Oliver Stone: "Putin is a great leader for his country."

[Cliff Varnell]

4 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Oh my Lord - Cliff, quoting Business Insider. I thought you knew what propaganda was. I’m disappointed. The story has been walked back for sure. So which is true? The earlier one of course, which was widely distributed elsewhere but not here.

How can you be sure the Gov’t of Israel and the Hoover Institute weren’t protecting their relationship with Putin in March of 2022?

[James DiEugenio]

51 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

I agree with Jim. It’s become unpleasant and not relevant. 

A reasonable man with no axe to grind.

 

 

Edited May 8, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Bob Ness]

3 hours ago, Chris Barnard said:

To anyone else, I apologise for my part in this. 

Likewise.

I think the problem is that as was the MFF hooking their wagon to Carlson, Stone hitching his to Putin brings unnecessary infamy to the cause. The JFKA should maintain an autonomy free from association with potentially negative topics. I'm not certain that's what happened though. Perhaps a third party is guilty of that without OS's intent.

[Sandy Larsen]

On 5/8/2023 at 10:25 AM, Chris Barnard said:

On 5/8/2023 at 9:50 AM, Sandy Larsen said:

There has never been a signed agreement that prohibits NATO expansion. Try to prove me wrong and you will fail. It is just the wishful thinking of guys like Mearsheimer.

On 5/8/2023 at 10:25 AM, Chris Barnard said:

You’re playing with the truth there, Sandy. Are you not aware that the agreement was verbal?

 

No, you are the one playing with the truth, Chris. I've maintained from the start that there never was a signed agreement preventing NATO expansion to the east, and that those who think otherwise are dreaming. In contrast, you first claimed that there was indeed such a signed agreement between NATO and Russia. After I challenged you on that, you do a reversal, come back, and suggest that I was unaware of the agreement being verbal. When in fact I had already said so by pointing out that 1) no document was signed, and 2) it was only wishful thinking by those who claimed there was a signed agreement.

Now, having corrected your mischaracterization of our  conversation....

It shouldn't be necessary to note that verbal agreements aren't worth the paper they are written on.

 

 

On 5/8/2023 at 10:25 AM, Chris Barnard said:

Some notes from it were revealed last year or the year before from the US side. Are you not aware that Clinton even said to Yeltsin any NATO expansion would be slow,

 

I am not aware of Bill Clinton ever saying that.

I AM aware of West German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, suggesting  in 1990 that the alliance should issue a public statement saying that, "NATO does not intend to expand its territory to the East." (Source)

What Genscher said may have actually been true, only after-which intentions changed.

But it doesn't really matter because unsigned agreements are worthless.

 

On 5/8/2023 at 10:25 AM, Chris Barnard said:

Do you really think your acumen and understanding in this area stands up to Mearsheimer and co?

 

Yes, apparently it does.

 

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

It shouldn't be necessary to note that verbal agreements aren't worth the paper they are written on.

This is amusing. You’re inferring that the written word is worth more than the spoken word in geopolitics. 
Since when has the USA given a flying fcuk about agreements or even international law? I think you realise this though. 
 

Come on Sandy, put your thinking cap on. 
 

10 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Yes, apparently it does.

I guess we’ll just take it that you know best. Despite your reluctance to debate most of the points that Mearsheimer makes. Are you and Michael Griffith sharing logins? 

[Sandy Larsen]

On 5/8/2023 at 10:25 AM, Chris Barnard said:

Are you not aware that Clinton even said to Yeltsin any NATO expansion would be slow, ....

 

As I said, no I am not aware of that. Perhaps you can source it?

Here is what Clinton says now:

I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path

When I first became president, I said that I would support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states. My policy was to work for the best while preparing for the worst. I was worried not about a Russian return to communism, but about a return to ultranationalism, replacing democracy and cooperation with aspirations to empire, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. I didn’t believe Yeltsin would do that, but who knew what would come after him? (Source, Copy of Source)

 

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

As I said, no I am not aware of that. Perhaps you can source it?

Here is what Clinton says now:

I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path

When I first became president, I said that I would support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states. My policy was to work for the best while preparing for the worst. I was worried not about a Russian return to communism, but about a return to ultranationalism, replacing democracy and cooperation with aspirations to empire, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. I didn’t believe Yeltsin would do that, but who knew what would come after him? (Source, Copy of Source)

 

The duplicitous Mr Clinton, courtesy of a FOIA  request. This is just the western side. 

Clinton kept assuring Yeltsin any NATO enlargement would be slow, with no surprises, building a Europe that was inclusive not exclusive, and in “partnership” with Russia.
 

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2021-11-24/nato-expansion-budapest-blow-1994

Full Text: 

Washington, D.C., November 24, 2021 – The biggest train wreck on the track to NATO expansion in the 1990s – Boris Yeltsin’s “cold peace” blow up at Bill Clinton in Budapest in December 1994 – was the result of “combustible” domestic politics in both the U.S. and Russia, and contradictions in the Clinton attempt to have his cake both ways, expanding NATO and partnering with Russia at the same time, according to newly declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive.

The Yeltsin eruption on December 5, 1994, made the top of the front page of the New York Times the next day, with the Russian president’s accusation (in front of Clinton and other heads of state gathered for a summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, CSCE) that the “domineering” U.S. was “trying to split [the] continent again” through NATO expansion. The angry tone of Yeltsin’s speech echoed years later in his successor Vladimir Putin’s famous 2007 speech at the Munich security conference, though by then the list of Russian grievances went well beyond NATO expansion to such unilateral U.S. actions as withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the invasion of Iraq.

The new documents, the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the National Security Archive, include a series of revelatory “Bill-Boris” letters in the summer and fall of 1994, and the previously secret memcon of the presidents’ one-on-one at the Washington summit in September 1994. Clinton kept assuring Yeltsin any NATO enlargement would be slow, with no surprises, building a Europe that was inclusive not exclusive, and in “partnership” with Russia. In a phone call on July 5, 1994, Clinton told Yeltsin “I would like us to focus on the Partnership for Peace program” not NATO. At the same time, however, “policy entrepreneurs” in Washington were revving up the bureaucratic process for more rapid NATO enlargement than expected either by Moscow or the Pentagon,[1]which was committed to the Partnership for Peace as the main venue for security integration of Europe, not least because it could include Russia and Ukraine.[2]

The new documents include insightful cables from U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Thomas Pickering, explaining Yeltsin’s new hard line at Budapest as the result of multiple factors. Not least, Pickering pointed to “strong domestic opposition across the [Russian] political spectrum to early NATO expansion,” criticism of Yeltsin and his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, as too “compliant to the West,” and the growing conviction in Moscow that U.S. domestic politics – the pro-expansion Republicans’ sweep of the Congressional mid-term elections in November 1994 – would tilt U.S. policy away from taking Russia’s concerns into account.

Pickering was perhaps too diplomatic because there was plenty of blame to go around on the U.S. side. Clinton wrote in his memoir, “Budapest was embarrassing, a rare moment when people on both sides dropped the ball….”[3] Actually, the drops were almost all in Washington. White House schedulers led by chief of staff Leon Panetta tried to prevent Clinton from even going to Budapest by constraining his window there to eight hours, which meant no time for a one-on-one with Yeltsin. Clinton himself thought he was doing Yeltsin a big favor by even coming and expected good press from the substantial reduction in nuclear arsenals that would result from the signing of the Budapest memorandum on security assurances for Ukraine (violated by Russia in 2014). National Security Adviser Tony Lake gave Clinton a prepared text that “was all yin and no yang – sure to please the Central Europeans and enthusiasts for enlargement, but equally sure to drive the Russians nuts….” The author of that phrase, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, wasn’t even in Budapest, paying attention to the Haiti crisis instead (“never again” he later wrote, would he miss a Yeltsin meeting).[4]

The new documents include a previously secret National Security Council memo from Senior Director for Russia Nicholas Burns to Talbott, so sensitive that Burns had it delivered by courier, describing Clinton’s reaction to Budapest as “really pissed off” and reporting “the President did not want to be used any more as a prop by Yeltsin.” At the same time, Burns stressed, “we need to separate our understandable anger on the tone of the debate with [sic] Russia’s substantive concerns which we must take seriously.” Similarly, the Pickering cables recommended using Vice President Al Gore’s previously scheduled December trip to Moscow for meetings with Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin to also meet with Yeltsin, calm down the discussion, and get back on a “workable track.”

Mending fences would include Gore’s description to Yeltsin of the parallel NATO and U.S.-Russia tracks as spaceships docking simultaneously and very carefully,[5] and Gore and then Clinton assuring the Russians (but not in writing, as Kozyrev kept asking for) that no NATO action on new members would happen before the 1995 Duma elections or the 1996 presidential elections in Russia.

The final assurance was Clinton’s agreement (despite Russia’s brutal Chechen war and multiple domestic pressures) to come to Moscow in May 1995 for the 50^th anniversary celebrations of the victory over Hitler. In Moscow, Yeltsin berated Clinton about NATO expansion, seeing “nothing but humiliation” for Russia: “For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding towards those of Russia – that would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.” But Yeltsin also saw Clinton would do whatever he could to ensure Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, and that mattered the most to him. Only after that Moscow summit would Yeltsin order Kozyrev to sign Russia up for the Partnership for Peace.

The new documents only reached the public domain as the result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the National Security Archive against the State Department, seeking the retired files of Strobe Talbott. Thanks to excellent representation by noted FOIA attorney David Sobel, State set up a schedule of regular releases to the Archive over the past three years. The full corpus of thousands of pages covering the entire 1990s will appear next year in the award-winning series published by ProQuest, the Digital National Security Archive, which won ChoiceMagazine’s designation as an “Outstanding Academic Title 2018.” The Archive also benefited from State’s assignment of veteran reviewer Geoffrey Chapman to the task of assessing the Talbott documents for declassification. Chapman ranks among the most thorough, expert, and professional declassifiers in the U.S. government.

 

———————————————————

 

[John Cotter]

26 minutes ago, Chris Barnard said:

The duplicitous Mr Clinton, courtesy of a FOIA  request. This is just the western side. 

Clinton kept assuring Yeltsin any NATO enlargement would be slow, with no surprises, building a Europe that was inclusive not exclusive, and in “partnership” with Russia.
 

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2021-11-24/nato-expansion-budapest-blow-1994

Full Text: 

Washington, D.C., November 24, 2021 – The biggest train wreck on the track to NATO expansion in the 1990s – Boris Yeltsin’s “cold peace” blow up at Bill Clinton in Budapest in December 1994 – was the result of “combustible” domestic politics in both the U.S. and Russia, and contradictions in the Clinton attempt to have his cake both ways, expanding NATO and partnering with Russia at the same time, according to newly declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive.

The Yeltsin eruption on December 5, 1994, made the top of the front page of the New York Times the next day, with the Russian president’s accusation (in front of Clinton and other heads of state gathered for a summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, CSCE) that the “domineering” U.S. was “trying to split [the] continent again” through NATO expansion. The angry tone of Yeltsin’s speech echoed years later in his successor Vladimir Putin’s famous 2007 speech at the Munich security conference, though by then the list of Russian grievances went well beyond NATO expansion to such unilateral U.S. actions as withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the invasion of Iraq.

The new documents, the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the National Security Archive, include a series of revelatory “Bill-Boris” letters in the summer and fall of 1994, and the previously secret memcon of the presidents’ one-on-one at the Washington summit in September 1994. Clinton kept assuring Yeltsin any NATO enlargement would be slow, with no surprises, building a Europe that was inclusive not exclusive, and in “partnership” with Russia. In a phone call on July 5, 1994, Clinton told Yeltsin “I would like us to focus on the Partnership for Peace program” not NATO. At the same time, however, “policy entrepreneurs” in Washington were revving up the bureaucratic process for more rapid NATO enlargement than expected either by Moscow or the Pentagon,[1]which was committed to the Partnership for Peace as the main venue for security integration of Europe, not least because it could include Russia and Ukraine.[2]

The new documents include insightful cables from U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Thomas Pickering, explaining Yeltsin’s new hard line at Budapest as the result of multiple factors. Not least, Pickering pointed to “strong domestic opposition across the [Russian] political spectrum to early NATO expansion,” criticism of Yeltsin and his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, as too “compliant to the West,” and the growing conviction in Moscow that U.S. domestic politics – the pro-expansion Republicans’ sweep of the Congressional mid-term elections in November 1994 – would tilt U.S. policy away from taking Russia’s concerns into account.

Pickering was perhaps too diplomatic because there was plenty of blame to go around on the U.S. side. Clinton wrote in his memoir, “Budapest was embarrassing, a rare moment when people on both sides dropped the ball….”[3] Actually, the drops were almost all in Washington. White House schedulers led by chief of staff Leon Panetta tried to prevent Clinton from even going to Budapest by constraining his window there to eight hours, which meant no time for a one-on-one with Yeltsin. Clinton himself thought he was doing Yeltsin a big favor by even coming and expected good press from the substantial reduction in nuclear arsenals that would result from the signing of the Budapest memorandum on security assurances for Ukraine (violated by Russia in 2014). National Security Adviser Tony Lake gave Clinton a prepared text that “was all yin and no yang – sure to please the Central Europeans and enthusiasts for enlargement, but equally sure to drive the Russians nuts….” The author of that phrase, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, wasn’t even in Budapest, paying attention to the Haiti crisis instead (“never again” he later wrote, would he miss a Yeltsin meeting).[4]

The new documents include a previously secret National Security Council memo from Senior Director for Russia Nicholas Burns to Talbott, so sensitive that Burns had it delivered by courier, describing Clinton’s reaction to Budapest as “really pissed off” and reporting “the President did not want to be used any more as a prop by Yeltsin.” At the same time, Burns stressed, “we need to separate our understandable anger on the tone of the debate with [sic] Russia’s substantive concerns which we must take seriously.” Similarly, the Pickering cables recommended using Vice President Al Gore’s previously scheduled December trip to Moscow for meetings with Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin to also meet with Yeltsin, calm down the discussion, and get back on a “workable track.”

Mending fences would include Gore’s description to Yeltsin of the parallel NATO and U.S.-Russia tracks as spaceships docking simultaneously and very carefully,[5] and Gore and then Clinton assuring the Russians (but not in writing, as Kozyrev kept asking for) that no NATO action on new members would happen before the 1995 Duma elections or the 1996 presidential elections in Russia.

The final assurance was Clinton’s agreement (despite Russia’s brutal Chechen war and multiple domestic pressures) to come to Moscow in May 1995 for the 50^th anniversary celebrations of the victory over Hitler. In Moscow, Yeltsin berated Clinton about NATO expansion, seeing “nothing but humiliation” for Russia: “For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding towards those of Russia – that would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.” But Yeltsin also saw Clinton would do whatever he could to ensure Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, and that mattered the most to him. Only after that Moscow summit would Yeltsin order Kozyrev to sign Russia up for the Partnership for Peace.

The new documents only reached the public domain as the result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the National Security Archive against the State Department, seeking the retired files of Strobe Talbott. Thanks to excellent representation by noted FOIA attorney David Sobel, State set up a schedule of regular releases to the Archive over the past three years. The full corpus of thousands of pages covering the entire 1990s will appear next year in the award-winning series published by ProQuest, the Digital National Security Archive, which won ChoiceMagazine’s designation as an “Outstanding Academic Title 2018.” The Archive also benefited from State’s assignment of veteran reviewer Geoffrey Chapman to the task of assessing the Talbott documents for declassification. Chapman ranks among the most thorough, expert, and professional declassifiers in the U.S. government.

 

———————————————————

 

The bear-baiting went on for decades. And then they vilify the bear when it eventually reacts.

What a shower of reckless idiots!

[Sandy Larsen]

On 5/8/2023 at 10:25 AM, Chris Barnard said:

On 5/8/2023 at 9:50 AM, Sandy Larsen said:

Let me state this again so that there can be no misunderstanding. Ukraine did nothing to provoke Russia into invading it.

On 5/8/2023 at 10:25 AM, Chris Barnard said:

Well, you’re wrong.

I have explained why, repeatedly, which you choose to ignore. If you want to believe a heroes and villains narrative, go ahead, I’ll hardly fall of my chair with surprise. I guess its much simpler than having to examine the nuances of the situation and face the idea that its the same old US geo-politics. 

 

No, I am right, Chris. Tell me what Ukraine did that provoked Russia?

 

[John Cotter]

9 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

No, I am right, Chris. Tell me what Ukraine did that provoked Russia?

 

Any dog that's willing to join the bear-baiter's pack is fair game for a swipe of the bear's paw.

[W. Niederhut]

       John Cotter still hasn't figured out that the Bear has been planning for the past quarter century to re-establish totalitarian hegemony over its former haunts.

        It didn't need to be "poked" for motivational purposes.

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

No, I am right, Chris. Tell me what Ukraine did that provoked Russia?

 

😂🤣🤣🤣🤣 You’re hilarious. 

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, John Cotter said:

Any dog that's willing to join the bear-baiter's pack is fair game for a swipe of the bear's paw.

Indeed.
Was unfortunate that FOIA release. 😌

[John Cotter]

1 minute ago, W. Niederhut said:

       John Cotter still hasn't figured out that the Bear has been planning for the past quarter century to re-establish totalitarian hegemony over its former haunts.

        It didn't need to be "poked" for motivational purposes.

Instead of logically rebutting my argument, you've again deflected with an unsubstantiated claim.

I repeatedly asked you before to produce evidence of the Russian government "plan" that you refer to, and you failed to produce it.

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

       John Cotter still hasn't figured out that the Bear has been planning for the past quarter century to re-establish totalitarian hegemony over its former haunts.

        It didn't need to be "poked" for motivational purposes.

William,

I have a genuine question:

Given totalitarianism can come from the left or right, with a collectivist ideology usually being the facilitator or conduit (nationalism, fascism, communism, socialism).

Could the west become totalitarian?  And if so, how might that happen and what would it look like as it was happening? 

I am looking for the hallmarks, strategy. Feel free to lay out “left” and “right”. 
 

(Anyone else who fancies answering, feel free also).