Bulgaria has paid a very high price, sacrificing its interests under threat from the US: Karbowski interview, Part 2

The title above is the one that my interviewer, Martin Karbowski, gave it. I assume this was to set out bait for his core audience, which is in Bulgaria. And, indeed, we do discuss here what a small member state like Bulgaria can do to change the direction of the European Union from its becoming Soviet Union 2.0, what it can do to protect itself from a Maidan-like take-over by globalists engineered by US-funded NGOs.

However, the subjects we discuss here are numerous and varied.

Some appear to be very, very relevant to today, the 18^th of July: I speak in the interview of the possible re-election of Ursula von der Leyen as head of the European Commission taking place on this day, which is true, though the interview was video recorded a couple of weeks ago.

Other issues are more abstract and undated, though hopefully, they will also be seen to be important by viewers. I have in mind what I say in the interview about the Russian Federation as an “empire” and whether anything short of a military defeat can bring about the break-up of this empire that is so desired by Washington, London and Berlin.

Finally, I call attention to my extensive remarks about Joe Biden and about Donald Trump.  What I say about Trump is what the Germans would call vorbei, meaning it is outdated and has been superseded by my own substantial reconsideration of the merits of The Donald following his near assassination last weekend and particularly his naming J.D. Vance as his running mate.

I will be writing and speaking about this change in my electoral calculus in the coming days. What I say here is that these latest developments provide hope that a Trump victory will spell the end of U.S. support for the demagogue in power in Kiev and his neo-Nazi entourage, hence an early end to the war even before this year is out.

Considering Vance’s position as Senator, and the fact that his power base is within the legislative house most critical to all future appointments of any incoming Trump administration, considering the speeches I have heard delivered at the Republican National Convention, and most particularly by the president of the Teamsters Union, I believe that this second Trump administration will be far better manned than the first, when Trump arrived in Washington with too few contacts and supporters to put together a capable team. That deficiency was most pronounced in the field of foreign affairs, where his advisers and successive appointees as Secretary of State were disasters from the standpoint of implementing the policies he had announced as a candidate to office.  And, yes, under Trump 1.0 relations with Russia spiraled downward to a new nadir rather than rise upwards to normality as he had pledged.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Transcript, followed by translation into German

Transcript below by a reader

Karbowski: 00:06
I know you speak very good Russian. Can we speak Russian?

[briefly translated from spoken Russian]

Doctorow:
Please, it is possible.

Karbowski:
How good.


Karbowski:
What kind of people do you say live in America now? Scared people or what?

Doctorow: 00:27
They live their private lives. In general, they are all friends of mine. Even my relatives are there. They live well, they are happy with life, they absolutely do not feel, do not understand and do not want to understand what is going on in the world. They don’t feel, absolutely don’t feel, what chaos America is creating in the world.

Karbowski: 00:57
And they don’t know.

Doctorow:
And they don’t want to know. There are no stupid people here. But people are ignorant because they don’t want to, they don’t want to find out.

Karbowski: 01:12
Let’s speak English, because in Bulgaria everyone who speaks Russian tells us that we are Russian spies, you know?

[remainder of interview spoken in English]

Doctorow: 1:24
Okay, back to English.

Karbowski:
You live in Brussels. What do you think about the European Union and its policies?

Doctorow:
Everyone talks about, “Yes, the problem with Brussels is the bureaucracy.” I don’t agree. The problem is in the parliament. There is no democracy. The parliamentarians are not free people. And the way voting is held– you know, here in Brussels, there is the debating and the drafting of laws. But the voting takes place in Strasbourg, on the brief stays in Strasbourg. And on a given day, when the deputies are in Strasbourg, they have to vote on maybe a hundred different bills, on one day.

Is that feasible? Of course it isn’t. And that’s intentional. They are given instructions by their party leaders, at the level of the parliament, on how they should vote on every bill. So the degree to which they are really representing their electors is nil. Therefore, I say the European Parliament is no more democratic than the European Commission. And the absolute violation of principles of democracy, where the people count for something, we are all going to witness later today, when the Parliament takes its decision on who will be the commissioners, the key commissioners. That is, whether von der Leyen will continue as the head of the Commission, whether Kallas, the Prime Minister of Estonia, will indeed become the replacement for Borrell at Foreign Affairs and Military Affairs.

3:21
And we have no role in that, just as no one had a role in the selection of von der Leyen, going back to her first placement in office, which was, as we all understood, a backroom deal that was pushed by Macron. And since I have always believed that Macron was a CIA plant, you can say– well, I can explain that, how he was elected. It was the same kind of manipulation that brought Hollande to power when the most viable and most intellectual and most popular candidates were disposed of, either in the case of Strauss-Kahn, by this scandal in New York where he was framed by the US authorities and led to the courtroom handcuffed to destroy his political career. Well, who did that? The CIA.

The same sort of thing happened in next electoral cycle, which brought Mr. Macron to power. His most serious competitor [Fillon] was removed when charged with manipulating funds, manipulating the funds available to him for assistance, by giving jobs to his wife. Well, yes, of course it was true, but you could throw out the whole of the French Parliament for the same reason. It was not an isolated case. It was a problem of financing elections in France.

05:05
Anyway, my point is that the United States is manipulating what’s happening today in the European Commission. We, the people who voted on June 6th for a new Parliament have been deceived because the clear mandate of the people for change is being ignored by the centrist right and centrist left, the European People’s Party and the Socialists and Democrats, at the expense of everyone else. And that’s very sad.

Karbowski: 05:38
Do you know what is this thing, Euro-Atlantism?

Doctorow:
It’s a very catchy term, and it suggests a kind of equality between the European side and the other side of the Atlantic, the other side of the pond. The reality, of course, is somewhat different. Euro-Atlanticism is American dominance. It is the creation and the consolidation of the colonial hold that America has over Europe, And, regrettably, this Ukrainian war has been used [to] great advantage by the United States. People speak of NATO’s being stronger than ever and more consolidated than ever. Well, yes, the American grip on Europe through NATO is greater than ever, and it’s not to the benefit of Europe.

06:37
The Europeans have suffered financially, economically. You see it in the streets of Brussels. You see it by the empty storefronts. You see it by the inflation. Officially here we have 2% inflation. You go to a restaurant, and you know there’s a 40% inflation over where it was a year ago. And all of that is a consequence of Euro-Atlanticism and the forcible introduction of sanctions against Russia that we have seen for the last two years.

Karbowski: 07:15
What is Europe’s mistake regarding Russia? Can we define the feeling of superiority over the Russians that is a new racism?

Doctorow:
Superiority over the Russians, of course. However, let’s put this in a broader context. As Americans like to say, don’t take this personally. It isn’t just directed against Russia. I think Josep Borrell said it all when he made his famous remark that Europe is the garden and outside is the jungle. So, the jungle inhabitants are not just living in Moscow, it’s the rest of the world.

Karbowski: 08:03
The United States did not take the risk of going to war with small nuclear states like Iran or North Korea. My theory is that with these small nuclear states, the risk is not worth it. But a war that aims at the collapse of Russia will immensely enrich the American imperialists. Am I right?

Doctorow:
Well, that really depends on what your estimate is of the consequences of a nuclear war. I have written in the last month that Russia actually has a first-strike capability. By that I meant not merely that it can unleash vast destructive power, but that it might even overwhelm the ability of the United States to respond, so that it would be a victory, yes. But that’s very risky. Like what happened in Sevastopol last Sunday. Five of these American missiles, ATACMs, were fired at the Crimean Peninsula. Four of them were shot down rather close to the point of launch, quite some distance from Crimea. The fifth one, however, overwhelmed the defense system and got through and was only destroyed over the beach in Sevastopol.

09:37
Well, you don’t want to take that risk with nuclear weapons. If 50 are coming and 49 are shot down, one getting through is quite enough, quite enough to cause unbelievable destruction. So the Russians, like the Americans, have a full triad. It is inconceivable that one side or the other will completely destroy the retaliatory possibilities of the other. And so anyone sitting in Washington would have to be out of his mind– well, there are quite a few of them that are out of their minds, but not all of them sitting, and certainly not in the Pentagon who do these calculations much better than you or I do– they would have to be suicidal to stage a strike against Russia. And the Russians also would have to be very, very immune to risk if they were to proceed and enjoy the use of their first-strike capability. They would have a heavy price to pay.

Karbowski: 10:48
It’s very dangerous. This is a very dangerous game. Is it a game for Russians, because for us this is not a game. We have no army, we are a member of NATO, but you understand us. We stay here and wait for the big guys to be peaceful. We hope for the big guys to be peaceful.

Doctorow:
Well, when I’m not doing geopolitics, I like to relax a little bit, and I go to opera. And of course Tosca is one of my favorite operas. And in answer to what you’re saying, I will tell you what the Russian view of the present confrontation with America is. They think of Scarpia, who is stabbed by Tosca, and he’s lying on the ground, lying on the floor of this fortress dying, and he says, “Me, Scarpia, killed by a woman.”

The Russians on the talk shows are saying, “We, Russians, killed by this dimwit in Washington and by the fools around him?” It is, they find it, very distasteful, very ugly to consider that these totally reckless people in Washington, with their Yale degrees, are the ones who may cause the end of the world.

Karbowski: 12:16
You are a specialist of Russia, I think so. All the old empires collapsed. Why does Russia survive? And if the sequel of the Russian empire is the USSR, Soviet Union, then the sequel of Russia, what kind of empire will be, Is it?

Doctorow:
It’s a very, very good question. Of course, in the United States now, among specialists in Russian, there is a slogan, to “decolonize Russia”. And by that they mean that everyone should be studying the Buryats or studying any of the hundred or more different major ethnic groups on the territory of Russia. However, it is the Russian people that have been the glue of this whole territory and remain so, as is the Russian language, which is the lingua franca for that whole vast territory that’s 13% of the globe. And it is not an empire,\– it’s a land empire, not a sea empire. That’s a very big distinction. The Russian empire already collapsed. It collapsed as a result of World War I. So did the Austrian Empire, and so did the Ottoman Empire. These were enormous economic disruptions and political disruptions that caused the end of these empires. Russia– the moral of that story is: don’t lose a war.

13:58
So, to answer your question, until Russia loses a war, it will not collapse. Call it an empire, call it what you will, the name is not important here. It is a highly integrated society, which is very mixed up, very mixed up, very intermarried, and there’s no reason for it naturally, on its own, to break up. There are not units, territorial, economic units, in the present Russian Federation comparable to those that were in the Soviet Union and which had been encouraged by Soviet policies on nationalities. They actually prepared the way for their own dissolution without thinking in those terms. And Russia is not preparing the way for its own dissolution. So it’s a– barring an unsuccessful war, It is unthinkable that that territory will break up.

Karbowski: 15:03
Some people wish this thing. Ukrainians and Russians were brothers. I believe in this. But now Ukraine hates the Russians after 10 years of work of American NGOs in Kyiv. Do you agree with me and do you suspect that this could also happen in Bulgaria?

Doctorow:
That’s a very good point. NGOs and then what you were saying is, of course, Madame Nuland admitted that. She said about five or six billion dollars were spent precisely to undermine the political consensus in Ukraine and to prepare it for what happened in 2014 with Maidan. Can this happen elsewhere? Well, of course it can. That’s why Mr. Orban has done what he has done to dismantle NGOs. And that’s why there’s such a fierce fight against it in– the university that was chased out, why there was such a fierce fight in Budapest over his policies. It’s why there’s such a fierce fight in Georgia over its foreign agent law, which is intended also to tame the NGOs, or at least to expose who’s paying for what. And it’s quite natural the country should do that. Everyone speaks about Putin’s law, but it wasn’t Putin’s law. Putin was simply taking up a law that was– in the United States, it goes back to the 1920s, which is essentially a foreign agent law. You have to declare foreign payments if you’re going to take a public stance.

16:45
So, that is all logical. Can it happen in Bulgaria? It can happen anywhere. The question of American influence over Bulgaria was most prominent, not at the popular ground level, but at the top. Let’s face it, Bulgaria was steamrolled by the United States to withdraw its agreement with Russia over South Stream. So Bulgaria has paid a very big price, both in terms of reputational price and economic price, sacrificing its interests under a threat from the United States. What will happen in the future, I can’t say.

Karbowski: 17:32
But if you are a Bulgarian political leader, tsar maybe, and you have whole power, what you will do and what you will say to Bulgarians?

Doctorow:
Well, I think that small countries can do a lot. And if anybody doubts that, look at Estonia. They have one million population and Kallas is about to be crowned as the second most important person in the European Commission.

Karbowski: 18:07
But with help, with a little help from my friends, with a little help from Americans.

Doctorow:
Of course. But the point is that without any help from America, Hungary, which I think has a population not too much different from Bulgaria, has put a pole in the mechanism. It has, it had an enormous impact on the European Union. If a few more small countries were to do the same, we would have a new European Union. So the possibility of changing life for the better exists, but someone has to find the courage in each country. In Slovakia they did. And the one who did it was almost murdered. So I understand there’s great personal risk for leaders of any country to stand up to 27 other countries and say enough is enough. But you do have that possibility. They want to remove the veto right. You have the voice that says don’t do it. You know, if you already do that, it will be a great help in preventing the further progression of Europe to a new Soviet Union-like organization.

Karbowski: 19:31
OK. Tell me something. What’s happened with American media? We believe this freedom of speech. When I was young, I wrote the article, Freedom of Speech, the most important thing in my life. What’s happened with American media?

Doctorow:
Well, a lot has happened to American media, and not just one thing. The point is, economic change, consolidation in the press goes back 30, 40 years, where many independent, smaller newspapers disappeared or were swallowed up by larger groups. And then since the internet age, at the end of the 90s, there has been a vast economic transformation of the whole business, so that newspapers have been struggling to survive. Say the same with independent television stations, even CNN. They still say that they are the most watched news organization globally, but that is doubtful, when you have independent broadcasters who get millions of viewers and CNN has tens of thousands of viewers.

This corporate media have been taking a beating in this digital internet age. So just to speak about the outcome without speaking about the inputs that made this possible is not entirely fair. But let’s look at the outcome. The outcome is complete servility to the state powers. They are not a check on abuse of power. They are not whistleblowers. They are looking to– not to rock the boat. And they become– the New York Times going back to the 1970s, had a bigger cooking section and restaurant section than it had international news. They are entertainment disseminators, more than they are news disseminators.

21:41
That is very sad. I have a colleague, a classmate from Harvard, Mr. Schmeman, who was for a long time the Bureau Chief of New York Times, International Herald Tribune in Paris. He’s in semi-retirement, but is still a member of the editorial board of the New York Times. And he is viciously anti-Russian. But then so is everybody else on the board. He has a lot of company. And of course, there’s the Washington Post, which is an egregious case of servility to Washington, to the State Department, to the Pentagon. And the fact that Mr. Bezos, a wonderful entrepreneur from Amazon, is the owner of the Washington Post has changed nothing. It has not given it a breath of fresh air as one might’ve hoped when he took it over. It is simply repeating what it receives in the morning as a handout from the press department of State.

22:57
But then the whole profession, I want to emphasize this, the whole profession of journalism has come down in quality, not just the international reporting, because there are fewer bureaus abroad and the rest of it. My wife is a journalist, does cultural journalism, and she sees what happens when we go to, she goes to an opera and then is meeting with the other journalists. And what they do and what is printed, and mostly it’s not even printed any more, because most of them have lost their jobs, and they’re now on online news portals, not receiving regular salaries. They simply are taking the handouts, the press releases, and putting their names on them. So, the best thing that anybody studying journalism can do in the West is become a public relations officer.

Karbowski: 23:56
Are you afraid [of] Biden next year, if he will be elected?

Doctorow:
Well, it’ll be amazing if he’s alive, if he’s elected. I think the assumption is that he’ll be elected and then be forced to step down and hand it over to Kamala Harris, who was a disaster. But it makes no difference, because he is manipulated. He is controlled by his handlers, and she certainly would also be controlled by her handlers. She’s utterly incompetent for the job and has virtually no popularity as a communicator. She has zero, and most of the job is communications, as Reagan correctly identified. So am I afraid for Biden winning? Biden’s winning would only be continuation of the rule by the deep state that we have now.

24:59
On the other hand, I’m not interested in Mr. Trump winning. Mr. Trump is volatile. He didn’t– in foreign affairs, and particularly with respect to Russia and international global management, he was a disaster. The relations with Russia worsened terribly under Trump. His appointments from the very beginning were terrible appointments. He was not established in Washington. He was relying on his family members to fill posts or to advise him, because he had no network in Washington to use to fill posts with competent people, he didn’t. So it’s a hopeless cause, it is like Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. I put my money on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

25:57
The Democrats are fractured now over Gaza and the Israeli war, with young people going against Biden and the older folks listening to Biden. Biden had a certain hold on older Americans. I remember very much my mother saying, “Ah, Joseph Biden, what a gentleman.” He also has a good head of hair, but what’s beneath the hair is what worries me. Not only has he lost what brains he had, but the worst of his instincts as a Cold Warrior have been decisive at his every move. He is mentally in an age of 40 and 50 years ago. And the world has changed a lot, but Joe Biden hasn’t. And that’s part of the problem.

Karbowski: 27:02
Is this for the first time in American history?

Doctorow:
That we have someone that old? Someone that old and senile?

Karbowski:
Yes.

Doctorow:
Yes, I’d say the Russians are the best people to appreciate this, because that’s what they were living under with with Brezhnev and Chernenko and Andropov. So they’ve been through that. They don’t want to ever see that again. Whereas the United States is experiencing it for the first time.

Karbowski: 27:32
Okay, the last question is, explain to us what is this deep state? Who is the deep state?

Doctorow:
Well, the deep state is the contingent of federal employees who stay there, administration to administration. They’re not political appointees as such. And that’s in a sense, that’s a good thing. It gives some consistency. The problem is who they are. And there were, going back again, I’ve spoken about 9-11 and the dramatic changes in society in America when the country was traumatized and people traded their freedom for what they thought was security. In that exchange and in the period of Bush Jr., Dick Cheney, the vice president, exerted enormous influence over the whole US government. He was responsible for directing the purge of the CIA to replace the Russia- experienced people with those he thought would have more relevant experience inside the government as Arabists and still more to outsource a lot of the intelligence work done by the United States to private contractors. These changes are still with us. The deep state has been remade by Cheney. There were political purges going back to that period, which brought in the worst people, the neocons. And so– the concept of a deep state isn’t by itself so difficult to deal with. There should be some permanence to government policy. The problem is when the people have been installed by a master like Dick Cheney, all to be politically chosen and chosen as neocons. That is the problem of the American deep state.

Karbowski: 29:55
Thank you for the interview.
Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Bulgarien hat einen sehr hohen Preis gezahlt, indem es seine Interessen unter der Bedrohung durch die USA geopfert hat: Karbowski-Interview, Teil 2

Der obige Titel ist der, den mein Gesprächspartner, Martin Karbowski, ihm gegeben hat. Ich nehme an, dass er damit einen Köder für sein bulgarisches Stammpublikum auslegen wollte. Und in der Tat diskutieren wir hier darüber, was ein kleines Mitgliedsland wie Bulgarien tun kann, um die Richtung der Europäischen Union zu ändern, damit sie nicht zur Sowjetunion 2.0 wird, und was es tun kann, um sich vor einer Maidan-ähnlichen Machtübernahme durch Globalisten zu schützen, die von US-finanzierten NGOs eingefädelt wird.

Die Themen, die wir hier diskut)eren, sind jedoch zahlreich und vielfältig.

Einige davon scheinen für den heutigen 18. Juli sehr, sehr relevant zu sein: Ich spreche in dem Interview über die mögliche Wiederwahl von Ursula von der Leyen als Chefin der Europäischen Kommission, die an diesem Tag stattfindet, was auch stimmt, obwohl das Interview vor einigen Wochen aufgezeichnet wurde.

Andere Themen sind eher abstrakt und undatiert, werden aber hoffentlich auch von den Zuschauern als wichtig empfunden. Ich denke dabei an das, was ich in dem Interview über die Russische Föderation als „Imperium“ sage und ob irgendetwas außer einer militärischen Niederlage den von Washington, London und Berlin so sehr gewünschten Zusammenbruch dieses Imperiums herbeiführen kann.

Abschließend möchte ich auf meine ausführlichen Bemerkungen über Joe Biden und Donald Trump hinweisen. Was ich über Trump sage, ist das, was die Deutschen „vorbei“ (sic!) nennen würden, was bedeutet, dass es überholt ist und durch meine eigene gründliche Neubewertung der Vorzüge von The Donald nach seiner Beinahe-Ermordung am vergangenen Wochenende und insbesondere der Ernennung von J.D. Vance zu seinem Vize-Präsidenten-Kandidaten überholt wurde.

Ich werde in den kommenden Tagen über diese Änderung in meinem Wahlkalkül schreiben und sprechen. Was ich hier sagen will, ist, dass diese jüngsten Entwicklungen die Hoffnung nähren, dass ein Sieg von Trump das Ende der US-Unterstützung für den Demagogen an der Macht in Kiew und sein neonazistisches Gefolge bedeuten wird, und damit ein frühzeitiges Ende des Krieges, noch bevor dieses Jahr zu Ende ist.

In Anbetracht der Position von Vance als Senator und der Tatsache, dass seine Machtbasis in der Legislative liegt, die für alle künftigen Ernennungen einer künftigen Trump-Regierung am wichtigsten ist, sowie in Anbetracht der Reden, die ich auf dem Nationalkongress der Republikaner und insbesondere vom Präsidenten der Teamsters Union gehört habe, glaube ich, dass diese zweite Trump-Regierung weitaus besser besetzt sein wird als die erste, als Trump mit zu wenigen Kontakten und Unterstützern in Washington ankam, um ein fähiges Team zusammenzustellen. Dieser Mangel war im Bereich der Außenpolitik am stärksten ausgeprägt, wo seine Berater und die nacheinander ernannten Außenminister eine Katastrophe waren, wenn es um die Umsetzung der Politik ging, die er als Kandidat für das Amt angekündigt hatte. Und ja, unter Trump 1.0 erreichten die Beziehungen zu Russland einen neuen Tiefpunkt, anstatt sich, wie er versprochen hatte, zu normalisieren.