Press TV
May 4, 2014
US in Ukraine to help stage offensive: Rick Rozoff
Press TV has interviewed Rick Rozoff, from Stop NATO, Chicago, to discuss the crisis in the Ukraine.
I’m telling you, the people running US and Western foreign policy and their paid flunkies and apologists are living in a Cold War nightmare. They are frozen in time, but they are willing to resort to any kind of behavior: using fascist brownshirts to effect their political will as occurred in Kiev three months earlier, using war, and I’ll say this openly, skirting the precipice of a nuclear conflict in order to achieve their geo-political objectives.
What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Do you think the violence that has been inflicted on these protesters has been justified in order to keep the country safe as Kiev and its Western backers are claiming?
Rozoff: Absolutely not. It’s offensive almost beyond my ability to comprehend that the other guest would employ precisely the term used by the illegally installed junta in Kiev, “terrorists”, to describe amongst other people 40 people who were burnt to death or died of asphyxiation yesterday in the Trade Unions House in Odessa, or the 200 that were injured, or the six that leaped from the third story window to their death, to refer to them or to imply that they are terrorists so as to justify this kind of barbaric and unbelievable carnage. But I expect as much from the professional apologists of US foreign policy both from the journalistic corps and in the think tanks.
Press TV: The situation in Ukraine has continued to deteriorate ever since the secession vote for Crimea. Do you think that Kiev coming down with an iron fist can stop the people? -Because we’ve seen city after city, town after town now, more and more people taking to the streets and demanding at least the right to have a vote to decide their own future. We have seen now Kiev coming down very, very hard. Will that be enough to stop the people and their demands?
Rozoff: No, but of course they’re not people, they’re terrorists, according to your other guest. They’re not only terrorists, they’re operating on KGB orders when the KGB has not existed for decades.
I want to say something very clear. When the same terrorists who are posting, posting proudly on YouTube videos of their setting fire to the Trade Unions House in Odessa yesterday and bragging about burning people to death and applauding and cheering it, wear the same outfits, with the same insignia, with the same Molotov cocktails they were hurling in Kiev three months ago, burning government buildings, murdering police officers, committing the most naked acts of terrorism and people like the other guest on the show didn’t have a word to say about it then. They have a very interesting set of criteria as to what constitutes terrorism.
Press TV: As [previous guest speaker] Mr. Budowsky says, the United States wants a political solution to this situation. Do you believe that Washington wants a political solution to this?
Rozoff: Anything but.
The fact is that CIA Director John Brennan and Vice President Joe Biden have recently been in Kiev not so much to coordinate the activities of the junta in Kiev but to give them marching orders for the current military offensive against civilians in the east and now increasingly it looks in the south of the country.
By the way, right before you cut off the other guest, he used another interested term Warsaw Pact, which has not existed for 23 years, just as he used the term or the expression KGB earlier.
I’m telling you, the people running US and Western foreign policy and their paid flunkies and apologists are living in a Cold War nightmare. They are frozen in time, but they are willing to resort to any kind of behavior: using fascist brownshirts to effect their political will as occurred in Kiev three months earlier, using war, and I’ll say this openly, skirting the precipice of a nuclear conflict in order to achieve their geo-political objectives.
If this horror in Odessa yesterday – by the way there’s no need for an investigation, as I mentioned earlier, the real terrorists who perpetrated this crime have posted their own videos, they’re boasting over what they accomplished.
If the world doesn’t pull back and indict the real conspirators in this situation, which are the US and its Western allies, who seem to see fit or feel entitled to overthrow governments, subvert them, you know, invade countries at will — while the other guest is talking about an alleged contingent of 40- to 50- thousand Russian troops in their own territory, as the US is perpetrating war crimes around the world – it’s time for the world to wake up.
[In response to previous guest speaker’s comments regarding 40- to 50-thousand alleged Russian troops] I hope Russia has troops in its own country. In their own country, yes, sir. And there’ve been millions of US troops deployed around the world.
[In response to previous guest speaker’s comments] I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said Russia has every right…
Press TV: Mr. Rozoff, your take, sir.
Rozoff: This Russophobic rant of the other guest, it’s not only evocative of the Cold War, it’s beyond that. It’s beyond the realm of rationality. Vladimir Putin, for example, never said he bemoaned the collapse of the Soviet empire or the Warsaw Pact. That’s sheer fabrication.
But let’s get back to the immediate point. In the lead-in to this story there was some discussion about the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which by its own admission is the largest single contributor to the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.
Victoria Nuland, the infamous Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, caught on an audio tape a couple of months ago essentially ordering the constitution of the post-coup government in Ukraine, admits that the US has spent five billion dollars for so-called democracy promotion i Ukraine since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
But in terms of the chutzpah of the other guest, who can talk about having free and fair elections in Ukraine, let me inform him such an election was held four years ago and it elected Victor Yanukovich as the president.
And less than a year before scheduled reelections, which would have occurred in March of next year, US clients overthrow the government, set part of the capital city on fire, stage a coup d’état and start what could very well be a hot conflict between the US and NATO on one end and Russia on the other, which is to say possibly a military conflict between the world’s two nuclear superpowers – so much for elections.
Press TV: Your take on the same question, what will it take now to calm things down at least and reach a political solution?
Rozoff: I wish I could tell you that, and I don’t promise to be privy to the sort of omniscience that the other guest has, where he knows the inner workings of the brain of every Russian official and so forth. So I have to talk about what is readily observable.
I fear that with the recalcitrance shown by the US and its NATO and EU allies in backing up the junta in Kiev, uncritically, that there is no incentive for the powers in Kiev who have thumbed their nose at the Geneva agreements as well as the arrangement supposedly negotiated by the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland earlier this year…Look, they would not be engaging in a full-fledged military assault on the east of their country without the absolute assurance of the United States and NATO that they will back them up should the conflict take an ugly turn with Russia. That’s unquestionable.
Second of all, I did not say there would or would not be a nuclear war. But I will say one thing, anyone who could tell me right now that they could rule that out for a certainty is exercising extremely poor judgment.