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Debuted last night ... brilliant 5/5 stars

posted 8 years ago by brux (14840)
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Oliver Stone's "The Putin Interviews" debuted last night, and it was and amazingly close and candid interview with Russia's leader.

We learn that Putin really came from almost nothing, certainly nothing like almost all of our American leaders. We see the story of Putin's career rise, as well as the story of Russia during this time, and we also see the story of the US from a different perspective.

We see how as the US said it was trying to make friends with Russia piece by piece it was expanding NATO to encircle and starve Russia.

Having read Oliver Stone's "The Untold History of the United States" it is apparent that he has wanted to bring this story to the American people to bring some real information and balance to the story we are told about the Cold War and "communism". Stone wrote about how the US made promises of assistance to Russia early in WWII to help them fight off the Germans, but in reality we allowed the German's to decimate that country killing tens of millions and destroying the Western part of the country. The story is amazing how Russia moved its entire infrastructure east and rebuilt its entire war-making machine in order to eventually beat the Germans.

We see the American actions in Afghanistan in a new light as Putin reminds us about how the US encouraged the very Islamic radicalism that blew back on us to bring us 9-11 and this War on Terror, the police state, and the triumph of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex - to which we must add Media and Corporate Complex to, as well now.

Putin reminds us how after 9-11 Russia supported us and allowed us to use Russian territory to supply our troops in Afghanistan as we hunted for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

Putin talks about how Russia's military budget is some 40 billion dollars, while in the US we spend almost 800 billion ... more than the rest of the world combined. Our former President Dwight David Eisenhower put it like this .... ( continued )

[–] brux (14840) 8 years ago

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Dwight D. Eisenhower,
34th president of US 1953-1961 (1890 - 1969)
From speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

That was 64 years ago. Today the real wages of American workers has not risen in 30 years or more. The labor union movement has been destroyed by the top level of business. We all are constantly surveilled, and we are in constant war. The whole media that informs us is owned by the very military contractors that are profiting off of this system that is funded through our taxes, that today is mostly paid for by taxes on labor. Comparing polls on what most Americans want to see our country do and what the government actually does ... the difference is like night and day.

Our health care system is a rip off. Our tax system is a rip-off. Our public school system that educated Americans enough to win WWII, the Space Race and the Tech Revolution is not under attack and the Republicans seeks to destroy it altogether, while private university education are unaffordable to almost all Americans. Jobs have become virtual slave labor where workers have so say about their work, they cannot quit or they lose their medical insurance and they fear to make even the smallest complaint because they fear getting fired since they are on average under so much debt it could destroy their families.

Meanwhile Putin has raised the pay of the average Russian worker from something like 2,000 "dollars" or "rubles" or whatever to over 20,000. ( continued )

[–] brux (14840) 8 years ago

That is not the full story, the whole truth is always more complicated, especially than can be written in a off-the-cuff post on social media, but when you look at Putin's hard work, the results he has had, and how this man can meet and speak extemporaneously and without conditions to an interviewer from ostensibly his country's greatest enemy, it is hard to not see past his many foibles and possible lies to the man underneath and compare that to any American President, whose honest comments to the public probably ended with Eisenhower, and what we get now is programmed propaganda and war talk that supports a system that as we think of Russia - no one voted for, wants and is probably helping very few.

At the very least this is a place to start to see past the media hype - hopefully NOT to be cowed into foolishness by a foreign leader who is trying his own brand of persuasion on us, but to contemplate the reality of the second biggest super-power and its leader and consider whether it may be possible that we all can do better for each other and everyone on the planet?

This is a very interesting and provocative interview at the least and I hope it will lead to undercutting some of the talk about firing up a new Cold War that no one can afford at this time, least of all - all of the citizens of these super-powers that have to take money they should be spending on us and continuously burn it in weaponry and security.