles. They've already demonstrated they could do it. Where do we go from there? All of these things are building up.
18:11
Nobody talks about it, just as in the early '60s, no one was talking about the build-up in Vietnam.
18:19
It's as if these guys are planning, and you can understand the rationale
18:25
and this concern now that the world may move to a more multipolar structure. The US allies in the
18:37
Middle East, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, they're drifting away. They're beginning
18:44
to make moves towards accommodation, not only with Iran but with China. The UAE is the major
18:52
hub for the Chinese-Maritime silk route. The US is kind of losing its control. Well, one way to bring
19:00
them all back together, like getting Europe into Washington's pocket, is let's go to war against
19:07
Iran, then they'll all join together. If Iran reacts, they'll be attacked, and we'll have them
19:15
under control. It seems that this kind of thinking is pervasive and doesn't stop. The failure to
19:25
mobilize against it, the mobilization was too late. Should be planning in advance, saying, look
19:33
what's going on. I have to do something about it. You have people who are like-- there was a report
19:41
about the joint military axis in the Intercept, but it has to be amplified. We have to bring to
19:54
people, this is what your elected representatives are planning. They're planning to calibrate the
20:01
war in Europe, so it'll be a stalemate, and we'll get a bargain. Degrade Russia while
20:07
we move to attack China, build up the war, the provocation/escalation in China that we've been
20:16
discussing, and maybe we'll keep it under control. Let Israel-- to support Israel, we have to provide
20:25
the refueling and so on and so forth for a bombing of Iran. Maybe that'll blow up and bring the Arab
20:32
states back into our control once again instead of drifting toward multipolarity. This planning
20:39
is constantly going on. We react, but too late. Have to find ways to get there in time.
20:48
Daniel Ellsberg So how to do it in time? Noam Chomsky All we can do is try to escalate our efforts
20:56
to take arms against a sea of troubles, to pick a famous phrase, and maybe you can even overcome
21:03
them. What else can you do? Daniel Ellsberg You're certainly not talking to somebody now who is trying to tell people to stop acting,
21:12
try, don't take any risks. The difficulties are greater than I understood 50 years ago,
21:20
and in part, because not all the people, even when they know we're moving toward war, are against
21:28
that. I'm sorry to say it seems easy to persuade them that this is inevitable, it's necessary, and
21:35
it's what we have to do. It's easy to fool them. Look, that doesn't mean it's impossible to change.
21:42
Let me go back to the positive side. As you said, which I agree with, I said the anti-war movement,
21:48
starting with me, with you, to a large extent, with what I learned from you, Howard Zinn,
21:54
and others, did keep a lid on the war. I think in 1969-- there's a movie about this coming out
22:03
on March 28, actually. The Madman-- something like that. The Madman and the Bomb. I forgot the exact
22:12
title. Steve Ladd and others are producing this. It is going to come out on PBS. It's about the moratorium that was really a general strike during a work day, a weekday, in which people took off
22:23
from work and took off from school to protest the war. It was two million people. It was a general
22:30
strike, but they didn't want to call it that. It sounded too radical, too provocative, so they called it a moratorium. I didn't know. I didn't know at that time, when copying the Pentagon
22:42
Papers, that Nixon was planning to escalate the war, including nuclear threats in nuclear war
22:48
on November 3. The two million people on October 15 showed him he would have ten times that many if
22:57
he did what he was preparing to do. He didn't do it; the escalation. So it carried out an
23:03
enormous-- it stopped an enormous escalation. I'll tell you another. Now in Vietnam, it didn't
23:10
stop the war. The war went on. The Pentagon Papers did not stop the war. It did not stop Nixon's
23:17
planning at all. The biggest bombing of the war in the offensive took place a year after the Pentagon
23:24
Papers, and Nixon was elected in that year (1972) in a landslide. It's a year and a half after the
23:33
Pentagon Papers, which didn't, however, point at Nixon. Unfortunately, they ended in '68. To
23:39
speak of miracles that are possible, I always cite the ending of the Berlin Wall and [Nelson]
23:46
Mandela becoming President of South Africa without a revolution, impossible years
23:55
beforehand to imagine this low likelihood, but impossible. Yet they did happen.
24:02
I'll add one that I know better than most people in sight. I know Nixon was planning to renew
24:11
Vietnam as soon as American troops were out. Ground troops were out in the spring of 1973.
24:17
The Paris Agreement was not meant in Nixon's eyes to end the war. It was meant to get US troops out
24:25
and carry it on by US airpower in support of ARVN troops, which we were totally financing,
24:33
totally equipping, training, and everything else. Like Afghanistan,
24:38
the role of our ground troops after a few years came down to involve almost no casualties.
24:45
How long could you carry on a war like that? Well, we learned in Afghanistan, 20 years, Nixon
24:53
wasn't forced out by an anti-war movement. He was against that war when he was vice president. He
25:00
wanted to be a lord. He was determined to get it out in the worst way, as they used to say,
25:05
and that's how he did it, in the worst way. He got out, and 20 years, well, that's what Nixon had in
25:12
mind for Vietnam. Hardly anybody understands that or believes me when I say it. It can't be
25:20
absolutely proved, by the way, but that's a long story. There's a lot of evidence for it.
25:25
How did the war end? In January of '73, the second of my trial was being sworn in. It was a break in
25:35
my trial. The trial started in '71, and then in '73, we're starting basically a new trial. Who
25:45
would-- the war I knew, and Mort Halperin knew could not be ended by the anti-war movement,
25:53
anybody else, or the Vietnamese, no matter what they did. With Nixon in office,
26:02
he just experienced a historic landslide, by some accounts, the greatest landslide in history. What
26:09
was the chance that Nixon would be out so that the war could be ended before 1977? This is in 1973.
26:21
Zero. It was not unlikely; it was unimaginable that Nixon would be out so that the war could be
26:30
ended because it wasn't going to end with Nixon. The anti-war movement alone could not do it. A
26:36
whole chain of events took place. Nixon's fear that I could document his plans and the threats
26:44
he was making led him to take crimes against me, which were very unlikely to be found out,
26:52
were almost impossible that the president would be held accountable for them. Then John Dean takes
26:58
on the president, calls him a liar, and that the crimes he'd been doing. It's very hard to get this
27:08
thing off, it appears, and that's how World War III will start in the end, by the way. A digital
27:14
screw-up of some kind, as happened in 1970, 1980, and 1995 for Russia. A mistaken message.
27:25
Anyway, if Alex Butterfield had not revealed the taping in the Oval Office confirmed what
27:34
John Dean had said, Nixon would have remained. It was unthinkable that Alex Butterfield, in
27:41
that Oval Office for many years, taking down notes and everything, would be the one. There was only a
27:47
handful of people who knew that taping was there. John Ehrlichman, for example, was not one of them.
27:55
Alderman did know. Kissinger did not know, but Butterfield knew. The idea that Butterfield would
28:02
reveal that was worth thinking about. He chose to do that, tell the truth about the taping.
28:11
Without that, Dean was nowhere. He had no documents to prove it. That was essential.
28:17
Without Supreme Court justices that Nixon had appointed being willing to say, he had to turn
28:25
over the tapes. Alex Cox [Archibald Cox] saying, I have to have the tapes. Elliot Richardson saying,
28:32
I resign, rather than fire Alexander Cox, his Harvard Law School teacher.
28:39
[Inaudible] being the second in command brought in there, I won't do it either and comes back
28:46
to [Inaudible], who was willing to do it. But even so, the tapes got out, etc.
28:52
So Patricia and I, Tony Russell, Lynda Resnick Sinay, who had helped the Xerox, Randy Keeler,
29:01
who was the person who went to prison and whose example was cruel to me in saying,
29:11
I do to help end the war, I'm ready to go to prison like him. None of those people,
29:18
including me, had any reason to think there was any chance or much chance, much chance
29:24
of shortening the war. They did what they could, and each one of us, each one of them,
29:30
was a link in a chain of events-- here's the point I'm making-- that led to an actually
29:36
unforeseeable event of making the war endable nine months after Nixon left office for the
29:44
first resignation in our history. So I'm saying if you push on every door, as you've been doing
29:50
for much more than half a century, you don't know which one will open or make any difference,
29:55
but it is not impossible that you will make a difference. The Pentagon Papers happened
30:03
to be a proof of that. It was not just the Pentagon Papers, but the fact that I had
30:08
copied other papers on Nixon that scared him into taking people to incapacitate me totally,
30:15
to go into my former psychoanalyst office, to get information, to coerce me, to blackmail me
30:22
into silence and that that should become known and so forth. All of these things were unforeseeable,
30:28
but all of us were doing what we could. You, as I said the other day, you and Howard Zinn,
30:35
and Dick fought (a teacher of mine), had copies of the Pentagon Papers before they came out. Did that
30:44
end the war? No. But I thought to know you above all should know, but it's not surprising to you.
30:50
It made a difference until things came in. So, Noam, you were a big part of that,
30:59
definitely. As I said, you're the one who put the idea in my head.
31:05
We don't have a right to be doing this, and we don't have a right to make nuclear threats. No one
31:12
does. Putin does not. Kennedy did not. [Nikita] Khrushchev did not in 1962. They all talk about,
31:22
"oh, this person was provoked into doing this, and he had no choice. It was inevitable." Yes,
31:28
that's the way they told everybody. The way people accepted bullshit. They were making choices that were insane, insane risks. That's what's happening right now.
31:40
If you ask me, could people think that a war could be contained in China?
31:46
Well, I have to say, yeah. Experience shows that. Putin thought a war could
31:52
be contained in Ukraine. Yet, It hasn't done so well. It's still contained, as you say,
31:58
it could always have been worse. Indeed, the public attitude about nuclear weapons has been
32:05
a major factor in the fact that threats not been carried out. Everything is at stake.
32:10
Can it be with each of us? Randy Keilar, you, going to Hanoi and reporting back
32:17
about the bombings, and all the others. We're taking a chance of imprisonment.
32:24
So for a chance that almost no official made, no matter how skeptical and cynical they were
32:31
about the chances of any progress, but they didn't reveal that outside the system because they might
32:37
have lost access. They would have lost access. They would have lost their jobs, their clearances, their career, and maybe their marriages. These are not minor, minor problems. Is it worth doing that
32:51
and demonstrating in civil disobedience for a small chance that you'll have any influence
32:57
and that that influence and a small chance will change the course of events?
33:03
The answer is, of course, it's worth it. Of course, everything is at stake.
33:09
Everything. Look out. The leaves, the trees, everything. Your family, the babies, everything.
33:17
Of course, it's worth it. Like you, who have been doing this most of your life, does it deserve
33:25
admiration and gratitude? You have gotten [inaudible 00:33:29]. Paul Jay Noam.
33:31
Last word, Noam. Noam Chomsky What you've been doing is a real inspiration. It should help us all
33:44
stand up for what has to be done, no matter what the difficulties, and move on to overcome
33:58
threats that could destroy us, but that we can control and overcome with enough
34:07
effort and commitment. I think you've shown that in a way that is truly incomparable.
34:16
Daniel Ellsberg Thank you, Noam and Paul, for giving me a chance to say that to Noam. I've wanted to for so long. I think the way things go,
34:27
I've said it clearly, but Noam, you are my hero and my mentor. I'm so glad you're my friend.
34:34
Noam Chomsky It's been wonderful for all of us. Still is and will be. Paul Jay
34:42
Thank you, gentlemen. You are both an inspiration for us.
34:47
Thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news.

[admin]

US Reveals Real Intentions in Ukraine.
by Glenn Greenwald
March 25, 2023 at 12:58 pm

The war in Iraq, or rather, Ukraine - is now more than a year old. The war in Iraq is on my mind because the 20th anniversary is coming up and many of the same arguments that were assembled to justify it are the same ones now assembled to justify the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.

In fact, I was looking at a video earlier today of George Bush and others saying that the reason we had to go fight in Iraq and invade Iraq is that we'd rather fight them over there than fight them over here. And I saw a video earlier today of California Democrat Adam Schiff saying exactly the same thing about the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. Namely, the reason we must fight Russia over in Ukraine is that, if we don't, we'll have to fight them over here. Presumably, the Russian army is on the verge of attacking the American homeland right after it gets done trying to hold a town or two for more than three months in Ukraine, confident that it can conquer the American homeland, despite spending 1/15 in its military of what the United States spends.

in any event, ever since that war began in Ukraine, more than a year ago, there have been two primary claims emanating from Washington, from defenders of this war policy who are the majority wings of both political parties. Yet again, we have complete bipartisan support with only some dissidence in the Republican Party and a few on the left, but not in the Democratic Party. Washington is united, as it usually is on such matters, and those two arguments have been the following. 1) the United States has no role whatsoever in the war in Ukraine in terms of deciding how this war will end and under what terms it will end. That decision is left solely to the Ukrainians and to President Zelenskyy because, after all, it's their country, not ours. And “we're just here to help” like we always do. We just want to help Ukraine and whatever Ukraine decides is best for them – having a diplomatic solution to the war, to end the war, continuing the war for as long as they want, that's totally their decision. We have no say at all in any of that because we're not interfering in that region. We're just helping. We're just helping. We're providing them with aid and assistance. We don't even have a position; we’re agnostic, whenever Zelenskyy wants, that's what we do. That's been the position.

Unfortunately, for people who have been claiming that, it's no longer tenable because China is now in that region trying to forge a peace agreement like it just did two weeks ago between Iran and Saudi Arabia, one of the most consequential peace agreements in that region in years in which the United States had absolutely no involvement because it was so focused on Ukraine, a country that Washington forever has said is not a vital interest to the allied states. But now our focus is so overwhelmingly on Ukraine and our money, and our weapons are going exclusively to that region that China waltzed into this much more important region and forged a peace deal. And now that they're trying to do so with President Xi in Moscow, U.S. officials are starting to panic and becoming much more candid about the reality that, of course, it's the United States that decides if and when a peace deal will be accepted and if and when this war will end. And as we're about to show you, what has been clear from the start is now made explicit, which is that the United States has no interest in having this war end because the goal is not it never was to protect Ukraine, but instead to destroy Ukraine, to offer it as a pawn, to sacrifice it at the altar of our real geostrategic goal of weakening Russia by entrapping Russia in Ukraine. And that only works if we entrap them in a war as long as possible. If that war ends too early, before Russia is destroyed, before we achieve regime change, we haven't really achieved our goal. So, we want to keep that war going and we're going to use our power over Zelenskyy, which we've had not since the war began, but way long ago, since 2014, in order to ensure that war continues. And we can show you the proof now that the U.S. officials are losing control of their message, finally revealing the truth inadvertently.

The other claim that has been emanating from the bipartisan defenders of Biden's war policy in Ukraine is that 2) the United States has no role to play whatsoever in Ukraine. Never did. We had no role there. We're just minding our own business. Ukraine is this totally independent, thriving democracy, bravely fighting for its core civil liberties and independence from Russia and one day Vladimir Putin decided he was going to invade Ukraine for totally imperialistic and malicious ends, having nothing to do with the United States or NATO or the West. We only got involved because we needed to help this democracy because that's what we do. We defend democracy. We arm, fund and support people who believe in democracy and we vanquish tyranny. And we're very, very opposed to wars of aggression of the kind Vladimir Putin launched, even though the current president, Joe Biden, like pretty much everybody who wields power in Washington, was an ardent and vehement supporter of the invasion of Iraq, of the bombing of seven Muslim countries over the last 15 years. We took our army, we packed it up, we sent it to the other side of the world, we invaded a country of 26 million people that wasn't remotely threatening our own and we stayed there and destroyed it for over a decade. And then we left.

And now the very people who did that look in the camera and they say, we're in Ukraine because we believe in the rules based international order. The very same people who tell you that send arms and money to the world's worst despots, including Saudi Arabia, with whom President Biden exchanged an affectionate fist bump with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. We send arms to General Sisi in Egypt, to the United Arab Emirates, to Jordan, to Qatar, and to despots all over the world. And yet they still tell you we have no role to play whatsoever in Ukraine. We're just there to help save democracy and vanquish authoritarianism and despotism because we like democracy and dislike despotism.

And yet, some newly uncovered videos by several independent journalists, including Michael Tracey and others that are incredibly interesting, where Chris Murphy, the Democrat from the very blue state of Connecticut, who's regarded as a liberal, went in 2014 with the pro-war wing of the Republican Party, John McCain, in particular, not only to support the people overthrowing the democratically elected government of Ukraine because that government was too hostile to the West and too favorable to Moscow - not only did they go and do that - but the things Chris Murphy said at the time are incredibly revealing. This is because he didn't realize that one day the United States government was going to have to claim the exact opposite. So, we're about to show you those videos that are incredibly revealing, along with a few others that really put together the story in a very comprehensive and compelling way.

The entire concept that the U.S. had no role to play in Ukraine, that it wasn't involved in the governance right on the other side of the border of Russia, in fact, the most vulnerable part of the Russian border – the part of the border that West Germany specifically twice invaded. Russia used that part of the border during the 20th century, killing tens of millions of Russians. They're pretty sensitive about that region. They're particularly sensitive when it comes to Western tanks and even German tanks rolling up to that part of the border, which is now happening as a result of Germany's decision to send German tanks to Ukraine to use against Russia, something that Germans swore would never happen again, that they would never send their military up to the Russian border. That was supposed to be the whole premise of the post-World War II order when it came to both Eastern and Western Europe and yet we have that again, along with German re-militarization and French re-militarization. Imagine what that looks like from Moscow's perspective.

But the entire idea that we weren't involved in Ukraine intimately and directly and aggressively since the change of government in 2013 is long been so preposterous that it's amazing that anyone could say it with a straight face, in part because let's remember the scandal of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and Burisma energy – not the part of the scandal that people like to talk about, the part of the scandal that even Biden administration supporters admit is genuine. Namely, you have this energy company, Burisma, that was facing serious legal problems with a prosecutor in Ukraine and another legal jeopardy as well and they did what American companies often do when they're facing legal jeopardy, which is they thought to themselves, let's try and get on our side, by paying them, someone with access to power so that we're protected. That's a common thing for a company to do. But no, the Burisma did not go looking for the son or a relative of a Ukrainian official, which is what you would do if Ukrainian officials were running Ukraine. They instead went and looked for the son of the United States Vice-President Joe Biden. Why would Burisma, an energy company facing legal problems in Ukraine, try and curry favor with Joe Biden to protect itself from prosecutorial pressure if Ukraine is a sovereign and democratic country in which the United States plays no role? Obviously, they did that because the real country running Ukraine for the last eight years, right on that side of the Soviet mob, the Russian border, has been the United States. And anyone who knows anything about that series of events knows that that's true. And that alone proves it, that Burisma's actions reflected their recognition of who the real power in Ukraine was. It wasn't Ukraine. It wasn't the elected leaders of Ukraine. It was the United States.

In case anyone had any doubts about that, all we have to remember is that Victoria Nuland, who worked in the Clinton administration and then ended up as Dick Cheney's top adviser on the Iraq war – obviously, did a smashing job there – and then, despite being a neocon involved in what the Democrats claim was a criminal war, ended up waltzing right into the Obama administration at the highest levels of Hillary Clinton’s State Department, when President Obama replaced George Bush as president, in 2008, and ultimately ran European policy for John Kerry State Department and specifically Ukraine, and she got caught on tape – the top official in the State Department in charge of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, who's still running Ukraine for the United States and the Biden administration – picking the Ukrainian leader. It had nothing to do with any democratic processes in Ukraine. The Ukrainians had already chosen their president. That was the president who won a five-year term in 2010 and was supposed to serve until 2015 but, instead, Americans like John McCain and Chris Murphy and almost every other official, as we're about to show you, traveled to Kyiv to work with those trying to overthrow the government of Ukraine and replace the democratically elected leader with one far more amenable to being a puppet to the two states and NATO. That's the history of Ukraine.

And here is Victoria Nuland, just the relevant part of the clip in which she did it, it can never be heard enough times. This – remember when they tell you that Ukraine is a democracy we’re there to protect – is how the actual leaders of Ukraine are selected (Feb.4, 2014).

This is the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt speaking on a phone call with Victoria Nuland in a conversation that leaked and that we all now get to listen to.

Geoffrey Pyatt: Yeah. I mean, I guess. Well, in terms of him not going into the government, just let him sort of stay out and do his political homework and stuff. I'm just thinking in terms of, sort of the process moving ahead, we want to keep the moderate and democrats together. The problem is going to be [Oleh] Tyahnybok and his guys. And, you know, I'm sure that's part of what [President Viktor] Yanukovych is calculating on all of this.

Victoria Nuland: I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience. He's the guy, you know. what he needs is Klitschko and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitschko going in, he's going to be at that level, working for Yatsenyuk. It's just not going to work.

Geoffrey Pyatt: Yeah, no, I think that's – I think that's right. Okay, good. Would you want us to try to set up a call with him as the next step?

Victoria Nuland: My understanding from that call, but you tell me, was that the big three were going into their own meeting and that Yats was going to offer in that context, a three-way, you know, a three-plus-one conversation or three-plus-two with you. Is that not how you understood it?

Geoffrey Pyatt: No, I think I mean, that's what he proposed. But I think just knowing the dynamics, it's been with them where […]

What a weird democracy, isn't it? – where Victoria Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine picked the leader of the country.

By the way, that plan they laid out, the one Victoria Nuland endorsed, ended up being exactly what happened. That's exactly how the Ukrainian leaders were chosen. These Ukrainian leaders were meeting with the United States intelligence agencies, to try and convince them that they should be the person who should lead of Ukraine. And that's exactly what happened. So, this entire narrative that Ukraine is a democracy, they're fighting for their sovereignty, they want to be free of foreign influence, the whole thing is a joke and a lie given that we get to listen to Victoria Nuland choose exactly how you claim was going to be run and Burisma obviously recognized that for the reasons I just described.

Not only that, but the claim that, oh, it's just Ukraine that decides when this war ends, that the United States has no role to play, that we just listen to President Zelenskyy – if he wants to end the war, we honor that; if he doesn't want to end the war, we honor that – listen to what John Kirby, who used to be the Defense Department spokesperson until a few months ago, now works at the White House, and his senior national security role had to say on CNN about whether or not that's, in fact, true. When he was asked whether or not it would be acceptable for Ukraine and Russia to agree to a cease-fire, if that's something that the Chinese got each side to agree to,

(Video. March 20, 2023)

John Kirby: We'll see. But as you know, we've been very, very public about any concerns about some sort of a cease-fire announcement right now. We all want to see peace. We all want to see this war end. It could end today if Mr. Putin did the right thing, but a cease-fire called right now would basically just ratify Russia's conquest and give Mr. Putin more time to reequip and retrain and restart operations at a time and a place of his choosing.

So, note that when asked about a cease-fire, John Kirby was not even pretending to say, “That's for President Zelenskyy to decide; that's for the Ukrainians to decide.” He offered his argument about why he and the United States would be opposed to a cease-fire. It would give the Russians time to consolidate their gains. It would allow the Russians to rebuild. Maybe it would actually foster a diplomatic resolution. That's the idea of a cease-fire: it's much easier for parties to negotiate in good faith when they're not trying to destroy each other. That's why the first step of diplomacy is often a cease-fire. But John Kirby just explained very emphatically why he, a U.S. official, opposed to it. And his argument was not because Zelenskyy is, but he has his own reasons for being opposed to it. And then he makes it even more explicit.

CNN: If they call for a cease-fire, you believe Ukraine should and will reject that?

John Kirby: Yes, we do. And we would reject it as well. We think that's […]

Ok, that's the key phrase. So, she asked him, you think Ukraine would reject a cease-fire and say, yeah, but we would reject it, too? So, we have a separate position from Ukraine. That's what matters, that we would reject it. The United States, that's the ultimate decision maker. Of course, the United States is the ultimate decision-maker. It's been running in Ukraine since 2013. It picked its government in 2014. It has been providing all of its arms and all of its funding from the beginning of its new government that the United States helped install. And, obviously, since the war began. So finally, this pretense that Ukraine is a sovereign, independent country that makes its own decisions is all crumbling down because they're in panic mode, that China may be able to negotiate an end to this war. And they're making very clear we, the United States, are not going to allow this. We, the United States, are opposed to it. Who cares if Zelensky wants it? It's not acceptable to us. He said that in several interviews, most explicitly right here.

Now, what's really interesting is that if you go back and look at history, which is incredibly easy to forget, especially – even when it’s very recent history – so often the real truth lies in just having a small amount of historical context. A small historical memory is invaluable in understanding the truth and being able to navigate and critically evaluate the propaganda that you're being asked to ingest.

So, let's recall that 2013, at the end of 2013, when there was an uproar in Ukrainian civil society when the Ukrainian president – that was elected still had two years in his own term – that groups funded by the United States and supported by the State Department began organizing and demanding the ouster of their elected president. That happens all the time. Liberals marched against Trump, even though he won; here in Brazil, there were marches all the time against Bolsonaro. Just the fact that there are marches and protests against an elected government doesn't mean you get rid of the government. The people voted for that leader. There's a constitutional term, but the U.S. funded groups in Ukraine to agitate violently to remove that leader because the U.S. preferred a different leader, because that leader was more amenable to Moscow right across the border than to the United States all the way on the other side of the world.

In the history of the United States government, if you know anything about American history, is that when there's a government that’s more loyal or closer to countries we regard as our enemies and not as close to us, our solution is first to warn those countries and threaten them. And then, if they don't heed that warning, we overthrow them. That's what the United States does, what the CIA exists to do, and it's what happened here.

So here, in late 2013, we always hear how Democrats and Republicans agree on nothing, how conservatives and liberals are so different. They're at each other's throats all the time. In this case, Senator John McCain, one of the most pro-war members of the Republican Party, and Chris Murphy, the young, newly elected liberal from the blue state of Connecticut, traveled jointly and they, in the open, gathered with the protesters, the anti-Ukrainian government protesters. That's what these U.S. officials did. Imagine if, say, Chinese officials came or Russian officials came and just openly marched with anti-Biden protesters or Occupy Wall Street – that's what they did. They just interfered openly in Ukrainian domestic politics by joining with these protesters.

There you see The Washington Post headline: “In Ukraine, Senators McCain, Murphy Addressed Protesters and Promised Support”.

KYIV, Ukraine – A showdown between Russia on one side and the United States and the European Union on the other drew closer here Sunday, as two American senators told a crowd of hundreds of thousands of protesters that Ukraine's future lies to the west, not the east (Washington Post. Dec 15, 2013).

It sounds a lot like interference in another country's politics to me.

“We are here”, said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), “to support your just cause: the sovereign right to determine [Ukraine's] own destiny freely and independently and the destiny you seek lies in Europe” (Washington Post. Dec 15, 2013).

They had just chosen their own destiny in the election three years ago but because we didn't like it, we were there to tell them it was time to pick a new destiny, one that lies in Europe, not Moscow.

Added Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn): “Ukraine's future stands with Europe and the U.S. stands with Ukraine.”

Murphy, McCain and European politicians who addressed the crowd in Kyiv on Sunday turned up the pressure on Yanukovych, promising that their governments will consider individual financial sanctions against responsible Ukrainian officials if there is any further outbreak of police violence against the protesters who come and go at the semi-permanent encampment on Kyiv’s Independence Square (Washington Post. Dec 15, 2013).

You can go back and look at Occupy Wall Street and the way that disappeared. It disappeared because the police came and crushed those movements. I spent a year going around the United States visiting various encampments in, I think, 15 different cities and it was a real movement against the Wall Street bailout. It was similar to the one on the right, the Tea Party, before it got co-opted by the Republican Party, that they had very common views which were in opposition to the dominance of Wall Street and the ability of Wall Street to get a bailout when they were gambling and getting rich with their wins and then socializing their losses. And the reason that movement disappeared is that the U.S. government and various local governments used the police force to crush it. And so here we are in Kyiv telling them if they do the same, we're going to support a change of government – which we then engineered – and pick their president.

At the time, Chris Murphy – who, again, is a young senator, he was 39 when he was elected just a year earlier –went on C-SPAN to talk about his role with John McCain in engineering all kinds of instability in Ukraine and trying to work with the Republicans and other Democrats in the administration to change the government of Ukraine. And he made some amazing admissions that are really worth watching in retrospect. Let's watch a couple of those.

Sen. Chris Murphy: I will admit to you that I have not been involved, as involved, in what's happening in Venezuela over the last week, because I've been focused, as the chairman of the Europe Subcommittee, on Ukraine. But […]

Time off from trying to change the government in Venezuela. He was a little bit absent from that, he said, because he was so focused instead on changing the government in Ukraine.

Sen. Chris Murphy: With respect to Ukraine, we have not sat on the sidelines. We have been very much involved. Members of the Senate who have been there, members of the State Department who have been on the Square, the administration, the Obama administration passed sanctions. The Senate was prepared to pass its own set of sanctions. And as I said, I really think that the clear position of the United States has in part been what has helped lead to this change in regime. [...]

I mean, did you hear what he said there? We have not been on the sidelines. We have been very active there. And our active role played a key role in the change of regime, meaning we helped topple the democratic government, the democratically elected government in Ukraine, and replaced it with one chosen by Victoria Nuland. It's just an explicit admission probably from the Senate are too inexperienced to understand how you couched these things in euphemisms. You don't go on CNN or I'm sorry, on C-SPAN and admit these things.

Sen. Chris Murphy: I know that there is merit in the claim that the United States sort of has these principles, and then we selectively apply them. We get involved in certain places, and then we don't get involved in other places. But I think if ultimately this is a peaceful transition to a new government in Ukraine, it'll be the United States on the streets of Ukraine who will be seen as a great friend in helping make that transition happen.

Oh, wow. So, apparently, it turns out that even back then we were willing to admit that the United States should get the credit for the change in government in Ukraine, which apparently is not a sovereign democracy, but one that we radically shaped for our own interest. And we're even boasting of it at the time.

Now, let's look at this next clip. They're all amazing. Let's look at what he says next.

Caller, on C-SPAN: Thank you for taking my call.

Sen. Chris Murphy: Sure.

Caller, on C-SPAN: All right. You know, my concern of being a child of the Cold War is always a threat from, you know, the East. And I was concerned with how this moving forward could lead to some type of global conflict. Whenever we seem to have these elections that are monitored, or the United States is involved or Europe's involved but seems to eventually end with some type of violence. I was concerned with that violence escalating on a global scale between Russia and the European Union, or with the United States’s involvement in a potential conflict between those two superpowers.

Okay. So that person said: look, seems to me, knowing the Cold War that I lived through and then whenever we do this sort of thing, whenever we start changing other countries’ governments, start interfering in their political affairs, especially when it involves the attempt to rule countries in Russia's neighborhood, that is a danger to escalate and to turn into a real war between Moscow and the West or Moscow and Ukraine in which the West gets involved.

That was that caller's concern that he posed to Senator Murphy, who's apparently an expert in Ukraine, given that he's now over there trying to pick their new government and change their politics for the better. He got elected by the people of Connecticut and immediately goes with John McCain to start fiddling with Kyiv. So, let's listen to what Chris Murphy told that caller about those concerns.

Sen. Chris Murphy: There certainly is some concern about what Russia is going to do over the course of the next week or month. I think it's irresponsible to talk about the potential for Russia to move some kind of offensive force into Crimea, which is the coastal region of Ukraine that has a Russian military base and a lot of the important ports. That would be a fundamental, grave mistake on behalf of the Russians. And I think they know that that would essentially lead it to a descent to madness. So, I don't worry that this is going to result in any kind of military confrontation between the U.S. and Europe and Russia.

Well, so just a few months after he assured everybody that, of course, Russia would never do something so stupid as to take Crimea, Crimea was part of Russia. And, of course, he's not concerned that this one day might lead to confrontation between Europe and the U.S. on the one hand and Russia on the other, because he's not the one whose house is going to be bombarded, who's going to fight in those wars. It's just going to be the Ukrainians getting bombed and the Russians dying. So, of course, he's not concerned. But here is this genius – who obviously can't even run the United States, the country where he's elected to be an elected official – who decided he was going to interfere in Ukraine instead, making all kinds of predictions about the future, all of which proved to be the exact opposite of what ended up happening. These are geniuses who are not only running our country but trying to run every other.

Let's listen to this next one. I'll just pick a few key excerpts from it. But these really are amazing.

C-SPAN: […] McLean, Virginia, Independent Line for Senator Chris Murphy.

McLean: Hi. I just have a few points and thank you for allowing me to call C-SPAN, by the way. […] So I'll just have three quick points and then I'll take my answer off the air. The first one is, isn't it true that Yanukovych was elected for the first time in 2010 for one five-year term, that elections were scheduled for 2015? So, the second point is, why is it okay for foreign ministers from other countries to show up during protest movements – so, let's say in Ukraine – like the foreign ministers of Poland and Germany and support the protesters against the current government there? Wouldn't it be something similar to the foreign ministers of, let's say, Mexico and Canada showing up during the Occupy Wall Street movement and saying, yes, we agree that your government is corrupt? And the third point is, why isn't the West and America talking about the fact that a large or significant portion of the Ukrainian opposition right now is made up of far-right politicians, including the party supporter, which openly is fascist and xenophobic, and they said that they don't want to join the EU because they considered the EU to be a bunch of gays and Jews just as well as they say that they don't want to join the imperialist Moscow regime?

Do you see how the random callers who just call C-SPAN and hope to get on because they have no credentials, are infinitely smarter than the people who are running all these policies? So, he said: you keep talking about democracy. Doesn’t the democratically elected president of Ukraine that you're trying to overthrow have a five-year term until 2015, and, also, like, by the way, isn't it kind of inappropriate for you, for foreign officials and foreign ministers, to go join protest movements in other countries to overthrow their governments? And, also, by the way, aren't we supporting the part of Ukrainian society that's filled with a bunch of neo-Nazis? Isn't that kind of like a concern?

Let's listen to his answers.

Sen. Chris Murphy: Let me take all those very quickly. One at a time. You're right. Yanukovych was elected and I mentioned this before. I understand the difficult position here, which is that Yanukovych was elected, and we are not in the business of encouraging rebellions and revolutions on the streets against elected leaders, because we ultimately think that elections, as you mentioned, are the place in which you should settle your differences […]

Okay. So just hold that thought, because that's going to be important in just a minute. According to Chris Murphy, the United States is not in the business of interfering with democratically elected leaders and trying to change them or topple them. That is not what we do. What we believe in is democracy. And if a country chooses a government democratically that we dislike, we accept it. That's according to Chris Murphy. The posture of the United States historically. We don't interfere in trying to topple the democratically elected leaders of other countries. Except he is doing exactly that here, he just admitted the government that he was trying to overthrow was democratically elected. And so, he has to explain how to reconcile that.

Sen. Chris Murphy: The issue here is that Yanukovych lost his legitimacy to govern when he used force to try to break up these protests and the United States didn't go on to that Square in any meaningful way until the president tried to break up the peaceful protests. That's why Senator McCain and I went and we certainly got a lot of grief from people asking why two U.S. senators are going to the Square to support a protest movement against an elected government.

So, the way democracy works is that countries get to choose their leaders but then if those leaders use more force than Chris Murphy and John McCain, who have no Democratic electability or accountability in those countries, decide is a little excessive – even though our government constantly uses violence to keep order against protesters here in the United States – as soon as John McCain, Chris Murphy, and others decide they've gone a little too far – somehow the Saudis haven't gone a little too far. We keep supporting them. The Egyptians haven't gone too far. Apparently, they're allowing dissent to a sufficient amount. But the Ukrainians, according to John McCain and Chris Murphy, went a little too far and now their democratic legitimacy is over. They lost their right to serve through the five-year term that the Ukrainian people chose them to serve.

Sen. Chris Murphy: We did that because we think that there were human rights and civil rights that were violated there. And we've always stood up for that, for that concept. And again, I think that answers your second question as to why you had foreign ministers and foreign leaders who were on that Square. It was because we're standing up for the idea that people should be able to lodge protests against their government.

Remember, this was 11 years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, set up torture regimes all around the world and continues to hold people in Guantanamo and in the middle of the Indian Ocean, with no charges of any kind. But somehow the United States senators have arrogated unto themselves in the name of human rights, the right to go around changing the governments of the world whenever they decide it's justified by some vague appeal to human rights. No UN decision is needed, and no international bodies. Once the United States decides that's the end of the democratic legitimacy of that country, and that's what happened in Ukraine, the country we're now told as a sovereign democratic leader got government, which is why we're over there. He then finally acknowledged, yeah, there's a lot of Nazis in the movement we supported. But don't worry, they're a minority. There were only a few thousand among the large numbers gathered there.

Let's look at this last clip. It's just 49 seconds.

These are all amazing because this is just explicitly acknowledging the truth, not realizing that since he's on C-SPAN in 2014, seven, eight years later, these are going to be incredibly incriminating statements because the entire position in the United States government is to make you forget that all of this happened.

C-SPAN: So, what is the best way the U.S. can help in this situation?

Sen. Chris Murphy: Well, I think the United States has a strong voice in support of the peaceful protest movement. This is a big part of the story as to why there is an opportunity now for the Ukrainian people to get what they want. Early on, the United States said that peace should be observed in that Square. We came down hard on Yanukovych when he violated that peace, when he sent his forces into the Square repeatedly to clear it, ultimately, over the course of the last week, resulting in dozens of people killed. And I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions that forced in parting Yanukovych from office. […]

I just need you to hear that again. Let's listen to that last part.

Sen. Chris Murphy: […] over the course of the last week, resulting in dozens of people killed. And I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions that forced in parting Yanukovych from office.

“I think it was our role that forced him from office.” So, there's no debate that the reason Yanukovych, the elected leader of Ukraine, was removed from office is because of the United States’ role. By the way, the way you determine what the Ukrainian people want is not by inciting a bunch of people to go into street protest. That's not counting what the majority wants. Those are called elections. That's how you determine what the Ukrainian people want. And what the Ukrainian people said they wanted in 2010 was to be led by a leader that the United States played an active role in overthrowing. So, it's an incredible set of admissions here.

Let me just show you a clip from Jen Psaki, in 2015. In one way, it's a banal clip. It's Jen Psaki at a State Department press hearing, a press briefing that she was giving every day the way she ended up doing when she became Biden's White House press secretary, but it reveals how casually and seamlessly and continuously these people just lie right to your face. There's no limit on what they're willing to say – none – to advance their career. If they're told to say something to justify U.S. actions, they will say it no matter how blatantly, insultingly, stupidly false it is.

Listen to Jen Psaki do something so extreme that even the journalists covering the State Department couldn't believe she was willing to say it.

Journalist: President Maduro last night went on the air and said that they had arrested multiple people who were allegedly behind a coup that was backed by the United States. What is your response?

So that was Nicolas Maduro alleging that the United States was involved in an attempted coup in Venezuela. It's basically an open policy. Remember, the United States went around for years calling somebody, Juan Guaidó, who never got a single vote, the legitimate president of Venezuela. Of course, it's U.S. policy to overthrow the government of Venezuela. It's been U.S. policy for decades to do that, just like it was in Cuba. So, she said, look, Nicolas Maduro said that the United States played a pretty big role in the unsuccessful coup that just happened. Here’s Jen Psaki’s answer:

Jen Psaki: These latest accusations, like all previous such accusations, are ludicrous. As a matter of longstanding policy, the United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means. Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful and legal.

Okay, so she's reading from the press briefing there. She says it in a very moderate way, so, it's easy to lose the evil of it – the evil of how much these people will just lie so easily. I honestly, I honestly, I'm not saying this to be sanctimonious. We're all humans. We all have our flaws. I certainly do. But I can't, for the life of me, understand what leads people like her to be willing to say things like this that she just said with a completely straight face and an obviously conscious, free comportment. The United States, as a matter of policy, does not engage in transitions that are anti-constitutional, only democratic. Even though we just listened to Chris Murphy, six months earlier, admit that the United States openly and successfully caused a coup in Ukraine by ousting the democratically elected leader. And of course, there are dozens or hundreds of examples throughout the Cold War and well beyond in which the United States did exactly what she just got done saying the United States never does as a matter of policy. Just let's listen to that again and the way she says it.

Jen Psaki: Their response to these latest accusations, like all previous such accusations are ludicrous. As a matter of longstanding policy, the United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means. Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful and legal. We've seen many times that the Venezuelan government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela. These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan government to deal with the grave situation it faces.

Journalist: Whoa, whoa, whoa. The U.S. has a long-standing practice of not promoting – what did you say? How long-standing is that? I would – in particular in South and Latin America, that is not a long-standing practice.

Jen Psaki: Well, my point here, Matt […]

Do you see that pause? I mean, even she. It's not that she’s conscious about it that bothered her. It does not bother her at all. She just didn't know what to say. I mean, it's like literally standing up and saying two plus two equals five and someone says, “Wait a minute, are you sure? How can that be? Everyone knows two plus two equals four.” So, she stood up and said, it's the United States's policy in longstanding practice not to engineer government changes in other countries that are in violation of the Constitution. We only do it democratically. And when he said, “Are you joking? Everyone knows that's wrong and dumb, especially in Latin America, where you can point to almost every country that has suffered exactly that. She barely knows what to say. You have this long kind of embarrassed pause, and then she says this:

Jen Psaki: Well, my point here, Matt, without getting into history, is that we do not support, we have no involvement with, and these are ludicrous accusations.

Journalist: In this specific case. But if you go back not that long ago, during your lifetime even […]

Jen Psaki: The last 21 years? (All laugh)

Journalist: Well done. Touché. But I mean, I know that there's long-standing I mean, ten years in this case. I mean […]

Jen Psaki: My intention was to speak to specific reports.

Journalist: But you said […]

So, there you go. The only valid conclusion from watching this is that she is a sociopath. There's no other explanation. If you can stand up and lie that obviously with such an authoritative tone, with such a straight face, to hide the crimes of the American government, your soul is broken, and you have no moral code. You're a sociopath. That’s the only way to allow somebody – she's only doing this for the most trivial career advancement - there’s no passion behind that. She doesn't stop working for a cause. It's just her job. Her job is to read what she's told without thinking about whether it's a complete lie or not. And so, when I called her out the other day online, I saw a bunch of journalists bristling because, after all, Jen Psaki is nice. Or she's nice when she's an ordinary woman. She, like, lives in the suburbs. She does kickboxing classes, she drinks margaritas. She talks about her young kids. I'm sure she loves her kids, no doubt about that. She's a mom. She likes being a mom. She talks about that a lot. She's friendly with reporters. They're all, you know, she should be a good neighbor. She doesn't look like a sociopath. So, you say that it's like a cognitive disconnect. Sociopaths are like Putin and like evil-looking people from evil-looking countries like Saddam Hussein's. Not Jen Psaki. She's now an MSNBC colleague to all those people who work there. And that's exactly what Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher, called “the banality of evil” when she went to the Nuremberg trials and watched Nazi war criminals, one after the next go on the stand. And she was shocked at how kind of mediocre they were. They didn't have any sense that they had done anything wrong, and they really didn't believe it. They were just basically like I just did my job. And my job was to count the number of Jewish citizens being transported on these trains. And I filled out that report. I don’t have hate in my heart for anyone. I was just doing my job. Evil is banal, and this is the banality of evil right here.

And the fact you can watch Chris Murphy openly boast of things that he will now tell you are insane conspiracy theories and will vehemently deny to your face because now he has to, that is the kind of sociopathy that dominates our government. Everything that we have been told for the last year and month about the United States’ role in Ukraine, that what Ukraine is and what our goal is, is a completely we have been governing and running Ukraine since at least 2013 when we ousted the government and installed the new one in 2014. We've been running the country right on the other side of the Russian border and we've been running it not for their benefit but for our own, which is the same reason we are fueling this proxy war, not to defend all the nice old ladies in Ukraine who are getting bombed and killed. It's very tragic. And the media will show you that in order to incite your hatred against Putin. We could stop that with the cease-fire, for example, and diplomatic efforts to end the war. But John Kirby told you he's against that. He wants this war to continue. Yeah, of course, if Putin humiliated himself and gave back everything, including Crimea, and told the Americans and NATO you have free reign over Ukraine and then turned himself into The Hague, of course, the war would end – if he was willing to do that. But short of that, they don't want the war to end. They want the war to continue. They're benefiting in every conceivable way from it. They don't care that Ukrainians are dying. That's part of the game for them. There are people in the United States benefiting the people who fund both political parties, the arms dealers, the intelligence agencies. There are all kinds of benefits to go around. And the fact that John Kirby is now finally admitting that it's the United States that continues to run Ukraine and we're running it to keep the war going, not to stop, it is something that you should at least have as your starting point when analyzing this war and all of the propaganda and lies that have been rained down upon us by the U.S. government and their media allies ever since Russia invaded.