 Hello, everybody. This is Roman in Ukraine. I recently had a really interesting offer from a friend of mine, Stefan Kinsella. He suggested that he host a debate about Ukraine and Russia with me and one of these libertarians who has been repeating the Kremlin propaganda as far as I'm concerned. I was so excited to get this offer that I immediately said I will offer one Bitcoin as a donation to some libertarian charity of Stefan Kinsella's choosing in exchange for the trouble of having this debate because I think these guys are lying and I want to expose them. This all happened on a Facebook thread about three weeks ago. As many of you know, I've done a lot of work to correct the disinformation about Ukraine. I've put most of it in three essays that I put a lot of effort into and cite a lot of evidence. I published these essays on a kind of a little known libertarian website called dailyanarchist.com and I'll link to them in the description below if you want to know what's really going on in Ukraine and how much of the libertarian media is treating it. Please check it out. Why do I think libertarians are getting Ukraine wrong? There's three reasons. First of all, a lot of libertarians are just caught in this echo chamber of a relatively small number of news sources and most of them are repeating the same thing over and over and they're repeating same stuff about this narrative of Ukraine narrative that's very intuitively appealing. For example, they're saying that the U.S. orchestrated a coup in Ukraine. For those of us who spent the last 10 years criticizing the war in Iraq, criticizing U.S. intervention overseas, this is very intuitively appealing. I might believe it myself were I not living in Ukraine and had I not seen up close what happened on Maidan, it was in fact a revolution. I had friends there, my lead developer, my lead computer programmer. Every time some violence flared up, he would drop his work and drive there to be a part of it because he thought it was, he felt it was his duty to be on Maidan as did up to a million other Ukrainians. This was a revolution, it was not a coup. That's the first reason. Echo chamber filled with intuitively appealing arguments. Russian propaganda is really good at appealing to people's intuition. Number two, justification. Most people are incapable of being honest when they feel like they have some skin in the game. I'm not immune from that either but I offer tons of evidence in these articles that I wrote. I'm pretty sure I have it right. So there's a lot of libertarians who are bitterly opposed to intervention and they are very willing to lie, lie or they're very willing to believe things that support their argument, that support their point of view. This is a bias that almost everyone has. They will do justification, they will not do logic. So my thing has been and continues to be, yeah argue for non-intervention if that's what you believe is best but just do it honestly. Don't tell lies as you are arguing for justification, as you are arguing against intervention. I have a, I wrote an article, I published it in The Daily Beast called Ukraine Caught Between Empires where I actually argue against U.S. intervention in Ukraine. So don't believe all these people who are going to go around calling me a neocon. Look it up. Skasky Ukraine Caught Between Empires on The Daily Beast. So the third reason the libertarians are getting this wrong, the third and most serious reason is that alternative media whether radical libertarian, radical communist, radical anything is filled with people who faithfully repeat Russian propaganda and a lot of them are doing it, or maybe not a lot but some of the prominent ones are doing it consciously and deliberately. There are propagandists in the libertarian media and in the communist media and in all the others who faithfully repeat Kremlin propaganda. I thought everyone was acting in good faith when this conflict in Ukraine started and I wrote to people who I've respected and followed for years and I said look I think you're getting it wrong about Ukraine. Here's why you're getting it wrong. Here's the evidence. Dear for example Paul Craig Roberts, I think you're wrong that the Maidan protests are motivated by $20 a day getting paid by German intelligence. He wrote that in one of his essays. The reason I think that is because my head developer who does not get would not drive to Maidan for $20 a day. He in fact gets $25 an hour or got it at the time. Maidan was filled with Ukraine's upper and middle class. One of the first persons killed was a university professor. I wrote these people very respectful letters and they either ignored me or they called me a dupe or they called me a Nazi. There was no absolutely no like curiosity like hey how does this thing look for up close. There was no enthusiasm oh we have a libertarian contact right there in the middle of it all. These people wanted nothing to do with me. Yes it's shocking to hear this accusation that there are that there are conscious Kremlin propagandists in the libertarian media. Let me give you examples of some of the lies being told. For example a recent Casey research newsletter said that the US ambassador tweeted a crudely doctored photo trying to convince us that the Russians shot down MH17. MH17 was the Dutch airliner that got shot down killed almost 300 people 298 people civilians. All right. Very specious argument very appealing to to libertarians who spent the last 10 years criticizing US false flag operations criticizing intervention maybe criticizing the account of nine 11 attacks. Problem is it never happened. There was no such tweet. They just they just made it up. There was no such tweet. They are lying. Okay. And what's even stranger is that if you look up crudely doctored photo in MH17 you'll find the Kremlin's crudely doctored photo. The Kremlin has had like five different narratives about what happened with MH17 and and once they released a photo showing a satellite image of a not just a Ukrainian plane shooting down the airliner but even the missile flying like everything was there in this photo which was very widely ridiculed. That is the crudely doctored photo. There was never any kind of tweet from from the ambassador from the US ambassador and the even bigger lie was the lie by omission. He never mentioned that there have been separate Malaysian Dutch and German investigations into MH17 which all found the same thing that the Russian side did it. The Dutch even think they've identified the the people who were on those intercepted calls that have been pretty widely broadcast. Intercepted calls of the Russian mercenaries discussing how the plane was just shot down. The Dutch think they've identified the individuals who are on those intercepted calls. You can read the reports. That's one lie. The Nazi thing. All right. Very persistent claim by both the radical left and the radical right and the radical libertarians that the Ukrainians are all Nazis. You have to take this in context. If you can imagine a map of Russia, start with the nation of Georgia and just follow the border. Black Sea, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states up to Finland. All right. If you include Kaliningrad, Russia also borders Lithuania, Poland. There is no country on that border which Russia has not accused of Naziism and fascism. It's just what they do. The Jewish community in Ukraine has been very outspoken against this accusation. You could look up Google Ukraine Jewish community open letter. Open letter of the Jewish community. You could look for the interview of the head rabbi in Kiev. This accusation that the Ukrainian protests are characterized by Naziism has never been accurate and it's also what Russia has been doing. It is their propaganda. It has been their propaganda for 70 years. They accuse all their neighbors of that. Another lie from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace. All right. Ridiculous statement. When Russia was invading Crimea, Ron Paul Institute for Peace asked the question, Russia is already by treaty has a right to use the Sevastopol naval base. How can they be attacking a place in which they're already legally present? Because Russia has the contract to use a naval base, it's like they have the right to attack the whole region. It's like saying the U.S. has a right to attack all of Cuba because by treaty they have a right to use the Guantanabe naval base. These are the lies that are coming from the libertarian press. Okay. Same thing. Ron Paul Institute for Peace claiming persistently that Russia is not invading East Ukraine despite the attackers themselves saying that we're Russian. Russian flags, Russian uniform, tons of equipment that's unique to the Russian Army, T-72 Bravo tanks, the new RPK machine gun with the handle in front, anti-aircraft systems, mobile artillery systems. Where do they think all this crap is coming from and how can they persist in their lies when the evidence is so obvious? Another persistent claim that Russian speakers are being ethnically cleansed, repeated over and over and over in the libertarian media, in the communist media, in the radical right media. This is not true. Half the Ukrainian Army is Russian speaking. The heads of the Ukraine's two biggest and most significant volunteer battalions are, in fact, Russian speakers from Eastern Ukraine. I can go on and on, check out my three essays which are linked to below. I detail a lot of the ridiculous statements being made. It's been observed that the purpose of Russian propaganda is to destroy the very idea of truth, just to exhaust people by offering so many, so many alternative narratives. I think that's what's going on. What we don't have time to do or one effect of Russian propaganda is that there's little time to talk about what's actually happening in the places that Russia has occupied, the huge transfers of property that have gone from private owners to the local gangsters, the widespread use of torture. And it's not like in the US where people are shocked and embarrassed. They freaking brag about torturing people. Huge suppression of ethnic minorities and religious minorities, evangelical pastors have been tortured to death in Donetsk. I think it's 21 now. Crimean Tartar activists have been kidnapped and vanished. There's a really dark cloud that descended over these Russian occupied areas. And Russian propaganda is just so offensive and it's being repeated so dutifully by the libertarian press that there's no little time left to talk about what's actually happening. The lies are enormous and I think that's evidence alone that if you take the time to look at the evidence and recognize these as lies, I think that that alone is very strong evidence that these people are not telling the truth. But you can also look at how Russian intelligence works and watching these videos really sealed it for me that, yes, these are propagandists. These are not just guys who are getting it wrong. These are propagandists. And if you have time and if you're curious, check out two videos on YouTube. One is a series of interviews called Active Measures. These are all Russian KGB agents who defected to the West in the 1980s and they talk about how they would do their job. The other video is a single KGB agent Yuri Bezmedov and it's the Deception Was My Job interview. Watch these videos and you understand how Russian intelligence works because all these KGB agents, they say the same thing. They say we don't do any of that or almost none of that James Bond espionage stuff. What we do is affect the message. We build, we figure out who the opinion makers are. We have huge lists of every community down to very small groups of people and we know who the opinion makers are and we look for vain people. We look for people who are struggling. We look for people who want status and we just make it very easy for them to repeat our propaganda. Those two videos really sealed it for me. I think there are, I think there are propagandists, conscious propagandists in the alternative media and it's not just, it's not just the libertarian media. It's like the communist media. It's the radical right media. It's all alternative media and that's what Russian intelligence does. They build, they build ties with dissenting political groups and get them to repeat their message. Even if you don't care about Ukraine, I'm not asking you to care about Ukraine. Let's say a lot of my audience, my very modest audience on this YouTube channel, they're libertarians that are not in Ukraine. Why should you care? Because these people make us look stupid. We need a basic respect for the truth. If you're going to lie to, even if you're going to lie to support something good, lie to support low taxes, lie to support private property, then you're no better than our ideological opponents. You've got to start with telling the truth. You should still care because people in our movement in libertarianism who lie, they make us all look stupid and they make us all lose credibility. Okay, I'm at about 15 minutes. Offer still stands. If somebody wants to debate me, I'll be happy to do it. I'll donate one Bitcoin to some libertarian charity. The only thing I ask is that it's somebody that I've heard of, somebody who's already been writing about Ukraine. I don't just want someone to pop up out of nowhere to waste my time. That's one request. Second request is that it's recorded and that we post it somewhere, somewhere public where a lot of people can see it. And that's that. Thanks for tuning in. Have a good one.