Here is an excerpt from a transcript: (0.07)
Russell Brand: Hello, there you 6.5 million awakening wonders, thanks for joining me on this great voyage to truth and freedom in which we must commune with truth-tellers like the great Oliver Stone, whose new film Nuclear Now is out now. There's a link down there in the description. I asked Oliver Stone about JFK, do we have more access to the truth now? And are we being told the truth about Putin: is he a reasonable man or is he a nut-job tyrant war criminal? Or is it a bit of both? Stay to the end of this conversation, you're going to love it,
Oliver Stone: We're going, we're taking Russia into the edge now. We are really going to the edge. This is crazy, what's going on and nuts, suicidal. We are going to hurt ourselves in a big way. This is a potential World War Three. This is the same situation as World War One, in a sense. The stupidity of it, is of the alliances and the fears and the built-up phobias. If we don't stop this, what Biden is doing, this guy is, I voted for ... My main mistake. thinking that he is an old man now, that he would calm down and be more mellow and so forth. I didn't see that at all. I see a man who maybe is not in charge of his own administration. Who knows? But he's going to fall down somewhere. But it seems that he's dragging us stupidly into a confrontation with a power that's not going to give. This is their borders. This is their world. This is NATO going into Ukraine. This is a whole other story. This is not as bad as we did. We did a lot of terrible things from 2001 on. We put, we NATOized a lot of these countries on the far end in Eastern Europe, who are anti-Russian because of old hostilities. And you know, you get dragged into Balkan Wars here. This is really the same thing as World War One. We're, our allies are rabid, anti-Russian people, the Ukrainian government and who are they fighting? They're fighting ethnic Russians in Ukraine. This is the madness of it. And our media does not recognize that the, what he called the ethnic Russians in Ukraine are really the ones who want their autonomy. That's all they asked for in 2014 -- autonomy. And they were about to get it. There was a deal about to be made with Putin and and Ukraine, right in March of 2022, when the war started. There was a deal about to be made; the Americans squashed and they didn't want to deal, they don't want the peace treaty. They don't want to give autonomy to Donbas and Luhansk. Now, look where we are, it's gotten worse and it's gonna get worse.
Notice that he doesn't say one word about Vladimir Putin. Stone blames the war in Ukraine on Biden, and absolves Putin of any responsibility. There was no deal to be made with Putin, and there was no deal between Putin and Zelensky.
As for the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, well, it's the Russians who have made their lives miserable. Look at what the Russians did to Mariupol - a Russian-speaking city in Donetsk.
Those who argue that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be allowed to keep parts of Ukraine should meet the survivors of his atrocities. They know firsthand the horror of life under Russian occupation. Their stories remind us of what Ukraine is fighting for — and what the free world is standing against.
Anna Zaitseva was a 24-year-old schoolteacher in Mariupol when Russian forces attacked her city in the first days of the invasion in February 2022. She and her 3-month-old son took refuge in the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant, where her husband, Kirilo, worked. A former soldier, Kirilo left his family bunkered there and joined the local defense forces, known as the Azov Regiment. Zaitseva brought enough diapers and food to last a few days.
Zaitseva and her son were trapped inside the plant for 65 days, enduring constant Russian shelling. They emerged only to find their hometown destroyed — but their ordeal was just beginning. She and her baby were evacuated via a supposed “safe corridor” that was anything but safe. The Russians regularly attacked civilians who were trying to get out of the city. During Zaitseva’s own evacuation, Russian forces bombed a building she was in and Ukrainian soldiers had to dig her out.
Zaitseva was then taken to a “filtration camp” run by the Russian army. There, she was strip-searched, forced to hand over all of her electronics — and told to leave her baby in her captors’ care. (She refused.) She was interrogated about her husband, but she didn’t know his whereabouts. Only through a YouTube video did she learn that Kirilo had been taken into captivity, on a stretcher, when the steel plant fell. The last time they spoke on the phone was 11 months ago.
“I don’t even know if he’s alive,” she told me in an interview last week in Washington.
Now a refugee in Germany with her son and mother, she still shudders whenever she hears a helicopter. She has no idea when she will be able to return home, if ever. Meanwhile, she is traveling the world with a message: Don’t abandon the Ukrainians living on the Russian side of the front lines.
“People in the West are tired of this topic, sure,” she said. “But could you think about the people in captivity? Are they tired or not?”
Zaitseva came to Washington last week to attend the screening of the film “Slava Ukraini,” the latest war documentary by French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. The film follows Lévy as he tours the front lines in eastern Ukraine. His goal is to remind Western audiences of the stakes in the Russia-Ukraine war for the greater cause of freedom and human rights.
“Ukraine is a shield that protects all of Europe and the United States from Putin’s barbaric actions,” Zaitseva said. “Don’t think that Ukraine is so far away — everything is connected in this world.”
Here is the trailer for Levy's film:
Previous Blog Posts on Oliver Stone's Politics
Relevant Links on Oliver Stone's Politics
Don't miss the Viewer's Guide to JFK: Destiny Betrayed and JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.
Over the past several months, I have shown in multiple blog posts how Oliver Stone's documentary series, JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed, misleads viewers. In fact, despite months of work, there are still many more misleading segments that need to be addressed. It's no wonder that the fact checkers of Netflix nixed the airing of the films.
There is a choice between four hours of tendentious nonsense (JFK: Destiny Betrayed) and two hours (JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass). As a handy guide for viewers, here are all those posts in order of their appearance in JFK: Destiny Betrayed and JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, preceded by some general critiques.
The Viewer's Guide has now been updated to include the sources from my new book, Oliver Stone's Film-Flam: The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza.
