Jimmy Dore recently appeared on Ep 237 of the PBD Podcast with Patrick Bet-David. I transcribed a portion of his interview, in which is described the relevant history of Ukraine as it pertains to the ongoing war. He contrasts the vast military aid the U.S. if providing to Ukraine to the desperate economic situation of millions of Americans.

Jimmy Dore:

Well, it’s obvious that they don’t want you to know the real history. They don’t want you to know that when Germany was allowed to reunify the promise from NATO to Russia was that we won’t expand NATO. And then of course, it did. I think there’s thirteen more countries that they put it into NATO. And now they wanted to put Ukraine into NATO or threatened to do that. That would be like if Russia got into a military alliance with Mexico and they wanted to start putting military bases in Mexico. We wouldn’t allow that we wouldn’t allow it. And just like what happened with Cuba with the missile crisis in the 60s, we wouldn’t allow stuff like that. But we’re doing that and they don’t want you to know that NATO is not a defensive, it is offensive. This is a war that was started and provoked by NATO and the West. Zelensky ran on peace. He brought on bringing the country back together, right? The Russian speakers in the east, the Donbas. But he didn’t do it. Why? Because he got threatened by NATO and the ultra right, the Nazis, in Ukraine. And so they’ll threaten to kill–he knows he’s a dead man–if he does a peace deal with Russia. So that’s why he won’t. They had a peace deal in March and that’s when Boris Johnson from the UK flew there and said, Hey, you better you don’t do this. And he he killed the peace deal. So Russia is the one that wants peace in this deal. And Ukraine and NATO do not. They want to bleed Russia economically. And that’s why they blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. They’ve always said they were going to do it and they did it. For the life of me, I can’t get why the European nations are going along with this. There was the foreign minister of Germany said I don’t care about my people, if they don’t want this. I care about the people of Ukraine. What leader of a country says they don’t care about their own people, but they care more about somebody else’s country? It’s crazy what’s going on.

People don’t realize that NATO has provoked this. In fact, there was a peace agreement in 2014. The CIA helped overthrow the Ukraine Government. And then the people in the Donbas didn’t want to go along with this coup’ed government, because the leader of Ukraine wanted to be friendly or economically with Russia instead of join, like the European Union, and that they couldn’t have that right. So that’s why they did a coup. And Russian speakers in the Donbas didn’t want to go along with that coup. And so they kind of wanted to break away. The Ukraine Government started shelling the Donbas. And so they had a peace agreement called the Minsk agreements. That was supposed to give them independence. They were supposed to have their own elections and they were going to stop shelling them, but they never did. They ended up killing like 14 or 15,000 people in the Donbas over the last eight years.

And now it’s been revealed that that peace agreement was never real. Merkel, the former prime minister of Germany, just admitted that the only reason they did that peace agreement was to give Ukraine enough time to build up its military. So when they finally did provoke an invasion, which is what they did, that they would have a military ready to fight Russia. People don’t know this is what happens. They just think that one day Putin woke up and said, I want to go invade Ukraine, because I’m a maniac. And they think that he’s the bad guy. He’s acting rationally. We always knew he would do this. In fact, we were counting on him doing this. That’s why we did what we did. And [Americans] don’t know that Ukraine ramped up their bombing right before the war started last year. They doubled their bombing. They were really trying to provoke it. And they did it. They got it. They provoked it. And Russia would rather have a peace agreement and the rest of the world rather have a peace agreement. Not NATO. Not Joe Biden. Not the military industrial complex. That’s where we are and people don’t know that. That’s what [Reporter Matt Lee] is saying: Hey, NATO’s the one expanding. That’s the reason why he said it. The reason why NATO’s army is on the doorstep of Russia is because we moved, not Russia.

It’s just obvious that we’re the bad guys. The United States are the world’s terrorists. We have 1000 military bases. We have 400 military bases surrounding China since the Korean War. We just added three new military bases in the Philippines, the Philippines. They just announced two weeks ago. This is how all empires end. We’re ending. We’re overextending militarily where we have people living under every bridge. People don’t have health care or living wages. Half the country can afford a $500 Emergency. 80% of workers live paycheck to paycheck. 50% of wage earners earn $30,000 or less. People go bankrupt when they get sick in this country. We have homeless people everywhere and that’s because our government is 100% corrupted. The people think that’s corruption, like Oh, Joe Biden gave his kid a no-show job in the Ukraine energy board. Donald Trump gave his kid a deal with the Saudis. No, no, no, that’s regular corruption. I’m talking about 100%, everything the government does, it only does it because of corruption. And that’s the only way the wheels get greased is through corruption. That’s why we can send $100 billion to Ukraine without any oversight. And we still won’t send it to our own cities to fix our homelessness, or our bridges that those homeless people are living under. We won’t even fix our own goddamn country. So people don’t realize that this is pretty much a Banana Republic where we’re at the end. This is the end of this empire. We’re basically Brazil with a couple of big cities that are keeping it afloat.

What do you call a system that takes the richest country on the face of the earth has ever seen and renders half of his population poor or low income? You call that a failed system. And that’s where we’re living in and people think we’ve got to be able to vote our way out of this. What we have to do is get people in the streets.

So when someone like AOC, has 13 million Twitter followers, and Bernie Sanders says, they’re supposed to tell people to get in the streets and take our government back, but they won’t, because they’re part of the system. And that’s what I’m trying to wake people up. And it’s worse off having people like Bernie Sanders and AOC in the Democratic Party in government, even though Bernie claims to be an independent. He’s a Democrat. And why it’s worse? Because it gives people the false impression that there’s somebody actually fighting for you and government. There isn’t. The only way you can have change and get people into the streets is when they lose faith in the system. And we have to disabuse them of the idea that there is somebody fighting for them in this system. There isn’t. . . .

That’s how we got civil rights. That’s how women got what should change. Once we get money out of politics. The first thing we’ve got to get money out of politics. I would recommend public financing of our elections and we shorten our election season. There’s a million things you could do. But definitely get money out of politics. That’ll never change until we shut stuff down. I mean, the truckers showed that you could bring them to your knees, their knees. And in Canada. Yeah. And so and you know, of course, people in the United States, they listened to the corporate media, they call those people Nazis, when they’re actually freedom fighters. And they were right. They weren’t fighting against medicine, the truckers were vaccinated at a higher rate than the general population in Canada. They were fighting against authoritarianism. And they were right. In America, Look at those truckers! And they call them Nazis. And they look at Nazis in Ukraine and they call them freedom fighters. That’s how messed up our corporate media is.

Resources:

Oliver Stone
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2015/january/01/oliver-stone-cia-fingerprints-all-over-ukraine-coup/

Greenwald: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrfeyjKCaPs

https://greatreject.org/ukraine-on-fire-full-documentary/

Oliver Stone’s 2016 documentary:

CIA involvement in 2014 coup: https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/03/07/national-endowment-for-democracy-deletes-records-of-funding-projects-in-ukraine/

[Added Feb 25, 2023]

Chris Hedges and Dennis Kucinich discuss the extinction of anti-war Democrats. In the past, many Democrats were opposed to war. What happened? 4:35 Kucinich: “As soon as the Democratic party made a determination–could have been 35 40 years ago–that they were going to take corporate contributions, that that wiped out any distinction between the two parties because in Washington he or she who pays the piper plays the tune and that’s what’s happened. So there isn’t that much of a difference in terms of the two parties when it comes to war.”