back to indexOliver Stone: Vladimir Putin and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast #286
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If you could talk to Vladimir Putin once again now,
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what kind of things would you talk about here?
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What kind of questions would you ask?
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The following is a conversation with Oliver Stone.
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He's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time
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with three Oscar wins and 11 Oscar nominations.
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His films tell stories of war and power,
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fearlessly and often controversially,
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shining a light on the dark parts
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of American and global history.
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His films include Platoon, Wall Street,
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Born on the 4th of July, Scarface, JFK,
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Nixon, Alexander, W, Snowden,
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and documentaries where he has interviewed
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some of the most powerful and consequential people
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in the world, including Fidel Castro,
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Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin.
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And in this conversation, Oliver and I
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mostly focus our discussion on Vladimir Putin,
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Russia, and the war in Ukraine.
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My goal with these conversations
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is to understand the human being before me,
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to understand not just what they think,
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but how they think, to steel man their ideas,
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and to steel man the devil's advocate,
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all in service of understanding, not derision.
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I have done this poorly in the past.
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I'm still struggling with this,
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but I'm working hard to do better.
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I believe the moment we draw lines
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between good people and evil people
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will lose our ability to see that we're all one people
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in the most fundamental of ways,
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and will lose track of the deep truth
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expressed by the old Solzhenitsyn line
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that I return to time and time again,
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that the line between good and evil
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runs through the heart of every man.
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Oliver Stone has a perspective
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that he extensively documents
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in his powerful controversial series,
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The Untold History of the United States,
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that imperialism and the military industrial complex
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paved the path to absolute power,
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and thus corrupt the minds of the leaders
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and institutions that wield it.
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From this perspective, the way out
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of the humanitarian crisis and human suffering in Ukraine,
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and the way out from the pull
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of the beating drums of nuclear war
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is not simple to understand,
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but we must, because all of humanity hangs in the balance.
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I will talk to many people who seek to understand
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the way out of this growing catastrophe,
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including to historians, to leaders,
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and perhaps most importantly,
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to people on the ground in Ukraine and Russia,
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not just about war and suffering,
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but about life, friendship, family, love, and hope.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description, and now, dear friends,
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here's Oliver Stone.
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You're working on a documentary now about nuclear energy.
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So it's interesting to talk about this.
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Energy is such a big part of the world,
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about geopolitics of the world,
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about the way the world is.
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What do you think is the role of nuclear energy
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in the 21st century?
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Good question, and first of all,
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obviously everyone's talking about climate change, right?
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So here I wake up to that a few years ago,
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and clearly were concerned.
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I picked up a book by Josh Goldstein
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and his coauthor, who's Swedish.
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Those two wrote a book called A Bright Future.
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It came out a few years ago, and I lapped it up.
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It was a book, fact based, clear,
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not too long, and not too technical,
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and it was very clear that they were in favor
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of all kinds of renewables, renewable energy, yes.
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They made it very clear how dangerous oil
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and gas were, methane,
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and made it very clear to the layman like me,
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and at the same time said that these renewables
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could work so far, but the gap is enormous
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as to how much electricity the world is gonna need
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in 2050 and beyond, two, three, four times.
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We don't even know the damage, but we have India,
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we have China, we have Africa, we have Asia
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coming onto the scene wanting more and more electricity.
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So they address the problem as a global one,
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not just as often in the United States.
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You get the ethnocentric United States point of view
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that we know we're doing well, blah, blah, blah.
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We're not doing well, but we sell that
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to people that we're comfortable.
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We spend more energy than anybody,
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this country per capita, than anybody,
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and at the same time, we don't seem to understand
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the global picture, so that's what they did,
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and they made me very worried.
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So the only way to close that gap,
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the only way in their mind is nuclear energy,
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and talking about a gap of building a huge amount
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of reactors over the next 30 years,
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and starting now, they make that point over and over again.
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So obviously this country, the United States,
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is not gonna go in that direction,
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because it just is incapable of having that kind of will,
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political will, and fear is a huge factor,
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and still a lot of shibboleths, a lot of myths
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about nuclear energy have confused
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and confounded the landscape.
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The environmentalists have played a huge role
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in doing good things, many good things,
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but also confusing and confounding the landscape,
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and making accusations against nuclear energy
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that were exaggerated.
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So taking all these things into consideration,
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we set about making this documentary,
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which is about finished now, almost finishing.
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It's an hour and 40 minutes, and that was a hard part,
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getting it down from about three and a half hours
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to about this, something more manageable,
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and is it interviews?
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It's interviews, among others,
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but essentially we went to Russia, we went to France,
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which is the most, perhaps, advanced nuclear country
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in the world, Russia, and the United States.
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We went to the Idaho laboratory,
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and talked to the scientists there,
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as well as the Department of Energy people
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that are handling this.
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Idaho is one of the experimental labs,
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the United States is probably one of the most advanced,
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and they're doing a lot of advanced nuclear there.
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We also, we studied, well, Russia gave us a lot of insight.
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We're very cooperative,
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because they have some of the most advanced nuclear,
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actually the probably most advanced nuclear reactor
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in the world, at Beloyarsk, at the Ural Mountains.
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So we did an investigation there,
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and in France they have some very advanced nuclear reactors
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and they're building, and now they're building again.
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The Green Party came into power,
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just not into power, but became a factor in France,
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and there was a motion when Hollande was president,
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they started to move away from it.
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Actually, they were beginning to just abandon,
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they let, not complete, in other words,
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close down some of the nuclear reactors,
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there was talk of that, but thank God,
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France did not do that, and Macron came in
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and recently reversed it, reversed it,
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and they're building as fast as they can now,
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especially with the Ukraine war going on,
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there's an awareness that Russia will not be providing,
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may not be providing the energy Europe needs.
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So, and then China is the other one too,
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that's the other factor, I'm talking about the big boys.
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They have, doing tremendous work and fast,
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which is very hopeful, but of course,
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China is building in all directions at once,
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coal continues to be huge in China,
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but basically coal, coal in India, in China,
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have the biggest users of coal,
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and as you know, Germany went back to coal a few years ago,
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so all these factors, it's a fascinating picture globally,
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so we try to achieve a consensus that where nuclear can work
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and where it will be working,
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where it will be used more and more,
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the question is how much carbon dioxide China
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and Russia will be putting out.
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France is the only one that's not putting it out.
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The United States has not changed,
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with all the talk and all the nonsense about renewables
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and the new lifestyle and all this,
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it's great for your guilt complex,
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but it doesn't do anything for the total accumulation
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of carbon dioxide in the world.
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Who's gonna lead the way on nuclear, do you think?
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You mentioned Russia, France, China, United States,
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Yeah, I don't think it's gonna be
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a United Nations kind of thing,
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because the world doesn't seem capable of uniting.
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We go to these conferences, Kyoto,
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and we talk and we agree,
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but then we don't actually enforce,
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so I don't think it can happen that way.
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I think it's gonna be an individual race with countries.
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They're gonna just do it for their own self interest,
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like China's doing it.
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China, the thing is, if it works, and I'm praying
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that it will really work on a big scale,
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China will back away from coal naturally.
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The same thing will be true of India.
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They will see the benefits, because if you go to India,
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you see the cities, the pollution.
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You walk around in that stuff, and you get,
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it's not, there's no hope in this, and you sense it.
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So people will move in this direction naturally,
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because nuclear is clean energy.
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And the amount of casualties of nuclear
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is the lowest on the industrial scale
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for energy producing, from coal down to oil, everything.
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The lowest casualty rate, very lowest,
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.002 or something, is nuclear.
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So not that many people have died from nuclear.
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Not that many, I think 50 people at Chernobyl,
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which was the worst accident.
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Nobody had died at Fukushima.
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Nobody died at Three Mile Island,
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and that's what you hear all over and over again,
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The environmentalists have sold us the idea
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that they're dangerous.
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And it's, a lot of environmentalists, thank God,
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are changing, they've come off that routine,
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and they've saying, this, we were wrong.
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We've done a lot of good work.
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Greenpeace did a lot of good work.
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Whale, whales, saving this, saving that.
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But they admit themselves, not they don't,
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but people who have been in the organization
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have said, we were wrong.
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In 1956, we show the articles
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in the New York Times that came out,
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the Rockefeller Foundation,
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which of course is a big producer of oil,
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the Rockefeller family, and the foundation came out
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with a study, which was weighted.
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They tipped the scale, put a thumb on the scale,
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but it was a scientific expose of radiation
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in the study that came out, printed in the New York Times,
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because the New York Times publisher, Salzburger,
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was on their board, he was one of the board members.
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So they got a lot of strong publicity
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condemning radiation, which killed,
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started the process of doubting nuclear energy.
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The radiation levels that they pointed out
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were very minor, and of course,
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if you go into a scientific analysis of this now
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with what we know, it's just not true.
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But it tilted the scale back in the 50s, 60s,
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and started the questioning the nuclear business.
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Do you think that was malevolence or incompetence?
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No, I think it was competition.
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I don't think it was conspiracy
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as much as it was essentially,
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we don't want this, nuclear energy's gonna end
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the dominance of oil, absolutely, and it will.
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And it will anyway, because it's the only sane way
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for the world to proceed.
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But the world will have to learn through adversity.
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So in other words, this situation could get worse,
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much worse, and certain countries
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are just gonna have to adapt, like we always do.
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When things become too hard, you've got to go,
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you have to change your thinking.
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And humans are pretty good at that.
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Yes, talking about human nature, they're very adept
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at that, Germany, for example.
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I mean, they were, when the Fukushima happened,
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they went out of the nuclear business.
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That was shocking to me.
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They just pulled out and they destroyed,
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destructed several of their nuclear reactors
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who were still functioning, and put up coal,
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or yeah, put up coal and oil, replaced it.
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And as a result, Germany drifted into this place
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next to France, their electricity bills went up,
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and France stayed the same.
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They don't have that, they have a different system
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in Europe, but more or less, no question that France
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was doing a lot better than Germany.
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And now, with this Ukraine issue,
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it's a very interesting fulcrum point,
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whether Germany is, what direction they're gonna go now.
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How can they, how can they keep going with coal?
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What's the connection between oil, coal, nuclear, and war?
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Sort of energy and conflict.
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When you look at the 21st century,
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when you were doing this documentary,
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were you thinking of nuclear as a way to power the world,
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but is it also to avoid conflict over resources?
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Is there some aspect to energy being a source of conflict
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that we're trying to avoid?
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I don't have the energy, the history of energy
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at my fingertips, and it's a very long history here.
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But I would say, apparently not.
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It does seem that individually, each country
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can answer its needs by building.
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And up until now, we haven't had conflict,
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except in this issue of Russia supplying Europe.
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Obviously, the pipeline, Nord Stream 2 has been closed,
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and Nord Stream 1 is also probably gonna be phased out.
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And the concept of Russia supplying gas to Europe
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is now up in the air, and who knows what's gonna happen.
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I just don't see how Europe can get away
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from using Russian gas.
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But Russian gas is not the solution,
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because it's methane, too, and it goes up
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into the atmosphere.
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Methane, in the short term, is worse than coal, worse.
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There's all kinds of charts we show in the film.
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We try not to be too overfactual,
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but methane is not the answer.
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It's a short term answer.
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Will countries go to war over energy is a question
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that I'm trying to think of all the wars that happened.
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You could say Germany, of course, during World War II
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needed oil very badly, and it dictated their strategy
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with Romania, et cetera, and getting the oil fields open.
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But I haven't thought that one through.
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I'd have to make a documentary on it
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to really understand how energy and war interface.
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It's always part of the calculation,
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but it's a question of how much.
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Right, that's the question.
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I just have to ask, because you mentioned
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your mom was from France, you've traveled
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for this documentary, and you traveled in general
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throughout the world in Russia, Ukraine.
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What are the defining characteristics of these cultures?
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Let's go with Russia.
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So as I told you, I'm half Ukrainian, half Russian.
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I came from that part of the world.
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What are some interesting, beautiful aspects
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of the culture of Russia and Ukraine?
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I can't really speak honestly of Ukraine.
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I was there only in 1983 when I visited
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the Soviet Union under the communism,
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and Kiev was beautiful and was one of the nicer places
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I went, but they were very much stultified
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by the communist system, they all were.
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The best places to visit in Russia were always in the South,
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whether Georgia or the Muslim countries,
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it was always a better culture in terms of comfort.
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But communism was rough, and that was the end of it,
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pretty much Brezhnev regime, and then Andropov.
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Gorbachev was three years in the future when I was there.
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So I can't talk about Ukraine, and they've not been friendly
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to me since ISIS, of course, since I made
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the Putin interviews, you know, Ukraine has banned me,
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I believe, they've been very tough on people
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I think the Russian people have been very special to me,
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and perhaps because of my European upbringing,
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but I enjoy talking to them, I find them very open,
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very generous, and they appreciate support,
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they appreciate people who say, you know,
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I understand why your government is doing this
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or this or this, I've tried to stay open minded
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and listen to both sides.
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The thing that I have seen as an American is, of course,
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this American enmity towards Russia from the very beginning.
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I grew up in 1940, 46, I was born in the 50s,
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it was so anti Russian, they were everywhere,
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they were in our schools, they were in our State Department,
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they were spying on us, they were stealing the country
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from us, that was the way the American right wing,
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not even the right wing, I'd say the Republican party,
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pictured the Russians, they were actively engaged
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in infiltrating America and changing our thinking.
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And television shows were based on this,
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it was very much the J. Edgar Hoover mentality
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that communism was even behind the student protests
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of the 1960s, this was the direction in which the FBI
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and the CIA were thinking.
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So I grew up with a prejudice, and it took me many years,
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my father was a Republican and he was a stockbroker
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and he was a very intelligent man, but even he,
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because he was a World War II soldier, he was a colonel,
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had fallen under the influence.
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In order to be successful in American business
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in the 1950s, you had to have a very strong
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anti Soviet line, very strong, you wouldn't get ahead.
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If you expressed any kind of, let's end this Cold War,
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any kind of activity of that nature, you'd be cast aside
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as a pinko or somebody who was not completely
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on the board with the American way of doing business,
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which was capitalism works, communism doesn't.
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And in particular, communism was embodied
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by the Soviet Union as the enemy.
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So hence the narrative behind the Cold War.
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Behind the Cold War, that's correct, and it basically
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lasted, I mean, you saw the ups and downs of it.
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When Reagan came in, I was, well, first of all,
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we had the crisis of 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis,
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and Kennedy proved himself to be a warrior for peace.
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He resolved that with Khrushchev.
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That was a big moment, huge moment, and people don't
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give him credit enough for really saving us from a war
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that could have affected all of mankind.
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But it still didn't avert.
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No, because the moment he was killed,
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honestly, there was a lot of, we can talk about that,
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and as you know, I've made a film, JFK Revisited
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is a documentary we released this year
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about the movie I made in 1991.
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But the moment he was killed, I would argue
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that Lyndon Johnson went back immediately
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to the old way of thinking, the old way of doing business,
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which was the Eisenhower, Truman way,
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which we had adapted since World War II.
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That was an interim.
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You have to think about it from, Roosevelt dies in 45.
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Roosevelt has an interim of 15 years where he,
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he has more of a democratic regime, more liberal.
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He establishes, he recognizes the Soviet Union
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for the first time since the revolution,
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and he actually has a relationship with them.
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He sends ambassadors who are friendly,
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and he has a relationship with Stalin, et cetera,
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and at Yalta, or no, at Tehran, rather,
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that's where he had the relationship.
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Do you think if JFK lived, we would not have a Cold War?
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No, absolutely not, and we go into great depth on that
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in the film, and I'd urge you to see it,
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because it goes into all the issues around the world.
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Kennedy was being very much an anti imperialist.
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It turns out, and many people just don't understand that,
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but you have to look at all his policies in Middle East
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with Nasser, he had a relationship with Sukarno in Indonesia,
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with Latin America, he made a big effort
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with the Alliance for Progress,
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and when Africa, above all, with Lumumba,
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he was very shocked at his death,
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and tried to defend the right, the integrity
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of the Belgian Congo with Dag Hammarskjold of the UN.
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He made a big effort.
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Unfortunately, it didn't work out,
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because Dag Hammarskjold was killed,
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and then Kennedy was killed,
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and Congo descended into the chaos
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of Joseph Mobutu's dictatorship.
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But Kennedy was very active in terms of,
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as an Irishman, not as an Englishman, he was an Irishman.
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And I say that because, well, we'll come back to that,
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because Mr. Joe Biden is an Irishman,
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but it's a different kind of an Irishman.
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They're both Catholic Irish, but Kennedy really made
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an effort to change the imperialist mindset
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that still was very strong in America and Europe.
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Lyndon Johnson changed back to the old policy,
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and we were never able to really keep
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big talk going with the Russians.
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Briefly had it with Carter, but then Brzezinski came in.
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Brzezinski was his national security advisor.
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He was put there by Rockefeller,
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and Brzezinski was a Pole, he got revenge from Poland.
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Poland has always been attacking Russia,
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as far as I remember, back to another century.
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I mean, the two world wars that occupied Russia,
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so tragically, entry points were always
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through Poland and Ukraine.
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So Brzezinski got his revenge,
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and Carter ended up being an enemy of the Soviet Union,
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and creating, as Brzezinski took pride in it,
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he created the atmosphere of the trap
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for the Soviets to go into Afghanistan in 79.
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That trap was set, he says, he said, in 1978.
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So there was never, except for brief moments,
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periods of detente with the Soviets,
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and I grew up under that.
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I didn't really know anything of this going on,
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because I was learning, I was educating myself
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as I was going, learning movies,
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and trying to be a dramatist, and this and that,
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so I wasn't thinking about this.
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Then, when Reagan came in, I was worried again,
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because it was the beat of the old beat,
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which was there, the most evil empire.
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I mean, it goes on in American history, it doesn't end.
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Reagan got a lot of points for that,
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and of course, when Gorbachev came in,
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it was a beautiful moment for the world.
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It was a great surprise.
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It was probably the best years for America,
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at least from my point of view,
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in terms of this relaxation in the mood.
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1986 to 1991 were great years
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in terms of ability to believe, once again,
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that there could be a peace dividend,
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but the world changed again in 1991, 92.
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There's an internal mechanism, who knows?
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You could blame the United States,
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you could blame Russia for...
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Gorbachev was perhaps not the right man
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to try to administer that country at that point.
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He had great visions, he was a man of peace,
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but it was very difficult to hold together
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such a huge empire.
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So vision is not enough to hold together the Soviet Union?
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I think the details are interesting.
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I followed up on that a little bit,
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because I was recently in countries like Kazakhstan,
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talked about the negotiations that were going on,
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and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
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It's a very interesting story,
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because it involves everything, Ukraine, of course,
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everything that's going on now.
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Some, what is it, 30 million Russians
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were left outside of the Soviet Union when it collapsed.
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They had no home anymore, they were homes
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in other countries, such as in Ukraine.
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So it's an interesting story, and with repercussions today,
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Kazakhstan is a good example of keeping a balance,
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keeping it neutral.
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He played both sides,
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and because Yeltsin wanted him
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to join the Russian Confederation
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in a certain way where he'd be supporting,
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against Gorbachev, there's a whole inward battle there.
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I think the Ukraine came along with Yeltsin,
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as well as, I'm sorry, I don't remember now,
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but two other regions came with him,
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and that was a block that broke up the Soviet Union.
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It was Yeltsin's plan to,
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and it wasn't make the Russian Federation, and they did.
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I would love to return back to JFK eventually,
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because he's such a fascinating figure
link |
in the history of human civilization,
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but let me ask you, fast forward.
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In 2000, Yeltsin was no longer president,
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and Vladimir Putin became president.
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You did a series of interviews with Vladimir Putin,
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as you mentioned, over a period of two years,
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from 2015 to 2017.
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Let me ask with a high level question.
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What was your goal with that conversation?
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Oh, came out in 2017, I guess I started them in 2014.
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At that point, the Snowden affair had happened,
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and I was working on a movie on Snowden.
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That happened in 13, Ukraine happened in 14,
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and one thing after another.
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By 14, Putin was enemy number, again,
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becoming a wanted man on the American list.
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He was enemy, he was certainly in the top five.
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But the animosity towards Putin
link |
had been growing since 2007 at Munich.
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I remember that speech when he made it.
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It's in my documentary, that's a four hour documentary,
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four different conversations.
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I mean, we talked over two years, two and a half years,
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but I remember that image of him at Munich
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making a very important speech about world harmony,
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about the balance necessary in the world,
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and I remember the sneer, the sneer on John McCain's face.
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He was in Munich, obviously eyeballing Putin
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and hating him, and it was so evident
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that McCain had no belief whatsoever that this,
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he was almost treating him like these are the communists
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are back, and we know that Putin was not a communist.
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We know that Putin is very much a market man,
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and he made it very clear and tried to keep an open climate,
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a new relationship with Europe,
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but the United States always, certain people
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in the United States always saw that as a threat,
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like Putin is trying to take Europe away from us
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as if we own it, as if we have the right to own it.
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But Putin was making the point, it's very important,
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about sovereignty, and sovereignty for countries
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is crucial for this new world to have balance.
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That's sovereignty for China, sovereignty for Russia,
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sovereignty for Iran, sovereignty for Venezuela,
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sovereignty for Cuba.
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This is an idea that's crucial to the new world,
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and I think the United States has never accepted that.
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Sovereignty is not an idea that they can allow.
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You have to be obedient to the United States idea
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of so called democracy and freedom,
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but much more important is sovereignty for these countries,
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and the United States has not obeyed that,
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has not even acknowledged it, and it never comes up.
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So from the perspective of the United States,
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when power centers arise in the world,
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you start to oppose those, not because of the ideas,
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but merely because they have power.
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Isn't that at the heart of the doctrine
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of the neoconservatives,
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and the pact for the new American century
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they wrote down in 1996, seven,
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they said there shall be no emergence of a rival power.
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It was very clear it was about power,
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and they've stuck to that doctrine,
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which is if you start to get dangerous in any way
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or have power, we're gonna knock you out.
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Now that won't work, and I don't believe it can work,
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and that is unfortunately a policy
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the United States is following,
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and the neoconservatives group, which is very small,
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but it's very strong apparently,
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and their idea has resonated.
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It was behind the George Bush's invasion of Iraq.
link |
It was part of not only Iraq,
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but cleaning out the whole world, draining the swamp,
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going to Afghanistan first,
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and then although Iraq had nothing to do
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with al Qaeda's attack, going after Iraq.
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And of course 60 some other countries
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that were terrorism had some signs of,
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wherever America judged would be a dangerous country.
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We had the right, you're either with us or against us.
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Now that is a disastrous policy,
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and led to one thing after another.
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The Iraq war never learned a lesson.
link |
The neoconservatives were never fired,
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never thrown out of office.
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The people who prosecuted that war are still around.
link |
Many of them are still around,
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and they're obviously guiding America now.
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Let me return to this question of power.
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Don't forget the sneer that I saw there.
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That emblemized the United States reaction.
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Also there were several other American representatives
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who were laughing, kind of mocking Putin.
link |
It was very serious.
link |
I felt there was a divide there.
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So since then, I mean in a certain sense,
link |
the Europe reaction to Putin is crucial,
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and they were more with him back then.
link |
And a big thing for America was always to keep NATO,
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to keep Europe in its pocket as a satellite.
link |
And with this recent war, of course they've succeeded
link |
in beyond their dreams.
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The Russians have fulfilled the fantasy
link |
of the United States, to finally be this aggressor
link |
that they have pictured for years.
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We can talk about that later.
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But at that time, Europe had significant support for Putin,
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and the United States was sneering at Putin.
link |
That's correct, you can say that.
link |
And then, so there was this,
link |
there was uncertainty as to the direction,
link |
as to the future of Russia.
link |
And that's exactly when you interviewed Vladimir Putin.
link |
I wanted to know what they thought,
link |
because we couldn't get the information war
link |
that the United States was fighting against Russia.
link |
It was in evidence back then.
link |
The condemnation of Russia on all fronts.
link |
I never saw a positive article about Putin.
link |
Although when I traveled in the world,
link |
and I traveled a lot doing documentaries,
link |
it was very clear in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia,
link |
there was respect for him.
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That he was a man who was getting his job done
link |
in the interest of Russia.
link |
He was, as I said in the documentary, a son of Russia.
link |
Very much so, in the positive sense, a son of Russia.
link |
Not that he's out there trying to destroy
link |
the interests of other countries, no.
link |
That he was out there to promote the interests of Russia,
link |
but at the same time, keep a balance.
link |
Keep the world into a harmony.
link |
This has always been his picture.
link |
Peace was always his idea.
link |
In other words, he always referred to the United States
link |
in all these interviews as our partners.
link |
And I said, will you stop using that word?
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And he was a little bit slow in waking up
link |
to what the United States was doing.
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Well, that said, he's one of the most powerful men
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He was at that time.
link |
And let me ask you the human question.
link |
As the old adage goes, power corrupts
link |
and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
link |
Did you see any corroding effects of power on the man?
link |
Forget the political leader, on just the human being
link |
that carries that power on his shoulders for so many years.
link |
Keep in mind that he's been, unlike most modern leaders,
link |
he's been in office off and on,
link |
because Medvedev was president
link |
and he was not literally in charge.
link |
He took another appointment at that point,
link |
but he was still very much involved.
link |
But for 20 years, more or less,
link |
he's been at the administrator of the state,
link |
the protector of the state.
link |
And he's apparently done a good enough job
link |
that the Russian people have kept him there.
link |
Because contrary to what many people think,
link |
I really believe that if the Russian people didn't want him,
link |
I firmly believe that.
link |
I don't think you can go against the will of the people.
link |
Now, it expresses itself in many ways,
link |
at the ballot box and so forth,
link |
but also in other ways in Russia.
link |
There's a strong currents of opinion.
link |
So contrary to what the position of him as a dictator,
link |
he wouldn't last if he was unpopular, number one.
link |
Number two, Russia is much more divided than people know.
link |
There's other factors in Russia.
link |
There are always tensions around the Kremlin,
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who has power, who doesn't have power.
link |
That's been going on for 100 years.
link |
But the factions in Russia are very much there.
link |
So when people refer to Russia as Putin, they're mistaken.
link |
And they do this regularly in the New York papers
link |
They say, Putin did this, Putin did that,
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Putin's doing that, but it's Russia that's doing it.
link |
And that's what, there's a distinction there that I,
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In the old days, I would read about Khrushchev,
link |
but it was never Khrushchev personally.
link |
It was about the Soviet Union.
link |
There was respect for a country.
link |
And now when it started to get personal with Putin,
link |
it changed and our thinking changed in a negative way.
link |
We no longer respected it as a country,
link |
we were seeing it as a man.
link |
And the man we had trashed repeatedly,
link |
repeatedly as a poisoner, as a murderer,
link |
and none of which has ever been proven,
link |
but which has always been repeated and repeated
link |
to the point at which it becomes like an Orwell mantra.
link |
It becomes like, he is of course a bad guy.
link |
Can I just ask you, as a great filmmaker,
link |
as a human being, what was it like talking
link |
to one of the most powerful men in the world?
link |
For honestly, and I'm not naive,
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I've talked to a lot of powerful people.
link |
In the movie business, there are powerful people
link |
and many of them are corrupted.
link |
I've talked to many people in my life.
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I've been in the military, I've seen, I've had other jobs.
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I have to say, I found him to be a human being.
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I just found him to be reasonable, calm.
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I never saw him lose his temper.
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And I mean, you have to understand that most people,
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most people in the Western way of doing business
link |
I saw him as a balanced man,
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as a man who had studied this like you have.
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There's a calmness to you.
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It comes from studying the world
link |
and having a rational response to it.
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It's interesting, his two daughters,
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one of them is very scientific
link |
and the other one's doing very well in another profession,
link |
but they're a thinking family.
link |
I can't talk for the new wife
link |
because I don't know about it,
link |
but he kept his family with great respect.
link |
He's raised his daughter's right.
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He served Yeltsin the way he looked at it.
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He served Yeltsin well, and he never trashed Yeltsin.
link |
Certainly a lot of people did,
link |
but I asked him repeatedly was he an alcoholic,
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this or that, but he wouldn't even go that far.
link |
And this man, Yeltsin, was in many ways ridiculed
link |
by the Russians, and he turned over the power
link |
because he felt like he was overwhelmed.
link |
He turned over the power to this man because why?
link |
How many people had he fired before him?
link |
Several, several prime ministers, this, that.
link |
Why did he turn power over to Mr. Putin?
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Because he respected him for his work ethic
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and his balance, his maturity.
link |
And that's what I can say is I saw in him.
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A poor person from a poor family who worked his way up
link |
through the KGB, Americans keep saying he's a KGB agent,
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but it's like saying George Bush was a CIA agent,
link |
but he became, you grow, you grow in your life.
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And he went from the KGB to this technocratic position.
link |
He dealt with many problems, including the Chechnyan War,
link |
which is a very difficult situation,
link |
as well as the Russian submarine problem.
link |
Several things happened early in his,
link |
that gave him a lot of experience,
link |
and he handled them all pretty well.
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Do you think he was an honest man?
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Now, of course, the question of money,
link |
the charge is that he's the richest man in the world,
link |
or ludicrous, certainly doesn't live like it
link |
If you're rich, I've been around
link |
a lot of rich people in my life.
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You'd probably have, too.
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In America, you run into them.
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So many of them are arrogant.
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I'm actually good friends now
link |
with the richest man in the world.
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Of course, I saw your interview with Mr. Musk,
link |
At least he speaks freely.
link |
I'm positive about him owning Twitter,
link |
because Twitter has become censorship city,
link |
as has all the major tech.
link |
I mean, the censorship that we are now seeing
link |
in the United States is so unAmerican and shocking to me.
link |
And he is a resistance to that, that is true.
link |
Yeah, I like Musk for that.
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Just for that only.
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But I also appreciate him, his adventuresome,
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his nature and his desire to explore the world
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and to ask questions.
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Yeah, there's certain ways you sound when you speak freely.
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There's certain ways you sound,
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a man sounds when he speaks freely,
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and he speaks freely.
link |
And it's refreshing.
link |
No matter whether you're rich or not, it doesn't matter.
link |
When you speak freely, it's a beautiful thing.
link |
Actually, Musk, in a major point
link |
on going back to nuclear energy,
link |
he never believed in it at first, apparently.
link |
He was going for batteries, right?
link |
And he put a lot of money into batteries.
link |
He made them bigger and bigger batteries.
link |
But it just, as Bill Gates has said,
link |
it's just, it's not gonna get us there.
link |
And now I think Musk is on another path.
link |
He understands the need for nuclear.
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Yeah, he's a supporter of nuclear.
link |
We're jumping around.
link |
Putin never asked for one thing, never.
link |
It was an interview, it was free form.
link |
Ask anything you want.
link |
No restrictions, no rules.
link |
As with Castro, frankly,
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Castro did the same thing as did Chavez.
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So I've had good luck in interviewing free ranging subjects,
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people willing to express themselves.
link |
He's much more guarded than Castro or Chavez,
link |
because as you know, he's setting government policy
link |
Anything he says is gonna be taken out of context.
link |
But there was no restrictions on what to talk about,
link |
Nor any desire to see anything before we published it.
link |
No need to check it with him.
link |
It was a completely.
link |
Do you think he watched the final product?
link |
Yes, I do, but I don't think he made judgments on it.
link |
I think he was pleased.
link |
He doesn't go either way.
link |
You see, he's pleased.
link |
I mean, it went well and he's happy for us.
link |
But I don't think he had great enthusiasm
link |
expressed it to me.
link |
And you can see the way he dealt with me each time.
link |
He warmed up to me four times.
link |
The first time I might've been a little stiff.
link |
You're asking, you don't know who you're dealing with
link |
I understand that.
link |
But he's used to it now.
link |
He's done a lot of press.
link |
The worst press he's done, frankly,
link |
has been the American press.
link |
And not because of his fault,
link |
but because of the way they have treated him.
link |
If you look at the interviews, they're awful.
link |
First of all, I noticed one thing as a filmmaker,
link |
right away, they use an overdub.
link |
They put a Russian speaker for everything he says,
link |
who's much harsher.
link |
He speaks Russian in a much harsher manner
link |
than actually Putin does.
link |
On my interview, I left him in his original language
link |
with translator, and I think that's important
link |
because he expresses himself very clearly and calmly.
link |
When you listen to the American broadcast,
link |
it's a belligerent person who looks like
link |
he's about to bang his shoe on the table.
link |
And secondly, the questions are highly aggressive
link |
from the beginning.
link |
There's no sense of rapport, there's no sense of,
link |
well, it's why, Mr. Putin, did you poison this person?
link |
Why, Mr. Putin, did you kill this person?
link |
Why are you a murderer?
link |
I mean, it's blunt, blunt negative television.
link |
Yeah, it's not just aggressive.
link |
So I obviously speak Russian,
link |
so I get to appreciate both the original and the translation.
link |
And it's not just aggressive, it's very shallow.
link |
They're not looking to understand.
link |
To me, aggression is okay if that's the way
link |
you wanna approach it, but it should be,
link |
there should be underlying kind of empathy
link |
for another human being in order to be able to understand.
link |
And so some of the worst interviews I've ever listened to
link |
is by American press of Vladimir Putin.
link |
So NBC and all those kinds of organizations,
link |
it's very painful to watch.
link |
And you saw the reception to the Putin interviews
link |
in America was hostile without seeing it.
link |
So many people criticized my series
link |
without having seen it.
link |
Even, I went on a show, a television show
link |
with this famous coal bearer.
link |
You know, he's very famous in America.
link |
And I was shocked on the show to find out
link |
that he hadn't seen anything of the four hours.
link |
He was just attacking Putin.
link |
And he threw me, I was complicit,
link |
therefore I was a Putin supporter.
link |
And the show was a disaster.
link |
It's one of my worst television shows.
link |
I actually, I had to just shut up and get off the air.
link |
I mean, at some point, it was embarrassing.
link |
Because the audience, too, was clapping for Kobe
link |
on anything he said.
link |
Well, as an interviewer in that situation,
link |
because between you and Vladimir Putin,
link |
there was camaraderie, there was joking, there was...
link |
Are you worried, do you put that into the calculation
link |
when you're making a film with somebody
link |
that could be lying to you, that could be evil?
link |
When you talk about Castro, you talk about,
link |
so are you worried about how charisma of a man
link |
across the table from you can...
link |
Do I take that into account?
link |
I absolutely take that into account.
link |
I mean, doing Castro, he's a wonderful speaker,
link |
he's charismatic, so is Chavez.
link |
Look at those interviews.
link |
I took it into account.
link |
But Putin doesn't play that game.
link |
He doesn't charm you, he doesn't try to overwhelm you
link |
with his bon ami at all.
link |
He just says, okay, ask your question,
link |
I'll give you my answer straight.
link |
Here it is, and he analyzes it.
link |
This is the history of NATO,
link |
this is the history of our relationship
link |
with the United States.
link |
How many times have we tried to talk to them
link |
about such and such and such and such,
link |
and each time, we get nowhere.
link |
In fact, it's a very...
link |
I would like to get along with the United States so much,
link |
he's saying it so clearly in all his words.
link |
So to play devil's advocate.
link |
But he's not making a big deal about it.
link |
But there is a charisma in the calmness.
link |
So let's just calm everything down, it's simple facts.
link |
That you can call, so there's like the Hitler thing,
link |
which is screaming, being very loud, charismatic,
link |
strong message and so on.
link |
And then there's a Putin style,
link |
I'm not comparing those two,
link |
there's the Putin style communication of calmness.
link |
And that, at least to me, my personality,
link |
that can be very captivating,
link |
is bringing everything down, the facts are simple.
link |
But then when you say the facts are simple,
link |
you can now start lying.
link |
And you don't know what's true and what's lies.
link |
It behooves you to do some research.
link |
And frankly, when it comes to research,
link |
you're gonna have a problem.
link |
Because if you go to the Americanized versions
link |
of Russian history, you're gonna run into a problem.
link |
And that includes even Wikipedia.
link |
They will tell you things
link |
that are just not factually supported.
link |
So it was a problem in terms of,
link |
if you read all the books in the American library
link |
about Putin, there's nothing positive about it.
link |
They're awful, they're awful.
link |
And a lot of them, I had a good relationship
link |
with Professor Stephen Cohen,
link |
who's the most, I think, one of the most informed men
link |
on Russia, he'd done a lot of research all his life.
link |
And knew Gorbachev very well.
link |
And was very analytical about all these situations
link |
that happened before his death in 2019.
link |
I'm not quite sure when Stephen died,
link |
but I knew him well.
link |
And he gave me the best information I could get.
link |
I would go to Stephen and I'd say,
link |
I'm confused here, tell me the history
link |
of this accusation of poisoning against this person
link |
And he'd explain it to me in, I think,
link |
the clearest ways that I understood.
link |
And he said to me once, he said,
link |
most of these people who go to Russia
link |
and write this stuff about Putin are going off internet.
link |
The internet has really been a source
link |
of a lot of fractured facts here.
link |
He said, pure analysis.
link |
You have to go back to the texts,
link |
all the documents, and to really fully understand.
link |
But he spoke Russian.
link |
And his wife and him, Katerina Vanhoovle,
link |
who's an editor, publisher of The Nation magazine,
link |
would go to Russia several times a year
link |
and talk to their friend Gorbachev.
link |
And Gorbachev's an interesting character.
link |
I talked to him, interviewed him,
link |
not interviewed him, but talked to him at length,
link |
and I like him very much.
link |
And I saw the divide, as you saw in the Putin interviews,
link |
between Gorbachev and Putin.
link |
Early on in the interviews, you sense Putin
link |
doesn't particularly care for Gorbachev
link |
because in his point of view,
link |
he screwed up the administration of Russia
link |
and is responsible for so much of the disaster
link |
of leaving all those people outside the Soviet Union.
link |
So these are problems that continue into the future.
link |
But they see each other at the,
link |
or he knows he's there at the May Day Parade, we filmed,
link |
and his attitude is funny, it's very human.
link |
He says, you know, he's welcome, he's got his pension,
link |
he's a pensioneer, he's done his duty.
link |
There's no animus towards him.
link |
Even when Gorbachev, in the early days,
link |
as you remember, criticized for his manners in terms
link |
of democracy, but I don't know that that becomes a quarrel.
link |
But frankly, by the end of the situation,
link |
it's very clear that Gorbachev has now moved closer
link |
and closer to the, says that Russia is now
link |
really under attack.
link |
This is, he sees where the United States
link |
has made a concerted effort to undermine Putin.
link |
And he's repeated this several times about Ukraine.
link |
I think you've seen what he said.
link |
And Gorbachev is, we have no respect for Gorbachev even,
link |
even at this juncture.
link |
When can you see Gorbachev's ideas printed
link |
in most American newspapers?
link |
Very rarely, very rarely, and recently not at all.
link |
So Gorbachev, who was our hero back in,
link |
an American hero back in the 1980s,
link |
has now been condemned to the garbage can,
link |
so to speak, of history.
link |
Well, in this complicated geopolitical picture
link |
you just outlined, can we talk about
link |
the recent invasion of Ukraine?
link |
So you wrote on Facebook a pretty eloquent analysis,
link |
I think on March 3rd.
link |
Let me just read a small section of that,
link |
just to give context, and maybe we can talk
link |
a little bit more about both Russia and the man Putin.
link |
You wrote, although the United States
link |
has many wars of aggression on its conscience,
link |
it doesn't justify Mr. Putin's aggression in Ukraine.
link |
A dozen wrongs don't make a right.
link |
Russia was wrong to invade.
link |
It has made too many mistakes.
link |
One, underestimating Ukraine resistance.
link |
Two, overestimating the military ability
link |
to achieve its objective.
link |
Three, underestimating Europe's reaction,
link |
especially Germany, upping its military contribution
link |
to NATO, which they've resisted for some 20 years.
link |
Even Switzerland has joined the cause.
link |
Russia will be more isolated than ever from the West.
link |
Four, underestimating the enhanced power of NATO,
link |
which will now put more pressure on Russia's borders.
link |
Five, probably putting Ukraine into NATO.
link |
Six, underestimating the damage to its own economy,
link |
and certainly creating more internal resistance
link |
Seven, creating a major readjustment of power
link |
in its oligarch class.
link |
Eight, putting cluster and vacuum bombs into play.
link |
Nine, and underestimating the power
link |
of social media worldwide.
link |
And you go on for a while giving a much broader picture
link |
of the history and the geopolitics of all of this.
link |
So now, a little bit later, two months later,
link |
what are your thoughts about the invasion of Ukraine?
link |
Well, it's very hard to be honest in this regard
link |
because the West has brought down a curtain here
link |
and anyone who questions the invasion of Ukraine
link |
and its consequences is an enemy of the people.
link |
It's become so difficult.
link |
I've never seen in my lifetime ever such a wall
link |
of propaganda as I've seen in the West.
link |
And that includes France too
link |
because I was there recently and England.
link |
England is of course really vociferous.
link |
It's shocking to me how quickly Europe moved
link |
in this direction and that includes Germany.
link |
I have German friends who express to me their shock
link |
I have Italian friends, same thing.
link |
And Italy of course has been perhaps the most understanding
link |
and compassionate of countries.
link |
So it's quite evident that there's a united,
link |
and this attests to the power of the United States.
link |
And of course you have Finland and Svinland
link |
which has generally been reasonable jumping in,
link |
talking about joining NATO and Sweden too.
link |
Generally there's been some more restraint in Europe.
link |
That's what surprised me the most, Europe.
link |
How quickly they fell into this NATO basket
link |
which is very dangerous for Europe, very dangerous.
link |
This goes back to my idea what I was saying earlier
link |
about sovereignty.
link |
These countries don't really give me a sense
link |
that they have sovereignty over their own countries.
link |
They don't feel, to me I'm obviously intuition here
link |
is working, I just don't feel that they have freedom
link |
to say what they really think and they're scared to say it.
link |
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003,
link |
I remember with great in a sense satisfaction
link |
that at least France, Chirac who I had not really
link |
known much about, stood up and said the United States
link |
we're not gonna join you in this expedition,
link |
basically into madness.
link |
Schroeder in Germany, same thing.
link |
Of course Putin condemned the invasion
link |
and Putin had been an ally of the United States
link |
since 9 11 if you remember correctly.
link |
And had called Bush and they were getting along.
link |
So even Putin said I won't go, don't go into Iraq.
link |
This is not the solution.
link |
He didn't oppose Afghanistan but he opposed Iraq.
link |
So Chirac and Schroeder stood for the old Europe.
link |
I remember de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle,
link |
he was independent of the United States.
link |
Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO
link |
because he saw the dangers of NATO,
link |
which is to say you have to fight an American war.
link |
When they say and they put nuclear weapons
link |
on your territory in England and France
link |
and Italy and Germany, when they do that,
link |
you're hitched to this superpower
link |
and you have no say in what they're gonna do.
link |
If they declare war and they use your territory,
link |
you're gonna be involved in a major conflict.
link |
I'm talking about sovereignty.
link |
Where is that sovereignty?
link |
They don't have it.
link |
And that has influenced their mindset for years now.
link |
Since 1940, well de Gaulle was the 60s.
link |
He actually reversed the whole flow
link |
and I think it was Sarkozy who put France
link |
back into NATO and now it's Macron.
link |
I hope because he was talking to Putin
link |
would at least have an independent viewpoint
link |
that could be helpful here, so he rolled it up.
link |
He may have told Putin something else,
link |
but within days he had rolled it up
link |
and gone along with the United States position,
link |
which was enforced by the United States in a very fierce way.
link |
The propaganda, as I say, I don't know how much time
link |
you spend in America, but it was vicious
link |
and everything was anti Russian.
link |
Russia were killing all these people,
link |
were shooting down civilians,
link |
although there was no proof of it.
link |
There was just, these are the accidents of war,
link |
but all of a sudden it was a campaign of criminality
link |
and they were talking about bringing Putin
link |
into war crime trial.
link |
Well, why didn't they talk like that when Iraq was going on
link |
and Bush was killing far more people?
link |
Or for that matter, why were they not talking
link |
about the killings in Donbass and Lugansk
link |
during that 2014 to 2022 period?
link |
That is what, it's a crime.
link |
There were so many people that were killed,
link |
many of them innocent, many of them innocent.
link |
What would be the way for Vladimir Putin
link |
to stop the killing in Donbass
link |
without the invasion of Ukraine?
link |
That's a very good question and I've asked that
link |
several times and I don't have the,
link |
I have not talked to him since about two years now.
link |
It's a very good question.
link |
What's the mistakes, what the human mistakes
link |
and the leadership mistakes made by Vladimir Putin?
link |
It's a very good question.
link |
You see, what the American press has not said
link |
and the Western press has not said is that on February 24,
link |
was it, that was, on that day when they invaded,
link |
the day before, if you check the logs
link |
of the European organization that was supervising,
link |
was in the field in Ukraine.
link |
These are neutral observers.
link |
They were seeing heavier and heavier artillery fire
link |
going into Donbass from the Ukrainian side.
link |
So they had, apparently, Ukraine had 110,000 troops
link |
They were about to invade Donbass, that was the plan.
link |
That's what I think.
link |
Russia, because of the buildup on the border of Donbass,
link |
brought 130, they say 130,000 troops
link |
to the area near Donbass, right?
link |
So you have buildup of forces on both sides,
link |
but you wouldn't know that from reading the press
link |
You'd believe that the Russians suddenly put all these men
link |
into the situation with the idea of invading Ukraine,
link |
not only Donbass, but invading all of Ukraine
link |
and getting rid of the, decapitating the government there,
link |
which is all assumption.
link |
We don't know what they would intend it to do.
link |
But you, at the time, as in a lot of people,
link |
thought that all the talk of the invasion,
link |
Russian invasion of Ukraine, is just propaganda.
link |
It's not gonna happen.
link |
It's very unlikely to happen.
link |
I think many of us thought that the United States
link |
is building this up into an invasion.
link |
In other words, that is the nature of false flag operations,
link |
when you create this propaganda.
link |
They are gonna invade.
link |
They are gonna invade.
link |
And then, when they invaded, the United States
link |
was completely ready, and all their allies
link |
were completely ready for the invasion, correct?
link |
So why did Putin do that?
link |
He fell into this, theoretically, into this trap
link |
set by the United States.
link |
Here you're telling all your allies across the board
link |
they're gonna invade.
link |
Why do you think he did it?
link |
So here, is it madness, or is it common
link |
strategic calculation, perhaps?
link |
This one I cannot answer you faithfully,
link |
because, first of all, we don't know what he was told.
link |
If he was indeed getting the right intelligence estimates,
link |
from what I said earlier in that essay I wrote,
link |
you would think he was not well informed, perhaps,
link |
about the degree of cooperation he would get
link |
from the Ukrainian Russians in Ukraine.
link |
That would be one factor, that he wasn't,
link |
he didn't assess the operation correctly.
link |
Mr. Putin has had this cancer, and I think he's licked it,
link |
but he's also been isolated because of COVID.
link |
And some people would argue that the isolation
link |
from normal activity, which he was meeting people
link |
face to face, but all of a sudden he was meeting people
link |
across the table 100 yards away, or whatever,
link |
10 yards away, it was very hard.
link |
Perhaps he lost touch with, contact with people.
link |
So it's not just power, it's the very simple fact
link |
that you're just distant from humans.
link |
As I say, I'm speculating, I don't know.
link |
I see that, and I also, perhaps he thought in his mind
link |
that there would be a faster resolution
link |
that the Ukrainian, because the evidence had been
link |
that the Ukrainian Russians, the Ukrainian army
link |
had folded so many times, and that they were only backed up
link |
and they were stiffened by the resistance
link |
of the Nazi oriented Azov battalions.
link |
That was a factor, of course.
link |
And that is a big factor for the Russians
link |
because these people are very tough, they rush.
link |
See, what people don't understand is that Ukraine,
link |
since 2014, has been a terror state.
link |
They've been run, anytime a Ukrainian has expressed
link |
any understanding of the Russian Ukrainian position,
link |
they've been threatened by the state.
link |
From 2014 to 2022, there's been a set of hideous murders
link |
that people don't even know about in the West.
link |
Journalists, people who speak out, liberals,
link |
people who, I interviewed Viktor Medvedev,
link |
who they make out to be some kind of horrible person,
link |
but Medvedev was a very important figure
link |
in the administration of Khushma,
link |
the first Ukrainian Prime Minister in the 1990s,
link |
and he did a great job on the economy.
link |
He was a very thoughtful man.
link |
If you'll see my interview, it's called Ukraine Revealed.
link |
He's very thoughtful about the future of Ukraine.
link |
He doesn't want to go back and join Russia.
link |
He wants it to be an independent country.
link |
Ukraine is independent, and he wants it to be
link |
a functioning economic democracy, more or less,
link |
a democracy, if you can get that,
link |
that exists in a neutral state,
link |
a neutral state, which Ukraine used to be before 2014.
link |
It was neutral from 1991 to 2014, neutral, very important.
link |
Under Poroshenko, it just immediately went
link |
into an anti Soviet Cold War position
link |
as an ally of the United States,
link |
and my point was that it was a very dangerous place
link |
People were being killed, death squads were out there.
link |
Medvedev, they stripped him of his television stations
link |
very suddenly, this is Zelensky, the new president.
link |
Zelensky was elected on a peace platform, remember that.
link |
70% of the country was for him to make peace with Russia.
link |
Did he ever even try to make peace with Russia?
link |
Did he attend any of the Minsk Two agreements?
link |
Did he visit, did he pay any attention to the Minsk?
link |
Did he pay attention to Putin?
link |
Did he go to Russia?
link |
The moment he got into office, I'm convinced
link |
that the militant sector of the right sector parties
link |
of Ukraine let him know that you will not make a deal
link |
with Russia, there'll be no concessions to Russia.
link |
This is very dangerous.
link |
This is where this attitude that's very, very hostile
link |
to Russia has hurt us.
link |
The whole world is being hurt by this,
link |
and no one calls them out.
link |
No one calls them out.
link |
Zelensky backed off from his platform
link |
as running for president, and as president,
link |
has been ineffective, did nothing to promote it.
link |
On the contrary, went the other way,
link |
and seemed to support the Ukrainian aggression.
link |
Well, he found his support in this war.
link |
You've revealed through your work some of the most honest
link |
and dark aspects of war.
link |
Nevertheless, this is a war,
link |
and there's a humanitarian crisis.
link |
Millions of people, refugees, escape in Ukraine.
link |
What do you think about the human cost of this war,
link |
initiated by whoever, just as you write,
link |
whatever the context, whatever NATO, whatever pressure,
link |
as you wrote, Russia was wrong to invade.
link |
Okay, yeah, let's get back to that original question.
link |
You said, what was he thinking at that time?
link |
We never answered that.
link |
Now, by the way, among those people
link |
who've been ruined by this war,
link |
you have to include the 2014 to 2022 Ukrainian Russians.
link |
14,000 were killed, not necessarily by,
link |
some of them by maybe accident and this and that,
link |
but certainly a large number of that
link |
is responsible to the Ukrainian military
link |
and the Nazi related battalions
link |
who have done a good job of death squatting that whole area.
link |
And remember, I did a film about Salvador.
link |
I know a little bit about death squads and how they work,
link |
and I know about paramilitaries,
link |
because in South America, they're all over the place.
link |
America supports, hates Venezuela,
link |
goes on about Venezuela,
link |
but do they tell you anything about Colombia,
link |
its next door neighbor?
link |
Colombia for years has been plagued by paramilitaries
link |
that are right wing, and the United States has said,
link |
nothing about them except occasionally,
link |
there's a newspaper report now.
link |
So this support of death squads by the United States
link |
is all over the world.
link |
It's not just in South America and Central America
link |
where we see plenty of evidence of it.
link |
It's here too, and this is what's horrible
link |
about this whole thing, this hypocrisy of America
link |
that they can support such evil, such evil.
link |
Now, going back to your larger question about,
link |
yeah, it's a terrible refugee disaster,
link |
but again, we have to get the numbers.
link |
Let's get the numbers and get the evidence,
link |
because I would ask you, I'm not sure at this point
link |
whether more civilians were killed before 2022 in Donbass
link |
than have been killed in this latest.
link |
So we can't talk about this without,
link |
we can't talk about the invasion of Ukraine
link |
without considering the full war
link |
between Russia and Ukraine since 2014.
link |
That's correct, absolutely,
link |
and take the toll on both sides,
link |
and you might be surprised by the result.
link |
I think the Russian military, of course, I'm not there,
link |
and I'm not, this is speculation.
link |
The Russian military has slowed down,
link |
and part of that reason
link |
is not to keep the civilian corridors open,
link |
and I think the Ukrainian military
link |
has made it more difficult on purpose,
link |
especially some of these battalions
link |
that are death squad battalions have gone out of their way
link |
to keep the civilians locked into these cities in danger
link |
because it's in their interest to do so.
link |
So there's no reason why Ukrainian military,
link |
who have killed Ukrainian civilians for years,
link |
would change their policies.
link |
They would have no compunctions about wiping out,
link |
for example, people with white armbands in Bukha.
link |
Okay, as to what Putin was thinking at the time,
link |
I wondered this, and I still do.
link |
I said, okay, so Putin can say,
link |
let's say the Ukrainian government
link |
wants to now invade Donbass.
link |
This is on February 23, and they have artillery,
link |
they're peppering the whole place.
link |
They're gonna go in, and they're gonna get Donbass back.
link |
And you have Russian separatists,
link |
who are Russian Ukrainians who are on,
link |
who are gonna fight.
link |
How far do you go in supporting them?
link |
Can Russia at this point say, well, we can't help you.
link |
You have to get along, you have to somehow,
link |
you have to be absorbed by the Kiev,
link |
you're gonna be absorbed by them,
link |
and they're not gonna give you autonomy,
link |
and you have to live with them,
link |
and there's gonna be a price to pay.
link |
You could do that, and you could also say,
link |
well, we open our borders to Donbass.
link |
You can come in to our country, you can leave,
link |
and we will help you to resettle.
link |
And that would be a reasonable approach.
link |
So you take it to the next stage, as Putin's thinking.
link |
You take it to the next stage.
link |
You stall, it's harder for your,
link |
of course, there's this pressure on Putin
link |
from inside his own government to say,
link |
what are you gonna do?
link |
I mean, you can't do this,
link |
there's a lot of nationalists in Russia.
link |
They would certainly bring, it would be to his,
link |
they'd say Putin is weak, and that's the biggest rap
link |
you can ever give a Russian leader,
link |
is you're weak, you can't get anything done.
link |
So there would have been some damage,
link |
but let's say he goes with that, and he says,
link |
okay, we know what the United States intention is.
link |
It's to get rid of me, regime change,
link |
and to get another Yeltsin in.
link |
That's what they want.
link |
And they will go to any ends,
link |
they will destroy Ukraine if necessary,
link |
but they want regime change in Russia.
link |
And then after they do that, of course,
link |
they'll go after China,
link |
but that's the ultimate policy of the United States.
link |
This is a country that has no compunctions
link |
about going all the way,
link |
and it will use hypocrisy and all the news propaganda
link |
in the world to get what it wants.
link |
This is the equivalent, frankly,
link |
of Germany's goals in World War II, world domination.
link |
There's no question in my mind,
link |
but we're going about it in our way
link |
as opposed to Hitler's way.
link |
So just to finish your thought, where do they go?
link |
Okay, let's say they take, Ukraine takes back Donbas.
link |
Let's say people get killed in large quantities.
link |
So we now to the next stage,
link |
we're finished with the Minsk II agreements
link |
that were never adhered to.
link |
So what does Russia do?
link |
They wait for the next aggression,
link |
which is gonna come in one form or another.
link |
Perhaps in Georgia, I don't know what happened,
link |
what the US is thinking,
link |
but the US cannot say Russia has done anything.
link |
They have not used violence to stop Donbas
link |
from belonging back to Ukraine, right?
link |
So you're in a new setup now.
link |
It's a whole thing rearranges.
link |
Now you have, but you still have nuclear weapons,
link |
and you still have a Russian nuclear weapons,
link |
and they're serious weapons.
link |
They're very well developed, crude,
link |
but not as refined as the American nuclear force,
link |
That becomes another game.
link |
Then you open another chess board,
link |
and you still haven't been condemned.
link |
The sanctions haven't been imposed.
link |
That's a new, it's a new game.
link |
Could he have done, could he have lived with that?
link |
That's the question I ask myself.
link |
So you see ultimately Ukraine today
link |
as a battleground for the proxy war
link |
between Russia and the United States.
link |
The United States would have then NATOized Ukraine,
link |
or certainly put more weapons in.
link |
The United States has already done a lot in Ukraine
link |
with intelligence, with training advisors.
link |
The intelligence aspect of the Ukrainian army
link |
has been raised enormously by the United States contribution.
link |
Is it possible for you to steal man,
link |
to play devil's advocate against yourself,
link |
and say that Vladimir Zelensky
link |
is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation?
link |
And in a way against Russia,
link |
but also against the United States,
link |
it just happens that for now, the United States
link |
But ultimately, the man, the leader,
link |
is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation.
link |
I would think, he thinks so.
link |
Yes, and he could say that.
link |
But he's not acknowledging that the sovereignty
link |
of his nation was stolen in 2014
link |
with the coup d'tat that brought this right sector
link |
into power, and they have controlled the country since then.
link |
It's thuggery, what they've done.
link |
The Medvedev case is a case in point.
link |
They just take what they need.
link |
They go to a house, and they have a,
link |
how many people have been killed?
link |
Serious people, journalists killed by these battalions.
link |
That's what people don't realize.
link |
In other words, you can't speak out.
link |
A person like me would have been on the death list
link |
There's no opposition to Zelensky,
link |
so he doesn't have a real sovereignty.
link |
It was a stolen sovereignty.
link |
Do you think President Zelensky would accept
link |
an interview with you today?
link |
Actually, since I made Ukraine on Fire,
link |
a documentary which perhaps you've seen,
link |
which records the incidents of 2014
link |
and the Maidan demonstrations,
link |
and shows you the dishonesty behind it,
link |
no, I think that they've been very negative,
link |
and they would kill me if I was in Ukraine.
link |
I mean, they don't have any,
link |
these people are very tough.
link |
These are as rough as they come, in my opinion,
link |
and I've seen rough in my life.
link |
I mean, these guys are not playing fair at all.
link |
These are death squads.
link |
No, I don't think, and Zelensky would have
link |
nothing to do with it, but of course,
link |
it would be dangerous for me,
link |
and they've been very hostile in their policies
link |
to any Ukrainians abroad who are also threatened.
link |
In other words, you could be in Paris,
link |
but if you speak out too much,
link |
I think Ukrainians know that they're gonna be targeted,
link |
and I think that's part of the reason they don't talk.
link |
A lot of them, you have to take the anti Russian line,
link |
but I think a lot of them are divided.
link |
So you think you would be killed,
link |
and Zelensky wouldn't even know about it, so there is?
link |
Well, I don't think, if I was killed certainly abroad,
link |
no, they wouldn't kill me abroad.
link |
I think they'd figure out a way.
link |
No, no, no, no, if you traveled to Ukraine, I mean.
link |
I wouldn't get in, I wouldn't get in,
link |
except through Donbass, I'd come through.
link |
There are some Americans in Donbass
link |
who are reporting on the war there,
link |
and I read their reports, actually.
link |
They're pretty interesting,
link |
because they show you the cruelty of what's going on,
link |
but never mentioned in the West, never.
link |
That's what's so strange about this.
link |
This is a modern world that we're living in,
link |
and yet this information is not coming out
link |
to the mass of the people,
link |
and on the contrary, the United States has closed down
link |
all the information centers that are possible
link |
to alternative news getting to the American people.
link |
They've seriously made an effort,
link |
and the BBC, English, and France.
link |
I was shocked when France closed RT down,
link |
because RT is actually pretty good.
link |
Yes, they may, it's called, there are distortions,
link |
but you know as well as I do, because you hear,
link |
you speak that RT has done a very brave job
link |
of putting correspondents into the field
link |
in very dangerous positions,
link |
and they've gotten great footage
link |
of some of the violence that's going on.
link |
Well, given the wall of propaganda in the West,
link |
I also see the wall of propaganda in Russia,
link |
the wall of propaganda in China,
link |
the wall of propaganda in India.
link |
What do we do with these walls of propaganda?
link |
Yes, let's talk about Russia,
link |
because you would know more about it,
link |
but my last experience there, newspapers,
link |
it was more interesting, put it this way,
link |
when I went to Venezuela, the United States was saying
link |
back then that Chavez controlled the press.
link |
I get to Venezuela, and there's nothing but criticism
link |
of Chavez in the press.
link |
It was owned by the oligarchs of Venezuela,
link |
and who hated him, so it was across the board.
link |
That's why Chavez opened the state television,
link |
spent more money on it, and advertised his point of view
link |
through state television.
link |
But in Russia, there is, what I saw was criticism.
link |
I met with a publisher who got the Nobel Prize
link |
of that famous newspaper, and his point of view
link |
at that time when I spoke to him a few years ago
link |
was we're operating, there is criticism of him,
link |
but you can't call for the overthrow of the government,
link |
nor in Venezuela, nor in the United States for that matter.
link |
If you call for the overthrow of the government
link |
of the United States, you're gonna be in deep trouble.
link |
Well, all right, so to push back on that,
link |
it's interesting, it's so interesting,
link |
because we mentioned Elon Musk,
link |
and there's a way that people sound when they speak freely.
link |
When I speak to, I have family in Ukraine,
link |
I have family in Russia.
link |
When I speak to people in Russia,
link |
let's put my family aside,
link |
when I speak to people in Russia,
link |
I think there's fear.
link |
I think they don't,
link |
sometimes when you call for the overthrow of government,
link |
that's important, not because you necessarily believe
link |
for the overthrow of the government,
link |
but you just need to test the power centers
link |
and make sure they're responsive to the people.
link |
And I feel like there's a mix of fear and apathy
link |
that has a different texture than it does
link |
in the United States.
link |
That worries me, because I would like to see
link |
the flourishing of a people in all places.
link |
Well, as I said, my impression was that there's far more
link |
freedom in the press than was pictured by the West,
link |
and that means different points of view,
link |
because the Russians are always arguing with themselves.
link |
I've never seen a country that's so contentious.
link |
There's more intellectuals in Moscow and the cities
link |
than you can believe, and you know the Russian people there.
link |
They've been fighting government for years,
link |
back from the 1870s, it was czarist times,
link |
they're always plotting against the government,
link |
and the intelligentsia has known through history
link |
as being contentious and anti government in many ways.
link |
And we see the same thing,
link |
educated people turning against Russia.
link |
I don't appreciate those people,
link |
because I think they're very spoiled,
link |
and they don't understand some of the stuff
link |
that's going on in the West.
link |
But we have a lot of Russians in Europe and America
link |
that attack Russia and sometimes don't understand
link |
that they are under pressure from the United States,
link |
and they don't understand the size of the pressure.
link |
And that's why Putin connects with the people,
link |
because he represents the common,
link |
more the common man who's saying to you,
link |
your interests are threatened, Russia is threatened.
link |
We are representing only the interests of Russia,
link |
not, we're not an empire, we're not gonna expand.
link |
He has no empire intentions,
link |
although the West paints it as empire.
link |
I see no evidence of it.
link |
Why didn't he do something in all these years?
link |
Nothing, he did nothing except defend the country
link |
in Georgia and in Chechnya.
link |
So the imperialist imperative is coming more
link |
It's the imperialist, it's the imperialist agenda.
link |
Going back to, I'm sorry, where we left our discussion off,
link |
I mean, I was gonna go on with America
link |
not only being censored, closed down now, closed down.
link |
And you say it's not fear, well, it is fear.
link |
I am scared, because if you get your Facebook page
link |
suspended or your YouTube, your Twitter account thrown off,
link |
a lot of good people are getting there, thrown off.
link |
You can't speak out, it affects your business.
link |
It goes back to the 1950s when my father's world,
link |
when you could not express any sympathy for a Soviet Union
link |
without endangering your job,
link |
without basically being not trusted.
link |
You had to be part of the program to get along, to go along.
link |
Same thing when the United Kingdom,
link |
I mean, for all their talk, this Boris Johnson is an idiot.
link |
But all their talk about, do you remember their policies
link |
with the IRA in Ireland when Ireland was threatening them?
link |
They cut off the IRA completely.
link |
Gerry Adams, who was a wonderful guy, I met him,
link |
was not allowed to even be heard in Britain
link |
during certain years.
link |
In France, all constantly through the Algerian War,
link |
the Algerians were not allowed to be heard.
link |
The Algerian War for Independence divided France greatly.
link |
You could not even show Paths of Glory,
link |
World War I film in France for, I don't know, 20 years
link |
after it came out.
link |
Censorship is a way of life
link |
when democracies also feel threatened.
link |
They are much more fragile than they pretend to be.
link |
A healthy democracy would take all the criticism
link |
in the world and shrug it off and say,
link |
okay, that's what's good about our country.
link |
Well, I'd like to see that in America.
link |
There are times that it's been like that,
link |
but it's so scary now.
link |
So it is scary, that's what I was trying to say.
link |
It's not unscary to me.
link |
In China, I would say to you, yes, it's much scarier to me
link |
because there is the internet wall that they cut off,
link |
and I got into problems in China too
link |
because I said something years ago
link |
about you have to discover your own history.
link |
You have to be honest about Mao.
link |
You have to go back and let's make a movie about Mao.
link |
That upset them and show his negatives.
link |
So China has been much more sensitive than Russia
link |
about criticism, much more.
link |
And it is a source of problems, but on the other hand,
link |
China has a lot of grievances,
link |
a lot going back to the 19th century
link |
and the British imperialism of that era
link |
and the American imperialism.
link |
If you could talk to Vladimir Putin once again now,
link |
what kind of things would you talk about here?
link |
What kind of questions would you ask?
link |
Huh, well, one thing I would certainly ask
link |
is what you were thinking on February 23,
link |
and I would ask him to reply to my question
link |
about what if you took this to phase two.
link |
You surrendered in Donbass.
link |
You had no ego about it.
link |
You just surrendered.
link |
It's in your interest to your country,
link |
and you invited all the refugees from Donbass into Russia
link |
as much as they can.
link |
What would you do now?
link |
What's the US next move in your opinion?
link |
How are you gonna, okay, where are we gonna go?
link |
That would be the key question because it's,
link |
but he didn't go that way.
link |
He chose to take the sanctions and to go this way.
link |
Why he did that is a key question for our time.
link |
Perhaps it was a mistake.
link |
Perhaps it was his judgment.
link |
Perhaps, as I said, but I don't,
link |
knowing the man I did, I don't think so.
link |
I think it was calculated.
link |
Now this is projection and speculation,
link |
but there's something different about him
link |
in the past several months.
link |
It could be the COVID thing,
link |
the isolation that you mentioned.
link |
I listen to a lot of interviews and speeches in Russian,
link |
and there's something about power over time
link |
that can change you, that can isolate you.
link |
Well, when I was there,
link |
no, he'd been in office for already 15 years.
link |
He didn't misuse it in my opinion.
link |
I saw him go on television and talk to his fellows
link |
the same way he always talked to them.
link |
He grew in intelligence and knowledge
link |
because he had dealings with the whole world.
link |
Now people had come to him.
link |
He was very well known in Africa and Middle East,
link |
certainly Syria, and I just never saw misuse of his power.
link |
I saw humility in him, actually.
link |
So perhaps there was a calculation and he calculated wrong
link |
in terms of what happens if he doesn't invade.
link |
Perhaps there was a calculation,
link |
perhaps he had a calm and clear mind,
link |
and he calculated wrong.
link |
Well, he also made the point that he,
link |
the talk of Zelensky saying,
link |
well, nuclear weapons were gonna come into Ukraine.
link |
There was talk about that right before the invasion too,
link |
and certainly that would have set off alarms.
link |
You know, the United States is already kind of doing that
link |
by not only putting its intelligence
link |
and its heavy weaponry into Ukraine,
link |
but you've got to deal with the question,
link |
the next question that comes up,
link |
the most immediate question is,
link |
is the United States gonna start?
link |
And I'm saying this is good.
link |
They're making a lot of noise in United States press
link |
about Russia using nuclear weapons and chemical weapons.
link |
That's a lot of noise.
link |
Again, going back to my analogy,
link |
when the United States starts that,
link |
it starts the conversation going.
link |
It's in the interest of the United States
link |
for Russia to be pinned with any kind of chemical
link |
or nuclear incident.
link |
Except, for example, it'd be very, not simple,
link |
but it would be possible to explode a nuclear device
link |
in Donbass and kill thousands of people.
link |
And we would not know right away who did it,
link |
but of course the blame would go right to Russia,
link |
right to Russia, even if it didn't make sense,
link |
if there was no motivation for it.
link |
It would just be blamed on Russia.
link |
The United States might well be the one
link |
who does that false flag operation.
link |
It would not be beyond them.
link |
It would be a very dramatic solution
link |
to sealing this war off as a major victory
link |
for the United States.
link |
That's terrifying.
link |
No, but it can happen.
link |
A one kiloton device, low yield, it's possible.
link |
So when you walk across that line,
link |
you can potentially never walk back.
link |
Well, I think the United States is calculating
link |
that it's a dangerous, yes, I agree,
link |
but I think the neoconservative arrogance is such
link |
that they really believe they can push their advantage
link |
to the max now because of all these propaganda successes
link |
The Ukrainian army could be wiped out for all we know.
link |
There's all this leftists or neo, Nazi brigades,
link |
but they're being advised very well by US
link |
and they're sending the weapons in,
link |
are huge amounts of weapons.
link |
What about American budget?
link |
No one talks about how much money we're giving to Ukraine.
link |
It's a billion dollars already in weaponry
link |
and not most of it just poured in.
link |
What about, you know, the Russian budget is,
link |
defense budget is 60 some billion dollars a year.
link |
It's nothing compared to the United States, 1 15th of it.
link |
But yet we've put so much weaponry into Ukraine.
link |
The money we've spent on Ukraine is equivalent almost
link |
to what we spent on COVID in our own country.
link |
It's astounding the distortion of our priorities.
link |
There's also chemical.
link |
Don't forget chemical is probably the easier way to go.
link |
But in Syria, there was far too many incidents of America
link |
in its quest to demonize Assad and the Russians
link |
of all these chemical attacks that were happening
link |
that they were vowing came from Russia.
link |
And in spite of the fact that Russia just pulled out of the,
link |
signed the agreement on chemical arms
link |
and apparently destroyed its stock several years ago,
link |
it's strange that the strangest incidents happened in Syria.
link |
You go back to them, trace every one,
link |
good journalism was done.
link |
The White Helmets got a lot of fame,
link |
but they were corrupted.
link |
And many good journalists tried to point out
link |
the inconsistencies in the American accusations.
link |
Robert Parry among them,
link |
who was one of my mentors at Consortium Press.
link |
A lot of good, you'd have to go back,
link |
but trace each, like you would trace each time
link |
they made an accusation against Putin of murder.
link |
You need that same kind of Sherlock Holmes intensity,
link |
investigation, and they don't do it
link |
because the United Nations or the chemical,
link |
not the United Nations as much as the chemical people,
link |
the organization has been tampered with.
link |
If you remember correctly, there was accusations
link |
that the chemical investigative unit,
link |
I don't know the name of it, was tampered with.
link |
And people quit, people who were working on that commission
link |
quit and said that this is not legit.
link |
So very interesting, that Syria story is wacko.
link |
So the United States is willing
link |
to use chemical in Syria freely.
link |
It did it three, four times.
link |
If you remember correctly, Trump was challenged
link |
that he did not attack after a chemical incident in Syria.
link |
All these newscasters in the United States,
link |
the most heaviest of them were saying,
link |
well, President Trump is now finally acting
link |
like a real president when he attacks,
link |
when he drops missiles in Syria.
link |
They actually said that.
link |
In other words, they wanted Trump to go to war on Syria,
link |
Chemical weapons and nuclear is really terrifying.
link |
Do you think, now combine this with the fascinating choice
link |
in your interviews with Vladimir Putin
link |
to watch Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
link |
or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
link |
And given the fact that you did that,
link |
now looking at the fact that the word nuclear,
link |
and it feels like the world hangs
link |
on the brink of nuclear war,
link |
do you think that that's overstating the case?
link |
No, that's what worried me from the beginning,
link |
and that's probably why I got involved in all this stuff,
link |
because I go back to the 60s when we were so close
link |
I lived through that period,
link |
and I thought, as many people did,
link |
that this was, it was gonna come now.
link |
So I've lived through that,
link |
and I didn't sense the period in 83
link |
when Reagan took us to the edge,
link |
if you remember correctly.
link |
Able Archer was an exercise that almost brought us to,
link |
because the Russians were really paranoid at that point,
link |
and they were responding to our military exercise
link |
There was also the Korean airliner, they went down.
link |
There were numerous incidents in the 80s,
link |
but I never felt the fear.
link |
I thought Reagan was testing the limits,
link |
but perhaps if I'd been younger, I would've felt it.
link |
But anyway, no, we come close.
link |
The United States has risked this several times.
link |
If I told you, it would be hard for you to believe,
link |
if I could set a scene for you in a drama in 1962
link |
when Kennedy has a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff
link |
and the CIA, and they talk about a plan,
link |
a military plan, to first strike the Soviet Union and China.
link |
It was an Eisenhower plan that had been put into potential
link |
operation in early 60s or 50s, late 50s, SIOP 62.
link |
This was an attack on the Soviet Union, first strike.
link |
That's why the United States has never given up
link |
the concept of first strike.
link |
It's interesting that the Russian nuclear policy posture
link |
is more defensive than the American one,
link |
which leaves options open.
link |
The same options are open in neoconservative agreements
link |
that we see from the late 90s, where they say,
link |
the emergence of a rival power will not be tolerated.
link |
That's a very broad statement,
link |
and it allows you to do a lot, including nuclear.
link |
So you have to understand the United States is always,
link |
first of all, it breaks so many treaties.
link |
We know that from the Putin story
link |
about the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002,
link |
and then the INF Treaty of, they broke that one.
link |
That was the intermediate missiles.
link |
I don't know when they broke it off,
link |
but the United States has not been very faithful
link |
on its nuclear agreements, and so I don't know
link |
that we can even deal with the United States diplomatically.
link |
It seems to be impossible.
link |
Now, it brings me to Biden.
link |
And this is the opposite of Kennedy.
link |
Kennedy was a Catholic Irish anti imperialist.
link |
Biden seems to be the opposite.
link |
He seems to be a get along, go along guy
link |
who's been not only old,
link |
but he's also gone along with this program,
link |
which I voted for Biden because I feared Trump,
link |
but I thought Biden at a certain age would mellow.
link |
He's not mellowed, apparently.
link |
He's still listening to these people, and he believes them.
link |
And it seems that his, that horrible woman,
link |
Victoria Nuland, who was Under Secretary of State,
link |
he appointed her to this sector of the world.
link |
She's very influential,
link |
and she's been one of the worst people on Ukraine.
link |
Obviously, she's behind the coup.
link |
She was the one who boasted that, you know,
link |
we got our man in, Yats, whatever it is, Yatsenuk.
link |
And also, remember the famous statement, fuck the EU?
link |
All these things, but she's back,
link |
and she said the other day about if the Soviets,
link |
if the Russians use nuclear weaponry of any kind,
link |
there's gonna be a horrible price to pay.
link |
She was out of the blue.
link |
I said, what the hell is she doing?
link |
She's talking nuclear all of a sudden.
link |
And then since that day, everybody in the US press,
link |
all the shows have gone, talk nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.
link |
Secretary of State has done it, Blinken, it scares you.
link |
If you think about it, the United States scares me.
link |
So that's the military industrial complex machine,
link |
fully functional, fully operational
link |
behind this whole thing.
link |
Is that what's to blame?
link |
That's why I showed him Strangelove,
link |
because I wanted him to show him.
link |
I wanted Mr. Putin to say, look at this film.
link |
How can you not say, you know,
link |
it's a seminal film in American history
link |
to those people who care.
link |
And it shows you the Kubrick had a pacifist, thank God,
link |
antiwar mentality, which he showed in Bows of Glory
link |
as well as Strangelove.
link |
And it's such a dire, well done scenario
link |
that I wanted Mr. Putin to be aware
link |
of the way the United States thinks.
link |
Yeah, the absurdity of escalation,
link |
the absurdity of war at the largest scale,
link |
the absurdity of nuclear war, especially.
link |
Can we walk back from the brink of nuclear war?
link |
What's the path to walk back?
link |
Between who and whom?
link |
Reason and diplomacy.
link |
There's no reason.
link |
I mean, talk to the guy.
link |
Mr. Biden, why don't you calm down
link |
and go and talk to Mr. Putin in Moscow?
link |
Why don't you just sit across the table from him
link |
and try to have a discussion without falling
link |
into ideologies and stuff like that?
link |
Can I ask you for advice?
link |
You did some of the most difficult interviews ever.
link |
Do you have advice that you can give to someone like me
link |
or anyone hoping to understand something
link |
about a human being sitting across from them
link |
about what it takes to do a good interview?
link |
Well, no, but there's a, listen,
link |
there's levels to this game.
link |
And interviewing somebody like Vladimir Putin,
link |
also language barrier, sit across from the man,
link |
try to keep an open mind,
link |
try to also ask challenging questions,
link |
but not challenging with an agenda,
link |
but seeking to understand and understand deeply.
link |
How do you do that?
link |
Seeking the truth.
link |
Seeking the truth, being a questioner like you are.
link |
You wanna know what is really going on.
link |
I could not get anywhere with Biden or Bush
link |
or for that matter, Obama.
link |
They'd be opaque with me.
link |
There's no interview possible
link |
with the president of the United States
link |
because he's got to stand for all the stuff
link |
that they stand for, which is imperialism,
link |
which is control of the world.
link |
How can you defend that?
link |
No one's gonna come out and say that.
link |
They're always gonna blame the enemy.
link |
They're gonna blame Iran.
link |
They're gonna blame China.
link |
So with some people, it may not be possible
link |
to break through the opaqueness.
link |
You can't, you can't.
link |
I mean, have you ever seen an interview with the president
link |
besides being personable,
link |
where he actually discussed American policy?
link |
Yeah, I mean, not really, but maybe after their president.
link |
I could see Obama being able to do such an interview.
link |
I could see George W. being able to do such an interview.
link |
Or are they not able to reflect at all on the?
link |
George W. hasn't shown much conscience
link |
in terms of thinking about what he's done.
link |
You ever see my movie, W.?
link |
I think that's one of my best movies
link |
because it shows a man who's just out of his depth
link |
and has no, he has a conscience at the end of the movie.
link |
If you remember correctly, he talks to his wife
link |
and he says, I don't get it.
link |
I'm trying to do good in the world.
link |
I've done, I believe in good and right.
link |
And why do people not understand that kind of complaint
link |
as if he can't get outside himself
link |
to understand the way other people think?
link |
Empathies, walking like a dramatist is what I do.
link |
You walk in the footsteps of other people.
link |
When I did a movie about Richard Nixon,
link |
it wasn't because I liked him.
link |
It was because I wanted to,
link |
I think I understood a part of him because of my father
link |
and I think I wanted to walk in his footsteps.
link |
That's not to say I sympathize with him because I didn't.
link |
I don't think he helped the American cause at all,
link |
but it was empathize as opposed to sympathize.
link |
Same thing with Bush.
link |
People were shocked when I did the Bush movie.
link |
They said, how can you be in any way receptive to this guy?
link |
Dramatists don't have political positions.
link |
They walk in the shoes of.
link |
That's why Bush movie perhaps was surprising
link |
and many people didn't care for it.
link |
Maybe that's what, but that's, you've got to go there.
link |
If you did a movie about a villain, you have to go there.
link |
You have to walk in their shoes.
link |
So see them, cause they usually,
link |
villains usually see themselves as the hero.
link |
So you have to consider what is it like to live in a world
link |
where this person is the hero?
link |
Not for George W. Bush.
link |
He's bitching because they didn't understand him,
link |
but he had a good vision he said of democracy
link |
and you know, democracy forgives a lot of sins.
link |
Can I ask you a hard question on that?
link |
So because empathy is so important to a great interview,
link |
let's ask the most challenging version of empathy,
link |
which is when you're sitting across from a man
link |
on the brink of war that leads to tens of millions
link |
of deaths, which is Hitler.
link |
So if you could interview Hitler in 1939,
link |
as the drums of war start to beat or 1941
link |
when they're already full on war, but there's still
link |
a lot of pacifists, there's still a lot of people unsure
link |
what are the motivations behind what Hitler's doing.
link |
How would you do that interview?
link |
Well it depends when you do it.
link |
If you do it in 38, I certainly would have,
link |
no you have to, if you sit down across from Hitler,
link |
What is your beef?
link |
Where have you been?
link |
What is your consciousness?
link |
Why do you hate Jewish people?
link |
Why, what is, all these questions that come up.
link |
His sense of grievance as a result of World War I.
link |
There's justifications there, et cetera.
link |
But if I, and by the way, Churchill was trying
link |
to make a deal with him in 38.
link |
That's a fact that people don't know.
link |
Churchill himself, there was still the desire
link |
in England to make peace with Germany.
link |
And it was seen as a possible, what Churchill
link |
really wanted was Hitler to go against Russia.
link |
And anything to destroy the Bolsheviks.
link |
So he was using Hitler as much as he could
link |
to go after Russia, but Hitler was too elusive
link |
to get, to pin him down.
link |
But if you remember, Hitler was very kind at the end of,
link |
kind is not the right word, was,
link |
did not go after the British Empire when he had France.
link |
And he could have.
link |
He had another objective, which was obviously the East.
link |
So Hitler's goal, I think, he always had an admiration
link |
It's an interesting story, always.
link |
Yes, and certainly Churchill, we have no doubts now
link |
from history revisionism that Churchill's interest,
link |
main interest, was not Germany.
link |
It was the British Empire.
link |
And to preserve it to India, the road to India
link |
and all that, and Middle East.
link |
Churchill fought the entire war with the concept
link |
of preserving the British Empire.
link |
All his goals, he sent America on a goose chase into Italy,
link |
you could argue, instead of establishing
link |
a sincere second front in Western Europe.
link |
So I would have tried to get, you know,
link |
I think I would have approached it the same way.
link |
In 1939, it would have been a different story
link |
because at that point, he'd attacked Poland,
link |
and in 1940, France.
link |
So it's another ball game.
link |
But certainly, at whatever point you talk to him,
link |
I would try to understand his point.
link |
I'm not judging you, Hitler.
link |
I'm saying to you, tell me what you're thinking.
link |
Why are you invading Russia?
link |
What's your thought?
link |
That's all an interviewer should do.
link |
He shouldn't be expressing his contempt for Hitler,
link |
which like an American journalist interviewing Putin,
link |
I'm getting brownie points for expressing my contempt for you.
link |
That doesn't wash with me.
link |
Seek to understand.
link |
This is a technical question,
link |
but was language a barrier as an interviewer?
link |
It's very hard to learn Russian.
link |
But I had very, they have excellent translators
link |
in the Kremlin, excellent.
link |
They are people who are trained very seriously
link |
for months or years before they,
link |
these people are young and they're very bright.
link |
I was very impressed with the Russian translators.
link |
I mean, I'm impressed as well,
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but there's a humor that's lost.
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There's a wit, a dry wit.
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There's stuff said between the lines.
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That's not actually how much content,
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but it's more kind of the things
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that make communication more frictionless.
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It's the, there's a kind of sadness to a Russian humor
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that permeates all things.
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And that sometimes is lost in translation.
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The translation is a little bit colder,
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meaning it just conveys the facts.
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Would you call it sardonic humor?
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I would say so, yeah.
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And so it's interesting.
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But I think you could see that from facial expressions
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when you're sitting across from the person
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and you can feel it.
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Let me ask you in general,
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what's the role of love in the human condition,
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in your life, in life in general?
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You've talked, you looked at some of the darkest aspect
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What's the role of this,
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one of the more beautiful aspects of human nature?
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I think without love, I wouldn't,
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I don't think I'd be able to carry on.
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I think that love is my, love is the greatest,
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the ability to love is the greatest virtue you can have.
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It's the ability to share with another,
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with your family, with your children, with your wife,
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with your lover, your partner.
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It's an ability to extend yourself into the world
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and it brings empathy with it.
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I think you expand it to the human race too.
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And it's the strength behind the great novelists,
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the great artists of our time.
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I think part of the reason I suppose
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we're scared of science sometimes
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is because the scientists sometimes
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don't express that clearly.
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You can lose that when you focus on the facts,
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on empirical data, on the science of things.
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You can lose the humanity that's between the lines.
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I'm often struck by when I talk to scientists
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and I've talked to a few,
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that how arrogant they can be about,
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they don't talk to you if you don't understand their world
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and they talk to each other and there's an arrogance,
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a closed circle kind of thing.
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Oh, he's not at my level, I can't,
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there's no discussion to be had with this person,
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he's a human being.
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That arrogance is terrifying to me
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because it's next door neighbor to closed mindedness
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which then can be used by charismatic leaders
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as it was in Nazi Germany
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to commit some of the worst atrocities.
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The scientists can be used as pawns
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in a very cruel game.
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What advice would you give to young people?
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You've done, first of all, some of the greatest films ever.
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You've lived a heck of a life.
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You've, were fearless and bold
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in asking some really difficult questions of this world.
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What advice would you give to young people today,
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high school, college, about career?
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How to have a career they can be proud of
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or how to have a life they can be proud of?
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Well, I have three children
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so obviously I'm not necessarily the best advisor
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in the world and I do find that the children,
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I've raised them with a sense of freedom
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and they do what they want.
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In the end, it's their life, their destiny, their character.
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That's what comes out.
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You can try to influence it
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but you can try to get your daughter to wake up
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at a certain hour in the day but it never works.
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So I long ago gave up on that
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and my children are all grown now
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but aside from that, I think if I was a teacher in a school
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and teaching film, I'd say to the students,
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You can't just look at film because it's not
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a full education, it's not the spectrum.
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I don't think you should teach film as a,
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I think you need a base in other worlds.
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One of the greatest courses I took at NYU was,
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and I was a war veteran on the GI Bill
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so I was older than the other students.
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One of the great, I took a class outside the film school
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in Greek classics because I hadn't had much history
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and I wanted to know more about the world of Homer
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and so forth and the teacher opened my eyes
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to so much in that class and I wrote about it
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in my memoir, it's called Chasing the Light
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about Professor Leahy and what he did to me.
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He gave me the concepts clearly of consciousness
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which is the Homeric theme of Odysseus
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and also lethe, L E T H E, which is sleep
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and how most of the crew, Odysseus's crew,
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were experiencing lethe and how necessary it was
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So it's not just film, it's just you have to learn
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the world as much as you can when you're young
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and so that I think is the basis of a good education
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and a classic one is important, a basis.
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I think then you go on and you can learn computer
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if you want but that's specialization.
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If you're a computer geek, is that a life?
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Does that give you enough satisfaction?
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Do you get the joy out of people?
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No, just like filmmaking is a skill.
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You have the broad background to understand the world,
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literature, history.
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So one of the things about being human is life is finite.
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Do you think about your death?
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Are you afraid of your death?
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Absolutely, you have to come to terms with death
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and that's a tough one for many people.
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It's always there.
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I'm older than you, obviously,
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and I'm getting closer to it.
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Couldn't happen any day, actually.
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When you get to a certain age,
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you can't assume that you're gonna be alive tomorrow.
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So I try to deal with that.
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Are you afraid of it?
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Much less so than I was when I was younger.
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Remember, I was in Vietnam
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but I thought I dealt with it there
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but when I came back, I realized that I wanted to live.
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So yes, I've learned over time
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to get more and more used to it and get ready for it.
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What's a good answer to the question of why live?
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So the realization that you wanted to live.
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What was the reason to live?
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Because it was better than being one of those corpses
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that I saw in the jungle.
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I saw how finite death is.
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Are there things in your life you regret?
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Is there something you wish you could have done differently?
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Like if you could go back to do one thing differently
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or that it regrets all of it.
link |
Did you ask Musk this?
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Offline all the time.
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You'd be curious to know.
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And he's an engineer too
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and engineers really value mistakes.
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Engineers value mistakes.
link |
Value mistakes and errors
link |
because that's an opportunity to learn.
link |
I mean, this is what you do with systems
link |
is you test them, then test them, then test them
link |
and errors is just information.
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He did that with the rockets.
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That is true in its way of filmmaking.
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There are certain things you learn as you build films
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and you make mistakes.
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It's like putting an engine together and you,
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oh, the film is flawed in that way, you know it.
link |
Other people may or may not see it,
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but the car runs or it made money or it didn't make money.
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It can be good and it didn't make money,
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but the point is that everything is a build.
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Every film is a construction.
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Same thing as he goes through on a Tesla,
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we go through on each film.
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But films are art.
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It's a little tricky.
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Yeah, the thing is one film does not lead
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to a lifetime guarantee of copyright.
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Well, yeah, you have the movie game as you've called it.
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It's a complicated and cruel game.
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But it takes enormous amount of work,
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enormous amount of work to make a film.
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People underestimate that.
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It's extremely complicated to have something be successful
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because it has so many elements of luck involved
link |
and reception and so forth.
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What do you think, I apologize for the absurd question,
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but what do you think is the meaning of life?
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I think to realize ourselves,
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to realize more of what you are,
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to realize what life is, to appreciate it,
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to grow, to honor our life,
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to honor the concept of life
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and to understand how precious life is.
link |
The preciousness of life, as the Buddhists say.
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And of course, the immediacy of death all around us.
link |
The causes of death are all around us.
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And our life is like, as they say,
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is like a lantern in a strong breeze existing
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among the causes of death.
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So life is so precious.
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And at the same time, the immediacy of death
link |
and then of course, the continuation of life
link |
in whatever form it's gonna take.
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But in this life, to wake up to the preciousness of it.
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To the preciousness.
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Yeah, that's a wonderful thing, by the way.
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I didn't have that when I was young.
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I took it for granted.
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Oliver, like I said, I'm a huge fan.
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You're an incredible human being,
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one of the greatest artists ever.
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So it's a huge honor that you sit with me
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and talk so deeply and honestly
link |
about some very difficult topics.
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Again, you're an inspiration and it's an honor
link |
that you will spend your valuable time with me.
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Thank you very much.
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Thanks for talking to me.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Oliver Stone.
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To support this podcast,
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please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words
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from Oliver Stone in the untold history
link |
of the United States.
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To fail is not tragic.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.