(as in: actual pre-Clintonian George McGovern-style Liberals)
“I don’t like to see myself as alternative. For heaven’s sake, I am a Harvard graduate, I’ve been a lawyer on Wall Street … I very much identify with the constitution of the US and with the good, American values …”
— Alfred de Zayas
He did all the right things. He wears a bow tie to teach. He looks like a somewhat humorless Bill Nye. He is offended, that all this buys him no respect and pushes him to the ‘alternative’ margins.
Because he is by intellectual honesty compelled, to recognize and offer the following.
NATO is a military alliance. There is no question on how the US would react if Mexico were to enter into a military alliance with, say, China. The US refusal to take Ukrainian NATO membership off the table was wildly provocative.
“I have no problem in saying that the United States is not a democracy. The United States is an oligarchy.” He’s moved on to Switzerland personally, which has an actual direct democracy.)
‘Spreading democracy’ is a smokescreen for spreading the (virulently oligarchic) economic systems of neo-liberalism.
Compare Ukraine 2022 to ‘the former’ Yugoslavia 1999. Were you howling about Serbian independence then? Even as cautious a centrist source as Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to the question, which begins: “The legitimacy under international law of the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has been seriously questioned”.
How do you feel about Catalan independence? How about for the Tamils? The Biafrans? The Cascadians? Now, how about the Donbass?
All else being equal, the only reason you care about ‘Ukrainian sovereignty’ is because some MSM jughead insisted you must, under the cultist Hillaritarian cry of Russia Bad, and if you think I’m exaggerating, show me all those times, dozens of them I’m sure, that you raged against the Putin machine before the Presidential election of 2016. (We didn’t get Trump because “Putin”, darling. We got him from millions of Americans completely repulsed by the heartless giant ball of shit the Democrats became between McGovern’s 1970 and the eight years of Obama. “Deplorable”.)
“There used to be many good people in the US government, and there still are. They’re just not in the majority.”
Post-Vietnam, post-Afghanistan, Syria will be the next place where routine US imperialism gone bad will end in disgrace.
The encirclement strategy NATO is using with Russia is also being attempted by the Empire in the case of China, giving both second-tier nations ever more reason to make common cause against it.
As a kicker, speaking from Switzerland, Professor de Zayas gives his opinion that modern Germany is a totalitarian state, and gives a number of reasons why he no longer accepts speaking engagements there.
***
There were still 20 minutes left in the video when I bailed to finally sleep. But you get the idea.