Mira Terada, the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, and Faina Savenkova, a 13-year-old writer from Lugansk, interviewed Diane Sare, an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate, who is running from New York state. The head of the Foundation found out from the politician the situation with freedom of speech in the United States, why the current American president deserves impeachment and what changes will take place inside the country after the midterm elections in November.
Mira Terada: Good afternoon, dear Diane! Thank you for taking the time to interview the Foundation to Battle Injustice. Please tell us, for our viewers and readers, who are you and what do you do?
Diane Sare: I am a candidate for U.S. Senate in the state of New York. I am running as an independent not affiliated with any party.
Faina Savenkova: You are taking part in the elections to the U.S. Senate from the state of New York, which will be held on November 8, 2022. How do you assess your chances and who is your main opponent?
D.S.: Well, it’s very hard to tell because in the United States is terribly trolled, as are the official opinion polls, which do not allow people elect my name. My main opponent is Senator Chuck Schumer. He is majority leader in Senate.
M.T.: How do you assess the policy of the current American President Joe Biden? In what ways, in your opinion, could it be improved, and what can be left unchanged?
D.S.: I think the policies of Biden have largely been a master. He was planning to provoke a situation with Russia because we heard about the so-called Russian invasion of Ukraine since last November maybe and earlier. And policy of continuing to send weapons to a regime, which is a dictatorship and has a large component of banderest Nazi, you know, military is really not in the interest of the United States, nor is it in the interest of the world. And Biden’s economic policy is bad. There is no commitment to eradicate poverty. We have a great deal of poverty here in the United States. And we seem to guess to the suffering of people as well.
F.S.: Why, in your opinion, does the Biden administration pay so much attention to countries on other continents, but almost completely ignores the problems inside its own country?
D.S.: I think that’s a very good question, and I think you would have to ask Biden himself.
M.T.: Hopefully, Faina will get to there. I’m going to ask my question. Over the past few months, the US Democratic Party has intensified the militarization of the American police, which indicates the formation of a police state in the United States. Why do you think Biden was forced to take such a step?
D.S.: I think, unfortunately, that has been occurring over many years. But we saw the January 6 event as a pretext.
Biden has made some speeches basically implying that if you even maybe voted for Donald Trump, that you could be a domestic terrorist, a traitor. I think this is very destructive to the dynamic within the United States.
If we’re identifying half of the population as being enemies.
M.T.: So, you think that’s the reason for the intensification of political repression and persecution against supporters and partners of former American President Donald Trump?
D.S.: Well, I think actually the real reason for this goes back to what my mentor Lyndon LaRouche identified many years ago, which is the United States shifted from the policy of being an industrial, scientific, optimistic, productive nation in the 1960s, becoming a consumer nation, the so-called post-industrial economy. And we had in that time four major assassinations: President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy, and only five years which created a generation of people who were terrified. And then you had the Vietnam War. And really, I think the United States lost its identity. And because Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy did a very good job of building very solid infrastructure, it has taken many years for it all to begin to disintegrate. But now everything is collapsing. And I think what we have is the opportunity actually to create an entirely new system, along the lines of what LaRouche proposed and what the Eurasian Economic Union is doing, the BRICS are doing.
The financiers, the bankers from the city of London and Wall Street are desperate to keep the lid on in the United States.
They don’t want the American people to have big ideas. They want them to be small and scared and divided.
M.T.: Is this why you think the US Department of Defense created the project 1033, according to which surplus military equipment is transferred to the needs of the police department?
D.S.: Probably, you know, I mean, if you’re going to take away everyone’s energy and food, I guess you would expect that there will be some unrest.
F.S.: What is the situation with freedom of speech in the United States and how much do you have of the censorship in the United States?
D.S.:
We have terrible censorship the United States.
As you know, even the president of the United States was taken off Facebook and Twitter before the election. You can agree or disagree with him, but that’s the president of the United States not being allowed to speak to people. Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector, was removed from Twitter because he said the Bucha massacre was not committed by the Russians. You were not even allowed to say that the 2020 elections were not conducted fairly, even though in 2016 the Democratic Party was screaming that Russia had hacked the election, that it wasn’t fair, that it wasn’t legitimate. No one is allowed to say that about the 2020 election, you will be removed from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, everything. And that kind of censorship creates a self-policing, thought police because people then begin not to say the truth. And once you begin to not see the truth, you begin to not think the truth. And I think this is very dangerous and you see it really what they did to LaRouche in 1986 was to shut down all of his publications. Now you see it with the treatment of Julian Assange, who was just a journalist but being left to die in prison. I see it with my campaign where I got 66,000 New York voters signed a petition to put me on the ballot, but they’re holding a debate which so far does not include me. It’s Schumer and the Republican nominee who agrees with him about Russia and Ukraine and they’re not going to even discuss it in the debate.
M.T.: Recently, representatives of the Republican Party in the US House of Representatives began discussing the possibility of launching the impeachment of the President of the United States Joe Biden. Do you think such a development is possible?
D.S.: Well, he certainly deserves to be impeached. My concern and the reason that I chose to run is we have so few qualified leaders in this nation. So you can make the argument, how could you do worse? But I’m afraid Kamala Harris would be worse. And, you know, so it’s very tricky. And I think that’s why we need a cultural change. That’s why they’re so afraid of Americans having big ideas, because if you begin to have big ideas about ending poverty, about having peaceful relations with other nations, then you will come up with the right policy. But if you stay small you won’t.
F.S.: I’d like to know why President Biden is losing his popularity.
D.S.: Well, I wish he noticed. I’m not sure he’s aware of how unpopular he is, but because what we are experiencing here is hyperinflation. It is shocking when you go to buy groceries, how much more money you have to spend. They have managed so far to keep the price of fuel. It’s not as bad as Europe but it’s gone up quite a bit. And Americans are experiencing real hardship and anxiety about their daily lives, about their savings. When I was petitioning, we met so many people who would be very upset coming out of the grocery store and they would say, “my retirement funds are going to be gone in six months”, “I don’t know what I’m going to do”. People are saying: “I can’t afford to buy meat”. One lady came out and said: “I just had to go back in to return some food because I can’t afford my medication”. This is everyday life for most Americans.
M.T.: This is just sad. Why, in your opinion, have American political and military officials responsible for a number of war crimes in the Middle East never been brought to justice? Can we say that this is due to the fact that the Americans, in fact, control all international courts and organizations?
D.S.: That would have something to do with it, I think. I’m very disappointed in the, I don’t know what to call it, attitude or degree of outrage of Americans. And perhaps it’s because people are struggling so much that they don’t have the passion they should have about what happened to Afghanistan or what we did in Iraq. I know many Americans feel so concerned about this, but I can’t say it’s the majority. when it was admitted that we were torturing people in Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war, I thought: “okay, this is it. People are going to rise up. This is so horrific. This is so anti-human and so evil that we’re just going to shut down this war. We’re going to shut down this administration”. And no, you had people actually arguing that torture was okay. It was a good thing to waterboard people. I mean, it should be obvious you don’t get intelligence from torturing someone. It should be obvious. And there was a Senate committee led by Dianne Feinstein about the torture. And you remember, some intelligence agency broke into the basement to get her documents. So even a senior U.S. senator who wanted to investigate this was not free to do it.
F.S.: I’d like to ask a question about Ukraine and USA. In your opinion, do Ukrainians realize that they are being used against Russia? Can we say that the US is using Ukraine to confront Russia?
D.S.: I think many of them probably do realize it. I think when you have a regime that is using Nazi tactics to silence people, that there must be an enormous amount of terror. If you can be tortured or killed simply because you received an aid package from the Russians, then I think there is an enormous amount of fear of people to speak out. And that is just the nature when you have something really evil. And a less extreme view when you talk about a toxic workplace, where maybe you have a coworker who is really mean, really hostile, really nasty, and somehow that becomes the dominant factor because other people are not so aggressive. And I think in Ukraine, you have a regime which is dominated by this banderest Nazi outlook of banning opposition parties, banning the Russian language, banning collective bargaining. So without being there, I imagine that the majority of the people of Ukraine are not Nazi sympathizers, but because of the evil of this and because this is what has been supported by the U.K., by the U.S. and by NATO, it is very hard to get out of it for the people there.
F.S.: What do you think about Myrotvorets website? I heard it’s supported by authorities of the US and European countries. Is it true?
D.S.: Unfortunately, I don’t think that the Ukrainian regime does anything without being told to do it by the West, So I would say yes. What was behind it? I don’t know. The CIA, NATO, GCHQ, MI6, some combination of that, because it’s very clear that Zelensky is not acting for himself. He’s doing what he is told.
M.T.: How do you think the US foreign policy will change after the accession of new regions to Russia?
D.S.: I don’t know. I actually do not know how it will change. I would say one thing that might bring about a change and maybe there is hope. I wanted to make sure I made this point, because there is growing, growing opposition to the policy. Americans really do have a sense, if we continue that, we’re going to have a nuclear war and no one will survive. So one thing that I have noticed of interest is there are many, many independent candidates for federal office in the U.S., who are very antiwar. I don’t know that all of us are going to get elected or not, but it’s a new element in the political scene. I also know that there is great fear that if there a Republican majority, and I don’t think they all have exactly the most enlightened understanding of the situation, but if they decide that it costs too much money to keep arming the Ukrainian regime, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
The Biden administration is very afraid that there will be a Republican majority after November 8th.
They’re trying to ram through an extra $50 billion package before the new Congress comes in in January.
F.S.: I’d like to ask you the question that everyone is worried about. Please estimate the probability of the outbreak of the Third World War. And do the NATO countries that arm Kiev realize that there will be no winners in the world conflict in the 21st century?
D.S.: That’s the question of the hour. That is the question that keeps me awake at night. And I don’t know the answer. I do think the opposition is growing. Probably some my campaign workers at the meeting with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and this has been picked up all over the news. So, the opposition is growing, and I think there is a little glimmer of hope which is coming through. But in this world, we have no guarantees.
M.T.: Thank you, Diane, for dedicating your time. I know you’ll have a very tough schedule. Thank you for the work you are doing, for being so brave and for being so active and every single subject that truly violates the human rights, children’s rights. And thank you for being so kind and humane. Thank you. It’s such a pleasure spending this time with you. And maybe you have some questions to Faina?
D.S.: Yes, I do. First, I would really like to thank Faina for the same thing, because in my opinion, she is like Joan of Arc.
F.S.: Thank you.
D.S.: I would like to know what she thinks I should know about the situation in Donetsk.
F.S.: People are dying. War is always bad.
D.S.: And I suppose there is nobody who is untouched by this, correct?
F.S.: Yes, I think so.
D.S.: And what is the effect, in your opinion, on the children in this region?
F.S.: I think it has a huge effect on us. We are trying to think only about what is happening right now, because tomorrow may not come. So I think we differ from ordinary children.
D.S.: Yeah, it’s what do you call post-traumatic stress disorder. My sister was deployed in Iraq. She was part of the surge, and she was the brigade surgeon for 3000 soldiers. She was the one who had to pronounce people dead and try and save the ones who could be saved. And after the first really big attack on their battalion, I asked her what that was like. And that’s exactly what she said to you. I said, “How can you live aren’t you terrified?” She said, “I only think about what’s directly in front of me in the moment I’m at and I don’t think about anything else.”