Bruce Gagnon is a veteran of many, many battles, and particularly has focused on the weaponization of the space. He is the coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and the State Coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice. He's worked on space issues for over 35 years, and in 1987, he organized the largest peace protest in Florida history at Cape Canaveral. He was the organizer of the Cancel Cassini campaign against NASA, where they were going to put 72 pounds of plutonium into space. And he has been given the award as having most censored articles of the year on several years from Project Censored. Bruce has been a supporter of the anti-war movement since the early 1980s, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and Fox News. He has also been a frequent guest on CNN, Fox News, NPR, CBS, and other media outlets. He has spent a lot of years studying Vladimir Putin, and his views on the current crisis in Ukraine are not only interesting, but critical of the U.S. government and its policies, but also of the media's coverage of the situation in Ukraine and Russia. He s been a long-time supporter of peace and human rights efforts around the world, and has been involved in a number of peace movements around the globe, including in the fight against nuclear proliferation and anti-AIDS. . In this episode, Bruce talks about the current state of affairs in the space, and why he thinks Putin is the most powerful man in the world and why we should all be worried about what he s up to in space and in the Middle East, not just in the Ukraine, and Russia s role in the future in the 21st century, and how he s going to play a role in creating a multipolar world in the next few years in the post-Cold War world. He also talks about how he thinks about Russia s relationship with China, and what he thinks we should be doing to make the world more multipolar and more like the old days of the Cold War era, not the old Soviet Union. and what we can do to stop Putin s Russia s influence in the first half of the world and how we can all of us can work together to make a better world in order to stop him from becoming more like China s in the second half of our the best country or better than the old USSR.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, my guest today is Bruce Gagnon, who I would, I guess I'd describe you, Bruce, as a, I guess in the broader level, as a peace activist.
00:00:11.000He is a veteran of many, many, many battles, and particularly he has focused on the weaponization of the space.
00:00:20.000He's the coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
00:00:25.000He was co-founder of that network in 1992, and he's the state coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice.
00:00:34.000He's worked on space issues for over 35 years.
00:00:39.000In 1987, he organized the largest peace protest in Florida history at Cape Canaveral.
00:00:46.000He was the organizer of the Cancel Cassini campaign against NASA, where they were going to put 72 pounds of plutonium into space.
00:00:59.000Given the award as having most censored articles of the year on several years from Project Censored, I have also won that award a couple of times myself, including in 2005 and more recently as well.
00:01:18.000And I want to get your take on the Ukraine.
00:01:20.000One of the things that I'm doing on this show is really, you know, I don't have a position on the Ukraine.
00:01:26.000I don't have a position on the Ukraine.
00:01:28.000But what really offends me is that there is no debate happening and no debate is permissible.
00:01:35.000And this is the same thing that happened during the Iraq war between 2001 and 2003, during, you know, when we had this kind of orchestrated hysteria that was all directed towards going to war, a preemptive war against Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with a preemptive war against Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do He had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks, but the neocons in Congress and in the White House wanted a war and they got a war.
00:02:03.000And today I look around the world and I see a lot of villains around the world, not just Vladimir Putin, but I see villains in Saudi Arabia who are killing hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen.
00:02:16.000I see atrocities occurring in Somalia, in Ethiopia.
00:02:22.000Many, many other hotspots in the world.
00:02:25.000And I have to wonder about whether all the things that were being told on the actual media, where there's no debate, there's no difference of opinion, everybody is operating within the same guardrails, whether it's CNN or Fox News.
00:02:42.000And so I've been inviting people onto this show.
00:03:53.000I think the U.S. wants to balkanize, break up Russia into smaller pieces.
00:03:58.000The Rand Corporation did a report in 2019 where they laid it all out.
00:04:03.000Saying that we can use Ukraine as a tool to destabilize, to create internal problems for Russia that will lead to the balkanization, like the US did in Yugoslavia, US and NATO did in Yugoslavia in 1999.
00:04:21.000The second reason is because of the growing effort by the Global South Russia, China, India, Brazil, many other countries to create a multipolar world, where it's not just US king of the hill, standing at the top, running everything, dictating terms, setting the rules.
00:04:43.000One day they say this is the new rule of the road and another day they change it.
00:04:49.000Nobody really knows what's going on, you know, from Washington.
00:04:52.000So the U.S., I think, recognizes it has a small window of opportunity left to try to break down that effort to create a multipolar world.
00:05:06.000We hear it from the White House that they want regime change in Moscow.
00:05:11.000And then they say, and then we're on to China after that.
00:05:14.000And they want the same thing in China, in Beijing.
00:05:18.000So I think those are the two things driving this.
00:05:20.000I've been following this story in Ukraine since late 2013, the lead up to the coup that happened in early 2014.
00:05:29.000I watched literally in real time on videos.
00:05:34.000And I've been following it daily ever since.
00:05:36.000I've been to Russia three times, then I went to the Donbass, the border area right next to the Russian border, eastern Ukraine.
00:05:45.000And I went to Lugansk and Donetsk and really learned a lot during that time.
00:05:50.000So I'm convinced that this whole operation by the United States and NATO is an intentional process to create a war.
00:05:59.000To enrich the military-industrial complex, we see that just this past week, President Biden asked for $33 billion more for the war, and now the Congress gives them $40 billion.
00:06:13.000At the same time, we can't have Medicare for all.
00:06:17.000Congress says, where will the money come from to pay for that?
00:06:20.000We can't have the alleviation of stupidity.
00:06:24.000We're dealing with climate crisis in any significant way.
00:06:27.000And the infrastructure of the country has fallen apart.
00:06:30.000So all of this to me indicates that there's something afoot.
00:06:37.000was immediately after the U.S. installed coup in 2014.
00:06:42.000One of the first things the new right-wing government did that was backed by the muscle of the neo-Nazis that come from western Ukraine, the first thing they did was to declare the speaking of Russian in Ukraine illegal.
00:06:59.000The people in eastern Ukraine Again, Russian ethnic right along the Russian border began holding peaceful marches and referendum campaigns where they said we want a federated Ukraine.
00:07:12.000They weren't saying we want to be part of Russia, we want to be separatists or anything else.
00:07:16.000We want a federated Ukraine where we can decide on our own language and we can elect our own local officials, our mayors, things like that, rather than have them appointed by Kiev.
00:07:28.000And so immediately as they were doing that, the Nazi death squads, as I call them, came eastward.
00:07:36.000You're talking about the Azov, Italian basically.
00:07:40.000And the right sector, there's several different elements of these neo-Nazis.
00:07:45.000And over the years now, over eight years, they've killed 14,000 people.
00:08:06.000And by the way, Putin, whether you believe or not, says that the reason that he has come into the Ukraine is to stop ethnic cleansing against ethnic Russians in the eastern Ukraine. says that the reason that he has come into the Is to stop ethnic cleansing against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
00:08:25.000He has said that he has no ambition to take over all of Ukraine.
00:08:31.000The Western story is that he is on a war of aggression to reintegrate Ukraine back into the Soviet Union.
00:08:41.000And so those are the two different stories.
00:08:43.000And I, you know, again, I'm taking note that those are the stories.
00:08:50.000But I have to say that if you look at 2014 to today, what you see consistently...
00:08:57.000Is Putin and the Russian government, Lavrov, the foreign minister, working so hard to talk to Europe, talk to the United States, to get them to restrain these death squads that have been coming, that have been trained.
00:09:14.000I have a friend whose son is in the U.S., Special Forces stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado.
00:09:21.000And he told me that his son and their units were sent to Western Ukraine to train Ukrainian soldiers.
00:09:32.000What we know is that during World War II, When Hitler's army swept into the Soviet Union, they came through Ukraine, and a guy by the name of Stefan Bandera, one of the nationalists from western Ukraine, put on a Nazi uniform, and his supporters joined the Nazis, and they helped kill tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, and Russian ethnics.
00:09:57.000And so in Western Ukraine, there's long been this history of support of Hitler and the Nazis.
00:10:30.000And before the last couple of years anyway, the mainstream media was covering that, that there were indeed Nazis there.
00:10:37.000So anyway, back to what I was trying to say was that Putin and Lavrov have been working hard for years to try to get the West to to do several things.
00:10:50.000After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Gorbachev was promised that NATO would not expand eastward.
00:10:57.000And it was during the Bill Clinton administration that he started What he called NATO enhancement that is now on steroids today.
00:11:06.000NATO war games coming right up to the doorstep of Russia.
00:11:09.000Let me interrupt you because the promise that you're talking about was a promise that was made by George Bush when he was president.
00:11:17.000to Mikhail Gorbachev, who was about to dismantle the old Soviet Union and wanted, before he started that process, wanted a promise from George Bush that George Bush would not expand NATO into those former Soviet vassal states. wanted a promise from George Bush that George Bush would And Bush made the statement famously that NATO would not move one inch to the east.
00:11:44.000And today, as a result of the process that was begun during the Glenn administration, NATO is now in 13 countries that are part of the former Soviet Union.
00:11:56.000And has nuclear weapons, I believe, and some of them are missiles, at least.
00:12:02.000And so those are two issues that are really important to Russia.
00:12:07.000A third one is the United States has built missile launch facilities in Romania and Poland that can fire first-strike attack nuclear-capable cruise missiles into Russia in a very short period of time.
00:12:22.000Essentially, a Cuban missile crisis in reverse.
00:12:30.000And when NATO has these war games, both up in the Nordic region, especially up in Norway, again bordering Russia, and in Eastern Europe, coming up to the Russian borders, After they leave, after the US-NATO leave, they leave a lot of hardware at weapons depots that have been built in Poland and in Norway.
00:12:52.000So Russia sees this massive escalation and preparation for war right on their doorstep.
00:12:59.000Now, how would the United States respond if Russia or China were doing the equivalent and putting bases in Mexico or Canada?
00:13:16.000But when we do it to them, number one, they're not supposed to say anything about it.
00:13:22.000And number two, the American people don't hardly know anything about it at all.
00:13:26.000It's not reported in the corporate media.
00:13:28.000So over these last eight years, Russia has been doing all kinds of shuttle diplomacy.
00:13:34.000They helped institute the Minsk agreements, an agreement that Ukraine signed, saying they would pull back their troops away from the Russian border, away from the Russian ethnic region of the Donbass.
00:13:50.000They would allow for federated Ukraine in Lugansk and Donetsk, in those areas.
00:13:57.000And they have never implemented those Minsk agreements whatsoever.
00:14:01.000They've essentially been ripped up and torn.
00:14:04.000There was Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, neither of them ever implemented.
00:14:10.000In fact, it's kind of well known that the Nazis told Zelenskyy Soon after he was elected, he ran on a campaign where he said he wanted to end the war.
00:14:23.000That's why he got most of his votes out of the Russian ethnic region.
00:14:28.000They were happy to hear somebody say that from in the government.
00:14:31.000But the Nazis threatened Zelensky with his life.
00:14:52.000And so if you had to assign blame, how much would you assign to Putin and how much would you assign to the West?
00:15:00.000Well, let's imagine you're Putin for a moment.
00:15:04.000You've been doing everything you can diplomatically, and it's been very public.
00:15:09.000I think anybody that has followed this at all has to acknowledge that Putin was meeting with Western European leaders over and over and over again, talking to him on the phone, talking to Biden.
00:15:21.000Lavrov was doing shuttle diplomacy like crazy.
00:15:48.000Why didn't he just diplomatically try to resolve this?
00:15:51.000Well, they haven't been following the situation so closely and they don't know that he did.
00:15:56.000He's been trying this even before the coup in 2014 in Kiev.
00:16:02.000The 2007 Munich Security Conference that Putin went to, a very famous one, you can find the video on YouTube, where he essentially pleads with the West.
00:17:11.000And they don't want such a big, strong country around to stand up to the United States.
00:17:18.000Well, people who, in the mainstream media, many of our leaders who are trying to do the right thing, we assume, what they will say is that Putin was fomenting A separatist movement in the Ukraine dressing Russian troops as if they were Ukrainian military or putting them in civilian clothes and fomenting a revolution and
00:17:49.000provoking the government in Kiev to retaliate in order to bring peace back to the to Dombas.
00:18:01.000Well, after the coup in 2014, again, Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Piat, the famous phone call where they said, F the EU, we're going to install who we want to install in the new government.
00:18:16.000After that coup, the new government said the speaking of Russian was illegal.
00:18:21.000People came out and started having these peaceful marches and they were holding these referendum campaigns.
00:19:26.000I've always called it a self-defense forces in the Donbass.
00:19:31.000They were literally protecting themselves, their families, their communities, and soon the Nazis were shelling with U.S. and NATO weapon systems, with U.S.-NATO training, U.S.-NATO advisors, clearly deeply involved in the operation on the part of the Kiev government.
00:19:54.000And they were just trying to protect their communities and their families.
00:19:58.000So I think the story is pretty simple if one is willing to look at it.
00:20:03.000I think, Bruce, it's really important to me to have dissident voices like yours, to have a different side of the story.
00:20:13.000Because the story that we're hearing now, the mainstream media, is very, very different.
00:20:18.000And again, I'm not taking a position on it, but I do take a position that we should hear every side and we should hear voices like yours.
00:20:27.000The people who are explaining U.S. policy to the American public, almost all of the people that you see on CNN and on Fox News who are supposedly military experts and security experts are working for the companies and are not identified as such.
00:20:46.000Like Boeing, like Lockheed, like General Dynamics, and the other big companies that are making billions and billions of dollars from this conflict.
00:20:57.000When Congress voted $40 billion, To go to this conflict, that money goes to the Ukraine and then bounces right back and goes to these military contractors in the U.S. whose employees are the people that you see on CNN acting as experts explaining the whole conflict to the public.
00:21:24.000They did the same thing during the Iraq War.
00:21:26.000And they gave us a war that at that point was the worst public foreign policy blunder in American history.
00:21:35.000I guess Vietnam probably is a rival, but the Iraq war was outrageous.
00:21:40.000And today we're seeing all of the same ingredients and that worries me a lot.
00:21:46.000Well, just think of our own Secretary of Defense in the United States, Lloyd Austin, was on the board of Raytheon before President Biden picked him to be the, you know, head of DOD. But, you know, you mentioned the media.
00:22:01.000Let's face it, in the last few years, we've seen repeatedly that That the media runs a particular line on various issues of concern to the nation.
00:22:15.000And anyone that stands outside of those lines, anyone that has an alternative voice, is demonized, is bounced off social media.
00:22:29.000So what I see happening when it comes to the Ukraine war is very similar to what we've been experiencing on other issues in the last few years.
00:22:51.000And I hope that the American people are figuring it out.
00:22:54.000I've seen polling the last few days that say that increasingly high percentages of the American people do not support this U.S. war.
00:23:05.000And they, you know, people are not stupid when they hear that Congress just appropriated $40 billion to give To Ukraine, which is losing in this war.
00:23:17.000I know we hear on the media that they're kicking Russia's ass, but it's not true.
00:23:22.000You know, when that money could be used to deal with real serious issues we have in this country, I think people understand that.
00:23:32.000They saw what happened 20 years in Afghanistan.
00:23:36.000Yeah, and what I think people are beginning to understand that they are paying for the war, we are paying for the war, and we're paying for it because that $40 billion, which the U.S. government does not have, they borrow that money from the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve prints more money, and And we get 8.5% inflation.
00:23:57.000That inflation, which is eating into the wealth of every middle class and working class American, is the tax that you are paying to finance General Dynamics and Raytheon and Boeing and all these other companies who are making billions on this war.
00:24:26.000And Europe, which is now being told that they have to buy U.S. fracked gas, LNG gas, that's going to be shipped overseas at a much higher cost.
00:24:39.000So the Europeans are being forced by the United States not to...
00:24:52.000The oil companies drove the Iraq war, and here we are.
00:24:55.000We're shutting down the oil and gas supplies from Russia and creating new markets for U.S. oil and gas manufacturers.
00:25:04.000And, you know, anybody who says they're concerned about climate, you know, this is a climate crime.
00:25:09.000It's all about making these companies, the oil companies and military industrial companies, richer.
00:25:15.000They're driving foreign policy like they always have, and We need to hear, you know, it doesn't mean that Putin is a good guy.
00:25:24.000There's a lot of bad guys in the world.
00:25:26.000The king in Saudi Arabia picked up a U.S. journalist with a bone saw in a premeditated murder.
00:25:35.000In Saudi Arabia, they behead people every Tuesday in a big parking lot behind the Great Mosque in Riyadh, and they have had an undeclared war against Yemen, where they've killed 350,000 people.
00:25:51.000If you want to look for villains in the world, there's villains all over the place, and they're doing bad things.
00:25:57.000And the question is, Why do we get involved in some of these controversies?
00:26:03.000Why is the U.S. the police person of the world?
00:26:07.000Why do we have to hollow out our middle class to pay for foreign wars?
00:26:12.000And it's a question I think every American needs to ask.
00:26:15.000And I deeply, deeply appreciate your courage at taking a dissident view on this, Bruce.
00:26:22.000Tell our listeners where they can follow you and how they can support you.
00:26:35.000And I have a popular blog called Organizing Notes, N-O-T-E-S. I hope maybe you can put the link in the description of the podcast.
00:26:45.000It's kind of like my organizing diary, where every day I'm posting things that I learn and And that I find out about everything that's going on today.
00:26:55.000I guess I would like to maybe conclude with the words of Martin Luther King, who was demonized when he came out against the Vietnam War.
00:27:04.000He said at the time, That the United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
00:27:11.000And I don't see anything different today.
00:27:14.000We're spending literally, when you add up all the various pots of gold, the Department of Energy, that's where the nuclear weapons money is put.
00:27:22.000So when you add up all these pots of gold, the US is spending a trillion dollars a year on the military.
00:27:29.000Well, Russia is spending the equivalent of What France and Germany spend, around $65 billion a year.
00:27:37.000Now, Russia might be able to fight a war in Ukraine on $65 billion a year, but there's no way in the world that they're going to be able to go out and take over all of Europe, as is claimed all the time by the corporate media.
00:27:53.000Russia has a smaller economy than California, so the idea that they're this huge global threat that's going to take over Europe is really a fantasy.
00:28:05.000Anyway, Bruce, thank you so much for everything that you do, and thank you for joining us.