Harry, Stelios and Josh discuss the gayest Star Wars film ever, right wing delusions and the new Star Wars TV show 'The Mandalorian' on Amazon Prime Video. Also, we talk about the Ukraine crisis and how to deal with it.
00:08:39.140So, what I'm seeing is gay interviewer, gay star, gay showrunner.
00:08:44.500I'm thinking that Hollywood and Disney is run by a very particular kind of person making films and TV for another very similar particular kind of person.
00:09:02.100Yeah, I think that although they are joking around and they're not being too serious about it, which is fair enough, really, I think there is an element of they are genuinely proud of how gay they made it.
00:09:16.760But they are proud of pushing this ideology into Star Wars.
00:09:21.040And they're also insulting the original Star Wars fans by just like, yeah, it's pretty gay, isn't it?
00:09:25.840You know, almost using it in the pejorative sense in the same breath.
00:09:29.180But then they're allowed to do that because they are one of the alphabet people and therefore it's okay.
00:09:35.900But the mainstream media picked up on this and reported on it.
00:09:41.980You know, Fox, lots of other outlets as well.
00:09:44.240And I think that the response here to an original post talking about this epitomizes my feelings.
00:09:56.820It's a gif of Yoda saying this is why you fail because you're inserting politics into something that is an escape from the world, right?
00:10:04.800That's why people watch, you know, sci-fi and fantasy.
00:10:09.080It's not, you know, obviously it needs to relate to the world in some respects, but the things that chip away at your will to live don't necessarily need to be in there.
00:10:17.540And these sorts of things just aren't an ordinary people's concern.
00:10:21.600Well, the interesting thing that you bring up there is that you say that they're inserting politics.
00:10:26.940And if I remember correctly, the fact that so much of the films was dedicated to Machiavellian power politics going on behind the scenes was one of the reasons that people said back in the day that they really didn't like the prequels when they first came out.
00:10:40.040And one of the reasons that people praised The Force Awakens when that came out was they said, oh, they got rid of all the boring political stuff.
00:10:49.860Even in The Force Awakens, there's some obvious social messaging going on in there.
00:10:53.660What they did was they just removed the, you could say, quite interesting internal political stuff that was specific to the Star Wars universe that was going on in the prequels.
00:11:04.860And they just added all of the, you know, rubbish that we have out in the real world.
00:11:08.520Yeah, I actually quite enjoyed that aspect of the prequels.
00:11:11.280But I think that the problem is it's sort of contemporary political messaging is what I mean when I'm talking about the politics.
00:11:18.700Obviously, you can portray politics because it's a part of life and it's inevitable that it's going to come up in a series like this.
00:11:26.360However, you could say the prequels were maybe allegorical.
00:11:29.480And I think this is fair, allegorical to the early Bush years.
00:11:32.540But it's still worked within the context of the universe and can be told as an internal story within that universe without you having to be aware of the outside context.
00:11:44.040All of this is just going, oh, I'm gay.
00:11:48.640And I think that the fundamental disagreement with this sort of thing is that it's taking a franchise that was good and it's making it bad.
00:27:17.420So I think we should call the reaction of the left to the right and the rising of the right of the last years as right-wing derangement syndrome.
00:27:27.620And you will see why this relates to the constant use of the term far right.
00:27:54.780We have seen around the world a rise of populist right-wing forces in just about every democracy that we've seen.
00:28:06.960And it is of concern to see political parties choosing to instrumentalize anger, fear, division, anxiety.
00:28:19.680My approach has always been to respond to it, to understand it and to look to solve it, to roll up our sleeves, work hard and with ambition for this country and for our future.
00:28:30.680And I continue to be convinced that Canadians are thoughtful about the challenges we're facing and ready to see them solved rather than just allow themselves to have their anger amplified without any solutions offered.
00:30:06.660I mean, Josh, you're a resident psychologist.
00:30:09.100You know far better than I do about the use of the term.
00:30:14.560Well, psychopaths are drawn to power and psychopaths.
00:30:19.180One of the ways you define what a psychopath is, is excessive narcissism is one of many.
00:30:24.620You know, you have the dark triad where you've also got psychopathy as a metric on its own and also Machiavellianism, which does Machiavelli dirty.
00:30:31.260But narcissism is the third and quite a central component of it.
00:30:36.440And I think that people who want to dictate what others do and use power against them tend to be predisposed to be narcissists, right?
00:30:44.960So one beautiful thing here is the way in which he just holds himself accountable to standards other than those that he uses to criticize his political opponents.
00:30:59.300Because, as Harry, you said, yes, his basic philosophy, wokeism, because he's the darling of the woke, is all about instrumentalizing anger, fear, division and anxiety.
00:31:10.340All of that is he routinely does exactly what he's criticizing.
00:31:15.760But it's good that he finally found out that in popular governments, if you alienate the people, the people will start to turn their back on you.
00:31:26.500Now, let's look at how the leftists are reacting, because you see what Justin Trudeau said, that he is just responding to things, he's not just doing it, he's responding to things, reminds me a lot of the communist tactic of just sticking an anti in front of anything they criticize and somehow miraculously it gets justified.
00:31:47.900So, is it violence? Just stick an anti-violence in front of it, and it's for good purpose, according to how they think.
00:31:55.300Is it imperialism? No. They're going to call it anti-imperialism.
00:31:59.260Because there's just magic when it comes to just putting anti in front of everything.
00:32:04.560It just makes the immoral unquestionably moral.
00:32:08.340Well, Stelios, I think you're failing to see the inherent logic in this, which is that they call themselves the good guys, well, they can't be the bad guys, can they?
00:32:26.700Yeah. So, you have here leftists in France attacking the streets and routinely causing violent episodes, because what they're doing is anti-protest. It's not protest, it's anti-protest. So, according to themselves, it must be justified.
00:32:43.960You might want to mute it, because your audio is probably overlapping there.
00:32:48.580Anyway, so, by all means, anyone who wants to watch this video, you can just click on our link and visit our website on our aiding list.
00:32:58.260There are lots of videos with footage of leftists just engaging in violence and civil discord.
00:33:08.580They will, of course, put an anti in front of it.
00:33:11.820Now, Jeremy Corbyn made some very interesting statements.
00:33:15.260I want to ask you if you see, again, something weird with them, if you notice something.
00:33:21.560So, he says, the far right is rising across Europe because politicians on both sides have pandered to their rhetoric and normalized their ideas.
00:34:28.340We must promise a politics of hope, combating racism, not stoking it, defending refugees, not scapegoating them, building a society that works for all, not protecting a system rigged for the rich.
00:34:41.180Then why do you present your ideology as a zero-sum game?
00:34:45.620Because anything that you're criticizing there is exactly what you're doing.
00:34:50.420To be fair, the party she represents does make me hope.
00:34:53.840It makes me hope that when I'm walking through the streets at night, I don't get raped or murdered from all the people that they imported without any correct documentation.
00:35:02.260Well, of course, what they're talking about here is in both Jeremy Corbyn here talking about defending refugees and inspiring more hope and her Zahra Sultana saying defend refugees as they're completely ignoring that one of the main reasons that there has been such a backlash to their policies is the demographic change, the people coming over.
00:35:29.900Zahra Sultana is just a foreigner, so she doesn't have any sort of care or love for the place that she's in right now.
00:35:39.120She just sees it as a place where all of her family members can come here and get a free check.
00:35:43.700Well, you see that what they're doing is they are routinely obfuscating the fact that they are employing direct anti-Western propaganda.
00:35:52.860They do hate the West and they do stoke racism.
00:35:56.480It's just not in the it's just racism against Westerners and they are scapegoating Westerners for everything for every evil in the world.
00:36:07.300It's always the West and anything that happens in the world, any kind of conflict, wherever it takes place.
00:36:17.760It is always presented as, let's say, something that is caused by the internalization of the pressure to assimilate to Western culture.
00:36:31.120So, she does exactly what she's criticizing.
00:36:35.160Now, again, let us see how this plays into real life and how, apart from the statements, we come to the allocation of blame and to the double standards when it comes to civil protest.
00:36:53.080Now, we have here some grannies from the Just Stop Oil organization, the pressure group, who are smashing the glass around the Magna Carta.
00:37:04.840Everyone knows this clip. Let's just remind people of it.
00:37:08.980That's the problem when you've got old people on the front lines is they can't use a hammer and chisel very well.
00:38:01.820I mean, a lady of God, she can't be wrong, Stelios.
00:38:06.160Yeah, but they're doing it for good purpose, Josh.
00:38:09.780So, here we see also the desecration of statues constantly, and apparently all these are isolated incidents.
00:38:20.240But when it comes to some pride murals that have skid marks and tire marks, that's the whole country needs to be announced to be on an epidemic of hate.
00:38:32.720So, again, there are some double standards.
00:38:34.260Well, they're facing a ridiculous prison sentence as well, and, you know, teenagers as well.
00:38:39.880Yes, and no one is reacting in the way I'm going to show you here, which I have shown you before, and you loved it, and this is why exactly I'm going to show it to you again.
00:38:49.400They are reacting like that for the mural, but they are not reacting like that, for instance, for the desecration of the Magna Carta and the glass,
00:38:58.400or for the desecration of statues, or for Western symbols.
00:41:03.320If anything, if you shifted that right quadrant all the way to the left, maybe, you know, where Labour of far left and Reform and Conservative are still left-wing, but closer to the centre.
00:41:17.660This is like the meme with a far right, where, you know, everything is just far right except from one area.
00:41:22.460Yeah, yeah, except the political quadrant exists in the top left corner and everything else is Nazi.
00:41:27.680Also, why are the Conservatives more right-wing than Reform, when Reform's whole shtick is that the Conservatives aren't Conservatives?
00:41:34.660Economics, I would suppose, because the left-right axis is supposed to be economic.
00:41:42.720But there is a very interesting implication from this graph.
00:41:47.560What about those who are saying zero seats for the Conservatives?
00:41:52.660Are they pushing against the right here?
00:41:55.940Well, surely we'd be completely off the reservation in that case, because I'm saying zero seats for the Conservatives from a right-wing perspective.
00:42:04.200So presumably, I'm somewhere off in a completely different political compass.
00:42:53.040Also, Keir Starmer is very, very into Roman Empire now.
00:42:57.660You haven't seen him come out in his toga with a chariot flanked with miles?
00:43:04.180Is Starmer the Caesar we've been after this whole time?
00:43:08.620I'm pretty sure Starmer sacrificed a goat and said for Jupiter at the start of the campaign, didn't he?
00:43:13.960Yeah. So basically what this is, is the basically that's the meme intended as a serious political graph.
00:43:22.660And there is a reason why this happens.
00:43:24.680And I think that the the main core of right wing derangement syndrome comes with the attempt to present anything to the right of social democracy as far right.
00:43:36.100And they do this for specific purposes.
00:43:40.500So there's a very interesting tweet here by the rabbit hole, and it has a meme that is very funny.
00:43:50.180And it says the term far right has become so loosely applied that it's effectively useless in sniffing out genuine cases of extremism and more often used to slander reasonable people.
00:44:01.380And what is interesting here is that you can see here the bell curve and you see the first here that you have the left and then the right, which I would say in common parlance, especially in the EU, these are the people who call themselves center right.
00:44:20.300And what is interesting is that the left has all sorts of reasons why they would do propaganda for political, amoral reasons, why they should they want to call everything the far right.
00:44:34.520But it's really interesting to ask why people who call themselves center right, especially in the EU, are buying that rhetoric.
00:44:41.020And they basically present everything as far right.
00:44:45.560And I would say that they also suffer from right wing derangement syndrome, because if you see in the EU, especially as they are talking about, they present the right area of the spectrum as a horseshoe.
00:44:59.300Basically, there is no right wing between the center right and what is conventionally referred to as the far right.
00:45:20.700Well, it's all part of being engaged in the dialectic, correct?
00:45:24.600If we truly are, as I suspect we are, in both the US and the UK, but certainly it seems more solidly so in the UK, because our system is so much more centralized than in the US.
00:45:36.660If we truly are ruled by a uniparty, then of course it makes sense for that uniparty to present itself within different fronts.
00:45:44.500And through that, through the dialectic that it creates between the left and the center right, it can gatekeep out dissident voices from the dialectic.
00:45:53.120So if the center right is presented as far right as you can go while still being part of the respectable dialectic, then anything that goes beyond that is automatically disqualified from being seen as legitimate.
00:46:04.560They're just trying to demonize their political opponents, basically.
00:46:46.320So basically, in a nutshell, I think that in Europe, those who are in the center right camp are doing this for two main reasons.
00:46:55.060Number one is to gain votes from the right and present themselves as the last bastion before extremism.
00:47:04.460And they want to take advantage of those who are, let's say, on the right, but they're not sufficiently well-versed into political theory and political philosophy.
00:47:17.240And number two is to virtue signal to the social democrats.
00:47:21.240And this is important because what you will see is that when you look at the parties who call themselves center right, and I think philosophically they're not, by the way,
00:47:29.520I think that what they're doing is very simple.
00:48:18.660Well, it's the old adage that the Tories are labor driving at the speed limit, isn't it?
00:48:23.000It's that same sort of philosophy, but applied to all politics.
00:48:27.380And there is a really good essay by Hayek when he was writing about why he's not calling himself a conservative.
00:48:34.640And he's very adamant about what he means by conservative.
00:48:38.840He means about people who treat conservatism purely as temperament, and they have no substantive values.
00:48:44.380So this kind of conservatism, conservatism that isn't attached to substantive and traditional values is precisely the kind of conservatism that is visionless
00:48:54.020and is slowly starting to mimic social democracy and occasionally those to the further left.
00:49:01.180And the left does this for two main reasons.
00:49:05.420One is to demonize everyone who is to the right of social democracy and also to sort of pre-justify violent action in the name of self-defense.
00:49:19.280Because as I said at the beginning, the left is known for sticking an anti in front of everything.
00:49:23.980And suddenly any kind of act that they think the other side is immoral when performing, they suddenly become moral when they are performing it.
00:49:33.380Because all of that is in the name of the good, in the name of the progress.
00:49:38.660And I want to show you how this term is basically routinely abused.
00:49:45.360And it presents politicians who aren't in any way related to what is conventionally associated with the term far-right in post-World War II continental Europe.
00:49:57.500I want to show you The Guardian and how they refer to Javier Millay.
00:50:01.600So, 19th of October, 2023, Argentina's far-right frontrunner reopens wounds of dictatorship.
00:50:09.140Who is Javier Millay? Argentina's new far-right president, El Loco, takes the stage.
00:50:16.460That's from the 20th of November, 2023.
00:50:20.500And from May, no, from June 7th, Argentina's far-right president posed to shut down anti-gender violence agency.
00:50:29.200So, basically, they're completely abusing the term.
00:50:31.980They're trying to lead to a communication breakdown and they're trying to demonize those to the left of social democracy.
00:50:42.240And those on the center-right, especially those who call themselves center-right, should bear that in mind.
00:50:48.040And if they're not basically leftists in disguise and they have been taken advantage of, if their ignorance has been taken advantage of by the other side, perhaps they should start revising how they use language and stop identifying and using the language of the left.
00:51:07.280Well, the Guardian would call the mid-century Germans far-right, wouldn't they?
00:51:13.560And then they're also calling Millay far-right, who is happy to wear a yarmulke and he visited the Wailing Wall and he's talked about his great admiration for Judaism.
00:51:25.780It doesn't matter. All of it is just demonizing because at the end of the day, they're trying to bombard the general public.
00:51:32.740That's what the propagandist mindset is. Just throw mud and some of it will stick.
00:51:39.120It doesn't matter if it makes no sense.
00:51:41.300What matters for them is if it promotes their interests and if it aids them to demonize anything to the further left, to the right of social democracy.
00:51:54.420And they also think, those on the far left, they think that social democracy basically is a facade for them, is just a means.
00:52:00.260That's why they constantly talk about, it's not our democracy, and they talk about our democracy.
00:52:06.900And even if the people vote differently, the people are not enlightened enough.
00:52:11.300We need an enlightened von Goert party, as they say, to tell the people how to think.
00:52:16.320So, even those to the further left than social democracy, they also view social democrats as their, they see their difference as a matter of time.
00:52:30.260So, that is what I think is behind right-wing derangement syndrome.
00:52:56.740And I think this shows exactly how the leftist propaganda is using this, and how those on the, allegedly on the center-right, are basically falling into this trap, because they have no substantive values.
00:53:28.880All right, so, I don't mean to be alarmist here, and I don't want to be alarmist through this segment.
00:53:35.080But I'm going to do a bit of a review of what's been going on with the Ukraine conflict, and some of the discussions that have been going on, and some of the statements that have been made from Western leaders regarding the conflict that seem to be escalating it to me.
00:53:49.080Certainly, there seems to be a lot of saber-rattling that is going on right now, and I want to try and understand why that is, because it does really worry me at the moment.
00:53:59.840And I know that there's some arguments against this, but it seems as though they are behaving as though we can escalate to a ground war with Russia.
00:54:06.920At least parts of the elite establishment are.
00:54:18.980Is it that they're not particularly confident in that Russia can fire nuclear exchanges accurately?
00:54:25.720Is it that they think that they won't do that much damage?
00:54:28.460Is it that they think that they can neutralize that kind of threat before it even gets here?
00:54:32.800I'm very concerned about what's going on, and I want to approach this with caution.
00:54:37.840Before I go any further, though, we do still have copies of Islander available for pre-order, if anybody is interested,
00:54:44.840which you should be, because it truly is an excellent magazine that we've produced here,
00:54:49.120and it's got articles from very, very interesting writers on very interesting subjects,
00:54:53.440and the pre-orders are still available up until next Monday.
00:54:57.280So, after that, you won't be able to get your hands on a copy, except for one which I assume will be marked up to an incredible price on eBay,
00:55:05.160because this will be a rare collector's edition, very, very valuable, very, very expensive, maybe.
00:55:10.760So, get a hold of one while you still can.
00:55:13.600Anyway, so, I'll move on to what's been going on recently.
00:55:16.240So, I have spooked myself, I will admit, looking into what's going on,
00:55:20.640because one of the recent reports that I was seeing was this,
00:55:23.820that Ukraine has been allowed to use U.S. weapons to strike targets on Russian soil,
00:55:29.520and this is according to senators and other Western officials.
00:55:32.780This has been approved under guidance from Joe Biden.
00:55:35.940What I believe it is that they're allowed to strike tactical, strategic targets within Russian soil using U.S. weapons.
00:55:43.440The Ukrainians have been calling for more tech so that they could defend new attacks that have been coming to Kharkiv,
00:55:48.220and Germany has also stated, Olaf Scholz has, that they will be allowed to use German weapons
00:55:53.740to strike similar relevant strategic targets.
00:55:57.060Putin has warned Germany on Wednesday that the use of its weapons by Ukraine to strike inside Russia
00:56:03.420would mark a dangerous step, and he said Moscow could in turn provide long-range arms
01:02:45.920But of course, as far as I'm concerned, there comes a point where you have to accept and acknowledge a lost cause.
01:02:52.300And it seems that our leaders from the saber rattling that I'm reading are not willing to accept that and are on some level willing to escalate it further to avoid losing face in the way that you're describing.
01:03:05.200So at the moment, this is one of the more recent reports is that Ukraine is short on ammunition, which is mainly artillery shells and air defense missiles.
01:03:13.800The average age of frontline soldiers is 43 years old and draft dodging among young amongst younger people who are coming up to conscription is has become a very big problem.
01:03:25.020And they're very short on manpower soldiers.
01:03:27.340When the war first broke out, 650,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age fled.
01:03:32.980And that's been over the past two years as well.
01:03:35.280Metro stations have police mounting document checks looking for draft dodgers.
01:03:39.860People are getting knocks on their doors.
01:03:41.300People are getting press ganged into it who are ready who are up for conscription.
01:03:45.240A lot of people are trying to dodge it.
01:03:47.460And there's a statement in this article here from an official saying this is becoming a real mess in I think you told me that it's pronounced Lvov.
01:03:57.580So you might want to correct us if that's wrong.
01:04:00.040People are buying apartments but not signing a purchase agreement to avoid it being formally registered or they register it in a friend's name because they're afraid later it could be confiscated.
01:04:08.500Others are emptying bank accounts in case legislation is approved and their money is frozen.
01:04:11.980And all of this is to avoid having to go out onto the front lines because at this point after two years a lot of people, as far as I'm aware from these reports, know people.
01:04:20.640There was a report in The Economist a few weeks back talking about people who knew their friends had gone over to fight in the front lines and had either died or been horribly wounded, come back, not able to serve anymore.
01:04:33.620After two years you get that initial burst of patriotism, that desire to defend yourselves.
01:04:40.000But after two years it does start to grind people down.
01:04:45.100I've told you before we started shooting that I lost a communication with a friend.
01:04:50.460Yeah, I'm really sorry to hear about that.
01:04:51.260She went to fight and we've lost contact.
01:04:54.560Yes, and then you see what's going on over here and here's an interview with the insane madman Emmanuel Macron.
01:05:03.020Now, this might not matter as much going forward because I know that he's just put up a snap election following the changes that happened in the EU elections recently.
01:05:14.200Although, being president, as far as I'm aware, his position is not up for election until 2027, somewhere around there.
01:05:22.140So he's still securely in his position, even if the parliament and prime minister changed underneath him.
01:05:29.820And he does seem to be referencing the fact that Europe would be in a position of strategic weakness if America were to pull out.
01:05:37.740He's starting to talk about how Europe could die.
01:05:40.620He's saying that we need to ensure European military security.
01:05:44.460In the case of America pulling out, we need European economic security.
01:05:48.480He's blaming all of this on Russia, saying through its behavior and choices, it has become a threat to European security, despite all the efforts made by France, but also by Germany and the United States.
01:05:58.680And we can fact check how honest that is later.
01:06:03.900But of course, he's basically saying that if Europe doesn't get its act together, create some kind of military and immediately go and assault Russia to a certain level, then we will all be in mortal danger.
01:06:15.740When it seems to me that this idea that if Ukraine falls, the rest of Europe is just a sitting duck is somewhat overstated.
01:06:23.420Because if Russia really had the kind of power to be able to take on the rest of the mainland continent, they probably would have flattened all of the areas they were after in Ukraine in about two weeks.
01:06:42.480And the idea that Europe, as it existed historically, or even as it has existed now, could be united and empowered under a former investment banker like Emmanuel Macron, who is somebody who has gone quite a long way for opening up the borders.
01:06:59.240He was a big supporter of Angela Merkel in 2015-2016 when she opened the floodgates to third world immigration into Europe.
01:07:07.200The idea that he's somebody who doesn't even really believe in a European identity being specific to the people who have existed historically.
01:07:16.200He was pushing, I believe, along with a few others, to get basically an EU army, a common army made, you know, where each member state contributes soldiers towards a military.
01:07:30.600And that is just further undermining the division between the countries, as in the actual borders.
01:07:36.420And it's trying to create this homogenous blob of sort of central or Western Europe.
01:07:41.380But even then, I mean, he doesn't really it doesn't seem to me that he really believes in like individual European identities outside of I've got a piece of paper saying I'm French.
01:07:52.540I've got a piece of paper saying that I'm German.
01:07:54.820So he goes on later in this interview to talk about the threat of nationalists, saying that I'm a patriot.
01:08:03.860But the best way of building together is to have as few nationalists as possible.
01:08:08.000Nationalists are just distorting the European debate.
01:08:10.760Brexit has impoverished the United Kingdom and all European nationalists are hidden Brexiteers.
01:08:16.160So, of course, he's the one saying earlier on in the interview when he's asked, do you stand by what you said about possibly sending ground troops to Ukraine?
01:08:29.980We're the ones threatening European security.
01:08:32.260He, who has become one of the most hawkish against Russia, saying that we need to escalate by sending French troops, German troops, all other troops, U.S. troops probably as well.
01:08:44.980I'm sure it would be his best case scenario to fight Russians on the ground, therefore escalating it into a greater conflict.
01:08:51.720You mean to say a man with a Napoleon complex wants to avenge his idol's last defeat?
01:09:00.800And he also says that he's got Franco, and he talks about how he would want to neutralize nationalists in Europe.
01:09:08.760And he says, we have a Franco-German agreement with Chancellor Scholz to move a move to qualified majority voting on the two main issues that still require unanimity, namely taxation and foreign policy.
01:09:20.360Foreign policy probably being the more important of the two in his mind right now.
01:09:23.580The reality of European practice is that even when you have a policy that is underqualified majority voting, when you are at a moment of crisis, a serious moment, unanimity comes back in because the leaders bring it back to the council table.
01:09:39.820So what that sounds to me, translated from bureaucrat speak, is to we create crisis to drive consensus.
01:09:48.380We have all of these nationalists threatening our vision, our way of life that we have created in Europe, which is impoverishing European people.
01:09:57.340So if we create a crisis, escalate something, for instance, then that will force the nationalists and populists to step aside or toe the line.
01:10:09.000What is absolutely appalling with lots of EU bureaucrats is that they are, I think basically they believe nothing because a lot of the times I hear this rhetoric that Merkel and Macron in 2015, they just wanted to do what they did.
01:10:27.920I think it's not so much that they want it.
01:10:30.520It's not that they have any humanitarian values or something.
01:10:33.520I think it was a political, what was seen as a political necessity at that moment, because we had the Grexit discussion.
01:10:41.860And at the time, Greece had the awful Syriza government that flooded Greece with 10% of Greece's population with immigrants.
01:11:16.240And what is absolutely wrong about this is that what they are doing is that they are, obviously they care for the next re-election, the next re-election period.
01:11:28.880But also they draw up their plans as bureaucrats and they have completely given up on the idea of the nation state.
01:11:37.540They try to demonize any kind of appeal to a nation.
01:11:42.280And what ends up happening on paper is that their plans are actually making the demographic problem worse, not because it's something that there is an intention behind it, but because when you have, let's say, a demographic issue, bureaucrats are treating it just like Chuck Schumer is treating it in the U.S.
01:12:10.660But most people in Europe and in the West are saying it's not just an economic problem.
01:12:16.560It's also a national and a cultural problem.
01:12:18.660And we want somehow to, let's say, go back and rediscover our culture, reaffirm our values and improve our numbers.
01:12:29.080Because the kind of bureaucratic forecasting and the plans that they are devising and the constant going after the GDP every year is what is actually doing things worse.
01:12:44.020Not because they have any values or they have a plan.
01:12:47.140I think they just care about the GDP and indexes of the sort.
01:12:52.680I do think that that is clearly something that they prioritize over any other what you could call humanitarian values.
01:12:59.560I do think there is an aspect of this where people like Macron, people like the elites that we have in the U.K. and in other parts of Europe have separated themselves so much from the population below them.
01:13:11.980The citizens of their nations, that they see themselves not only as being above them in a hierarchical sense in just terms of I've got the levels of power, but also better than them.
01:13:23.680And see the concerns of those lower than them, specifically the middle classes, as being petty.
01:13:30.440They would probably use terms like bourgeois to describe them.
01:13:33.500And they have a certain disdain for them.
01:13:35.260So I agree with what you're saying there, but I do think that there is a somewhat intentional element in the demographic change that's been foisted upon Europe as a way to try to destroy those values that they see as being disdainful and oppressive to a certain extent.
01:13:50.460I think on a certain extent, these people have drank the Kool-Aid of their own insane ideology.
01:13:55.480But if I carry on, so Russia, of course, in response to this, said, well, if we find French troops, we're going to shoot them.
01:14:06.040If the French troop, if the French appear in the conflict zone, they will inevitably become targets for the Russian armed forces.
01:14:12.160It seems to me that Paris already has proof of this.
01:14:15.660Zakharova said Russia was already seeing growing numbers of French nationals among those killed in Ukraine.
01:14:23.540Russia said on Monday it would practice the deployment of tactical, this is from last month, by the way, of tactical nuclear weapons as part of a military exercise after what Moscow said
01:14:33.940were threats from France, Britain and the United States and regarding Trump as well.
01:14:38.260It does seem that parts of the U.S. security state are trying to do what they're calling Trump proofing Ukraine aid.
01:14:44.900They want to make sure that if Trump gets in, that he won't be able to reverse the escalation and they won't be able to reverse the commitments that the U.S.
01:14:53.880has made to Ukraine in prolonging the conflict.
01:14:56.540So NATO is considering taking over the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the U.S.-led group of nations that coordinates military aid deliveries to Kiev.
01:15:06.960It's also looking to establish a five-year aid package to Ukraine worth more than $100 billion, alliance officials confirmed to SITREP, with NATO Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg pitching the effort to the allies directly.
01:15:22.040So that does seem to suggest what you were talking about earlier, that they want to extend it for as long as possible, that it will drag on and on and on.
01:15:30.300Because for whatever reason, there does seem to be a lot of pride and there does seem to be a lot of investment put into the Ukraine conflict and making sure it goes on.
01:15:40.320And foreign policy here just says that much of this effort centers on future proofing the alliance and Ukraine security if Donald Trump wins a second term as U.S. president.
01:15:50.980And if you want to learn more about how the conflict started, we've got videos on that when it first happened.
01:15:57.520But also an excellent, excellent source of information for this is any discussion that Professor John Mearsheimer has had on this, especially with Judge Napolitano.
01:16:12.200Very interesting discussions that the two of them have together.
01:16:15.080So some of this discussion, what they were discussing was that the U.S. equipment that's been approved to allow targets to be hit in Russia is operated using particular codes, strategic and confidential codes that the U.S. aren't just going to release to Ukraine, Ukrainian officials.
01:16:35.960So in all likelihood, when they are making strikes using U.S. equipment, there are U.S. men with those codes operating them.
01:16:43.140But I've heard from a number of different independent sources that there have been Westerners, so Western European countries and Americans, in combat roles since the beginning of the conflict.
01:16:57.060It's been kept under wraps and it's sort of emerging now as it's been going on.
01:17:01.340But it's been something that's been going on and I don't think it's something we should really doubt or even be surprised by.
01:17:14.740And again, none of this is to say that Ukraine should not be able to exist as an independent and solve for a nation if that's what it is able to do.
01:17:23.560I'm not saying that the people who have sacrificed their lives in Ukraine, on the Ukrainian side, should have been able to sacrifice them in vain.
01:17:30.680What I'm saying is that our leaders in the West seem hell-bent on one level or another escalating and prolonging this conflict for as long as possible.
01:17:40.900And the only thing that you need to do to confirm that this seems to be the intention is to go back and look at what happened in the months following the beginning of this conflict.
01:17:49.800Now, this is an excellent article from the Foreign Affairs written by Samuel Charup and Sergei Radchenko, where they analyzed the peace talks that were initially going on in the months following the conflict's beginnings.
01:18:03.080Where they examined draft agreements that were given by both sides.
01:18:07.700They conducted interviews with the participants and government officials.
01:18:10.920They've reviewed interviews and statements that have been released since then and developed a full timeline of the events.
01:18:15.840Now, I won't go over all of this, but I'll read some of it and try and give you some of the main points because we're running out of time now.
01:18:21.440So, it was only a few days after the war started that Moscow was starting to look for agreement between the two countries.
01:18:27.680Putin arranged a negotiating team, as did Ukraine.
01:18:30.820The reason for it being so soon after seems to be the initial push into Ukraine did not go as well as Russia were expecting.
01:18:37.820They pushed a certain distance onto the territory, but they were unable to take Kiev.
01:18:44.280And Putin realized that he was in for the long game if he wanted to carry this on.
01:18:48.520So, perhaps it was time to get to the negotiating table already and see what we can work out here.
01:18:54.780They exchanged demands and draft agreements over an immediate ceasefire, humanitarian corridors, etc.
01:19:00.900Zelensky and Ukraine were primarily after absolute security agreements from Russia and other states, which would mean that they wouldn't be part of NATO.
01:19:09.040They would actually have the opportunity to join the European Union as part of these talks.
01:19:14.020That was a very strange thing, seeing as Putin was very against that in 2013.
01:19:18.520But it would require them to be neutral.
01:19:21.600And here's the logic as put in the article.
01:19:23.300Russia would be a guarantor too, which would mean that Moscow essentially agreed that the other guarantors would be obliged to intervene if it attacked again.
01:19:30.840In other words, if Moscow accepted that any future aggression against Ukraine would mean a war between Russia and the United States,
01:19:36.460it would be no more inclined to attack Ukraine again than it would be to attack a NATO ally.
01:19:41.920So, it's just a, if you attack us, it immediately escalates.
01:19:46.400You don't get this buffer period like we're in right now.
01:19:50.000That's a really good point because that sort of plays into my interpretation of everything.
01:19:55.320Do you want me to go over it very quickly?
01:21:52.100Although Ukraine would be permanently neutral under the proposed framework, Kiev's path to EU membership would be left open.
01:21:58.540And the guarantor states would explicitly confirm their intention to facilitate Ukraine's membership in the European Union.
01:22:04.600And the communique, they say here, also includes another provision that is stunning in retrospect.
01:22:09.840It calls for the two sides to seek to peacefully resolve their dispute over Crimea during the next 10 to 15 years.
01:22:16.660Which just goes to show that, to a certain extent, this must have been relatively quite serious in terms of the peace talk.
01:22:23.980If Russia was willing to put Crimea on the table and say, we can negotiate this if it means that we can end this conflict early.
01:22:31.200I'm not sure if I'm stealing your thunder here, but I know that a few Western leaders played significant roles in sabotaging these early peace deals to keep the conflict going on.
01:22:41.880Well, the article isn't quite as cut and dry as to say that it's explicitly just the result of someone like Boris Johnson meddling in the affairs.
01:22:53.520It does mention it because it seems that it was after these peace talks started that they were able to push the Russians back even more so than had initially happened that had led to the peace talk starting in the first place.
01:23:05.880And it kind of gave the Ukraine government the sense that they would be able to forge on and possibly push them all the way out.
01:23:13.920So maybe these peace talks aren't entirely needed.
01:23:17.980But, of course, outside parties weren't enthusiastic about them either.
01:23:23.000The West, like you say, has a massive vested interest in attacking Russia.
01:23:26.840They see Russia as kind of a historical enemy at this point, ever since the end of the Second World War.
01:23:33.920And there are still a lot of people within the Western establishment who probably go back to those Cold War years, who carry on that same animosity.
01:23:42.820But they say here, already on March 30th, Boris Johnson seemed disinclined towards diplomacy, stating that instead,
01:23:48.300We should continue to intensify sanctions and with a rolling program until every single one of Putin's troops is out of Ukraine.
01:23:54.320On April 9th, Johnson turned up in Kiev, the first foreign leader to visit after the Russian withdrawal from the capital.
01:23:59.680He reportedly told Zelensky that he thought that any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid.
01:24:05.480Any deal, he recalled saying, would be some victory for him.
01:24:08.740If you give him anything, he'll just keep it, bank it, and then prepare for his next assault.
01:24:12.520In a 2023 interview, David, apologies for the pronunciation,
01:24:19.000Arak Amaya, ruffled some feathers by seeming to hold Johnson responsible for the outcome.
01:24:25.420When we returned from Istanbul, he said, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we won't sign anything at all with the Russians,
01:24:53.280Ultimately, however, in his discussions with Western leaders,
01:24:57.000Zelensky did not prioritize the pursuit of diplomacy with Russia to end the war.
01:25:00.860Neither the United States nor its allies perceived a strong demand from him or them to engage in the diplomatic track.
01:25:07.320At a time, given the outpouring of public sympathy in the West, such a push could well have affected Western policy.
01:25:12.620The Ukrainians' newfound confidence that they could win the war also clearly played a role.
01:25:16.800The Russian retreat from Kiev and other major cities in the Northeast, and the prospect of more weapons from the West changed the military balance.
01:25:24.200Optimism played a big role, and so they carried on, and by late April, they'd hardened their position,
01:25:29.120demanding a Russian withdrawal from the Donbass as a precondition to any treaty.
01:25:34.320And so the chair of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council put it on May 2nd.