Tell Us Mr. Trump

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

So many things to learn

Online

Absurd Times

Our new first lady.

The election is over, more or less, so we have to learn some details and find out what this all means.  So, we have a few questions for the President Elect:

Does this mean that BLACK LIVES DON'T MATTER?  We know you talked about the movement a lot, but now we want details.

When will Hillary start serving time in jail?  You said she would, so when?

Should we invest in Greyhound?  You said you will deport 11,000,000 people to Mexico right away, so are you going to use Greyhound to get them there?  In not, what means will you use?  We should be able to cash in on this.

Will the wall be union made?  Perhaps a silly question, but a lot of your voters were Detroit union workers who were simply abandoned be the automobile industry (which also went to Mexico, BTW).

When can South Korea expect delivery on their H-Bombs?  You said they should have them – we just want a timetable.

When will Saudi Arabia get their H-Bombs?  Same thing.

When will NATO be dissolved? It is expensive and we are tired of defending a bunch of Hungarians anyway.

When will the Moslems get banned?  They need time to sell of the Mosques.

When will you make China bomb North Korea?  You said it's their problem, so we think you will do something about it.

When will people be officially encouraged to grab pussies?  And when should women get pussy-protectors?  We see a big market for that.

When will you send that wild-eyed Islamic terrorist in Pennsylvania to Turkey as Erdogan demanded in his letter of congratulation to you? 

When will you lift sanctions on Russia as Putin asked in his congratulations to you?

When will you get back the money we gave back to Iran and end the treaty with Iran thus enabling them to build nuclear weapons within the next 3 to 4 years?

Has anyone told you where Crimea is yet?

Are you going to be comfortable flying in a place without your name on the side?

We do find it amazing that so many were surprised by this.  We did expect the corporate world to make certain that the country remained under corporate rule, but Daffy Donald might do anything.  Even he doesn't know what he is going to do next, so how can you predict it?

You made certain that the same anger at the corporate world that made both Bernie and Daffy Donald so popular was ignored and frustrated by your DNC, and figured that the anger was not so deep that Clinton could not overcome it.  Well, she failed, thus becoming the first woman ever to loose the Presidency.  Truly historical.

So, many are wondering what next.  Can they actually go out on the streets? Will cops kill more blacks? Will Moslem children be more attacked?  Let us know.

Meanwhile, here is a discussion of what happened, an interview with a more objective view than mine.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, on Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders issued this statement on Trump's election. "Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids—all while the very rich become much richer."

Senator Bernie Sanders, who opposed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, went on to say, quote, "To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him." That's the statement from Bernie Sanders.

Glenn Greenwald, many have said that if Sanders had been the Democratic presidential candidate, then perhaps Trump would not have won the election.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. So, that's a counterfactual that none of us can know for certain. What I do know for certain and what I wrote about back in March or February, I believe, was the fact that all empirical evidence, which, remember, is what Democratic opinion-making elites and liberal pundits and data journalists tell us is the thing that should guide our thinking—all available empirical evidence showed that Bernie Sanders was a much more popular and a much stronger candidate than Hillary Clinton against every single Republican opponent, including Donald Trump. He was running many points ahead of Clinton on every poll, in terms of who he might run against versus her, in terms of approval rating, in terms of popularity.

Democrats insisted that we should ignore all of that empirical evidence, that it was unreliable, that once the general election campaign started, Republicans would depict Sanders as a communist, that he would have no chance, in contrast to Clinton, who has already been deeply vetted. We'll never know for certain whether those arguments were true or not, but what I know for certain is two things. Number one, that the empirical evidence, weak or unreliable or incomplete as it might have been, all pointed to the fact that Hillary Clinton was highly likely to lose, and Bernie Sanders had a greater chance of winning. And, in fact, I wrote an article, back in the primaries, saying, with Donald Trump looming, can we really take the gamble, the huge gamble, of nominating a candidate who is as weak and unpopular as Hillary Clinton? But lost that argument, lost that debate. And as a result, Hillary Clinton was the nominee, and she lost to Donald Trump.

The other point that I think is really worth making is that Sanders—that statement from Senator Sanders is actually quite remarkable, because he isn't coming out and saying everybody who voted for Donald Trump is a racist troglodyte. He's not saying that everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a misogynist who hates women and cast their vote for that reason. He's saying that there are a huge number of people who voted for Donald Trump, and not for Hillary Clinton, who have very valid grievances. And those grievances are grounded in a system of policies that both political parties have played an equal role in creating.

Look at what he is describing: jobs going overseas, industries being destroyed, Wall Street being protected. You can go back into the '80s, into the era of Reagan and trickle-down economics and the destruction of unions, to find the genesis of it. And then you look into the '90s, with NAFTA and free trade mania and the liberation of Wall Street from all kinds of constraints, and into the 2000s, when in the post-2008 economic crisis the Obama administration prosecuted not a single Wall Street executive responsible for that crisis, while continuing to build the world's largest penal state, largely for poor people, people with no power. And it's this inequality, this oppression of huge numbers of people in the name of globalism and free trade, that Bernie Sanders is describing in that statement as why Trump won.

And it's the Democrats and the Republicans who played a huge part in constructing that system, and Hillary Clinton, probably above every other politician who could have run, is the symbol of safeguarding that system, of believing in it, of advocating for it and, most of all, of benefiting from it greatly. And so, you sent a Democratic nominee into the general election, in this climate, who could not have been more ill-suited to voice the kind of systemic critique that Donald Trump, being the con artist that he is, was able to voice and that Senator Sanders has spent his entire career trying to advocate for. And I think you see the contrast really well in terms of how Senator Sanders would have run against Trump in that statement that he just issued versus how most Democrats are reacting to this Trump victory.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have the media part of this—right?—where you have the unending Trump TV, not the new Trump TV, but all the networks' Trump TV, when it came to Donald Trump. They showed more footage of his empty podium, waiting for him to speak, than they ever played of the words of Bernie Sanders. So you had the endless platform for Donald Trump, but rarely did you have Bernie Sanders showing, in any way, the extent of the speeches that he gave. You'd have whole speeches of Donald Trump. But when it came to Bernie Sanders, that famous night, March 15th—that was, what, Super Tuesday 3—every single victor and loser that night, from Rubio to Kasich to Clinton to Cruz to Trump, all their speeches were played—except for Bernie Sanders, who was speaking to thousands and thousands and thousands of people that night in Arizona. This is just emblematic of the rest of the coverage. They never played a word that he said that night.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right, and I think there's a lot to unpack there in terms of how the media functions and in terms of the media role in this election. So, let's begin with the fact that Donald Trump's public persona prior to this election was consecrated and constructed by one of the most powerful media organizations in the world, if not the most powerful media organization in the world, which is NBCNews, which—or NBC, rather, which for many, many years paraded Donald Trump in the format of a reality TV program, watched by tens of millions of Americans, that portrayed him as the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit. He marched into boardrooms, in charge, and unflinchingly fired people who weren't working up to standard performance. He built new businesses. He was the embodiment of everything that Americans are taught to revere. And this is the person who, for decades, has been a racist, a demagogue, a con artist, and yet NBC turned him into this swaggering hero at great profit to itself.

And so, already, he was a byproduct of media worship. And then, once the campaign began, the media, as you said, nonstop fed on Donald Trump, to the exclusion, certainly, first and foremost, of Bernie Sanders, but even to the other candidates, who got far less TV time than Trump did, because he was a ratings gold mine. And they would literally wait on the tarmac and excitingly and breathlessly show his plane about to land. And this built up this image in Americans' minds that Donald Trump was this all-consuming, towering new presence on the American political landscape. And the American media did a critical job in building him up during the primary and entrenching in the minds of Americans that he was not this out-of-the-norm, radical, extremist, dangerous, racist authoritarian that he was, but instead was this new and powerful figure who was going to come in, revolutionize American politics and the American political culture, that so many citizens of the United States have come to despise.

And I think that what you just contrasted, in terms of how Trump was treated and how Sanders was treated, shows a really important truth about how media operates, which is, if you talk to most journalists who work at major media outlets or newspapers, as you know, and you say to them, "You have all kinds of ways that you censor certain opinions, that you have of excluding certain viewpoints," they'll insist that that's not true, that they never are told what to show or not to show, they're never told what to say or not to say. And, of course, that's true. And yet, embedded within all of their editorial judgments about who is worth hearing from and who isn't worth hearing from are all kinds of ideological and partisan biases. So the idea that Donald Trump, the billionaire, celebrity, TV star, should constantly be heard from, whereas Bernie Sanders, the old Jewish socialist from Vermont, who nobody took seriously, doesn't need to be heard from, with all of his boring speeches about college debt and healthcare and the like, in that choice is a very strong and pedantic ideological choice that the American media embraced and played a huge role in enabling Trump to march to the primary.

Now, the only other point I want to add to this immediate issue is that I do think that media behavior changed fundamentally with regard to Donald Trump once he became the nominee. So, you have the primary period, where they treated him like a normal candidate. They revered him. They gave him endless free TV time. But once he became the nominee and they took seriously the prospect that he might be president and they started to realize and internalize the responsibility they bore for enabling him to get that far, I think they went all the way to the other extreme, where they completely united in this kind of mission of destroying Donald Trump, of preventing his victory and ensuring that Hillary Clinton was elected. And in a big way, that also played a role, unwittingly, I think, in helping Trump, because, of all the institutions in the United States, the institutions of authority that are hated, the American media leads the way. And so, when people saw the media basically trying to coerce them or dictate to them that they should turn their backs on Donald Trump, that they should vote for Hillary Clinton, I think a backlash ensued, where people believed that the media was being unfair, and were not going to you take marching orders from these media institutions, that they also have come to regard as fundamentally corrupt. And, unwittingly, I think that played an important role, as well, in ensuring that he could win.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, there's the leaked Clinton campaign memo to the Democratic National Committee from last year regarding Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. The memo said, quote, "We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are the leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously." Glenn Greenwald, your response to that?

GLENN GREENWALD: There are a lot of fascinating insights in those Clinton emails. I know Democratic partisans are furious that they ever saw the light of day, and they're furious precisely because they contain a lot of really important and interesting insights about how political operatives manipulate the media, about how the media aids certain factions and tries to work against others, about how campaign operatives within the Democratic Party manipulate public opinion.

And one of the more interesting aspects is exactly that, the fact that the Clinton campaign did view certain Republican candidates, like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, as being serious threats to them and to Hillary Clinton's election, and, in what they thought was a very clever maneuver, wanted to elevate the candidates that they thought were less threatening, such as Donald Trump, to the top of the pack. And in a lot of ways, they have reaped what they have sown, because Donald Trump did end up essentially becoming the nominee because of the media's treatment of him, and, in retrospect, he probably was one of the more threatening candidates, because the Clintons know how to defeat conventional Orthodox Republican candidates like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. They can do that in their sleep. Donald Trump was a very unconventional candidate. I think he animated parts of the voting population who either haven't voted in the past or who haven't voted Republican to vote for him. And the strategies that the Clintons anticipated they would use, because they've always worked in the past, simply didn't work this time. And you could conclude that, in some ways, they sort of outsmarted themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break, then come back to this discussion. And after we finish with Glenn, we'll be joined by 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben on where the environmental movement goes here, with a president-elect who calls climate change a Chinese hoax and is calling, among other things, for permitting the Keystone XL pipeline. Glenn Greenwald is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, one of the founding editors of The Intercept. This is Democracy Now! Back with Glenn in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Our guest is Glenn Greenwald, who wrote the piece, "Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit."

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Glenn Greenwald, in that piece, you write, quote, "that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people." You point also to the many analogies between Brexit, the decision by the British public to exit the European Union. So could you say a little about those analogies and how Trump fits into wider public sentiments, not just in the U.S., but also in Europe?

GLENN GREENWALD: It's incredibly striking, but also very alarming, how similar the path of Brexit was to the election of Trump, because just like with the U.S. election, in the U.K. during the Brexit debate referendum, British elites, outside of this kind of circle of populist, right-wing Murdoch types, pretty much were unified across ideological and party lines. You had the Liberals and the Labour centrists and the sort of more establishment Conservatives united in opposition to Brexit. And they essentially stayed online all day on Twitter telling each other how smart they were and praising each other's columns, saying that Brexit was this grave threat and this unique evil. And the opinion class that is considered respectable, meaning not the right-wing tabloids, essentially unified, just like the opinion-making elites in the U.S., outside of Sean Hannity and Fox News and Ann Coulter, that wing of Fox News and that right-wing circle, were unified, as well. You had leading neocon intellectuals and establishment Republicans and then the sort of establishment liberal pundits all in agreement that Trump was this grave evil, constantly praising each other and citing each other in this endless echo feedback chamber.

And so, the people who were supporting Brexit and the people who were supporting Trump weren't really ever heard from; they were just talked about in very contemptuous tones. These were the troglodytes. These were the uneducated idiots. These were the people motivated by malice and racism and xenophobia. And so they were sort of looked at like zoo animals, like things that you dissect and condemn.

And because this opinion-making elite was so unified, it led so many people, in both cases, to believe that their victory was certain. Nobody thought, in the opinion-making elite classes, that Brexit would win, and the same is true of Trump.

And then, both before and after you had this result, what you saw is not any notion of accountability. Why are there so many people wanting to leave the EU? Why are there so many people supporting this person so far outside the norm? No accountability, no self-critique. Only a way to distract attention from their own responsibility by just spouting hatred and disgust for the people who are being insubordinate.

And what you have as a result are these decades of trends that we began by talking about, that Senator Sanders described, in which tens of millions of people have been trampled on by these policies of Western institutions of authority, who are essentially invisible and ignored. And the more you ignore them and the more you scorn them and the more you tell them that their grievances are invalid, the more they're going to be susceptible to scapegoating, the more their bigotry will be inflamed, and the more they'll want to destroy the systems and the institutions that they believe are responsible for their suffering. And so, a lot of people who voted for Brexit, a lot of people who voted for Trump understand exactly all the arguments that were made about why each of them is potentially destructive and so dangerous, and they did it, not despite that, but because of that, because they want to punish and ultimately destroy the institutions who no longer have any credibility with them and who they believe are responsible for the suffering and the lack of security that they experience in their lives without anyone really caring about it at all. And until we start to address that and until institutions, elite institutions, take responsibility for it, those things are going to continue to fester and grow, and it very well may be the case that Trump and Brexit are just the beginning of this very alarming cycle, rather than the peak of it.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

THE ABSURD TIMES

  

          We have been subjected, you and I, to a constant stream of erroneous and quite biased language on the subject of the independence of Crimea and its joining of the Russian Federation. We warned of it, it happened, and now we are making things worse.  This is quite an accomplishment for this country, but we are full of, er, resources.

          For example, our media usually uses words such as the "invasion" of the region, "annexing," and "takeover".  

          A short after this former Reagan/Bush ambassador to the Soviet Union and then Russia gave this interview, Obama got on the networks to say he is imposing "sanctions" against Russia.  Shortly after that, Russia imposed sanctions on several U. S. Senators, the correct ones, BTW.  

THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2014

Former U.S. Ambassador: Behind Crimea Crisis, Russia Responding to Years of "Hostile" U.S. Policy

The standoff over Ukraine and the fate of Crimea has sparked the worst East-West crisis since the end of the Cold War. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on top Russian officials while announcing new military exercises in Baltic states. Meanwhile in Moscow, the Russian government says it is considering changing its stance on Iran’s nuclear talks in response to newly imposed U.S. sanctions. As tensions rise, we are joined by Jack Matlock, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Matlock argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin is acting in response to years of perceived hostility from the U.S., from the eastward expansion of NATO to the bombing of Serbia to the expansion of American military bases in eastern Europe.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Ukrainian government has announced plans to abandon its military bases in Crimea and evacuate its forces following Russia’s decision to annex the region. Earlier today, Russian forces reportedly released the commander of the Ukrainian Navy, who has been seized in his own headquarters in Crimea. At the United Nations, ambassadors sparred over the situation in Crimea. Yuriy Sergeyev is the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.N.

YURIY SERGEYEV: The declaration of independence by the Crimean Republic is a direct consequence of the application of the use of force and threats against Ukraine by the Russian Federation, and, in view of Russian nuclear power status, has a particularly dangerous character for Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, as well as for international peace and security in general. Accordingly, I assert that on the basis of customary norms and international law, that the international community is obliged not to recognize Crimea as a subject of international law or any situation, treaty or agreement that may be arise or be achieved by this territory.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, defended Moscow’s move to annex Crimea.

VITALY CHURKIN: [translated] A historic injustice has been righted, which resulted from the arbitrary actions of the leader of the U.S.S.R. at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, who, with the stroke of a pen in 1954, in violation of the constitutional norms, transferred the Russian region of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was part of the same state then. And he did this without informing the population of Crimea and, of course, without their consent. And nobody cared about the views of the Crimeans.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the U.S. Navy warship, the Truxtun, a U.S. guided-missile destroyer, conducted a one-day military exercise in the Black Sea with the Bulgarian and Romanian navies. And Vice President Joe Biden has been meeting this week with the heads of states of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, promising Washington would protect them from any Russian aggression. On Wednesday, President Obama addressed the crisis during an interview with NBC 7 San Diego.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We are not going to be getting into a military excursion in Ukraine. What we are going to do is mobilize all of our diplomatic resources to make sure that we’ve got a strong international coalition that sends a clear message, which is: The Ukraine should decide their own destiny. Russia, right now, is violating international law and the sovereignty of another country. You know, might doesn’t make right. And, you know, we are going to continue to ratchet up the pressure on Russia as it continues down its current course.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the growing crisis in Ukraine, we’re joined by Ambassador Jack Matlock. He served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 1987 to 1991. He’s the author of several books, including Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended. He recently wrote a column for The Washington Post headlined "The U.S. Has Treated Russia Like a Loser Since the End of the Cold War."

Ambassador Matlock, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the situation right now, what has just taken place, Ukraine now pulling out of Crimea.

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Well, I think that what we have seen is a reaction, in many respects, to a long history of what the Russian government, the Russian president and many of the Russian people—most of them—feel has been a pattern of American activity that has been hostile to Russia and has simply disregarded their national interests. They feel that having thrown off communism, having dispensed with the Soviet Empire, that the U.S. systematically, from the time it started expanding NATOto the east, without them, and then using NATO to carry out what they consider offensive actions about an—against another country—in this case, Serbia—a country which had not attacked any NATO member, and then detached territory from it—this is very relevant now to what we’re seeing happening in Crimea—and then continued to place bases in these countries, to move closer and closer to borders, and then to talk of taking Ukraine, most of whose people didn’t want to be a member of NATO, intoNATO, and Georgia. Now, this began an intrusion into an area which the Russians are very sensitive. Now, how would Americans feel if some Russian or Chinese or even West European started putting bases in Mexico or in the Caribbean, or trying to form governments that were hostile to us? You know, we saw how we virtually went ballistic over Cuba. And I think that we have not been very attentive to what it takes to have a harmonious relationship with Russia.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ambassador Matlock, Americans often look at these crises in isolation, and some of the press coverage deals with them that way. But from your perspective, you argued that we should see the continuum of events that have happened from the Russian point of view—for instance, the Orange Revolution, the pronouncements of some of our leaders several years back, the crisis in Georgia a few years ago, and how the Russians are seeing the original good feeling that most Russians had toward the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union compared to now.

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Yes, that’s absolutely true. You see, in the Orange Revolution in Kiev, foreigners, including Americans, were very active in organizing people and inspiring them. Now, you know, I have to ask Americans: How would Occupy Wall Street have looked if you had foreigners out there leading them? Do you think that would have helped them get their point across? I don’t think so. And I think we have to understand that when we start directly interfering, particularly our government officials, in the internal makeup of other governments, we’re really asking for trouble.

And, you know, we were pretty careful not to do that in my day. And I recall, for example, when I was being consulted by the newly elected leaders of what was still Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. They were still in the Soviet Union, and they would come to us. We were, of course, sympathetic to their independence; we had never even recognized that they were legally part of the Soviet Union. But I had to tell them, "Keep it peaceful. If you are suppressed, there’s nothing we can do about it. We cannot come and help you. We’re not going to start a nuclear war." Well, they kept it peaceful, despite provocations.

Now, what have we been telling the Ukrainians, the Georgians—at least some of us, officials? "Just hold on. You can join NATO, and that will solve your problems for you." You know, and yet, it is that very prospect, that the United States and its European allies were trying to surround Russia with hostile bases, that has raised the emotional temperature of all these things. And that was a huge mistake. As George Kennan wrote back in the ’90s when this question came up, the decision to expand NATO the way it was done was one of the most fateful and bad decisions of the late 20th century.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Vice President Joe Biden, who criticized Russia recently during his trip to Lithuania Wednesday.

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I want to make it clear: We stand resolutely with our Baltic allies in support of Ukrainian people and against Russian aggression. As long as Russia continues on this dark path, they will face increasing political and economic isolation. There are those who say that this action shows the old rules still apply. But Russia cannot escape the fact that the world is changing and rejecting outright their behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: And in a speech Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin blasted what he called Western hypocrisy on Crimea, saying that the U.S. selectively applies international law according to its political interests.

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] Our Western partners, headed by the United States of America, prefer in their practical policy to be guided not by international law, but by the right of the strong. They started to believe that they have been chosen and they are unique, that they are allowed to decide the fate of the world, that only they could always be right. They do whatever they want

AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Jack Matlock, if you could respond to both Biden and Putin?

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Well, I think that this rhetoric on both sides is being very unhelpful. The fact is, Russia now has returned Crimea to Russia. It has been, most of its recent history, in the last couple of centuries, been Russian. The majority of the people are Russian. They clearly would prefer to be in Russia. And the bottom line is, we can argue 'til doomsday over who did what and why and who was the legal and who was not—I'm sure historians generations from now will still be arguing it—but the fact is, Russia now is not going to give up Crimea. The fact also is, if you really look at it dispassionately, Ukraine is better off without Crimea, because Ukraine is divided enough as it is. Their big problem is internal, in putting together disparate people who have been put together in that country. The distraction of Crimea, where most of the people did not want to be in Ukraine and ended up in Ukraine as a result of really almost a bureaucratic whim, is—was, I think, a real liability for Ukraine.

Now, the—we should be concentrating now on how we put Ukraine back together—not we, but the Ukrainians, with the help of the Europeans, with the help of the Russians, and with at least a benign view from the United States. Now, the American president and vice president directly challenging the Russian president and threatening them with isolation is going to bring the opposite effect. All of this has actually increased President Putin’s popularity among Russians. Now, you know, most politicians, they like to do things that make them more popular at home. And, you know, the idea that we are acting, you know, contrary to what Russians would consider their very natural interests—that is, in bringing an area which had been Russian and traditionally Russian for a long time back into Russia—they look at that as a good thing. It’s going to be very costly to Russia, they’re going to find out, in many ways. But to continue all of this rhetoric, I would ask, well, how is it going to end? What is your objective? Because it isn’t going to free up Crimea again or give it back to Ukraine.

I think it would be most helpful to encourage the Ukrainians to form a united government that can begin reforms. The proposals before, both by the EU and by Russia, would not have solved their problems. And they are not going to solve the problems by taking a government that basically represents one half of the country and making it work on the whole country. And all of this interference, both by Russia and by the West, including the United States, has tended to split Ukraine. Now, that is the big issue there. And we need to turn our attention more to it. And I just hope everyone can calm down and look at realities and stop trying to start sort of a new Cold War over this. As compared to the issues of the Cold War, this is quite minor. It has many of the characteristics of a family dispute. And when outsiders get into a family dispute, they’re usually not very helpful.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ambassador Matlock, what would you, if you were counseling the president, urge him to do at this stage? Because obviously there are these pretty weak sanctions that have so far been announced. What would your advice be?

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Well, I think, first of all, we should start keeping our voice down and sort of let things work out. You know, to ship in military equipment and so on is just going to be a further provocation. Obviously, this is not something that’s going to be solved by military confrontations. So, I think if we can find a way to speak less in public, to use more quiet diplomacy—and right now, frankly, the relationships between our presidents are so poisonous, they really should have representatives who can quietly go and, you know, work with counterparts elsewhere.

But fundamentally, it’s going to be the Ukrainians who have to put their society back together. It is seriously broken now. And it seems to me they could take a leaf from the Finns, who have been very successful ever since World War II in putting together a country with both Finns and Swedes, by treating them equally, by being very respectful and careful about their relations with Russia, never getting into—anymore into military struggles or allowing foreign bases on their land. And they’ve been extremely successful. Why can’t the Ukrainians follow a policy of that sort? I think, for them, it would work, too. But first, they have to find a way to unite the disparate elements in Ukraine; otherwise, these pressures from Russia, on the one hand, and the West, on the other, is going to simply tear them apart. Now—

AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador, on Wednesday—

JACK MATLOCK JR.: —in the final analysis, if the—

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, the head of Ukraine’s First National TV was attacked in his office by members of the far-right Svoboda party, including at least one member of Parliament who serves on the parliamentary committee on freedom of speech. The attackers accused the station of working for the Russian authorities, after it aired a live broadcast of the signing of the agreement between President Putin and the de facto Crimean authorities. In a video posted online, the attackers are seen forcing the head of the channel to write a resignation letter. Heather McGill of Amnesty International condemned the attack, saying, quote, "The acting Ukrainian authorities must waste no time in demonstrating that basic human rights are protected in Ukraine and that nobody will face discrimination because of their political views or ethnic origin." Ambassador Matlock, can you talk about this attack and the role of these far-right-wing parties in the new Ukrainian government?

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Well, I’m not intimately informed about all of the details, but—and I would say that I think Russian media have exaggerated that right-wing threat. On the other hand, those who have ignored it, I think, are making a big mistake. We do have to understand that a significant part of the violence at the Maidan, the demonstrations in Kiev, were done by these extreme right-wing, sort of neo-fascist groups. And they do—some of their leaders do occupy prominent positions in the security forces of the new government. And I think—I think the Russians and others are quite legitimately concerned about that. Therefore, you know, many of these things are not nearly as black and white, when we begin to look at them, as is implied in much of the rhetoric that we’re hearing. And I do think that everybody needs now to take a quiet breath to really look at where we are and to see if we can’t find ways, by keeping our voices down, to help the Ukrainians in present-day Ukraine to get to a road to greater unity and reform that will make them a viable state.

AMY GOODMAN: Jack Matlock, we want to thank—

JACK MATLOCK JR.: And I would argue that—

AMY GOODMAN: We want to—

JACK MATLOCK JR.: —they are better off without Crimea.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us. Ambassador Matlock served as the U.S. ambassador—

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: —to Moscow from 1987 to 1991 under both President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush, and he’s the author of a number of books, includingSuperpower Illusions and Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended.

---

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.