On November 11 – Remember Who Profits From War



Veterans Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in Canada are sold as days to honor soldiers who have died in war, but are far more about promoting militarism and the mythology that dying and killing in unjust wars is “patriotic“. This is a collection of episodes on profit and war.


Canadian Profits and Nuclear Armageddon pt 1



In spite of self-righteous posturing as a peaceful nation, the Canadian military-industrial complex helped develop and fuel nuclear weapons. Yves Engler, author of “Stand on Guard for Whom?” joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news. This interview was originally published on December 2, 2021.

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. Please don’t forget, without your financial support, moral support, sharing, social media support, we can’t do this. I’ll be back in just a few seconds with Yves Engler, and we’re going to talk about the self-righteous Canadians. 

Canadian governments like to portray themselves as the peacekeepers, the more reasonable country that tries to mitigate the excesses of American society and its military machine. Of course, Canada pitches in troops when necessary, but only when it seems like a just and legal war or so goes the self-serving and self-righteous narrative. Well, Yves Engler has written a new book that exposes the true North’s role in serving and making massive profits from the U.S. military-industrial complex. The book is titled Stand On Guard for Whom? A People’s History of the Canadian Military.

In the Canadian national anthem Oh, Canada, the phrase ‘we stand on guard for thee’ is repeated three times in four stanzas. Just who we stand on guard for is never made clear, but when the first version of the anthem was written in 1880, the main threat to stand on guard from was coming from the South. That said, a 1908 version made Canada’s military role clear at the time. Quote “At Britain’s side, whate’er betide. Unflinchingly we will stand. With hearts we sing, “God save the King.” Guide then one Empire wide, do we implore.”

Canadian elites and military have always found it profitable to support Empire. With the coming to power of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, Canada became a fullfledged junior partner of the American global hegemony. In fact, it was President [John F.] Kennedy that helped put Pearson in power in the first place in a flagrant manipulation of a Canadian election. More on that later.

None of what follows is meant to denigrate the courage and self-sacrifice of thousands of Canadians who served in the Canadian Armed Forces. My father was one of them, flying as a Navigator for the RCAF [Royal Canadian Air Force] from 1939 to 1945 in some of the most dangerous missions of the war. It was typical of the Canadian government in World War I and World War II to allow Canuck’s to be fodder in what amounted to suicidal missions and often pointless ones. My father consciously volunteered to join the Air Force in order to fight Hitlerite fascism, but he never had any illusions about Canada’s role in supporting fascism in the lead-up to the war. Including, as Yves writes in his book quote: 

“Canada largely sided with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Ottawa refused repeated requests from Spain’s elected government to sell it weaponry. In April 1937, Ottawa passed the Foreign Enlistment Act in a bid to block Canadians from fighting on behalf of the Republican government.” 

End quote. That is fighting against the dictator [Francisco] Franco, who was supported by [Adolf] Hitler and [Benito] Mussolini. My father’s brother volunteered and made it to Spain in spite of attempts by the Canadian government to obstruct the members of the Mac-pap [Mackenzie-Papineau] Battalion. Yves writes further down.

During this period, Canada found no fault in supplying war materials to the fascist Japanese army that occupied Korea and massacred the Chinese and Manchuria. In the years leading up to the start of the European front of World War II, Japan was the third-largest importer of Canadian nonferrous metals.

Every year on Remembrance Day, Canadian children are taught to recite a poem written by a Montreal doctor, John McCrae, in 1915 after thousands of Canadians were slaughtered in Yieppes, Belgium. The poem begins, “In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow.”. It ends with a call to arms. 

“Take up our quarrel with the foe: 

To you from failing hands we throw

  The torch; be yours to hold it high. 

  If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

    In Flanders fields.”

I think it’d be better if kids were taught to read a piece by another Montreal doctor, Norman Bethune, who volunteered to go to Spain and China to fight against fascism. In 1939, he wrote:

“Are wars of aggression, wars for the conquest of colonies, then, just big business? Yes, it would seem so, however much the perpetrators of such national crimes seek to hide their true purpose under banners of high-sounding abstractions and ideals. They make war to capture markets by murder, raw materials by rape. They find it cheaper to steal than to exchange; easier to butcher than to buy.” 

Bethune continues:

“Behind all stands that terrible, implacable God of Business and Blood, whose name is Profit. Money, like an insatiable Mulloch demanding its interest, its return, and will stop at nothing, not even murder of millions to satisfy its greed. Behind the army stands the militarists. Behind the militarist stands finance capital and the capitalist. Brothers in blood; companions in crime.” 

Bethune ends with:

“Such an organization of human society as permits them to exist must be abolished. These men make the wounds.”

As much as Canadians like to think we’re better than that, the real history shows we’re not. Now joining us to discuss his new book, Stand On Guard For Whom? is Yves Engler. He’s a Montreal-based activist and author. He’s published 11 books, including House of Mirrors: Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy. Thanks for joining us, Yves.

Yves Engler

Thanks for having me.

Paul Jay

So, you traced quite a bit of history in the book. I’m going to kind of jump ahead and, in future interviews, pick up some of the other pieces of history. As people that watch theAnalysis know, I’m working with [Daniel] Ellsberg on a film about nuclear weapons. So, I jumped right to your chapter about Canada’s role in developing the apocalypse, apocalyptic weapons. So, start with the history of Canada and nuclear weapons. I guess it starts with uranium?

Yves Engler

Yeah. Canadian uranium was used in the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and ultimately the bombs dropped on Japan. In fact, in the late 1990s, the Dene people, who the uranium was taken from their land with little of their own control over. They actually apologized to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the bombs being dropped. The Canadian government spent huge amounts of money researching nuclear weapons during World War II, coordinating with the British and the Americans. The British nuclear weapons program actually moved to Canada for safety reasons during World War II. Canadian officials were signatories to the Quebec Agreement between the U.S. and the British around nuclear weapons development, and Canadian officials were aware that the nuclear weapons were going to be dropped on Japan. 

So, there’s a history of Canadian support for nuclear weapons. The Prime Minister, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bombed, says in his diary that he’s happy that this took place on the Asian races versus the European races, reflecting a certain kind of racism. I think that the Canadian involvement in nuclear weapons production and then Canadian military having nuclear weapons in future years is really kind of reflective of how Canada was very close to the British Empire and then, during World War II, became very close to the U.S. military. So, it’s sort of an outgrowth of Canada’s kind of unique history of close ties to the two great military empires of the past couple of hundred years.

Paul Jay

As the American economic investment, power, control of Canada grew—even before the First World War, a lot of the railroad expansion in Canada was actually American capital. Between the wars, Americans increased their position enormously. Off the top of my head, I believe, by the Second World War had overtaken British investment, but Prime Minister [John] Diefenbaker, who was in power in the late ’50s and early ’60s, he was still playing this sort of positioning of trying to play off the Americans and British, to some extent—having certain independence from the U.S., which pissed the hell out of Kennedy. It came to a head over a couple of issues, which directly connected with nuclear weapons. Tell us that story.

Yves Engler

Yeah, well, in the October 1962 blockade, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Diefenbaker government was unwilling to just accept the U.S. position. Most importantly, putting NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] on high alert and that angered the U.S.. So basically, Diefenbaker and the foreign Minister were not happy to just go along with the U.S. position. In fact, Canadian naval vessels, without any political directive, did support the U.S. blockade of Cuba. The main thing that Kennedy wanted, which was the NORAD high alert and the full political subservience, they didn’t do. The head of the Canadian naval at the base in Halifax actually deployed Canadian naval vessels acting like they were part of a training mission, but they were just supporting the U.S. without having any piece of paper or any directive to do so. He basically broke the proper civilian-military command structure.

Paul Jay

Let me interrupt. There was a proper military-civilian command structure. Just the civilian command structure was in Washington, not Ottawa.

Yves Engler

No, exactly, and it’s actually totally surreal to read some military historians. Like Jack Granatstein points out, this is the worst breaking of the proper command structure in Canadian military history. Note, this is a very pro-military historian, but there’s actually a number of military historians that I quote in the book that actually act like this was a good thing that the naval commander just ignored the political directive and just followed the political directive from Washington versus what the people were supposed to be doing.

Paul Jay

Yeah. Let me add one other note. It’s Pierre Trudeau, the current Trudeau’s father. When he was Prime Minister, he got all the credit for Canada maintaining a sort of independent policy on relations with Cuba. But actually, it’s not true. It’s Diefenbaker that established that and defied the Americans, and maintained normal diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba. But go on with the story. 

Yves Engler

Yeah. There’s actually more to that story as well, but the result of Diefenbaker’s position on the Cuban missile crisis. I think that more generally, there was a— Diefenbaker, it should be noted that he wins the election, in part, by criticizing Lester Pearson, then as Foreign Affairs Minister and his role in the Suez crisis. So, the British, the French and Israelis invaded Egypt in 1956, and the famous peacekeeping mission that Lester Pearson came up with was done in conjunction with John Foster Dulles. It was a way the Americans opposed the British French Israeli invasion. The peacekeeping mission was a way to basically help the British out of this disastrous invasion, but it was the clear diplomatic break of Canada being tied to the British Empire and then being tied to the American Empire.

Paul Jay

Okay, let me just add another fast note because we have a lot of American viewers. So Diefenbaker was the head of the Conservative Party. He had maintained more relations with the British, and Pearson became the head of the Liberal Party. Pearson and the Suez crisis, as you mentioned, is an example of how much Pearson was allied with the Americans.

Yves Engler

Exactly. This is part of the background to Kennedy being closer to Pearson and hostile to Diefenbaker. What happened with Cuba just amped up that longer history of tension or political disagreement and, so, then Kennedy helps basically have the Diefenbaker government collapse in early 1963. There’s a series of parts to that—everything from leaking all kinds of negative press reports in the U.S. media around Diefenbaker, U.S. officials repeatedly calling Diefenbaker a liar. The head of NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Agreement] comes to Ottawa in early 1963 to basically say that Diefenbaker’s refusing to take bomarc missiles and is undermining Canada’s role in the NATO alliance. So, there’s a whole series of measures that Kennedy pursues to precipitate the fall of the Diefenbaker government, and then when that happens, there’s a series of measures to support Pearson during the 1963 election. The most important one is his pollster, Lou Harris is sent—

Paul Jay

His meaning Kennedy’s?

Yves Engler

Kennedy’s pollster is sent to support the Liberal Party, Pearson, during that election. And previously, the Labor Party in Britain had asked to have Lou Harris support them. That was refused, but then it was granted to Pearson. There’s other claims that Diefenbaker and other Conservative officials claim that the CIA actually was involved throughout the election campaign in sort of undermining their campaign. Some of that’s never really been fully—

Paul Jay

But one of the things that is, I believe now factually proved, is that Kennedy and I don’t know if it’s through the CIA or not, but he arranged for Lou Harris, the pollster, to get a phony passport under a false name and go to Ottawa. My old colleague who helped me create this TV show, CounterSpin, he says it was a standing joke amongst journalists at the time of that election that Pearson’s campaign was being run by Lou Harris out of the basement of the U.S. Embassy. Literally out of the U.S. Embassy. He brought all these modern polling methods to help message and create Pearson’s campaign and defeat Diefenbaker, but let’s talk a little bit more about that bomarc missile issue because that’s a big deal.

Kennedy wanted nuclear-armed bomarc missiles on Canadian territory as part of this SAGE [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] radar system that was supposed to shoot down Soviet bombers when they come in. Diefenbaker said no, partly because if I understand it correctly, he said it would just make Canada a target. Is that right?

Yves Engler

Yeah. He was concerned about making Canada a target, and I think that there was a certain degree of ambivalence towards nuclear weapons, of course. Also, Diefenbaker had been ambivalent towards NORAD, which is set up in 1958. The negotiations for that began earlier before he became Prime Minister, and it’s viewed that the military basically forced Diefenbaker into agreeing to NORAD. I believe it was initially signed in 1957 and came into effect in ’58. The military basically forced it upon Diefenbaker. The bomarc missiles, which were stationed, I believe, mostly in North Bay, Ontario, I think there were some in Quebec as well. Effectively, they were under the control of the NORAD headquarters in Colorado, obviously. So basically, effectively under the U.S.— not effectively. They were under U.S. military control of Canadians that are part of the NORAD command structure as well. So, there was an ambivalence around that question, and I think it just fit within a kind of more general questioning of U.S. military power.

Now, I’m kind of a little bit ambivalent around Diefenbaker because he was somebody who was supportive of the British Empire and it’s not like the British military and the British Empire were some sort of Democratic or humanitarian force. So, it’s kind of a battle between two different political outlooks that I don’t really agree with, but certainly, the extent to which Kennedy and the U.S. played a role in precipitating the Diefenbaker government’s fall but also Pearson’s rise is one that’s a pretty scandalous story. Just one little anecdote in this. Pearson himself tells a story just the extent to which Kennedy was sort of intervening. He tells a story about how Kennedy wanted to meet him in person during this period when he was the head of the opposition in 1962. In 1962 he asked to have a justification for Pearson to go down to Boston. He asks Pearson if he has an honorary degree from Harvard. Pearson already has an honorary degree from Harvard. He says, do you have an honorary degree from Boston College? I think Pearson already had an honorary degree from Boston College. They said, how about BU Boston University? And he comes up. Kennedy orchestrates getting Pearson an honorary degree from Boston University to have a reason for Pearson to go down and then to have private meetings with Kennedy on the side.

Paul Jay

Because he’s not the Prime Minister, he’s the leader of the opposition, and it wouldn’t be appropriate otherwise.

Yves Engler

And there was already criticism of Pearson being sort of a U.S. stooge and being really close to Kennedy and to Washington. So to have this other rationale and obviously, that would also add to Pearson’s media aura that he gets lots of honorary degrees from prestigious institutions. But that just gives you a sense of how much Pearson— I did a whole book about Pearson. Pearson had really been aligned with the U.S. going back to during World War II, right after World War II, on questions from the partition plan on Palestine, to the Korean War, to supporting the ouster of [Jacobo] Arbenz in Guatemala, et cetera.

Paul Jay

Let me just add a couple of notes to this. Of course, I agree with you about the British Empire, which has plenty of blood on its hands, but the extent to which Diefenbaker still maintained a certain amount of, if you can call it independence- dependence on Britain rather than total dependence on the United States. The Pearson election was really a watershed where from then on, both parties, Conservatives and Liberals, became complete junior partner supplicants of the United States. Diefenbaker was overthrown within the Conservative Party, but it’s an important watershed moment in Canadian politics and Canadian history.

This bomarc missile thing, a lot of it was used to defeat Diefenbaker, not just because Kennedy wanted bomarc missiles in Canada, but there was a lot of Cold War hysteria in Canada. So it would look weak on fighting communism, fighting the Soviet Union, and all that. That was also meant to help Pearson and, in fact, as I understand it now, from talking to Ellsberg and others like Lester Earnest, who worked on the SAGE radar program, which is the one that controlled these missiles. SAGE radar was supposed to detect the Russian Soviet planes, and then the missiles would be guided by computers to go hit them, which in itself was insane because, over Canadian territory, you would have nuclear Soviet bombers hit by nuclear weapons over Canadian territory. That’s what they wanted Diefenbaker to agree to, two nuclear blasts over Canada. The whole thing was bloody insane.

The only other part to it is that SAGE never worked. People that watch my interviews with Lester Earnest; the whole thing was bullshit. They had never solved the problem of radar jamming. They spent a trillion dollars over 25 years on this MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] thing. It was just a boondoggle that MIT and a bunch of contractors made money out of. It wouldn’t have worked for one minute, and Kennedy knew it, but he needed to rub Diefenbaker’s nose in this bomarc missile thing. They wanted to establish the principle or precedent of nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, and he just didn’t damn well like that Diefenbaker had said no. Apparently, they also wanted Canada to have; in Europe, the Canadian forces should have some nuclear weapons and apparently, Diefenbaker didn’t agree with that either. So, there was an anti-nuclear thing. In fact, in that sense, there were sections in Washington that sort of agreed with them but were not dominant. Anyway, let’s move on, but just to sum all this up. Essentially, the United States carries out a regime change in Canada in order to assert its full power over the Canadian foreign policy and, certainly, military policy. But that ain’t all. Let’s go on. Should we go on to CANDU [Canada Deuterium Uranium] reactors at this point?

Yves Engler

Yeah. In the book, I suggest that after the nine countries have nuclear weapons, Canada is kind of next in line as playing the biggest role in nuclear proliferation. One element of this is the exporting of CANDU reactors, nuclear reactors to at least half a dozen countries. India uses the CIRUS [Canada India Reactor Utility Services] reactor to develop its nuclear weapons. Part of the reason they choose the Canadian is their weak safeguards in the agreement. Then Pakistan, of course, responds and also uses Canadian reactors, a CANDU reactor that’s exported to Pakistan.

Pakistan then uses the exports Canada already made for them to develop nuclear weapons. The Canadian government is even involved in nuclear cooperation with the South African apartheid white regime until fairly late in the apartheid game. So, the Canadian government has been heavily involved. There’s this huge amounts of uranium exports to the U.S. over many decades for a long period. It was after World War II; it was, I think, the fourth-biggest Canadian export: uranium. 

So, the Canadian government has this history of being unconcerned about nuclear proliferation. Also, the Canadian military wanted Canada to acquire nuclear weapons and put forward numerous proposals over the years, explicitly lobbying for Canada to acquire nuclear weapons because they wanted to be part of the big boys if you like. So, the Canadian government and then also through NATO, right. Canada has supported NATO nuclear weapons. That goes on right up until today and has opposed efforts to rid the world of these abhorrent mass killers.

Paul Jay

Let’s go back to India and Pakistan for a minute because it may be that there is actually no more immediate danger to the world than a potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan. In Pakistan, you have a military that essentially runs the government, and that military is highly, highly infiltrated by Al-Qaeda and various other Islamic extremists. A lot of fanatical religion within the Pakistan military up into very senior levels. And then you have Hindu nationalist fascists in power in New Delhi. You have two sides of the equation of an extremely tense situation. Both nuclear-armed countries, both where things could easily get out of hand, where there’s outbreaks of actual fighting over Kashmir, every so often. An extremely dangerous situation. 

Canada had a lot to do with providing the reactors that kicked this whole thing off. If these countries went to nuclear war, it wouldn’t just devastate millions and millions of people all throughout this part of the world. It also creates a kind of minor nuclear winter. And then the other thing that’s in the works right now is there’s some pressure building in the United States. By the way, let me say there’s a lot of religious fanaticism within the American military. I don’t think anyone can let that go unsaid when you’re talking about religious fanaticism in the military, but there’s a lot of pressure building to end the Test Ban Treaty.

Apparently, if the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty ends, it’s going to quickly speed up the development of an H bomb in India and Pakistan. If they were ever to go to war with H bombs rather than the older atomic bombs, that is apparently, according to a lot of the scientists that study climate change and nuclear winter, enough to create a global nuclear winter, which means essentially the end of most human civilization. Am I correct that it wasn’t unknown to Canada when they sold these reactors? That they would probably be weaponized even though Pakistan and India claimed they wouldn’t?

Yves Engler

I’m not sure about that, but what I am sure about is that the Canadian government in the agreements was very lax, specifically with the CIRUS to India on what they could do with it. The Indians chose Canadian technology precisely for that reason. After India tested its first nuclear weapon, the Canadian government brought in restrictions on any exports to India, but in fact, about a decade ago, the [Steven] Harper government, when they really sort of recharged relations with India, which was partly about concern around China, they restarted the nuclear exports. I believe there were even officials; if I remember correctly, there were even officials from CANDU that came on the trade mission with Harper to, I guess it was probably to New Delhi. It was a little bit controversial at the time that the Harper government was changing some of the agreements or some of the restrictions, should I say.

So yeah, the Canadian government has a certain degree of ambivalence, and they have hostility towards things like the TPNW, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and that’s the Trudeau government. When there was the initial UN [United Nations] in, I believe it was late 2016, discussions about holding a conference to try to come forward with an agreement to work towards banning nuclear weapons the [Justin] Trudeau government voted against it, and then Trudeau himself mocked it when they held a conference. About two-thirds of the world’s countries didn’t attend. And then, when the treaty was signed, Canada refused to sign it, and then it finally hit the 50 signatures. Fifty countries signed it, so it came into effect in January of this year. 

The Canadian government continued to oppose it, and kind of, amazingly, throughout this whole thing, they say they want to rid the world of nuclear weapons. So they have quite good rhetoric on nuclear weapons, but they are unwilling to sign this landmark international treaty to try to move towards abolishing nuclear weapons, and I think that kind of fits with their stuff on concern around India and Pakistan potentially getting into a nuclear war. They’re more concerned with their NATO alliance and nuclear exports than they are with the existential threat that nuclear war poses to humanity.

Paul Jay

Just to add one quick note on Pakistan. It was the [Ronald] Reagan government that also facilitated or looked the other way, at the very least, as Pakistan developed its bomb. Even though I believe there has been a law passed in Congress banning any support for a Pakistani bomb. When Pakistan collaborated with Reagan in arms shipments to Afghanistan, Reagan agreed to let the Pakistanis develop a bomb without any interference.

The new German government just elected a foreign minister from the Green Party, and apparently, they’re going to take a position advocating NATO issuing a no first strike of nuclear weapons declaration. If I understand it correctly, that isn’t just a declaration if anybody gets serious about that. It’s also about what weaponry you have because certain weaponry really is designed for first strike. So then you have to start seriously looking at— like ICBMs [Intercontinential Ballistic Missiles] are first-strike weapons. A second strike doesn’t mean much. Where is Canada on this issue of no first strike? Do you know? 

Yves Engler

I think that they’ve been opposed to some of those discussions within NATO, historically. I don’t know where the position is now. I know that the German government has talked about some sort of, I forget the exact terminology, but essentially an observer status within the treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. I believe the new Norwegian government is going to attend as an observer and that the Germans following suit is kind of viewed as starting the potential snowball within NATO around not support for the TPNW, but some level of interest in it. Thus far, the Canadian government has been completely hostile to any movements on that front.

Paul Jay

Now, it’s a well-known laughable secret that Israel has nuclear weapons. Everyone knows Israel has nuclear weapons. Everyone knows Israel has not signed the nonproliferation agreement. When I say everyone, it’s practically acknowledged. Jimmy Carter, former President, came out, I guess the first senior American to say so after he was President, said that Israel has nuclear weapons. But there’s been attempts to get Israel to actually sign international accords on weapons, and they refuse, but where’s Canada been on that?

Yves Engler

Well, the Harper government isolated Canada against most of the world in a vote in 2010, 2011 around a conference to discuss making the Middle East a nuclear-weapons-free zone. They voted against a couple of different initiatives that went in that direction. So the Canadian government has been— I don’t believe there’s been any new effort on that front during the current government, the Trudeau government. But the Harper government was quite explicitly hostile. That got a little bit of attention at the time. So, yeah, the Canadian government definitely kind of follows along with the U.S. on Israel.

When we talk about Iran, the flip side to this is the Canadian government says it’s all concerned with Iran’s nuclear weapons program. One of the best ways to ensure that Iran doesn’t acquire nuclear weapons is to have a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East that’s taken seriously and applied and overseen rigorously. But the obstacle to that, of course, is Israel’s nuclear weapons and the U.S. who sends its naval submarines, and whatever, which have nuclear weapons, into the region. So, when you see the Canadian government go on about concern around Iran’s potential nuclear weapons, which the reigning government has said it doesn’t want to require and has shown an openness to the idea of a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East, as have many countries in the region. It’s quite a hypocritical position, and Canada just goes along with Israel’s nuclear weapons program in power.

Paul Jay

Yeah, you write in the book that in 2012, there was a resolution at the UN calling on Israel’s weapons to be brought under the International Energy Atomic Energy Agency. There are only six countries that voted against it. Of course, Canada was one of them. 

You talked about during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the break in the chain of command, where essentially the Canadian military was taking its orders from Washington. But I guess it’s in the ’60s you write that Canadian forces were actually negotiating to get nuclear weapons, and the civilian leadership didn’t even know.

Yves Engler

Yeah, well, there’s all kinds of coordination between the Canadian military and the U.S. military around nuclear weapons. Basically, Canadian military leaders want to try to move towards something towards a [foreign language 00:42:50] before bringing in the political leadership. There were divisions between external affairs and the military over nuclear weapons where external affairs didn’t want nuclear weapons, but the military wanted them. Also, as mentioned a bit, the military was— there were Canadian fighter jets stationed in Europe that all they had was a nuclear weapon. I think the Canadian military has been quite supportive of the idea of acquiring nuclear weapons, and they understand that their political echelon is ambivalent or hostile to those efforts.

They wanted Canadians trained after World War II. There were all kinds of Canadian military officials that were part of U.S. testing, and the Canadian military throughout that whole period wanted to ensure that they had the knowledge and technical capacities to potentially acquire Canadian-made nuclear weapons.

Paul Jay

Okay, so we’re going to pick this up in another segment. We’re going to talk. First of all, I have a question that will start the answer in the next segment: why didn’t the Canadian political elites go along with all the nuclear weaponization when they seem so willing to go on with most of what else goes on in U.S. foreign policy? So, please join us for that. And then, we’re going to talk about the broader relationship between the Canadian military-industrial complex and the American one. For now, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks, Yves.

Yves Engler

Thank you

Paul Jay

And thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. Again, please don’t forget the donate button. It’s near the end of the year. I know some people are thinking about giving money at the end of the year. They look at their taxes and all the money they made on the stock exchange, or I don’t know how many of our viewers can afford stock. I have no idea, but anyway, five bucks help. Five hundred helps. A dollar. Whatever you can do. Five thousand helps even more, and anyway, thanks a lot for watching. 

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Risking Apocalypse for the Spoils of War – Andrew Cockburn pt 1



More than effective weapons, geopolitics or national defense, profit and massive budgets drive U.S. military and nuclear weapons spending. Andrew Cockburn joins Paul Jay to discuss his new book “Spoils of War”. This interview was originally published on December 21, 2021.

Paul Jay

So welcome to theAnalysis.news. I’m Paul Jay.

There’s a document from the year 2000; it’s known to many as the Project for New American Century. It was signed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and many other neo-cons that made up President Bush’s cabinet and defence department. People usually focus on the fact that the document advocates regime change in Syria, Iraq and eventually in Iran. And it’s all about asserting American dominance, asserting its role as a single superpower after the demise of the Soviet Union.

But one should pay attention to what the actual title of that document is. It’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which is all about a massive increase in military spending. Of course, it should be called Rebuilding America’s Offense, but the key point is about the supposed need for creating trillions of dollars to modernize the U.S. armed forces. This is the document that’s often cited in reference to the 9/11 attacks, as it out and out says that Americans won’t support such spending or another major war without another Pearl Harbor type attack on the United States. Of course, in 2001, they got what they wished for, perhaps what some of them planned for. According to Senator Bob Graham, who led the Joint Congressional 9/11 investigation, Bush/Cheney actually facilitated the attacks in collaboration with Saudi Arabia. More on that another time, but why is Bob Graham’s position on this being ignored? 

The objective we are told was rebuilding America’s armed forces, but rebuilding them for what? Well, to defend America’s freedom, of course, and it doesn’t take a lot of scrutiny to find out that there’s actually no threat to America’s “freedom”, at least not externally. There might be quite a few threats internally, domestically, but what exactly is that freedom to begin with? There is certainly a lot more freedom for people who have wealth than people who do not have wealth. At any rate, there’s no real external threat to America’s freedom, and there never has been, at least not since the end of WWII, in spite of decades and decades of propaganda otherwise.

So the classical analysis, whether it is from the Left or from the libertarian Right, is that the military buildup is really about securing foreign control, domination, global hegemony for the sake of markets and raw materials. Except when you actually look at post-WWII history, where exactly did this global American military might actually accomplish any of that? Maybe in Grenada, but they weren’t successful in Cuba. They weren’t successful in securing North Korea. They lost the Vietnam War. They lost in Afghanistan. In Iraq, yes, they overthrew Saddam. But China gets even more of Iraq’s oil than the United States does, and the Iraqi government is at least as friendly to Iran as they are to the United States. But while these adventures ended in military and geopolitical failure, trillions of dollars flowed into the arms industries. Perhaps U.S. military power has discouraged China from reunifying Taiwan, but that’s not sustainable. They haven’t been able to invade Venezuela to topple [Nicolas] Maduro, not because the U.S. has some moral objections to such intervention, but they know they will face endless resistance from the Venezuelan people and the wrath of all of Latin America. 

So, this use of this massive global military might actually hasn’t even been all that successful in terms of securing raw materials and markets and asserting its hegemony. The real power of the U.S. empire is its financial sector and the power of its markets. And yes, the CIA and its covert activities, but primarily the United States is the manager of global capitalism, and so far, that’s an indispensable role. None of what I’m saying is meant to minimize the very real control the U.S. has over most of the globe. And certainly, its ability to project military power plays a role in certain situations. But that said, in spite of this massive military might, China is now the leading trading partner for almost all of Latin America, Africa, Australia, and most of Asia. China doesn’t have any global military power, to speak of, and still dominates many markets and sources of raw materials.  

So what exactly is at least a trillion dollars a year of military spending accomplishing? What is the point of this enormous military power?  

There’s a new book out by Andrew Cockburn called Spoils of War, which makes the argument quite persuasively, I think, that the primary objective of all the military spending is the spending itself. It’s the money-making—the profits made by the military-industrial complex. Even to the extent, it doesn’t much matter if the weapons produced work or are effective in carrying out actual military missions. 

Now joining us to talk about his book is Andrew Cockburn. Andrew is the Washington Editor of Harper’s magazine and the author of many articles and books on national security, including the New York Times Editor’s Choice Rumsfeld and The Threat, which destroyed the myth of Soviet military superiority underpinning the Cold War. He is a regular opinion contributor to the Los Angeles Times and has written for, among others, the New York Times, National Geographic and the London Review of Books and many others.

Andrew, thanks very much for joining me. 

Andrew Cockburn

Great, Paul. Good to be with you.

 Paul Jay

So am I missing something here? What the hell is the point of this obscene military budget?

 Andrew Cockburn

Well, It’s a very important point. I think you mentioned it in your introduction. It’s a trillion dollars worth of a point. If you dangle a trillion dollars in front of people, or person, or an institution, a system, they’re going to grab at it. That is the point. Very evidently, the point is not what we’re told it is, which is the defence of the United States based on a very carefully considered strategy, plans, and so forth. The point is to garner money, money and power. Or the power to get more money.

And at that, this system is incredibly successful. I mean, people who deride the U.S. military complex, the military-industrial complex, whatever you want to call it, I think really do it an injustice when they say it can’t shoot straight, it’s incompetent. No, it can shoot very straight. And it hits the target very effectively and has done for years, and years in the face of really some quite significant obstacles, like the occasional outbreak of peace.

In 1975, the Vietnam War ended, and a very significant effort they’ve been putting into that: half a million men, vast expenditures over a huge distance. The war is over. You’d expect there to be a matter of cost-saving. Well, the budget went down briefly for a year or so and then started to climb again. So peace is not a big obstacle.

Again, even more significantly in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. The enemy that it had all been based on confronting the Soviet threat, that’s why we were up and running in the Cold War and the arms race in the late 1940s. Suddenly that goes away. What do we do? Things go latent for a few years, not to a great extent. I can explain why or how.

But within a few short years, the budget is zooming up again. And now we spend more than we spent during the Cold War on average. I mean, it’s quite extraordinary and quite a testament to the human resourcefulness or the resourcefulness of our defence complex.

Paul Jay

Andrew, you talked to some of the insiders, both in the military and then, I’m guessing, in the military-industrial complex. To what extent are they themselves conscious of the fact that most of this spending is for the sake of profit-making and has next to nothing to do with national security?

Andrew Cockburn

Well, if you catch them in moments of honesty, they do. I mean, really, deep down, they do. To a certain extent, they believe in their own propaganda. Their careers, their fortunes, their children’s college education or whatever is vested in believing in whatever it is they happen to be pushing: the wonders of precision-guided global strike, remote warfare, drone warfare. So I wondered if I could sort of inject them with truth drugs would they start committing it? Committing truth? I’m not sure they would. I think they internalize it to such a degree.

Someone once told me, he said until he went to work for the Air Force, he’d never understood the communist system idea of the party line. When [Joseph] Stalin would give a new instruction, which contradicted what he was saying yesterday, everyone in the global communist movement would fall into line immediately. You had to follow the party line. Then he said he went to work for the U.S. Air Force, and he saw it in action, that the groupthink and the discipline of believing in the ideology was so firmly entrenched that they would follow it.

That being said, I do find, usually, when you catch them when they’re retired or mellowing into old age, they’ll admit that what a crock it all is. But you’ll see, for example, recently, they crept out of or hurried out of Kabul after being defeated in the Afghan war, and their biggest complaint is that it’s been called a defeat. People like H.R. McMaster [Herbert Raymond McMaster] considered for a long time the bright hope of the U.S. Army, then he was [Donald] Trump’s National Security Adviser. He had a piece last week basically complaining that people are saying we’re defeated and how bad that is.

So they don’t like to be called out on their failures. But because it interrupts the money flow, that’s the demand now, is for God’s sake, even though we lost that war, and then one before that, and the one before that; we did conquer Grenada, as you said. They don’t want the money flow interrupted, so now we have the China threat to justify it.

Paul Jay

It’s one thing to sort of buy-in and rationalize somehow, troops all over the world, bases, aircraft carriers, but it’s all over there. And I’m pretty sure; they think for themselves, my kids aren’t going to get killed over there. So that’s one thing to somehow get your head around all that.

But the fact that they allow such expenditure on nuclear weapons. And what is it now? Maybe $2 trillion over the next 10-20 years rebuilding America’s nuclear might. If a nuclear war breaks out, there is no “over there” there.  

Andrew Cockburn

Well, it really comes back to the profit-making move or to institutional power. I can give you the need to maintain positions of power and influence. The nuclear weapons industry or effort provides a very good example of this, which is we have the so-called triad. We have missiles that are based on land, the ICBMs [Intercontinental ballistic missile], which they’re about to build a new one, or they are building a new one. We have nuclear weapons on bombers, and we have nuclear missiles on submarines.

Now, a long time ago, we had nuclear weapons on bombers because that was our strike force. And that’s how we could; if the Russians tried to attack us with nuclear weapons, we would strike back with bombers. And then we invented these missiles, so they were our retaliatory force, and we had a huge air defence network to stop the Russian bombers from getting through and radars to detect the Russian missiles. Then they figured out how to put missiles, fire a missile from a submerged submarine.

Well, now who needs the rest of it? We can deter. This is completely invulnerable. The Russians could never find these submarines, or they could never find them, period. But even in the worst case, they could never be sure of finding them. So the Russians or whoever, the Chinese, anyone would never dare launch a nuclear attack on us because we could quite certainly retaliate from our submarines and blend them all to pieces.

So they had to think up new reasons to keep the ICBMs, particularly, and the bombers. The original rationale had gone away completely. So they put their best minds to work to think of an excuse for having the land-based missiles.

And Daniel Ellsberg can tell you more about this than I could. But that was purely because the Air Force wanted to keep that budget and all their attendant contractors. There was no other earthly reason, no rational— if you call anything to do with nuclear weapons, rational— reason for maintaining this enormous and enormously expensive force in being, but keeping the money flow. That’s the only reason.

Paul Jay

To replace them while they’re talking about essentially a whole other modernization of exactly those missiles.

Andrew Cockburn

That’s right. Now, having to sort of refresh and dust off some of the old arguments for having these useless things in the first place. And interestingly, there’s a sort of nuclear industrial, political congressional complex. Look at the Senators from the missile States in Montana and Wyoming. Whenever there’s a threat to the land-based ICBM, you see those Senators rising up in righteous anger because it’s jobs. It’s considered important to the economy of their States to keep these missiles and be. And by the way, I mean to keep their population of Montana or Wyoming at risk of nuclear emulation because they’re there they would obviously be targeted by an enemy: by the Russians, or whoever, the Chinese, it doesn’t matter.

And so they never say to the people of Montana, by the way, we’re holding you up. We’re enhancing your role as a nuclear target because we think the jobs it generates make it worth it, and the campaign contributions I get from Lockheed or the Northrop Corporation or so forth. It’s never put that way, of course, but it just shows the appalling, the sort of risks and the denial. Level of denial that happens when in terms of the pursuit of, as I say, profit, money, power, and influence.

Paul Jay

I assume their defence of these missiles is that, well, the Russians still have a lot of them. And now they’re saying the Chinese are building more of them. So if they have, we got to have it. Although, that’s the argument they are using in Russia and China.

Andrew Cockburn 

Well, yeah, they do say that. But presumably, the people in Russia and China are saying the same thing. I want to stress how incredibly dangerous this is because on the presumption that you have to be able to fire them more or less on an instance notice because the Russians have them targeted, and therefore if the radar and the satellites pick up signs of incoming Russian missiles, the President has to be woken up immediately and give the order to launch the land-based missiles in particular because they’re so vulnerable.

Which means that everything’s on hair-trigger alert. Which means that a slip-up, and we’ve had near disasters in the past, can blow us all to kingdom-come because it happened in 1979. If I remember the date, right. When Zbigniew Brzezinski, President [Jimmy] Carter’s National Security Adviser, was woken up, they said we’ve detected Russian missiles taking off and heading our way. And then, a minute later, he gets another call confirming that. And he’s just about to wake up the President, who would then very likely would have been steered to say, okay, launch ours.

We’ve would have been off to the races when Brzezinski got another call saying, oops, sorry, we fed the wrong tape. We fed the tape of a simulated attack into the computer. Sorry about that. No, the Russian missiles aren’t on their way. We came that close to nuclear catastrophe, and that’s not the only time and certainly won’t be the only time. Hopefully, we’ll come out of it unscathed.

Paul Jay

How do they get their own heads around the danger of this? Why do they seem so sure there won’t be a nuclear war?

Andrew Cockburn

Well, look what happens at the fringes. As an example, I often cite as part of President [Barack] Obama’s nuclear modernization program that he, I think, very reprehensibly signed off on back in 2010. There was a part of what was slid in there was to increase our production of plutonium or produce more plutonium pits. A plutonium pit is the core of a nuclear weapon. And these pits were to be made or are made at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in New Mexico.

Now, as it so happened, there was no earthly need for these pits. I mean, even in the context of having building nuclear weapons, because we already had a surplus of pits. We had more than enough to keep us going for hundreds of years. We could fight not just World War III but World Wars IV, V, IV and IIV with what we have in the locker.

Paul Jay

Let me just interject. If there is a WWIII, there ain’t going to be a four, five, six or seven. But I get your point.

Andrew Cockburn

There were objections raised on this basis that we didn’t really need to do it. Among those who fought like a tiger to keep that appropriation in there was Tom Udall, then the U.S. Senator, one of the U.S. Senators for New Mexico. Now, Tom Udall was a very decent, Liberal, progressive Senator. One of the best we had. Very sad he resigned. But because Los Alamos was part of the New Mexico economy, a major employer in the area, he felt it behooved him to dive in and fight for the money to build more of these useless or unneeded nuclear weapons components.

So that’s what happens on the fringe, someone who certainly doesn’t believe in any of this. So imagine what it’s like for someone of determinedly Conservative attitudes much more of whose sort of prosperity and power depends on the nuclear weapons thing. I think they have no trouble at all.

Paul Jay

The Air Force is one of the centers of religious extremism. I guess you could say Christian nationalism. It’s in all the branches of the military, apparently, but most powerfully in the Air Force and Air Force’s Stratcom. And that’s the primary control over nuclear weapons, if I understand it correctly. It’s a pretty dangerous cocktail there, and people that are cynical enough just to want to make money out of all this. And a lot of people, including, apparently, people at very senior levels, might actually welcome the apocalypse.

Andrew Cockburn

Well, yeah, that’s something else to worry about. I mean, I do remember years ago, I was addressing a meeting where I was talking about this sort of thing, and there was an Air Force Colonel in uniform in the audience. This was in Texas. And he said he’d come a long way to hear me. And he said, but we were chatting away, and he said you do know, he was complaining about science education in the U.S., which is a thing anyone could complain about.

And he said you do know that there are footprints, human footprints, contemporaneous with dinosaurs. He said it’s all nonsense what they tell you about evolution and all that. He said, really creationism shows, if you study creationist research, you’ll find out that human beings and dinosaurs were, more or less, were indeed contemporary on the earth’s surface.

I thought, oh, my God. I said to him, by the way, Colonel, what’s your job in the Air Force? Hoping he’d say maintenance or something. And he said, oh, I command a Titan Missile Squadron. Now, the Titan missile at that time, it’s been phased out now, but it was a missile that carried a nine-megaton warhead. I think it’s the biggest warhead we’ve ever had on a missile. So this lunatic was in charge of, down to his direct command, he had enough to blow up half the world. So I don’t know how many people like that there are around, but I suspect a few.

Paul Jay

The Dr. Strangelove’s scenario says Daniel Ellsberg is not outlandish, that a rogue general could launch nuclear weapons. This idea that only the President with his little briefcase can actually launch is actually not true. The ability to launch has certainly been divested at various levels. In your book, you talk about what it would take for just a few people in those missile silos to figure this out.

Andrew Cockburn

Well, right, my unfortunately late good friend Bruce Blair, who was very, he was a great American who really cared about this stuff and really worked for much of his life trying to change it and make this threat go away. He told me the story, which I report in the book, how in the early ’70s, he was a Launch Control Officer in a minuteman silo deep under Montana. And he would sit down there for days at a time when they were on duty. And I’d say it was pretty boring.

So he figured out what it would take— now you know, he got to know the system very well— what it would take to bypass the entire chain of command and launch. And he worked out how if he had to suborn one other, well, he’d have to either disable or enlist his fellow control officer in the silo with him. But having done that, all he would need was someone of like mind in another silo to cooperate. And together, they could launch the entire wing. I forget about 50 missiles or so. If they got, in particular, if it was in the silo, the sort of command silo for the entire wing, then if they suborn that one, then they could launch the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal.

They could send a signal. It was called Red Dot Emergency Signal; it overrode everything else and just launched everything except the bombers, I believe. So that was well over 1,000 missiles. So I said to Bruce, so God, you figured out how to start a nuclear war and kill a few million people. And he said a few million? He said a few hundred million, maybe a billion. Once Bruce Blair had figured out how easy the system was to subvert and how easy it was for someone— he’d been a Captain in the Air Force at that point, how a U.S. Air Force Captain or a couple of Captains or Lieutenants could actually blow up the world.

Once he’d left the Air Force, he went to the Congress and explained the situation, and the Congress, the Committee, went to the Air Force and tried to say what’s your explanation? Can you comment on this? And the Air Force did an investigation which they classified at a level so that even the Congressional Committee that had asked for the investigation couldn’t see it. And Furthermore, they kept the system in place.

So they claim now, and Bruce thought that maybe they’d improve things in the succeeding decades, but he wasn’t sure. And I’m certainly not sure. I think the situation is still hellaciously dangerous because if we’re going back to the point we’re discussing, because the object of the exercise is not to have an efficient military that does the task assigned to it as efficiently and, in this case, as safely as possible. No, it’s to enhance the power of the Air Force. Enhance in this case the Air Force budget and the bottom lines of the very many interested individuals and contractors who live off it.

Paul Jay

Thanks for joining us, Andrew. And thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. And please join us again for Part two of Andrew Cockburn; it will be coming soon. Don’t forget to find his book Spoils of War. And please, if you haven’t donated yet to theAnalysis.news, we certainly can’t do this without you. If you live in the United States, once again, we are are a 501 C3, so your donation will be tax-deductible. Thanks again for watching. 

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The Doomsday Machine Still Exists – Daniel Ellsberg



Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg tells Paul Jay of “theAnalysis”, the danger of nuclear war is as present today as during the Cold War. He says seeking profit in spite of the risk of nuclear winter is “institutional madness”. This interview was originally published on December 18, 2019.

Paul Jay

How much is the whole system of profit-making drive [crosstalk 00:00:06]

Daniel Ellsberg

Without the profit, we wouldn’t have ICBMs [Intercontinental ballistic missiles] if it would even make a profit. If you nationalize that or if there was no profit in it, then we would not have ICBMs. The ultimate thing is the military-industrial complex on both sides. Do they need their ICBMs? What do they do for them and so forth?

Okay, I’m just going on about this, but no, of course, ultimately it is profit. But the question you ask is; can smart people in a job, whose career while they’re in the service, convince themselves that it makes sense to try to have more weapons than the other, which doesn’t make any sense in the context of a nuclear war. It just doesn’t make any sense. But can they convince themselves? Yeah. If that’s the directive they’ve been given to do it, then yes.

Reagan said that nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought. Now, as I’ve often said, he did not say must not be threatened, must not be prepared for, and must not be risked. We could use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state, and we often threatened it, and we prepared for it.

So, how about a war between two nuclear States, even India and Pakistan? No, neither of them is going to win a war. We in the U.S. and Russia are not going to win a war either. But even the people who know that and don’t pretend otherwise in the Pentagon do believe a fallacy. They believe that however bad it is to fight a nuclear war, however bad, it’s better to go first than second.

Now I could conceivably think of a counterexample to that, but it’s not practical. They believe plausibly, very plausibly — they really do believe it, and it’s wrong — that if you’re about to be attacked either within minutes, or hours, or weeks in terms of a limited conflict, it’s going to escalate, and it’s going to escalate to all-out war. I believe both sides believe better that we go first. Why is it better? Because you’re going to prevail in the end? They may say that, but that’s not good thinking. I mean, that really is Trump-like logic. They think, however, bad the damage is in our society, it will be less if we go first. If we lose 50 million by going first — this is what they’ve often calculated — that will prevent us from losing 150,000,000 if we went second.

Now the reality of nuclear winter, and here’s where it does make a difference; after a year, you don’t end with 50 million dead you end with everybody dead, nearly everybody. It doesn’t make a difference. With nuclear winter, with the smoke enveloping the world and killing nearly everyone within months you could tell, you might be able to tell which one went first. Might or might not, but a year later, no, it wouldn’t make any difference. Harvests are gone. The food is gone. Humans depend on food, and nearly everyone dies except the people eating mollusks.

In terms of arms, our political economy is heavily committed and invested in the production of these arms, in general, and these particular corporations.

As I have told you before, I have come to think, just in the last year, that the Cold War was, to a very large extent, a marketing scheme for massive annual subsidies to the aerospace industry. I’m an optimist. I think we have a chance to get through this. And I continue.

When four compartments flooded on the Titanic, there was no chance it was going to stay afloat. It was going to go down. I continue to act as if we haven’t yet hit the four compartments. We haven’t yet hit the iceberg.

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For Humanity’s Sake, Ukraine War Must End – Wilkerson



An important Chinese commentator warns that a cornered Russia may lead to “unimaginable consequences”. Larry Wilkerson says there must be immediate negotiations to end the war to avoid the danger of nuclear conflict and to refocus the world on the climate crisis. Wilkerson and Jay also discuss rising fascism in the U.S.

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. In a few seconds, I’ll be back with Larry Wilkerson to talk about the current and very dangerous situation in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Please join me. Please also don’t forget this is only possible because of donations from people like you. The donate button is– best to just come over to the website, theAnalysis.news or .com works too. Hit the donate button and also get on our email list. It’s critical that we have a direct way of communicating with you because if you are mostly a YouTube viewer, you may never know whether you’re going to get messages or communication from us, given the way YouTube has treated us. I’ll be back in just a few seconds.

 Hu Xijin is the former editor-in-chief of Global Times. Global Times is an online paper that’s essentially an English publication that’s an extension of People’s Daily, which essentially is the publication of the Chinese Communist Party. This is an important role, meaning a fairly senior role in the Chinese Communist Party, at the very least, a direct line to the CCP propaganda leadership.

Here’s what he wrote in a recent opinion piece in Global Times. To some extent, it must reflect the thinking of the party leadership, or at the very least, an important opinion within the party leadership. It’s not necessarily monolithic. Here’s an excerpt from that article:

Excerpt

“Shortly after the breakout of the Ukraine war, some Western analysts cautioned not to push Putin and Russia into a dead end….”

Paul Jay

In brackets, this is me talking, and I would include Larry Wilkerson in those pundits. He’ll be joining us soon. Here I go back to the article:

Excerpt

“…push Putin and Russia into a dead end because Russia is a nuclear power. This view may be unpopular in Western politics, but it does reflect a kind of rationality. Just imagine, when Putin and Russian soldiers believe that losing the war may lead to a collapse of the government…”

Paul Jay

That means the Russian government.

Excerpt

“…and a purge on them…”

Paul Jay

That means, this is me adding, that means Putin and the people around him in which their lives cannot be guaranteed. In other words, this is me again– the possibility of a violent coup in Moscow. I’ll continue:

Excerpt

“…when the Russian people believe that defeat in the war would mean that their country would disintegrate again and there will be a series of fighting surrounding the new regime, they will take the Ukraine war as a new “Great Patriotic War” to fight it to the end.”

Paul Jay

He goes on a little further down:

Excerpt

“The Ukrainian armed forces equipped by the West have become stronger, but their counteroffensive doesn’t mean they can reshape the outcome of the war. When the war turns to a life-and-death struggle, if the West wants to win the final victory, it needs to transcend the confidence and strength that nuclear weapons have given to Russia.”

Paul Jay

Let me read that again.

Excerpt

“…If the West wants to win the final victory…”

Paul Jay

Which I assume means the downfall of Putin. Back to reading what he wrote:

Excerpt

“…it needs to transcend the confidence and strength that nuclear weapons have given to Russia.”

Paul Jay

This is me again, meaning don’t fear this use of tactical nuclear weapons and continue to push this until Putin falls. Back to the article:

Excerpt

“Undoubtedly, in terms of morality and the actual interests of mankind, the Russia-Ukraine conflict should not be escalated into a nuclear war at any point. That would open a Pandora’s Box, and would inevitably lead to a series of unimaginable consequences. 

“An emergency brake needs to be put on the situation in Ukraine at a time when the scale of the war is still manageable. There needs to be a ceasefire and negotiations rather than an ever-increasing showdown between Russia and NATO. Please don’t forget that there will be no absolute winner or loser in a military conflict between nuclear powers. Whoever tries to completely overwhelm the other side must be crazy.”

Paul Jay

I don’t know if this is President Xi [Jinping] speaking or an opinion within the party, but it certainly is a message to President Biden and others; be careful what you wish for. This comes at a time when President Putin has called up 300,000 reserves, called for a referendum that would lead to Russia annexing Donbass, and again hinted at the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons if the situation threatens Russian sovereignty.

Now joining us is Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to the Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Thanks for joining us again, Larry.

Larry Wilkerson

Good to be with you, Paul.

Paul Jay

So, Larry, what do you make of that opinion piece from Global Times?

Larry Wilkerson

I think it’s an aspect, as you pointed out, of the [inaudible 00:05:44] bureau’s propaganda. Sometimes propaganda needs to be listened to. In this case, I think that’s the case. It needs to be listened to because it happens to be accurate, I think, as far as it goes. Let me just add that the challenge right now is that Zelenskyy, Biden, and other NATO leaders– and let me tell you right now that these NATO leaders do not represent their people. They do not. They’re a group of leaders who we have put in place over the last 20 years, who do our bidding more or less, including Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO.

These are people who don’t necessarily reflect the majority opinion in France, German, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or any place else, really. Check out Slovakia’s leaders’ [inaudible 00:06:36], who has been speaking the truth about the things that are going on that they don’t like. For example, the extension of this war. People understand that this war is being extended because the West is making money. Who’s making money? Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Grumman, you name it. These people are making money. They’re influencing the White House to keep the war going. They’re influencing Congress, which is influencing the White House to keep the war going.

Then you’ve got people like [Lindsey] Graham from South Carolina, my state, who really hate Russia and want to do something to Russia. There are other people in Congress like that, too. They’re dumb. They truly are dumb. This is a serious war in the heart of Europe that needs to have stopped yesterday. The pope’s right. Making money off of it is not a reason to keep it going.

On the other hand, bringing Putin down, to which some of these neoconservatives, in particular, objected, like John Bolton, is not viable either. For the very reasons that the Global Times piece you quoted points out, plus more, you do not want this war to lead to the collapse of Russia. That’s what we’re looking at. That’s what some people want in addition to moneymaking. You put that together, and Pope Francis is absolutely correct to excoriate the West, NATO, Washington, London, Berlin, and the whole group of us because it should stop. The only way you get it to stop is if you have a lose-lose situation, if you will. If you want to put a positive turn on it, call it a win-win. That is to say, we give up some stuff and eat a little crow, Putin gives up some stuff and eats a little crow, and we meet in the middle, and we stop this dang conflict.

It’s nonsense that Putin covets Lithuania, Estonia, or whatever. He is doing what anyone would do, I think, realistically and strategically, given what we’ve done with NATO and what Ukraine presented to him as a potential threat. I’m not excusing him. I don’t like him at all. He’s an autocrat. He’s a dictator. He gets worse every day. Let’s face it, you sometimes have to deal with these kinds of people in order to stop something that’s going to be a lot worse than Putin being a dictator. That’s a nuclear war.

We need to negotiate. We need to sit down. We need to talk. We need to end this conflict. We’re not going to do it because of all these influences in all the Western capitals that seem to think we should keep it going. Let me repeat, they do not represent their people. When winter comes, we will find that out big time.

Paul Jay

When I talk to Ukrainians, including Ukrainians that actually supported the idea of neutrality before the invasion and who was against Ukraine– thought Ukraine should declare they won’t join NATO, who are very critical of the Ukrainian oligarchy and have been organizing in Ukraine against the Ukrainian oligarchy prior to the invasion. Those of them, and I have no idea how broad this represents the Ukrainian Left, do not want an end in a way that ends with Russia controlling Donbass and perhaps even some other sections of Ukraine, Eastern Ukraine. They say too many Ukrainians have died fighting this criminal and brutal invasion. I think it is a criminal and brutal invasion and I don’t in any way disagree with everything you said up until this point. I agree with everything you said. Some of my Ukrainian people– not mine– people, I was going to say my friends, but they’re not my friends. I just know them because I interview them. I think very much underestimate the role of NATO and the Americans in helping provoke and instigate this.

I also agree with Boris Kagarlitsky and other Russians I’ve talked to that this really was Putin’s agenda, Putin’s decision, Putin’s miscalculation, and there was no need for this invasion whatsoever.

Anyway, all that being said, when we’re talking about how to resolve this and negotiate this, you can’t leave the Ukrainians out of this. So far, I’m not sure the Ukrainians want to negotiate this in a way that leaves Russia in control of a significant part of Ukraine.

Larry Wilkerson

I’m not willing to sacrifice the world for Ukraine. I’m not willing to sacrifice the world for those people you just talked about. Now, I understand when you’ve been attacked, when your family has been threatened, when your cities have been bombed, when your streets are full of enemy tanks, when artillery rounds are falling on you, when rockets are hitting you, you are going to change your mind. You’re not going to be a peacenik, as it were. Not the normal person anyway. I understand their feelings, but I’m not going to sacrifice Europe and certainly not the world for them. It’s that simple. Let’s get to the table, and let’s talk. I don’t give a hang if you don’t want to give up some of your country; turn around and look at Poland. Poland has been marched over by armies for God knows how many centuries. They’ve lost this and lost that. Everybody in that part of Europe has been marched over. Father Árpád of the Hungarians, they have a joke in Budapest. He should have kept going to the English Channel and not stopped where he did because Hungary is in such an untenable geographic position.

Well, they’re all in untenable geographic positions. I’m sorry you live there, and the rest of the world does not need to sacrifice its existence because of you. Get to the negotiating table, start talking, and get some kind of deal. Get the best deal you can, but you are not going to get Crimea back. I’ll bet you on that. You might get the eastern oblast back. You might be able to achieve some sort of integrity as Ukraine looks like without Crimea. Other than that, you’re probably going to have to sacrifice a little bit. Realize that Putin’s going to be sacrificing in terms of his wishes, something too. Not least of which is he started this brutal war, got all these Russians killed, and doesn’t have a whole lot to show for it.

Paul Jay

Well, that’s actually what I said to my quote-unquote Ukrainian friends. I said the same thing. I said, “Are you fighting and dying? Even if you win, the way things are, you’re going to hand Ukraine back to the Ukrainian oligarchs. Thousands and thousands of people are going to die to defend that kind of sovereignty.” It makes no sense to me. Make your deal. If the people in Donbass don’t want to be part of Russia, even if the referendum that’s coming is a crock and the pro-Russian forces win, well, then the people of Donbass can organize against Russia and wage their own kind of fight. Tens of thousands more people don’t have to die, and we don’t have to risk global world annihilation. I think what you just said and also the quote from the Global Times guy, I think this is very possible. I thought one of the most important things he said, imagine if Putin does think his government regime, I think, he used the word regime, is going to fall, then his life could be at risk. Anything’s possible. Why on earth would anyone want to corner him that way?

Larry Wilkerson

Absolutely. Let’s look at the military situation again, too. I keep pointing this out to my general officer friends who are part of the mega media propaganda machine in the West, most of them getting paid too from that media to do that. Someone said to me today, “Look what the Ukrainians have done. Look!” While they walked over several miles of empty territory. “Look what they’ve done. The Russians are now on the defensive. They’re on the defensive. Completely on the defensive.” I said, “Yes, and he’s calling up 300,000 more.” You know what Russia did to Germany on the defensive. You know what Russia did to Napoleon on the defensive. This is Russia’s strength. If he thinks he’s going to cross that border and actually bring harm to Russia, he is going to be engulfed and beaten to a pulp. So, where are we going from here? It’s nonsense.

Paul Jay

Yeah. I read accounts of what’s going on on the ground. The Ukrainians are doing really well. The Ukrainians aren’t doing as well as Western media says they are. I have no idea what the hell’s going on on the ground. In some ways, in terms of what we just talked about, it doesn’t matter. This is not going to end in a complete Russian defeat in Donbass. If it does, then we’re probably into a more dangerous situation, and it’s actually worse. Make the damn deal. Which means, in terms of U.S. policy, what? So Biden says, okay, I’m listening to this interview with you and that crazy person Paul Jay, and I can’t tell anyone I’m talking to Wilkerson because they’ll think I’m out of my mind. Larry, what the hell are you saying I should do here?

Larry Wilkerson

Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken, I’m going to give you a directive. You are to go meet with Sergey Lavrov. Whatever you have to do to convince him that you are sincere, do it. Whatever you have to do to convince him that you speak directly from me, do it. Whatever you have to do to convince him to meet in Geneva or in Timbuktu, do it. Let’s do it within 48 to 96 hours. Let’s have our negotiating team sit down with his negotiating team. The Ukrainians can be observers if they want to. Other members of NATO can be observers if they want to. We’re going to have a direct talk. We’re going to end this conflict. Now–

Paul Jay

How can you do it without the Ukrainians there as full participants?

Larry Wilkerson

Easy. They aren’t going to be anything without you. If they haven’t figured that out by now, they aren’t going to wage one more second of effective warfare without us. They simply honor. You’ve got real leverage, just like we’ve had leverage over the Israelis for years and years and never used it. Here, we need to loot to use the leverage that we have. If anybody objects in a serious way, we need to threaten to leave. We need to really bring some exquisite, as I call it, diplomacy to these talks. Not only the talks that result with the Russians, but the talks with all the people we have led into this mess.

Paul Jay

Well, I agree with you on most of this, but I wouldn’t agree with that. I think the Ukrainians have to be at the table. I can’t imagine how they wouldn’t be if the Americans were serious about saying you come to the table and make a deal that’s within reason, or the arms–

Larry Wilkerson

They would eventually be there, of course. You’re not going to sit down with Sergey now. You’re not going to sit down with him and some Ukrainian. I don’t care who it is; Zelenskyy can sit there. You need to talk, Tony, with Sergey. Sergey needs to talk to you. You need to come away from this one-on-one, one hour, two hours, three hours; Russians like to talk, so probably four or five hours– conversation with both of you, at least trusting that what you have said is achievable. Then you bring the other people in to complicate the discussion. 

Paul Jay

What do you think that looks like then? What do they come away with? Where is there a possible agreement? What does it look like?

Larry Wilkerson

I think it’s Ukrainian territorial integrity, with the exception of the question, perhaps, of a portion that is most Russian of the eastern region, that then would be under some sort of independently monitored– the OSCE, the United States, I mean, whoever might do it, that would do it best and be accepted by all parties– a referendum. The referendum is about what they want to do and what they want to be. You get in the negotiated deal that both sides, all sides, will accept the results of that referendum. Especially if the United States, the OSCE, or whoever attests to its fairness and its validity. That’s how you settle that particular region. Everything else is a done deal.

Paul Jay

Just quickly. The OSCE, I believe, has about 50 or 60 countries that have representatives. This is quite a multilateral thing essentially of the United Nations. In theory, it is not controlled by either the Americans, Russians, or anybody else.

Larry Wilkerson

As a matter of fact, they have a reputation for pissing us off. When you do this, you have to have in mind the aftermath and what you’re trying to achieve. By aftermath, I mean Russia has to be as it is geographically. Rand McNally’s maps show it as part of Europe. They are a part of Europe, certainly from the Euros end. Now, I think they’re a part of Europe and have aspired to be a part of Europe for centuries from Moscow all the way and even further than that. Now you could say, well, Vladivostok is not a part of Europe. Okay, I’ll buy that. They are multi parts. The part is more Asian than it is European and vice versa. That part of Russia which is always long and yearned from the Tsar’s time on to be a part of Europe. I mean, they spoke French at Catherine’s Court. That needs to be recognized, and they need to be brought into Europe.

Paul Jay

They used to intermarry with Europe aristocracy all the time.

Larry Wilkerson

Yes, and it needs to be a successful attempt this time. We tried in the early ’90s. I was listening to [Bill] Clinton interviewed by [inaudible 00:21:41]. Not [inaudible 00:21:42]. He was interviewed by Fareed [Zakaria] the other day. I’m listening to this guy talking about what he did. He’s very articulate. He was into it. He was very studied and analytical, which is not like Bill Clinton, but he was. What he said was very persuasive. What he said was an angle that was wrong because he was defending his expansion of NATO, and he was giving excuses that made the Russians guilty. He was saying things like we offered them NATO membership. We offered them all manner of participation in the alliance. We offered them all manner of economic participation and such, a member of the E.U. Bullshit, Mr. President! You might have whispered in somebody’s ear that you were going to do that, but you’ve never whispered in a Russian ear. Any Russian will tell you that. If [Boris] Yeltsin was the one he was whispering into the ear of, that’s like whispering at a goose. Yeltsin was drunk 90% of the time. It’s one of the reasons that so much happened on his watch that was negative for Russia.

You need to get out of this attitude that Russia needs to be an internal enemy of Europe. It is a part of Europe. How can you have a stable, economically successful– look at the E.U. now. The E.U. is 740-750 billion people with a GDP the equivalent to ours. They can’t get their political act together. That’s part of why we’re doing this, too. We don’t want that GDP that’s the equivalent of ours to be competitive with us. We want to be hegemonic with respect to it. We don’t want this to happen. That’s why we’ve seen all this mess in part over the last few years. That’s why H.W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Jim Baker started out with this attitude. Then it got morphed into, “oh, no. We can’t make peace with Russia.” What if we make peace with Russia, and they really do become a part of Europe? We add another 150 million people to that 740 million. We add Russia’s gas and oil to that trillion dollars already– what, 18-19 trillion dollar GDP?

Paul Jay

Well, also nuclear weapons.

Larry Wilkerson

Yeah, and nuclear weapons, too. This is not what Washington wants in terms of the people who think about these sorts of things in these ways.

Paul Jay

Which are only a few who think.

Larry Wilkerson

We have no empathy, Paul. We cannot empathize with Tehran. We cannot empathize with Havana. We cannot empathize with Moscow. We don’t know how to empathize. We cannot put ourselves in other people’s shoes and say, “Okay, now I’m sitting here. How do I feel about this? How do I feel about a president going to Tbilisi and announcing to all in sundry in public that Georgia will be a member of NATO?”

Paul Jay

Well, let me just add to that a nuance, which is this. First of all, the American state is a rogue state. International law means absolutely nothing unless it serves the particular context to start worrying about international law. Bush and Cheney should have been– you and I have talked about this because you were there then. They should have been charged with war crimes. Obama actually, by not charging them with war crimes, actually committed one. My understanding is Obama had a responsibility under international law to prosecute Bush and Cheney.

All that being said, it doesn’t mean that this Russian state isn’t also another rogue state, to a large extent, because of the way Russia’s been treated. Hitler rose, to some extent, large extent, because of the Versailles Treaty and the way Germany was humiliated. Even if it’s true that not only is the U.S. essentially a rogue state and Russia is a rogue state now, we have to live with that, and we have to demand that these two states had better not blow up the world.

Larry Wilkerson

I agree. That’s the reason I say find a neutral city and sit down. We have to end this conflict. There’s another reason we need to. You know what I’m going to say. We have to end this conflict because we have two other challenges that are staring us in the face like a roaring freight train. The first one, no nuclear arms control, no treaties, not even a conventional forces in Europe treaty anymore. We have abandoned all arms control. The second, of course, is what’s coming at us with regard to the changing climate. We need to focus on these two threats. We need to focus badly. We needed to yesterday– 15-20 years ago. They’re going to eat our lunch if we don’t. Here we are throwing away money, lives, and power in Ukraine. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Paul Jay

Well, the only sense that makes is, as you started this interview with, the money being made by gun manufacturers. I did an interview with Boris Kagarlitsky. We talked about a lot of things. One of the things we talked about is the extent to which Russia is being savaged by climate change already.

Larry Wilkerson

Yes.

Paul Jay

It is a fundamental existential threat to the entire Russian society and economy. It’s already in a fairly advanced state in certain areas like Siberia and others.

Larry Wilkerson

The methane released in Siberia and Alaska now–

Paul Jay

Yeah, a grand deal here to save humanity is so necessary and so obvious. The fossil fuel companies and the arms manufacturers would rather play this out even though it leads to a complete shit show.

Larry Wilkerson

We’re the first human civilization, in, as far as I know, 5,000 years of history, perhaps all of human history, to have the technological know-how to save ourselves in a situation where we could be existentially threatened. Do we have the wisdom to do it? So far, the answer is no.

Paul Jay

Well, I’ve got a quote, Osama bin Laden, which I don’t normally do, but I thought he had one pretty good line. He wrote this thing called A Letter to Americans, which doesn’t get quoted very much. In it, he says, “You say we fight you because we hate your freedom and democracy.” He says, “if that was true, we would have attacked Sweden.” He had another line in which he said, “You Americans, you vote for these policies, so you’re not innocent in this picture.”

Larry Wilkerson

That’s one of the things my few Iranian colleagues who still talk to me are constantly saying. “We don’t hate the American people. We hate your government.” I look back at them, and I say, “Our government is the people.”

Paul Jay

Well, that’s further than I would go. I think the situation is so manipulated. That said, in these coming elections in 2022 and 2024, people better understand that as bad as the Biden foreign policy is, and the extent to which many of the neocons that used to be in the Republican Party are now in the Democratic Party and have a lot to say about U.S. foreign policy. The Christian nationalists could wind up controlling the House and maybe the Senate. They seem to already have a majority on the Supreme Court. If they get a president in 2024, it’s, I think, more dangerous. These elections are very critical, and people better avoid sectarian positions here. It’s a complicated balance because these Biden forces are very dangerous and playing with fire in Ukraine and Taiwan.

Larry Wilkerson

If you go back and look at the arguments that people– and look at the literature. Look at the literature that came out of that region of Europe, particularly Germany at that time, and particularly from Jewish writers, actually, playwrights and others. You see the arguments that they had in ’33, ’34, and ’35 about what they could do with the Nazis if they gained real power. How they could neutralize them. How this party was this way. How the Reds were the Reds. All this argument was for nothing because the man had the idea, and he had the populace behind him once he expressed that idea in some really, very hateful ways, to be sure. The persecution of the Jews was the most hateful of all. He expressed them in ways that caught the attention of all those who were on the fence, as it were, and it turned out to be the majority of the German people. We’re talking about Ron DeSantis coming in. Trump is not going to run. He may try to run, but he’s not going to run. DeSantis is going to run. If he gets elected, he will be much smarter than Trump. What you’re saying is very likely to come true. We may indeed have a national religion and an armed force that protects that religion. We may have a religious test for the office. I mean, we’ve got representatives who are saying the Constitution needs to be rewritten in that regard. People just disregard it. So did the people in Germany. “No, this can’t happen. No, it could never happen.”

Paul Jay

It happened quickly. You had a time when Hitler was first elected as chancellor of Germany. If I get my history right, there was enormous opposition to Hitler. There were workers in the streets. The workers’ movement was almost at a height. In a matter of very few years, there’s an out-and-out fascist dictatorship. Go ahead.

Larry Wilkerson

 You still have people, especially the old Prussian aristocracy and that portion that was in the military in the [inaudible 00:32:25]. You still have people who are saying, “Oh, we can handle it. We can handle it.” As they sip their cognac and smoke their cigars.

Paul Jay

Well, let me end this with one chilling piece of documentary footage. People might have seen this, but I’m going to play it again anyway. I think in 1938 or nine, there was a rally of Americans, essentially fascists, at Madison Square Gardens. They filled the place. Over 20,000 people doing an American-style Sieg Heil with a big picture of George Washington on the stage using the words “Make America Great Again,” essentially. Here’s that footage I mentioned. You can watch that for a chilling ending for the interview.

Footage

“Undivided allegiance to the flag of the United States of America as the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans, American patriots, I’m sure I do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger. You all have heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail. We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.

“If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our cherubim, first, a social just Right, gentile ruled United States. Second, gentile-controlled labor union, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.

[Singing U.S. National Anthem 00:38:22] 

To listen to the audio only click here.


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