Reality with Bruce de Torres 27 Martin Sieff

Reality with Bruce de Torres 27 Martin Sieff

Martin Sieff is a senior fellow at the American University in Moscow (AUM) and, formerly, Adjunct Professor of Transnational Threats at Bay Atlantic University; Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Washington Times; Managing Editor, International Affairs, for United Press International, and UPI's chief news analyst for 10 years.

He has written nine books, including CYCLES OF CHANGE, a political history of the United States from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. He has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for International Reporting, and his Rising Tide Foundation seminars can be seen on YouTube (channel: Rise Tide Foundation).

We discuss:

The national security state we’ve been since World War II (with JFK’s presidency a brief shining moment of sanity and relief).

America’s provocation of Russia from the 1990s to today: economic subversion, NATO expansion, the 2014 coup in Ukraine, and our commitment to confrontation, including the chance of nuclear war.

After WW2 we had a tiger by the tail. The Soviet Union, whom we empowered to defeat Nazi Germany, was deemed a threat by factions who convinced President Truman to create a national security state.

President Eisenhower put a psychopath in charge of the CIA in 1953: Allen Dulles. The agency killed “possibly thousands” of people who got in their way, including perhaps well-known and respected reporter Dorothy Kilgallen in 1965 because she was questioning the Warren Commission-LBJ-Allen Dulles-J. Edgar Hoover version of who killed JFK.

The traumas of race riots and the Vietnam War in the 1960s ended the illusion that the US could do no wrong.

LBJ did enormous evil and enormous good as well. The Civil Rights Act. Medicare and Medicaid. But he sucked us into Vietnam and was deeply implicated in JFK’s assassination and was corrupt as hell in Texas politics. Nothing new. We’re not allowed to debate the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Martin, an American, wrote for a foreign publication that questioned the 2020 results. He and other highly credentialed American writers were visited by the FBI and told that, under the Magnitsky Act, if they wrote again for those publications, they would be fined $100,000.

The Magnitsky Act was meant to prosecute organized crime or others threatening national security. (It “authorizes the U.S. government to sanction those foreign government officials worldwide that are human rights offenders, freeze their assets, and ban them from entering the U.S.” -Wikipedia) But the Administration is abusing it to silence whomever it chooses.

The Biden Administration is dangerously outraging Russia. We might have war before the 2024 election. Our provocation of Russia began with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, who shaped the foreign policy of a number of presidents. He hated communism like poison and was a genocidal, hate-filled, racist Polish aristocrat against Russia.

We promised the USSR as it came apart in the late 1980s and early 1990s there would be no NATO expansion in Europe. But that’s what we’ve done, and other things. Putin, once in power, warned, please don’t; and especially don’t mess with Ukraine; that we will never tolerate.

But we helped or caused a coup there in 2014 and backed a new president doing things unacceptable to Russia. And the invasion came in 2022.

When policies lead to hundreds of millions dying, is it malevolence or stupidity slash incompetence? Very often both. But Russia sees the economic manipulation we inflicted in the ‘90s as intentional harm and considers us deliberate murderers.

Russia and China have nuclear weapons. We should respect them. But our leaders are telling us cheap, fascist, racist, anti-Russian lies which we must smash through, or we will be dead (in a war with Russia).

President Clinton’s free-trade policies moved the manufacturing center of the world, the industrial center of gravity of the world, from the US to southeast China. Our sanctions don’t isolate Russia. China is the largest industrial power in the world, with the most positive balance of trade and the largest foreign currency reserves in the world. And China supports Russia.

Russia’s foreign currency reserves in gold bullion are more than a thousand-times greater than those of the US. Their government is in budget every year, while ours is bankrupt every year. And they are among the top two energy-producing nations in the world every year, of the energy that really matters – oil and gas – along with Saudi Arabia.

And Saudi Arabia announced that it’s scrapping the 80-year agreement with the US that was the foundation of our dollar’s stability. Our deficits didn’t matter as long as Saudi Arabia backed the dollar. That’s ending.

With servitude to the military-industrial complex by the politicians and industries employed by it directly or indirectly, will the momentum of its policies and projects lead us into a catastrophic war?

“We’re going to get into a hot war,” not through calculation but through cowardice, denial and incompetence.

Per Churchill: “No one is in charge of the clattering train. Death is in charge of the clattering train.” The system that sells weapons and creates conflicts is a money-go-round. We must discuss these things without ceasing, to apply what brakes we can, even if those brakes must be our bodies on the rails.

“We live in a world where the fantasy counts and what we used to call reality doesn’t matter any more.” This past week Putin asked for new peace negotiations over Ukraine, for a new ceasefire as soon as possible. Our political leaders laughed at him.

“It is worse than being diabolical. They are stupid.”

Martin, paraphrased: We have to put personal pressure on congressmen and Administration officials. Talk to them personally. Don’t be polite. Scream at them. No violence. Keep phoning them. Give no peace to anyone who knows or supports them. Grassroots pressure from tens of millions of people. The lunatics are cowards who wilt under pressure. “Their entire existence is based on being protected from pressure.”

We must avoid the prime danger: thermo-nuclear war.

People need to talk to each other rather than demonize each other.

REALITY WITH BRUCE DE TORRES
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