Kevin Barrett
If it survives, Turkey and Egypt should be able to liberate Palestine “without too much difficulty”
Excerpts from the interview:
Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Audiovisual. I’m Kevin Barrett. I’ve been doing this show since 2006. And my current guest actually is somebody I’ve known since even before that: Israel Shamir. He was one of the few people back in 2005 who was willing to entertain the thought that 9/11 may not have been exactly what the US government told us. So that’s how we got acquainted. (Israel Shamir was one of the original endorsers of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth.) He’s been putting out a lot of really interesting perspectives ever since. So, hey, welcome, Israel Shamir. Great to have you back.
Hey, Kevin. Very nice to see you.
So you’ve been putting out this consistently interesting and provocative and unusually insightful work for a very long time. Let’s go ahead and remind the viewers where you’re coming from. You lived in Israel for a while. You came from a Jewish background out of Russia (and are now in Sweden). Maybe you could succinctly describe that.
So many travels, so many lifelong, full of travels and of movement. I remember what one of my American friends told me when I tried to answer this question. He told me that I noticed that whenever Jews describe something, they describe peripatetic existence. So apparently it is peripatetic, moving from place to place….
Let’s get started with the issue that you recently wrote about, which is Russia and the pressure that President Putin is under to enforce one of his red lines. And of course, Trump has now gotten his military to sign off on sending Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. which would presumably be fired by Americans. These are technically nuclear-capable missiles with the range of getting well past Moscow, possibly crossing a very serious red line there. So what are your thoughts on how dangerous this is?
It could happen anytime. And I decided to make myself already prepared for it. Whatever happens, let it happen if it has to happen. Because it seemed to me that neocons surrounding the American president have really decided that they can go and brave every Russian move. They can force every red line that would be posted by the Russians. So in such case, sooner or later, it will maybe all blow up. But, you know, maybe Morocco will survive. So it’s a good thing about (your moving there). But as for Russia and the United States, I think it’s very difficult to say whether they will survive.
I recently wrote about the madman theory that was coined to describe Nixon deliberately trying to pretend he was crazy during the Vietnam war so the North Vietnamese would think he was capable of nuking them. And now we have Trump behaving quite erratically, although maybe no more erratically than the senile Biden did. So the Americans seem to be pushing this madman leadership theory pretty hard, whereas Putin seems to err on the opposite side of being almost too rational. Would you agree?
He is absolutely, yes. Putin seemed to be absolutely sane, a totally sane person. And many people in Russia say that he should really do more that would sow fear of Russia. But he apparently doesn’t want that. He’s a peaceful man.
I am actually pretty impressed with Putin’s competence, which is not something I can say about the American leadership. And maybe that’s because Russia, like China, is sort of on a historical upswing. China’s recovering from the 19th century, and Russia’s recovering from the immediate post-Cold War period in the 1990s. Whereas the United States is heading down. The United States has seemingly…there’s nowhere to go but down after largely ruling the world since World War II. But in terms of the Tomahawks issue, what would be the likely Russian response if Ukraine fired Tomahawk missiles at Russia?
Well, we enter into the unpredictable. It is the area of unpredictable. Some people think that they can predict the future, but I think that we can’t predict anything about it. So if Zelensky fires Tomahawks, it could be that Russians will fire back into Washington one of the Oreshniks or whatever other beautiful devices they have. Or into London. The possibilities are all open. And what will happen, nobody knows.
What do you think of Ron Unz’s suggestion that Russia could give NATO a warning that “this Friday at three o’clock in the afternoon, we’re going to blow up NATO headquarters with an unstoppable Oreshnik missile, so get everybody out of that area so that there are no casualties”? Would that work?
I remember that, I read this very funny article. No, I don’t think it’s realistic at all.
Why not?
I think it’s a very nice, very interesting idea, but I don’t think it could be realistic. I think if we go to bombing of Brussels, Moscow, or Washington, that just goes all the way.
We’re off to the races.
Yeah, no reason to stop.
Is there any other kind of demonstration that could ever be done that wouldn’t start that process?
No, I doubt it very much. Putin is being pushed all the time by different forces in the Russian government that want him to throw a nuclear bomb or to nuke something. But he doesn’t want to nuke anything. So, you know, I don’t think that something like that could be done. And I think the big problem, obviously, is that the neocons who are seemingly ruling America are suicidal. There’s not much that we can do about it. But if we speak about an overview and how they are going to explain things, I noticed that there is a very strong feeling among the writers in the Unz Review that we are coming now to some new American revolution, that they are likely to get rid of the neocons. Whether by the left forces, like the mayor of New York, Mamdani, or by the right wing forces, someone like Tucker Carlson. So I think there are possibilities that this or that will change and will save mankind, save the United States. Whereas Russia is, I think, an unmovable object. Something you can push anywhere. You shouldn’t really expect them to take the initiative because they don’t want to take the initiative.
Right. That was what I said, actually, right after the special military operations started. The Western side was high on its own supply at that time: “Oh, my goodness. Look, the Ukrainians just stopped Russia at the gates of Kiev and pushed them back.” They were all very happy and giddy, thinking that Russia’s economy would be destroyed and they could force regime change on Russia and knock it back to the 1990s. And my response at the time, the same thing I’ve been saying ever since, has been: This is an existential war for Russia, and Russia’s the biggest nuclear power on earth. And it will match whatever level of destruction that’s visited on it. It will go to whatever level is necessary not to lose. Because it’s existential for Russia in a way that it isn’t for the U.S. or for Europe…
Absolutely. I agree with you. Indeed, it is existential for Russia. For them, there is a necessity to keep some kind of hold on friendly Ukraine. But also the ex-Soviet republics are necessary, even such one as Moldova, which is not an especially big country, not especially powerful, probably as poor as anything at all in Europe, one of the poorest countries. But even it is necessary for Russian existence. The Russian Tsars and General Secretaries of the KPSU worked for centuries to build up this kind of defense. Because Russia is not separated from Europe by water, like Britain is, nor by mountains. It is just a huge, huge field. And on this field, Russians really should have friendly Ukraine, that’s for sure.
In your most recent article, which is “The Russian Regret,” you mentioned that the Trump policy of essentially pushing Europe to rearm and to increase its military spending as percentage of its GDP is a bad move. You argued that that’s going to turn Europe into a monster, that it will become independent of the US and it’ll start pushing its weight around. And you’re sort of implicitly raising the possibility of Europe being a threat to invade Russia, as has happened a few times in the past.
Yeah.
But I wonder if you’re not exaggerating that threat a little bit, in the same way, though maybe not as much, as the Europeans have exaggerated the non-existent Russian threat. Russia, of course, has more territory than it needs. It’s not going to invade Europe. But I’m not sure Western Europe is very likely to invade Russia either. It seems to me that maybe… Both sides need to realize that neither one is really in a position, ideologically or materially, to dream of conquering the other. So what are we fighting about?
Well, I agree with you absolutely. Indeed, there is no chance that Europe will succeed in conquering Russia, or Russia will succeed or even want to conquer Europe. Russia doesn’t want it. Russians in the past took over Berlin and Paris and moved back from there quite fast, actually. Didn’t want to keep it for a lot of money. There is a point of view in Russia that Russians should not keep any territory that is not populated by the Orthodox Christians. The religious question will drive in. So that’s why the non-Orthodox territories like Baltic Republic or Finland or Poland were given up by Russia on this or other stage because they thought it’s kind of impossible to fight over it. But Ukraine is orthodox, so it fits the bill.
And that brings up the issue of to the extent that this is actually a sort of disguised religious war. It seems that some of the fuel that’s causing this hysteria in Europe has to do with Europe’s obsession with… their notion of progress, Enlightenment progress, meaning LBGTQ and hyperliberalism. And Russia is moving away from progressivism and liberalism towards something more traditional. And that seems to drive the Europeans crazy for some reason.
Yes. Recently I read the articles that me and other people wrote many years before the Ukraine war. And I was absolutely amazed that so many years before the Ukraine war, European newspapers and magazines were already mad against Russia. Why? Because they mistreat homosexuals. Sounds to me absolutely crazy. First of all, it’s not even true. They don’t mistreat any homosexuals. But on the other hand, they don’t have gay parades and such things. But why should that be the reason for such excitement? I couldn’t understand it.
My son told me an interesting idea. There is an opinion that gay men are more susceptible, more playable, more easily manageable. They don’t have…kind of independence of character. They could be pushed to do whatever. So maybe that’s the case.
And I remember even during the Sochi Olympic Games many years ago. It was so strange to see that… British newspapers and American newspapers were so absolutely crazy about it with such a level of hostility. It was years before any war. It seemed to be calm. This question of why there is such intensity of hate towards Russia, I really can’t understand that at all.
Source: https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/israel-shamir-our-world-is-a-short
