 So, my name is Jerry Marcus, and it's been a pleasure working with so many people around the triangle on issue after issue, and here's one that just brings so many things together. I mean, with nuclear war kind of, with leaders dancing on the precipice of nuclear war, there's nothing that we go untouched, and this is just beyond what we usually have to deal with. I'd like to thank people who have contributed to help make this North Carolina tour possible. We do have a Greensboro venue, and also at Warren Wilson College, and also in Asheville. So, things have come together very nicely, and you all have made it possible. And I want to say it's interesting how a project that Medea had helped with years ago that involved the Forest Foundation. It was a benefit for the Leemore Project over at Duke, and so the Forest Foundation has generously helped us make this happen. So, thanks all of you. Now, we've been so lucky to have Ray McGovern come and speak to us over the years, and it's hard to imagine anybody closer to the kind of issue we're talking about tonight than Ray. Ray has, well, he has a responsibility for his wife, Rita, who has been ailing, and so sometimes she's really ahead of things, and other times she's kind of slipped back, so this was one of those slipped back days, but I think things are kind of on a level, and but he was unable to come tonight. So, we will hear from him again, so keep an eye on the emails. There's so many powerful analyses and responsible discussions going on amidst all of the heavy, heavily influenced pro-war, basically self-righteous kinds of claims that I wanted to especially share, and I made a lot of discs of John Meersheimer's talk, looking at how the major powers amorally just collide, and what he has to say I think is very interesting. I made a lot of CDs, and I made some thumb drives with that talk, and also a number of videos on it, so you all feel free to pick up material from the table. I just noticed recently that while the computers that play a CD are becoming rather rare, almost every car has got this sort of, it's not a smile, it's this thin lips there, you just slide the disc in, and a lot of our driving is half an hour or so, so we really use our CDs that way. So be sure, feel free to share the Meersheimer piece and other discs that you see. So we're likely to have with us tonight Will Zayn who teaches at UNCG and will be hosting Medea on Tuesday evening, and so Will is going to come forward and introduce Medea. Thank you, Jerry. I am standing in for for Randy Gover tonight, filling some quite big shoes. I'm just going to say a few words about Medea, and then I'm going to get off the stage and let her come up and speak. So like Jerry said, my name is Will Zayn. I'm the assistant director of the International Global Studies Program at UNC Greensboro. I'm hosting Medea tomorrow, but I actually live in the area, so I get two for one, so it's pretty good for me. So it's my great pleasure, pleasure tonight, excuse me, to introduce our speaker this evening, Medea Benjamin. Medea has such a long and distinguished career as an author and an activist that I will be forced to leave much out of this intro for the sake of time. Many know Medea best as the co-founder of Co-Pink, a grassroots woman-led organization working to end U.S. foreign wars and imperialism. This organization was founded, as you all probably know, in the wake of the 9-11 attacks in the Ebejiu, Afghanistan. She has worked on many of today's most pressing human rights issues, including ending unfair labor practices both here and abroad, organizing to end U.S. interventions in the Middle East and fighting for justice in Palestine. Also a distinguished author, Medea has written 10 books on such very topics as U.S. Saudi Alliance, U.S. drone warfare, and Cuban agriculture. Being a tireless and tenacious advocate for social justice over nearly five decades has clearly not slowed her down. She comes to us this evening to speak on her recently published work, co-authored with Norm, excuse me, Nicholas Davies, entitled War in Ukraine, Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. Ladies and gentlemen, Medea Benjamin. Well, it's a pleasure to be here tonight and while I was waiting and talking to many of you in the front area, I was just so impressed at how many activists are here on so many different issues. So I don't know exactly how many of you might not be active in things, but for those of you who are doing so much great work on issues like Palestine and Free Jolene Assange and the general work for peace, the raging grannies, so many great, great things that you're doing, thank you for all that work. I just wonder how many of you yourselves or people you know are very confused about this issue. Could you raise your hand? So just about everybody knows somebody or has your own kind of conflicting views in your own hand. This is a tough one. This has been a really, really tough issue to get people to understand and I want to go through tonight some of the myths that I think are holding a lot of people back in their comprehension of where this came from. But first let me start by saying Happy Martin Luther King Day and this is certainly a day to reflect on Martin Luther King's Beyond Vietnam speech. His anti-war calling, what that cost him, the way that he was reviled when he came out against the Vietnam War, persona non grata in a lot of places including the White House and yet he said that it was his moral obligation to speak out against war and certainly that one quote of his in that speech always sticks with me when we talk about a society that puts more money into the military than into social uplift is moving towards spiritual death and he said that many decades ago and unfortunately I think it's still the case especially when you see the recent budget that was passed of eight hundred and fifty eight billion dollars for the Pentagon that's not counting the money for Ukraine that's not counting the money for nuclear weapons you put that all together and we're about a trillion dollars now a trillion dollars a year and I have just arrived here today so I don't know what your community is like but I just came from Los Angeles where the streets are lined with people that don't have housing and where the schools are crumbling where the infrastructure is terrible where people can't find a good place to go to get decent health care and where young people are paying absurd amounts of money for what they should get for free in fact they should get a stipend to do it and that's to get a college education so to think how we have evolved since the time of Martin Luther King in some ways of course we have made progress but we've not made progress in terms of where we spend our money where we spend our resources and we haven't made progress in terms of how we deal with conflict and that's especially true after 9 11 when we've been then involved in war after war after war and I know some people in this room were active trying to stop the US from responding to the 9 11 attacks by by going to war and thank you for the veterans for peace and others who do so much work on this issue will women's international league for peace and freedom so many groups and so many of us that came out into the streets by the hundreds of thousands and said no to the war in Iraq and the government wouldn't listen to us and here we are 20 years later and Iraq now has a government that is pro-Iran now I don't say that's good or bad but I'm just saying what did 20 years of US involvement do except for kill about a million Iraqis destroy the lives of millions of people who had to flee their homes killed so many of our own soldiers and left Iraq in way worse shape than it was under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and then you look at Afghanistan where I have worked very recently to try to write the wrong of the US not only being there for 20 years and then leaving the country in the hands of the Taliban and stealing the seven billion dollars that was their bank cash reserve for the whole country where the US has said oh put your money in the US Federal Reserve that's a safe place for it and when the US leaves they leave and take the money leaving Afghanistan in a catastrophic situation today with millions of people hungry I was there quite recently visiting poor neighborhoods where you saw people that were drying grass so that they could boil it and feed it to their kids people eating grass people selling their kidneys to be able to feed their families we went to one house and we were very concerned about the girls not being able to go to school and I remember saying to this one mother surrounded by a couple of her children you know it's so sad that your girls can't go to school and she said our boys can't go to school either we can't afford the pen the paper the books that they would need to go to school and we have to send them out on the street to beg so we'll have something to feed the rest of the family that's the situation we left Afghanistan in after spending trillions of dollars it really is sickening and so some of us thought after the very chaotic exit that Biden oversaw leaving Afghanistan that maybe there would be a peace dividend meaning maybe we the taxpayers would get to put our money into something other than a humongous pentagon but no right after that war now we're into another one so I said I wanted to talk about some of the myths and I think it's something that we hear over and over and over again when it comes to Ukraine is that this is a war that is unjustified and unprovoked and I want to say very clearly that I think it is totally unjustified because I think war is unjustified I don't think that we can say that with all the issues faced by Russia they had the right to go in and invade a sovereign nation and the brutality they are inflicting upon the Ukrainian people is tragic now they're using the tactic of blowing up the infrastructure the electricity grids and if you think you're cold in the winter here think what the winter is like in Afghanistan and Ukraine and think of what it's like when you don't have heating when you don't have electricity it is really tragic what is happening in Ukraine but it has been provoked and that is something that the American people don't understand because either it isn't brought up or it's just poo pooed oh yes the expansion of NATO that really wasn't very important you know what it set the stage for this invasion and there were so many warnings about it in our book we go page after page giving examples of the warnings from foreign policy experts who said this is a tragic mistake and it will cause instability in the region from us officials who said it's a tragic mistake it will cause instability in the region from former ambassadors who said you find throughout Russia absolute opposition to the expansion of NATO and so what did the US government do whether it was a democratic administration of Bill Clinton or whether it was a republican administration of George Bush expand expand expand and that is a provocation just think if Mexico decided they wanted to go into an alliance with China or with Russia would the US ever allow that a military alliance would they ever allow that absolutely not in fact we're at the 200th anniversary this year of the Monroe Doctrine that said not only Mexico but all of Latin America was our backyard and we would not allow another power to come in and challenge us there so here you have the expansion of NATO right up to the border of Russia and you have US involvement directly in Ukrainian affairs now we often hear about Russia's involvement in US affairs Russia gate and how Hillary Clinton only lost the election because of Russia gate that's how Trump won there was recently a very academic study that was done looking at the effects of the Russian trolls and said it had no impact but the US certainly had an impact when it came to its intervention in Ukrainian affairs and again we go in our book into great detail we talk about the national endowment for democracy and all the tax money that was poured into building pro-western groups anti-russian groups and then there was the Maidan uprising in 2014 which was a popular uprising against a democratically elected government but a corrupt government and people came out peacefully large numbers of people to protest that government but it was hijacked it was hijacked by right wing paramilitary elements and it was right a hijacked by US government officials now we don't know the extent of US government involvement because these are things that we find out after the facts when there are more freedom of information requests that come out but we have a leaked telephone call between the assistant secretary of state Victoria Newlin when she was talking to the US ambassador to Ukraine when they were deciding who would be the ones that would be in charge of the government that would be overthrown literally saying who they wanted in power who they wanted to sideline and keep on the outside that was the famous quote in which they said screw the EU the European Union we're going to be the ones to decide and then you have Victoria Newlin that goes out into the streets of well during the Maidan uprising giving out sandwiches and cookies now what if on January 26 when there was an uprising in our capital in Washington DC somebody from the Russian embassy came out and said here are some sweets go and overthrow your government we are with you well it wouldn't have happened because all hell would have broken loose if it did but that's what the US was doing so provocation provocation and after the Maidan uprising and after it ended in a coup and there was then a pro-western government that was put into power the pro-russian part of the Donbas rebelled broke away and the Russians came in to take back Crimea which had been given to Ukraine by Khrushchev and the fighting started in the Donbas so the fighting didn't just start on February 24th when the Russians invaded the fighting has been going on for years now since 2014 and the US got very involved with the civil war that was going on in the Donbas by training Ukrainian soldiers and by sending weapons now there was an agreement that was negotiated one year later in 2015 called the minced agreements that was supposed to end the conflict but what happened the political part of the agreement was never fulfilled by the Ukrainian government they were supposed to go talk to the leaders of the breakaway republic they were supposed to then give autonomy to the region within the framework of being part of Ukraine and that never happened Zelinsky who campaigned as a pro-peace president and got overwhelming support for that stand when he came into power and said he was going to go meet with the heads of the breakaway regions was threatened with his life he was told he would be hanging from a tree and so the mince agreement was never implemented now very recently in the last couple of weeks there were some quite remarkable revelations that we heard from the former chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and from the former head of France of Francois Hollande and both of them said that that minced agreement which we all thought was supposed to end the conflict was really meant to buy time for the Ukrainians to build up their military for the West to send in the weapons for them to be able to attack the Douglas and perhaps even be ready for a war with Russia and so Russia learned just recently that they had been duped with that agreement that it had never intended to be implemented but here we have the conflict going on the Russians deciding to invade on February 24th I would say a terrible mistake that they did perhaps they had really bad intelligence like the US often gets really bad intelligence perhaps they thought they could easily go in and overthrow the government key then put a pro-russian government in place that obviously did not happen but we also see that the US and the West was ready to take on this fight and that the US said that this was a fight between democracy and dictatorship that we would have to get involved in this because this we have to defend democracies now many of you who came who work here on the issue of Israel Palestine know that the US is oftentimes not on the side of democracies in fact in the case of Israel we give them what about four billion dollars every year to repress the Palestinian people Egypt we give about two billion dollars a year to a repressive government that has about 60,000 political prisoners we sell weapons to one of the most repressive regimes in the world and that is Saudi Arabia but the US said we have to get into this fight to defend democracy and so we see this pouring in of weapons and weapons and training and weapons and so here we are at a situation where we are being told that the way to victory in Ukraine is to send in more and more weapons we are told that victory is around the corner and all we have to do is give another 40 billion another 30 billion what was the latest another 47 billion and the narrative that we're hearing in the press is this narrative that there is a possibility of victory now what does victory mean the way they're hearing we're hearing in the press it is that Ukraine will be able to take back every inch of territory that is controlled by Russia or pro-russian forces meaning all of the Donbass and all of Crimea basically going back to 2014 but guess what the military generals who know a losing war when they see it the ones in the United States they are saying victory on the battlefield is really not possible you're hearing that from the number one military advisor to the president and that is the chair of the Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley who said the Ukrainians has done a courageous battle they have won what they are going to win on the battlefield now is the time to seize the moment and go for negotiations and it's not just what we're hearing or what they're saying inside the Pentagon it's also what people are saying what we're hearing from former generals in Europe as well very pessimistic that if this goes on and on it could as the head of NATO Jen Stoltenberg a real warhawk he said his fear is that this will spin out of control and if it goes wrong he said it can go horribly wrong horribly wrong means not just the Ukrainians will keep getting killed it means that it will go and spin out into another country a NATO country like Poland which will mean article five of NATO will be invoked which means that we will have to get involved physically militarily and confront Russia directly spinning out of control horribly could also mean that Putin feels that he is pushed into a corner and would use a nuclear weapon now it's so interesting that people who want us to keep pumping more weapons into Ukraine said oh Putin will never use a nuclear weapon but they say he's a crazy man well if he's a crazy man maybe he would use a nuclear weapon and so there are certainly people in the military who are very concerned about this possibility and remember in 1962 when JF Kennedy was negotiating with Khrushchev because they knew they held the world in their hand and the possibility of a nuclear war was very real they negotiated they compromised Russia took its nuclear weapons out of Cuba and the US removed its missiles from Turkey and JFK said never if you were in a confrontation with the nuclear power never put them in a position of either a humiliating defeat or the use of a nuclear weapon is that where we are pushing Putin so the people inside the military are really starting to question where is this going but we're not hearing that from our government officials we're not hearing that from President Biden we're not hearing President Biden said oh I think I better start talking to Putin he has to talk to Putin in this entire time it's going on a year you're not hearing the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken say oh I think we better start talking to my counterpart Lavrov in Russia no what you're seeing only is that the head of the CIA William Burns by the way he was in Russia during the time of the early NATO expansion and talked about what a disaster it was back then he has met with his counterpart Jake Sullivan National Security Council has met with this counterpart and so has Lloyd Austin the Secretary of Defense they are meeting not to come up with a peace plan but they are meeting to see how they can stop this from spinning out of control but we need the civilians in our government we need the Secretary of State we need the president to get on board to push for negotiations and you know how they say the excuse nothing for Ukraine without Ukraine we can't convince the Ukrainians to go for negotiations well guess what if you said there was no longer a blank check the Ukrainians would have to negotiate so there also have been attempts at negotiations there was a very good attempt at negotiations right a month after the Russian invasion when Erdogan in Turkey was mediating and you had both sides that came up with a 15 point peace plan and the peace plan included that Ukraine would be a neutral state that it recognize that it would not be able to join NATO but that its neutrality and its sovereignty would be guaranteed by strong states Russian troops would leave there would be a negotiated process for the Donbas so there could be internationally monitored elections there so that people there could decide for themselves how they wanted to be affiliated and they talked about the issue of Crimea being bumped down the road they would deal with that in the coming years it could be as long as 15 years away a very positive peace process that was in the works until Boris Johnson the head of the UK at that time came and said the collective west does not want to see you negotiate a deal with Russia we are in this with you for victory and then Lloyd Austin also came from the US and said that we must weaken Russia and so you saw the peace talks were cut off there have been talks though on small things and I think it's important to mention that because what I hear a lot is people say you can't talk to Putin you can't talk to Russia well let's recognize not only were those talks happening before they were sabotaged but the Ukrainians and the Russians have also talked about some very serious things and successfully for example you remember a couple of months ago when it looked like the largest nuclear power plant in all of Europe the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant was going to be blown up that there were a shelling coming from both sides and they sat down and they negotiated and they agreed that the international atomic energy association would come in and calm the situation down there have also been successful negotiations about the grain trade because who knew before this happened that Ukraine and Russia were responsible for so much of the exports of grain around the world and it was so important to get this grain out to countries in Africa in the Middle East who were so desperately in need of that grain and so they negotiated a land corridor and a sea corridor to get over 10 million tons of grain out of Ukraine and to get more fertilizers out from Russia because they were on the sanction list and then got lifted from the sanction list happened through negotiations and a third area of negotiations that is ongoing is prisoner swaps now we heard about the prisoner swap with Britney Griner and that was between the US and Russia but there have been prisoner swaps going on constantly between Ukraine and Russia we don't hear about them very often if at all but there have been probably about two dozen prisoner swaps the last one I heard was on January 8th and imagine all the work that goes into one prisoner swap and some of them are hundreds of prisoners in negotiating who's going to get traded for who how it's going to happen the trust that's built up that each side is going to do what they say so there have been negotiations on some of these issues what we need to get of course is negotiations on how to stop this war and that's where we come in because in our congress we are certainly not getting even the discussion about that I live most of my time in Washington DC and it is just mind-blowing to see what is happening in Washington DC that when that 40 billion dollar package to Ukraine was voted on in which almost half of it was for military there wasn't a discussion on the house floor about that there wasn't a hearing about it and there wasn't one democrat that voted against it not one not a member of the squad not Barbara Lee who was the one who voted against war after 9 11 none of them a democratic president and they all voted for that package there were 57 republicans in the house that voted against it there were 11 senators who voted against it but that's a small handful as well and some of them because they thought the enemy is China and that's where we should be putting our sights and others said it should be going to the border to militarize our border to make us safe from the hordes trying to come in but very little discussion about Ukraine itself and then I don't know if you followed what happened when afterwards months months later there was a letter initiated by the head of the Progressive Caucus Premier Pramila Jayapal that was saying yes we were giving the weapons and that was good and what Biden is doing is good but on top of all that it would be good to start some negotiations a very very very mild letter well a letter usually is out there for a week or two and then that's the end it's whoever signs it signed it and it's given in well they had such a hard time getting democrats to sign that letter there are 100 members of the Progressive Caucus they they could not get four fifths of that caucus to sign that letter so they kept extending it and extending it there were five people there were 10 people finally months later they put it out with 30 members who had signed and all hell broke loose people started saying wait did I really sign that well I don't remember having signed that we'll take my name off that and Nancy Pelosi coming down on them like a ton of bricks and saying what are you doing there's elections coming up and the president Biden is the one who sets those policies why are you trying to second guess within 24 hours I've never seen anything like this in my life a letter that was signed sealed and delivered to president Biden was withdrawn and there was only one person out of those 30 who didn't go back on it only one person who came out publicly and said of course that was a rational thing to call for negotiations and that was Rokana from California so the only one in the Democratic party now who's publicly saying the negotiations would be a good thing it is very very strange when you see somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene in the Republican Party having one of the most rational voices when it comes to Ukraine you have to say what is going on in our country and one thing that is going on is when it's a Democrat in the White House you get very very little blowback and you get very little response because the Republicans are mostly war hawks all the time and the Democrats you know sometimes I think if it were Trump in the White House we would have some Democrats with us but you also have to look at what the media is doing and I have never seen a campaign like this I mean we've seen campaigns to sell the war in Iraq we've seen campaigns to sell other wars this one is on a whole different level I mean when did you ever see the head of a country a war in country the president of a foreign country come twice to address a joint session of congress he got 18 standing ovations of course Nick to know who got bored but he has been on the cover of Vogue he has been the person of the year of time magazine he addressed the Oscars he addressed the Grammys he addressed the Khan Film Festival he's come to every Davos and every important economic meeting addressing them it is just amazing the selling of Zelensky the selling of this war and this is what we're up against now on the positive side in the rest of the world there is a lot of pressure to end this war we're seeing that from the global south where country after country are saying we're not taking sides in this war there's only one side for us and that's the side of peace you better sit down and come up with a solution because you're hurting our people you're hurting our people because of the price of energy you're hurting our people because of the price of food you're hurting our people because of the attention being taken away from the existential threat of the climate it is affecting people all over the world and that's where we have to be putting our money and you're hearing that from Europeans as well because when this war started the US and the NATO countries were all prepared with the sanctions against Russia they thought they had it nailed they thought when they put those sanctions into place the Russian economy would just crumble and guess what it's been the opposite the Russian economy is not crumbled because the price of all is going down recently but it was way high and they made a lot of money from that but the Europeans are paying the price of the cost of energy the Europeans are saying that our dirty energy companies are war profiteers because they're selling the LNG and the oil to Europe at four or five times the price of what we are paying for it here they're also saying that US weapons companies are the ones that are really the winners from this war not only are they the ones that are getting most of the our taxpayer money that we're spending for this but now the European countries are spending more on their military and guess what a lot of that is going to our weapons companies as well so there's tremendous war profiteering going on and there's growing anger and in Europe they're having demonstrations with tens of thousands of people on the street it happened in East Germany it's happened in the Czech Republic it's happened in Italy and it's happened in France where they're coming out against the inflation and they're connecting that to the issue of Ukraine and so then here I come to what can we do because we're still at the point where we're not able to get large numbers of people out in the streets one reason is because we have to do a better job educating educating educating and that's why I wrote the book and I'm so glad that many of you got a copy of it and I hope others will and get it for your friends and relatives and people who really need to read it and we have an 18 minute video that you can see online it's free please pass it around we're showing it in college campuses all over the country it's important to give people the facts about this and we are in small numbers getting out in the streets in rallies and I know you have ones here in your community that are happening in places all over the country people going out to farmers markets people sitting out with booths that say come talk to me about Ukraine let's just have a discussion I was just in New York City yesterday on Saturday we had a very lively demonstration with a lot of young people which was great to see and the champ that they kept chanting was money for the poor not for war money for the poor not for war they understand that their future is at stake and so what we need to do is just find more ways to educate to organize and to mobilize and one thing that I'm very excited about is that we manage right up into the lead up into the holiday season this year to work with groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation to call for a Christmas truce and we were aiming to get a hundred religious leaders to sign on for that call we got over 1500 religious leaders in about two weeks time showed how much they felt it was their calling it was their duty to come out and be on record calling for peace talks and that brings us full circle to Martin Luther King who said it was his moral obligation and whether we're doing this from a faith-based perspective from an environmental perspective or simply from a perspective that we don't like seeing people killed we've got to find ways to convince others and then ultimately convince the people who hold the purse strings in Congress and the people who really can initiate talks not only with Russia but push the Ukrainians to the peace table and that is the White House so thank you for listening to me thank you for the work you're doing let's see what we can do together to show that we are a nation that isn't going towards spiritual death because we want to renew our spiritual faith in humankind by building a world without war thank you everybody see where it ended up is anybody not had a chance to sign we really want to stay in touch with you i don't think it's gone over to this side so if we can who hasn't oh yeah if we can be passing around that'd be great thank you yes so we're going for questions if people could come up here because we're recording this it would be helpful if we could get it into the mic if you can't get to the mic just raise your hand and we'll repeat the question my question is is very general and i'm just curious about your opinion aside from the grotesque greed and the corruption in washington and the government which has been rampant for many years and it's gotten worse in recent years uh how much do you think this this and aside from the the demand by elivia continuated that that america may maintain hegemony essentially in the world uh how much do you think it's because with the rise of china especially uh the american economy has been sort of deindustrialized and therefore all we have is military stuff and the military industrial complex i'm just always been curious about i mean do we dependent now on perennial war one after another or not well certainly we have a war economy and i talked about the companies that profit from this war but it's much larger than the companies uh because uh you know how smart these war manufacturers these merchants of death as the pope calls them have done their manufacturing in just about every single congressional district so it becomes an issue about jobs and it's an issue of tremendous corruption because the lobby groups for those weapons industries are in the halls of congress constantly and they are giving money to the campaigns of the congresspeople and we know that people like the secretary of defense came to us directly from the board of raytheon i mean how much how much more obvious can it be that this military industrial congressional and i love the way uh uh red government says that mickey bat uh he adds the other uh elements of this complex that what uh right eisenhower warned us about how it's become so humongous and yet in yes it is the industrial basis of this country it's terrible of yeah it wasn't always so not at all and you also brought up the issue of us wanting to maintain hegemony in china and i think it is so important when we talk about this to bring china into the picture because you know when the u.s was bogged down as they say in the middle east and obama was like we got to pivot to asia we got to pivot to asia you know they wanted to start setting their sights on china but they were too involved in these wars in the middle east and now involved in this war in russia but at the same time nato and the u.s in its own security documents talks about our greatest adversary is china which is ridiculous there is no reason for us to treat china as an enemy but china unlike the u.s is not going around the world using its military might it's going around the world using its economic might with its belt and road initiative and creating infrastructure projects that uh sometimes are bad projects that hurt the environment and can hurt people and a lot of times are good projects they're actually win-win situations that make them friends and so what is happening right now is that the u.s and i think it was part of nato's raison d'etre from the u.s perspective is to keep europe in the u.s realm and to stop it from going close to the asian side and when they were getting the energy from uh russia of the u.s didn't like that and i remember being in some of these hearings in congress and hearing people from texas like senator ted cruz who were saying we can't let that pipeline go through that north stream pipeline we've got to do something about that like i'm thinking well wait you know they have the right to have their own north stream pipeline with the brush if they want and then lo and behold the north stream pipeline is going up and we can't figure out who the heck might have blown that up uh what about voto who didn't want to see it built to the begin with who said they could blow it up who gained for blowing it up in any case it's part and by the senate and press conference we're going to get rid of it it's part of bringing europe back into the fold of the u.s making europe dependent economically even more on the united states but what it's doing is pushing russia and china closer together even though our mass media is usually saying oh the chinese are criticizing the russians and they don't like you know the chinese don't want the war i don't think they they want to see russia continue this war but they are certainly increasing their trade with russia right now so in some ways um this is backfiring uh not only against europe but against the united states as well and what we're also seeing is so many countries fed up with the u.s imposing its economic sanctions on the rest of the world whether it's cuba or whether it's venezuela or syria or bria and now russia and imposing sanctions on china that they are starting bilateral trade outside the u.s dollar and there will be probably in the lifetimes of the younger people here um a uh a complete revamping of the economic system so that the swiss system which is dominated by the dollar and all financial transactions will just be one of many ways to transfer what it's actually stunning to me is that leaders are so stupid to think that they can gain favor and make friends with other countries so well that's right and we uh you might have heard of the uh entity called the bricks the alliance that's the brazil russia india china south africa uh it is a huge uh part of the world population and a huge part of the global economy and now there are many many other countries that want to join the bricks and this is really uh a reflection of the kind of blowback that the u.s is getting from all of these wars all of these uh uh sanctions that it imposes or tries to impose on the rest of the world in your book you talk a lot about the uh background in the current ukrainian military of the far right and nazis to put it bluntly i guess um have you given any more thought to that and have you uh why don't we hear about it in the press because it would see if a lot of people here knew some of what you talked about in terms of the sections of the ukrainian army actually actively being current uh nazi sympathizers and adherents of hitler and given that ukrain seems to have had a very uh reprehensible past in world war two of killing jews that there would be some opposition but this isn't talked about and some people here i've mentioned what you said in the book i've just said oh that's a lie and uh mr snider who's written a lot of histories of the ukraine also feels that isn't the major factor so i just wonder what your comments would be on that aspect of things yeah as we talked about in the book uh the uh neo-nazi groups like the political parties um did very poorly in the last election they did not have a lot of political sympathy with the general population but they've played an outsized role uh militarily because they had paramilitary groups that were armed that went to the dunbas that were fighting there refused to step down refused to comply with the mints to courts um they were the ones that threatened uh past presidents including zalinsky if they were going to actually go and meet with the leaders of the breakaway republics and now they have been incorporated into the army you know it used to be that there was um some of you might remember congressman john connor's from the u.s and he was very active a real icon in the civil rights movement uh he passed a bill saying that no u.s money could go to the asa battalion because of their uh nazi sympathies and um that bill was taken up or more recently but now it doesn't mean anything because it's a whole one army and you can't say well this can't go to this group because you couldn't tell in the battlefield um but certainly when you have more uh it is the most militant ones that actually have even more power and so i think um it doesn't come into the narrative because it doesn't fit within the narrative that the u.s um wants to put out there it doesn't fit with the narrative of zalinsky being the greatest democrat we've ever seen and that we have to fight this war for democracy and those who try to talk about it are silenced but i think it is important to know that history that's why we wrote about it and it's an important element to discuss with people when we talk about the issue of Ukraine not being as black and white as it's made out to be thank you very much for coming really appreciate your news i wish you good luck in the future i was i'm very grateful for your reference at the beginning of your talk to martin with the king speech at health were given at riverside church and it really focused on a part of martin with the king that few people knew much about and i want to say to you that eight years ago we moved from my wife and i we moved from pennsylvania betheline and there's a peaceful organization and for the last i don't know how many years every time his birthday is like today we take turns reading that speech and so i have a question about pudin um angela merkel for some 16 years she was in frequent conversation with pudin and probably pudin met more times with her than anyone else and when they got together they would often argue whether they should conduct the conversation in russian or german um but my question it seems to me that angela merkel's views on pudin have changed she began to see a darker side of the man and in your talk tonight you mentioned pudin only two or three times can you tell us a little bit who is that man what is your view what is his goal has he changed how big is his ego what is it that we need to know about this man well i wish we had ray mcgovern with us here tonight because he could give us a much much more insightful view of pudin than i can what i do know is that when the soviet union broke apart and there was the uh what uh Naomi Klein calls the disaster capitalism that came in and the tremendous privatization of government enterprises and the uh the the plummeting of the well-being of the russian people the plummeting of the life expectancy of the russian people a lot of me or pudin came in and got rid of a lot of the corruption improve the economy improve people's standard of living and has been extremely popular because of that and i have friends in russia that i talk to all the time including just today um who think that pudin uh has been a good leader they my friends and uh it doesn't reflect i don't know you know what the population thinks think that this is a terrible mistake that he committed uh and that he is now boxed himself into a corner now there are others who disagree and i think that he knows what he is doing um i think that just like the u.s has gotten terrible intelligence when it went into iraq when it went into afghanistan when it went into uh libya wherever uh i think so is the case in russia where he got bad intelligence about what would happen with the russian invasion and i think once he was inside russia he's now staked his reputation on this which means he's not about to pull out and say i made a mistake that would be the end of him it also uh i also think that it's not just pudin who wants to make sure that Crimea stays in the hand of russia i think that's a widespread feeling among a lot of russians and uh i was told that they feel towards Crimea the way we feel towards alaska that it belongs to us um and that uh pudin is doing the right thing by trying to make sure that stays in the hands of russia and protecting the russian speaking and the ethnic russians in the donbas now there is tremendous censorship in russia just as there is tremendous censorship in ukraine and so it's hard to know what the russian people are thinking and feeling we do know that when people came out on the streets in russia the protest they've been arrested uh they we do know that when they called up 300 000 more reservists hundreds of thousands of uh young men of military age fled the country because they don't want to fight we do know that there is an underground movement against the war in russia um i think in the united states we personalize it so much to be about Putin but i think when it comes to Putin and russia there is a much larger group of nationalists in russia who do feel uh that they have lost a lot of their prestige with the fall of the soviet union that the u.s has been trying to push them around that they shouldn't allow the u.s to push them around they shouldn't allow the u.s to expand NATO to the borders that it already is now and so i think even with the censorship it is a popular position inside russia that russia is just trying to protect itself and that having a stronghold of NATO on the border of ukraine is an existential threat to russia whether that's because of russian propaganda or because it's the way they really feel i do think um that that we have to recognize that sentiment goes away beyond Putin so maybe we have time for one other comment to your question about Putin i just read this book called rush at upside down somebody who's been a scholar of russia his whole life could you get a little closer oh yeah he's been a scholar of russia his whole life he said uh that Putin's uh approval rating is 80 percent well it was uh that before the war began but it's going down now to about 67 percent which is still a lot more than the president's around here again yeah absolutely yeah so do we have any last uh comment suggested yes yeah war has a mind war has a mind of its own once it gets started there's no stop there's a fly rule that's going so heavy that's the military industrial complex and the money you follow the money goes to the weapons if you think about that everything all these decisions that are being made benefits the war machine so well that that's right and when you say you know war has a cycle of its own and it starts and then you know you hate your opponent war because they killed your comrade or your son or you know and that hate just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning absolutely but you know that's why when you're especially now at war with a nuclear power if we go back to Martin Luther King it's either uh non-violence or non-existence well along with along with our conversations here and the material that's on the table back there i'd like to i'd like to just read a brief bit here that came from Robert Jensen the journalist from University of Texas who stood up against his critics when he criticized the attack on Iraq it's called a citizen's oath of office have y'all heard of this okay it says i do solemnly pledge and i feel like this is in keeping with Medea's charge to us to act i do solemnly pledge that i will faithfully execute the office of citizen of the united states and that i will to the best of my ability resist corporate control of the world resist militarism resist the rollback of civil rights and resist illegitimate authority in all its forms so there's some copies of this off the back and and i ran across the demonstration in brigade and i asked them look at this do you think the folks here would like to hear it and uh and like you know 50 or any people were swollen in that day great and jerry are there things that you want to tell people they can do get involved in well supporting independent media is something that has been our theme here because corporate media i mean they have their priorities and and we're not it and so uh we're it is there is a let's see it's a university of adelaide in australia that did a study as to the the massive influence peddling that's going on through social media and found that the u.s pro war essentially used to make it brief uh effort has been intense worldwide uh and we we see it at different times and we're certainly seeing it now so um there's just a proliferation of programs and proliferation of of interviews series on youtube some of them have been pulled from youtube and have to go to mint press or other other media so just follow the folks you find consistent in their in their efforts and we have a lot of allies so and it's great to be here among this crowd of allies tonight so thank you all applaud yourselves and let's give me another big round that wcom our best north carolina public radio station a little tiny station in carver uh is considering carrying it so so check check the schedule what's that 103.5 and it's online check it out wcom fm and that's how we get it down it yeah the books are available if anybody missed yeah yeah we'll be out there and