Transcript
00:00:00 If you could talk to Vladimir Putin once again now,
00:00:04 what kind of things would you talk about here?
00:00:08 What kind of questions would you ask?
00:00:12 The following is a conversation with Oliver Stone.
00:00:15 He’s one of the greatest filmmakers of all time
00:00:17 with three Oscar wins and 11 Oscar nominations.
00:00:21 His films tell stories of war and power,
00:00:24 fearlessly and often controversially,
00:00:27 shining a light on the dark parts
00:00:28 of American and global history.
00:00:31 His films include Platoon, Wall Street,
00:00:34 Born on the 4th of July, Scarface, JFK,
00:00:37 Nixon, Alexander, W, Snowden,
00:00:41 and documentaries where he has interviewed
00:00:43 some of the most powerful and consequential people
00:00:46 in the world, including Fidel Castro,
00:00:49 Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin.
00:00:52 And in this conversation, Oliver and I
00:00:54 mostly focus our discussion on Vladimir Putin,
00:00:57 Russia, and the war in Ukraine.
00:01:00 My goal with these conversations
00:01:02 is to understand the human being before me,
00:01:04 to understand not just what they think,
00:01:07 but how they think, to steel man their ideas,
00:01:10 and to steel man the devil’s advocate,
00:01:12 all in service of understanding, not derision.
00:01:16 I have done this poorly in the past.
00:01:18 I’m still struggling with this,
00:01:20 but I’m working hard to do better.
00:01:23 I believe the moment we draw lines
00:01:25 between good people and evil people
00:01:28 will lose our ability to see that we’re all one people
00:01:32 in the most fundamental of ways,
00:01:35 and will lose track of the deep truth
00:01:37 expressed by the old Solzhenitsyn line
00:01:40 that I return to time and time again,
00:01:43 that the line between good and evil
00:01:45 runs through the heart of every man.
00:01:48 Oliver Stone has a perspective
00:01:50 that he extensively documents
00:01:52 in his powerful controversial series,
00:01:54 The Untold History of the United States,
00:01:57 that imperialism and the military industrial complex
00:02:01 paved the path to absolute power,
00:02:04 and thus corrupt the minds of the leaders
00:02:06 and institutions that wield it.
00:02:08 From this perspective, the way out
00:02:10 of the humanitarian crisis and human suffering in Ukraine,
00:02:14 and the way out from the pull
00:02:16 of the beating drums of nuclear war
00:02:18 is not simple to understand,
00:02:20 but we must, because all of humanity hangs in the balance.
00:02:25 I will talk to many people who seek to understand
00:02:27 the way out of this growing catastrophe,
00:02:30 including to historians, to leaders,
00:02:32 and perhaps most importantly,
00:02:34 to people on the ground in Ukraine and Russia,
00:02:37 not just about war and suffering,
00:02:39 but about life, friendship, family, love, and hope.
00:02:44 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:02:46 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:02:48 in the description, and now, dear friends,
00:02:51 here’s Oliver Stone.
00:02:54 You’re working on a documentary now about nuclear energy.
00:02:58 Yes.
00:02:59 So it’s interesting to talk about this.
00:03:01 Energy is such a big part of the world,
00:03:04 about geopolitics of the world,
00:03:06 about the way the world is.
00:03:08 What do you think is the role of nuclear energy
00:03:10 in the 21st century?
00:03:11 Good question, and first of all,
00:03:12 obviously everyone’s talking about climate change, right?
00:03:14 So here I wake up to that a few years ago,
00:03:17 and clearly were concerned.
00:03:21 I picked up a book by Josh Goldstein
00:03:25 and his coauthor, who’s Swedish.
00:03:27 Those two wrote a book called A Bright Future.
00:03:30 It came out a few years ago, and I lapped it up.
00:03:33 It was a book, fact based, clear,
00:03:37 not too long, and not too technical,
00:03:40 and it was very clear that they were in favor
00:03:44 of all kinds of renewables, renewable energy, yes.
00:03:49 They made it very clear how dangerous oil
00:03:53 and gas were, methane,
00:03:56 and made it very clear to the layman like me,
00:03:59 and at the same time said that these renewables
00:04:02 could work so far, but the gap is enormous
00:04:06 as to how much electricity the world is gonna need
00:04:10 in 2050 and beyond, two, three, four times.
00:04:14 We don’t even know the damage, but we have India,
00:04:16 we have China, we have Africa, we have Asia
00:04:19 coming onto the scene wanting more and more electricity.
00:04:22 So they address the problem as a global one,
00:04:25 not just as often in the United States.
00:04:27 You get the ethnocentric United States point of view
00:04:31 that we know we’re doing well, blah, blah, blah.
00:04:34 We’re not doing well, but we sell that
00:04:37 to people that we’re comfortable.
00:04:38 We spend more energy than anybody,
00:04:40 this country per capita, than anybody,
00:04:44 and at the same time, we don’t seem to understand
00:04:47 the global picture, so that’s what they did,
00:04:49 and they made me very worried.
00:04:50 So the only way to close that gap,
00:04:52 the only way in their mind is nuclear energy,
00:04:55 and talking about a gap of building a huge amount
00:04:58 of reactors over the next 30 years,
00:05:01 and starting now, they make that point over and over again.
00:05:08 So obviously this country, the United States,
00:05:11 is not gonna go in that direction,
00:05:13 because it just is incapable of having that kind of will,
00:05:17 political will, and fear is a huge factor,
00:05:20 and still a lot of shibboleths, a lot of myths
00:05:25 about nuclear energy have confused
00:05:29 and confounded the landscape.
00:05:30 The environmentalists have played a huge role
00:05:33 in doing good things, many good things,
00:05:36 but also confusing and confounding the landscape,
00:05:39 and making accusations against nuclear energy
00:05:41 that were exaggerated.
00:05:45 So taking all these things into consideration,
00:05:48 we set about making this documentary,
00:05:50 which is about finished now, almost finishing.
00:05:53 It’s an hour and 40 minutes, and that was a hard part,
00:05:56 getting it down from about three and a half hours
00:05:58 to about this, something more manageable,
00:06:00 and is it interviews?
00:06:02 It’s interviews, among others,
00:06:04 but essentially we went to Russia, we went to France,
00:06:07 which is the most, perhaps, advanced nuclear country
00:06:10 in the world, Russia, and the United States.
00:06:14 We went to the Idaho laboratory,
00:06:16 and talked to the scientists there,
00:06:19 as well as the Department of Energy people
00:06:22 that are handling this.
00:06:23 Idaho is one of the experimental labs,
00:06:25 the United States is probably one of the most advanced,
00:06:27 and they’re doing a lot of advanced nuclear there.
00:06:29 We also, we studied, well, Russia gave us a lot of insight.
00:06:36 We’re very cooperative,
00:06:37 because they have some of the most advanced nuclear,
00:06:41 actually the probably most advanced nuclear reactor
00:06:43 in the world, at Beloyarsk, at the Ural Mountains.
00:06:46 So we did an investigation there,
00:06:49 and in France they have some very advanced nuclear reactors
00:06:55 and they’re building, and now they’re building again.
00:06:58 The Green Party came into power,
00:07:01 just not into power, but became a factor in France,
00:07:04 and there was a motion when Hollande was president,
00:07:07 they started to move away from it.
00:07:08 Actually, they were beginning to just abandon,
00:07:13 they let, not complete, in other words,
00:07:17 close down some of the nuclear reactors,
00:07:18 there was talk of that, but thank God,
00:07:20 France did not do that, and Macron came in
00:07:23 and recently reversed it, reversed it,
00:07:27 and they’re building as fast as they can now,
00:07:28 especially with the Ukraine war going on,
00:07:32 there’s an awareness that Russia will not be providing,
00:07:36 may not be providing the energy Europe needs.
00:07:39 So, and then China is the other one too,
00:07:42 that’s the other factor, I’m talking about the big boys.
00:07:45 They have, doing tremendous work and fast,
00:07:48 which is very hopeful, but of course,
00:07:51 China is building in all directions at once,
00:07:53 coal continues to be huge in China,
00:07:57 and methane too,
00:08:01 but basically coal, coal in India, in China,
00:08:05 have the biggest users of coal,
00:08:08 and as you know, Germany went back to coal a few years ago,
00:08:13 so all these factors, it’s a fascinating picture globally,
00:08:16 so we try to achieve a consensus that where nuclear can work
00:08:20 and where it will be working,
00:08:22 where it will be used more and more,
00:08:24 the question is how much carbon dioxide China
00:08:28 and Russia will be putting out.
00:08:30 France is the only one that’s not putting it out.
00:08:33 The United States has not changed,
00:08:34 with all the talk and all the nonsense about renewables
00:08:38 and the new lifestyle and all this,
00:08:41 it’s great for your guilt complex,
00:08:43 but it doesn’t do anything for the total accumulation
00:08:47 of carbon dioxide in the world.
00:08:48 Who’s gonna lead the way on nuclear, do you think?
00:08:51 You mentioned Russia, France, China, United States,
00:08:54 who’s gonna lead?
00:08:54 Yeah, I don’t think it’s gonna be
00:08:56 a United Nations kind of thing,
00:08:58 because the world doesn’t seem capable of uniting.
00:09:01 We go to these conferences, Kyoto,
00:09:03 and we talk and we agree,
00:09:06 but then we don’t actually enforce,
00:09:08 so I don’t think it can happen that way.
00:09:09 I think it’s gonna be an individual race with countries.
00:09:13 They’re gonna just do it for their own self interest,
00:09:16 like China’s doing it.
00:09:18 China, the thing is, if it works, and I’m praying
00:09:21 that it will really work on a big scale,
00:09:23 China will back away from coal naturally.
00:09:26 The same thing will be true of India.
00:09:27 They will see the benefits, because if you go to India,
00:09:31 you see the cities, the pollution.
00:09:33 You walk around in that stuff, and you get,
00:09:35 it’s not, there’s no hope in this, and you sense it.
00:09:39 So people will move in this direction naturally,
00:09:41 because nuclear is clean energy.
00:09:44 And the amount of casualties of nuclear
00:09:48 is the lowest on the industrial scale
00:09:50 for energy producing, from coal down to oil, everything.
00:09:54 The lowest casualty rate, very lowest,
00:09:57 .002 or something, is nuclear.
00:10:00 So not that many people have died from nuclear.
00:10:04 Not that many, I think 50 people at Chernobyl,
00:10:07 which was the worst accident.
00:10:09 Nobody had died at Fukushima.
00:10:12 Nobody died at Three Mile Island,
00:10:13 and that’s what you hear all over and over again,
00:10:16 these accidents.
00:10:19 The environmentalists have sold us the idea
00:10:22 that they’re dangerous.
00:10:24 And it’s, a lot of environmentalists, thank God,
00:10:27 are changing, they’ve come off that routine,
00:10:29 and they’ve saying, this, we were wrong.
00:10:32 We’ve done a lot of good work.
00:10:34 Greenpeace did a lot of good work.
00:10:35 Whale, whales, saving this, saving that.
00:10:38 But they admit themselves, not they don’t,
00:10:41 but people who have been in the organization
00:10:44 have said, we were wrong.
00:10:46 In 1956, we show the articles
00:10:51 in the New York Times that came out,
00:10:54 the Rockefeller Foundation,
00:10:56 which of course is a big producer of oil,
00:11:00 the Rockefeller family, and the foundation came out
00:11:05 with a study, which was weighted.
00:11:09 They tipped the scale, put a thumb on the scale,
00:11:13 but it was a scientific expose of radiation
00:11:17 in the study that came out, printed in the New York Times,
00:11:22 because the New York Times publisher, Salzburger,
00:11:24 was on their board, he was one of the board members.
00:11:28 So they got a lot of strong publicity
00:11:32 condemning radiation, which killed,
00:11:36 started the process of doubting nuclear energy.
00:11:39 The radiation levels that they pointed out
00:11:40 were very minor, and of course,
00:11:43 if you go into a scientific analysis of this now
00:11:46 with what we know, it’s just not true.
00:11:49 But it tilted the scale back in the 50s, 60s,
00:11:52 and started the questioning the nuclear business.
00:11:56 Do you think that was malevolence or incompetence?
00:11:59 No, I think it was competition.
00:12:01 I don’t think it was conspiracy
00:12:02 as much as it was essentially,
00:12:04 we don’t want this, nuclear energy’s gonna end
00:12:07 the dominance of oil, absolutely, and it will.
00:12:10 And it will anyway, because it’s the only sane way
00:12:13 for the world to proceed.
00:12:14 But the world will have to learn through adversity.
00:12:20 So in other words, this situation could get worse,
00:12:23 much worse, and certain countries
00:12:25 are just gonna have to adapt, like we always do.
00:12:28 When things become too hard, you’ve got to go,
00:12:30 you have to change your thinking.
00:12:33 And humans are pretty good at that.
00:12:35 Yes, talking about human nature, they’re very adept
00:12:37 at that, Germany, for example.
00:12:40 I mean, they were, when the Fukushima happened,
00:12:42 they went out of the nuclear business.
00:12:44 That was shocking to me.
00:12:46 They just pulled out and they destroyed,
00:12:49 destructed several of their nuclear reactors
00:12:51 who were still functioning, and put up coal,
00:12:54 or yeah, put up coal and oil, replaced it.
00:12:59 And as a result, Germany drifted into this place
00:13:03 next to France, their electricity bills went up,
00:13:07 and France stayed the same.
00:13:09 They don’t have that, they have a different system
00:13:11 in Europe, but more or less, no question that France
00:13:13 was doing a lot better than Germany.
00:13:15 And now, with this Ukraine issue,
00:13:18 it’s a very interesting fulcrum point,
00:13:20 whether Germany is, what direction they’re gonna go now.
00:13:25 How can they, how can they keep going with coal?
00:13:29 They just can’t.
00:13:30 What’s the connection between oil, coal, nuclear, and war?
00:13:36 Sort of energy and conflict.
00:13:41 When you look at the 21st century,
00:13:43 when you were doing this documentary,
00:13:45 were you thinking of nuclear as a way to power the world,
00:13:48 but is it also to avoid conflict over resources?
00:13:53 Is there some aspect to energy being a source of conflict
00:13:57 that we’re trying to avoid?
00:14:04 I don’t have the energy, the history of energy
00:14:06 at my fingertips, and it’s a very long history here.
00:14:12 But I would say, apparently not.
00:14:15 It does seem that individually, each country
00:14:18 can answer its needs by building.
00:14:21 And up until now, we haven’t had conflict,
00:14:24 except in this issue of Russia supplying Europe.
00:14:31 Obviously, the pipeline, Nord Stream 2 has been closed,
00:14:34 and Nord Stream 1 is also probably gonna be phased out.
00:14:38 And the concept of Russia supplying gas to Europe
00:14:44 is now up in the air, and who knows what’s gonna happen.
00:14:47 I just don’t see how Europe can get away
00:14:50 from using Russian gas.
00:14:53 But Russian gas is not the solution,
00:14:55 because it’s methane, too, and it goes up
00:14:57 into the atmosphere.
00:14:58 Methane, in the short term, is worse than coal, worse.
00:15:04 There’s all kinds of charts we show in the film.
00:15:06 We try not to be too overfactual,
00:15:09 but methane is not the answer.
00:15:12 It’s a short term answer.
00:15:18 Will countries go to war over energy is a question
00:15:22 that I’m trying to think of all the wars that happened.
00:15:25 You could say Germany, of course, during World War II
00:15:28 needed oil very badly, and it dictated their strategy
00:15:32 with Romania, et cetera, and getting the oil fields open.
00:15:36 But I haven’t thought that one through.
00:15:40 I’d have to make a documentary on it
00:15:42 to really understand how energy and war interface.
00:15:47 It’s always part of the calculation,
00:15:49 but it’s a question of how much.
00:15:51 Right, that’s the question.
00:15:53 I just have to ask, because you mentioned
00:15:55 your mom was from France, you’ve traveled
00:15:57 for this documentary, and you traveled in general
00:16:00 throughout the world in Russia, Ukraine.
00:16:04 What are the defining characteristics of these cultures?
00:16:07 Let’s go with Russia.
00:16:09 So as I told you, I’m half Ukrainian, half Russian.
00:16:14 I came from that part of the world.
00:16:16 What are some interesting, beautiful aspects
00:16:18 of the culture of Russia and Ukraine?
00:16:21 I can’t really speak honestly of Ukraine.
00:16:23 I was there only in 1983 when I visited
00:16:28 the Soviet Union under the communism,
00:16:30 and Kiev was beautiful and was one of the nicer places
00:16:34 I went, but they were very much stultified
00:16:38 by the communist system, they all were.
00:16:41 The best places to visit in Russia were always in the South,
00:16:43 whether Georgia or the Muslim countries,
00:16:49 it was always a better culture in terms of comfort.
00:16:52 But communism was rough, and that was the end of it,
00:16:55 pretty much Brezhnev regime, and then Andropov.
00:16:58 Gorbachev was three years in the future when I was there.
00:17:01 So I can’t talk about Ukraine, and they’ve not been friendly
00:17:05 to me since ISIS, of course, since I made
00:17:08 the Putin interviews, you know, Ukraine has banned me,
00:17:11 I believe, they’ve been very tough on people
00:17:14 who are critical.
00:17:16 I think the Russian people have been very special to me,
00:17:19 and perhaps because of my European upbringing,
00:17:22 but I enjoy talking to them, I find them very open,
00:17:25 very generous, and they appreciate support,
00:17:29 they appreciate people who say, you know,
00:17:31 I understand why your government is doing this
00:17:33 or this or this, I’ve tried to stay open minded
00:17:36 and listen to both sides.
00:17:39 The thing that I have seen as an American is, of course,
00:17:42 this American enmity towards Russia from the very beginning.
00:17:46 I grew up in 1940, 46, I was born in the 50s,
00:17:50 it was so anti Russian, they were everywhere,
00:17:54 they were in our schools, they were in our State Department,
00:17:57 they were spying on us, they were stealing the country
00:18:01 from us, that was the way the American right wing,
00:18:05 not even the right wing, I’d say the Republican party,
00:18:08 pictured the Russians, they were actively engaged
00:18:11 in infiltrating America and changing our thinking.
00:18:15 And television shows were based on this,
00:18:17 it was very much the J. Edgar Hoover mentality
00:18:21 that communism was even behind the student protests
00:18:24 of the 1960s, this was the direction in which the FBI
00:18:28 and the CIA were thinking.
00:18:30 So I grew up with a prejudice, and it took me many years,
00:18:35 my father was a Republican and he was a stockbroker
00:18:38 and he was a very intelligent man, but even he,
00:18:41 because he was a World War II soldier, he was a colonel,
00:18:45 had fallen under the influence.
00:18:47 In order to be successful in American business
00:18:50 in the 1950s, you had to have a very strong
00:18:53 anti Soviet line, very strong, you wouldn’t get ahead.
00:18:58 If you expressed any kind of, let’s end this Cold War,
00:19:01 any kind of activity of that nature, you’d be cast aside
00:19:04 as a pinko or somebody who was not completely
00:19:09 on the board with the American way of doing business,
00:19:12 which was capitalism works, communism doesn’t.
00:19:16 And in particular, communism was embodied
00:19:19 by the Soviet Union as the enemy.
00:19:24 So hence the narrative behind the Cold War.
00:19:29 Behind the Cold War, that’s correct, and it basically
00:19:33 lasted, I mean, you saw the ups and downs of it.
00:19:37 When Reagan came in, I was, well, first of all,
00:19:40 we had the crisis of 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis,
00:19:44 and Kennedy proved himself to be a warrior for peace.
00:19:47 He resolved that with Khrushchev.
00:19:49 That was a big moment, huge moment, and people don’t
00:19:52 give him credit enough for really saving us from a war
00:19:56 that could have affected all of mankind.
00:19:59 But it still didn’t avert.
00:20:02 No, because the moment he was killed,
00:20:05 honestly, there was a lot of, we can talk about that,
00:20:08 and as you know, I’ve made a film, JFK Revisited
00:20:11 is a documentary we released this year
00:20:14 about the movie I made in 1991.
00:20:18 But the moment he was killed, I would argue
00:20:21 that Lyndon Johnson went back immediately
00:20:24 to the old way of thinking, the old way of doing business,
00:20:26 which was the Eisenhower, Truman way,
00:20:30 which we had adapted since World War II.
00:20:33 That was an interim.
00:20:34 You have to think about it from, Roosevelt dies in 45.
00:20:37 Roosevelt has an interim of 15 years where he,
00:20:44 he has more of a democratic regime, more liberal.
00:20:47 He establishes, he recognizes the Soviet Union
00:20:49 for the first time since the revolution,
00:20:52 and he actually has a relationship with them.
00:20:54 He sends ambassadors who are friendly,
00:20:56 and he has a relationship with Stalin, et cetera,
00:21:01 and at Yalta, or no, at Tehran, rather,
00:21:05 that’s where he had the relationship.
00:21:08 Do you think if JFK lived, we would not have a Cold War?
00:21:10 No, absolutely not, and we go into great depth on that
00:21:14 in the film, and I’d urge you to see it,
00:21:17 because it goes into all the issues around the world.
00:21:19 Kennedy was being very much an anti imperialist.
00:21:21 It turns out, and many people just don’t understand that,
00:21:24 but you have to look at all his policies in Middle East
00:21:28 with Nasser, he had a relationship with Sukarno in Indonesia,
00:21:33 with Latin America, he made a big effort
00:21:35 with the Alliance for Progress,
00:21:37 and when Africa, above all, with Lumumba,
00:21:40 he was very shocked at his death,
00:21:42 and tried to defend the right, the integrity
00:21:47 of the Belgian Congo with Dag Hammarskjold of the UN.
00:21:51 He made a big effort.
00:21:52 Unfortunately, it didn’t work out,
00:21:55 because Dag Hammarskjold was killed,
00:21:57 and then Kennedy was killed,
00:21:58 and Congo descended into the chaos
00:22:01 of Joseph Mobutu’s dictatorship.
00:22:04 But Kennedy was very active in terms of,
00:22:07 as an Irishman, not as an Englishman, he was an Irishman.
00:22:10 And I say that because, well, we’ll come back to that,
00:22:12 because Mr. Joe Biden is an Irishman,
00:22:14 but it’s a different kind of an Irishman.
00:22:16 They’re both Catholic Irish, but Kennedy really made
00:22:19 an effort to change the imperialist mindset
00:22:25 that still was very strong in America and Europe.
00:22:30 Lyndon Johnson changed back to the old policy,
00:22:33 and we were never able to really keep
00:22:36 big talk going with the Russians.
00:22:37 Briefly had it with Carter, but then Brzezinski came in.
00:22:42 Brzezinski was his national security advisor.
00:22:45 He was put there by Rockefeller,
00:22:47 and Brzezinski was a Pole, he got revenge from Poland.
00:22:50 Poland has always been attacking Russia,
00:22:53 as far as I remember, back to another century.
00:22:55 I mean, the two world wars that occupied Russia,
00:22:58 so tragically, entry points were always
00:23:02 through Poland and Ukraine.
00:23:05 So Brzezinski got his revenge,
00:23:07 and Carter ended up being an enemy of the Soviet Union,
00:23:11 and creating, as Brzezinski took pride in it,
00:23:15 he created the atmosphere of the trap
00:23:16 for the Soviets to go into Afghanistan in 79.
00:23:20 That trap was set, he says, he said, in 1978.
00:23:26 So there was never, except for brief moments,
00:23:29 periods of detente with the Soviets,
00:23:33 and I grew up under that.
00:23:35 I didn’t really know anything of this going on,
00:23:37 because I was learning, I was educating myself
00:23:40 as I was going, learning movies,
00:23:42 and trying to be a dramatist, and this and that,
00:23:45 so I wasn’t thinking about this.
00:23:47 Then, when Reagan came in, I was worried again,
00:23:50 because it was the beat of the old beat,
00:23:52 which was there, the most evil empire.
00:23:54 I mean, it goes on in American history, it doesn’t end.
00:23:57 Reagan got a lot of points for that,
00:24:00 and of course, when Gorbachev came in,
00:24:04 it was a beautiful moment for the world.
00:24:07 It was a great surprise.
00:24:09 It was probably the best years for America,
00:24:11 at least from my point of view,
00:24:13 in terms of this relaxation in the mood.
00:24:16 1986 to 1991 were great years
00:24:21 in terms of ability to believe, once again,
00:24:24 that there could be a peace dividend,
00:24:27 but the world changed again in 1991, 92.
00:24:30 There’s an internal mechanism, who knows?
00:24:31 You could blame the United States,
00:24:35 you could blame Russia for…
00:24:39 Gorbachev was perhaps not the right man
00:24:41 to try to administer that country at that point.
00:24:43 He had great visions, he was a man of peace,
00:24:47 but it was very difficult to hold together
00:24:48 such a huge empire.
00:24:50 So vision is not enough to hold together the Soviet Union?
00:24:53 I think the details are interesting.
00:24:56 I followed up on that a little bit,
00:24:58 because I was recently in countries like Kazakhstan,
00:25:01 talked about the negotiations that were going on,
00:25:05 and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
00:25:08 It’s a very interesting story,
00:25:09 because it involves everything, Ukraine, of course,
00:25:12 everything that’s going on now.
00:25:14 Some, what is it, 30 million Russians
00:25:15 were left outside of the Soviet Union when it collapsed.
00:25:19 They had no home anymore, they were homes
00:25:21 in other countries, such as in Ukraine.
00:25:25 So it’s an interesting story, and with repercussions today,
00:25:30 Kazakhstan is a good example of keeping a balance,
00:25:34 keeping it neutral.
00:25:36 He played both sides,
00:25:37 and because Yeltsin wanted him
00:25:41 to join the Russian Confederation
00:25:45 in a certain way where he’d be supporting,
00:25:48 against Gorbachev, there’s a whole inward battle there.
00:25:53 I think the Ukraine came along with Yeltsin,
00:25:57 as well as, I’m sorry, I don’t remember now,
00:26:02 but two other regions came with him,
00:26:04 and that was a block that broke up the Soviet Union.
00:26:09 It was Yeltsin’s plan to,
00:26:12 and it wasn’t make the Russian Federation, and they did.
00:26:15 I would love to return back to JFK eventually,
00:26:19 because he’s such a fascinating figure
00:26:20 in the history of human civilization,
00:26:23 but let me ask you, fast forward.
00:26:26 In 2000, Yeltsin was no longer president,
00:26:29 and Vladimir Putin became president.
00:26:32 You did a series of interviews with Vladimir Putin,
00:26:36 as you mentioned, over a period of two years,
00:26:39 from 2015 to 2017.
00:26:43 Let me ask with a high level question.
00:26:45 What was your goal with that conversation?
00:26:49 Oh, came out in 2017, I guess I started them in 2014.
00:26:55 At that point, the Snowden affair had happened,
00:26:58 and I was working on a movie on Snowden.
00:27:00 That happened in 13, Ukraine happened in 14,
00:27:08 and one thing after another.
00:27:10 By 14, Putin was enemy number, again,
00:27:14 becoming a wanted man on the American list.
00:27:17 He was enemy, he was certainly in the top five.
00:27:22 But the animosity towards Putin
00:27:24 had been growing since 2007 at Munich.
00:27:27 I remember that speech when he made it.
00:27:29 It’s in my documentary, that’s a four hour documentary,
00:27:32 four different conversations.
00:27:34 I mean, we talked over two years, two and a half years,
00:27:37 but I remember that image of him at Munich
00:27:40 making a very important speech about world harmony,
00:27:44 about the balance necessary in the world,
00:27:47 and I remember the sneer, the sneer on John McCain’s face.
00:27:52 He was in Munich, obviously eyeballing Putin
00:27:55 and hating him, and it was so evident
00:27:57 that McCain had no belief whatsoever that this,
00:28:01 he was almost treating him like these are the communists
00:28:03 are back, and we know that Putin was not a communist.
00:28:05 We know that Putin is very much a market man,
00:28:07 and he made it very clear and tried to keep an open climate,
00:28:13 a new relationship with Europe,
00:28:15 but the United States always, certain people
00:28:17 in the United States always saw that as a threat,
00:28:18 like Putin is trying to take Europe away from us
00:28:21 as if we own it, as if we have the right to own it.
00:28:24 But Putin was making the point, it’s very important,
00:28:26 about sovereignty, and sovereignty for countries
00:28:31 is crucial for this new world to have balance.
00:28:35 That’s sovereignty for China, sovereignty for Russia,
00:28:38 sovereignty for Iran, sovereignty for Venezuela,
00:28:41 sovereignty for Cuba.
00:28:43 This is an idea that’s crucial to the new world,
00:28:45 and I think the United States has never accepted that.
00:28:49 Sovereignty is not an idea that they can allow.
00:28:53 You have to be obedient to the United States idea
00:28:58 of so called democracy and freedom,
00:29:02 but much more important is sovereignty for these countries,
00:29:07 and the United States has not obeyed that,
00:29:08 has not even acknowledged it, and it never comes up.
00:29:13 So from the perspective of the United States,
00:29:15 when power centers arise in the world,
00:29:18 you start to oppose those, not because of the ideas,
00:29:24 but merely because they have power.
00:29:28 Isn’t that at the heart of the doctrine
00:29:30 of the neoconservatives,
00:29:32 and the pact for the new American century
00:29:34 they wrote down in 1996, seven,
00:29:38 they said there shall be no emergence of a rival power.
00:29:41 It was very clear it was about power,
00:29:43 and they’ve stuck to that doctrine,
00:29:46 which is if you start to get dangerous in any way
00:29:49 or have power, we’re gonna knock you out.
00:29:52 Now that won’t work, and I don’t believe it can work,
00:29:56 and that is unfortunately a policy
00:29:58 the United States is following,
00:30:00 and the neoconservatives group, which is very small,
00:30:04 but it’s very strong apparently,
00:30:05 and their idea has resonated.
00:30:08 It was behind the George Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
00:30:12 It was part of not only Iraq,
00:30:14 but cleaning out the whole world, draining the swamp,
00:30:17 going to Afghanistan first,
00:30:19 and then although Iraq had nothing to do
00:30:21 with al Qaeda’s attack, going after Iraq.
00:30:25 And of course 60 some other countries
00:30:28 that were terrorism had some signs of,
00:30:34 wherever America judged would be a dangerous country.
00:30:38 We had the right, you’re either with us or against us.
00:30:41 Now that is a disastrous policy,
00:30:43 and led to one thing after another.
00:30:45 The Iraq war never learned a lesson.
00:30:48 The neoconservatives were never fired,
00:30:50 never thrown out of office.
00:30:51 The people who prosecuted that war are still around.
00:30:55 Many of them are still around,
00:30:57 and they’re obviously guiding America now.
00:31:00 Let me return to this question of power.
00:31:03 Don’t forget the sneer that I saw there.
00:31:07 That emblemized the United States reaction.
00:31:09 Also there were several other American representatives
00:31:12 who were laughing, kind of mocking Putin.
00:31:16 It was very serious.
00:31:17 I felt there was a divide there.
00:31:21 So since then, I mean in a certain sense,
00:31:25 the Europe reaction to Putin is crucial,
00:31:27 and they were more with him back then.
00:31:31 And a big thing for America was always to keep NATO,
00:31:34 to keep Europe in its pocket as a satellite.
00:31:37 And with this recent war, of course they’ve succeeded
00:31:40 in beyond their dreams.
00:31:42 The Russians have fulfilled the fantasy
00:31:44 of the United States, to finally be this aggressor
00:31:47 that they have pictured for years.
00:31:50 We can talk about that later.
00:31:51 But at that time, Europe had significant support for Putin,
00:31:58 and the United States was sneering at Putin.
00:32:01 That’s correct, you can say that.
00:32:03 And then, so there was this,
00:32:05 there was uncertainty as to the direction,
00:32:12 as to the future of Russia.
00:32:13 And that’s exactly when you interviewed Vladimir Putin.
00:32:16 I wanted to know what they thought,
00:32:20 because we couldn’t get the information war
00:32:24 that the United States was fighting against Russia.
00:32:26 It was in evidence back then.
00:32:28 It was full out.
00:32:29 The condemnation of Russia on all fronts.
00:32:33 I never saw a positive article about Putin.
00:32:36 Although when I traveled in the world,
00:32:38 and I traveled a lot doing documentaries,
00:32:40 it was very clear in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia,
00:32:44 there was respect for him.
00:32:45 That he was a man who was getting his job done
00:32:48 in the interest of Russia.
00:32:50 He was, as I said in the documentary, a son of Russia.
00:32:53 Very much so, in the positive sense, a son of Russia.
00:32:58 Not that he’s out there trying to destroy
00:33:02 the interests of other countries, no.
00:33:05 That he was out there to promote the interests of Russia,
00:33:09 but at the same time, keep a balance.
00:33:11 Keep the world into a harmony.
00:33:14 This has always been his picture.
00:33:15 Peace was always his idea.
00:33:17 In other words, he always referred to the United States
00:33:19 in all these interviews as our partners.
00:33:22 And I said, will you stop using that word?
00:33:24 They’re not.
00:33:26 And he was a little bit slow in waking up
00:33:28 to what the United States was doing.
00:33:31 Well, that said, he’s one of the most powerful men
00:33:34 in the world.
00:33:35 He was at that time.
00:33:37 And let me ask you the human question.
00:33:42 As the old adage goes, power corrupts
00:33:44 and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:33:47 Did you see any corroding effects of power on the man?
00:33:52 Forget the political leader, on just the human being
00:33:55 that carries that power on his shoulders for so many years.
00:33:59 Keep in mind that he’s been, unlike most modern leaders,
00:34:03 he’s been in office off and on,
00:34:06 because Medvedev was president
00:34:08 and he was not literally in charge.
00:34:12 He took another appointment at that point,
00:34:17 but he was still very much involved.
00:34:18 But for 20 years, more or less,
00:34:20 he’s been at the administrator of the state,
00:34:24 the protector of the state.
00:34:26 And he’s apparently done a good enough job
00:34:29 that the Russian people have kept him there.
00:34:32 Because contrary to what many people think,
00:34:34 I really believe that if the Russian people didn’t want him,
00:34:37 he would be out.
00:34:39 I firmly believe that.
00:34:40 I don’t think you can go against the will of the people.
00:34:42 Now, it expresses itself in many ways,
00:34:44 at the ballot box and so forth,
00:34:46 but also in other ways in Russia.
00:34:47 There’s a strong currents of opinion.
00:34:51 So contrary to what the position of him as a dictator,
00:34:55 he wouldn’t last if he was unpopular, number one.
00:34:58 Number two, Russia is much more divided than people know.
00:35:01 There’s other factors in Russia.
00:35:04 There are always tensions around the Kremlin,
00:35:07 who has power, who doesn’t have power.
00:35:09 That’s been going on for 100 years.
00:35:12 But the factions in Russia are very much there.
00:35:17 So when people refer to Russia as Putin, they’re mistaken.
00:35:22 And they do this regularly in the New York papers
00:35:25 and all this.
00:35:25 They say, Putin did this, Putin did that,
00:35:28 Putin’s doing that, but it’s Russia that’s doing it.
00:35:31 And that’s what, there’s a distinction there that I,
00:35:34 it’s changed.
00:35:35 In the old days, I would read about Khrushchev,
00:35:37 but it was never Khrushchev personally.
00:35:40 It was about the Soviet Union.
00:35:43 There was respect for a country.
00:35:45 And now when it started to get personal with Putin,
00:35:48 it changed and our thinking changed in a negative way.
00:35:53 We no longer respected it as a country,
00:35:56 we were seeing it as a man.
00:35:57 And the man we had trashed repeatedly,
00:36:00 repeatedly as a poisoner, as a murderer,
00:36:02 and none of which has ever been proven,
00:36:04 but which has always been repeated and repeated
00:36:07 to the point at which it becomes like an Orwell mantra.
00:36:10 It becomes like, he is of course a bad guy.
00:36:13 Can I just ask you, as a great filmmaker,
00:36:17 as a human being, what was it like talking
00:36:20 to one of the most powerful men in the world?
00:36:23 For honestly, and I’m not naive,
00:36:25 I’ve talked to a lot of powerful people.
00:36:28 In the movie business, there are powerful people
00:36:30 and many of them are corrupted.
00:36:32 I’ve talked to many people in my life.
00:36:34 I’ve been in the military, I’ve seen, I’ve had other jobs.
00:36:38 I have to say, I found him to be a human being.
00:36:40 I just found him to be reasonable, calm.
00:36:44 I never saw him lose his temper.
00:36:45 And I mean, you have to understand that most people,
00:36:48 most people in the Western way of doing business
00:36:51 get emotional.
00:36:53 I don’t see that.
00:36:54 I saw him as a balanced man,
00:36:56 as a man who had studied this like you have.
00:36:59 There’s a calmness to you.
00:37:00 It comes from studying the world
00:37:02 and having a rational response to it.
00:37:06 It’s interesting, his two daughters,
00:37:07 one of them is very scientific
00:37:09 and the other one’s doing very well in another profession,
00:37:12 but they’re a thinking family.
00:37:15 His wife too was.
00:37:18 I can’t talk for the new wife
00:37:19 because I don’t know about it,
00:37:20 but he kept his family with great respect.
00:37:23 He’s raised his daughter’s right.
00:37:26 He served Yeltsin the way he looked at it.
00:37:28 He served Yeltsin well, and he never trashed Yeltsin.
00:37:32 Certainly a lot of people did,
00:37:34 but I asked him repeatedly was he an alcoholic,
00:37:38 this or that, but he wouldn’t even go that far.
00:37:40 Just respect.
00:37:41 And this man, Yeltsin, was in many ways ridiculed
00:37:46 by the Russians, and he turned over the power
00:37:52 because he felt like he was overwhelmed.
00:37:53 He turned over the power to this man because why?
00:37:56 How many people had he fired before him?
00:37:57 Several, several prime ministers, this, that.
00:38:00 Why did he turn power over to Mr. Putin?
00:38:03 Because he respected him for his work ethic
00:38:07 and his balance, his maturity.
00:38:10 And that’s what I can say is I saw in him.
00:38:12 A poor person from a poor family who worked his way up
00:38:18 through the KGB, Americans keep saying he’s a KGB agent,
00:38:21 but it’s like saying George Bush was a CIA agent,
00:38:25 but he became, you grow, you grow in your life.
00:38:28 And he went from the KGB to this technocratic position.
00:38:33 He dealt with many problems, including the Chechnyan War,
00:38:38 which is a very difficult situation,
00:38:40 as well as the Russian submarine problem.
00:38:43 Several things happened early in his,
00:38:44 that gave him a lot of experience,
00:38:47 and he handled them all pretty well.
00:38:49 Do you think he was an honest man?
00:38:52 I do.
00:38:52 Now, of course, the question of money,
00:38:54 the charge is that he’s the richest man in the world,
00:38:57 or ludicrous, certainly doesn’t live like it
00:39:00 or act like it.
00:39:01 If you’re rich, I’ve been around
00:39:03 a lot of rich people in my life.
00:39:05 You’d probably have, too.
00:39:06 In America, you run into them.
00:39:07 So many of them are arrogant.
00:39:08 I’m actually good friends now
00:39:11 with the richest man in the world.
00:39:13 Of course, I saw your interview with Mr. Musk,
00:39:16 who I appreciate.
00:39:18 At least he speaks freely.
00:39:21 I’m positive about him owning Twitter,
00:39:23 because Twitter has become censorship city,
00:39:27 as has all the major tech.
00:39:29 I mean, the censorship that we are now seeing
00:39:30 in the United States is so unAmerican and shocking to me.
00:39:34 And he is a resistance to that, that is true.
00:39:36 Yeah, I like Musk for that.
00:39:38 Just for that only.
00:39:39 But I also appreciate him, his adventuresome,
00:39:43 his nature and his desire to explore the world
00:39:47 and to ask questions.
00:39:49 Yeah, there’s certain ways you sound when you speak freely.
00:39:54 There’s certain ways you sound,
00:39:56 a man sounds when he speaks freely,
00:39:58 and he speaks freely.
00:40:00 And it’s refreshing.
00:40:02 No matter whether you’re rich or not, it doesn’t matter.
00:40:05 When you speak freely, it’s a beautiful thing.
00:40:06 Actually, Musk, in a major point
00:40:10 on going back to nuclear energy,
00:40:12 he never believed in it at first, apparently.
00:40:15 He was going for batteries, right?
00:40:17 And he put a lot of money into batteries.
00:40:19 He made them bigger and bigger batteries.
00:40:20 But it just, as Bill Gates has said,
00:40:23 it’s just, it’s not gonna get us there.
00:40:25 And now I think Musk is on another path.
00:40:28 He understands the need for nuclear.
00:40:29 Yeah, he’s a supporter of nuclear.
00:40:33 We’re jumping around.
00:40:35 Putin never asked for one thing, never.
00:40:37 It was an interview, it was free form.
00:40:39 Ask anything you want.
00:40:41 No restrictions, no rules.
00:40:44 As with Castro, frankly,
00:40:46 Castro did the same thing as did Chavez.
00:40:47 So I’ve had good luck in interviewing free ranging subjects,
00:40:50 people willing to express themselves.
00:40:52 He’s much more guarded than Castro or Chavez,
00:40:57 because as you know, he’s setting government policy
00:41:00 when he speaks.
00:41:01 Anything he says is gonna be taken out of context.
00:41:03 But there was no restrictions on what to talk about,
00:41:06 none of that.
00:41:07 Nor any desire to see anything before we published it.
00:41:10 No need to check it with him.
00:41:14 It was a completely.
00:41:17 Do you think he watched the final product?
00:41:19 Yes, I do, but I don’t think he made judgments on it.
00:41:23 I think he was pleased.
00:41:25 He doesn’t go either way.
00:41:26 You see, he’s pleased.
00:41:28 I mean, it went well and he’s happy for us.
00:41:30 But I don’t think he had great enthusiasm
00:41:33 expressed it to me.
00:41:34 He trusted me.
00:41:35 And you can see the way he dealt with me each time.
00:41:38 He warmed up to me four times.
00:41:41 The first time I might’ve been a little stiff.
00:41:44 You’re asking, you don’t know who you’re dealing with
00:41:47 and so forth.
00:41:48 I understand that.
00:41:49 But he’s used to it now.
00:41:51 He’s done a lot of press.
00:41:53 The worst press he’s done, frankly,
00:41:55 has been the American press.
00:41:57 And not because of his fault,
00:41:59 but because of the way they have treated him.
00:42:01 If you look at the interviews, they’re awful.
00:42:04 First of all, I noticed one thing as a filmmaker,
00:42:06 right away, they use an overdub.
00:42:09 They put a Russian speaker for everything he says,
00:42:11 who’s much harsher.
00:42:12 He speaks Russian in a much harsher manner
00:42:15 than actually Putin does.
00:42:17 On my interview, I left him in his original language
00:42:20 with translator, and I think that’s important
00:42:22 because he expresses himself very clearly and calmly.
00:42:27 When you listen to the American broadcast,
00:42:29 it’s a belligerent person who looks like
00:42:30 he’s about to bang his shoe on the table.
00:42:33 And secondly, the questions are highly aggressive
00:42:37 from the beginning.
00:42:38 There’s no sense of rapport, there’s no sense of,
00:42:41 well, it’s why, Mr. Putin, did you poison this person?
00:42:44 Why, Mr. Putin, did you kill this person?
00:42:46 Why are you a murderer?
00:42:47 I mean, it’s blunt, blunt negative television.
00:42:52 Yeah, it’s not just aggressive.
00:42:53 So I obviously speak Russian,
00:42:56 so I get to appreciate both the original and the translation.
00:43:00 And it’s not just aggressive, it’s very shallow.
00:43:04 They’re not looking to understand.
00:43:06 To me, aggression is okay if that’s the way
00:43:09 you wanna approach it, but it should be,
00:43:12 there should be underlying kind of empathy
00:43:15 for another human being in order to be able to understand.
00:43:19 And so some of the worst interviews I’ve ever listened to
00:43:23 is by American press of Vladimir Putin.
00:43:25 So NBC and all those kinds of organizations,
00:43:29 it’s very painful to watch.
00:43:32 And you saw the reception to the Putin interviews
00:43:34 in America was hostile without seeing it.
00:43:37 So many people criticized my series
00:43:41 without having seen it.
00:43:43 Even, I went on a show, a television show
00:43:45 with this famous coal bearer.
00:43:47 You know, he’s very famous in America.
00:43:49 And I was shocked on the show to find out
00:43:51 that he hadn’t seen anything of the four hours.
00:43:53 He was just attacking Putin.
00:43:56 And he threw me, I was complicit,
00:43:58 therefore I was a Putin supporter.
00:44:01 And the show was a disaster.
00:44:03 It’s one of my worst television shows.
00:44:05 I actually, I had to just shut up and get off the air.
00:44:10 I mean, at some point, it was embarrassing.
00:44:13 Because the audience, too, was clapping for Kobe
00:44:16 on anything he said.
00:44:17 Well, as an interviewer in that situation,
00:44:20 because between you and Vladimir Putin,
00:44:23 there was camaraderie, there was joking, there was…
00:44:28 Are you worried, do you put that into the calculation
00:44:34 when you’re making a film with somebody
00:44:37 that could be lying to you, that could be evil?
00:44:41 When you talk about Castro, you talk about,
00:44:43 so are you worried about how charisma of a man
00:44:48 across the table from you can…
00:44:51 Do I take that into account?
00:44:53 I absolutely take that into account.
00:44:55 I mean, doing Castro, he’s a wonderful speaker,
00:44:58 he’s charismatic, so is Chavez.
00:45:01 Look at those interviews.
00:45:03 I took it into account.
00:45:04 But Putin doesn’t play that game.
00:45:06 He doesn’t charm you, he doesn’t try to overwhelm you
00:45:09 with his bon ami at all.
00:45:13 He just says, okay, ask your question,
00:45:15 I’ll give you my answer straight.
00:45:17 Here it is, and he analyzes it.
00:45:19 This is the history of NATO,
00:45:20 this is the history of our relationship
00:45:22 with the United States.
00:45:23 How many times have we tried to talk to them
00:45:26 about such and such and such and such,
00:45:27 and each time, we get nowhere.
00:45:29 In fact, it’s a very…
00:45:32 I would like to get along with the United States so much,
00:45:35 he’s saying it so clearly in all his words.
00:45:38 So to play devil’s advocate.
00:45:40 But he’s not making a big deal about it.
00:45:42 But there is a charisma in the calmness.
00:45:44 Yes, there is.
00:45:45 So let’s just calm everything down, it’s simple facts.
00:45:50 That you can call, so there’s like the Hitler thing,
00:45:56 which is screaming, being very loud, charismatic,
00:46:00 strong message and so on.
00:46:02 And then there’s a Putin style,
00:46:03 I’m not comparing those two,
00:46:04 there’s the Putin style communication of calmness.
00:46:07 And that, at least to me, my personality,
00:46:10 that can be very captivating,
00:46:12 is bringing everything down, the facts are simple.
00:46:15 But then when you say the facts are simple,
00:46:16 you can now start lying.
00:46:18 And you don’t know what’s true and what’s lies.
00:46:21 It behooves you to do some research.
00:46:23 Yes.
00:46:24 And frankly, when it comes to research,
00:46:26 you’re gonna have a problem.
00:46:27 Because if you go to the Americanized versions
00:46:30 of Russian history, you’re gonna run into a problem.
00:46:33 And that includes even Wikipedia.
00:46:35 They will tell you things
00:46:37 that are just not factually supported.
00:46:39 So it was a problem in terms of,
00:46:42 if you read all the books in the American library
00:46:45 about Putin, there’s nothing positive about it.
00:46:48 They’re awful, they’re awful.
00:46:49 And a lot of them, I had a good relationship
00:46:52 with Professor Stephen Cohen,
00:46:54 who’s the most, I think, one of the most informed men
00:46:56 on Russia, he’d done a lot of research all his life.
00:46:59 And knew Gorbachev very well.
00:47:02 And was very analytical about all these situations
00:47:07 that happened before his death in 2019.
00:47:11 I’m not quite sure when Stephen died,
00:47:13 but I knew him well.
00:47:15 And he gave me the best information I could get.
00:47:20 I would go to Stephen and I’d say,
00:47:22 I’m confused here, tell me the history
00:47:24 of this accusation of poisoning against this person
00:47:27 and so forth.
00:47:27 And he’d explain it to me in, I think,
00:47:30 the clearest ways that I understood.
00:47:32 And he said to me once, he said,
00:47:34 most of these people who go to Russia
00:47:35 and write this stuff about Putin are going off internet.
00:47:38 The internet has really been a source
00:47:40 of a lot of fractured facts here.
00:47:42 He said, pure analysis.
00:47:44 You have to go back to the texts,
00:47:46 all the documents, and to really fully understand.
00:47:50 But he spoke Russian.
00:47:54 And his wife and him, Katerina Vanhoovle,
00:47:59 who’s an editor, publisher of The Nation magazine,
00:48:03 would go to Russia several times a year
00:48:06 and talk to their friend Gorbachev.
00:48:08 And Gorbachev’s an interesting character.
00:48:10 I talked to him, interviewed him,
00:48:12 not interviewed him, but talked to him at length,
00:48:14 and I like him very much.
00:48:16 And I saw the divide, as you saw in the Putin interviews,
00:48:19 between Gorbachev and Putin.
00:48:20 Early on in the interviews, you sense Putin
00:48:23 doesn’t particularly care for Gorbachev
00:48:25 because in his point of view,
00:48:26 he screwed up the administration of Russia
00:48:29 and is responsible for so much of the disaster
00:48:32 of leaving all those people outside the Soviet Union.
00:48:36 So these are problems that continue into the future.
00:48:39 But they see each other at the,
00:48:44 or he knows he’s there at the May Day Parade, we filmed,
00:48:48 and his attitude is funny, it’s very human.
00:48:53 He says, you know, he’s welcome, he’s got his pension,
00:48:57 he’s a pensioneer, he’s done his duty.
00:48:59 There’s no animus towards him.
00:49:04 Even when Gorbachev, in the early days,
00:49:07 as you remember, criticized for his manners in terms
00:49:09 of democracy, but I don’t know that that becomes a quarrel.
00:49:14 But frankly, by the end of the situation,
00:49:18 it’s very clear that Gorbachev has now moved closer
00:49:21 and closer to the, says that Russia is now
00:49:23 really under attack.
00:49:24 This is, he sees where the United States
00:49:28 has made a concerted effort to undermine Putin.
00:49:31 And he’s repeated this several times about Ukraine.
00:49:35 I think you’ve seen what he said.
00:49:37 You can quote it.
00:49:39 And Gorbachev is, we have no respect for Gorbachev even,
00:49:42 even at this juncture.
00:49:43 When can you see Gorbachev’s ideas printed
00:49:46 in most American newspapers?
00:49:48 Very rarely, very rarely, and recently not at all.
00:49:52 So Gorbachev, who was our hero back in,
00:49:54 an American hero back in the 1980s,
00:49:58 has now been condemned to the garbage can,
00:50:00 so to speak, of history.
00:50:01 Well, in this complicated geopolitical picture
00:50:05 you just outlined, can we talk about
00:50:08 the recent invasion of Ukraine?
00:50:12 So you wrote on Facebook a pretty eloquent analysis,
00:50:17 I think on March 3rd.
00:50:22 Let me just read a small section of that,
00:50:26 just to give context, and maybe we can talk
00:50:28 a little bit more about both Russia and the man Putin.
00:50:33 You wrote, although the United States
00:50:35 has many wars of aggression on its conscience,
00:50:38 it doesn’t justify Mr. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine.
00:50:41 A dozen wrongs don’t make a right.
00:50:44 Russia was wrong to invade.
00:50:46 It has made too many mistakes.
00:50:48 One, underestimating Ukraine resistance.
00:50:51 Two, overestimating the military ability
00:50:54 to achieve its objective.
00:50:55 Three, underestimating Europe’s reaction,
00:50:58 especially Germany, upping its military contribution
00:51:01 to NATO, which they’ve resisted for some 20 years.
00:51:04 Even Switzerland has joined the cause.
00:51:07 Russia will be more isolated than ever from the West.
00:51:11 Four, underestimating the enhanced power of NATO,
00:51:15 which will now put more pressure on Russia’s borders.
00:51:18 Five, probably putting Ukraine into NATO.
00:51:22 Six, underestimating the damage to its own economy,
00:51:25 and certainly creating more internal resistance
00:51:28 in Russia.
00:51:29 Seven, creating a major readjustment of power
00:51:32 in its oligarch class.
00:51:34 Eight, putting cluster and vacuum bombs into play.
00:51:39 Nine, and underestimating the power
00:51:43 of social media worldwide.
00:51:45 And you go on for a while giving a much broader picture
00:51:51 of the history and the geopolitics of all of this.
00:51:53 So now, a little bit later, two months later,
00:52:01 what are your thoughts about the invasion of Ukraine?
00:52:05 Well, it’s very hard to be honest in this regard
00:52:08 because the West has brought down a curtain here
00:52:13 and anyone who questions the invasion of Ukraine
00:52:18 and its consequences is an enemy of the people.
00:52:24 It’s become so difficult.
00:52:26 I’ve never seen in my lifetime ever such a wall
00:52:33 of propaganda as I’ve seen in the West.
00:52:38 And that includes France too
00:52:39 because I was there recently and England.
00:52:42 England is of course really vociferous.
00:52:46 It’s shocking to me how quickly Europe moved
00:52:50 in this direction and that includes Germany.
00:52:52 I have German friends who express to me their shock
00:52:55 over Ukraine.
00:52:56 I have Italian friends, same thing.
00:52:58 And Italy of course has been perhaps the most understanding
00:53:01 and compassionate of countries.
00:53:03 So it’s quite evident that there’s a united,
00:53:09 and this attests to the power of the United States.
00:53:11 And of course you have Finland and Svinland
00:53:14 which has generally been reasonable jumping in,
00:53:17 talking about joining NATO and Sweden too.
00:53:21 Generally there’s been some more restraint in Europe.
00:53:26 That’s what surprised me the most, Europe.
00:53:29 How quickly they fell into this NATO basket
00:53:33 which is very dangerous for Europe, very dangerous.
00:53:36 This goes back to my idea what I was saying earlier
00:53:38 about sovereignty.
00:53:41 These countries don’t really give me a sense
00:53:44 that they have sovereignty over their own countries.
00:53:47 They don’t feel, to me I’m obviously intuition here
00:53:52 is working, I just don’t feel that they have freedom
00:53:56 to say what they really think and they’re scared to say it.
00:53:59 When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003,
00:54:05 I remember with great in a sense satisfaction
00:54:07 that at least France, Chirac who I had not really
00:54:12 known much about, stood up and said the United States
00:54:15 we’re not gonna join you in this expedition,
00:54:17 basically into madness.
00:54:18 Schroeder in Germany, same thing.
00:54:21 Of course Putin condemned the invasion
00:54:24 and Putin had been an ally of the United States
00:54:27 since 9 11 if you remember correctly.
00:54:29 And had called Bush and they were getting along.
00:54:32 So even Putin said I won’t go, don’t go into Iraq.
00:54:36 This is not the solution.
00:54:38 He didn’t oppose Afghanistan but he opposed Iraq.
00:54:41 So Chirac and Schroeder stood for the old Europe.
00:54:46 I remember de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle,
00:54:49 he was independent of the United States.
00:54:52 Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO
00:54:54 because he saw the dangers of NATO,
00:54:56 which is to say you have to fight an American war.
00:54:59 When they say and they put nuclear weapons
00:55:02 on your territory in England and France
00:55:05 and Italy and Germany, when they do that,
00:55:09 you’re hitched to this superpower
00:55:12 and you have no say in what they’re gonna do.
00:55:14 If they declare war and they use your territory,
00:55:18 you’re gonna be involved in a major conflict.
00:55:20 I’m talking about sovereignty.
00:55:22 Where is that sovereignty?
00:55:23 They don’t have it.
00:55:24 And that has influenced their mindset for years now.
00:55:28 Since 1940, well de Gaulle was the 60s.
00:55:33 He actually reversed the whole flow
00:55:34 and I think it was Sarkozy who put France
00:55:38 back into NATO and now it’s Macron.
00:55:44 I hope because he was talking to Putin
00:55:47 would at least have an independent viewpoint
00:55:50 that could be helpful here, so he rolled it up.
00:55:53 He may have told Putin something else,
00:55:55 but within days he had rolled it up
00:55:57 and gone along with the United States position,
00:55:59 which was enforced by the United States in a very fierce way.
00:56:03 The propaganda, as I say, I don’t know how much time
00:56:05 you spend in America, but it was vicious
00:56:08 and everything was anti Russian.
00:56:10 Russia were killing all these people,
00:56:11 were shooting down civilians,
00:56:17 although there was no proof of it.
00:56:18 There was just, these are the accidents of war,
00:56:20 but all of a sudden it was a campaign of criminality
00:56:23 and they were talking about bringing Putin
00:56:25 into war crime trial.
00:56:27 Well, why didn’t they talk like that when Iraq was going on
00:56:30 and Bush was killing far more people?
00:56:33 Or for that matter, why were they not talking
00:56:35 about the killings in Donbass and Lugansk
00:56:39 during that 2014 to 2022 period?
00:56:45 That is what, it’s a crime.
00:56:47 There were so many people that were killed,
00:56:49 many of them innocent, many of them innocent.
00:56:51 What would be the way for Vladimir Putin
00:56:54 to stop the killing in Donbass
00:57:00 without the invasion of Ukraine?
00:57:02 That’s a very good question and I’ve asked that
00:57:04 several times and I don’t have the,
00:57:06 I have not talked to him since about two years now.
00:57:12 It’s a very good question.
00:57:13 What’s the mistakes, what the human mistakes
00:57:16 and the leadership mistakes made by Vladimir Putin?
00:57:18 It’s a very good question.
00:57:19 You see, what the American press has not said
00:57:21 and the Western press has not said is that on February 24,
00:57:25 was it, that was, on that day when they invaded,
00:57:28 the day before, if you check the logs
00:57:31 of the European organization that was supervising,
00:57:35 was in the field in Ukraine.
00:57:37 These are neutral observers.
00:57:39 They were seeing heavier and heavier artillery fire
00:57:43 going into Donbass from the Ukrainian side.
00:57:50 So they had, apparently, Ukraine had 110,000 troops
00:57:55 on the border.
00:57:56 They were about to invade Donbass, that was the plan.
00:57:59 That’s what I think.
00:58:00 Russia, because of the buildup on the border of Donbass,
00:58:05 brought 130, they say 130,000 troops
00:58:09 to the area near Donbass, right?
00:58:13 So you have buildup of forces on both sides,
00:58:15 but you wouldn’t know that from reading the press
00:58:18 in the West.
00:58:19 You’d believe that the Russians suddenly put all these men
00:58:21 into the situation with the idea of invading Ukraine,
00:58:26 not only Donbass, but invading all of Ukraine
00:58:29 and getting rid of the, decapitating the government there,
00:58:33 which is all assumption.
00:58:34 We don’t know what they would intend it to do.
00:58:36 But you, at the time, as in a lot of people,
00:58:40 thought that all the talk of the invasion,
00:58:44 Russian invasion of Ukraine, is just propaganda.
00:58:48 It’s not gonna happen.
00:58:49 It’s very unlikely to happen.
00:58:50 I think many of us thought that the United States
00:58:52 is building this up into an invasion.
00:58:54 In other words, that is the nature of false flag operations,
00:58:58 when you create this propaganda.
00:59:00 They are gonna invade.
00:59:01 They are gonna invade.
00:59:02 And then, when they invaded, the United States
00:59:05 was completely ready, and all their allies
00:59:07 were completely ready for the invasion, correct?
00:59:09 So why did Putin do that?
00:59:11 He fell into this, theoretically, into this trap
00:59:14 set by the United States.
00:59:16 Here you’re telling all your allies across the board
00:59:18 they’re gonna invade.
00:59:19 But you.
00:59:21 Why do you think he did it?
00:59:23 So here, is it madness, or is it common
00:59:27 strategic calculation, perhaps?
00:59:29 This one I cannot answer you faithfully,
00:59:31 because, first of all, we don’t know what he was told.
00:59:34 If he was indeed getting the right intelligence estimates,
00:59:38 from what I said earlier in that essay I wrote,
00:59:44 you would think he was not well informed, perhaps,
00:59:47 about the degree of cooperation he would get
00:59:51 from the Ukrainian Russians in Ukraine.
00:59:57 That would be one factor, that he wasn’t,
01:00:00 he didn’t assess the operation correctly.
01:00:03 Remember this.
01:00:04 Mr. Putin has had this cancer, and I think he’s licked it,
01:00:09 but he’s also been isolated because of COVID.
01:00:12 And some people would argue that the isolation
01:00:15 from normal activity, which he was meeting people
01:00:18 face to face, but all of a sudden he was meeting people
01:00:20 across the table 100 yards away, or whatever,
01:00:23 10 yards away, it was very hard.
01:00:26 Perhaps he lost touch with, contact with people.
01:00:30 So it’s not just power, it’s the very simple fact
01:00:33 that you’re just distant from humans.
01:00:34 As I say, I’m speculating, I don’t know.
01:00:36 I see that, and I also, perhaps he thought in his mind
01:00:40 that there would be a faster resolution
01:00:45 that the Ukrainian, because the evidence had been
01:00:48 that the Ukrainian Russians, the Ukrainian army
01:00:52 had folded so many times, and that they were only backed up
01:00:56 and they were stiffened by the resistance
01:00:57 of the Nazi oriented Azov battalions.
01:01:02 That was a factor, of course.
01:01:04 And that is a big factor for the Russians
01:01:06 because these people are very tough, they rush.
01:01:08 See, what people don’t understand is that Ukraine,
01:01:11 since 2014, has been a terror state.
01:01:14 They’ve been run, anytime a Ukrainian has expressed
01:01:18 any understanding of the Russian Ukrainian position,
01:01:25 they’ve been threatened by the state.
01:01:28 From 2014 to 2022, there’s been a set of hideous murders
01:01:32 that people don’t even know about in the West.
01:01:34 Journalists, people who speak out, liberals,
01:01:37 people who, I interviewed Viktor Medvedev,
01:01:40 who they make out to be some kind of horrible person,
01:01:43 but Medvedev was a very important figure
01:01:46 in the administration of Khushma,
01:01:48 the first Ukrainian Prime Minister in the 1990s,
01:01:52 and he did a great job on the economy.
01:01:54 He was a very thoughtful man.
01:01:55 If you’ll see my interview, it’s called Ukraine Revealed.
01:01:58 He’s very thoughtful about the future of Ukraine.
01:02:00 He doesn’t want to go back and join Russia.
01:02:02 He wants it to be an independent country.
01:02:04 Ukraine is independent, and he wants it to be
01:02:07 a functioning economic democracy, more or less,
01:02:10 a democracy, if you can get that,
01:02:13 that exists in a neutral state,
01:02:15 a neutral state, which Ukraine used to be before 2014.
01:02:19 It was neutral from 1991 to 2014, neutral, very important.
01:02:25 Under Poroshenko, it just immediately went
01:02:28 into an anti Soviet Cold War position
01:02:31 as an ally of the United States,
01:02:34 and my point was that it was a very dangerous place
01:02:39 in Ukraine.
01:02:39 People were being killed, death squads were out there.
01:02:43 Medvedev, they stripped him of his television stations
01:02:47 very suddenly, this is Zelensky, the new president.
01:02:50 Zelensky was elected on a peace platform, remember that.
01:02:54 70% of the country was for him to make peace with Russia.
01:02:57 Did he ever even try to make peace with Russia?
01:03:00 Did he attend any of the Minsk Two agreements?
01:03:04 Did he visit, did he pay any attention to the Minsk?
01:03:08 Did he pay attention to Putin?
01:03:09 Did he go to Russia?
01:03:10 No, not at all.
01:03:11 The moment he got into office, I’m convinced
01:03:14 that the militant sector of the right sector parties
01:03:22 of Ukraine let him know that you will not make a deal
01:03:26 with Russia, there’ll be no concessions to Russia.
01:03:30 This is very dangerous.
01:03:31 This is where this attitude that’s very, very hostile
01:03:34 to Russia has hurt us.
01:03:35 The whole world is being hurt by this,
01:03:37 and no one calls them out.
01:03:40 No one calls them out.
01:03:41 Zelensky backed off from his platform
01:03:45 as running for president, and as president,
01:03:47 has been ineffective, did nothing to promote it.
01:03:50 On the contrary, went the other way,
01:03:52 and seemed to support the Ukrainian aggression.
01:03:56 Well, he found his support in this war.
01:03:59 You’ve revealed through your work some of the most honest
01:04:02 and dark aspects of war.
01:04:04 Nevertheless, this is a war,
01:04:07 and there’s a humanitarian crisis.
01:04:10 Millions of people, refugees, escape in Ukraine.
01:04:16 What do you think about the human cost of this war,
01:04:20 initiated by whoever, just as you write,
01:04:24 whatever the context, whatever NATO, whatever pressure,
01:04:28 as you wrote, Russia was wrong to invade.
01:04:32 Okay, yeah, let’s get back to that original question.
01:04:36 You said, what was he thinking at that time?
01:04:38 We never answered that.
01:04:39 Now, by the way, among those people
01:04:44 who’ve been ruined by this war,
01:04:48 you have to include the 2014 to 2022 Ukrainian Russians.
01:04:53 14,000 were killed, not necessarily by,
01:04:58 some of them by maybe accident and this and that,
01:05:01 but certainly a large number of that
01:05:02 is responsible to the Ukrainian military
01:05:05 and the Nazi related battalions
01:05:09 who have done a good job of death squatting that whole area.
01:05:11 And remember, I did a film about Salvador.
01:05:13 I know a little bit about death squads and how they work,
01:05:16 and I know about paramilitaries,
01:05:17 because in South America, they’re all over the place.
01:05:19 America supports, hates Venezuela,
01:05:22 goes on about Venezuela,
01:05:23 but do they tell you anything about Colombia,
01:05:25 its next door neighbor?
01:05:27 Colombia for years has been plagued by paramilitaries
01:05:30 that are right wing, and the United States has said,
01:05:32 nothing about them except occasionally,
01:05:34 there’s a newspaper report now.
01:05:36 So this support of death squads by the United States
01:05:39 is all over the world.
01:05:40 It’s not just in South America and Central America
01:05:43 where we see plenty of evidence of it.
01:05:46 It’s here too, and this is what’s horrible
01:05:48 about this whole thing, this hypocrisy of America
01:05:51 that they can support such evil, such evil.
01:05:55 Now, going back to your larger question about,
01:05:59 yeah, it’s a terrible refugee disaster,
01:06:02 but again, we have to get the numbers.
01:06:03 Let’s get the numbers and get the evidence,
01:06:05 because I would ask you, I’m not sure at this point
01:06:09 whether more civilians were killed before 2022 in Donbass
01:06:13 than have been killed in this latest.
01:06:15 So we can’t talk about this without,
01:06:17 we can’t talk about the invasion of Ukraine
01:06:19 without considering the full war
01:06:21 between Russia and Ukraine since 2014.
01:06:24 That’s correct, absolutely,
01:06:26 and take the toll on both sides,
01:06:29 and you might be surprised by the result.
01:06:32 I think the Russian military, of course, I’m not there,
01:06:35 and I’m not, this is speculation.
01:06:37 The Russian military has slowed down,
01:06:39 and part of that reason
01:06:40 is not to keep the civilian corridors open,
01:06:43 and I think the Ukrainian military
01:06:45 has made it more difficult on purpose,
01:06:47 especially some of these battalions
01:06:49 that are death squad battalions have gone out of their way
01:06:51 to keep the civilians locked into these cities in danger
01:06:55 because it’s in their interest to do so.
01:06:58 So there’s no reason why Ukrainian military,
01:07:01 who have killed Ukrainian civilians for years,
01:07:04 would change their policies.
01:07:06 They would have no compunctions about wiping out,
01:07:08 for example, people with white armbands in Bukha.
01:07:12 Okay, as to what Putin was thinking at the time,
01:07:16 I wondered this, and I still do.
01:07:18 I said, okay, so Putin can say,
01:07:22 let’s say the Ukrainian government
01:07:24 wants to now invade Donbass.
01:07:27 This is on February 23, and they have artillery,
01:07:30 they’re peppering the whole place.
01:07:32 They’re gonna go in, and they’re gonna get Donbass back.
01:07:35 What do you do?
01:07:36 And you have Russian separatists,
01:07:39 who are Russian Ukrainians who are on,
01:07:42 who are gonna fight.
01:07:47 How far do you go in supporting them?
01:07:49 Can Russia at this point say, well, we can’t help you.
01:07:51 You have to get along, you have to somehow,
01:07:54 you have to be absorbed by the Kiev,
01:07:56 you’re gonna be absorbed by them,
01:07:58 and they’re not gonna give you autonomy,
01:08:00 and you have to live with them,
01:08:02 and there’s gonna be a price to pay.
01:08:04 You could do that, and you could also say,
01:08:05 well, we open our borders to Donbass.
01:08:08 You can come in to our country, you can leave,
01:08:10 and we will help you to resettle.
01:08:13 And that would be a reasonable approach.
01:08:16 So you take it to the next stage, as Putin’s thinking.
01:08:18 You take it to the next stage.
01:08:20 You stall, it’s harder for your,
01:08:23 of course, there’s this pressure on Putin
01:08:25 from inside his own government to say,
01:08:27 what are you gonna do?
01:08:28 I mean, you can’t do this,
01:08:29 there’s a lot of nationalists in Russia.
01:08:31 They would certainly bring, it would be to his,
01:08:34 they’d say Putin is weak, and that’s the biggest rap
01:08:37 you can ever give a Russian leader,
01:08:39 is you’re weak, you can’t get anything done.
01:08:41 So there would have been some damage,
01:08:42 but let’s say he goes with that, and he says,
01:08:44 okay, we know what the United States intention is.
01:08:47 It’s to get rid of me, regime change,
01:08:51 and to get another Yeltsin in.
01:08:53 That’s what they want.
01:08:54 And they will go to any ends,
01:08:55 they will destroy Ukraine if necessary,
01:08:58 but they want regime change in Russia.
01:09:00 And then after they do that, of course,
01:09:02 they’ll go after China,
01:09:03 but that’s the ultimate policy of the United States.
01:09:06 This is a country that has no compunctions
01:09:09 about going all the way,
01:09:11 and it will use hypocrisy and all the news propaganda
01:09:14 in the world to get what it wants.
01:09:16 This is the equivalent, frankly,
01:09:17 of Germany’s goals in World War II, world domination.
01:09:22 There’s no question in my mind,
01:09:24 but we’re going about it in our way
01:09:26 as opposed to Hitler’s way.
01:09:29 So just to finish your thought, where do they go?
01:09:32 What’s stage two?
01:09:33 Okay, let’s say they take, Ukraine takes back Donbas.
01:09:36 Let’s say people get killed in large quantities.
01:09:40 So we now to the next stage,
01:09:42 we’re finished with the Minsk II agreements
01:09:44 that were never adhered to.
01:09:45 So what does Russia do?
01:09:46 They wait for the next aggression,
01:09:48 which is gonna come in one form or another.
01:09:52 Perhaps in Georgia, I don’t know what happened,
01:09:54 what the US is thinking,
01:09:56 but the US cannot say Russia has done anything.
01:10:02 They have not used violence to stop Donbas
01:10:05 from belonging back to Ukraine, right?
01:10:07 So you’re in a new setup now.
01:10:10 It’s a whole thing rearranges.
01:10:12 Now you have, but you still have nuclear weapons,
01:10:15 and you still have a Russian nuclear weapons,
01:10:17 and they’re serious weapons.
01:10:19 They’re very well developed, crude,
01:10:21 but not as refined as the American nuclear force,
01:10:24 but powerful.
01:10:26 That becomes another game.
01:10:27 Then you open another chess board,
01:10:29 and you still haven’t been condemned.
01:10:31 The sanctions haven’t been imposed.
01:10:33 That’s a new, it’s a new game.
01:10:35 Could he have done, could he have lived with that?
01:10:36 That’s the question I ask myself.
01:10:39 So you see ultimately Ukraine today
01:10:41 as a battleground for the proxy war
01:10:43 between Russia and the United States.
01:10:45 The United States would have then NATOized Ukraine,
01:10:49 or certainly put more weapons in.
01:10:51 The United States has already done a lot in Ukraine
01:10:53 with intelligence, with training advisors.
01:10:57 The intelligence aspect of the Ukrainian army
01:11:00 has been raised enormously by the United States contribution.
01:11:04 Is it possible for you to steal man,
01:11:05 to play devil’s advocate against yourself,
01:11:07 and say that Vladimir Zelensky
01:11:11 is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation?
01:11:14 And in a way against Russia,
01:11:17 but also against the United States,
01:11:19 it just happens that for now, the United States
01:11:21 is a useful ally.
01:11:23 But ultimately, the man, the leader,
01:11:27 is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation.
01:11:29 I would think, he thinks so.
01:11:31 Yes, and he could say that.
01:11:33 But he’s not acknowledging that the sovereignty
01:11:35 of his nation was stolen in 2014
01:11:38 with the coup d’tat that brought this right sector
01:11:42 into power, and they have controlled the country since then.
01:11:46 It’s thuggery, what they’ve done.
01:11:50 The Medvedev case is a case in point.
01:11:52 They just take what they need.
01:11:53 They go to a house, and they have a,
01:11:55 how many people have been killed?
01:11:57 Serious people, journalists killed by these battalions.
01:12:02 That’s what people don’t realize.
01:12:04 In other words, you can’t speak out.
01:12:06 A person like me would have been on the death list
01:12:08 on day five.
01:12:11 There’s no opposition to Zelensky,
01:12:13 so he doesn’t have a real sovereignty.
01:12:16 It was a stolen sovereignty.
01:12:17 Do you think President Zelensky would accept
01:12:21 an interview with you today?
01:12:24 Actually, since I made Ukraine on Fire,
01:12:27 a documentary which perhaps you’ve seen,
01:12:29 which records the incidents of 2014
01:12:35 and the Maidan demonstrations,
01:12:37 and shows you the dishonesty behind it,
01:12:40 no, I think that they’ve been very negative,
01:12:43 and they would kill me if I was in Ukraine.
01:12:46 I mean, they don’t have any,
01:12:48 these people are very tough.
01:12:50 These are as rough as they come, in my opinion,
01:12:52 and I’ve seen rough in my life.
01:12:54 I mean, these guys are not playing fair at all.
01:12:57 These are death squads.
01:12:59 No, I don’t think, and Zelensky would have
01:13:01 nothing to do with it, but of course,
01:13:02 it would be dangerous for me,
01:13:04 and they’ve been very hostile in their policies
01:13:07 to any Ukrainians abroad who are also threatened.
01:13:11 In other words, you could be in Paris,
01:13:12 but if you speak out too much,
01:13:16 I think Ukrainians know that they’re gonna be targeted,
01:13:18 and I think that’s part of the reason they don’t talk.
01:13:21 A lot of them, you have to take the anti Russian line,
01:13:24 but I think a lot of them are divided.
01:13:26 So you think you would be killed,
01:13:29 and Zelensky wouldn’t even know about it, so there is?
01:13:31 Well, I don’t think, if I was killed certainly abroad,
01:13:34 no, they wouldn’t kill me abroad.
01:13:35 I think they’d figure out a way.
01:13:37 No, no, no, no, if you traveled to Ukraine, I mean.
01:13:40 I wouldn’t get in, I wouldn’t get in,
01:13:42 except through Donbass, I’d come through.
01:13:44 There are some Americans in Donbass
01:13:46 who are reporting on the war there,
01:13:48 and I read their reports, actually.
01:13:49 They’re pretty interesting,
01:13:50 because they show you the cruelty of what’s going on,
01:13:53 but never mentioned in the West, never.
01:13:55 That’s what’s so strange about this.
01:13:58 This is a modern world that we’re living in,
01:13:59 and yet this information is not coming out
01:14:02 to the mass of the people,
01:14:03 and on the contrary, the United States has closed down
01:14:06 all the information centers that are possible
01:14:11 to alternative news getting to the American people.
01:14:15 They’ve seriously made an effort,
01:14:16 and the BBC, English, and France.
01:14:20 I was shocked when France closed RT down,
01:14:22 because RT is actually pretty good.
01:14:24 Yes, they may, it’s called, there are distortions,
01:14:27 but you know as well as I do, because you hear,
01:14:29 you speak that RT has done a very brave job
01:14:33 of putting correspondents into the field
01:14:35 in very dangerous positions,
01:14:36 and they’ve gotten great footage
01:14:38 of some of the violence that’s going on.
01:14:40 Well, given the wall of propaganda in the West,
01:14:43 I also see the wall of propaganda in Russia,
01:14:47 the wall of propaganda in China,
01:14:49 the wall of propaganda in India.
01:14:51 What do we do with these walls of propaganda?
01:14:54 Yes, let’s talk about Russia,
01:14:55 because you would know more about it,
01:14:57 but my last experience there, newspapers,
01:15:00 it was more interesting, put it this way,
01:15:03 when I went to Venezuela, the United States was saying
01:15:06 back then that Chavez controlled the press.
01:15:09 I get to Venezuela, and there’s nothing but criticism
01:15:11 of Chavez in the press.
01:15:12 It was owned by the oligarchs of Venezuela,
01:15:16 and who hated him, so it was across the board.
01:15:18 That’s why Chavez opened the state television,
01:15:22 spent more money on it, and advertised his point of view
01:15:26 through state television.
01:15:27 But in Russia, there is, what I saw was criticism.
01:15:32 I met with a publisher who got the Nobel Prize
01:15:34 of that famous newspaper, and his point of view
01:15:38 at that time when I spoke to him a few years ago
01:15:40 was we’re operating, there is criticism of him,
01:15:44 but you can’t call for the overthrow of the government,
01:15:48 nor in Venezuela, nor in the United States for that matter.
01:15:50 If you call for the overthrow of the government
01:15:53 of the United States, you’re gonna be in deep trouble.
01:15:55 Well, all right, so to push back on that,
01:15:57 it’s interesting, it’s so interesting,
01:15:59 because we mentioned Elon Musk,
01:16:02 and there’s a way that people sound when they speak freely.
01:16:06 When I speak to, I have family in Ukraine,
01:16:09 I have family in Russia.
01:16:11 When I speak to people in Russia,
01:16:12 let’s put my family aside,
01:16:14 when I speak to people in Russia,
01:16:16 I think there’s fear.
01:16:21 I think they don’t,
01:16:25 sometimes when you call for the overthrow of government,
01:16:28 that’s important, not because you necessarily believe
01:16:30 for the overthrow of the government,
01:16:32 but you just need to test the power centers
01:16:36 and make sure they’re responsive to the people.
01:16:41 And I feel like there’s a mix of fear and apathy
01:16:47 that has a different texture than it does
01:16:51 in the United States.
01:16:53 That worries me, because I would like to see
01:16:58 the flourishing of a people in all places.
01:17:01 Well, as I said, my impression was that there’s far more
01:17:05 freedom in the press than was pictured by the West,
01:17:08 and that means different points of view,
01:17:10 because the Russians are always arguing with themselves.
01:17:12 I’ve never seen a country that’s so contentious.
01:17:14 There’s more intellectuals in Moscow and the cities
01:17:19 than you can believe, and you know the Russian people there.
01:17:23 They’ve been fighting government for years,
01:17:25 back from the 1870s, it was czarist times,
01:17:27 they’re always plotting against the government,
01:17:30 and the intelligentsia has known through history
01:17:32 as being contentious and anti government in many ways.
01:17:37 And we see the same thing,
01:17:39 educated people turning against Russia.
01:17:40 I don’t appreciate those people,
01:17:41 because I think they’re very spoiled,
01:17:43 and they don’t understand some of the stuff
01:17:45 that’s going on in the West.
01:17:46 But we have a lot of Russians in Europe and America
01:17:51 that attack Russia and sometimes don’t understand
01:17:55 that they are under pressure from the United States,
01:17:57 and they don’t understand the size of the pressure.
01:17:59 And that’s why Putin connects with the people,
01:18:02 because he represents the common,
01:18:05 more the common man who’s saying to you,
01:18:08 your interests are threatened, Russia is threatened.
01:18:11 We are representing only the interests of Russia,
01:18:14 not, we’re not an empire, we’re not gonna expand.
01:18:16 He has no empire intentions,
01:18:19 although the West paints it as empire.
01:18:21 I see no evidence of it.
01:18:24 Why didn’t he do something in all these years?
01:18:26 Nothing, he did nothing except defend the country
01:18:29 in Georgia and in Chechnya.
01:18:30 So the imperialist imperative is coming more
01:18:33 from the West.
01:18:34 It’s the imperialist, it’s the imperialist agenda.
01:18:37 Going back to, I’m sorry, where we left our discussion off,
01:18:40 I mean, I was gonna go on with America
01:18:42 not only being censored, closed down now, closed down.
01:18:47 And you say it’s not fear, well, it is fear.
01:18:50 I am scared, because if you get your Facebook page
01:18:53 suspended or your YouTube, your Twitter account thrown off,
01:18:58 a lot of good people are getting there, thrown off.
01:19:02 You can’t speak out, it affects your business.
01:19:04 It goes back to the 1950s when my father’s world,
01:19:07 when you could not express any sympathy for a Soviet Union
01:19:12 without endangering your job,
01:19:14 without basically being not trusted.
01:19:16 You had to be part of the program to get along, to go along.
01:19:20 Same thing when the United Kingdom,
01:19:22 I mean, for all their talk, this Boris Johnson is an idiot.
01:19:26 But all their talk about, do you remember their policies
01:19:29 with the IRA in Ireland when Ireland was threatening them?
01:19:32 They cut off the IRA completely.
01:19:34 Gerry Adams, who was a wonderful guy, I met him,
01:19:37 was not allowed to even be heard in Britain
01:19:40 during certain years.
01:19:41 In France, all constantly through the Algerian War,
01:19:44 the Algerians were not allowed to be heard.
01:19:46 The Algerian War for Independence divided France greatly.
01:19:51 You could not even show Paths of Glory,
01:19:52 World War I film in France for, I don’t know, 20 years
01:19:56 after it came out.
01:19:58 Censorship is a way of life
01:20:00 when democracies also feel threatened.
01:20:02 They are much more fragile than they pretend to be.
01:20:05 A healthy democracy would take all the criticism
01:20:07 in the world and shrug it off and say,
01:20:09 okay, that’s what’s good about our country.
01:20:11 Well, I’d like to see that in America.
01:20:13 There are times that it’s been like that,
01:20:15 but it’s so scary now.
01:20:17 So it is scary, that’s what I was trying to say.
01:20:20 It’s not unscary to me.
01:20:22 In China, I would say to you, yes, it’s much scarier to me
01:20:26 because there is the internet wall that they cut off,
01:20:30 and I got into problems in China too
01:20:32 because I said something years ago
01:20:34 about you have to discover your own history.
01:20:37 You have to be honest about Mao.
01:20:38 You have to go back and let’s make a movie about Mao.
01:20:42 That upset them and show his negatives.
01:20:46 So China has been much more sensitive than Russia
01:20:49 about criticism, much more.
01:20:51 And it is a source of problems, but on the other hand,
01:20:54 China has a lot of grievances,
01:20:56 a lot going back to the 19th century
01:20:58 and the British imperialism of that era
01:21:01 and the American imperialism.
01:21:02 If you could talk to Vladimir Putin once again now,
01:21:07 what kind of things would you talk about here?
01:21:11 What kind of questions would you ask?
01:21:13 Huh, well, one thing I would certainly ask
01:21:19 is what you were thinking on February 23,
01:21:21 and I would ask him to reply to my question
01:21:24 about what if you took this to phase two.
01:21:26 You surrendered in Donbass.
01:21:28 You had no ego about it.
01:21:30 You just surrendered.
01:21:31 It’s in your interest to your country,
01:21:33 and you invited all the refugees from Donbass into Russia
01:21:36 as much as they can.
01:21:38 What would you do now?
01:21:40 What’s the US next move in your opinion?
01:21:43 How are you gonna, okay, where are we gonna go?
01:21:46 That would be the key question because it’s,
01:21:50 but he didn’t go that way.
01:21:51 He chose to take the sanctions and to go this way.
01:21:56 Why he did that is a key question for our time.
01:22:00 Perhaps it was a mistake.
01:22:01 Perhaps it was his judgment.
01:22:03 Perhaps, as I said, but I don’t,
01:22:05 knowing the man I did, I don’t think so.
01:22:07 I think it was calculated.
01:22:09 Now this is projection and speculation,
01:22:12 but there’s something different about him
01:22:14 in the past several months.
01:22:16 It could be the COVID thing,
01:22:17 the isolation that you mentioned.
01:22:20 I listen to a lot of interviews and speeches in Russian,
01:22:23 and there’s something about power over time
01:22:28 that can change you, that can isolate you.
01:22:30 Well, when I was there,
01:22:31 no, he’d been in office for already 15 years.
01:22:35 He had power.
01:22:37 He didn’t misuse it in my opinion.
01:22:38 He was very even.
01:22:39 I saw him go on television and talk to his fellows
01:22:42 the same way he always talked to them.
01:22:44 He grew in intelligence and knowledge
01:22:47 because he had dealings with the whole world.
01:22:50 Now people had come to him.
01:22:52 He was very well known in Africa and Middle East,
01:22:55 certainly Syria, and I just never saw misuse of his power.
01:23:01 I saw humility in him, actually.
01:23:03 So perhaps there was a calculation and he calculated wrong
01:23:09 in terms of what happens if he doesn’t invade.
01:23:12 Perhaps there was a calculation,
01:23:14 perhaps he had a calm and clear mind,
01:23:16 and he calculated wrong.
01:23:18 Well, he also made the point that he,
01:23:20 the talk of Zelensky saying,
01:23:22 well, nuclear weapons were gonna come into Ukraine.
01:23:25 There was talk about that right before the invasion too,
01:23:28 and certainly that would have set off alarms.
01:23:30 You know, the United States is already kind of doing that
01:23:34 by not only putting its intelligence
01:23:36 and its heavy weaponry into Ukraine,
01:23:39 but you’ve got to deal with the question,
01:23:41 the next question that comes up,
01:23:42 the most immediate question is,
01:23:44 is the United States gonna start?
01:23:47 And I’m saying this is good.
01:23:50 They’re making a lot of noise in United States press
01:23:52 about Russia using nuclear weapons and chemical weapons.
01:23:56 That’s a lot of noise.
01:23:58 Again, going back to my analogy,
01:24:00 when the United States starts that,
01:24:02 it starts the conversation going.
01:24:04 It’s in the interest of the United States
01:24:07 for Russia to be pinned with any kind of chemical
01:24:12 or nuclear incident.
01:24:16 Except, for example, it’d be very, not simple,
01:24:19 but it would be possible to explode a nuclear device
01:24:23 in Donbass and kill thousands of people.
01:24:27 And we would not know right away who did it,
01:24:29 but of course the blame would go right to Russia,
01:24:32 right to Russia, even if it didn’t make sense,
01:24:34 if there was no motivation for it.
01:24:36 It would just be blamed on Russia.
01:24:38 The United States might well be the one
01:24:40 who does that false flag operation.
01:24:42 It would not be beyond them.
01:24:44 It would be a very dramatic solution
01:24:48 to sealing this war off as a major victory
01:24:50 for the United States.
01:24:51 That’s terrifying.
01:24:52 No, but it can happen.
01:24:53 It can happen.
01:24:54 A one kiloton device, low yield, it’s possible.
01:24:59 So when you walk across that line,
01:25:01 you can potentially never walk back.
01:25:05 Well, I think the United States is calculating
01:25:07 that it’s a dangerous, yes, I agree,
01:25:10 but I think the neoconservative arrogance is such
01:25:13 that they really believe they can push their advantage
01:25:16 to the max now because of all these propaganda successes
01:25:20 up to now.
01:25:21 The Ukrainian army could be wiped out for all we know.
01:25:23 There’s all this leftists or neo, Nazi brigades,
01:25:25 but they’re being advised very well by US
01:25:29 and they’re sending the weapons in,
01:25:30 are huge amounts of weapons.
01:25:31 What about American budget?
01:25:33 No one talks about how much money we’re giving to Ukraine.
01:25:36 It’s a billion dollars already in weaponry
01:25:39 and not most of it just poured in.
01:25:41 What about, you know, the Russian budget is,
01:25:47 defense budget is 60 some billion dollars a year.
01:25:51 It’s nothing compared to the United States, 1 15th of it.
01:25:54 But yet we’ve put so much weaponry into Ukraine.
01:25:59 The money we’ve spent on Ukraine is equivalent almost
01:26:03 to what we spent on COVID in our own country.
01:26:07 It’s astounding the distortion of our priorities.
01:26:11 There’s also chemical.
01:26:12 Don’t forget chemical is probably the easier way to go.
01:26:15 But in Syria, there was far too many incidents of America
01:26:20 in its quest to demonize Assad and the Russians
01:26:25 of all these chemical attacks that were happening
01:26:27 that they were vowing came from Russia.
01:26:31 And in spite of the fact that Russia just pulled out of the,
01:26:36 signed the agreement on chemical arms
01:26:38 and apparently destroyed its stock several years ago,
01:26:43 it’s strange that the strangest incidents happened in Syria.
01:26:47 You go back to them, trace every one,
01:26:50 good journalism was done.
01:26:51 The White Helmets got a lot of fame,
01:26:53 but they were corrupted.
01:26:55 And many good journalists tried to point out
01:26:58 the inconsistencies in the American accusations.
01:27:04 Robert Parry among them,
01:27:05 who was one of my mentors at Consortium Press.
01:27:08 A lot of good, you’d have to go back,
01:27:10 but trace each, like you would trace each time
01:27:13 they made an accusation against Putin of murder.
01:27:16 You need that same kind of Sherlock Holmes intensity,
01:27:19 investigation, and they don’t do it
01:27:21 because the United Nations or the chemical,
01:27:24 not the United Nations as much as the chemical people,
01:27:27 the organization has been tampered with.
01:27:30 If you remember correctly, there was accusations
01:27:33 that the chemical investigative unit,
01:27:36 I don’t know the name of it, was tampered with.
01:27:39 And people quit, people who were working on that commission
01:27:42 quit and said that this is not legit.
01:27:45 So very interesting, that Syria story is wacko.
01:27:48 So the United States is willing
01:27:49 to use chemical in Syria freely.
01:27:52 It did it three, four times.
01:27:53 If you remember correctly, Trump was challenged
01:27:55 that he did not attack after a chemical incident in Syria.
01:27:59 All these newscasters in the United States,
01:28:02 the most heaviest of them were saying,
01:28:04 well, President Trump is now finally acting
01:28:08 like a real president when he attacks,
01:28:11 when he drops missiles in Syria.
01:28:12 They actually said that.
01:28:14 In other words, they wanted Trump to go to war on Syria,
01:28:17 but he didn’t.
01:28:17 Chemical weapons and nuclear is really terrifying.
01:28:23 Do you think, now combine this with the fascinating choice
01:28:28 in your interviews with Vladimir Putin
01:28:31 to watch Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove
01:28:36 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
01:28:38 And given the fact that you did that,
01:28:42 now looking at the fact that the word nuclear,
01:28:46 and it feels like the world hangs
01:28:49 on the brink of nuclear war,
01:28:52 do you think that that’s overstating the case?
01:28:55 No, that’s what worried me from the beginning,
01:28:58 and that’s probably why I got involved in all this stuff,
01:29:00 because I go back to the 60s when we were so close
01:29:06 to nuclear war.
01:29:07 I lived through that period,
01:29:08 and I thought, as many people did,
01:29:11 that this was, it was gonna come now.
01:29:14 So I’ve lived through that,
01:29:16 and I didn’t sense the period in 83
01:29:19 when Reagan took us to the edge,
01:29:21 if you remember correctly.
01:29:22 Able Archer was an exercise that almost brought us to,
01:29:26 because the Russians were really paranoid at that point,
01:29:29 and they were responding to our military exercise
01:29:32 on Able Archer.
01:29:33 There was also the Korean airliner, they went down.
01:29:35 There were numerous incidents in the 80s,
01:29:37 but I never felt the fear.
01:29:40 I thought Reagan was testing the limits,
01:29:43 but perhaps if I’d been younger, I would’ve felt it.
01:29:46 But anyway, no, we come close.
01:29:48 The United States has risked this several times.
01:29:51 If I told you, it would be hard for you to believe,
01:29:53 if I could set a scene for you in a drama in 1962
01:29:57 when Kennedy has a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff
01:30:01 and the CIA, and they talk about a plan,
01:30:06 a military plan, to first strike the Soviet Union and China.
01:30:11 It was an Eisenhower plan that had been put into potential
01:30:18 operation in early 60s or 50s, late 50s, SIOP 62.
01:30:27 This was an attack on the Soviet Union, first strike.
01:30:29 That’s why the United States has never given up
01:30:32 the concept of first strike.
01:30:34 It’s interesting that the Russian nuclear policy posture
01:30:38 is more defensive than the American one,
01:30:41 which leaves options open.
01:30:44 The same options are open in neoconservative agreements
01:30:49 that we see from the late 90s, where they say,
01:30:52 the emergence of a rival power will not be tolerated.
01:30:56 That’s a very broad statement,
01:30:58 and it allows you to do a lot, including nuclear.
01:31:01 So you have to understand the United States is always,
01:31:05 first of all, it breaks so many treaties.
01:31:07 We know that from the Putin story
01:31:10 about the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002,
01:31:13 and then the INF Treaty of, they broke that one.
01:31:17 That was the intermediate missiles.
01:31:19 That was 2019.
01:31:21 I don’t know when they broke it off,
01:31:22 but the United States has not been very faithful
01:31:25 on its nuclear agreements, and so I don’t know
01:31:29 that we can even deal with the United States diplomatically.
01:31:32 It seems to be impossible.
01:31:34 Now, it brings me to Biden.
01:31:36 And this is the opposite of Kennedy.
01:31:40 Kennedy was a Catholic Irish anti imperialist.
01:31:43 Biden seems to be the opposite.
01:31:45 He seems to be a get along, go along guy
01:31:48 who’s been not only old,
01:31:50 but he’s also gone along with this program,
01:31:52 which I voted for Biden because I feared Trump,
01:31:56 but I thought Biden at a certain age would mellow.
01:31:59 I really did.
01:32:00 He’s not mellowed, apparently.
01:32:01 He’s still listening to these people, and he believes them.
01:32:05 And it seems that his, that horrible woman,
01:32:08 Victoria Nuland, who was Under Secretary of State,
01:32:10 he appointed her to this sector of the world.
01:32:14 She’s very influential,
01:32:16 and she’s been one of the worst people on Ukraine.
01:32:19 Obviously, she’s behind the coup.
01:32:21 She was the one who boasted that, you know,
01:32:24 we got our man in, Yats, whatever it is, Yatsenuk.
01:32:28 And also, remember the famous statement, fuck the EU?
01:32:32 All these things, but she’s back,
01:32:34 and she said the other day about if the Soviets,
01:32:37 if the Russians use nuclear weaponry of any kind,
01:32:41 there’s gonna be a horrible price to pay.
01:32:44 She was out of the blue.
01:32:44 I said, what the hell is she doing?
01:32:46 She’s talking nuclear all of a sudden.
01:32:48 And then since that day, everybody in the US press,
01:32:52 all the shows have gone, talk nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.
01:32:55 Secretary of State has done it, Blinken, it scares you.
01:33:05 If you think about it, the United States scares me.
01:33:08 So that’s the military industrial complex machine,
01:33:11 fully functional, fully operational
01:33:13 behind this whole thing.
01:33:14 Certainly is.
01:33:14 Is that what’s to blame?
01:33:16 Certainly is.
01:33:17 That’s why I showed him Strangelove,
01:33:18 because I wanted him to show him.
01:33:20 I wanted Mr. Putin to say, look at this film.
01:33:22 You never saw it.
01:33:23 How can you not say, you know,
01:33:24 it’s a seminal film in American history
01:33:27 to those people who care.
01:33:28 And it shows you the Kubrick had a pacifist, thank God,
01:33:34 antiwar mentality, which he showed in Bows of Glory
01:33:39 as well as Strangelove.
01:33:42 And it’s such a dire, well done scenario
01:33:46 that I wanted Mr. Putin to be aware
01:33:48 of the way the United States thinks.
01:33:51 Yeah, the absurdity of escalation,
01:33:53 the absurdity of war at the largest scale,
01:33:56 the absurdity of nuclear war, especially.
01:33:59 Can we walk back from the brink of nuclear war?
01:34:03 Can we?
01:34:04 Can we?
01:34:05 Yes, yes we can.
01:34:06 What’s the path to walk back?
01:34:07 Reason.
01:34:08 Reason.
01:34:09 Between who and whom?
01:34:10 Reason and diplomacy.
01:34:11 There’s no reason.
01:34:12 I mean, talk to the guy.
01:34:15 Mr. Biden, why don’t you calm down
01:34:17 and go and talk to Mr. Putin in Moscow?
01:34:20 Why don’t you just sit across the table from him
01:34:23 and try to have a discussion without falling
01:34:26 into ideologies and stuff like that?
01:34:29 Can I ask you for advice?
01:34:31 You did some of the most difficult interviews ever.
01:34:34 Do you have advice that you can give to someone like me
01:34:38 or anyone hoping to understand something
01:34:40 about a human being sitting across from them
01:34:44 about what it takes to do a good interview?
01:34:47 You’re doing one.
01:34:48 Well, no, but there’s a, listen,
01:34:52 there’s levels to this game.
01:34:55 And interviewing somebody like Vladimir Putin,
01:34:58 also language barrier, sit across from the man,
01:35:03 try to keep an open mind,
01:35:06 try to also ask challenging questions,
01:35:08 but not challenging with an agenda,
01:35:11 but seeking to understand and understand deeply.
01:35:14 How do you do that?
01:35:15 Seeking the truth.
01:35:17 It’s very simple.
01:35:18 Seeking the truth, being a questioner like you are.
01:35:20 You wanna know what is really going on.
01:35:23 I could not get anywhere with Biden or Bush
01:35:26 or for that matter, Obama.
01:35:28 They’d be opaque with me.
01:35:30 There’s no interview possible
01:35:31 with the president of the United States
01:35:32 because he’s got to stand for all the stuff
01:35:34 that they stand for, which is imperialism,
01:35:37 which is control of the world.
01:35:39 How can you defend that?
01:35:41 No one’s gonna come out and say that.
01:35:42 They’re always gonna blame the enemy.
01:35:44 They’re gonna blame Iran.
01:35:45 They’re gonna blame China.
01:35:47 So with some people, it may not be possible
01:35:50 to break through the opaqueness.
01:35:51 You can’t, you can’t.
01:35:52 I mean, have you ever seen an interview with the president
01:35:54 besides being personable,
01:35:57 where he actually discussed American policy?
01:36:00 Yeah, I mean, not really, but maybe after their president.
01:36:03 I could see Obama being able to do such an interview.
01:36:06 I could see George W. being able to do such an interview.
01:36:10 Or are they not able to reflect at all on the?
01:36:13 George W. hasn’t shown much conscience
01:36:15 in terms of thinking about what he’s done.
01:36:17 You’ve seen that.
01:36:18 You ever see my movie, W.?
01:36:20 I think that’s one of my best movies
01:36:22 because it shows a man who’s just out of his depth
01:36:25 and has no, he has a conscience at the end of the movie.
01:36:28 If you remember correctly, he talks to his wife
01:36:31 and he says, I don’t get it.
01:36:33 I’m trying to do good in the world.
01:36:34 I’ve done, I believe in good and right.
01:36:36 And why do people not understand that kind of complaint
01:36:40 as if he can’t get outside himself
01:36:42 to understand the way other people think?
01:36:45 Empathies, walking like a dramatist is what I do.
01:36:47 You walk in the footsteps of other people.
01:36:50 When I did a movie about Richard Nixon,
01:36:52 it wasn’t because I liked him.
01:36:54 It was because I wanted to,
01:36:55 I think I understood a part of him because of my father
01:36:57 and I think I wanted to walk in his footsteps.
01:37:00 That’s not to say I sympathize with him because I didn’t.
01:37:03 I don’t think he helped the American cause at all,
01:37:05 but it was empathize as opposed to sympathize.
01:37:08 Same thing with Bush.
01:37:10 People were shocked when I did the Bush movie.
01:37:11 They said, how can you be in any way receptive to this guy?
01:37:18 That’s wrong.
01:37:19 Dramatists don’t have political positions.
01:37:22 They walk in the shoes of.
01:37:23 That’s why Bush movie perhaps was surprising
01:37:27 and many people didn’t care for it.
01:37:29 Maybe that’s what, but that’s, you’ve got to go there.
01:37:34 If you did a movie about a villain, you have to go there.
01:37:38 You have to walk in their shoes.
01:37:41 Yes.
01:37:41 So see them, cause they usually,
01:37:43 villains usually see themselves as the hero.
01:37:46 Yes.
01:37:47 So you have to consider what is it like to live in a world
01:37:51 where this person is the hero?
01:37:53 Yes.
01:37:55 Is that a burden?
01:37:56 Is that hard?
01:37:57 Not for George W. Bush.
01:37:59 He’s bitching because they didn’t understand him,
01:38:02 but he had a good vision he said of democracy
01:38:05 and you know, democracy forgives a lot of sins.
01:38:09 Can I ask you a hard question on that?
01:38:11 Yes, sure.
01:38:13 So because empathy is so important to a great interview,
01:38:16 let’s ask the most challenging version of empathy,
01:38:19 which is when you’re sitting across from a man
01:38:23 on the brink of war that leads to tens of millions
01:38:26 of deaths, which is Hitler.
01:38:28 So if you could interview Hitler in 1939,
01:38:32 as the drums of war start to beat or 1941
01:38:36 when they’re already full on war, but there’s still
01:38:39 a lot of pacifists, there’s still a lot of people unsure
01:38:44 what are the motivations behind what Hitler’s doing.
01:38:48 How would you do that interview?
01:38:49 Well it depends when you do it.
01:38:50 If you do it in 38, I certainly would have,
01:38:54 no you have to, if you sit down across from Hitler,
01:38:57 you empathize.
01:38:57 What is your beef?
01:38:59 Where have you been?
01:39:00 What is your consciousness?
01:39:02 Why do you hate Jewish people?
01:39:05 Why, what is, all these questions that come up.
01:39:10 His sense of grievance as a result of World War I.
01:39:13 There’s justifications there, et cetera.
01:39:16 But if I, and by the way, Churchill was trying
01:39:19 to make a deal with him in 38.
01:39:21 That’s a fact that people don’t know.
01:39:23 Churchill himself, there was still the desire
01:39:25 in England to make peace with Germany.
01:39:29 And it was seen as a possible, what Churchill
01:39:34 really wanted was Hitler to go against Russia.
01:39:36 And anything to destroy the Bolsheviks.
01:39:40 So he was using Hitler as much as he could
01:39:42 to go after Russia, but Hitler was too elusive
01:39:46 to get, to pin him down.
01:39:48 But if you remember, Hitler was very kind at the end of,
01:39:51 kind is not the right word, was,
01:39:54 did not go after the British Empire when he had France.
01:39:58 And he could have.
01:40:00 He had another objective, which was obviously the East.
01:40:04 So Hitler’s goal, I think, he always had an admiration
01:40:08 for England.
01:40:09 It’s an interesting story, always.
01:40:13 And the empire.
01:40:15 Yes, and certainly Churchill, we have no doubts now
01:40:19 from history revisionism that Churchill’s interest,
01:40:22 main interest, was not Germany.
01:40:24 It was the British Empire.
01:40:26 And to preserve it to India, the road to India
01:40:28 and all that, and Middle East.
01:40:31 Churchill fought the entire war with the concept
01:40:34 of preserving the British Empire.
01:40:36 All his goals, he sent America on a goose chase into Italy,
01:40:39 you could argue, instead of establishing
01:40:41 a sincere second front in Western Europe.
01:40:47 Interesting man.
01:40:49 So I would have tried to get, you know,
01:40:50 I think I would have approached it the same way.
01:40:52 In 1939, it would have been a different story
01:40:55 because at that point, he’d attacked Poland,
01:40:58 and in 1940, France.
01:41:00 So it’s another ball game.
01:41:02 But certainly, at whatever point you talk to him,
01:41:05 I would try to understand his point.
01:41:07 I’m not judging you, Hitler.
01:41:09 I’m saying to you, tell me what you’re thinking.
01:41:11 Why are you invading Russia?
01:41:12 What’s your thought?
01:41:13 That’s all an interviewer should do.
01:41:15 He shouldn’t be expressing his contempt for Hitler,
01:41:18 which like an American journalist interviewing Putin,
01:41:21 I’m getting brownie points for expressing my contempt for you.
01:41:26 That doesn’t wash with me.
01:41:27 That’s ugly.
01:41:29 Seek to understand.
01:41:30 Yes.
01:41:32 This is a technical question,
01:41:33 but was language a barrier as an interviewer?
01:41:36 To some degree.
01:41:37 It’s very hard to learn Russian.
01:41:40 But I had very, they have excellent translators
01:41:42 in the Kremlin, excellent.
01:41:43 They are people who are trained very seriously
01:41:47 for months or years before they,
01:41:50 these people are young and they’re very bright.
01:41:53 I was very impressed with the Russian translators.
01:41:55 It’s interesting.
01:41:56 I mean, I’m impressed as well,
01:41:58 but there’s a humor that’s lost.
01:42:01 There’s a wit, a dry wit.
01:42:03 There’s stuff said between the lines.
01:42:06 That’s not actually how much content,
01:42:09 but it’s more kind of the things
01:42:12 that make communication more frictionless.
01:42:15 It’s the, there’s a kind of sadness to a Russian humor
01:42:20 that permeates all things.
01:42:22 And that sometimes is lost in translation.
01:42:24 The translation is a little bit colder,
01:42:26 meaning it just conveys the facts.
01:42:29 Would you call it sardonic humor?
01:42:31 I would say so, yeah.
01:42:33 And so it’s interesting.
01:42:34 But I think you could see that from facial expressions
01:42:36 when you’re sitting across from the person
01:42:38 and you can feel it.
01:42:39 I feel it, yeah.
01:42:39 You can feel it.
01:42:41 Let me ask you in general,
01:42:43 what’s the role of love in the human condition,
01:42:48 in your life, in life in general?
01:42:50 You’ve talked, you looked at some of the darkest aspect
01:42:53 of human nature.
01:42:55 What’s the role of this,
01:42:57 one of the more beautiful aspects of human nature?
01:42:59 I think without love, I wouldn’t,
01:43:01 I don’t think I’d be able to carry on.
01:43:02 I think that love is my, love is the greatest,
01:43:08 the ability to love is the greatest virtue you can have.
01:43:11 It’s the ability to share with another,
01:43:14 with your family, with your children, with your wife,
01:43:17 with your lover, your partner.
01:43:19 It’s an ability to extend yourself into the world
01:43:22 and it brings empathy with it.
01:43:23 If you love well,
01:43:25 I think you expand it to the human race too.
01:43:28 And it’s the strength behind the great novelists,
01:43:32 the great artists of our time.
01:43:35 I think part of the reason I suppose
01:43:41 we’re scared of science sometimes
01:43:42 is because the scientists sometimes
01:43:44 don’t express that clearly.
01:43:45 You can lose that when you focus on the facts,
01:43:49 on empirical data, on the science of things.
01:43:54 You can lose the humanity that’s between the lines.
01:43:58 I’m often struck by when I talk to scientists
01:44:00 and I’ve talked to a few,
01:44:02 that how arrogant they can be about,
01:44:03 they don’t talk to you if you don’t understand their world
01:44:06 and they talk to each other and there’s an arrogance,
01:44:09 a closed circle kind of thing.
01:44:10 Oh, he’s not at my level, I can’t,
01:44:12 there’s no discussion to be had with this person,
01:44:14 he’s a human being.
01:44:16 That arrogance is terrifying to me
01:44:18 because it’s next door neighbor to closed mindedness
01:44:23 which then can be used by charismatic leaders
01:44:25 as it was in Nazi Germany
01:44:27 to commit some of the worst atrocities.
01:44:29 The scientists can be used as pawns
01:44:34 in a very cruel game.
01:44:37 What advice would you give to young people?
01:44:39 You’ve done, first of all, some of the greatest films ever.
01:44:43 You’ve lived a heck of a life.
01:44:47 You’ve, were fearless and bold
01:44:51 in asking some really difficult questions of this world.
01:44:53 What advice would you give to young people today,
01:44:56 high school, college, about career?
01:45:00 How to have a career they can be proud of
01:45:02 or how to have a life they can be proud of?
01:45:06 Well, I have three children
01:45:07 so obviously I’m not necessarily the best advisor
01:45:11 in the world and I do find that the children,
01:45:15 I’ve raised them with a sense of freedom
01:45:17 and they do what they want.
01:45:19 In the end, it’s their life, their destiny, their character.
01:45:22 That’s what comes out.
01:45:24 You can try to influence it
01:45:27 but you can try to get your daughter to wake up
01:45:30 at a certain hour in the day but it never works.
01:45:34 So I long ago gave up on that
01:45:38 and my children are all grown now
01:45:40 but aside from that, I think if I was a teacher in a school
01:45:44 and teaching film, I’d say to the students,
01:45:48 get an education.
01:45:49 You can’t just look at film because it’s not
01:45:53 a full education, it’s not the spectrum.
01:45:55 I don’t think you should teach film as a,
01:45:59 I think you need a base in other worlds.
01:46:02 One of the greatest courses I took at NYU was,
01:46:05 and I was a war veteran on the GI Bill
01:46:08 so I was older than the other students.
01:46:10 One of the great, I took a class outside the film school
01:46:13 in Greek classics because I hadn’t had much history
01:46:18 and I wanted to know more about the world of Homer
01:46:20 and so forth and the teacher opened my eyes
01:46:23 to so much in that class and I wrote about it
01:46:26 in my memoir, it’s called Chasing the Light
01:46:29 about Professor Leahy and what he did to me.
01:46:33 He gave me the concepts clearly of consciousness
01:46:36 which is the Homeric theme of Odysseus
01:46:39 and also lethe, L E T H E, which is sleep
01:46:47 and how most of the crew, Odysseus’s crew,
01:46:53 were experiencing lethe and how necessary it was
01:46:56 to stay awake.
01:46:58 So it’s not just film, it’s just you have to learn
01:47:01 the world as much as you can when you’re young
01:47:04 and so that I think is the basis of a good education
01:47:10 and a classic one is important, a basis.
01:47:15 I think then you go on and you can learn computer
01:47:18 if you want but that’s specialization.
01:47:21 If you’re a computer geek, is that a life?
01:47:24 Does that give you enough satisfaction?
01:47:26 Do you get the joy out of people?
01:47:29 No, just like filmmaking is a skill.
01:47:32 Yes, right.
01:47:32 You have the broad background to understand the world,
01:47:36 literature, history.
01:47:40 Absolutely.
01:47:43 So one of the things about being human is life is finite.
01:47:48 It ends.
01:47:50 Do you think about your death?
01:47:52 Are you afraid of your death?
01:47:53 Yeah, sure.
01:47:54 Absolutely, you have to come to terms with death
01:47:56 and that’s a tough one for many people.
01:47:58 It’s always there.
01:47:59 I’m older than you, obviously,
01:48:01 and I’m getting closer to it.
01:48:02 Couldn’t happen any day, actually.
01:48:04 When you get to a certain age,
01:48:06 you can’t assume that you’re gonna be alive tomorrow.
01:48:08 So I try to deal with that.
01:48:10 Are you afraid of it?
01:48:12 Much less so than I was when I was younger.
01:48:15 Remember, I was in Vietnam
01:48:16 but I thought I dealt with it there
01:48:18 but when I came back, I realized that I wanted to live.
01:48:21 So yes, I’ve learned over time
01:48:24 to get more and more used to it and get ready for it.
01:48:27 What’s a good answer to the question of why live?
01:48:31 So the realization that you wanted to live.
01:48:34 What was the reason to live?
01:48:36 Because it was better than being one of those corpses
01:48:38 that I saw in the jungle.
01:48:40 I saw how finite death is.
01:48:45 Are there things in your life you regret?
01:48:48 Oh, sure.
01:48:48 Too many.
01:48:55 Is there something you wish you could have done differently?
01:48:58 Like if you could go back to do one thing differently
01:49:00 or that it regrets all of it.
01:49:01 Did you ask Musk this?
01:49:02 I’m curious.
01:49:04 What did he say?
01:49:04 Offline all the time.
01:49:09 No, no.
01:49:11 You’d be curious to know.
01:49:12 And he’s an engineer too
01:49:13 and engineers really value mistakes.
01:49:17 Engineers value mistakes.
01:49:18 Value mistakes and errors
01:49:19 because that’s an opportunity to learn.
01:49:22 I mean, this is what you do with systems
01:49:24 is you test them, then test them, then test them
01:49:26 and errors is just information.
01:49:28 He did that with the rockets.
01:49:29 That is true in its way of filmmaking.
01:49:31 There are certain things you learn as you build films
01:49:35 and you make mistakes.
01:49:36 It’s like putting an engine together and you,
01:49:39 oh, the film is flawed in that way, you know it.
01:49:42 Other people may or may not see it,
01:49:43 but the car runs or it made money or it didn’t make money.
01:49:48 It can be good and it didn’t make money,
01:49:49 but the point is that everything is a build.
01:49:53 Every film is a construction.
01:49:54 Same thing as he goes through on a Tesla,
01:49:57 we go through on each film.
01:49:59 But films are art.
01:50:03 It’s a little tricky.
01:50:03 Yeah, the thing is one film does not lead
01:50:05 to a lifetime guarantee of copyright.
01:50:11 Well, yeah, you have the movie game as you’ve called it.
01:50:17 Yeah.
01:50:17 It’s a complicated and cruel game.
01:50:22 But it takes enormous amount of work,
01:50:24 enormous amount of work to make a film.
01:50:26 People underestimate that.
01:50:28 It’s extremely complicated to have something be successful
01:50:34 because it has so many elements of luck involved
01:50:38 and reception and so forth.
01:50:42 What do you think, I apologize for the absurd question,
01:50:46 but what do you think is the meaning of life?
01:50:48 Why are we here?
01:50:50 The why.
01:50:51 I think to realize ourselves,
01:50:52 to realize more of what you are,
01:50:54 to realize what life is, to appreciate it,
01:50:57 to grow, to honor our life,
01:51:01 to honor the concept of life
01:51:02 and to understand how precious life is.
01:51:06 The preciousness of life, as the Buddhists say.
01:51:08 And of course, the immediacy of death all around us.
01:51:12 The causes of death are all around us.
01:51:15 And our life is like, as they say,
01:51:18 is like a lantern in a strong breeze existing
01:51:23 among the causes of death.
01:51:25 So life is so precious.
01:51:27 And at the same time, the immediacy of death
01:51:31 and then of course, the continuation of life
01:51:33 in whatever form it’s gonna take.
01:51:36 But in this life, to wake up to the preciousness of it.
01:51:40 To the preciousness.
01:51:41 Yeah, that’s a wonderful thing, by the way.
01:51:42 I didn’t have that when I was young.
01:51:43 I took it for granted.
01:51:47 Oliver, like I said, I’m a huge fan.
01:51:49 You’re an incredible human being,
01:51:51 one of the greatest artists ever.
01:51:54 So it’s a huge honor that you sit with me
01:51:57 and talk so deeply and honestly
01:52:00 about some very difficult topics.
01:52:02 Again, you’re an inspiration and it’s an honor
01:52:05 that you will spend your valuable time with me.
01:52:06 Thank you very much.
01:52:07 Thanks for talking to me.
01:52:08 Fun being here.
01:52:10 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Oliver Stone.
01:52:12 To support this podcast,
01:52:13 please check out our sponsors in the description.
01:52:16 And now, let me leave you with some words
01:52:18 from Oliver Stone in the untold history
01:52:20 of the United States.
01:52:22 To fail is not tragic.
01:52:24 To be human is.
01:52:26 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.