Oliver Stone on Putin's reason, Europe's collapse and the madness of the USA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnlUGuYzs_E

When you talk to American media, they don't have a sense of history, they don't have a sense that we made a deal. What bothers me deeply is that the United States doesn't seem to understand what a war is. That a war could happen very easily now. You have met Vladimir Putin, you have talked to him, what do we get wrong about him? Well, the one thing they get wrong about him is that they make him into a Hitler, a Saddam, somebody who's dangerous, who has plans for expansion in the West. I've never felt that. Never even talked about it. Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. A very warm welcome and a wonderful good day, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, from near and far, from wherever you may be watching us. I'm happy to be able to present to you today a very special special edition of Wednesday Daily, the Other Side. I had the opportunity to have a longer conversation with the legendary American Hollywood director, Oliver Stone. Oliver Stone is one of the outstanding filmmakers of our time. He also won the Oscar three times. He was nominated 11 times. A grandmaster, especially of political, provocative and critical cinema. His works have gone down in history. Just a few names to recapitulate here. Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, Wall Street, JFK, Nixon, W, Alexander. Recently, Oliver Stone appeared in documentary films, with interviews he conducted with important personalities of the time, with Fidel Castro, with Hugo Chavez and, above all, with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He met with Putin again and again over two years, and condensed that into a four-hour conversation, a documentary of prehistoric value. Now he's going to the start of the festival of those days, with a brand new film, with a documentary about the Brazilian President Lula, which he also asked intensively, trying to understand him, to explain him. Lula, a very brilliant, a highly interesting figure, a politician of the left, who had to go to jail a lot in Brazil, in the highest offices, came back from the prison Phoenix, from the ashes, and now, in his appearance, as a bridge builder, as a pacifist, as a neutral balancer in this new Cold War, especially as a representative of the multipolar world order, against the hegemonic aspirations of the United States of America, with which Oliver Stone is so critically opposed. Of course, we talked about this new film, about the fascination of Lula, about the importance of these multipolar ambitions, for example of Brazil, but we then quickly switched to the Ukrainian war, which Oliver Stone was intensively involved in. We talked about the cause of this war, I asked him how he assessed Putin today, how he sees Ukraine, President Zelensky, the role of the Americans, of course, of Washington, and very pessimistically and almost terribly, yes, incredibly, Oliver Stone expressed himself about Europe, there the politics collapsed like a house of cards, they let themselves be driven into the NATO, into these representative wars, that is very dangerous, and the world is approaching a nuclear disaster every day, and you don't want that to be true, and that is very, very threatening. I tried again and again, so to speak, to put the silver lining on the horizon, it became a rather gloomy conversation, but highly interesting, and the honesty of this highly decorated filmmaker, that impressed me very, very much. Oliver Stone is a man who also led a very intense and interesting life, he is the son of a wealthy family, a father American, the mother French, he attended excellent universities, then left the university and voluntarily signed up for the Vietnam War, returned highly decorated and sobered up home, he later worked on this in several films, and then made a very big career as a screenwriter and film director, he also wrote books, and I was very happy to be able to talk to him like this, without being forced, and straight out, and I invite you to follow this conversation here afterwards, take a look at how Oliver Stone observes the world. He had two successful terms in the early part of the century, and two four-year terms, and as you know, he was put into jail, when he was running for the third term in 2018, and he was miraculously, I think, in many ways, saved from jail, he spent 18 months there, and then he came out and ran for office, and he barely won against the right-wing candidate Bolsonaro, who benefited from his absence in the previous election, so it's a fairy tale, in the sense that he came back from the dead, was revived by a hacker, who went into the accounts of the prosecuting attorneys, and found that there was a lot of misbehavior, on the part of the prosecutors on Lula, and that they were falsifying information, and that, in other words, it was what they call lawfare in South America, it's a form of controlling elections through media, and through legal suits, which is a new way of fighting, but it's very interesting to watch how that works, so there's a lot of variables on the story, but above all, he's a very warm person, who I got to know in 2009, when I was making South of the Border, Chavez was very close with him, and he was a big part of that movement, of the presidents of various countries, to bring South America up to a modern standard, and to this day, Lula is still in BRICS, and I think he went back into BRICS, after Bolsonaro pulled out, but very much involved with South Africa, India, Russia, China, in creating an alternate economy for the world. I mean, that's an interesting point, and I just want to remind you, your colleague Cassandra told me, I should tell you, this is a recorded interview, just for your information, I mean, President Lula is particularly interesting, I think, because he's a representative of this so-called multipolar world of the BRICS states, which is in a confrontation with the new Cold War world, you can say, of the United States, and what's your impression there? Is the multipolar world going to prevail, the Lula world, or are we heading into this darkness of a new absurdity of a Cold War? I agree with you, I see where you're going, I happen to, I think we align on that point, it's up to the United States, it's up to the United States, Russia and China are simply doing what they do, business, the United States is the one that's being aggressive here, and blowing up pipelines, and trying to subvert Russia at every turn, and China now with the trade, but Russia is my main concern, because I can see it coming, I see the commitment that's grown in this country towards Ukraine, there's no reason to doubt, it's not thought out, so America has committed itself to this NATOization of Ukraine, which makes no sense, considering the history of NATO, and where the 1990 agreements were drawn, were not drawn up, but they were talked about, America committed to those commitments, Baker and Bush, and also Shultz, they said that the United States, if Germany was reunited, and East Germany was let go, and became part of NATO, that would be okay, but the idea was that no more NATO east of Germany, of East Germany, and that's what happened, so what happened is the United States, in the next administration of Clinton, broke that promise, and absorbed over the next 20 years, 13 new countries into NATO, right on the border of Russia, so pushing right up to the border, I mean, you couldn't be more naked in your aggression, like putting missiles right into Canada or Mexico, this is what they're doing, Ukraine has been warned, that was a big point, that was a red line for Russia, they said no NATO in Ukraine, and even today, by Lincoln, the Secretary of State, made this, again today, yesterday, made the comment that, yes we're committed to bringing NATO into Ukraine, as soon as possible, and with all the modern equipment we're going to put into Ukraine, that's been more or less what he said, thank you very much, that really helps the situation, it's the most vulnerable point for Russia, they don't want to have to worry about this, and they fought for it, and they won this, and they did go to war over it, we didn't listen, because we're very arrogant, and we don't listen to Russia, we don't even talk to Russia right now. I mean, I observe it from Switzerland, and it seems totally absurd, I mean, we were in 1990, it was the fall of the Iron Curtain, Putin was stretching out his hand, everybody was happy, we thought we're getting into a new world, and it's somehow, what's the reason why this whole thing fell apart? That's a very good question, and I've addressed it, but I've been misinterpreted so many times, I'm glad that I can talk to somebody who seems like a realist, you seem like a person who remembers history, but when you talk to American media, they don't have a sense of history, they don't have a sense that we made a deal, America made a lot of deals, we made deals with Russia on NATO, we made deals with them on the intermediate missile, and we made deals with them on the ballistic missiles, which back in the 1970s, and we broke both those agreements, those nuclear agreements, INF and the ballistic missile, defensive ballistic missile, ABM, right, sorry, we broke both those deals, Russia is out in the cold, and we said, fuck you, that's it, we're ripping it up, and by the way, Russia has a huge nuclear arsenal, and it's not as sophisticated perhaps as ours, or as precise, but it certainly is heavy, and what bothers me deeply is that the United States doesn't seem to understand what a war is, that a war could happen very easily now, that what the United States has done for the last four years with the Biden administration is provoke the Soviets, provoke Russia, provoke, stick them, poke them, poke the bear, poke the bear, why? Because apparently we want to weaken Russia, this is a strategy, what strategy is that? That's basically a state of war, it's the same way we want to weaken you, that's like trying to destroy you, we want to get rid of Putin, we want to replace your administration with our guy, like Yeltsin used to be, and we want, I've heard talk about dividing Russia up into three zones or four zones, it's crazy talk, and it makes no sense because we can't do anything about it, and on top of it we would be blown up to pieces if we did it, if we tried to do it, so if America thinks it can get away with poking Russia and not get hurt, they're dreaming, they're dreaming, where does this come from? This comes from the neoconservative movement that started up here in America and has always been anti-Soviet, anti-Russian, and you know the people involved, they were the ones who brought us into wars in Iraq and Libya, they're the expansionists, the ones that want a strong America that's always challenging the Russians and the Chinese, this is what they want, but you can't challenge somebody who's got the goods, they have the goods, and we don't even have a military that is ready to go to war, but we're certainly ready to use the Ukrainian military as cannon fodder, and it's sad what's going on because the Ukrainians have been, a Ukrainian nation has been created in our hands that is the beacon of democracy in Eastern Europe, which it is not, it never has been, it's a corrupt state. You have famously been to Vietnam, I've just returned from Vietnam, my wife is from Hue, I visited the town, you have been there in 1968 when the Battle of Hue raged, and when I read the books about this event and you witnessed it, it was striking about how the Americans got it wrong at the time, and if you look at the situation now, how the West, the Americans, but also the European leaders are talking about Vladimir Putin, I mean he's the epitome of evil, it's like they were talking about Ho Chi Minh in those days, no diplomacy, only weapons, you have met Vladimir Putin, you have talked to him, how do you see him today in the light of probably also this new interview by Tucker Carlson, by your observations in the war, by your experience, how do you see Vladimir Putin today and what do we get wrong and what do they, the proponents of war, what do they get wrong about him? Well, the only thing they get wrong about him is that they make him into a Hitler, a Saddam, somebody who's dangerous, who has plans for expansion in the West, I've never felt that, never even talked about it, his goal, he talks very clearly about Ukraine, if you remember in our documentary The Putin Interviews, very clearly, he goes on about it more than once and he says how important it is that we understand a Russian relationship with Ukraine and if you remember correctly, it used to be a neutral government until 2014 when there was a coup d'etat to some degree, to a large degree orchestrated by the United States, the neoconservative Nuland was in office and she went over there and made a lot of trouble and Biden went over there and John McCain went over there and the NAD went over there, the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Endowment for Democracy spent a lot of money with George Soros to create a coup and all of a sudden Ukraine said we need to be, we no longer need to be neutral, we can be anti-Russian and why that is so when Russia was willing to trade, had made a great trade deal with Ukraine actually, Ukraine wanted a better trade deal, they went to the EU and they couldn't get it, they couldn't get as good a deal so that was why there was a hitch and everybody said well the Russians are preventing Ukraine from going to the EU, no, no, it was just that they were, they were selling EU items through Ukraine into Russia for free which was what the old trade agreement was about, it was that Russia had no duties on that trade so it's all been fucked up and confused but there's essentially the coup happened because it was orchestrated and young people wanted to be part of the West, okay fine, it was quite a lot of them and we understand that but that was not the implication, what happened was that it was a violent coup and there was shots fired and frankly it's been, I don't want to get into all that detail but the evidence looks like it was fired, the people who fired the shots were from hired agitators by the United States CIA and by the Ukrainian Secret Service, they fired on the students and on the policemen, killed quite a few and got away with it because it was confusion, quite a lot of chaos and that led to the flight from Ukraine of the president, Yanukovych, Yanukovych, who I've interviewed and I produced the movie Ukraine on Fire about that whole situation and we interviewed Yanukovych as well as several people in the Ukrainian system who filled us in on the intelligence services of Ukraine and the United States' involvement so, sorry, go ahead. You had a very interesting conversation with the American podcaster Lex Friedman one year after the Russians invaded Ukraine and your perception at the time was that it was a mistake by Putin to invade. There were made some mistakes, misunderstandings and let me come up with a provocative question because I thought about this event a lot of times and you're actually not allowed to say this in Europe because you get decapitated at any moment but I was thinking, was this war really avoidable? I mean, what should he have done in that moment when you see eight years artillery bombardment of the Russian minority, you see the Americans stepping in with their NATO into Ukraine, do you see that differently now or would you still say it was a huge mistake by Putin or was it somehow terribly enough an inevitable war as it played out? Well, that's a very good question because frankly, I'm not a Russian defense minister or defense advisor and I don't know exactly what the measurements are if you put the kind of weapons that America is giving to Ukraine now, if you put them into Ukraine, how dangerous they would be to the Russian country. Now, that has to be measured because, you know, as far as, I don't think my statement was correct back then. I think my statement was wrong because I didn't understand what Russians understand is that how dangerous this was, that if Ukraine were able to be so anti-Russian and be able to bring all this kind of military equipment in, the next step would have been to kill all the Donbass Russians and bring back, what is Ukrainian? I mean, frankly, the president of Ukraine learned how to speak Ukrainian recently. He grew up speaking Russian so I don't understand this whole Ukrainian sovereignty. Fine, that's fine with Putin because he allowed for the Orange Revolution to happen in 2004, if you remember correctly. So Ukraine has had Orange leadership and the NED has been all of Ukraine so they've been propagating their propaganda. The point is that at a certain place, Ukraine has become a Western proxy. It's not no longer, the people don't know what's going on. The people simply want to survive and they want to live and they want to have good lives. And when the coup happened, as you know, the Russian-speaking minority, if you call it a minority, did not want to have a government that was pro-Western like they were, that had Nazis, had fascists in it, had the Azov Brigade as well as other units, military units, and they were right away, there was, if you remember conflict when they came in, there was people being killed in Odessa, they killed a bunch of people. It was a massacre. Massacre in Odessa, there was massacres of pro-Russian speakers everywhere. There was also a picking up of the, in the Donbass, there was a separate government trying to come in and say, we had nothing to do with this coup, we would like to have an agreement with Russia at that time. And Putin said no, he wanted them to negotiate and that led to Minsk 1 and they were trying to work out an agreement between Ukrainians and Russian-speaking minority for the east of Ukraine, Donbass particularly and Luhansk. And that negotiation went on for years but it was the admission of the Germans and the French now, they're saying that that was just a ruse, a trick to buy time for the Ukrainian army to get armed by the United States, which is what happened at NATO. How do you think will this all play out? I mean, the question now is the tides of war have to be changed one year ago, it looked probably a bit more difficult for the Russians, now they seem to advance on all fronts and there seems to be another strategic failure probably of the West. Do you think that the Americans and the Europeans, the NATO countries, they will accept that Putin wins militarily or do you see a nuclear confrontation? This is what makes it very dangerous, it's about pride, isn't it? It's like World War I situation, it's like pride is more important than the reality. First of all, we shouldn't even be there and why Ukraine has become so important to us is because we put money into it, so much money. Now it's become a major issue, all of a sudden it's like Taiwan or something, or put it this way, it becomes a major symbol and that's where it's scary because the Russians are not going to back down. You see, look at it this way, if you put in that whole Ukraine and the Ukrainians are certainly good fighters like the Russians and they are rushing their way in, so there is a strong, they're strong and it's become a civil war between Russians and Ukrainians in a sense, but they started killing people in the Donbass and they killed a lot, estimates about 5,000 to 7,000 Donbass wanting sovereignty for the Donbass and Luhansk. That is the arrangement that was not working, so the fighting was pretty serious and artillery was being used and sides, it was World War I positional lines were formed in the Donbass and who knows how many people were really killed but it was cruel, it was very cruel to the people who were part of the pro-Western alliance and there was no violence in Crimea, if you remember correctly, because the soldiers were not, the Ukrainian soldiers were not interested in fighting against their brothers. I mean, the difficult thing today is that I'm speaking out of Europe, you know Europe well, you're friends in all over the place, your mother was from France, you used the term a wall of propaganda but you haven't seen anything before this one-sided perspective and I think this gets increasingly worse, I mean, it's almost as if free speech was killed in Europe, I don't know about the United States, probably it's a bit better with Elon Musk and Twitter, what's your assessment there, what's the propagandistic element at the moment on our side in this world? It's just a total brainwash, there are people in America who speak about an alternate reality which is what we have here but the mainstream message is uniform and very, very strong in the sense of censoring people who go against it so they're very sensitive in America to, if Ukraine is being presented as a revolutionary country like the American Revolution or something and very democratic and they're being oppressed by this, it's a one-sided point of view and it's an artificial and it's not even true because there are so many Nazis in Ukraine that we can't even call it a revolution, a good revolution, it's a Nazi... Ultra-nationalistic kind of... Yeah, it's nationalistic is the better word because Nazi gives you a vibration of or to an anti-Jewish, no, it's really nationalistic but very anti-Russian because that has always been the issue, Russia was bigger than Ukraine and the famine in Ukraine there's always a beef about Russia and that's true about all these Eastern European countries but the Baltics are the worst, they say the Russians did all these horrible things but again, there's a lot of propaganda here. In an interview you made with our newspaper a few years ago after you made your documentary about Vladimir Putin, you said, and we used this as a title on the interview, you said Vladimir Putin is the most irrational person in this circus of mad men governing the world. Would you still say that if you look at the leadership of the West, if you look at the leadership of the United States that somehow with all its downsides and the aggression and everything, the war, would you still say that Putin is a rational guy here in this strange, he did... First of all, look at it from Putin's point of view, you have a fully armed, fully armed, if you had a fully armed Ukraine right now killing Russians in Donbass and in Luhansk and trying to get Crimea back, you'd have a worse situation because they would really be fully armed and you'd have to go in there and be much bloodier, be much bloodier. He acted at that point because he felt that he could still control the situation in Donbass and he did. Frankly, he did well and he called it a special operation but it was portrayed in the West as the beginning of the Hitler regime. It was not true because he had limited goals, he never went after Ukraine, he never had a goal for Kiev even, he just had a goal to take over Donbass because that was the autonomous region he was concerned about and people were being killed, he had evidence of it and there was a European group, I forgot the name of it but it was an organization, they testified to these deaths that there was at least 5,000, maybe 7,000 in Donbass and I think probably more. I think it was even 14,000 it was between 2014 and 22. These are people being killed by artillery, being butchered at night by Chechens, Chechens who come over and whatever, dirty work with knives, it's been a pretty rough war. And what do you think, I mean, Europe is somehow not existing in this whole situation, everybody looks at the United States and the United States seem to be in a certain state of uproar, the polarization is extreme, what's happening in the United States, how do you see this whole process that's coming? I'm shocked that Europe folded, so to speak, so quickly like in a poker game, just folded, I can't believe there was no resistance to the United States bullying, the United States bullying NATO into this war, Stoltenberger, the NATO chief, was saying outrageous things, Biden was out of line saying that Putin was a butcher and stuff like that, and he hated Putin way back in the 80s, 90s, he's been anti-Russian since the beginning, he's a cold warrior, it never changed, I was fooled by him, I thought he'd gotten older and he was so, but he went over to Ukraine by the way, not only that, his son benefited from a Ukrainian deal, he was telling the Ukrainian corruption, the minister who was investigating corruption, the general counsel of the government, he was kicked out, was removed at Biden's request, so he was very involved in Ukraine. And now we got to a presidential election and there are people in Europe saying that Donald Trump is the last hope of Western civilization, would you agree with that assessment? I don't agree with that because Trump is a dangerous man, he calls his enemies fascists and then he calls them communists, I'm confused, communists are left wingers, come on, he's also said outrageous things about Israel, pro-Israel, and he's certainly no friend to the Palestinians as far as I know, he did a lot of harm to them, and he's no friend to Iran, he's made threats on Iran, you're looking at a potential madman here, so if we have a nuclear war with Iran as opposed to Russia, is that better? I can't think so, I think it's crazy. Do you think we're closer to a nuclear war than one year before? I never thought so until what happened in Europe, when the war started in February of 2022, the Europeans, one after the other, sounded just like the United States, they were saying the same things, they jumped in and they said this is outrageous, it's like a war of bullying against some kind of person, a bully, Russia is a bully and Ukraine is a democratic society, bullshit. Then Sweden fell in, Finland fell in to the NATO, I was shocked by all this because there used to be some resistance in Europe, what happened to Shabak and Schroeder, Germany, at least they objected to the Iraq war, who's objecting to this war, don't they see it where the United States is going? They had monitors on the ground, they could have gotten the information, they knew about the Donbass situation and they went along with the blind story, the story that Russia was breaking the rules, the internet order and all that shit. The international order was broken so many times by the United States in these nuclear treaties and in Iraq and in Libya and in Syria, the United States can break the rules whenever it wants. And where is the silver lining? Suppression of dissenting thought has not been allowed, it's a terrible situation, why? You ask me, I don't know what happened to Europe, I can't understand the reasoning of Macron who thinks that Russia is a bigger threat. Russia has moved very reasonably slowly to consolidate its goals in Ukraine, I've never seen any interest in going beyond that, because I don't think Russia wants a war with NATO and they know that's coming. Because the United States is not rational in this, they won't talk to the Russians, there's no diplomacy going on. Lavrov has said this many times, the United States doesn't talk, they don't communicate. What they do is, I guess maybe the CIA is talking to the Russians, I hope so, but I'm not sure you know that anymore. Biden has, I would not vote for Biden for that reason only because I think that's the greatest issue facing the world today, is nuclear war. I mean, climate change is the biggest one, but let's say nuclear war, a limited nuclear war between Russia and the United States is in nobody's interest, nobody's interest. And that's where we're climbing to because the United States keeps saying, if we lose in Ukraine, and this is what Blinken said yesterday, you know, we're not going to lose, but if we lose, we're going to be with you in Ukraine all the way to the end. We're going to stick with you, we're going to arm you, we're going to make you a member of NATO, whatever's left of Ukraine is going to go into NATO and this situation will continue for years. This is crazy, this is so crazy. I mean, why do we, we have a stake in Ukraine. I mean, you mentioned in several conversations and also your movie work, John F. Kennedy. I mean, Kennedy was the president to save the world from a nuclear confrontation in 1962. Are they to finish our conversation? Are there any, is there any hope in this rather dark picture that we are seeing here? Are new Kennedys around? Are there politicians around? I think I'm going to have to vote for the young man who I like very much, Robert Kennedy Jr., because he's actually said the same things I'm saying about Ukraine. He's called the bullshit out and nobody's really listening to him because they don't want to hear it. And the media outlets that support the United States, and this is a patriotic issue, but it's become the goal of the neoconservatives. That's what we've embraced. We've embraced the neoconservative goal, which is an America that would basically move into Russia and do what we did with Yeltsin in the same years that we had economic control of Russia. This is what they think is reasonable to expect, but they don't understand that the Russian people are united in many ways. And one of the ways they've always been united is in Russia, their love of Russia. This is their motherland. Hitler learned this when he went into Russia. If you remember correctly, the Russians fought back and they never gave up. They never ever gave up. They lost a huge amount of people, but they were partisans fighting against the German rear or in the front they were fighting. The Russians never lost maybe 30 million people in that war, but they kept fighting. This is what is still going on. And this is why it doesn't make a difference if communism or capitalism. We know Putin is no communist and all he hates that. He thought it was a completely irrational system and he wanted a limited capitalistic system, which is what he has. And they were working towards integrating with the West as well as towards democracy. They were integrating that for those 20 some years that Putin has been in office more or less off and on. And all of a sudden, it's like the Russians are more dangerous to us they were saying than they've ever been. But that doesn't make any sense because when Kennedy dealt with the Cuban Missile Crisis, we were fighting over East Germany. We were fighting over Germany. If you remember correctly, Berlin was a touch point. Cuba was a touch point. Berlin was in Europe. Look where it is. But now the line has moved from Berlin to Ukraine and we're saying this is as important as Ukraine as Berlin was in 1960. So I don't buy that and nobody buys it. If you do any kind of history and reading, you'll see that this is an inflated situation. We're fighting over nothing. We're fighting over a pride and we're fear of Russian, Chinese empire, Bricks taking over the economic world. Well, that's happening and it will happen and nobody's going to stop it unless you go to war. And unfortunately, America should not go to war for trade ever because economically, we may end up as number two. We may end up as number three. We may end up dropping back but then we're alive and we're part of the world. I don't see what's wrong with that. We don't have to be the bully. We don't have to be the dominant factor. We talk about a hegemonic world, a world where the United States is in control. That's not realistic anymore. The world is multipolar and unfortunately, we haven't been able to accept that. I don't understand. I don't understand why we can't accept it unless only if you're some kind of frozen conservative in this country and you see any foreigner as the danger, would you think that? And I think that's the problem in the United States. It's got to educate itself. And what's for you personally in this situation? What gives you hope? What's scary is that we don't seem to realize what a war is, you see. I've been to war. I know what would really be destructive for not only our economy but our society, our civilization, even a limited war. And I don't think that people understand it. I mean, they had 9-11, they had 2001 and they talk about it but that's not the real war that we should worry about. You go back to President Lula. Is he probably one of those politicians who can create with others together a better world? Well, Lula has come out for a peace truce in Ukraine and he certainly understands the two-sidedness of the viewpoints. He understands the Ukrainian point of view and he understands the Russian point of view. And he was a great peacemaker in his previous terms when he was in office. He tried to get involved in the Iraq situation with the United States and he got chased out of it. He talks about that. So Hillary Clinton chased him out, didn't want anything to do with peace, didn't want him involved in any kind of peace. That's so different than what it used to be in the old days. Remember when they had respect for the UN when you talked and Dag Hammarskjold, although they killed him probably. So, you know, the United States talks about a world order and yet the head of the UN, the Mexican chief, made a beautiful speech about peace and about dealing with this Ukraine situation correctly. The United States doesn't give any notice to the UN. It's so sad that we've lost our anchor and somehow we're unmoored and we're in waters we don't understand and we're in the Black Sea we don't understand. And even Switzerland is not as neutral anymore as it used to be. Why? What is wrong? According to me, it's some kind of mass psychosis in our leadership. It's like a self-hypnosis that they're talking themselves into this new kind of absurd Cold War. And you have made a film about Richard Nixon. You're not a fan of Richard Nixon. But Richard Nixon had the greatness to shake hands with Mao because he saw the necessity that the great powers have to sit together and to have to overcome their ideological strife. And the problem is we don't have these kind of politicians anymore. These realists. No, no. But we have still great filmmakers such as you. I don't understand. I don't understand. What's her name? Merkel. I don't know what she was doing and she admitted that it was a ruse. They were not legitimate in their aspirations for peace. Germany. I don't understand this guy Scholes at all. And here the United States blows up his pipeline and there's no sense of sovereignty or self. Sovereignty is the key and that's where de Gaulle goes. I'm going back to way back to when I was younger. There was a Europe that was fighting back. He was sovereign and now that's gone. The English are behaving like Doberman pictures of America, like working for America and France now too. I mean, I can't understand my colonel saying these things. To send French troops into Ukraine is insane. Losing one life for Ukraine is insane. Well, I think our time is up. Many thanks for your... Please relay my message correctly because otherwise I get into trouble. But I know that you agree with me, so... No, I thank you for your honesty and I think it's also important that people with such an experience like you, that they speak up. I mean, you have the first hand insight to talk to these people. You were in the war yourself. You have experience. You're not a theoretical person. So thank you very much. I'm 75... 77 years old. I should say something. I mean, a man who's lived this long and seen it, I have an obligation to speak and I can't speak in my country. I'm speaking to a Swiss. Is that so? I mean, you have... This is also a very interesting issue. The so-called deep state. I always thought that was like an ideological construction. But if you look at the Twitter files and all these developments, I mean, is there some kind of secret service, deep state organization which makes even your life harder in the United States? What's your experience there? I think so, but I can't tell you exactly the details because I do think that they've cut me off from the communications. They can't get the big media outlets. They don't report it. They just don't report it. They don't report it. And this is a... It's quite a change in my life. I was a hero for a while. I had medals and all that from Vietnam. And now I'm on the shit list. You have three Oscars and 11 Oscar nominations. You made a lot of great films. But truthfully, I didn't cut off. I didn't cut off. Even my documentaries, there was no distribution for the nuclear documentary. There was none for the JFK revisited documentary. Oh, yeah. So in the United States, I mean, there is really... I mean, you're somehow attacked or sidelined or canceled by some media, etc.? No. Well, in Switzerland, you're always welcome. I mean, we would host anytime a big public interview with you on all these issues because it's so interesting also your historical experience in Vietnam. I think the Vietnam experience is so... It's so contemporary. I mean, it's... If I read... I just read the book by Mark Bowden about Hué in 1968. I mean, that's a fantastic book. I don't know whether you know it about the... And it's... I mean, it mirrors a lot of stuff we're witnessing today. Well, I certainly can... I would disagree with Bowden about some stuff, but he was the guy who did the Black Hawk Down thing. Right. Be careful where you're going. Hué was a fake battle in the sense that it was. It did happen, but that was not where the geological center was. The goal is the... Yeah. They wanted to cut Saigon. That was the key. That's when... The 25th century. We were right next to Saigon, above it. They came from Cambodia down. That was the plan. That's where they put all their weapons. The case was a feint. You know what they did? Aim with the left. Hit with the right. That was a big invasion. And they... He can't even get that right. Amazing. It was about the battle of Saigon. And if they had succeeded in cutting the country in half, it would have been in Saigon. That was the key. That way. What was I going to say? Anyway, good luck to you. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Stone, and lots of success with your new movie and in Cannes. All the best. Yeah, let's hope for the good, guys. Let's try to get through this. Hopefully, we'll be talking to you again in a year. Absolutely. Because, you know, it's going to be... What's sad about this whole thing is if we do end up on the other side of life, if we end up dead or something, or maimed, it would be such a waste because nothing happened that was really bad. It wasn't like we had killing of Jews or this or that. It was a world that was carrying on and it was ultimately prosperous and succeeding. And here we've turned this into a major nightmare that Biden has and really resent him for this and I will campaign against him. But this is much more dangerous than the American people and the European people know. Much more. Because America is too prideful and too arrogant. So the moment we start... Don't get our way in Ukraine, we're going to be very nasty. That's what I've... Very nasty. Good luck to you. Good luck to you. And let's see whether we can have a conversation in one year and the outlook is better. I promise you that. Don't laugh about it. Seriously. I'm a Protestant optimist. We always think that at the end we'll somehow be safe. But, you know, that's just like the conception. We don't know whether it's happening. Really hope to see you again. Hope to see you. Great talking to you. Many thanks. I mean, you are one of my heroes. It's great to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you.