Full Transcript follows this introduction
On March 21, subsequent to the Russian military operation in Ukraine, Phil Taylor (host of CIUT’s Taylor Report) interviewed Diana Johnstone about her recent writings on the conflict.
We republished Johnstone’s writings HERE and HERE.
You can also find the original Taylor Report interview, below:
(March 21, 2022)
Now, you can read the full transcript of the interview!
Please click the document below, or read-on for the full text!
Document: Diana Johnstone interview transcript
Full Text
Interview: “Washington’s Drive to Dominate”
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Phil Taylor:
Welcome to the Taylor Report, CIUT 89.5 FM. I’m Phil Taylor. We’re going to be speaking today to Diana Johnstone, who has written two really important articles in the Consortium News. Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher, that’s Clarity Press 2020, she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions. That’s Pluto/Monthly Review. And in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning, Clarity Press. She can be reached at dianajohnstone@wanadoo.fr.
Phil Taylor:
Diana, welcome to the program.
Diana Johnstone:
Well, thank you very much for having me back.
Phil Taylor:
Diana, this story is by your account in the Consortium News, is that America has had a view of a perpetual war. You dated from World War I, World War II, and we’re coming into what people are already calling World War III. What is this different point of view of the Americans from Russia and perhaps other Europeans?
Diana Johnstone:
Well, the other Europeans were mostly… It was mostly a disaster for Europe in general, both wars, and the second one, especially. It was a disaster for the Soviet Union, except they managed heroically, amazingly to defeat this extraordinary German war machine. So they came out as victors, but having tremendously suffered. The United States, on the contrary, the war was taken… In both world wars in Europe, they came in a bit late, when it was finishing up.
Diana Johnstone:
But the point is that the United States emerged from World War II, especially as the great power in the world. Its economy was recovered from the Depression due to the military buildup. Everybody else was pretty much ruined. And the United States emerged as the leading power. So for the United States leadership, World War II was really a great thing. It made US the world number one power. And that’s a role that they have been striving to maintain ever since. That’s the point. They have seen war is something that was wonderful for America.
Diana Johnstone:
Now, the Russians suffered so much that… They were the victors who did the main defeat of the German war machine, that they had suffered so much that they had no taste for war and were really ready to devote themselves to peaceful reconstruction from then on. But the United States, having built up this war machine, which was providing prosperity and especially profits for Wall Street, so every reason to keep building up by finding the next threat, which was communism, and transforming the Soviet Union into the next enemy, and created really… The United States with the help of Britain really created the Cold War by considering the existence of the Soviet Union and its buffer zone as a threat to the rest of Europe, which it was not. And so, this has been going on forever.
Phil Taylor:
You have a great term. You refer to military Keynesianism. I said a little echo there of also the famous comment by Dwight Eisenhower, that he said we’re getting, what do you call it? A military industrial complex. It seems to be… NATO seems to be a machine that can’t be turned off. There’s never any talk about limiting it.
Diana Johnstone:
That’s exactly the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is that the military industrial complex solved the Depression problem for the United States. And it became the permanent solution. It was the permanent way to make jobs, the permanent way to ensure profits. Never forget that it’s very important that military contracts are an investment with an insured profit, because the government is going to give you your profit. Other investments may lose money. So for Wall Street, for investors, the military is ideal, the ideal investor, because they know they’re going to get a profit. And so, it’s government guaranteed.
Diana Johnstone:
And of course, the Keynesian was the idea of spending to build up the economy. But Keynes’ idea was not to do it in a military way, but to do it in more socially beneficial way, but that’s the way it’s worked out in the United States. And it’s become… So in order to justify this endless way to keep the economy profitable for big investors, you have to have an enemy. You have to have an enemy to justify all this psychologically, philosophically. And so, communism became the enemy. But just how fake that was is proved by the fact that when communism collapsed, when the Soviet Union collapsed, all of a sudden there was no reason whatsoever to continue with NATO and this military industrial complex. And yet, it has gone on worse than ever, which proves that the communist threat was an excuse. Because when the communist threat has gone… Well, now what they call the threat is the authoritarian threat. In fact, it’s gone from communism to conservatism. So they can reverse the ideology of the enemy, and it’s still an enemy because they have to have an enemy.
Phil Taylor:
That was so striking. I think if there was any great culture shock, it was the discovery or the realization that the hostility to Russia, which was supposed to be all about communism, and America and Western Europe tore itself up persecuting people who were allegedly friendly to communists or were communist or et cetera. And after all that trouble and terrible repercussions for the culture, then they said, “Well, no. It’s actually not about communism.”
Diana Johnstone:
Yeah, that’s right. It turns out not to be about communism at all. It’s about Russians because they’re a great big country. They’re a great big country with a lot of resources that the US would like to control. But not that big a population. And I just think it’s the perfect enemy for the United States because they would like to get in control of it, as they almost were for a short time in the ’90s, when Yeltsin was really an American puppet, and they were actually ruining the country.
Diana Johnstone:
And then, that stopped after Yeltsin, and with Putin as his successor. So Putin has become the villain because he snatched Russia away from them. And so, he’s become a demon because Russia is just their normal enemy. And it’s also a way of preventing Western Europe and Russia from having a normal trade relationship and being a big block that would maybe liberate itself from American control. Because remember that the Western Europe has been militarily occupied by the United States ever since World War II, especially Germany and Italy, which have American nuclear missiles on their territory and are under military occupation all this time. And this military occupation is accompanied by a great deal of political control. And so, keeping Russia as an enemy is a way to maintain eternal US control of Western Europe.
Phil Taylor:
Well now, by the way, you wrote an article on the 23rd of February about baiting the bear. And they did run and have run into a problem, in that… putting it mildly, all of us have, that there were going to be consequences. This thing of the expansion of NATO, as it was playing out between diplomats, it made… I thought we were on the verge of maybe reaching an understanding because on the Russian side, they said, “Well, here’s a letter to you that would be a formula for peace in Europe, but we have to have answers because you cannot continue to put forces on our border, which are a threat to our existence.” And they, I guess through, what is it, imperial hubris, they just laughed at it, or they didn’t respond.
Diana Johnstone:
Well, no, no. There was this agreement, there was the Minsk agreement, and then this so-called Normandy formula, which implied that Germany and France, whose leaders probably really don’t want to have Ukraine in NATO, were going to put some pressure on the Ukrainian government to accept the agreement, which it had accepted formally but never took out, which was to accept a certain amount of federalism, a certain amount of autonomy for the Eastern part of Ukraine, which did not appreciate the anti-Russian coup of 2014. And the problem was obviously that the French and Germans were never able to do this because actually the Kiev government was totally under control of the United States. And the United States has made an agreement, a strategic agreement with Ukraine that it would defend it, and urging it on.
Diana Johnstone:
The strategic… This is very important because it’s outside NATO, but America runs NATO. So they’re saying they’re not taking… They haven’t taken Ukraine into NATO, but it’s totally United States’ puppet, totally under their control. And with the strategic agreement between Washington and Kiev that the United States will never accept the return of Crimea to Russia, which really means a permanent declaration of war of Ukraine against Russia.
Diana Johnstone:
And so, there was no agreement because in fact, Kiev was following US instructions and being armed by the US and Britain as a platform against Russia. It is perfectly clear that this has been going on for years, along with military action against the Eastern provinces of Ukraine, where the people are Russian speaking, et cetera. And you have to realize that Ukraine is totally divided between east and west.
Phil Taylor:
That aspect of this has not been underlined in the Western media at all. The fact that this, the Donbas region, has been actually a war with losses above 10,000 people since 2014. Of course, the media here has completely failed us. There’s no knowledge of it or understanding of it. You make a tie in, which is in your article. I thought it was very valuable. You discuss the Russian view of Donbas as, if you wanted to use the language of the West, the West says, United States said… They went into Kosovo or intervened over Kosovo. They bombed Belgrade in the name of responsibility to protect, is an old saying. Two can play that game.
Diana Johnstone:
Well, yeah. I happen to have some personal acquaintance with the situation in Kosovo. I was there just before, shortly before the bombing and everything. I saw what the situation like, and the fact is that there were plenty of people who were willing to make a compromise. The United States did not want to compromise. They did not want to make a compromise about Kosovo. And the proof of that is that days after they drove the Serbs out of Kosovo, they were building a huge US military base in Kosovo. So they wanted Kosovo, to build their military base in, because they didn’t have a military base like that in the Balkans. And this was a way to get one.
Diana Johnstone:
So they bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days, mainly the infrastructure, to blackmail the Serbs into giving up the province of Kosovo, and which became… Declared itself independent. And that is described in the West as a great humanitarian action.
Diana Johnstone:
But when the Russians say they are going in to protect the people who have been being bombed, but really much more seriously in Eastern Ukraine, than for eight years of that, well, that’s terrible. The whole West must not have anything more to do with Russians. Russians are bad, evil, horrible people for doing something that isn’t nearly as bad as the West has done. And that’s not all.
Diana Johnstone:
Because the point of that mission in Kosovo was that it was a totally aggressive act of NATO against a country which did not threaten anybody. After all, Kosovo was not… Serbia and Yugoslavia was not threatening any of its neighbors. Whereas Ukraine is being built up as a platform of attack against Russia. So it’s a completely different situation. And the point of the 1999 Kosovo war was to transform NATO from a defense alliance, defending against communism which wasn’t there anymore, into a humanitarian police force that can, just when it feels like it, go into any country, overthrow the government, because it says they’re doing some bad thing. And of course, they did that with Libya too. They destroyed that country, creating a huge humanitarian disaster.
Diana Johnstone:
And so, it’s clear that NATO is an offensive organization that is under US control and is extremely dangerous. And the Russians realize that, and they see this NATO and US surrounding them with bases, carrying out military exercises all the time. That’s not reported either, but the US is constantly running military exercises near Russia’s borders, to show we can… To practice the war we can make with you in the future. And the West pays no attention to this, and it has the inevitable result. It has a war which the United States wanted, because they hope this war will weaken Russia, and that’s their whole purpose.
Phil Taylor:
I thought it was very important. You underlined the fact that actually this, our unfolding crisis, that was the moment for the Russian point of view, of where they began to seriously dig in their heels about what NATO was up to with Kosovo.
Phil Taylor:
There was another element, small twist to that, but again that’s not reported here. During the bombing of Belgrade, they struck the Chinese… I think the news agency, and was it the embassy? But three Chinese were killed, and everyone understood… There was a smirk on the face of NATO. “Oh, did we do that?” It was like they were sending a little message. And the Chinese seemed to have got the message. I understand that President Xi, in talking to Biden, reminded him of it.
Diana Johnstone:
Well, they sent a special flight. I think it was a special US flight all the way from Texas or something like that, for that bombing of the embassy in China, the Chinese embassy. Excuse me, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. And then they said, “Oh, we didn’t realize that was a Chinese embassy. We didn’t know that.” Well, that’s absolutely impossible. No matter how bad their intelligence may be, they had to know that was a Chinese embassy.
Diana Johnstone:
And the point is that there was some sympathy in the Chinese embassy for the Yugoslavs. And they also… In a different bombing, they also bombed the Serbian television radio tower to take out their communication. So that’s another thing. They take out communications, and they bomb the Chinese. That was in this Belgrade humanitarian action, which was to show that NATO is really mean, that we can really do anything.
Phil Taylor:
There was an episode that happened there, where the Russians arrived at a… Entered, and I can’t remember whether it was in Serbia or was it in Kosovo, where they sent some soldiers. And I remembered that they almost had a little confrontation. The Russians were very upset over that, at that moment.
Diana Johnstone:
Well, no, that was because there was an agreement to stop the bombing. And then there was the idea that an international force could go in there, that would supposedly be sponsored by the United Nations. And the Russians sent in a contingent of that international force, and it was blocked by the Americans, and then the British prevented it from becoming an actual fight. But it was then shown that then when you say international community in the West, you don’t mean the Russians, you mean NATO. And in fact, NATO took charge of that occupation of Kosovo in various zones, by various NATO countries. And they blocked the Russians.
Phil Taylor:
We’re speaking to Diana Johnstone. And the article is in Consortium News, March 16. This matter has been flagged now. And I think it’s caught some people’s attention. Putin is… I should call him President Putin is saying that one of the goals in this intervention is, they label it, is the de-Nazification. And again, your article points out that Russian understanding of de-Nazification was a little more profound or to the point than has been in the West. Do you want to talk about that?
Diana Johnstone:
Well, in the West… And Nazi has become almost a term that certain leftists use to describe anybody they don’t like. It’s just thrown around like anything. Or else, if you really refer back to history, you mean antisemitic or else the people that were… The Germans were against the Roma or homosexuals, but you don’t realize that the big thing that the Nazis did was to invade all of Europe. And that behind that whole invasion was a racist superiority complex, and especially against the Slavs. And so, the main thrust of that war, of the Nazis, was to destroy the Soviet Union and to take the territory, et cetera, for what they call lebensraum, more living room, more room for the Germans to inhabit.
Diana Johnstone:
And you see within Ukraine, there were certain racists, anti Russian racists, who were also anti-Polish. It was very complicated when you get into these racists, they can be against a whole lot of people. And now they’ve been revived as heroes in this new America-controlled Ukraine because they hate Russians, and they’re ready to fight Russians. And the US is ready to support anybody who is ready to fight their enemies.
Diana Johnstone:
Let’s face it. It starts with Afghanistan, when the US supported Islamic fanatics who became Al-Qaeda, et cetera, et cetera, and became our main enemy, but doesn’t matter what crazy ideology they have. If that crazy ideology inspires them to kill people we don’t like, then we support them. And the same thing is happening, happened in Ukraine. There are these Nazis, anti-Russian Nazis, and the US doesn’t worry about that because you figure you can use these people, use any fanatics that are available because normal people usually don’t want to go killing. So the fanatics are always useful, and never matter what crazy ideology they have, they’ll get US support because they’re available to do our dirty work.
Phil Taylor:
Yeah. Already we’re seeing in mainstream media the portrayal of Russians and President Putin as Asiatic, which is old echo from before World War I, even. Of course, it was a little maybe more overt then, but it’s certainly becoming overt now. We’re back to the old Churchill idea that Asians can’t be understood or Russians can’t be, they’re a complete mystery. If there’s ever been anybody who’s mysterious, it’s Churchill, as far as I’m concerned.
Phil Taylor:
But your article includes, and I’m very glad it did, a video of a speech given in Munich by President Putin, and sitting in the front row is John McCain. And it couldn’t have been a better portrayal because even in that video, McCain isn’t being very statesmanlike. It’s clear that the Americans were very unhappy with the speech they were hearing. And McCain and this woman, Victoria Nuland became the big… That speech was in 2007. In 2014 McCain and Victoria Nuland and Mr. Murphy, the liberal from Massachusetts, I think, they were standing on a podium in Maidan. What a dramatic and clear picture that gives us of the contenders.
Diana Johnstone:
Well, McCain, there’s something… The late Senator McCain was celebrated as a hero, although he had caused some bad accidents when he was in the Navy, which is a tradition in his family, and as a prisoner of war. But he’s known to me for having described Russia, this great nation, as a gas station pretending to be a country.
Phil Taylor:
That is so vulgar.
Diana Johnstone:
It shows the low level of these people, the arrogance of, as being an American, we can decide everything, and we’re so superior, and everybody else is nothing at all, worth nothing. And this, he totally expresses this contempt for any country that isn’t an American satellite. And this has been going on and on.
Diana Johnstone:
And of course, the fact is that Nuland, she wasn’t just there. She engineered the coup d’etat. She was heard over the telephone deciding who was going to take over when they overthrew the elected president Yanukovich. Victoria Nuland, she was saying it’s going to be Yats [Arseni Yansenyuk]. It’s going to be our guy, not the one that the Germans want, but the one we want. And she designed the takeover of power in Kiev when there was violence that drove out the elected president, a day after he had agreed with the British, with the Europeans, to have early elections. That wasn’t good enough. Early elections weren’t good enough. They went ahead and overthrew him and put in Yats, that is the choice of Victoria Nuland.
Diana Johnstone:
So she wasn’t just there. She designed that coup. She decided who it was. And then they had the election and they got Poroshenko, who they wanted, and they’ve been running things ever since. They filled up the government with their own candidates. The Kiev government was filled up with people that the Americans wanted in power. So it’s become a total satellite, Ukraine. And for one purpose, to cause trouble to Russia.
Phil Taylor:
Yeah. It strikes me they needed a coup, they couldn’t have an election, because the results would’ve been probably what they had had before. But it’s so striking, to underline that about Victoria Nuland, because she served with Cheney. She seems to be permanent, and the Presidents and Secretaries of State come and go, but she’s there. A lot of people are stunned, actually stunned that she could have said, and she acknowledged it was her, naming, micromanaging who’s going to be the mayor, who’s going to be the foreign affairs, et cetera. And then saying F the EU, and she’s still got a job. Not only does she have a job, she’s still driving.
Diana Johnstone:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, of course she has a powerful group behind her. She’s married to a leading… To Robert Kagan, a leading neocon theorist. She represents the very powerful neocon lobby in Washington, which inhabits these think tanks, editorial pages, and so on, and have really taken over most of US foreign policy. And this is tragic because there are still people in Washington, I could name a few, who have some common sense and could run a decent foreign policy, but they have been totally marginalized. And the problem is that the Congress is so beholden to the military industrial complex, which contributes to their campaigns, that a decent person cannot get approved by the Senate to have a high position. There’s that. It would be difficult for a President now to get any decent Secretary of State, because the people who are really qualified and have some wisdom and knowledge would be probably banned by the Senate, which prefers warriors.
Phil Taylor:
We’re speaking Diana Johnstone. She’s very generous with time to be talking to us today. And the title of her article for Consortium News is “For Washington, war never ends”. I have to ask you, it appears… One of the conclusions of what’s going on at this moment was that Europe, West Europe, actually is being humiliated by the way the US is conducting all this. We have Germany still occupied, by the way. You mentioned this in the article. In France, there’s got to be… Everybody always wonders, is there ever going to be anybody there who says you’re pushing us into something that’s costing us a lot of money and harming our economies and may actually kill us? What’s your take on West Europe and what’s happening?
Diana Johnstone:
Well, actually, I live in France. I live in Paris. And my impression is that the people in the say, foreign policy establishment, or people who think about this, or in fact, most of the opposition candidates… There’s supposed to be a presidential election next month in France. And this comes along, really, at a very bad moment for that election, because most of the… Whether the far right, whether the right or the left, whether Melanchon of the left or the right candidates would like to improve French relations with Russia. And now of course, there’s this screaming against them that they’re Putin puppets. I think there’s a great deal in the French establishment really would like to improve relations with Russia, but this makes it that much more difficult. But I don’t know how that’s going to turn out.
Phil Taylor:
So Macron is running against Putin.
Diana Johnstone:
Well, no. Well, sort of, yes, but…
Phil Taylor:
And Mr. Schultz with his pipeline problems or gas problem, we’re also hearing that he has, what, quadrupled the military budget?
Diana Johnstone:
Well, the Germans, it’s much worse. I’ll tell you, the Germans are really disturbing and very disappointing because it’s clear that Robert Habeck, who is a big person in the Green party… The Green party has turned into the war party, number one, and went to the US and says that Germany is now in a leading serving role, like they’re the leading servants of the United States. And the Green in particular seemed to have become total just echoes of the United States. And where this is going to lead them in the energy crisis, I don’t know.
Diana Johnstone:
See, this energy subject is a whole subject I can’t really get into now, but there is a division because Germany is more particularly dependent on Russian gas, which they are being forced to give up in order to support Ukraine. France has a big nuclear industry, in that they’ve been following the Green thing of getting rid of nuclear. But the big sense in France now is to revive their nuclear industry. It’s just that it’s difficult to do it under European Union rules, which don’t favor it, but this is another complicated subject.
Phil Taylor:
It’s a grim picture. By the way, you lived through that. With the Green party, what a shock. And the social Democrats, it was them who decided to join in bombing Belgrade, right? It was the liberals of Germany who wanted to get in on that.
Diana Johnstone:
Yeah. You see, something has happened in the German elite. It’s funny because when I first knew the Germans, and I saw in the ’80s there was this peace movement, and all these people saying, “Oh, let’s cure all the images of the enemy that we had from World War II.”
Diana Johnstone:
And then all of a sudden with Belgrade, after all Serbia was a historic enemy of the Germans. And all of a sudden, they were hating Serbia just like forever. And they’re back to it with the Russians. They’re super nice to the Jews and to Israel as the victims, but when it comes to the Slav, no. They’re right back with the enemy images, that these are the bad guys, and we’re the good guys. And this is very alarming you see. And they seem to be quite a lot of Germans at the top that are very happy to be going along with the United States in a new offensive against Russia.
Phil Taylor:
Yeah. It’s very interesting that that was when they first used fighter planes for the first time since World War II. And now they also, they like to remind us, they say since the first time since 1945, they’re providing lethal weapons to Ukraine. And of course, everybody pats them on the back without thinking, where could this lead? And well, I should ask… And lastly here of Diana Johnstone and the article is “For Washington, war never ends”, Consortium News.
Phil Taylor:
Your view in the article is that the US is hoping, and I guess NATO, being it’s part of the US, that this will drag out so as to… Well, I’ll let you explain. Your take is that the Americans are hoping not to have a diplomatic or peace agreement settlement, I assume with neutrality for Ukraine. They want to make this a long war. Is that right?
Diana Johnstone:
Well, I’m not sure exactly what they want, but what they do obviously want is to weaken Russia. And they say that, and they’ve been saying that. They’re delighted, first of all, because they have all these sanctions. They’ve got everybody saying, everybody in their sphere of influence, because this doesn’t go beyond that. It’s EU Europe, the British Empire, by that, I mean Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, which has been taken in.
Phil Taylor:
Honorary Anglo-Saxons.
Diana Johnstone:
It’s the English-speaking world, and its occupied countries. And that’s it. Because the rest of the world is not going along with this, but they’re hoping that this is going to ruin the Russian economy. But you see, there’s backlash from that. And this can be just as bad for the European economy. And also other countries will suffer from this.
Phil Taylor:
I wonder if-
Diana Johnstone:
The idea is clearly that the war have… Get everybody to hate the Russians, not to trade with the Russians, cause trouble for the Russians, and let the war drag on and on. And of course, there’ll be not much left of the Ukraine under those circumstances. So of course for the Ukrainian people, it would be much better to have a leadership that would be willing to make a compromise, but that’s very difficult considering the US control. I don’t know exactly how they control Zelenskyy, but they certainly have… I don’t think he’s a very independent actor at this point.
Phil Taylor:
Yeah, it doesn’t appear so. We’ve asked that, and others have commented is a deal possible if you have a government that seems to be… The man is very conflicted. He was elected as a peace candidate, as one who was going to talk, to settle the Donbas matter. And he was going to improve relations with Russia. He won 60% of the vote.
Diana Johnstone:
Exactly.
Phil Taylor:
And now he’s the war president. It would make anybody who was voting and thinking wonder, well, who is this guy?
Diana Johnstone:
I think that shows, in fact, how divided Ukraine is. You see, you come back to the fact that Ukraine is… For one thing, it’s too extended in two directions. It has too much Russia in the east side. And it has too much of the West in the west end. Unfortunately, I would say unfortunately, the Soviet Union incorporated Lviv, and parts that could have been part of Poland. It might be better if it were part of Poland because these ultra Western parts hate Russia. And then you have a big middle, which is probably the 60% that voted for Zelenskyy, hoping that he would make peace, because probably most of the Ukrainians are neither of this extreme West or extreme East and would just like to be left alone. But the agitation is coming from the West, which is using the traditionally anti-Russian, Western end to foment all this trouble, which must be terrible for most Ukrainians who really would just be rather be left alone.
Phil Taylor:
I guess the last thing I want to make sure I ask about this. We are seeming to… Everybody talks about who’s isolated. Well, in the past couple of years, we’ve begun to hear really about this phenomenon called five eyes, which they talk about openly. I find it shocking. They say five eyes. They mean white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, English-speaking people. And they call themselves the world, but I wonder if they were surprised. The world, they’re acting like they’re conducting an orchestra, but I don’t see any orchestra. India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil. They don’t seem to be listening.
Diana Johnstone:
Well, no, it’s becoming so blatant. So the arrogance is so extreme. The contempt for everybody who isn’t like us, the determination to make everybody be like us, whatever that means, because what like us is, isn’t very clear. Because the West keeps changing its value system. As far as democracy is concerned, you cannot call the US system right now a model of democracy, since money is the big factor in the elections. And they talk about democracy versus authoritarianism. Well, it seems to me that the United States is very authoritarian in its own way. And so, all of this ideological split, which maybe had some credibility in the Cold War with communism now makes no sense whatsoever. It’s completely arbitrary. The US decides who is democratic and who is authoritarian, and is going to make everybody supposedly be democratic when they’re not democratic at all.
Diana Johnstone:
And this is becoming so blatant that the only reason other countries will follow it is because the US still has a lot of means of blackmail and pressure that it can put on the rest of the world. But I don’t know how long that’s going to last because the United States is more or less collapsing from the inside. Just look at these streets of drug addicts, of homeless people. The United States is falling apart inside, and still demanding that it be the model for the world. Well, I don’t think this is working.
Phil Taylor:
Not at all. Diana Johnstone wrote “For Washington, war never ends”, Consortium News, March 16. Diana, thank you very, very much. We really needed this discussion. And so on behalf of Taylor Report, we want to thank you for giving us this time.
Diana Johnstone:
Well, thank you for talking with me. Thank you very much. Thank you for what you’re doing.