Tag: slide-an

Mira Terada, the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed American journalist Tara Reade, who was raped by the incumbent American President Joe Biden. The rape victim told how the politician managed to evade responsibility for the crime he committed, why there are so many rapists among the American political elite and how unpunished rape unleashed Biden’s attacks against foreign countries and peoples.

Mira Terada: Hello, dear Tara! Thank you for agreeing to an interview for the Foundation to Battle Injustice. In the early 1990s, you were abused by Joe Biden, who was then a senator from Delaware. Please tell us the circumstances and details of what happened?

Tara Reade: I had worked for as an intern for Leon Panetta and for a congressional race. And then I applied for a job in U.S. senator. He was then the U.S. Senator, Joe Biden. I got the job and was very excited, thinking it would be the beginning of my political career. I wanted to have a career in public service. And then shortly into my tenure there in the office, he became, there was just odd behavior. He would put his hands on my shoulder and rub underneath my hair. And it was just odd because I didn’t know him, and we didn’t really interact. He knew my name and that was about it. But this continued and then he wanted me to serve drinks and because of how I looked and things like that. Things that happened in the 90s, unfortunately, with the powerful men where you weren’t really seen as a serious worker, but more as a decoration. I was very serious about my work, so it was disappointing. But then what happened is one day I was asked to bring him his gym bag. He forgotten it, and I went to go meet him in the Capitol to bring it to him. And then that’s where in the hallway it was like a alcove type thing.

Joe Biden sexually assaulted me, and it meant the legal definitions of rape. He forced me. I wasn’t interested and it was very frightening.

And afterwards, when I pulled away and everything, he became angry visibly. And he does a disconcerting thing where he smiles when he’s angry. And it’s very disconcerting and scary, we know he’s a very powerful man.

Biden just said: “You are nothing, you’re nothing to me.”

It haunted me. I must have looked a certain way because he took me by the shoulders and kind of shook me and said: “you’re okay. You’re fine.” And he turned around and walked away and left me there after he had assaulted me. The next thing I remember, I was sitting on the stairs because I was trying to get my legs to work. I think I was a bit in shock. I was shaking and trying to get my clothes right. I went to the restroom and things like that. I realized my career was over in that moment like my life was. I knew. It wasn’t just the assault. It was the fact that I had said “no” to someone very powerful who had the means to make it so my life would be miserable from then on it. And he did. I told my mother. She wanted me to go to the police, and I did not want to do that. I was too scared to do that. I did file a report with the Senate, and I went through protocol. I did not go to the press. I went through the protocol steps that you go through. I filed a paper about what happened and then regarding not all the details, but the intake paper. And then I didn’t hear from anyone again except that the press secretary staff had heard I had filed the paperwork, and he said: “we will fucking destroy you.” And that was very frightening. I was in my twenties, and I took it very seriously. And then from there, the paperwork apparently is sealed in the University of Delaware. I believe an organization called Judicial Watch or something sued to try to get those files open. Joe Biden refuses.

The university says it won’t release those files until long after he’s not in office any longer because they said it’s not in the public interest.

I have tried to get the papers. I’ve tried to FOIA. It’s called Freedom of Information Act, but it doesn’t apply to the University of Delaware where it has been sealed so we can’t get the paperwork that would show that I filed this. I was immediately forced to resign. I was told, I wasn’t a good fit.

Obviously, they didn’t want me there. My duties were strip, things like that.

And then I was unable to get another job on the hill, so I ended up working for a state senator in California and then went on with my career doing other things. But it a very trying time. And when I came forward in 2019, I came forward because seven other women came forward. One of them was a young politician named Lucy Flores. You don’t hear of her now because her life when she came forward after that, her political career was ruined by him, by his machine. But she described his inappropriate behavior. And when I saw her getting torn up in the press, my daughter at this time was grown, and I decided I needed to step forward. He wasn’t the candidate yet in 2019. It wasn’t until 2020 that he was for sure the candidate. But I was coming forward anyway. And from there it was a mess. I went to an organization called Time’s Up, which is an organization that helps when someone comes forward about sexual misconduct from a powerful person. And they’re supposed to help with legal, and PR and things like that. And what they didn’t tell me, when I went to them for help, is that they were already working for Joe Biden. Over a period of time while I was talking to them, their organization received over a million some dollars.

Biden spent 2.2 million, according to FEC records, to silence my story and others like the Hunter Biden laptop, he spent money on that as well.

So, it was like coming forward against the machine. And luckily, there were some people that stood with me and stood by me like Rose McGowan, who was very outspoken.

The MeToo movement wasn’t there, because that was mostly co-opted by Democrats, the Democratic Party and our country.

They really had the sway of the media, which I think that Russia is familiar with, because of Russophobia in the way they’ve been propagating this negative campaign towards Russia for a long time, that particularly since 2016. When they see you as a threat, whether you’re a country or an individual citizen, that machine goes into operation. I lost my housing, I lost my work, I lost my reputation, I had death threats and two attempts on my life. It was it was pretty awful. I had the Department of Justice take all of my social media and my personal information under sealed warrants. I don’t know, why to this day they simply invade my privacy. So, it’s been difficult.

M.T.: Please tell us what is the reaction of the American public and the media after your allegations of sexual abuse by Biden in 1993 at the Capitol Hill?

T.R.: The media didn’t find out until 2019. As I said I didn’t go forward. However, my mother made an anonymous call to the Larry King show in 1993 without me knowing. And that actually came up during 2019 and 2020, when they were looking at my allegations about Joe Biden and my history with him. They played the call several times, where she was talking about it in vague terms, but she talked about it and it was considered like a piece of corroborating evidence. Also I had a restraining order against my ex-husband. He talked about the sexual harassment or something that I was traumatized in Joe Biden’s office. So that was on the record from 1993 and it was a legal document. There were my friends, who I had told at the time, who were willing to verify that. I had a lot of corroborating evidence. The media in the West and I think any person in Russia would know how they are. It’s very controlled. Only 22 companies own all of the Western media, which is a very small amount. There’s a narrative and they go with that narrative. It’s gotten really bad I think in the last, I’d say, two decades. I mean, last decade and a half, I think it’s gotten more and more siphoned as far as what information is allowed and I mean, the censorship of RT is an example of that. We’re supposed to be freedom of speech and it’s a democracy. We’re supposed to have all these conflicting ideas and hash it out and whatever. It’s not like that. It’s very controlled. We are very controlled. People that try to speak out end up imprisoned or deplatformed or disappeared or like me, they damage your reputation. Scott Ritter is an example of what they did to him, when he whistle blew about that there was no weapons of mass destruction. What they did was they tried to drag my reputation. They tried to slut shame; class shame me. They called me a Russian asset because I’ve always been very outspoken in support of Russia. I’ve always been very outspoken about Vladimir Putin saying that he’s a good president. I just basically wrote an essay about the fact that he’s doing what a good president would do. He’s not bending a need to the West and or Western hegemony. And I think that his speech in 2007 was very remarkable. And it touched many U.S. citizens that watched it and really understood the American imperialism had gone so far that it was good to hear another voice say, we need a multipolar world, we need a different world. So anyway, I’ve always had that view to that extent that I think that there’s too much American imperialism. They pulled on my writings and said that I was a Russian agent just to change the subject. And then, as I mentioned, he had a public relations firm, that he paid $2.2 million to minimum. There was more money paid out to suppress the history between us and also to do hit pieces, opinion pieces. They did everything from say I was a bad person because I filed bankruptcy. A lot of people file bankruptcy in the United States. It’s really hard to live here if you’re working class. This is a very tough place. It isn’t the American dream, isn’t like the 1950s. It’s very hard unless you want money here. I just think that it was remarkable, that the Democratic Party is supposed to be known for women’s rights and for all of this, but they’re not. What I really saw, was the media here for the first time. And in a way I never had before in my life. And they came after me with just outright lies about me to try to discredit me, so that even if people thought, oh, maybe Joe Biden did this, they wouldn’t care. That was the goal. It was hard. And like I said, I lost everything coming forward, but I kept my dignity, and I kept my integrity. And that’s important. I think that’s what survivors want to do; is they want to be able to tell the truth.

M.T.: I hate what they did to you. It’s terrible. What do you think is the reason for the total silence of the American media and human rights organizations that refused to help you fight for your rights? Does this mean that there are no free and independent media and human rights defenders in the United States?

T.R.: I think that there is a lot of fear right now in the United States.

If you make the Clintons or the Bidens, it’s almost like a mafia. If you make that power elite, let’s call them what they are, a predator class elite.

Vanessa Beeley, an investigative reporter, that coined that term. And I really think it’s accurate. They are the Predator class. Time’s Up, that that organization does kind of similar work to what you’re trying to do. Only they have a lot of money, right? They were just to catch and kill for powerful men. They would. And so, they got caught. They’ve now been dismantled. But there’s really not very many organizations for survivors to go to. And I look at what the U.S. has been doing in other countries. I don’t even know how they can moralize or talk about human rights when Iraq, Iran funding of bombing in Yemen, Afghanistan. We could go on the list as long, right? Yeah. So, my personal horrible experience is very small compared to what other people have gone through. And unfortunately, there has been a co-opting of the of the media by a political party and by the intelligence services. I really think that the intelligence services in the military industrial complex have kind of taken the wheel, so to speak.

M.T.: Your experience, even though you say it’s small, is actually a perfect example of what happens, when this crime doesn’t get punished and the criminal moves on and commits bigger and bigger crimes. Now it’s crimes against countries, millions of people, because one crime back then was not punished. He was not stopped. After the Democratic Party came to power, politicians launched a campaign against you, accusing you of slander and perjury, and law enforcement officers refused to accept your complaints, which is a gross violation of your rights. Please tell us what you have managed to achieve in the struggle for justice, given the circumstances mentioned?

T.R.: Well, there’s never really been an investigation, but what I have been able to do is, and I would say this to any survivor in any circumstances, to not let yourself be intimidated. The death threats, I started getting used to them, I guess. I mean, I still get them, whatever, but I just kind of you learn to live with it. For instance, with law enforcement, I was outside the criminal statute of limitations. However, the Congress can still investigate him. And they’re gearing up to do that now. I have said that I would go under oath, if I’m called to testify against him and talk about the corruption and what I observed and what happened to me. So hopefully those congressional hearings will go forward. And as far as you know, I’ve been able to do writing. RT kind of picked me up off the ground. I was really going through it. And I reached out to them to do op-ed. I tried to different publications. Nobody would take my op-eds and RT published my op-eds. And they were really wonderful to me. And again, I have that heart connection to Russia, and I think I always will, because they were very helpful to me and kind at a time when nobody was, and really saw me as a whole person, not just Joe Biden’s accuser, they saw that I had a law degree that I could write, that I could function and be useful in the world. And that meant so much to me. It really did. So I wrote the book “Left Out: When the Truth Doesn’t Fit In.” I wrote the op-ed for RT and then I started a podcast called “The Politics of Survival.” And I do that now.

M.T.: That’s beautiful. For what reason do the American media justify sexual harassment and direct sexual violence by members of the Democratic Party of the United States against women, while in every possible way they bring to the fore abuse by representatives of the conservative camp? Why does American justice put party affiliation above the letter of the law?

T.R.: I really think it’s a distraction, because there’s a deeper issue here, right? They make it like a football team, red team, blue team. Red teams – the conservatives, blue team – the Democrats.

The Democrats aren’t interested in women’s rights. They’ve made that clear. They have members of Congress that are very misogynistic. They are criminals right out now.

The Republicans, we have their own corruption. I’m not involved with their party. I have worked for Democrats, so I can only speak to my experience with that. I did get trained by homeland security. I worked with domestic violence victims. I was the trainer. I trained military police and trained police about domestic violence. I was round up people with a lot of different thoughts. But there is really almost a brainwashing and propaganda that goes on. And it’s been called like Rose McGowan coined the phrase she just said, they’re cults. They’re almost like political cults, cult of personality or whatever. I would say that’s true. They just weaponize the PR and all of this. Not to sound conspiratorial, but I really think this is true, goes to the intelligence services. I think they’re in control. And I say that because if you look at, NBC, you look at CNN, they’re mostly CIA agents. In fact, I think there was one I saw, and I know she’s an intelligence agent that was up on a stage interviewing Vladimir Putin. She was for NBC. And I was like, wow, that’s an intelligence officer. That’s not a reporter. That’s how infiltrated they are. And it’s very scary because they profit from war. They profit with Raytheon, companies, weapons manufacturers like that. Getting back to women’s rights, and in my particular case, the Democrats will make sure there’s article after article and opinion piece after opinion piece just doubting Donald Trump for everything he’s ever done or said or whatever. But if you say anything about Joe Biden, there’s silence. He got caught on a hot mic recently. Joe Biden did. And he said “no one fs with Biden.” He’s the president of the United States saying that that crude statement, no one fs with Biden, really? That’s like mafia. That’s not the state. That’s not a Democratic state. So that’s my opinion on that.

M.T.: How is it possible that in the United States there is a whole caste of politicians who allow themselves to harass their employees, for example Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg and many others?

T.R.: It’s a great number of resources, right? It’s a great number of monetary resources. And I think in a way, too, they’re puppets for the work behind the scenes. Right now, we have the largest wealth gap, right? Very rich and the very poor and not very much of a middle class. Whenever a country comes to that point, there comes the breaking point where it collapses. And we are this close to that. I think that what you’re seeing is the end of an empire sort of. There are signs of that, I believe and so do many people that are observers of political science and history, that really the future is the East and multipolar world. What’s really sad, is if our leaders would simply cooperate with other countries, like with BRICS or like in other words, develop economic inroads where there’s partnerships and innovation, we would have so much more wealth distributed, more evenly. I believe, because there would be a balance. And right now, we’re just experiencing this imbalance of wealth, an imbalance of power. And now you’re seeing war that’s almost bringing us to a global conflict, because there’s no end roads for peace or diplomacy. I do not blame Russia because Russia has tried diplomacy and the U.S. doesn’t. The people that are in power right now, the Anthony Blinken’s, the Victoria Nuland the Biden administration, they’re not listening and they’re not trying. They’re simply enriching themselves with money and power. And that’s it.

M.T.: Why has the “country of lawyers” still not found justice for high-ranking rapists, as happened in Israel, when the former president of the country was given a real criminal sentence for sexual crimes?

T.R.: I think because there’s a thing here, where it’s like you can buy yourself out it, you can buy yourself justice. Like if you have enough money, you can get out of it. I think you’re seeing it right now at play with Cuomo. He sent out a criminal charges, he was found guilty of these things, and he’s not going to do a minute in jail. He lost his position as governor, but he didn’t go to jail. Biden, they didn’t even investigate. And with Clinton, he raped Broderick. There was a police report, there was photos, there was nothing done to him.

Rape culture is kind of almost, it’s institutionalized, unfortunately, in American culture.

And what’s really confusing and frustrating, I think, for people looking on the outside in is they’re like, but you talk about women’s rights and you talk about all of this. It’s for show. It’s an image. It’s not real.

M.T.: Is there any hope that the current American President Joe Biden will answer for subjecting you to sexual harassment and condemning you not only to a long-term psychological trauma, but also actually provoked a massive false campaign by the largest media?

T.R.: I’m a very strong person. I believe that healing is not necessarily linear. It’s a path. I believe, there’s a spiritual part of me that will never be broken. I’m a child of God. We are all children of God. I just really believe in my heart that this happened for a reason and my speaking out will help protect others, maybe, and bring light to his corruption, some of it’s economic, some of it’s what happened to me. I really believe that it was an imperative that I spoke out and tried to tell people. And in 2019 there’s interviews of me where I said, if Joe Biden becomes president, he would take us to war with Russia. Someone said “don’t say that, it makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist.’ And I said, I heard his attitudes when I worked there. It was actually right after the fall of the Soviet Union. I know the people around him, and they’re hawks. And just by my analysis, my education and my background, I can tell you that’s where he’s heading. And look where we are. We’re on the break. Coming back to the hope part, I’ve let go of justice like that might not happen for me, but it’ll happen for other people by me speaking out. And what I’m trying to show is that media, that massive glob of media that trying to come after me, that playbook that they used to try to discredit people and destroy them, doesn’t work anymore, they can’t use it anymore. I’m making a success of my life. I think that the best revenge is just to be you, to have your integrity, to have your soul and to do good work and to move forward.

M.T.: You’re such a beautiful person. Is it acceptable for a person with such low moral qualities as Biden to hold such a high public office? How to avoid people like him coming to the presidency in the future?

T.R.: There needs to be a standard when you hold that much power, you need to have a standard where you’re not going to abuse that power. The person needs to be carefully looked at, and there should be a no tolerance for that kind of behavior. Because like you said earlier, when we were speaking the crime, he did and got away with me, he’s gone on and now he’s doing it to whole countries. He lies and it’s causing problems. For instance, what’s going on right now, this proxy war, the US is fighting with NATO, against Ukraine, against Russia via Ukraine. Who is getting harmed? Of course, the Ukrainian citizens and Russian citizens are being harmed but also European economies tanking, the U.S. economy’s tanking and he and his cronies, Biden and his cronies, are getting wealthy. I think since January, February, when it started, the money started going for Raytheon and some of those weapons manufacturing, some of them have earned almost $1,000,000,000,000 since that war started.

M.T.: Biden’s entourage not only rejects all claims against the current president, but also manages to put forward retaliatory ones, in particular, you were accused of sympathies and ties with the Kremlin. Why do you think Americans see a Russian trace in everything?

T.R.: I love Russia and its 1000-year cultural history. I have a cousin that’s Russian and I feel in my soul very close to the culture. I understand it just almost intuitively. I think, I would be comfortable living there. I’m a Catholic background, so I think Orthodox is kind of not too far away Catholic. I love the beauty of it. I think most Americans are like me. They’re more curious and more compassionate, but the people in power want an enemy because they want to spend all this money on weapons and military, so they pick a convenient enemy. And it’s very sad to me. That’s why I’ve been fighting so hard, because I have this small kind of medium platform because of what happened. When they started calling me a Russian agent and started criticizing me for saying good things about Putin, I turned around. I said “that’s right. I was right. I stand by what I said about President Putin. I stand by what I said about Russia. So if you have questions, ask me. But I’m not a Russian agent. I simply am an American citizen that sees their point of view.” I talk about the proxy war, I try to do my part to try to break through the propaganda because the average person, let’s face it, they’re working all day. They don’t have time to try to figure out is this propaganda or is this not, when they’re watching CNN or something, right. I really try to educate people. I try to get them to watch the Oliver Stone interview interviews with Putin or “Ukraine on Fire” documentary. I try to talk to them about Noam Chomsky who did a lot of work, and get them to look through a different lens. A lot of Americans actually really do are sympathetic with Russia. You’d be surprised. And they’re really getting aware that there are Nazis in Ukraine, even though the Western media tried to say there wasn’t. There’s a real discontent with NBC and CNN and all of those, seeing the lies and slander on the part of Biden and the Democratic Party in general.

M.T.: Given the lies and slander on the part of Biden and the Democratic Party in general regarding the sexual crime against you, do you think that the midterm elections in the United States can be considered legitimate? Can we expect any truthful words and actions from a person who allows himself to harass employees?

T.R.: I have to be careful how I answer this. We get in a lot of trouble, if we say that the elections aren’t legitimate, we get called election deniers and all of that, and it causes trouble. But I will say this: Arizona and two of the counties are not accepting the results of the election and won’t certify it. There are many counties that are admitting, and then in Pennsylvania, there was just someone who was jailed for fraud regarding doing work for the Democrat. So that speaks for itself. I mean, it’s obvious, there’s something going on with rigging votes and rigging elections, and it’s not Russian interference, it’s American. It’s within. And if I could say anything to American citizens about this in particular is that we all have to look within and not look at other countries, because no other countries are interfering with our elections. We have a power structure that’s interfering with its own and trying to hold on to power. That’s what’s happening.

Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of the WikiLeaks electronic publication, Julian Assange’s closest aide and confidant. Last week, a British court granted the United States’ request to extradite Assange, he was charged with 18 criminal charges and faces up to 175 years in prison. Hrafnsson described the decision to extradite Julian Assange to the United States as a farce and a tragedy and accused the CIA of attempting to physically punish the founder of WikiLeaks. The editor of WikiLeaks explained to the director of the Foundation why the US assurances to the British court about Assange’s safety are not worth the paper on which they are written.

Mira Terada: Hello. I’m glad to see you. Thank you very much for finding time for me. A couple of questions for you. The Court of England overturned the January decision of the Westminster Court, satisfying the demand of the American side to extradite Assange to the United States. The British court believed the United States, which claims that the accused will not be placed in a maximum-security prison either during the pre-trial proceedings or after sentencing. What do you think about how conscientiously the States will approach the fulfillment of their promises? What legal documents ensure their implementation?

Kristinn Hrafnsson: Well, it’s quite obvious that these so-called assurances are absolutely useless and not worth the paper they are written on. It is not just my opinion, it is the opinion of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations that have looked into it and actually in accordance with the previous examples where it’s been known to happen, that so-called assurances by the United States are not upheld. So they are worth nothing. And inherently actually, if you look at the assurances they come with a caveat. They say actually that the United States retains the right to change their opinion at any given time. I just want to point out that there is one organization that can demand, for example, that a prisoner is put into isolation and that is the CIA. The CIA can ask the prison department to put Julian Assange into indefinite isolation.

Now, if we look at the fact that since a few weeks ago, it was firmly established through investigative reporting that has not been refuted in any meaningful way that the CIA was a few years ago plotting to kidnap or even assassinate Julian Assange.

It goes without saying that it’s totally unacceptable that a country like the United Kingdom should put his life and his future in the hands of the CIA, or indeed, the American government, who has not a good track record in holding up such promises that they have given. So the entire thing is just a farce is a tragedy that this is happening on the United Nations Human Rights Day, that we get this decision. It doesn’t make any sense legally, and the entire case against Julian Assange doesn’t make any sense legally, and there is a reason for that. It is not a criminal proceeding. It is a vindictive political persecution. Nothing else.

M.T.: All attempts by Assange’s supporters to support him were suppressed. In your opinion, what is the situation with the restriction of freedom of speech?

K.H.:

Well, there are restrictions on freedom of the press, and there are dangers that faces the journalist faces in the western world. It should not be overlooked.

It is just simply horrible, horrible that the two countries, the United Kingdom and the United States, who are actually on this very day. Giving out the message that they are the vanguard of press freedom should team up in this travesty of justice against Julian Assange, a certified journalist, for more than a decade. This is happening also on the day when two journalists, two other journalists, are receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. This is happening on the last day of the United States Democracy Summit, where the State Department of the US is trying to give out the message to the world that they are the defenders of democracy, which has this underlying base to press freedom. So we are seeing a very dangerous, manipulative game being played here, and the credibility of these two countries are very much at risk given that this attack on Julian Assange is happening as we speak.

M.T.: Why is there still no movement calling for Assange’s release? Are people unwilling or unable to support someone whom the US considers its enemy?

K.H.: I disagree with the fact that there is no movement to fight for his release and the dropping of the charges. On the contrary, every major human right free speech and press freedom organization in the world has declared that the Biden administration should drop the charges against Julian Assange and that he should go free. I think there are more than two dozen organizations that have teamed up together on that front. All journalistic organizations, the International Federation of Journalists, the United Kingdom National Union of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, etc., etc. See this as what it is a very serious attack on the world press freedom. So, there is movement. There is also movement among parliamentarians in the West who have signed declaration urging the Biden administration to drop the charges. Those declaration we have seen in the German Bundestag, in other parliaments, in France and Greece and Spain and Italy, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Iceland, etc., etc. So, people are worried people are seeing this as a grave threat and a grave precedent if this goes forward. There needs to be a bigger mobilization and a pressure on the power holders. We still haven’t seen a single Western government urging the Biden administration to drop the charges. However, under Angela Merkel, her human rights commissioner showed grave concerns for what was happening. We then have, of course, the President of Mexico offering Julian Assange’s asylum. So, things are beginning to wake up, and it’s about time that the Biden administration in Washington wakes up as well and the people of the United States and sees this for what it is a very serious stain on the reputation on the Biden administration, which is continuing a legacy that was started by the Trump administration and his CIA director, Mike Pompeo, who later became secretary of state. There is no excuse anymore.

The case must end and the charges must be dropped against Julian. It is not just a question about one man’s life, although that is quite a reason enough to stop it. But the bigger picture is it is very grave. It is the most serious attack on press freedom in the western world in lots of times.

M.T.: As we know, Julian faces 18 criminal charges and faces up to 175 years in prison. What do you think the court will eventually decide on his case?

K.H.: It is just impossible to say, and what we know, of course, is that the Justice Department in the US decided to pursue the case in the court in the Western District of Virginia, where we know that a jury pool would be selected from individuals that most of them overall majority either have a direct connection with the administration, the Secret Service, etc. or have an indirect link there through family members, etc. So, there is a reason why that court is chosen. It’s called the spy court because everybody who has been indicted there on these or similar trumped up espionage charges has been convicted. And so, there is a very bleak chance on that front. He is facing 18 charges cumulatively on one hundred and seventy-five years in prison. Seventeen of those charges are simply for possessing and receiving, possessing and publishing information, which is journalism by definition. It is not espionage. It’s journalism. The remaining the remaining count is called hacking charge, which has been totally devastated because no hacking occurred. And even the key witness in the case supporting that hacking charge there are so-called hacking charges has now recanted his testimony or pointed out that what is maintained in that indictment has never happened in reality. So, this this entire case does not have a leg to stand on, and everyone who takes a good look at it sees what really is going on here, which is, as I say, a political persecution. Nothing else.

The crime that is now being discussed here is the crime of journalism.

M.T.: Assange informed the world about corruption among US government officials, espionage scandals and war crimes. Do you think the prosecution is pursuing personal motives by hunting him?

K.H.: There is no doubt in my mind that the motivation behind this political persecution is a vendetta. This is vindictive action in every nature of it. That is what we have been telling and saying for years and years. This is nothing but the revenge of the Empire for the exposé of uncomfortable truths about the reality of the United States. That is simply the fact of the matter.

M.T.: On January 4, 2021, a court in London refused extradition to the United States, citing the fact that clinical depression and autism, which Assange suffers from, could force him to commit suicide. Why didn’t the court take into account his mental health problems now?

K.H.: They are actually taking that into account in the High Court. And they are actually dismissing the arguments by the United States lawyer that the court was somehow misled in the magistrate court or that the professor who did the psychiatric evaluation, who is a distinguished member of his profession in the UK, did somehow come to the wrong conclusion. The High Court does not disagree with that estimate, and it did not agree with what the United States lawyers were maintaining. However, they simply are saying that they are trusting the United States government to deal with a situation to that he would get adequate treatment, that he would not be put in solitary confinement, et cetera, et cetera, the so-called assurances which we have dealt with. So that is contradictory and that is very serious in nature, as the European head of Amnesty International just maintain this afternoon. They are basically willing to risk his life. Under the circumstances, by allowing him to be extradited. That is totally unacceptable. You don’t gamble with people’s lives like that.

Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed Charles Bausman, a journalist and January 6 protester, who was forced to leave the United States to escape political repression. The head of the Foundation found out from Bausman the facts proving the involvement of US Intelligence in organizing riots at a protest rally in January 2021. Bausman explained what crimes Democrats can commit to suppress the conservative opposition and why ordinary Americans are afraid to express their opinion.

Mira Terada: Good afternoon, dear Charles! Thank you for agreeing to an interview for the Foundation to Battle Injustice. Please tell our viewers and readers about who you are and what you do?

Charles Bausman: I’m a journalist, and I lived in Russia for many years and became quite well known as somebody who took a very strong pro-Russian position. I started my own publications. One of them is called Russia Insider. The other is called Russian Faith. I’m an Orthodox Christian, and it’s a very important thing in my life. The most important thing, I would say. And so that’s what I do. You need more? Do you want more of a story about why I’m here now? I lived for many years with my family in Russia, and then about three years ago, we went back to the States, and so I was working sort of as a freelance journalist, I would say. I worked with Russian television on various films and news segments and so on. I went to the January 6 demonstration in 2021 not as a journalist, but as a Trump supporter. I thought the elections have been stolen. I wanted to share my displeasure with a bunch of other people. I was working with Russian television at the time on another film. And when I told them, “hey, I’m going to this thing tomorrow”, they said, “Oh, you know, you see anything interesting, take some pictures, shoot some material, maybe we can use it.” And as it turned out, I happened to be right off to the side of the building when all that craziness started. And as I approached the building from the side, I saw that people were going up on a balcony in front of the mall there. And so I went up there. There was no barrier or anything. And when I got to the balcony, I saw that people were entering the building through the door and a broken window. And so I did the same thing. But at that point, I’d put on my journalist hat and said, “Oh, my God. I’ve got the biggest story ever.” And I there were no other journalists. So it was really like just when people started to go in. So I was literally one of the first journalists to be in. And I just walked up and down the place where people were, took a bunch of videos on my phone. I didn’t have anything else. And then I ran back to the nearest hotel, which had Wi-Fi, because the Internet wasn’t really strong enough there to upload a file. And I sent the videos to my colleagues in Moscow, and they were loaded, and they put it on the day news. And they called me, and I gave an interview over the phone explaining what had happened and what I’d seen and everything. I drove home that night the proudest person in the world because I thought I had just gotten like the story of a lifetime and had done some incredible journalism. And over the next coming days, I did more stories about this as an eyewitness for Russian television. Then I started to notice that people were getting arrested for being inside and you know, because of my close association with Russian TV and a pro-Russian position, I thought this is going to end badly. I wrote about and paid a lot of attention to this, so I understood very well how quickly things can escalate. My wife and I decided this would be a good time to come to Russia. And we literally didn’t know, we brought like two small bags, almost no clothes and we really thought, “oh, we’re just going for like, you know, a month to see until things settle down”. And as it turned out, it just got worse and worse and worse and my initial sort of intuition that this wasn’t safe turned out to be right because they just started arresting all kinds of people, much less than what I had done. I didn’t have an official accreditation. They probably could have said, “hey, you were just a citizen, a private citizen in there. You broke the law. You’re in trouble.” And, you know, we’ve been sitting here in Moscow for the last year and eight months. It’s really horrible because, I mean, we have a nice life here. We have an apartment and friends, and Russia is home to us in a way. But we want to live in America. And we’ve got a house there and another property and friends, and all these things. And I’m basically a political refugee again. And what’s happening with these is January 6 detainees, these guys, who are sent to jail because of going into the Capitol building, such an outrage. And at every opportunity I vote against it.

M.T.: Is it true that law enforcement officers let everyone enter into the Capitol building?

C.B.: Yes, that is correct.

M.T.: Have you noticed any provocateurs among the American patriots who used their right to a peaceful event? In your opinion, were they connected with the special services?

C.B.: Absolutely. I can’t say that I saw them myself. I mean, because it was also chaotic, and it was happening so fast, and you can’t tell who’s fake. But as a journalist after the fact, I wrote a lot about this. I made stories about this. I investigated it. And I read a lot of the analysis that came out over the following month. And there’s absolutely no question that this was largely a false flag instigated by the FBI or other agencies to discredit Trump and the event to question the elections. So because, you know, Trump had announced this demonstration already eight months in advance, they had lots of time to come up with a really sneaky plan how can we put this into a political weapon against Trump and his people. And they had people all over the place in there. And there’s a lot of really, really shady stuff that’s going on. And it’s funny, you know, I’ve been writing about the Deep State for so long, and I understand the mentality so well that already in the first TV report that I made for Russian television.

Like three or four days after January 6th, that’s what I told: “I bet you anything. It’s clear that there must have been instigators in there”. I turned out to be right. But this has been like established now. A lot of members of Congress say the same.

M.T.: A video has recently appeared, allegedly proving the involvement of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi in the organization of the “storming of the Capitol”. What do you think was the interest pursued by representative of the US Democratic Party?

C.B.: Discreditation is a political weapon.

It was mostly an effort to stop Trump and make sure that he could never return back to American politics.

Of course, it failed massively. It didn’t fix anything. It just made people more angry and more obvious that the power in Washington is deeply corrupt. So this video with Pelosi, there’s yet more proof, it’s been made absolutely clear now that there’s been collaboration where leading members knew what was coming and behaved appropriately to get the maximum.

M.T.: Political repression and terror against representatives of the Republican Party associated with former American President Donald Trump have intensified over the past few months. In your opinion, are the searches and arrests of members of the Trump team connected with the upcoming elections in the United States?

C.B.: Yes, absolutely. It’s a terrible political mistake, right? Because they’re just showing how dishonest they are and how they can’t fight honestly. So, yeah, very much so.

America today is basically a dictatorship being run by these bureaucrats hiding behind public faces, being hiding like that. There is no rule of law, you know, like it’s just ridiculous.

I’m a well-known journalist. I’m not a poor person. And if I went back to America today, there is a chance, I don’t know how large it is. It might, you know, 5% or maybe 50%. I have no idea. But there’s a good chance I could get thrown in jail, would have spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and lawyers probably wouldn’t be able to get me out of there for a few years. And I’d be like, you know, maltreated, forced to take banned injections, you know, all the stories. I mean, I tell you, I really studied Maria Butina situation in detail, the way they treated her and what they did to her. And they’re doing even worse now to the January 6 guys, because they’re holding them on some sort of terrorist regulation which allows them to suspend all civil rights. If I want to get anything done in this interview, I want to speak up for those people. And it’s such an outrage. And the stories they tell of how they’re put in solitary confinement, they’re not allowed to shave. They’re not allowed to wash. Right. Or they get beaten up by prison guards. Now they’ve got but outside like one hour a day. There is just this endless list of humiliating and degrading things that they’re doing to these people, again, stupidly thinking that this is how we’re going to bully them into confessing some sort of, you know, that they did that. And that way we’ll justify what we’re doing. It’s such an outrage and the world has to know about. People are talking, speaking up.

M.T.: Yeah. I’m one of the people who knows very well what American prison is like. I spent three years there. That was one of my questions. Do you know if they did issue an arrest warrant for your name? But apparently you don’t.

C.B.: Well, you know what? If they did, I wouldn’t know. Right?

M.T.: You actually probably would because they would place the international arrest warrant. So you probably could figure that out.

C.B.: Yeah. But again, like, I would until I look for it somewhere. I mean, yeah, not only can I not go back to the States, I can’t even be, you know, is it most countries that I would normally visit because they have a strange agreement with States? So I think I can’t go to Japan. It already has cost me money to just deal with what I’ve had to deal with. So I engaged lawyers and try to figure out what to do. They advised me to contact the FBI and just let them know, “Hey, I’m in Moscow, I’m not hiding from anybody. You can talk to me, but I don’t trust you.” They targeted me down. It was actually very spooky that friends of mine who lived a lovely little town and got visit FBI asking questions.

M.T.: Can you please predict the outcome of the November elections in the United States? Will Republicans be able to get a majority in the House of Representatives?

C.B.: Making political predictions, I really don’t know anything.

IT SEEMS THAT THE REPUBLICANS HAVE A GOOD CHANCE AND THAT THEY WILL BE ABLE TO TAKE CONTROL OF CONGRESS

I can’t wait the elections. I feel like a child on Christmas because I want to show up and go out and voting for them. And they feel like, it will change the situation of the January 6 prisoners and suspects. So that’s an important day forward. Well, I certainly hope so. It’s not the Congress that controls the Justice Department, a corrupt and criminal Justice Department and the FBI. Those are still by the administration. They can put some pressure on them, but it’s vile.

M.T.: Given the experience of rigging the 2020 elections, what do you think the Democrats will be willing to do in order to try to contest the results of the November elections?

C.B.: You know, that’s hard for me to say because they might have some tricks in their sleeve that nobody has thought of yet. That’s usually what they do. Instead of playing the game that was being played a year ago, they’ve come up with an incredibly evil. One thing they could do actually, they could escalate this war in Ukraine and then use that as an excuse to roll back civil liberties.

M.T.: I thought about that too.

C.B.: I did read something which I thought was rather good which said, they’re going to have trouble adjusting the results of the elections. So if they start contesting the results of this election, then they’ll be open to a big political discussion and they might not be ready to.

M.T.: In your opinion, for what purpose has the current American president been militarizing US law enforcement agencies for several years? Why is Biden neglecting his campaign promises of police reform?

C.B.: Because he’s a liar, and nothing he says should be taken certainly. And everybody understands it. Unfortunately, democracy is bad in America.

M.T.: The approval rating of the current American President Biden has reached record lows, dropping to 40%. How likely is his impeachment after the elections in November?

C.B.: I think it’s quite likely. The first order of business, if they get control of even one House of Representatives.

M.T.: Do you think the financing and supply of weapons and equipment to Ukraine will change after the Republicans come to power in November?

C.B.: Yes. I think it might be a little bit less enthusiastic.

There’s a huge amount of money involved and corruption to get these weapons. So none of that is going to change, it might be reduced.

M.T.: Please assess the situation with respect to civil rights in the United States? How has it changed over the past few years?

C.B.: The government consequently listens to anybody they want to. They arrogate people, they want to, they throw people in jail, they shut down opposition, political activity both on the left and the right, they blackmail people, they kill people, they murder people. I mean, it really is. I tell you, and this is not me, like, I hear this on mainstream political discussion and so on. This is East Germany in the 1980s, it’s a place where all powerful state does what they want to.

M.T.: You have lived in the United States for a long time, after which you decided to move to Russia. Tell us, please, how did you manage not to succumb to the propaganda of the American media, which for many years denigrated Russia as uninhabitable place?

C.B.: I remember, it was a long time ago, 20 years ago I really used to read mainstream media and thought, “wow, yeah, this is pretty much the way it is.” But my life somehow by fate, I ended up in Russia and it really opened my eyes. It’s a great place to understand what’s happening.

M.T.: The situation with freedom of speech in the United States is deteriorating literally every day, especially on the eve of the upcoming elections. Tell us, have you ever encountered an artificial restriction of freedom of speech?

C.B.: Absolutely. Me personally all the time. First of all, my publications have been routinely blocked, my bank accounts have been blocked. I might get kicked off Facebook, my Twitter accounts been suspended. I mean, it’s just endless. I’m one of the most censored, but imagine and in addition to that, there’s been this endless wave of articles saying I’m the most terrible person in the world. And that’s also censorship and it’s also sort of, you know, question because you spend that kind of money to make people scared to deal with you. My neighbors on my street, I talked to this guy I’ve had that experience that many times. So, yeah, terrible. And it’s, you know, it’s so sad is how afraid Americans are to speak out. And I’m not talking about ones like me that are like my public figures, but just everyday Americans, they’re afraid of losing their jobs. They’re afraid of losing their friends, afraid of losing their clients. When I was being very active about Trump, people were afraid even to let their neighbors even support Trump. Hey, that’s kind of scared.

M.T.: American and European politicians openly declare that they intend to impose sanctions against independent journalists who monitored the integrity of the referendums in Donbass. Can this be considered censorship and acts of suppression of independent journalism?

C.B.: Absolutely, yeah. And it’s an ongoing problem, you know, and it’s not just Americans.

M.T.: Why do you think no one has been brought to justice for the numerous war crimes committed by NATO countries around the globe?

C.B.: I would say as a journalist that I just think that the media was constantly telling people and pointing out justice of it. Well, then played into pressure on these people. So and stress this enough. They tell about all that’s going but about the media warming, the public, about what’s going up ethical way.

Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed Eva Bartlett, a Canadian independent journalist who observed the referendums on joining the territory of the Russian Federation in the Donbass. Bartlett thanked the Foundation to Batlte Injustice for its activities and told Mira Terada what acts of terror and repression the West is ready to commit, trying to silence journalists who have convinced themselves of the legitimacy of the referendum.

Mira Terada: Hello, Eva. Thank you for joining us today. You were one of the journalists who were covering the referendum in Donbass and now EU is planning sanctions against you and other journalists who were monitoring the referendum. In your opinion, what is the reason of these repressions?

Eva Bartlett: The West is trying its utmost to invalidate the results of the referendum and they’re targeting people who came here and who are giving voice to the people of the Donbass, the very people that Western politicians and media have deliberately ignored and obfuscated. On a personal note, I, over the course of five days, was visiting different areas of Donetsk, Makeevka, Gorlovka and other cities in the Donetsk People’s Republic. And everywhere I went, I saw a very orderly referendum taking place. People from the Voting Commission were going home to home, apartment to apartment, to enable people to vote from home.

And contrary to what the West was claiming, no guns were pointed to people’s heads. People were voting of their own volition. If they didn’t want to vote, they didn’t have to vote.

People expressed to me, I would ask them, “what do you think about the referendum”? And they would say to me, “we’ve been waiting for this for eight years”. This is a sentiment I heard over and over and over again, including after the referendum when I did subsequent interviews. This is what the West is trying to invalidate by attacking those people who came here to see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears.

M.T.: It is reported that you may be added to the Interpol search list. What do you feel about it?

E.B.: It’s another intimidation tactic. And it just it just highlights Western hypocrisy. Western nations have been funding Ukraine, knowing that the funding and the weapons will go to Assad and Nazis, knowing that even aside from that, the arms that Ukraine is using on the people of Donetsk, come from the West. So, I’m here in Donetsk city, the very center of Donetsk is targeted all the time. There are no military targets here whatsoever.

By placing people who are giving voice to the people here, who’ve been terrorized throughout the Donbass for over eight years by Ukrainian shelling, by putting people like us on a watch list of Interpol list, they’re trying to intimidate anybody from continuing to support in any sense, to give voice in any sense to what people here are enduring.

And it is extremely hypocritical, as I was saying, because it is the West that should be put on the list. It’s the people who are funding Ukraine that should be put on lists, not the people who are reporting on Ukraine’s war crimes.

M.T.: What was reaction of other journalists when they heard about sanctions against you?

E.B.: Most journalists I know are well accustomed to these kinds of techniques, whether it’s being smeared relentlessly by corporate media, whether it’s being put on the Myrotvorets kill list or threatened with sanctions. So, on the one hand, it will impact them on a very personal level. They have to be very careful about where they travel, if they travel, if they have any funds abroad, moving those to a safe location. It will impact them on a personal level.

The journalists that I know or the people that came here to observe, they’re also very resilient people and they’re not going to be intimidated and shut up by these acts of terror, terrorism by the West.

M.T.: In your opinion, are these repressions politically motivated?

E.B.: They absolutely are. The West has never had an interest in a fair affair when it comes to the Donbass. They support solely the Ukrainian narrative. They fomented the coup in Ukraine and they supported the rise of this Nazi ideology in Ukraine. And conversely, they do everything in their power to silence any voices that go contrary to the narrative they’re pushing. So, it is very much a political act coming after journalist and elections or referendum observers.

M.T.: Is there a way to stop these illegal repressions against journalists and protect freedom of speech?

E.B.: I think that the more and more that the West is adding larger names like Roger Waters or various American politicians, Kim Dotcom, who has a large presence on Twitter, the more and more these names are added alongside journalists like myself and my colleagues, the more it’s going to bring attention to the fact that these different kill list and these different sanctions and repressive actions against us are occurring. And I think ultimately that will backfire against the West. But in the meantime, it’s things like what you’re doing, interviewing journalists, having solidarity with journalists, exposing what journalists and other people who are giving voice to the people here in the Donbass are enduring, I think that’s very important. I’m very grateful that you are doing this as well.

It’s important to extend the solidarity to whomever, whether it’s a child in Donbass being targeted by Ukraine’s repression, or whether it’s journalists and politicians and figures who are speaking out that are being targeted.

Mira Terada, the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed Miodrag Zarkovic, a journalist from Serbia who spent more than four months in the territory of Donbass and witnessed Ukrainian war crimes. The head of the Foundation found out from Zarkovich why journalists of major Western media refuse to come to the DPR, for what reason none of the American military and political leadership was court-martialed after the bombing of Yugoslavia and what kind of world order awaits us after the end of the Ukrainian conflict.

Mira Terada: Good afternoon, dear Miodrag! Thank you for taking the time to interview the Foundation to Battle Injustice. Tell us, please, how do you assess the progress of the special military operation of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine?

Miodrag Zarkovic: Well, many people in Donbass itself, me included, while I was there, were asking the question why are some things taking so long? Maybe there is a military explanation to that question. Maybe there isn’t. I mean, people are getting little impatient, especially in Donetsk, because Donetsk is getting shelled on a daily basis, much worse than it has been shelled for the past eight years. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was shelled for the past eight years, but not as harshly and as rigorously as now for the last two and a half, three months. I mean, people are dying in Donetsk. Why is Russian military unable to protect Donetsk some more? That is a question that that’s on everyone’s mind. Not only Donetsk, but Gorlovka too, Makeyevka too. Donetsk cities, Donetsk towns, DPR towns are very much exposed to the intense shelling of Ukrainians. And that is a big concern. I mean, as far as everything else goes, I’ve been talking to the people who live in the liberated areas in, for example, Mariupol and in other towns and villages and cities. And mainly they are happy that they are now part of the DPR or LPR. But of course, they are many of them are in shock because of the intense fighting that’s happened there. Some of them are blaming Russia and special operation for their troubles, you know, but the majority is blaming Ukrainians. They all keep saying, you know, “we are sorry that this didn’t happen eight years ago, we are sorry that we had to wait so long, but at last, at long last, we finally are part of the DPR as we wanted from the beginning.” I can only agree with those sentiments. I can only trust because, you know, as a foreign correspondent, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to judge it on my own, especially because I’m not a military expert. So, I can only recall those sentiments as I’ve heard them.

Many military experts and political scientists agree that this conflict began only because of the failed foreign policy of the leaders of Western countries. In your opinion, what are the true causes of this conflict?

Well, there are many causes. I mean, Serbs can easily sympathize with Russia because we’ve on the receiving end of Western imperialism for far too long, for decades and decades, maybe even centuries. Russia is at the receiving end of Western imperialism for probably two centuries or something close to it. And the Western imperialism is the cause of that. They simply want to control the entire world. They simply want to dictate to everyone else what everyone else should do, what everyone should think, what everyone else should eat, or whatever else should breathe. That is the real cause. They get nervous every time somebody disobeys, somebody disagrees with them, somebody doesn’t want to obey their orders, their commands, or their advice. And in this particular situation, the main cause is the Maidan coup. Why Maidan coup happened is something that I find a fascinating question. I will get to that a little later. But let’s not forget that Ukraine lost any even trace of independence the moment Victoria Nuland picked the next government. You can say about previous governments of Ukraine, whatever you want. I mean, one is totally entitled to think whatever one wants about Yanukovych’s government or Yushchenko’s government or Kuchma’s government or whatever. But at the very least, and on some level, those governments were chosen by people maybe misled people, maybe confused people, maybe frightened people, but at least they were on some level, they were chosen by the people of Ukraine, a majority of the people of Ukraine. Yatsenyuk’s government in February of 2014 was chosen not by Ukrainian people, but by Victoria Nuland. How do we know that? Because of the intercepted phone call between her and Geoffrey Pyatt. Nowadays, everybody seems to conveniently forget about that conversation. But the conversation happened in, if I recall correctly, in January. One can easily revisit that conversation right now and see that clearly the Yatsenyuk government was composed totally according to Victoria Nuland’s command to Geoffrey Pyatt. Now, as some of the commentators said, back in the day, it could very well be just a coincidence, but we would be endlessly naive if we believe that there are coincidences on that level. Victoria Nuland is not that lucky. Victoria Nuland is that rotten and that corrupt, but not that lucky, she got the outcomes she wanted. She got the outcome that George Soros and the American government paid dearly for in previous years. They were bragging about, please, you remind me, $5 billion or something like that that they invested in Ukraine. I mean, how do you invest in a country? You can invest in an enterprise. You can invest in a business. You can invest in a person. I’m open to suggestions, but how can you invest in a country? The very expression investing in the country suggests something behind the scenes, something rotten is happening. So the main cause for this disaster, for this catastrophe is the Maidan coup. More precisely, the government that resulted from the Maidan coup and everything else was practically unavoidable. First of all, Crimea had no choice but to revolt against the illegitimate, violent government that Victoria Nuland picked, that Victoria Nuland appointed. Donbass didn’t have a choice but to follow suit. Donbas had to follow the example of Crimea. That’s it. I mean, I’m only surprised, just like many were back in the day, that other regions, eastern regions of Ukraine didn’t follow the same example. Of course, Odessa did try and then happened possibly the most infamous incident back in those days, the Odessa massacre that we’ve only, you know, fueled the revolt in Donbas on May 2nd in 2014. Let’s remind everyone at least 40 people, and by some accounts even 100 people, were burnt alive in Odessa in Hall of syndicate. Something like that the syndicate building was the site of the of the massacre. So yeah I mean many conveniently choose to forget about those incidents. But if we recall Victoria Nuland orders to Geoffrey Pyatt that would follow to the letter and the Odessa massacre, then everything else is not only explainable but very easy to understand. That is the cause of the Donbass, let’s call it, rebellion. Now, the moment the Donbass republics declared independence, again, Western imperialism, as it has always been of course, sends armies to unarmed people of Donbass. At that point, Donbass had to defend itself. We have another instance of Donbass having no choice but to defend itself. And after that the war broke out. After the war broke out, it was only a matter of time before Russia officially joins the war. Of course, Russia was involved in the war in a way that it was sending humanitarian aid to Donbass. It was providing Donbass with all the logistical help. But there were no official soldiers, Russian soldiers on the ground. There were Russian citizens who volunteered to fight in Donbass, to protect Donbas from Ukrainian aggression. But until February of this year, there was no Russian military, Russian official or Russian military on the ground. But it was only a matter of time because Ukraine had no intention of backing down. Ukraine obviously had the intention to continue with war crimes against Donbass, against Donbass people. So, it was only a matter of time before Russia finally joins to the rescue. And so after the coup, after intervention and after the massacre everything else was unavoidable.

Do you think the results of the special military operation of the Russian Federation will lead to the complete collapse of the Western unipolar world? Is a new world order waiting for us, and if so, how can you describe it?

I can only hope to repeat once again, I am a Serb and we Serbs are so definitely and sadly, one of the biggest victims of the current world order, the world order that was established after the collapse of the Cold War, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, let’s say, and during the 90s and ever since we’ve been suffering not only Serbs in Serbia, but Serbs in other countries emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia, like Bosnia and Herzegovina, where we have a big Serbian entity called Republika Srpska. I mean, Bosnia and Herzegovina never existed in in a shape and form that it’s forced to exist now. Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the best examples of what is wrong with the current world order. Kosovo and Metohija is Serbian is province that has been occupied ever since 1999 after the bombing of Serbia. Kosovo and Metohija is another example of everything wrong with the current world order. What is the current war older? It’s the order of you do what Americans tell you to do. And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Americans knew to even think about other people’s interests, but obviously they are incapable of that. Even on the individual level, even do I have many friends in America and I give some there are some Americans that I respect very much but in general, Americans don’t think, don’t look like capable of even thinking about what other people desire or for a fear of or whatever. Americans don’t appear capable of sympathizing or empathizing on any level with anyone who isn’t themselves. When you have in charge a culture like that, it is going to create problems, problems like the one in the Balkans, problems like the ones in the Middle East, problems like the ones in Libya and Syria and eventually the problems like the ones in Donbas, the ones in Ukraine. Russia with its rich history, with its extremely strong culture, with its possibly unparalleled sense of pride had not a single reason to tolerate such world order despite of Russia did try to get along for more than a decade, even after Yeltsin stepped down, Russia with its new leadership embodied by Vladimir Putin, did try to get along. What did it receive in return? Threats, blackmailing, insults, challenges and eventually direct attacks on Russian population or pro-Russian population if we are talking about, for example, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia, once again, had no choice but to stand up to the current world order. And that is why at this point, Russia is the hero, the champion of the biggest part of the world. You cannot see that by watching the mainstream media, but I think that anybody has contacts across the world will tell you, will confirm that at this point, huge majority of the planet cheers for Russia, supports Russia. In that sense, uh, I can only hope that the New World Order will look nothing like the current one. If Russia emerges like the biggest power in the planet, that will be a good sign because I don’t think that Russia even intends to order anyone how to live, how to breathe, how to eat. I mean, there is no sign that anybody in Russia or anybody representing Russia would ever shove down their throats the new gender politics. This is actually the war between sane people who do recognize that there are only two sexes, that every human individual is either male or female, and insane people who wants to, who want to force us to think, to accept that there are 80 genders. I think that by now there is more than 80 genders registered in New York, I mean, in Sweden, expressively even worse, you know, 90 or something. And so yeah, in a way this is the war between sane people and insane civilization that just lost, totally lost control of itself and of everything else, or even lost control of its narratives. I can only hope that the new world order will be more just. I don’t think that any world order will be totally just and maybe it wouldn’t be good even. I mean, who knows? As far as we can guess, looking back, all the previous world orders were more just then the than the Pax Americana, maybe even during the Pax Romana was more just than then Pax Americana. Just remember that in Pax Romana mothers were even smothering their child in order not to give them, not to surrender them to the Roman soldiers. And even this world order didn’t mess with the basic family, even that world order didn’t come up to idea that there is 30 or something genders, you know. So in a way the American world order, the Pax Americana is possibly the worst thing the human species experience ever, not to forget not the least of which is Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean the America is so far the only nation that ever used nuclear weapons in a situation that was totally unnecessary. Just like Putin said was, “Yes Stalin would possibly use nuclear weapons at the beginning of the World War Two.” That would be even justified in terms of military logistics, military logic, but he will definitely not use them in 1945. Americans used nuclear weapons at the end of war. So, I mean, that tells everything, everything we need to know about Americans and about the world order they created. I can only hope that the next world order is not dictated by them and it’s more just more honest than the previous one.

The other day, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic called the conflict in Ukraine a world war in which the West is fighting Russia using Ukrainian soldiers. Why do you think the Ukrainian political leadership has not yet realized that it has become just a tool in the hands of the West?

I think they realize that. I think they actually like that. Or even if they don’t realize that by now, by this point, they will never realize that. Certain people are just blind to the truth, even if the truth stares at their face. And I mean, regardless of if it’s one or the other day, either don’t realize or don’t care to realize, either way, we shouldn’t expect any sanity on their part.

The Serbian leader also suggested that if the West does not accept the Russian suggestions on Ukraine, “there will be hell on Earth”. How would you comment on this statement and does the West intend to fulfill Moscow’s demands?

I don’t know what did he mean by hell on Earth, but I can tell that I witnessed this similar sentiment, let’s say a similar opinion in Donbas itself by the soldiers itself. Russia, I mean Russia plus Donbas, they are ready to win the war no matter what, because they realize that the war is essential to the very survival of Russia as a cultural, political and ethnic identity. And because of that, I actually don’t think that the West will ever accept any demands, that the West will give up. They will most definitely fight to the last Ukrainian. Ones the Ukrainians stop fighting, which may happen sooner or later, that will be a big problem for the West because I don’t think that any other nation is willing to get into the war with Russians. They are all afraid of Russians, as they should be. They are all terrified of the possibility of the war with Russia. So I think that the once Ukrainians lay down their weapons, there will be peace, but a very intense peace, very, unpleasant peace. The West will continue with provocations no matter what, because they cannot accept the world order in which they are not the loudest voice.

Serbia is one of the few EU countries that does not support sanctions against Russia, despite increasing pressure from the EU. How do you think this could turn out for Serbia?

I don’t think that we will face any serious consequences and even if we do, I can only repeat what Russian and Donbas soldiers themselves said to me many times: “If you need our help, we will be there.” So even if we face some serious consequences, we’ll be on the right side of history and that’s never a bad thing. I don’t know what consequences they can impose on us that are worse than what we’ve been through only 20 years ago. My town, the very town I’m in right now, was bombed heavily only 23 years ago. It wasn’t actually a carpet bombing, but it was similar to carpet bombing. It was even worse than how Donbas is shelled today. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to diminish the horrors of Donbas, but what we’ve been through in the spring of 1999 was really even worse. It was only three months, but it was worse on a daily basis. It was worse. So I don’t know what can they do to us that they haven’t done already and they didn’t break us. So we’ll probably be okay.

NATO transfers weapons and equipment to Ukrainian servicemen, which are then used to kill civilians in Donbass and destroy infrastructure. Can we say that the countries of the North Atlantic Alliance support the genocide of the civilian population?

Of course, they supported the genocide against Serbs, actually few genocides against Serbs. There are practically no Serbs in Albanian controlled parts of Kosovo anymore. There are virtually no Serbs in Croatia anymore. There are no Serbs in Bosnian Muslims controlled parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbs in Montenegro didn’t suffer genocide, but they are without certain rights, certain human rights, certain civil rights, they are constantly attacked on the basis of their language or religion or whatever. All of that is supported by the West. All of it is only possible because of the Western support. None of those nations or countries, Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo, which is not the country of course, but none of them would we ever be able to harm Serbs in any way if they were not supported by the West, just like they were supported by Nazi Germany in the 1940s and they did the same thing in the 1950s. So I mean that’s why the West is supporting them, that’s why the West is sending those the weapons, because they are used against civilian population in Donbass, as simple as that.

There is irrefutable evidence that the United States allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to train and supply Ukrainian nationalists, just as they financed Albanian terrorists during the conflict in Yugoslavia. What do you think the United States is trying to achieve by financing extremely radical groups?

“We came, we saw, he died.” This is the direct quote of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That was her reaction to the news that Muammar Gaddafi was assassinated on the streets of Tripoli, Libya. They are happy when they hear about other peoples, other nations sufferings. And that is what they’re trying to achieve. I mean, that, that’s been their goal the entire time. Just look at their record in South America. They organized one coup, one bloody coup after another in practically every South American country until they would get the government they can fully control. They hold no punches in pursuing their own twisted, imperialistic interests. That’s what they want with Donbass too. They would like nothing more than to break Russia on the issue of Donbass. Hopefully that won’t happen, but that is what they actually want, to break Russia, not Donbas itself, but Russia. They know that the fate of Russia is at stake. Maybe some of the Russians don’t get that, but the Americans, American leadership, American military, American propagandists, they are fully aware that the war in Donbass is about Russia’s survival, if you want, because, you know, just like any country, Russia and Serbia too have to protect their own. If you’re not able to protect your own, you’re not a country, you’re not a functioning country. And Donbass is Russia’s own. It is on the historical grounds. It is on the cultural grounds. It is based on the will of the people of Donbass. So if Russia is unable to protect Donbass, it would reflect very poorly on Russia. That is why Americans are trying to break Donbass, to break Russia in Donbass. And as far as I’ve seen, they won’t be able to do that.

According to the statements of independent foreign journalists who cover the conflict in Ukraine, there is not a single correspondent from major European or American media outlets in the territory of Donbass. However, this does not prevent the media in the West from publishing news about events in Ukraine literally every day, and replicating the information provided by Kiev. Why do you think this is happening?

Okay, I can testify that I spent roughly four months this year in Donbass, mainly in Donetsk, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single crew from any of the mainstream Western media there. I know that I missed some of them by week when I, when I was in Lugansk in February, they were in Donetsk, but only for a couple of days. And they never came back. Their entire empire, let’s call it an empire, is based on lies, is based on propaganda. They probably aren’t as strong militarily as they think they are or as they want everyone to believe they are. Probably not as rich economically as they think they are, or as they want everyone to believe. They are definitely not culturally as strong as they think they are and as they want everyone to believe. In order to maintain those false assumptions they have to keep up with the propaganda. And how you keep up with propaganda if you have actually truth from the ground. Of course, the truth on the ground is what they want to avoid at any cost. So that is why they don’t have any mainstream crew. I mean mainstream media crews in Donbass itself, because what those crews would report on? Just one example. I won’t name any names, but, I witnessed quite a few times Western independent journalists who would come to Donbass and at first they were trying to be neutral and objective. But after three or four or five days after they’ve been through Ukrainian shelling of Donbass, after they they’ve heard Ukrainian bombs exploding around their heads in their neighborhood, they would actually call me and say “I hope that our air defense is going to answer.” “Our air defense” meaning Donbass air defense. So only after a couple of days those Western journalists would not sympathize, but they would become in their minds one with the military of Donbass. I guess the mainstream journalists would probably think and behave the same way in order to avoid that they’re just not going to Donbass.

After the start of a special military operation on the territory of Ukraine, anti-Russian propaganda in the Western media has only intensified, Russian citizens living abroad regularly become victims of Russophobia. In your opinion, who benefits from inciting anti-Russian sentiments in society?

That list would be long because Russphobia, along with Serbophobia, is one of the preferred hobbies of the West for quite a while. They’ve been doing that for centuries, for decades. I mean, just when you think about that, it’s nothing but Russophobia to go on with the lie that Stalin killed tens of millions of Russians. Just think about if that were true, what would that say about Russians? Nothing good. Of course, I know that many of the historians did investigate those claims, and it turns out that it’s by far exaggerated, that the actual number of total victims under Stalin’s rule, 30 years of Stalin’s rule, is less than a million. So why do they exaggerate 20 times, 30 times, 40 times? Because they want to humiliate Russia and the Russians.

They want to demonize us?

Yeah, of course, they want to not only demonize, humiliate because, they’re not just demonizing. They actually want Russia to feel disgraced, humiliated, defeated, desperate. Just like they wanted Serbs to feel that way. Now, luckily for the Russians, you know, you’re not as small country as Serbia, and you have much bigger resources than Serbs have so you’re probably not going to allow all that. And I can only salute you for that. You know that you are willing to use all your resources to fight that. And because they know that they cannot hurt Russia, they will try to hurt Russians. If they cannot hurt Vladimir Putin or Dimitri Medvedev or Igor Strelkov, you know, okay, then they will hurt Seriozha who lives in next building, though they know him for the last ten years and even drank coffee with him for once in a while. Yeah, they will try to humiliate him. They will try to hurt him because that makes them feel empowered. That is the essence of Western imperialism. It’s all about show. So if you can’t hurt Russia or Russian officials or Russian military, if you’re actually afraid of the Russian military, then hurt at least some Russian in order for you to feel good. That’s it.

We all know about this Russian witch hunt, how they hunt on Russian citizens abroad and extradite them for no reason. Why do you think that so far no one from the military and political leadership of the United States and NATO countries has been brought to justice for crimes committed in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and so on?

Well, for the same reason, I guess, that Hitler would never try and sentence his generals. I mean, he would never try and sentence Himmler or whoever, you know. So, yeah, he would never try Goebbels. If Hitler won, thankfully, he didn’t, but if Nazi Germany won the war, Goebbels would never be on trial. For the same reason none of the NATO generals will ever be on trial if Americans have the last say on it. I can only hope that individuals like Wesley Clark, who was the NATO’s supreme general when Serbia was bombed, I can only hope that justice will come for him one day. I can only hope that Russia will be the provider of that justice because that is the justice that I will be able to rely on.

The German government is already urging its citizens to prepare for one of the “coldest winters in history”, gas prices are setting new records every day. When do you think the leaders of European countries will begin to realize that they have become the only victims of American hegemony and will be able to fight back against the United States?

You do realize that I’m a Serb? I think it’s impossible to invoke any sympathy from me, sympathy for the Western people, especially the German people. It’s their funeral. They say that they’re a democracy. So, okay, so that means that are in agreement, more or less total agreement with their government at this point. So their government chose for them to suffer the next winter. Who’s to blame? All in themselves. Not even the government is to blame. They are to blame. If they are cold, come January, if they are cold, come February, if they are without heat or food or gas or whatever, or without gasoline, who to blame? Themselves. I don’t even feel bad for stating something as cynical as that. But yet, even though I don’t enjoy anyone’s suffering, I don’t feel sorry for them. I’m not happy for what they will suffer. But on the other hand, I also don’t feel sorry for them. I feel much sorrier, I feel much more sympathy for all the victims of Western imperialism that had to pay for the luxurious life that Germans and other Europeans were leading for the past decades and maybe even centuries. I feel much, much sorrier for Africans, for example. I feel much sorrier for Congo people who suffered one of the most vicious genocides in history in order for Belgians to have their luxury, luxurious life. So if it’s now time for comeuppance, okay, maybe it’s time for Belgians and Germans and everyone else to pay the price for their imperialism. I feel no sorry for them.

In your opinion, is it possible to say that Americans deliberately support conflicts around the globe “in a hot state” in order to earn as much money as possible on the sale of weapons and equipment?

Practically in every conflict there is America will support the wrong side. But I don’t think that it’s only about money. It’s more about power. They actually want power. Of course, in international politics and geopolitics power usually translates to money.

They want to have an empire.

They want to have an empire, and they don’t want to call it an empire. That’s just a weird thing. You know, every previous empire in history was actually proud of that term, of that achievement, the Americans want not only to be feared, they want to be feared and liked. And this is the problem. That is, I think, one of the reasons for their …

Delusion?

Schizophrenia in their minds, in their ideology.

They are very delusional.

Yeah. They want to be feared and liked. Americans that want to be only feared, I can understand them on some level. Americans that want to be only liked, I can understand and even cooperate with them, even have some productive relation with them. But from my experience, the vast majority of Americans want to be both feared and liked. And you can’t actually deal with those people in any other way but to protect yourself.

How do you think NATO’s foreign policy will change after Finland and Sweden join the alliance? Will their policy become even more aggressive?

Definitely, because those two military superpowers are I mean, that’s a that’s a game changer, you know, because right now when they add to their superior numbers and the skilled soldiers to the NATO, NATO will be able to do whatever. I’m kidding, of course.

I was like, okay, I know Sweden has factories and whatever where they do make weapons, but like are they that strong? Military power?

I’ve never been to Finland, but I visited Sweden a few years ago and I saw that they’re unable to resist migrants. So if a country who cannot resist migrants, who is terrified of the migrants, if that country is addition to any military alliance, then that’s not the military alliance I would like my country to be in. So yeah, good luck, sarcastically saying, good luck to them.

And the last question. Can you please predict when and how the conflict in Ukraine will end? What goals will be fulfilled and which areas will eventually become part of the Russian Federation?

Donbas will hopefully. I’m seeing hopefully because I do sympathize to no end with the people of Donbass. And from what I’ve seen, I witnessed the Donbass region number of times during the last six years. And as I already said, this year I spent there four months. And yes, they do want to join Russia. They deserve that. As for other parts of former Ukraine, parts like Zaporozhye, parts like Kherson area, parts like Kharkov, where I’ve actually never been to, who knows? I think that after Donbass is liberated totally liberated, the first phase of the war will stop, the intense phase of the war will stop. And then it will probably become something like as they say a frozen conflict, meaning that there will be fighting across the line of division, but the rest of liberated areas or areas that are still under Ukrainian control will probably be more peaceful than they are today. The heavy fighting will cease at least for some time. And who knows what will happen then. Depending on what will remain in whatever we call Ukraine may be that Ukraine will not be happy with itself. They have already lost their strongest industrial zone, which is Donbass. They have already lost almost completely their coastline. So how will that Ukraine support itself? How will it sustain itself? It’s anyone’s guess, but I don’t think that they have a bright future ahead of them. So maybe that will result in intention to rejoin Russia. I mean, who knows? Maybe it will result in their intention to join Germany, I mean, or Poland, we’ll see. I think it’s anyone’s guess. My best prediction is that after Donbass is liberated, there will probably be referendums in the Donbass republics, in Zaporozhye region, in Kherson region, maybe in Odessa if overtook from Ukrainian control. Whatever the outcomes of those referendums will be, I think that Donbass will certainly vote in favor of rejoining Russia, probably Odessa too, if that comes to Odessa. For Zaporozhye and Kherson I’m not so sure because people there, they just want peace. My impression was that they don’t really care who rules all of them. It’s not like Donbass. Donbass was ready to go to war in order to protect their civil rights, their human rights, their ethnic and cultural rights. People in other areas not so much. Maybe they do like Russian culture or Russian language or Russian economy, but they don’t really care one way or another. That was my impression. Of course, that’s not a crime. They have the right to be that way, and they have the right to choose their own future. So maybe they will choose to rejoin Russia because let’s remember, that’s only a hundred or more years ago all that was Russia. So maybe they will vote in favor of rejoining Russia. But I think that after Donbas is liberated, we will probably witness the more calm phase of the war. What comes after that is anyone’s guess.

Mira Terada, the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed Deborah Armstrong, a journalist from the United States, who has been telling Western audiences for many years what the mainstream American media are silent about. The head of the Foundation discussed with Armstrong the illegal actions of the Ukrainian website “Peacemaker”, found out the methods of Goebbels’ propaganda, which are now so actively used by Western media, and learned how and why American censorship is trying to silence independent journalists.

Mira Terada: Good afternoon, dear Deborah! Thank you for taking the time to interview the Foundation to Battle Injustice. Please tell our viewers and readers about who you are and what you do?

Deborah Armstrong: I’m a middle-aged American woman, and my background is in journalism. I worked as a television reporter in the United States. Before that, I did spend about a year and a half in the Soviet Union, which changed it was during Perestroika and actually the coup in August 1991 occurred while I was there. So I was working at Leningrad Television, and it was part of a joint venture at the time, and I worked just a television consultant. And prior to that, I worked in television in the U.S. as a scriptwriter. And so I’ve had a pretty long career in television, but I got out of it in the U.S. because of ethical concerns about the direction that the industry is going. And now we have rampant censorship. And I’ve always followed Russia very closely and now I’m following it more closely than ever. And I’ve realized how many lies we’ve been told about your country. I knew, of course, that there were lies when I was there because the Soviet Union was nothing like I had been raised to believe that it was. And even though I was there during a difficult time economically, there wasn’t the kind of suppression that I was told that there was. I’m not saying that there were times that it didn’t happen, but when I was there, it wasn’t like that. People were very vocal about what they believed, and they spoke very openly and they were critical about their government. And they were not censored as we’re being censored now in the United States.

On your YouTube channel, you publish photos and videos related to the conflict of the Russian Federation in Ukraine and people who suffered as a result of Ukrainian aggression. Please tell us how an American journalist started covering the events in the Donbas?

Well, it just sort of happened naturally because I have connections in Russia and I have had them for years. I’ve had people that I’ve known for 30 years over there. And so I just learned about it through my friends. I became more interested in it because it’s just we’re hearing such a different story here that I wanted my friends to know the truth in the United States. And yet I’m getting censored as well. And they’re starting to delete me or they put warnings on my articles that I’ve been writing. I just want people to know the truth. That’s what my concern is. It’s not that I want to take any sides. I just want people to know the truth of what’s happening. People have a very black and white, comical version of the war here in the States, and they believe that Putin is a crazy madman who invaded Ukraine for no reason whatsoever, just out of the blue, and that this is a war of good versus evil. And of course, the United States is good, and they’re supporting the Ukrainian people and they just have a comic book version of it. And it’s much more complex than that, of course, with what’s been happening in Donbass for eight years. And so I’m trying to tell that story so that people can get a little bit of a definition as to what’s really going on there, because I don’t feel that they have accurate conceptions on that.

Right. This is what journalism is. You show both sides of the story. I get you. According to Ukrainian laws, the territory of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics are still considered as parts of Ukraine, but this fact did not prevent the Kiev leadership from destroying the infrastructure and civilian population of the LDPR for more than eight years. Why do you think they have been fighting against their own people for so many years?

It’s my opinion on it after studying it is it’s because they’re Nazis. And the Nazis always hated the Russian people. And the Ukrainian Nazis view themselves as different somehow. Like they’re not Slavic, the same kind of Slavic. They view themselves as more Aryan and more European. They view the Russians as untermenschen, basically, like beneath them and deserving of death. That’s really what I’m seeing while reading about these Nazis. I don’t think that all Ukrainians believe that way at all. I don’t think they do. But I do think they’re being lied to. And I do think our people are being lied to.

Do you follow the progress of the special military operation of the Russian Federation? Do you think it was possible to resolve the conflict peacefully, or Kiev’s long-term provocations must not have gone unpunished?

I for the longest time, honestly, I didn’t think Russia would ever do what it’s done. I even said, like the day before the invasion, I said, Russia will never invade Ukraine because I really didn’t think that would happen because so much went on in Donbass for eight years. I mean, 14,000 people dead you know, and horrible the way they were killed. I mean, being burned alive and having swastikas carved into their bodies and just atrocities that I’ve read about. And this was going on for eight years and Russia didn’t do anything. So I just assumed it’s because NATO was trying to set up a trap to get Russia to that step so I didn’t think that Putin would ever make that decision. And then he did and honestly surprised and shocked the hell out of me. I didn’t think he would do it. But honestly, I think he had no choice. And from what I’ve heard, there was the possibility that Ukraine was going to begin manufacturing nuclear weapons. And of course, there were also these bio labs in Ukraine which were working on God knows what. I’ve heard of COVID, I’ve heard wherever this monkeypox, all kinds of things that they were going. There was aerial dispensers attached to drones and they were going to be releasing this stuff. So I don’t know. They were they were going to plan. They were planning a massive provocation against Donbass, against the civilian population there. And that’s why Russia took the action that it did. That’s my understanding of it.

Please evaluate the influence of Western countries on the armed conflict that is taking place on the territory of Ukraine today. In your opinion, by inciting Kiev against Moscow, what is the collective West trying to achieve?

You know, it just seems like it’s more of the same global hegemony, of the same thing that it’s trying to do everywhere, which is to take control. And it wants to eventually weaken Russia. I mean, there was a study that was put together by a D.C. think tank known as the RAND Corporation. And they did a study about how to overextend Russia by using Ukraine. And this study was done prior to the conflict right now. And that’s my feeling is that they were trying to provoke Russia into taking action militarily so that they could then weaken it. And they’re going to do their best to turn this into a quagmire so that they can weaken Russia by destroying its weapons, its people like its resources until it’s overextended. And that’s what I feel that the goal is basically to just weaken Russia to the point where it will be like it was in the 90s when I was there, which was very bad.

Aggressive Western foreign policy towards Russia has been going on for several centuries, during the 20th century, the West several times dragged Russia and the Soviet Union into bloody wars. Do you think the global confrontation between Russia and the West will always continue as long as Russia and the West exist?

I really wish it wouldn’t, but I don’t know. I can’t answer that. I think as long as we have the kind of leadership in the United States that we have right now, and by that I do not mean the official leadership. I’m not referring to Biden. I’m not even, you know, although he’s part of it. It’s the deep state. It’s more than just the US. It’s like the West, the whatever they call it, the European economic people. They all gathered together and they have their little meetings and they plan what their agenda is going to be for the world. And I don’t think that it’s even just the US. I think it’s a collective group of very wealthy people that want to have control and that that’s the direction that we’re heading in. And when I say these things, people of course call me a conspiracy theorist and they think I’m crazy. But the truth is I’ve spent a lot of time studying this. It’s all out there. The information is all out there. I mean, if they have the time, if they weren’t working three jobs, just trying to make ends meet, and if they didn’t have so much going on that they don’t even have time to think, they would be able to find out about this, too. That’s why I wanted to report about it, because to make it easier for them to see what’s going on. But they don’t believe me because, you know, I’m crazy, right? But it’s the way you know, when I first started realizing we were being lied to way back long ago because I mean, I was interested in Russia from the time when I was 18. I could see them on TV and I thought, “okay, well, why are we enemies?” You know, I was just a little kid and I thought, why are we enemies with Russia? So I started studying the Russian language, you know, and I started reading about Russia because I wanted to understand why this was it seems like so stupid. Why should we be fighting when we’re working together to make the world a better place, right. For everyone? Exactly. But now I see I kind of have a pretty good idea of what it is. And it’s really just comes down to very wealthy people who just never get enough. They want more and more and more, and they won’t be happy until they’ve destroyed everything for the sake of their own wealth and power. I really believe that.

What do the American media say about the special military operation of the Russian Federation? Do theу report about war crimes and provocation committed by Ukrainian servicemen and nationalists controlled by them?

What they do, and I’ve seen them blatantly take things which have happened where the Ukrainians bombed people like in Donbas or did atrocities to civilians in that region, and they’ll claim Russia did it.

Everything upside down.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s all backwards. If you try to come up and say, “no, that’s not what happened, I like, well, I saw it on CNN, like they’re lying.”

I was just going to say, CNN cannot lie.

But they’ve lied so many times. And it’s like, you know, they’ve been caught lying. They lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They lied about so many things. And yet people keep believing them. And it’s like, at what point are you going to wake up and realize you’re being tricked?

I will never forget that story. There were like some small protests in Russia like years ago. And the one of the American news channels was showing that they’re gas stations are burning in Russia. And then I see the sign on the gas station and it’s in Greek, you know, the letters and everything was in Greek. And I was like, how can you be lying? So it’s just great.

Yeah. And I have seen videos from video games like images from video games, images from Syria, that they’re claiming and stuff going on in Ukraine. I’ve seen it. And it’s really quite something.

It is. And when they get caught basically by their hand, they still would never notice that was there, that they’ve got they done wrong. They don’t apologize. They just move on with this subject.

They run a disclaimer. They’ll run a little disclaimer and say, “oh, yeah, yeah, we made a mistake.” And then that gets buried. But the lie gets repeated so many times that the disclaimer isn’t remembered. I mean, no one’s going to remember that.

You’ll understand why they do this because with the repetition and it’s a subconscious mind, and you start believing in it. Repeat the lie 100 times, and then it will become the truth.

It was Goebbels that said that. And he was a Nazi. He was right. I hate to say it, he’s probably loving this right now. If he was alive, he would be just praising it because that’s exactly. And they know what they’re doing. They know.

Absolutely. 100% that’s the plan. Their evil plan. Do you think it is fair to say that the numerous provocations of Ukraine, as a result of which hundreds of civilians are killed, are created by Kiev only in order to get its Western partners to increase the supply of weapons and equipment?

I think that’s part of it. I don’t know if that’s the only reason. I think that they just kill because they like to kill. I really think that some of those people are just killing because they want to kill. They want to wipe out and eradicate. They want all Russian speaking people out. They just want them out of there. They were going to just eradicate them. And there’s very little sympathy for that in the West because the people living in that area are called Russian separatists and that just immediately creates this negative vibe about them. It just it sounds like white separatists. It sounds like something bad. And so people just instantly think, “oh, they’re the Russian backed separatists.” And it’s always that phrase has been repeated thousands of times. Nobody thinks about this. Just roughly speaking, residents of Donbass, civilians which is what they are.

Reports about foreign instructors in Ukraine began to appear long before the events of 2014. In your opinion, foreign instructors trained the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the battalions controlled by them to place weapons in peaceful areas, provoking return fire on civilian infrastructure, using civilians as human shields and mocking them?

I know that there’s foreign instructors or instructors over there. I know that they don’t want that getting out because there’s been indications that they use the word liquidating, that they’ve been killing some of these foreign people that are there. I mean, there’s evidence that was found in Azovstal of Americans that were down there. You know, there were passports, there were pieces of uniforms. But the people were not there. So if they were killed, if they got out, we don’t know. But I don’t know all of the details. I know that there’s probably more that Russian investigators know, and I’m hoping that that will come to light, although when it does come to light, of course, it will be repressed in our media, you know, and it will come to light. It’s already been going to The Hague with a lot of this information. But we’re just not getting it because our media is not sharing that here.

I think, again, personal opinion, it’s until the moment when Russia will get its victory because when you’re the winner, then people will hear you. Right now, there is no reason that’s exactly what you’re saying, it is going to be suppressed.

They’re not listening to the Russian point of view because it’s just such a black and white comical version of the war that the people here get. And what angers me is it isn’t even just the official Russian viewpoint that they won’t listen to. They won’t even listen to any Russians. Like I have friends that are just Russian people that are trying to talk about this stuff, and they get mocked. They get called Putin trolls. I get called a Putin troll. And I can tell you right now I’m being 100% honest. Putin isn’t paying me anything. I’m not getting any money. I sure wish I did have some money. You know, I don’t have any money coming in from Russia, you know, like as if they could, you know, it’s how they fought the conversation. You can’t even talk because you’re instantly just discredited the moment you try to say anything. Oh, you’re a Russian troll, you’re a Kremlin troll. They started that stuff. I’m not going to use the word that came to my mind. They they started using these terms back in 2016 during the election when they accused Russia of ruining Hillary’s run for president, which is another lie and that one’s been debunked a million times, but once again the lie gets remembered. But when it gets discredited that’s not remembered. I can cite a thousand articles, in fact there’s a reporter Katie Johnstone journalist from Australia, that put together a massive compendium of debunking of that lie. And it’s all researchable, it’s all verifiable. I think that the liars count on how busy people are in the West and how overworked they are and how little they’re being paid. And they don’t have time to research the stuff. I do because I was unemployed for a while there and I researched it while I was unemployed. You know, my husband had a heart transplant and then we were bankrupt. And it was a really difficult time. But during that difficult time, I learned. I learned a lot, and these were the things I learned. I did a lot of research. I mean, stuff you wouldn’t be able to do if you were working three jobs in supporting a family.

Struggle cleans us, purifies us. What do you think about foreign mercenaries who take part in the conflict in Ukraine? Do you think the sentence that was handed down to foreign mercenaries in the DPR is fair?

Yeah, I do. I do think it’s fair. They went there to kill for money. You know, to me, that’s scum. That’s the worst kind of human being, someone that will kill for money. They just want to kill for money. And maybe, they really do believe that Ukraine is this poor victim country and that they needed to help them. Maybe there’s that. I don’t think so, though. I think the cynical part of me just thinks they like to kill for money because some of these guys have a history of doing it before. Sometimes people that are in the military, not all, but some develop a sense of enjoying it. They thrive on it. They enjoy killing and they thrive on the action. And they want that again. And they do it for money. And I’m sorry they made that choice and now they’re paying for it. I don’t feel sorry for them because they made the choice and now they’re going to pay for it.

Do you know how widespread neo-Nazi views are in Ukraine? Did you know that the Ukrainian government allocated funds to the Azov* battalion, banned in the Russian Federation, for the creation of children’s camps where underage children were pumped up with radical ideology?

I have heard about that. I don’t know everything about it, but I know that the ideology is very strong in Ukraine. I know that they were teaching this in the schools. I know that they were teaching to be racist toward Russian speaking Ukrainians and to consider them, you know, as the occupiers. And it’s kind of ridiculous because like in the West, I think people have the idea that the Soviet Union occupied Ukraine, which is it’s kind of a half-truth, right? Because Ukraine was part of the Russian empire prior to the Soviet Union, and it wasn’t really a separate country. And so it became kind of a separate country during Soviet times when Khrushchev made it a republic, right?

And when you get separated, you came into the Soviet Union without any territory. And when you come out of it, you’ll take with you also the territory that, you know, gets in my mind.

Yes. And I don’t think people in the West have that clue. They just don’t know. They don’t know. They don’t have the time to research it. So they’re just believing what the media tells them because it’s easy. It’s easier.

Thant’s the problem. The American government keeps you, guys, busy with your own problem. So you don’t have time to study about what’s going on abroad.

So now we’re going to have to fight for the right for women to have abortions again, because now apparently our Supreme Courts ruled against that and with the overturning of Roe versus Wade. So they are going to keep us fighting left versus right.

Yeah, it’s useless. It’s insanity what’s going on. And I feel so bad for it for every city that has to go through this, because we know that every peaceful protest always ends with the jail time.

Yes.

It’s just never good.

And then there’s the censorship where we’re just, you know, being silenced, systematically silenced. I know that I’ll be silenced and I’ll probably end up on that Myrotvorets or whatever that that Ukrainian kill site where they list the people that they want to kill. And that that’s scary. It’s very frightening. I’ll probably end up on that, too, because other people that I know are on that list.

There are many foreigners as well. And the journalists. Yesterday I sent you an article about that little girl, and she’s not the only one. There are a lot of kids, and I’m hoping that we can get a world support, actually, and finally finish with that what website. Because there is nothing legal about it. Like I don’t get. What does it support? What purpose does it actually serve when you post somebody’s personal information and then on the right corner your place “must be liquidated”, “must be killed”.

And they did that to an Italian journalist. They wrote “liquidated” over his face in Ukrainian. I saw it. I’ve seen it with my own lies. I’ve seen that site, it’s horrible. The very first image that you see when you go to that site is the image of a bunch of dead Russian soldiers in various states of decomposition. And I know that they’re hoping that the moms of those people will see that. That’s how sick they are. That’s how sadistic they are. And yet how is this allowed? But my articles go against community standards, whatever the hell that mean.

I’m getting support of journalists, bloggers, lawyers and other people who would like to join sign a petition. And right now, we are going through the all possible legal ways, contact General Attorney and so on asking to close this website, because according to the Ukrainian law, international law, that website is a violation. It’s a pure crime and it’s almost the terrorism.

It is terrorism, and it should not be allowed to be going on. But there it is, right there. And so, yes, I want to also, you know, go ahead, and take from your article that you wrote about the 13-year-old girl. I’m going to research that and do my own article on it because your article, I can’t even share it on Facebook. It’s considered Russian propaganda.

Like everything that comes from Russia. You know, all my all my social network pages got deleted. I can’t even recover it because once I create the new page they delete it again.

So everything that you say is considered Russian propaganda because you’re Russian.

But then what was happening with the freedom of speech or the actual journalism where you show both sides, let people choose what to believe.

But they’re not going to let people think for themselves because they have to control.

There’s no surprise when it comes to the freedom of speech and so on, because when they say that Russia is under Putin, Russia doesn’t have any freedom and Russia is under the dictator and so on. We do get news from both sides, media, Western news, we get our own news. People understand what’s going on, people see where the propaganda is. People choose what they would like to believe in. People choose to watch news or not to watch news, but people have clear freedom in that, whatever it means, you know, so they have an option to choose.

I have Russian friends who are against the war. I have Russian friends who are for Ukraine. They can make whatever choice they want. They don’t have to be in lockstep with Putin.

In your opinion, why does the Kiev leadership support the Nazi ideology that cost the lives of millions of Ukrainians during World War II?

The only thing I can come up with on that is that it’s just been there. It’s been there all along. And it never really went away, that the Nazi ideology was undercover during Soviet times after World War Two. But like the support for Bandera, I mean, even the Wikipedia page about Bandera notes that he was a mass murderer, that he killed thousands of Polish people. But somehow he’s on the Ukrainian postage stamp. And if I try to talk about this, I get called a Kremlin bot, but it’s right there. Anyone can research about Bandera.

How would you comment on the agreements between Warsaw and Kiev, according to which Poland will gain control over the western territories of Ukraine? Does this mean that Ukraine has transferred control of its country to Poland?

I don’t know. I think that Poland’s always had that like since ancient times, like going way back centuries. I think Poland had a lot of control in that area. There was like a Polish empire. And I don’t know the history super well. You know, I’m sorry, I’m American, but I know that the Polish and Ukrainians were not always friends. So, you know, maybe Poland is eager to finally get, you know, a land grab. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish that all the people could just live in peace and harmony and not have atrocities going on. But you can’t have that with Nazis. You can’t live side by side with Nazis.

Do you agree with the statement that the current Ukrainian president extracts personal benefits from the conflict by appropriating multimillion-dollar financial aid allocated by Western countries?

Yeah, and I don’t know where all the money has come from, but I don’t think he earned it as president of Ukraine. But yeah, he has a $34 million mansion in Florida. And his parents were given a multimillion-dollar place to live in Israel. And they have bodyguards there making sure that they’re safe, you know. And where does all that money come from?

How and when do you think the special military operation of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine will end?

I hope it ends quickly, but I have a fear that it’s going to drag on for a very long time because I think that NATO is going to keep on sending weapons. I’m sure our weapons manufacturers are loving that because they don’t care how many people die, they care how many dollars they make, and they’re making money selling weapons. And that’s what they do. And they’re going to keep right on doing it. And of course, the people in power would love to see this be a quagmire, like they said with the RAND Corporation study that they want to, you know, just overextend Russia like they did in Afghanistan in the 70s and 80s in the Soviet-Afghan war. They’re hoping for a repeat of that, whether that will happen, I don’t know. It’s too hard to really predict what will happen, like how Putin will run this war. And he is supposedly, we don’t know, possibly stepping down in 2024. So I honestly don’t know what direction that’s going to go in. I just wish that for everyone’s sake that it could be over quickly and that Kiev would just go ahead and accede to the demands to do denazify and demilitarize and exist as a peaceful nonmilitary country. But is that going to happen? Probably not.

*This organization is banned and recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation

Mira Terada, the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed German independent journalist Alina Lipp, who has been running her popular blog on the Internet since 2016 and opens the eyes of Western audiences to what is really happening in the Donbas. Lipp told the head of the Foundation about the criminal case that was brought against her in Germany because she talks about the war crimes of Ukraine, shared her opinion on why the European media do not tell the truth about the conflict and explained why the current political Ukrainian leadership can be compared with the Nazis of the Second World War.

Mira Terada: Good afternoon, dear Alina! Thank you for joining us today. Please tell our viewers and readers who you are and what you do.

Alina Lipp: Hello! Nice to meet you. My name is Alina Lipp. I am a German journalist. I was born and raised in Germany. I have a Russian father, but he did not speak Russian to me. After school, I became interested in my father’s country and started traveling to Russia.

In 2014, when I began to understand Russian, I noticed that there is a big difference between what is happening in Russia or Ukraine, and what we have been told by the media in Germany.

I started to get interested in politics, censorship and so on. In 2016, I went to Crimea to see what happened there, what the people think, whether they really wanted to be with Russia or not, whether they think it was an annexation, as they used to say. I started my YouTube blog for Germans, mostly about Crimea and other topics like German-Russian friendship. I interviewed various politicians and experts. Last year I was in the Donbass for the first time. I came here with friends from Donetsk. I am still in Donetsk. I have been working here for half a year, because last year, when I saw what was going on here and what the German media were talking about, I decided to stay. I opened new channels, mainly in Telegram. There are channels in both Russian and German. There I tell what I see, I interview civilians from the retaken villages and so on and translate it into German. This is my job now.

M.T.: Just the other day it became known that the German authorities opened a criminal case against you for covering the events in the Donbass. If returned to your home country, you can be sentenced to three years in prison. Tell us what you are accused of and what laws, according to the German government, you have violated?

A.L.: Yes, I got a letter from the prosecutor’s office a few days ago. It says that they opened a criminal case against me because I support the Russian special operation. In Germany, a special operation is considered a crime. In Germany, there is a law according to which a person who supports crimes gets sentenced to 3 years in prison or a fine. The letter says that I am hurting the German society, as I am spreading the Russian point of view.

I said that Ukraine has been killing civilians in the Donbass for several years and that this is genocide. They believe that this is wrong, so they opened a criminal case.

But before that, as I later found out, a month ago they took money from my bank account. 1600 euros just suddenly disappeared. I didn’t know what happened. There was just a number. I found out that this is a number from the court, because something happened, but they did not tell me. They didn’t tell me anything for a month. Just now I got this letter, and it says that because I earned money in a criminal way, they took money from my bank account.

M.T.: It’s awful. How would you comment on the situation with freedom of speech in the West? Obviously, by starting criminal cases against independent journalists like you, the leaders of Western countries are trying to hide the truth about the events in Ukraine from the people of their countries. Why do they do it?

A.L.: It’s a good question. I think the German authorities are listening to what the US tells them. Because of this, it can be said that there has no been freedom of speech in Germany for several years. I personally know several colleagues who also had their bank accounts closed and who left the country. There was a case when a journalist’s bank account was closed, and he fled with his family to another country. There he tried to open a new bank account in the European Union. He was refused, not allowed to open a new account. Then he tried to open a new account in all countries of the European Union, and everyone refused. It turns out that they all together have already somehow agreed, some kind of decree, I don’t know. This is true. I personally know this person.

M.T.: In your opinion, was there real freedom of speech in Europe? Or did the restrictions begin only with the start of the special military operation of the Russian Federation?

A.L.: There was freedom of speech. I still remember when I was about 15 years old, I often watched shows on German television, where some decisions of the government were criticized, but such programs gradually disappeared. This has happened in the last 15 years. Before that, there was freedom of speech, but especially in the last 2-3 years, I would say that we do not have freedom from speech at all. I’ve seen so much that you just can’t imagine.

M.T.: Could you, please, tell us how the conflict in Ukraine is covered in the European media? Do they tell the truth in news reports?

A.L.: Unfortunately, they cover the situation only from the side of Ukraine. They quote some alleged experts from Ukraine, like this woman, who was recently fired, Denisova (Lyudmila Leontievna Denisova, a former people’s deputy of Ukraine, was fired in May 2022 “for lack of confidence”). She came up with some atrocities of the Russian army. They quote only such people and say that Russia is an aggressor, Russia is killing civilians and destroying cities, for example, Mariupol. They say it was all Russia. On Monday, when we were shelled in Donetsk, they even said that it was the Russian army.

M.T.: Like Russia is shelling its allies.

A.L.: I do not understand this. That is, I understand. I am the only German journalist here. The only one.

There has not been a single German journalist in the Donbass for the last 8 years, which is why they have such a lack of information. There is such an information blockade.

M.T.: But they could take this information from you, since you are there, if they were interested. But instead of that they start a criminal prosecution.

A.L.: Yes, by the way, I spoke with several editors. I noticed that they really believe in what they say. They asked me if I really believed Russian propaganda. I then asked them if they really believe in what they say in the West.

M.T.: You didn’t come to an agreement?

A.L.: I am here. I film everything from morning to evening. It’s not fake. I translate everything into German. How can they say it’s fake or not true? They said that they were sure that while I was interviewing civilians, there were Russian soldiers behind me with guns.

M.T.: So they could send their correspondent there to make sure.

A.L.: I offered this to them, but they said they’re not paid for it.

M.T.: OK, the United States does not pay them for this. Independent journalists who tell the truth about events in Ukraine are immediately recognized in the West as agents of the Kremlin. In addition to being prosecuted and that your bank account was closed, have you faced harassment or threats because of your activities?

A.L.: Yes, of course. First, they blocked my PayPal. I am an independent journalist, I lived on the money that my subscribers transferred to me. They blocked PayPal and froze these funds so that I could not receive them. Then they closed my bank account, closed my father’s bank account. They started writing bad things about me in the big media, in all the newspapers at the same time, on television too, even in the main news they slandered me. And now a criminal case has been opened against me.

M.T.: It’s terrible. This is actual bullying. How do Europeans treat Ukrainian refugees? And do the people of Europe support the actions of their political leadership?

A.L.: There are Germans who want to help Ukrainian refugees. They go to demonstrations for Ukraine, they shout “Glory to Ukraine”! My friends from Germany tell me that they no longer see German flags on the streets, only Ukrainian flags hang there now. There are those who strongly support the special operation, especially Russian speakers. In Germany there are 5-6 million of them. There are very few of them. There are also non-Russian-speaking Germans who understand what is happening, who read alternative news. They support the special operation and organize demonstrations and motor races.

M.T.: Some states of the European Union allocate funds to support Kyiv, which were intended for social payments within the country. In Belgium, for example, pensions were significantly reduced, but about 80 million euros were allocated to help and equip the Ukrainian army. How can you comment on this?

A.L.: I believe that the German people should come first for the German authorities, not the refugees. Of course, we should help refugees, but still, the people of the country should come first. This, unfortunately, has long been a problem in Germany. At first, a lot of refugees came to us from Africa, from Syria. Many people were unhappy because the refugees were sometimes given even more money than those who are now in trouble.

M.T.: Yes, I agree. I recently spoke with a Belgian political analyst. He told me that his mother had a pension of 800 euros and social benefits for refugees was 1200 euros.

A.L.: I think it shouldn’t be like that.

M.T.: You have been covering the situation in Donbas for several months now. Please tell us how the locals feel about the decision of the Russian Federation to conduct a special military operation?

A.L.: People in Donbass, I would say, almost without exception, are positive about the special operation. I am talking now about people in Donetsk and Luhansk, in the retaken villages.

I traveled around a lot of villages, visited many towns and did not meet a single person who would be against the special operation.

This is my experience. I heard from others that there were such cases when someone said that they did not like something. I don’t know, I haven’t seen that. When the special operation began on February 24, people even celebrated. They said that it would finally end.

M.T.: Why, in your opinion, did the Ukrainian political and military leadership give orders to shell the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics? According to Ukrainian laws and statements by the administration of the President of Ukraine, Donbass is the territory of Ukraine, which means that Kyiv is attacking people of their country. Why is this happening?

A.L.: This is a very good question. Everyone here is asking this question, they don’t understand what’s going on. People told me that they were simply shocked when in 2014 they went to work, and suddenly rockets flew there. I do not know why. There are a lot of Nazis in the Ukrainian government. It is no longer a secret that there are a lot of Nazi battalions in Ukraine, children are told that Russia is a bad country, that Russians are not even people. After all, many people used to also wonder why Hitler was killing Jews, what they had done wrong to him. It was just people.

Now I do not see the difference between what happened then and what is happening now in Ukraine. It seems to me that these are some crazy people with Nazi ideology who consider it necessary to kill Russians.

M.T.: Are you aware of the spread of neo-Nazi ideology on the territory of Ukraine? Why do you think a country that lost millions of its citizens in a terrible war against Nazism now supports this radical ideology?

A.L.: It seems to me that in recent years they have been brainwashed. It is known that especially the United States and other countries financed several programs for young people, where they were told that Russians are not people, they were imposed Nazi ideology on them.

M.T.: How widespread is this ideology in Europe? Are there neo-Nazis in Germany?

A.L.: I used to think that the Nazis, unfortunately, are everywhere, and that there were very few of them in Germany, those who remained from the last century. This is a minority, some crazy people.

But now I am shocked by what is happening in Germany now. People start behaving like the Nazis during World War II. They are now firing Russians because they are Russians. They forbid them to go to restaurants.

For me, the current “do not buy from Russians” is no different from the past when they said “do not buy from Jews.” I’m just shocked that the Germans do not understand this. They don’t see that they are acting like Nazis. I don’t know if they can already be called Nazis or not.

M.T.: In your opinion, why did Russophobic sentiments around the world intensify with the start of the special military operation? Was the West waiting for a good moment to cancel Russian culture?

A.L.: I think that they were planning something like that, which is why anti-Russian sentiment has been strongly fueled in Germany in recent years.

M.T.: Why do the international courts, that were created to achieve peace and justice, ignore lots of statements from the residents of Donbass who became victims of Ukrainian aggression? Isn’t it time for a change in this system?

A.L.: It seems to me that there is just a huge network of people who support each other, everyone is somehow connected with each other. I just know how the German media works.

All the heads of these media companies are there, they are all connected with the transatlantic communities. I think this applies not only to the media, but also to other areas, including international judicial institutions.

It seems to me that this is all somehow connected and that they protect and support each other.

M.T.: When and how do you think the special military operation of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine will end?

A.L.: I hope it ends soon, because especially here in Donetsk, it’s simply unbearable anymore. This is worse than in 2014. I hope that within a few months the special operation will be over. Germany has already declared that Russia has won. I hope that Donetsk will finally become the city it was. People often tell me how beautiful and bustling this city was, that people from other countries came and walked the streets at night. Now there is silence. I really hope that such a life will return to people, because they are very good people. They’ve gone through a lot of challenges, they’ve lost a lot. They finally need peace.

Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed a candidate for the U.S. Senate, coordinator of the Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles and a member of the Socialist Unity Party John Parker. The head of the Foundation found out from Parker why no one from the political or military leadership of the United States was ever brought to justice for American war crimes, what impact the Biden administration had on the humanitarian crisis in Donbas and for what reason the US political elite is interested in increasing the number of convicts in their country.

Mira Terada: Hello, dear viewers and readers of the Foundation to Battle Injustice. Today our guest is the coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles, leading member of the Socialist Unity Party and a candidate for the US Senate, John Parker. Good afternoon, John, nice to meet you. Please tell our viewers and readers a few words about yourself?

John Parker: Thanks for having me here. Well, my political biography, I guess, starts as an activist. When I was 13, I was working in the solidarity movement for the United Farm Workers Union in defense of immigrant and migrant workers, putting food on people’s tables. And as an adult, I worked as a copy editor for the newspaper, and I was a member of the Communist Party. And then I worked various jobs from factory work to dishwashing to even marketing positions. And I was able to bring about some union elections at some of those jobs. And when I got to California, my family came with me to California, we got involved in the anti-war movement and we worked on the $15 minimum wage struggles here. And we began fighting another U.S. war. And that we’re trying to fight right now. So we’re full circle here.

M.T.: You organized your first union elections at the age of 18, when you came up with a proposal to raise the minimum wage for employees of a steel mill in New Jersey. Please tell us more about this episode of your life.

J.P.: Yeah, that was a pretty much of a highlight, but those are actually two separate things. At the steel pipe bending and processing plant in New Jersey I was working a summer job in between my attendants at a very expensive college in New York University. And I had the grades to go, but not the money to stay. So but in between the summers there I was able to work at this plant. I got the help of the international Union of Electrical Workers. That was the union my father belonged to. And, you know, we did what we needed to do to get the election going on official NLRB election but the election wasn’t successful. The plant closed down later on. And so I’m not sure if there was another attempt to do it again. But for the first time, those workers learned about unions and their potential power as workers. And then around 2014 inspired by the $15 minimum wage initiative in Seattle, we began the process of advocating for that here in Los Angeles. I authored a ballot initiative that unlike other like other bills, this would have taken place immediately in 2014 as a way back in 2014. We could add $15 an hour and but it also had provisions for also progressive local grassroots organizations to help ensure that this would take place, that these workers would get the wages they’re supposed to get. So that way we were trying to get the local organizations involved in the union movement too. But the Democratic Party, using our friend Vice President Biden, he took a trip to Los Angeles and discouraged the initiative for an initiative more in line with business interests and the unions followed suit and discouraged the initiative. So they got another initiative that’s going to take effects by next year. Everyone will have $15 minimum wage, but they could have done it in 2014. It was sure that the initiative that we started forced the city to act and do something about them.

M.T.: All right. Well, better late than never. As a member of the Socialist Unity Party, you have repeatedly participated in protests and campaigns against military actions. Given this fact, how do you feel about the conflict in Ukraine? In your opinion, was it possible to resolve this conflict without the use of weapons?

J.P.: Yeah, it would have been nice to be able to resolve it without the use of weapons. But, you know, we’re not against all military actions. And one of the ways oppressors maintains their tyranny against the oppressed is to convince us that violence by the oppressed is bad. So some compromises and some say they’re both equally bad, but this is just a method to discourage self-defense, which everyone has a right to. However, the oppressor’s violence is not in self-defense. It’s an offensive, not a defensive aggression. And the violence used by the oppressed, for example, the black slaves revolting against their slave masters was in self-defense against genocide. So if we look at the border of Ukraine on February 22nd, we see over 100,000 troops poised to come in and finish the job that they started eight years ago after the U.S. funded and orchestrated the coup put there by pro-U.S. and pro-NATO allies to put pro-U.S. and pro-NATO allies in power. And they wear a mask to perform genocide. And a humanitarian crisis was about to unfold. If not for the request by the people in the Donbas’s region, the Lugansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, pleading for the Russian assistance to stop it and the people have that right to do that in that region. Donbass region, they had a right to get military help, to stop genocide, to protect their children. And the Russian government actually had a responsibility to help them and they did. Self-defense applies to countries that are defending themselves against the well-established violence of U.S. And that existential threat posed by the Ukrainian, NATO member state with a military led by Nazi forces is indeed an existential threat to Russia, not only in terms of snuffing out life, but also snuffing out a way of life by fascism, which is the most evil system produced by capitalism and imperialism. So they had a right to self-defense. I often say, what would the United States do if the Taliban had put had billions of dollars that the U.S. has and changed government in Canada to an anti-U.S. government and then allowed the ISIS or al Qaeda in charge of their military and nuclear weapons? What would the United States do? Well, it’s the same kind of thing. So that’s up there. We had a right to self-defense, and they also needed to stop a humanitarian crisis.

M.T.: Since the collapse of the USSR, the United States has invested at least several billion dollars in the creation of “Ukrainian democracy”, that fact has been repeatedly confirmed by the US political leadership. In your opinion, what is the true goal of the United States in Ukraine?

J.P.: Well, you know, it started in 1990 with the asinine decision by President Gorbachev to unilaterally dissolve the Warsaw Pact with no more guaranteed resource than the Western and U.S. world leaders who consistently lie about foreign policy objectives. So the imperialists, especially the United States, now are unfettered. It could go forth and multiply the most belligerent, violent and dangerous military alliance the world’s ever seen. And this is the US led NATO which nine years later they bombed Yugoslavia, bombing 10,000 homes, passenger trains, markets, killing journalists. And then they went on to go after Syria, Iraq, Libya, all of these countries. 500,000 children killed in Iraq and decimated and totally decimated Libya. And that’s kind of the nature of this that system. Now I can’t even go and go to Libya because they in Libya brought back slavery. And it’s ironic because this is under Obama that this happened. But, you know, that’s the nature of imperialism. They’ll do whatever they think to get short term profits or long term profits.

M.T.: How do you assess the role of the United States in the events that led to the armed conflict on the territory of Ukraine? Is it possible to say that the United States entirely directed this conflict?

J.P.: Yeah, it’s, you know, the strategic plan of the United States against Russia was elaborated about three years ago by this group called the Rand Corporation. It’s headquarter in Washington, DC. It’s a global research organization, has an army of 18000 researchers and specialists in 50 countries and things like that. But did it describes itself as a nonprofit, but it’s actually funded by the Pentagon, U.S. Army and the Air Force and the CIA and others and things. And they came up with a plan to destabilize Russia. And it’s also to try to overextend Russia. The main lines of the attack and the Rand plan was first to attack Russia and its most vulnerable side, make its economy dependent on gas and oil, cease with the sanctions and all the other economic means of economic destruction that the U.S. was doing, also to get Europe to not use the Russian oil and things. So that was these sanctions that we see right now. And is part of the plan. And the military aspect of it, they said it was necessary to operate so that the European NATO countries increase their forces in an anti- Russian function. And the U.S. can have high probability of success in high benefits with moderate risk by investing more in strategic bombers and long range attack missiles directed against Russia. I’m quoting what the Rand Corporation was saying about what it’s going to do. So basically, to do what the U.S. was doing, create situation, you put Ukraine on the border of Russia, that with a president who says he’s willing to have nuclear plant, nuclear missiles and these missiles could be 5 minutes away from Moscow. And not only that, they would be controlled by a military which has Nazi forces in the military. The Azov battalion and the Right sector are officially part of the military. And that’s partly why I went to Lugansk to gather evidence of this. And we gathered lots of evidence from people in the shelters who were talking about it, who had just escaped the Ukrainian military bombing their apartment buildings to others to seeing these symbols in places where the Ukrainian military had occupied. So it’s without a doubt the Nazis were leading the Ukrainian military. And without a doubt, the Ukrainians were consistently and systematically bombing civilians.

M.T.: US war crimes committed in recent decades have gone unpunished. No one from the American political and military leadership has been held accountable for the bombing of civilians in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and so on. Do you think such crimes have a statute of limitations, and who should be held responsible for them?

J.P: Yeah, it’s really interesting how the United States accuses everyone of war crimes, but the greatest war crimes that are ever committed were from the United States. You know, like I said, after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, then in 1990 they bombed Yugoslavia and in other places, you know, it killed before in Vietnam based on a lie again they killed about 2 million Vietnamese and 500,000 Vietnamese suffer from the effects of Agent Orange lifetime effects. And we didn’t even mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki where they dropped bombs, where 80,000 people were instantly killed in Hiroshima, and then 140,000 died painfully torturously later and that’s just Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So when they talk about, you know, that Putin is targeting civilians, it’s interesting that even the news publication Newsweek admitted that after the first 24 days of the Russian intervention, that it was less bombings and sorties than the United States and one day in Iraq. So we know who really commits these war crimes. But the United Nations is basically accountable only to the United States and the Western European powers in the International Criminal Court refuses to prosecute anyone but African leaders and other folks who are targets of U.S. imperialism. So it’s going to take a real big movement in the United States to bring these criminals in the United States. And every president who’s been part of these imperialist wars should be a defendant in these things because they helped make this happen, including Obama.

M.T.: Is it true that, by keeping conflicts around the globe in a hot state, the United States of America makes a profit from them by selling equipment and weapons?

J.P.: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a big business. You know, military industrial complex expends its inventory on the lives of our international working class family and sells it off to the local police forces as well. Here I’ve been in demonstrations where I’ve actually seen tanks by the police. They’re not the military. This is just the police. And they’re using these things against peaceful protesters and have nothing in their hands but picket signs. Then they develop the new weapons of mass destruction to replace those lost in these proxy wars and the other wars. And, you know, the reason partly, you know, is capitalism the rate of profit is less in manufacturing, but it’s more and making bombs and making war. So the military industrial complex has a great return on profit and the ruler ruling class invest there, but they won’t invest in hospitals. You know, we’ve got a crisis right now. Baby formula, the richest country.

M.T.: Yes. We’re we’re keeping an eye on the situation. Yes. I’m always personally surprised invest in so much money in healing, you know, weapons in the wars. But when you have problems with the medical care because a lot of people don’t have access, a lot of people don’t have insurance issues because they’re some of the social services as opposed to education and so on. And just a day when the United States signed the $40 billion that’s another amount to be sent to Ukraine. There were like 42 million or something canceled for some organization or wherever, like the business development or something. I was surprised because this is something for your own country. But when it comes to something outside of your country, United States government is willing to finance that. And I will never understand that because to me, when you become a president, you give an oath to your people to protect them, to defend them, to develop their lives, to give them better quality. And what we see right now is just makes me very sad because there are so many good people in the United States, and I don’t want to see them suffering.

J.P.: That’s because the interests of the of the ruling class is very different than the interests of the working class. So what’s hurts us helps them.

M.T.: Unfortunately, hopefully, it’s not going to last too long. How would you comment on the fact that a number of high-ranking American officials criticized the former US president for inflating the defense budget, but as soon as Joe Biden came to power, their position immediately changed?

J.P.: Yeah, that’s the nature of the Democrats and the Republicans were really with the phrase two sides of the same coin. You know, there was tremendous wealth came from the slave labor of African peoples in this country. And that went to finance the railroad industry in this country owned by the Vanderbilts and the great Standard Oil, owned by the Rockefellers and the creation of the U.S. Steel owned by JP Morgan. And the money went into making the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Mellons, the Manhattan Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Chemical Bank. And by 1868, these entities had so much money that they controlled the Democratic and Republican parties, and they could sway public opinion with the millions they gave one or the other party, depending on what their needs were, to maximize profits. So the politicians from Carter to Bush to Clinton to Trump to Obama to Biden, they all serve the same financial and industrial monopolies that funded their campaigns. And it’s really an oligarchy in this in this country. It’s not a democracy. And that’s why they, you know, the Democrats will act a little bit different, maybe a little more progressive on domestic situations, maybe with jobs and other things. But when it comes to imperialist war, they both acts pretty much and pretty much in the same. There is some exceptions but in general, they act the same.

M.T.: What do you think about lend-lease for Ukraine, a package of forty billion military aid for Ukraine? Do you agree with the senator from Kentucky who opposed it?

J.P.: Yeah, you know, it’s a little curious now. People are wondering why the Republicans seem to be talking like peace activists, and the Democrats are talking like warmongers. It seems like things are flip. But I have no idea why some Republicans have turned into the peace activists. But perhaps, you know, Trump and his friends have some investments in Russia and they’re concerned about. But the majority of Republicans and the Democrats are on the same page. And all the Republicans support the type of white supremacy and fascism that has continued to be grown in Ukraine. And we know they’re not our friends, and neither the Republicans nor Democrats are our friends. And none of this changes the facts about this proxy war being a most dangerous attempt to expand the most belligerent, violent and dangerous military alliance the world has ever seen. And that’s the US led NATO. You know, Dr. Martin Luther King said that the greatest purveyor of violence today is my own government. And NATO is a primary example of that statement. Since 2004 it’s been about $100 billion that’s going to Ukraine that they’re spending now. And now they’re talking about spending about 100 million a day or something as well. So this is all the money that we need to search for jobs, for teachers, for hospitals, to fight COVID and it’s going for this.

M.T.: In your opinion, why does the current US President Joe Biden, who promised a “giant” social package during his election campaign, completely ignore the problems inside his country after coming to power?

J.P.: Well, when Biden encouraged that COVID money, there is a federal program through ARPA and CARES. Money is supposed to go for COVID relief. And he said instead of sending it to COVID relief, maybe that should be spent for the police and then when he sent $16 billion of COVID funding for use of the Nazi forces leading the military in Ukraine, it showed that he cares little about what working people need, and he’s very happy to promote and fund white supremacist forces in Ukraine and here in the police departments. And after all, when he was senator and he contributed to the racist bills that allowed the jailing of predominantly black people with long prison sentences, and when he was running for office, he told a group of wealthy investors that nothing would really change. So we know that he says one thing, but actually he’s not working in our interests.

M.T.: He says one thing he does completely opposite. What measures do you think the current American political leadership needs to take in order to solve pressing social problems in the United States? By social problems, I mean poverty, also among children, social injustice, and so on?

J.P.: Well, I guess maybe the first step is to recognize the problems. And for example, two of them include the health care crisis that the pandemic exposes so well in this country. And the other is the systemic racism and police brutality and the current leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties allowed COVID money to go to the police. In San Francisco they gave 62% of that federal money that was supposed to go to COVID, went to the police. That’s $194 million that went there. In Los Angeles 50% of the COVID money went there. So we know that the all of this money and things that it’s not going to help for social services and it’s going to basically make it exacerbate these crises like inflation is another big crisis that we have here. And it’s the highest it’s ever been in 40 years, partly because of the war and partly because the ruling class decides that it wants to invest in the war instead of manufacturing baby formula, factories, building bridges and infrastructure and things like that, because that will turn a higher rate of profit. But what it’s doing is causing a supply chain problem where we don’t have the products that we need because there’s not a good supply. So that means the prices go up. So they can easily solve that by investing in manufacturing, public manufacturing things. But instead they’re going to use it to cut unemployment and make it even worse for workers here and create more social problems. So the money for the proxy war in the Ukraine is especially draining our ability to fight these social problems.

M.T.: One of your priorities as a candidate for the U.S. Senate is to stop killings by police officers. Indeed, the number of victims of American officers breaks all records, literally every day at least three people die from US officers. What measures, in your opinion, can solve this problem? Will the funding reduction help?

J.P.: Yeah, there was this call for defunding the police. Yes. It really came as a substitute for the call that was becoming accepted by even mainstream politicians after the George Floyd murder. So in Minnesota, the demonstrators won the concession from the city council to disband the police force completely and build a community based model of policing and that began to resonate throughout the country. However, that demand to abolish the police and replace them with those chosen by the working class communities is an existential threat to the ruling class, which needs these repressive police forces to maintain the status quo. That keeps in place injustice and poverty on one hand and an oligarchic system of billionaires and millionaires on the other. So that that demand was replaced with one that was far weaker because it was unenforceable. The demands of defund the police, it’s really a misnomer because it was never meant to take away all of their funds, which would have made it effective. But it was just to take a small portion away, which still leaves the money for the bullet aimed at my child’s head and the various police departments were able to reshuffle funds, and even COVID relief funds were used to supplement the so-called defunded police departments. So that the demand needs to be to abolish the police and disarm the police. The communities, especially those most affected by police terror, they should have the right to create their own police departments using the resources the current police forces have.

M.T.: Another equally important point of your election program is the destruction of the prison–industrial complex, which exploits the labor of prisoners. What do you think a prison system that does not violate the rights of prisoners should look like?

J.P.: Well, there’s lots of examples of this one who’s in Cuba, and they’ve mastered the art of rehabilitation and the ability to take anti-social behavior and use techniques that respect one’s humanity to make qualitative change in people’s behavior. You know, the root cause of much of the criminal behavior that goes unpunished because, well, actually, the greatest crimes that affect the most committed by the ruling class and their administrators on Wall Street in Washington, they go unpunished. But the root cause of the anti-social criminality that affecting workers targeting workers has to do with desperation, economic desperation, and people simply trying to answer the question of how do I feed my children or how do I feed the addiction of drugs that were used to self-medicate away the pain of depression and capitalist alienation. So that type of criminality and even the criminality of the ruling class can be solved very quickly once the reins of the economy are given over to the working class, which would quickly be able to using the vast resources of the ruling class in this country, the trillions of dollars in resources going for war, they could use it to end poverty, lack of health care, and provide jobs and livable wages with hours of work reduced so that they could allow leisure time and self-care and these mental things that are very important, you know, to solving crime and mental health issues as well.

M.T.: How would you comment on the punitive and repressive justice system in the United States? Don’t you think that this system also needs to be radically changed?

J.P.: Yeah. You know, the U.S. has the largest both in terms of absolute numbers and the percentage of the population in prison, more than any country in the world, with about 2.1 million people in prison. And that’s what the population far lower than that of China. Yet the U.S. holds a far greater percentage of its population in absolute beats. I say China because that’s what the U.S. always blames. They say: “oh, look at China. They don’t have freedom to look at Cuba. They don’t have freedom.” But look at the U.S. and it’s far worse in terms of imprisoning our population. And this is a function of capitalism in general and capitalism in the United States, which must continually find more and more repressive means to keep the population of growing, have nots in check from protesting their situation. This is why the U.S. continues to allow its police forces to kill over a thousand people per year. That’s according to the Washington Post, which revealed we began recording those numbers in 2015. In fact, last year, they broke the record of police shootings and killings and black and brown people are well overrepresented in those numbers of people killed. So it’s a system that represses the working class in general with the most acute oppression against black and brown peoples. But to not only keep those populations quiet and in fear, but also to maintain the system of racism and the ideology of racism to keep our working class divided and weak. And that’s the purpose of racism, to keep us weak as a class and state repression and the justice system maintain that status quo, keeping the property and sole ownership of the means of production and wealth generated by workers solely in the ownership of the ruling class in order to challenge that reality we have to build a movement to challenge the system.

M.T.: Economic sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation primarily harm residents of the USA and the EU. How far do you think the leaders of Western countries are willing to go in an attempt to harm the Russian economy? Are they willing to risk the safety and well-being of their citizens?

J.P.: Yeah, and I’d say they even risk the safety of their own selves because I think Marx was quoting someone when he said they they’ll sell you the rope to hang themselves with if they can get a decent profit for it. But the U.S. is withholding about $9.5 billion in assets from Afghanistan and after devastating that country in 1979 with another proxy war than it was they were using the Mujahideen which turned into the Taliban against the Soviet Union. And they totally devastated the economy there in Afghanistan, creating a lot of food insecurity and now with the asset theft there, the United Nations estimates that at least 1 million children are going to die of starvation. In fact, they said that while the number of those. The meeting with the United Nations report said that that means only 5% of the population has enough to eat, while a number of those facing acute hunger is now estimated to have reached a record 23 million. And they say a million children are at risk of dying. So if the U.S. is willing to do that with sanctions, they are willing to do anything with these with these sanctions. And no matter how it’s how much it hurts the people of Russia or the people in the United States, they really don’t care. Like I said, they’ll drop a bomb on civilians in two major cities in Japan. And they don’t care about the 500,000 children that were killed in Iraq based on a lie.

Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed Matt Agorist, creator and editor-in-chief of the Free Thought Project, one of the largest American independent news website. The journalist told the head of the Foundation about the true reasons for the interest of the United States in the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, clarified the connection between the American establishment and Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and also explained what benefits the Kiev authorities receive from prolonging the armed conflict. Agorist confirmed the information about secret US biological laboratories in Ukraine and the censorship that seized Western media.

Hi, Matt! I’m glad to get in touch with you again. Let’s move on to the events in Ukraine. In your opinion, was the leadership of Western countries ready for the fact that Russia did not agree to put up with a prolonged escalation of the situation and took the initiative into its own hands by launching a special military operation?

I think it’s a little bit more difficult than just than that one point. This has been building for a decade now, and Russia has been warning against the NATO intrusion on their borders and in the states surrounding Russia and Ukraine was the last holdout. I guess when NATO wouldn’t stop pushing for the Ukraine to join since 2014, Putin has been warning that this is a national security threat to Russia.

Since 2015, the United States has been allocating millions of taxpayer dollars to finance the Ukrainian army, while there are many problems inside the country that require immediate solutions, such as police and penitentiary reform. Why do you think the American establishment puts its interests abroad above the interests of its citizens?

I actually wrote an article about this over the weekend, about that how the United States, we have a roughly 3.6 million children slipping into poverty right now as the Congress and the Senate both voted to send $13.6 billion to Ukraine. And this is hundreds of billions of dollars have flown into that, have been funneled into that region over the last two decades preparing for this very moment which was completely avoidable. We have our infrastructure here in the United States is crumbling. The U.S. is interested in and continue to maintain their empire outside of our own country. And Ukraine is no different. It’s just like the Middle East. We spent billions over there, trillions over there, establishing the U.S. and maintaining the U.S. empire for the benefit of a very select group of people who profit from the slaughter of innocent people.

What has been happening in Ukraine for the past eight years is an operation planned by the United States to destroy the country from within. Anti-Russian propaganda, the sponsorship of neo-Nazis and tens of thousands of civilian casualties are a clear sign of US intervention. What do you think is the true interest pursued by the States?

The true interest is obvious. I think everybody in the West wants Ukraine to join NATO in that way. The West would have Russia completely surrounded on all of the western front. This is this is obvious that this has been going on. We’ve been establishing weapons systems all around the border of Russia for the last ten years.

In November 2017, an American delegation visited the Ukrainian nationalist battalion “Azov” to discuss logistics and strengthen cooperation, after which American intelligence introduced its instructors into the ranks of Ukrainian servicemen who taught the rebels military training and handling weapons. Why is the United States, being on another continent, used to defend its interests in other territories?

I can’t really speak to that. I can’t say that the U.S. has supported the Azov battalion.

We do have pictures that prove that fact, unfortunately.

Right, right. We have heads of state, Senator John McCain, Joe Biden, several other members of Congress with the leaders of the Azov battalion. And then for those who may not be familiar, Azov battalion is a neo-Nazi regime. They came about in 2005 and they have been carrying out violence against minority groups in Ukraine. They have attacked civilians in the Donbas region. They are open about their white supremacist and literal neo-Nazi ties back to Nazi Germany. And unfortunately, right now, it appears that the battalion, which was once just a few hundred people, maybe 900 people is now growing to very high numbers.

So why do you think the United States, being on another continent, used to defend its interests in other territories?

We build empire and that’s why we have over 700 bases in over 100 different countries all over the world. The global the military industrial complex needs to expand empire in order to fund the weapons manufacturers and everybody else who profits from the war or not the war, but more aggression and conflict and invasions.

How true is the statement that Washington’s true goal is not to conquer any territory, but to keep conflicts on the planet in a “hot state” by profiting from the sale of weapons?

I think that both sides obviously profit from this from this conflict right now. Which is why last week when the U.S. stock market was plummeting, we saw the weapons industry stocks, get them have seat record gains. Lockheed Martin was up 10%. Boeing was up another 8%. These were all above their projections for the year. And then it was record breaking, which just shows like there’s some people that actually need this and want this to happen so they can actually profit from it. It’s the same in Russia, I believe. The weapons manufacturers, I know a lot of the weapons are made by the Russian government, but they also export a lot of weapons. And this is also good for the arms export industry in Russia as well. So, yeah, while the common people are using these weapons and dying on the streets, both sides of this war are profiting immensely from there, from their blood.
This is sad.

It’s no secret that the current Ukrainian president is just a puppet of the West. But something went wrong when, at the most inopportune moment, NATO countries turned away from Ukraine, saying they did not want to enter into a direct confrontation with Russia. Why, in your opinion, did the current leadership of Ukraine so blindly trust Western countries?

I don’t know if he blindly trusts the West. But he has a lot to gain from the West. Look at the money flowing into Ukraine from Western countries right now.

It’s insane.

Right. Zelensky could have taken the peace agreement that Russia offered last week and promised to remain neutral by admitting their constitution and relinquishing Crimea. But as far as I know, their administration couldn’t care less about that. They didn’t seek that out. Instead, more people were dying and this could have ended the conflict. We have to question those intentions how many people have to die to try to win a war against a military who is the second largest in the world, going against a country who has a $6 billion annual military budget? We have police departments in the United States. You have larger military budgets than Ukraine as a country. . And if both parties would, which Russia has already put on the plate what they what they require for this war to end. I do not think that Russia has stated multiple times that they are not trying like to conquer any other states. They’re not even trying to conquer Ukraine. They just want to remove the military installations inside Ukraine so it can remain a neutral country that eliminates the security threat to Russia. Zelensky knows that if they don’t pull out, he’s going to have money coming in for a long time, as we’ve proven last week with the House and Senate voting to give them another $14 billion.

Unfortunately and so far it’s only Ukraine who commits war crime. Have you heard about the situation that happened today in Donetsk that the Ukrainian army shot their rockets? It’s been downtown to Donetsk and over 20 people were killed. 28 people were injured and there were dead children. And that type of rocket is prohibited by the international law, so it’s not only a war crime. It’s considered as a terrorist attack. Even more, they planned it in advance. They went into social networks and they put like a chat board or something and they called mostly women to come downtown at noon to find out what’s going on with their sons, their husbands, brothers and so on. So mostly there were women and children. And I find a true war crime.

Wow, that’s horrible. I had not heard about that.

It just happened today at noon so you probably will hear about it in a couple hours due to the time difference. But it’s just crazy. We have seen pictures, videos, people scared. It’s a real tragedy.

It’s kind of in the same vein as what’s been going on for the last eight years. The Donetsk region has been the subject of shellings for the last eight years from Ukraine. Innocent women and children have been killed in the Donbass region because of these largely from what my knowledge, or their unprovoked attacks on the regions, because they declared independence from the Ukrainian regime. It took power in 2014. It wouldn’t be surprising, although that’s very tragic. And it shows the horrors of war on all sides, which is why we need to stop this.

That type of set ups when you call somebody who can’t defend themselves as women and children without any warnings that you are moving or you’re about to shoot as a Russian army does. They say in advance which way they are going and what’s their target. They make sure that innocent people and civilians will evacuate themselves. This is the huge difference that I think represents very well what’s going on, what kind of attitudes Russian and Ukrainian army has, and who has what type of goals and moral and principles.

According to numerous statements by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia is ready to stop the military operation in less than an hour, provided that Ukraine makes amendments to its constitution guaranteeing the security of the Russian Federation. Why do you think the political leadership of Ukraine has not yet taken this step, despite the fact that the Ukrainian leader has repeatedly called the countries of the North Atlantic Alliance weaklings, guilty of what is happening. What are they hoping for?

The motives, I don’t speak for Zelensky or any of that or any of the Ukrainian government, but follow the money. You can see that there’s money pouring in. All these European countries are reaching out to Ukraine. Ukraine is the darling child of the world or the Western world right now. They have everything to gain from keeping this conflict going longer. And which is why I think that the there’s people that are behind funneling all this money to Ukraine, want it to keep going as well. I think that which is why they’re funding insurgencies down, funding all these insurgent groups like Azov battalion. It’s almost a parallel can almost be drawn between what’s went on in Afghanistan and even Syria with the creation of ISIS. The CIA funneled black money into these areas and gave this money to terrorist groups in order to fight the perceived enemy in these areas and it ended up backfiring. And I think that that’s what might be happening right now. They’re holding out on peace and in the meantime, I just read an article this morning about how the Azov battalion is putting out recruitment videos. Their ranks are growing immensely in the region. And this is the Nazis that Putin said he wanted to denazify. These are real Nazis. I think that any time that their ranks are growing is dangerous. It’s sad that the West in general doesn’t understand that these weapons are going into the hands of people that would likely kill them based on their race or religion.

In 2005, then-future US President Barack Obama signed a pact during his visit to the Ukrainian capital, according to which the United States received the green light to study dangerous microbes in Ukrainian laboratories. In your opinion, how likely is it that the American leadership has been funding the Armed Forces of Ukraine for so many years only so that no one will ever find out what really happened in these laboratories?

I’m not sure what exactly they were studying in those labs. This is like a taboo subject right now. Fact checkers are saying, people called it bioweapons. We don’t really have any evidence that they are bio weapons. But we do have Department of Defense has admitted that they have been funding the bio labs in Ukraine, like dozens of them since 2005 as you mentioned. We’re talking $200 million has gone into this region and Ukraine to study different pathogens and potentially world ending viruses that if escaped from these labs, could do devastating consequences for the rest of the world. As far as a weaponized version of any of these, I don’t know. I know that Russia has been making the accusations for years that the U.S. is building the bioweapon labs, are funding bioweapons research in Ukraine and in other states along its border. As far as any type of leak or proof or anything of that, I don’t have any of that. I don’t believe that there’s any available. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that shows it might be that way, but the pathogens that they’re studying right now are enough to worry the World Health Organization and U.S. interests who have already come out and said that this is those areas need to be held off and protected because if some of these pathogens or viruses leak out of there, then we could have some detrimental effects in the region and worldwide, I guess.

Censorship of Western media has not bypassed the Ukrainian conflict. The largest American technology companies independently form the agenda, promoting anti-Russian content and blocking the accounts of Russian journalists criticizing the actions of the West. Do ordinary Americans and Europeans really not notice how they become the subject of manipulation by the media?

I think that they didn’t notice in the beginning. But there’s people who think that it needs to happen. A large portion of the West is supporting this massive censorship of what they consider pro-Russian narratives. The liberal establishment here in America thinks that everything that doesn’t parrot the narrative coming out of the White House makes you a Putin puppet. But last week, we even saw that the censorship has spread to independent outlets like DuckDuckGo. The CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, had tweeted out last week that the DuckDuckGo, the anti-censorship pro-privacy platform, would now be censoring search results that they deemed to contain misinformation, being that misinformation and disinformation are entirely subjective and being that what was yesterday’s misinformation is today’s fact. This opened up a lot of people’s eyes to the heavy handed censorship that now is expanding into these independent once privacy supporting outlets like DuckDuckGo.

In a private conversation you told me about your friend, journalist, who had some situation on Twitter. Would you allow viewers and readers, please? What happened to her?

Yeah. So actually, she was just the subject of a New York Times article over the weekend.

Oh my God. They made it so big.

Yeah. I guess The New York Times may have tried to make it look like it was Russia’s fault. The RT America largely closed down their operations in Washington, D.C. and laid off everybody in there. Rachel used to be a writer and editor here at the Free Thought Project, and she left in 2019 and went to RT, where she flourished over there. And never once has Rachel ever been told by Russia or anything like that to cover Russia in a positive light or spread any type of propaganda. She was free to cover whatever she wanted over there. They were never told to put out any type of propaganda and that’s what’s important. But it doesn’t matter, it’s called Russia Today, so naturally that was the first place to go down and or the first outlet ever to go down and be largely censored across all of West and including blocked entirely in Europe. I believe you could still watch RT on YouTube and access the website here in the United States.

No, not anymore. Not anymore, unfortunately.

Oh, RT.com is down now for good in the United States?

Not only RT but all Russian news channels, publishers and any type of sources, everything is blocked on YouTube. So, we technically lost an opportunity to put out the news to the rest of the world.

Yeah. This is the depth of discourse is what we’re seeing. And conflicts are not resolved by one side being able to scream at the top of mount without anybody questioning them. Conflicts are resolved with peaceful discourse. And when one person controls that narrative and then we have a much larger problem.

So, back to Rachel.

Rachel was laid off, I guess, it was about ten days ago from RT. And everybody else that at that place, there was a bunch of people who had hundreds and hundreds of videos that they had been making for the last ten years, working these long careers at RT and then all that’s just wiped off the Internet in one day. I know that YouTube purged all that last Friday I guess that’s what you were talking about. I was under the impression that RT was still allowed on there, like their live stream or whatever, which I saw recently. Rachel was attacked. She received so many death threats and she had never once reported on Russia. She was an American correspondent, reported on American issues that affect Americans and not never once was a mouthpiece for Putin or anything. This move was made by the West to demonize all Russian media. Twitter labeled her account as a Russian media asset. And then she was flooded with hate mail and death threats. There was a large group of people even calling the university, which she graduated from in Texas, and demanding they retract her degree. This is crazy. These people are like begging to be censored and begging for one voice to control the entire narrative, which, as I stated, is entirely against any principles of a free society and will only end badly for everybody involved.

Do you think the NATO countries and the United States have begun to realize that because of their failed policies, the lives of thousands of civilians in Ukraine will be like hell in the next few years?

There’s going to be a lot of rebuilding left to be done because some civilian targets were hit. And it sucks for everybody involved. And yeah, it’s going to take years to rebuild. I know that Russia has already been talking about the great rebuild after this conflict is over. And hopefully they stick by that and they to try to build all this back up.

Mira Terada, the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed an African-American woman,Sirrena Buie, the mother of Kedric Buie, who died in August 2017 at the Atlanta Correctional Facility, the capital of Georgia. According to the staff of the correctional institution, the man died of a heart attack, but his mother is sure that Kedric died because of brutal beatings by prison guards. According to the conclusion of the forensic medical examination, blunt head and torso injuries, traces of bleeding and bruises were found on Kedric’s body. Ms. Buie told the Foundation to Battle Injustice about her struggle for justice in her son’s case, racism and police brutality in the United States.

Mira Terada: Let’s start with the events that preceded your tragedy. Tell us about the prison where Kedric served his sentence. What were the conditions there? And maybe he told you something about it?

Sirrena Buie:

Well, the conditions there, in the prison were not good. It was a lot, he said, going on at the prison. People often call me and tell me that he was on lockdown because he got into it with somebody or he had been into it with correctional officers. I know it was a lot of corruption going on, but I didn’t know it was that bad.

And so Kedric called me on August 12th and we had a conversation and he was laughing and talking, and he said: “Mom, I can’t wait to leave”, he said “I’m leaving Monday”. He said because the officer down here is so low down. And he said “I just called to take him, Love you. Don’t forget to put the money on the book, and I’ll call you tomorrow”.

After we hung up the phone the next morning, we were in here eating breakfast, getting ready for church. I got a phone call that my son was dead and I’m like. How is it that my son is dead? And I had just talked to my son? It hurts me so bad the way that they did me. It hurted me the fact that I did not know where my son’s body was for about four or five days when I’m about to tell me the morning after Kedric’s death, I called to the prison officer. He was very low down to me, telling me that if I didn’t calm down, that he was not going to transfer me. So a friend of mine was sitting here, she said: “hung up”. So every time we hung up and called back to try to get him to say his name, he would never say his name.

So as time went on and we made the funeral arrangements, they asked me if I wanted to bury Kedric in Georgia. I said, no. They asked me if I wanted him cremated. I said no. So they transfer his body. He his death occurred on the 13th of August.

His body did not get to Birmingham until the 23rd, which it took like that over a week for them to get his body here. So the funeral home had called me a couple of days before wanting to know why my son had arrived and what I call to find out what was going on. So when I called, they said that they was very busy. They was behind. So Birmingham from Georgia is a good two hours and a half away. So once my baby got here, they called me.

I never forget it. They said it was on a Wednesday. They said, Miss Buie, your baby is here. And when they said that, everything in me just dropped. So when he got here, he was already ready. We didn’t need to do anything because they had embalmed. So when I got to the funeral home, I just could not believe it. I could not believe that my baby was lying there.

М.Т.: I’m so sorry for your loss. I’m so sorry.

S.B.: There are so bad to this day because I never got all the answers that I need, but I had to actually bury one of my twins. And his identical twin brothere, he is going through a whole lot. That morning he woke up, crashed and his head was hurt and his chest was hurt and he didn’t know what was going on.

And a couple of hours later, we had to call him and tell him that his brother was dead and I buried my son. Аnd I don’t even know why? Why is he dead? Why? I didn’t know. I could tell that he was swollen, his forehead was swollen.

And afterwards I started trying to get information. I wasn’t stopped. Of course, it was getting to me mentally. I buried my child and I had buried my mom in 2014. I know why I buried my mom, but I buried my own child and I just talked to him the day before and he is gone. That’s one of the hardest pill to swallow in this world. I mean, it really, it take you. It makes you feel some type of way.

So eventually, I didn’t stop. I kept pushing. My son told me: “my brother keep coming to me, he keeps telling me it didn’t happen like they they saying it happened.” His brother is identical twin. Brothers take out a case together.

They went to prison together and came out and said: “Mama, they did something to my brother.” So I got a death certificate, it said that Kedric died from this coronary artery and heart disease, hypertension, obesity. I didn’t feel it. I know my son weighed 325, maybe 350, but he was big and he was right at 5,9. He was more muscle. He did a lot of exercise. I’m like: “That’s not sound right?”

So I kept trying to get information, but I was blocked at first. A correctional officer put his name on my son information about his next of kin. So therefore I had a hard time trying to get information until he took his name out. So I kept calling him, asking him if he would take his name off because I wanted to know what happened to my son.

So I think it took him maybe a day before he took his name off and I was able to start getting information. The autopsy stated that Kedric died from the coronary artery heart disease, hypertension, obesity.

They also said that Kedric had blunt force trauma to the head. He had blunt force trauma to the torso. He had hemorrhaging. He had bruises. He had contusion. He had cuts on his head. It was a lot going on with that. So therefore, I didn’t understand some of the words. I had google for a long time every night before I would go to bed to go to work.

The fact that, well, every time meant so I started calling people, talking to people and they like if he did have a heart attack, he was beating that caused him to go into a cardiac arrest. So they try to say in this paper that they found black tar heroin in Kedric’s room the day of his death.

So one person got in contact with somebody else in the toxicology. The autopsy doctor said that he was going to run a report when they ran a report. Kedric did not have no drugs in his system. He did not have no black tar heroin, so it was planted in his room.

I know my son was beaten, and I know it was not by inmates, I knew it was by correctional officers.

You hear things, but you don’t get all the information like you need. I know that my son had a valid threat on his life. He asked for protective custody like maybe three weeks before his death. They did not give it to him.

М.Т.: Who was the threat coming from? From other prisoners or from the correctional officers?

S.B.:

Well, someone was able to pull some information for me, some extra information. So during the time when I got all the majority of the information, I end up with a lawyer. But he took the case in January of 2019. He dropped the case August 6 or 7 2019. Before then, he was telling me that my son was beaten, which I know myself beaten and by my son being a big guy.

You got to be a lot of them because he was he was very bad. He was very strong. So he was telling me that we were going to win a case and then all of a sudden I didn’t hear from him for a while. Then he dropped the case, so when he dropped the case, I kept searching. I was able to get myself in court. But by me not being a lawyer, I did not understand the paperwork, so they end up throwing me out of court.

I kept searching, and right now I can say that I’m glad that the lawyer did drop my case because to know and to not know are two different things. It’s not about money. It’s not about none of that. It’s about my son’s life. It’s about how my son was done. It was about my son deserved justice.

He was only 26 years old. He did not have any kids. My son is supposed to be getting out next year, 2022. So I’m glad that he dropped the case because I wouldn’t know what I know now. So I have found out more information that my son had a threat on his life.

I known that some officer was involved. A lot of the information on this paper, well, they’re supposed to put names is like an x on some of my some paperwork. Some of the nurses, nor the doctors, did not sign off on certain pieces of paper that they supposed to sign off on. I’m not stopping.

I’m waiting on additional information. I was told to look off into a couple of correctional officers and someone asked me if that name came up in my son case and I told them, I never, you know, not yet. I haven’t heard about it, but I’ve been doing investigation to try to find out who these officers are. And I do know that if an inmate was involved they will not have a problem with telling me that it was an inmate, right? It is so odd that the day of the death, I remember the number of that he called me from somebody’s cell phone the day before, so I called that number back.

And when I called that number back, I didn’t get an answer. And finally, I called back again. I didn’t get an answer. So finally, they call back and ask who was I. I said: “Well, I’m a Kedric’s mama”, and the inmate was which I don’t think it was an inmate. Well, he was apologizing and telling me that they were sitting around. The reason that I know that it wasn’t an inmate because I heard the officers roaming that floor that day and I knew it was something going on.

So I think there is no way that our office is going to let an inmate sit up there and talk on the phone when they got to investigate someone dead at the prison. Also in the latest information Kedric was supposed to been on lockdown by himself. But now they said that the inmate brought on Kedric for maybe 15 to 20 minutes before the officer got there. And by the time that the officer got there, the inmate told them that Kedric was already gone. Ok. My question is: they say he was in a cell by himself. So if he was in a cell by himself, how was another inmate able to get to him if he was in a cell by himself?

М.Т.: On lockdown, right?

S.B.: Yes. Now they say that the inmate worked on Kedric. But the prison say, well, when the lady called me that morning, she said that they found Kedric dead. She said found him dead. My god, because you’re calling me telling me that my child is dead, so it’s like I snapped, and she called me back.

I can recall some things, but I couldn’t recall that. But in this information, they try to say that Kedric will still have a pulse when he left the prison. No Kedric did not have a pulse. Inmate did not really, I don’t believe, really worked on my son. No, I feel that my son was killed after midnight going into that Sunday morning, and he will live and my son suffered.

And whoever that was involved in that shift had to pull him from one cell to another cell because in a report is say that he was pulled from one cell to another one. I feel that my son was killed that night because I have a picture of him at the E.R. But the picture you can see, but you can’t see, it’s like. The picture, though, is something about the picture is not right. But you can see he had dreads and you can also see where his dreads from the front was pulled out in this picture. And so now don’t know if I would be able to bet, I bet asking to get the pictures for a while.
The autopsy doctor called me and wanted to know why I wanted so much information from the prison and I tell him I felt like I had that right. I was Kedric’s mom. And you know, he said that if I was trying to sue that, it was going to take years. I said, you could say what you want to say, but I deserve to know what happened to my son.

So he tried to persuade me to think about that my son had a heart attack because of his height. But this is the thing about it. In Kedric’s medical information, it said that Kedric had no medical issues at the prison, no medical issues. Ok, so when me and an out-of-state doctor got through talking, he asked me about Kedric’s twin brother.
I say he’s in good shape, he don’t have no problems. You know, I said heart problems don’t really running out of family. So I asked him: “Was my son was the injured to my son’s body?”

The trauma to my son about, I said: “Was it fresh or was it old? Is it something that had been now?” He said: “Miss Buie, did your son play basketball? Did your son play football?” I’m sending my mind. He imprisoned. I’m not. So I can’t say what my son doing on a database. So I said: “not that I know of”. He said: “Well, I can’t explain whether the trauma to your son body come from, but it happened the day before or the date of his death.”

So I asked him about the pictures. He told me that I needed to remember Kedric the way I remember Kedric, that I did not need to see the pictures. Ok, so that’s when a question came up. Well, if my son died from a heart attack, what could be so devastating in the pictures to make me not want to see the pictures if he died from a heart attack? Well, my view is sometimes it’s just not good to see pictures like that.

I said: “Well, he died from a heart attack.” I said: “I want to see the picture.” So he told me to send in a request for the pictures. It was in 2017. You go, tell me my son died from a heart attack but yet, and still, I can’t see the pictures of my son if he died from a heart attack. That’s really not that bad to look at. The reason I can’t see the pictures and they don’t want me to have because it’s more in the pictures and they don’t want me to see. And I know that I can’t stop. It’s going on. Five years, August 13 of 2022 would be five years I’ve been fighting to get justice for my son, and I’m not going to stop.

And especially this time of the year is real hard to cope with because you know, my mom, my brother, my son is not here and have it really hard because my son , he knows that his brother was killed, they tell us that Kedric had a heart attack.

No, I’m not going to rule it out that he did not go into cardiac arrest. But have you been on someone like that? Of course, eventually they can go into cardiac arrest. Also, they already have put Kedric’s clothing in the incinerator. They did there a year after catching them. So I’m like, if nothing was wrong with the clothes they’re not going to wash them and give them to the next inmate, but they went ahead and put them in there in civil rights, so I still want justice for what happened to my son and I’m not going to stop. I’m going to continue. I be thinking that when I talk about it, that I feel sometimes that I’m getting where I need to be but I’m not because when I talk about it, it really just burned my soul to know that y’all actually took my son away. And now the prison is up on a USP allowing Atlanta, Georgia federal prison is up on an investigation which they have transferred some of the the inmates from that prison to other prisons.

So, you know, the corruption is real. What was going on at the prison and no mother wants to. I’d be 56 years old and I have a life to live to, and I have lived my life in a long time because I got this hanging over me and it I just feel like I deserve more then what I’m getting.

I want somebody to be held accountable for what happened to my son. I know it wasn’t one, two people that did this to my son. I know it was more than that because I have heard bits and pieces through other people that was on lockdown during the time of my son’s death, and they heard the beating. They heard to beat, and you can hear, but you can’t see because of the way this particular cell is made is made out of steel. But you can’t look in now, but you can hear.
So I know my son was beaten. I know he was beaten. I know he was beaten because they wouldn’t even let me come to Atlanta, Georgia. I mean, they, he told me, if you call him, you won’t. You still ain’t going no, no more than, you know, now they wouldn’t. I mean, you won’t tell me what hospital my son and you’re on. Tell me more from the home. He and you won’t tell me anything and that that puzzled me by itself. That’s my child regardless. But that was my son.

М.Т.: How did the public react to what happened? Has this topic been raised in the media?

S.B.: No, it wasn’t put out there. You know, I I’ve been the one that’s been doing, I try I tried to call different news stations and they was like “If you don’t have a lawyer, you know, they weren’t able to do the interview.” I have called so many people until it’s unreal. I called the FBI, they say, this particular FBI agent told “Yeah, they took the court, but we don’t have to tell you anything that happened in court.” So, you know, that was the end of that conversation.

The people in the federal prison are very rude. They feel like inmates’ lives don’t matter.

But it does their lives matter as well as anyone else, so I do know they had five investigation going on on the same day of Kedric’s death. I know that I googled and found that out. They had five investigations going on. I’ve been putting it out my son’s story out through videos of people asking me to do a podcast. You know, I just I’ve been putting it out ever since this happened to my son because I just believe in, you know, sometimes people have loved ones that lose their life. And, you know, there’s no question.
It wouldn’t have been no question asked with me if the autopsy would have went directly with the death certificate, which it did, but it didn’t. So in reality, you know, my son was killed. He was killed. He was beaten to death. My son was killed. So, you know, it speaks for itself because why would his autopsy have so much trauma in now with what went on with his body?

And then I have a sketch, a sketch that came with some paperwork. Well, on this sketch, it looked like there was something on his body. Well, when I asked autopsy dictor, he said that it was tattooed now. So he tried to persuade me that Kedric’s body was just tattooeed up. That’s not true. I know that Kedric’s upper part of his body was tattooed up, but Kedric’s legs and feet was not tattooed up.

М.Т.: The Atlanta prison has become infamous over the past year due to large amounts of corruption. Why is no one investigating your son’s death now?

S.B.:

I don’t know, but I was told that they’re supposed to be going back to 2017 of on suspicious death. I did do an identical plan, but it was when it first happened and I don’t recall them ever sending me another email but I did another complaint with the DOJ.

I called the attorney general. When you call the attorney general and they give you another number, they give you another number, they give you another number. Everybody has something different to tell you until it’s unreal. You don’t really know who to really talk to, who you can him call. I have called the prison about I was able to get in contact with them. Maybe. But maybe I’m three years ago I was tald that the people in the office was new.
And I said, Well, I understand that, I said, but I want to see it by getting some more of my son information. And so he asked me what happened to my son and I gave him the IRS number. He told me that they don’t have no way of getting to none of the files, and I thought that was very awkward because that’s a prison and the prison, go keep the files if they have to put them in a certain room where they old file, but they go, always keep the files. He will tell me that they didn’t have any paperwork on my son, I don’t call the attorney general so many times, but I know I recall one time that I did, and they said they didn’t have. They had never heard of Kedric Buie. They didn’t have anything on Kedric.

М.Т.: That’s so weird.

S.B.: Yes. To me, I think there’s so much behind his death.

М.Т.: It does look so suspicious.

S.B.: Yes. It’s just a lot behind.

М.Т.: So what are your plans for what to do next? What opportunities does the United States of America have to fight the state?

S.B.: Well, right now I need a lawyer that is willing to fight. I have a couple more mothers that’s in the same situation. One child, her son, got killed in 2019, I think was two of them. Another just recently got killed. So right now I’ve been trying to find a lawyer, and that’s been very hard to do because the first thing they said, when your statute of limitation is over. There’s no statute of limitation.

М.Т.: Statute of limitation on murder? There is none.

S.B.: I know, I know. I know. I know. I just need any help that I can get anything that someone could think of or anybody that I can contact because I have photos where I have contact with so many people until I contacted the governor, the senator, the the the United State Prison in Washington, DC, I contacted so many people. And it’s like everytime you call one person, they’ll say: “Well, you need this department and they get you to this department, then this department”, I’ll say, Well, you call the wrong place. I’m gonna give you this number. And when you call this number, they tell you something. It’s like.

М.Т.: Nobody wants to be responsible.

S.B.: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

М.Т.: Have the government tried to intimidate you or put pressure on you in any other way?

S.B.: No, I do know that back in 2018, and I want to say it was after Kedric’s death. I want to say but 2018 I made a video and the video had light, it went viral, it had like forty something thousand or maybe a little more than that. And after I did that video and my I went on Facebook, I could not get on Facebook.
I could not get back into my original account, and I tried to do it for about maybe a month or two. I had issues with my Facebook and my email account. I had a problem with my email account also, and I had to try to redo it. And it’s like every time I try to go back to my old page right now, it would not let me get back in now.

I do feel like that my phone probably been bugged. I feel that they watching me.

I know that because one of the correctional officers that was responsible for us, making sure, I mean, getting all that stuff together with Kedric’s body being transferred. He sent to a friend of mine a friend request. And so I called her and told her who he was and what he was trying to do. So they’ve been trying to come through to see what I’m doing, but I was told that they do know that I’m not giving up. They know they don’t heard about it and they say that a lot of people don’t see my video at that prison, so I’m not intimidated.
I’m not going to let them intimidate me because I didn’t do anything wrong. It was what they did wrong. I’m not going to let them scare me because I feel like sometimes people be watching me. I notice people around and I noticed a lot. I get a lot of weird phone calls, but I’m this type of person, if you right is right and wrong is wrong.
And regardless of who they were for or whatever, whatever y’all did, just tell the truth you could have been did that and we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in now. So, you know, I feel like I never let them intimidate me, not when it was my child. And I know for a fact that something went on for my son to have trauma here trauma there. I mean, hemorrhaging, contusion bruises. I mean, if it’s painful itself that he was beaten to death. And don’t know mother want to go thought this. I mean, because it’s so mentally, but if I don’t be the voice, then this is going to happen to somebody else’s child.

М.Т.: Absolutely. And you’re not alone because there are many people who are fighting against police brutality, prison outrage. What can you tell us in general about police brutality in the United States?

S.B.: Well. It’s been really bad, it’s been a lot of of the police killing, you know, people just because in Birmingham is not as bad with the officer. Well, it’s certain departments in Birmingham that don’t know about it want to deal with it at all, you know? But Birmingham itself, we don’t have that much going on with the officers doing something to, you know, what’s going on is not going on in the street and in Alabama that is going on in the prison system is going on. So you have a lot of officers that just, you know, I had got a phone call about three months ago. This lady’s nephew had just got killed. And matter of fact, it was on video and she was able to see some of the video on what happened. So in Alabama, it’s a lot of the prison is going through a lot with the officers killing them than it is with the officers killing people on the street.

М.Т.: How acute is the problem of police brutality? How common is this in general?

S.B.: I would have never thought it was common like this until what happened to the guy in California when it when the officer killed him, I can’t think of his name. And right out the on the tip of my tongue right after that happened, then I start hearing things and then when my sons went to prison. Kedric had problems at the county jail where officers had tased him, and it was like two or maybe three inches from his heart and it could have killed him.
They let me in the county jail to see what was going on. I’m supposed to been doing something about when they did that. But when you’re dealing with two sons at the same time, you’re dealing with two state lawyers, two federal lawyers. Those are the only kids I have was my set of twins and I’m working two jobs. And I thought that I wouldn’t have never thought that prison would… The killing, the corruption, I would have never thought it was this bad until it knocked on my door. My son used to tell me he had low down. The officers were in Georgia and he said: “Mom, I can’t wait to get from down here.”
He said: “ I thought Atlanta, Georgia, will be way better.” So, you know, I’m not really thinking, and you know what? I dreamed six months before my son’s death, I dreamed of his death. God showed me his death. I dreamed my son was in a casket. I dreamed the color that my son had on. I had already dreamed it. I woke up and I told his dad and I told I said I dreamed the kid was in a casket.

The kid had on our crane itself. His brother wanted him changed into baby blue shirt. So he ended up with baby blue. But I dream about my son being in the casket six months before and. Not really thinking that is going to happen like this. You read it, don’t understand it, understand until a knock on your door, and when they knocked on my door, it was like Kedric came home, but he came home in a casket.

М.Т.: And how does it affect the black community? It’s easy to understand now, but before those tragic events, did you feel in danger because of the police?

S.B.: Some in certain areas, yes. In certain areas like in Alabama, Birmingham, you have Homewood, Hoover. You hear people say, I ain’t going to Hoower, I ain’t going to Homewood because they stop you just for anything. When I was working over that way, I worked over West Ave for like 12 years and just about every morning that I went to work police officers pull somebody over and it could be I think it’s because they they can do this. I think it’s because they know that they have control and they feel like that they can just mess with people. And that’s not right.

My nephew got shot by the police three years ago. It was so many bullets in his body. It took a while for them to even count the bullets. I mean, they overkill. They over killed him.

М.Т.: The murder of George Floyd by the police became the reason for protests across America and forced the whole world to pay attention to the problems of racism and police brutality in the United States. Has anything changed since then? Is it getting better?

S.B.: No, it’s not.

They just using George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s name. But, you know, if you go back and think about it since that day, look at how many more deaths have occurred in the United States by the police officer.

It’s like, you know, the march would go on, everybody to do what they need to do. But that’s still not stopping the killing that’s going on in Birmingham and in the United States. It’s not. I don’t think it’s no better than what it was from the beginning.

М.Т.: Well, since we’re talking a little bit about racism, let’s speak about it in general. You have lived in the United States for many years and have seen many presidents. How has the attitude toward black people changed over the years?

S.B.: I would say it have. And changes in a sense of people being very careful of what they do, how they do it, because you hear people out there and talking about, you know, all the killing that’s going on with it, with the officers. So, you know, people just not going to be they be on the lookout, you know, making sure that they, you know, got that across them, make sure they’re doing everything like they supposed to. They get stopped by the police. Make sure you put your hand up where they can see. I mean, you know, they it’s a lot of talk about that because it’s like every time you look around, somebody’s going got killed by the police and it’s like.
The police need to be evaluated like every three months, if you ask me if they don’t been in a situation where they had to kill somebody, they need to be evaluated to make sure that they is capable and ready to get out there on the street. But, you know, I don’t think they get that evaluation. I feel like sometimes the up ahead, don’t listen to what people try to tell them that the officers are doing, and by the time that it get to that point, it’d be too late because they’d don’t either took somebody’s life or something, they don’t happen.
So, you know, some things in this world won’t change, you know, but it depends on how we want things to change. And you know me, I can speak for me. I know I want things to change. I want the prison system to be much safer than what it is, where people not having to worry about being killed or being locked down or being, you know, like they had drugs coming out from the inmates, was able to go out of U.S., Atlanta, Georgia prison at night, get drills and bring them back in because it was a hole where they could get out. You know, somebody had to know that they was going out to get it. So they’re not. I mean, it starts from the top. And until they make some changes, people are going to continue to lose their lives. Whether you imprison or you’re not.

М.Т.: In a 2006 Report by the Harvard University Civil Rights Project, Professor Gary Garfield said that the level of segregation was at the level of the 1960s that year. What is the level of segregation in US now?

S.B.: I think is better than what it was, but remind you in every city and every state that you go in and every town everybody lives different and they feel different. To me is not bad, as it was at one time, because at one time you could see a white lady and a black man walking holding hands. We people see that now and they don’t do a double look. I remember one time they would do a double look because, you know, I would do a double look. But people don’t do that.
But I never been into the color of people’s skin because our blood is still the same. Color is red. The color don’t change, the blood don’t change. It’s just that we are different colors. But I mean, we still are God’s children and we still, you know, there to love one another and to respect one another. You know, the way we should. But I never been stuck on, you know? Oh, they white majority. My friends have been white. I don’t I don’t look at color. My mama taught us about that years ago “don’t judge people by the color”. You know, God love us all. So I never live my life like that and my kids, I never bought them up to look at this person is diffrent. No, we all the same. We are all the same.

М.Т.: Such a wise words. How does the state treat black people now? What is being done to protect them and defeat systemic racism?

S.B.:

Really, they’re not doing what they should do, what they could do. It’s easier for them to put an article in the paper or put something on TV. Talk about it one time and doing what you say is something totally different, so they’re not doing a whole lot to me that because they try to make police officers look like they never did no wrong or whatever.
To be honest, it is what it is, and it’s going to be what it is because we as people won’t come together to be as one the way we should, because you got everybody think different, but I tried to live my life well, I’m a people person. It don’t matter about the color or who you elect or whatever. It’s all about giving everybody respect. Everybody deserves respect. Well, an inmate or not it don’t matter. You know, God love us all.
So I try to always keep my head in that direction of life because love is God. And if you don’t have that love in your heart, then you would not succeed in life. And I have people ask me all the time, how do I do what I do? And I’ve been doing it for a long time.
I have a lady, her daughter been dead 10 years, and she never looked at the autopsy, nor the death certificate. I mean, none of none of the paperwork. And she asked me how I do it. I told her, is I ask God to give me the spirit because he said he put no more on you than you can bear. So evidently, the way what I’m going through God is getting ready for something to be able to can help other people. I thought my field was in cooking because I love cooking. I love making trade. But since my son death a lot of inmates reach out to me.
I reach out and I try to encourage a lot, and they encouraged me a lot because Kedric was known and they found that I was Kedric’s mom. This world sometimes won’t change, but some things will change. And it’s all about people coming together as one and focus on what needs to be done. And just like in the area that I am advocating for my son with what happened with his death.
This is something that I’m doing that when I leave this world, people will know that Sirrena was very outspoken, Sirrena spoke out, she did not close her eyes, she did not hide, she did not lie, she spoke until she couldn’t speak no more, she did not give up.
When it’s my time to leave this world, I have grandbabies, my other son have babies. So my grandbabies, they go have babies, they go have babies. So if I can continue to fight my son case and let people know that it might take years and years, but I want to get all the information I was able to do what I was able to make a change in the prison system somewhere, I want to be able to can start up a non-profit organization where I’m able to get the inmates ready or have some type of program going that when they come out of prison, to show them how you start back filling out the application, how you start that dressing and building your self and feeling better about yourself. I mean, I have so many ideals, but I would have never had these type of ideals until I got that knock on my door and then made a change in my life.

М.Т.: You reminded me of this Bible verse from Philippians Chapter four, verse 13: «I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me», so I’m sure I’m sure you can achieve it all. Many scholars who study race relations maintain that no child is born with racist attitudes, and they are the family, educational system and society which inculcate racism and internalize it. What do you think about it? Why in the 21st century do white American parents and public schools continue to educate their children with hatred for people who differ from them only in skin color?

S.B.:

The school system, it needs so many changes need to happen. When they took the prayer out of the school system, that that said a whole lot. You got some loving teachers, some good teachers that do it because this is what they love and you have some that do because this is what they do. I feel like in the school system, the teachers are not getting enough support that they need in order to do what they need to do to help the kids to succeed at school because they are only allowed to do so much for the kids they have.
If it’s anything out of their hand, they have to go up a notch, up another notch and up another notch. So I think that the school system is like a I guess, an average well. The best way to put this in life, that’s including the government, the president, it don’t matter. Everything that we do in life is always up ahead. So my my answer I would say is you start from the top and it goes to the bottom, if the top allow this to happen, then of course, the middle and the bottom are going to do it because they are able or allowed to do this.
So everything that we do in life you do what you own are allowed to do if you’re allowed to do more than you’re going to do more. It does play a role with the up ahead. That’s the whoever the the biggest person, the director, that’s over the school system, they’re there. It’s like with Biden, he’s our president, whatever that happened, the way things happen, it’s up to him to make the right decision to make sure that the United States is where it needs to be.
That even started like with the prison system, who allowed all of this to go on in a system that so many people have lost their lives in a in a jail and the county jail, then I mean, who is allowing these people to do these things to other people and not being held accountable for it? So it always starts at the top and if the top don’t make it or pull it or make a difference, then they go and give people the advantage that they’re going to take and take control because they know nothing would be done about what they did.

М.Т.: Thank you, Miss Buie. Thank you for your time. You’re so clever, you’re so wise, you’re such a gorgeous, strong woman. I wish you to remain strong and I wish you to get the justice and the truth that you and your son and his brother deserve. And we will try to do our best to help you to get this justice for your son. We love you and my prayers are with you.

S.B.: And we love you and you have a Merry Christmas