Jimmy Dore Offers Some History Regarding the Ukraine War

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.

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Seymour Hersh Blows Up Joe Biden’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline Story

Here's a short chronology, then my reaction:

Feb 7, 2022: Joe Biden promises that Russia invades Ukraine, the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline will not be operational: "We will bring an end to it."

Sept 26, 2022 - The Nordstream 2 pipeline is destroyed.

Sept 28, 2022 - The Washington Post scolds Tucker Carlson for reporting that the U.S. destroyed Russia's pipeline.

Sept 30, 2022 - The White house denies U.S. involvement in destroying the pipeline. Accuses the Russians of lying. Claims that Russia destroyed its own pipeline.

Feb 8, 2023 - Highly respected investigative reporter Seymore Hersh issues news article detailing how the U.S. blew up the Nordstream 2 Pipeline. Title: "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline: The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now."

Feb 8, 2023 - The White House claims that the article by Hersch, a well-decorated reporter (see comments), is "utterly false and complete fiction."

In a surreal way, it has ceased to become "news" that our political leaders constantly lie to us, even on matters that could dramatically escalate (already high) tensions between the U.S. and Russia, two irresponsible trigger-happy countries, each of which is capable of ruining the entire planet with their over-abundance of nuclear weapons.

You and were not give an opportunity to vote on whether the U.S should engage in such reckless behavior. Congress did not deliberate on whether the U.S. should jump into a proxy war with Russia. You and I were not asked whether the U.S. should destroy a valuable asset of Russia, committing what Russia will undoubtedly consider an act of war.

Witness yet another short-term victory for the Military-Petroleum-Industrial-Complex. We are playing out yet another round of wars of discretion. This should be horrifying to all of us. Why? Here are the ending lines of Hersch's article:

The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.

“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.

“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”

At this time, based on my own search of these five websites, not a single word about Hersh's Nordstream 2 reporting at NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC or NPR. The only recent thing I found on MSNBC was this glowing interview of Hersh by David Gura.

Nathan Robinson:

Continue ReadingSeymour Hersh Blows Up Joe Biden’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline Story

Chris Hedges Describes our Self-Destructive Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine

Chris Hedges describes the dire situation. At the end of this passage he ties in the poison of Russiagate, as exposed by the Twitter Files and the recent reporting of Matt Taibbi:

The near hysterical calls to support Ukraine as a bulwark of liberty and democracy by the mandarins in Washington are a response to the palpable rot and decline of the U.S. empire. America’s global authority has been decimated by well-publicized war crimes, torture, economic decline, social disintegration — including the assault on the capital on January 6, the botched response to the pandemic, declining life expectancies and the plague of mass shootings — and a series of military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism.

In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion spending bill included $847 billion for the military; the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which oversees nuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them. In 2021, when the U.S. had a military budget of $801 billion, it constituted nearly 40 percent of all global military expenditures, more than the next nine countries, including Russia and China, spent on their militaries combined.

As Edward Gibbon observed about the Roman Empire’s own fatal lust for endless war: “[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”

A state of permanent war creates complex bureaucracies, sustained by compliant politicians, journalists, scientists, technocrats and academics, who obsequiously serve the war machine. This militarism needs mortal enemies — the latest are Russia and China — even when those demonized have no intention or capability, as was the case with Iraq, of harming the U.S. We are hostage to these incestuous institutional structures.

Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, for example, appointed eight commissioners to review Biden’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) to “examine the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS.” The commission, as Eli Clifton writes at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.” The chair of the commission, Clifton notes, is former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who “sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.”

Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposes as an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.

Continue ReadingChris Hedges Describes our Self-Destructive Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine