Transcript submitted by a reader
Mike Farris:
Gilbert, good to see you again. I always appreciate you making yourself available. We set this up just a few days ago. Let me start off with congratulations on your new book.
Doctorow:
I’m very happy with this newly-hatched book. It took a great deal of effort, frankly, to put this together and I’m pleased with the result. It is in two formats. First, a week ago, the paperback edition appeared on all of Amazon’s websites across the globe. And this is not an abstract consideration. One of my first orders came from Japan, another order came from Australia.
Not to mention, of course, the States is obvious, Britain and English-speaking countries are obvious. But these remote locations already have placed orders to receive the book, which is a great pleasure because the issues are global. The interests of the whole world are in what is taking place now in and around Ukraine. So it’s logical that this would be topical. The achievement here was to cull the writings that I do several times a week to try to reduce duplication, because necessarily you cover the same track when you are writing about events before, during, and after them, and to give a very important introduction forward to this to prepare the reader for what they’re about to see and what they’re not going to see.
I’ll say right up front what they will not find here is a comprehensive history of the Russian-Ukraine war. That’s something that there are dozens and dozens of historians and political scientists who will be doing that for forever. And the public, the audience can choose among them. What I’ve done is something they do not do, because they weren’t in Russia, and I was. This book in particular covers a period, this is 2022, 2023, when virtually all foreign journalists left Russia.
Some of them weren’t there anyway because the Russian-Ukraine war started only a few months after the Covid epidemic ended. During the epidemic, there were relatively few foreign journalists anywhere outside their home base. So that was how we went into the war. And during the war, they of course, the Russians, stopped issuing visas. And so, visas for all purposes, business visas, visas for journalists, visas for anyone, except humanitarian visas.
And my visas fall in that category because I have a Russian wife. And those who were in close family relations were issued visas by the Russians. So I got into Russia and I wrote about what I saw. And this book is about how the Russian society fared during the war. Nobody else was paying much attention to it.
Certainly Western newspapers and electronic media were not interested in conveying to their publics anything that they might know, because Russia was taboo, Russia was supposed to be isolated, Russia was supposed to be collapsing. Therefore I recommend this book to those who want to see how Russian society developed, because it was not static, the war as I– there’s an old saying that wars make nations, And it is true. Of course, in Western media, that has been used with respect to Ukraine, how Ukraine consolidated and became a single culture country under the impact of the war. In the case of Russia, it also had dramatic effect on rising patriotism by creating new elites to replace the elites that we all know about from the Yeltsin period, that is to say the oligarchs, who are deeply tainted with corruption and with selfishness and so on. And they are steadily being replaced by patriotic self-sacrificing people who have impressed the broad public, and of course the powers that be, with their possible contributions in future.
For the Americans who are watching this, I refer to the effects of military service in creating whole cadres of higher business executives and government officials following the World War II, following the Korean War. When I was coming up through the business in the late 1970s, almost anybody who was at the top of a major corporation had seen military service in one of the many wars that America had been engaged in. So Russian society has been shaped also by the pressures and the opportunities for upward movement that come out of wars. And this is something I describe. Of course, greater interest, I think, to the general public is consumer, the consumer services and goods that were available in supermarkets, in the corner grocery store, in the electronics store, how these things changed over the three years.
And the changes were very significant. Of course, the single biggest item here when speaking about supermarkets is that Russia became really very self-sufficient in almost everything that you would find in a supermarket. And they’ve also created new sources of supply from Iran, from Azerbaijan. So, I’m not going to repeat here points in the book, but I will say that for the general reader, this type of material, my travel notes in Russia during my periodic visits in 22, in 23, will be of particular interest. And then there are other items, because the book has several different genres.
It has book reviews of books that I think are highly relevant to understanding. The Feeling of Patriotism, my one book, I found for 85 days that the city of Slaviansk survived as a cradle of Russian renaissance in 2014, this was the Russia’s Alamo to liken it to historical events that would be known to Americans at least, standing up against vastly superior forces and ultimately losing, but creating a kind of landmark kind of tradition that Russians would return to in 22 and 23 when an actual war took place with participation of the Russian Federation. So there are books. There are some very important documentary films, which most of the audience, most of the readership of this book will not know about, should know about. So as I say, there are a number of genres, not a single one.
I hope, as I say in the introduction, there are, there’s material here that not everyone will be interested in. And my recommendation is to skim and to go to what you find is of particular interest to you in the general subject matter of the Russian-Ukraine war. It’s 772 pages of rather condensed print, typeface, and of large format book, 7 by 10 inch book instead of the usual 6 by 9. So there is, there are 280,000 words. I do not recommend to anyone other than scholars who are keen to do a book review to try to sit down and take on this book in one sitting or two sittings.
I myself, in editing it, took a week to get through 280,000 words with some comfort. But there is material here. And I’ll answer the question, why republish and present here material that otherwise was available on my internet sites. My internet sites are here today and gone tomorrow. I expect that this book will find a readership not just next week and next year, but for a good long time.
And I say that not idly, but with good reason from my experience. I am still selling comfortably books which I published in 2010, like my analysis of the great writers or authors of road maps to the future after the United States was looking for the next big thing, having slain the other communists in Russia by their own thinking. Of course, not in fact, but that’s how they imagined it. In any case, the books that go back to 2010, also collections of essays, are still selling with good reason, because they have a lot of relevance. And so I believe that this book will find readers, not just among scholars, for several decades.
I think it’s easier, the last comment I’ll make, to help people understand what this is. It is a primary source, it is not a secondary source. Secondary sources are based on materials like this primary source. Otherwise, primary sources are autobiographies or similar material. This is personal journalism, and it is–I position myself as a chronicler.
I am a historian by training. And in Russian history, there are figures who are very well known to the broad public who are chroniclers. Pymian is the one case in point. The one man who wrote about it, Isidman, who wrote about what the Russians call the “time of troubles” in the early 17th century, which led to the installation of the Romanov dynasty. He was recording what he saw around him.
And that is what I am doing in this book, recording what I saw around myself. And I hope people will find it to be of value.
Farris:
And for people, we didn’t say the title of the book, so would you like to share the name of the book?
Doctorow:
Oh yes, oh yes please. It is “War Diaries” with “Volume One”, Volume One because there’s going to be a “Volume Two”, and I hope that will be the end of it.
Volume Two, I expect will come out at the end of this year, assum ing that the war winds down one way or another, although how it will wind down is still a matter of great conjecture. So “War Diaries, the Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023”. This is Volume 2, where it is intended to be 24-25.
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Farris:
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——–
And so for people that are listening on the audio, I’ve just put up an image of the cover page for Gilbert’s new book. And where can people find it?
Doctorow:
It’s available globally from Amazon. There are, people like their little bookshops, I understand that. So I hope they’ll bear with me. As an author and self-published person, I am very satisfied with Amazon, even if I don’t like the owner of Mr. Bezos. These are unrelated issues.
What he has created is brilliant. For authors, I have experience both with publishers who look like traditional publishers, though actually they’re also just typography, so printing houses, and who pretend to give you full service and promotion and rest of it, for your money, of course, and who keep almost all the royalties to themselves. Thank you very much. Amazon is a generous partner with the authors who publish on it. And so I am a, also they give the author instantaneous information about sales and where the sales take place.
This is invaluable for properly positioning and promoting your book to audiences who are interested in it. So my experience with them has been very good. My experience with other means of publishing, like my memoirs, physically the books look wonderful. I was very pleased with them. But as an author who would like to be reimbursed for my expenses, possibly make a cent or two on my intellectual efforts, I find these alternative ways of publishing to be considerably less attractive.
So I hope that the audience will bear with me and understand why I’ve chosen to market this book exclusively through Amazon. Now, there are, it’s in two formats. I mentioned at the start of this explanation of the book. The first that came out was the paperback, and that is not cheap, but the production costs of the book aren’t cheap. A 772-page book costs quite a bit to make.
So the retail price in the US is $36 for that book. Now I’m happy to say a more democratically priced solution is also available. For $10, you can get the e-book also on the Amazon website starting June 4th, which is the proper launch date of the ebook, it will be instantaneously available for download from the various Amazon websites. And I mentioned various because they’re all over the globe. They have centers, of course, nodes, which serve several countries at a time.
Here in Europe, almost every country has an Amazon website. Of course, the States, Canada, South America, Brazil, Mexico, in the Far East, or Australia, or Japan, these all have Amazon websites, and they serve the country where they’re located, and they serve neighboring countries. So, from the standpoint of the audience, this is readily accessible and they ship very quickly. So that is my recommendation.
Farris:
Well, again, congratulations on that. When you look at the completed book now and it’s it’s been released and you know, starting in 2022 and where we’re at, especially the events that unfolded over the weekend you know, what were your thoughts with seeing this drone attack? And it’s unbelievable where we’re living, the times we’re in, because I’m reading this stuff yesterday morning, and I don’t know Gilbert, like it’s just, you’re like, okay, was it just damaging? Was it not damaging? Depends on who you read. And what will the response be from it? So what were your thoughts yesterday?
Doctorow:
Well, my thoughts are the same that you’ll find expressed in the foreword to the book, that this war has had many turning points. And the people like myself, who have been on interview programs and who have written essays have been proven wrong, consistently wrong, because no one could participate in the escalations that have changed the nature of the war periodically or the dramatic events that occurred this past weekend, which you’re alluding to. And they open up complete change of perspective of what happens next. So in this, I think it is essential, an essential point of the book, that we have been proven wrong, not because we’re stupid, but because events have changed in an unforeseeable way.
And by the events I mean the level of US and NATO participation in the war, which changed the war from what was initially a special military operation, meaning a certain cleanup or regime change plan that Mr. Putin and his colleagues had to justify their military entry into Ukraine to a full-blown proxy war between Russia and the collective West. That was unforeseeable. Also, the level of offensive weapons, of deadly weapons that the West gave to Ukraine after forswearing it at this point and at that point, changed the Russian approach to the war.
As I have said repeatedly, in order for the Russian Federation to be safe from attack from Ukraine, they have to push Ukraine back the distance that the latest weapons systems give them to attack Russia. As Mr. Medvedev said the other day, “We soon will have to push Ukraine back to the Polish border, because– if we are to be safe from weapons that are put on the ground or in the air in what remains of Ukraine.”
So these things were foreseeable. Now as to what’s going to happen next from this weekend, there is, as you say, uncertainty about the extent of damage that was carried out by the drones on Russian planes in the various air bases from Murmansk in the north to the Moscow, a central Russian region, all the way out to the Irkutsk, 5,500 kilometers east of the Ukraine border.
How many of the nuclear-capable big bombers were actually destroyed? Well, Some people, the Ukrainians, were saying initially that they had destroyed one-third of the Russian fleet of these strategic bombers, and that 40 planes worth $7 billion had been destroyed. Latest indications, unofficially coming out of Russia because the ministry of defense says nothing, but unofficially it’s believed that maybe five of these bombers were actually damaged, or a few of them were destroyed. But the issue of course is bigger than the dollar value on how many planes were destroyed and whether it is just a tiny fraction of the Russian fleet that is part of their nuclear triad, which was destroyed, or a more significant number of planes. The issue is much bigger than that.
And it has to do with possible involvement, or likely involvement, of the United States intelligence, the CIA, of MI6, in helping the Ukrainians to prepare for this attack 18 months ago when the work began. The good thing to come out of this event is that it took them 18 months to prepare this attack, so it is virtually excluded that anything similar can be done now by the Ukrainians for as long as this war goes on. That doesn’t mean that something different that is devastating cannot be done by the Ukrainians. But this type of attack on air bases, we can exclude for the future. Nonetheless, it puts into question much bigger issues than just Ukraine.
The– people have asked “Why were all these Russian planes sitting like sitting ducks out on the airstrips exposed to possible attack?” Well, they were there because that is the condition of the New StART arms limitation treaty that had both the United States and Russia still honor it, though the Russians suspended participation in it. And so the planes were there. And the question, next question is, how did this, these drones get into Russia? Why were the– because they all seemed to have passed Russian customs border points being carried in semi-trailers.
So why did they, the Russian customs officials, not stop them? But I have traveled repeatedly across the border from Estonia into the Russian Federation, and our bus was almost taken apart by Russian border guards looking for Lord knows what in the engine case. How did these semi-trailers get across the border with no one stopping them anywhere with more than one border crossing? And if any one border crossing had stopped and discovered them, they all would have been discovered. So there are unanswered questions.
Was it, were these border posts bought off? Were they traitors? It’s possible. There’s a lot of corruption in these underpaid positions. How about the drivers? Did they know if they were carrying? Of course they’ll say they didn’t know. But what is the truth? Several have been arrested, and I imagine that their interrogation will be more intense than just a verbal interrogation, to get to the bottom of what was going on. So Russian security has been shown up to be very lacking.
And that is a big problem for Mr. Putin. The bigger problem is: the loss of prestige and humiliation that this entails, and how, whether or not Mr. Putin can resist the surely growing calls of patriots to do something serious about Ukraine, by which I mean to do what he said he would do three years ago, when they challenge strategic interests, strategic defenses of Russian Federation, namely to destroy decision-making centers. Well, that means the Ukrainian government. Can the Russians do that? Of course they can. They have the Oreshnik. It’s not nuclear. They could, with surgical precision, wipe out the Ukrainian government from one day to the next.
Will they do that? I just will introduce here an observation. You know that I have been interviewed weekly on Judge Napolitano’s program. That has in recent weeks, every program, has been translated into Russian, not just translated, voiceover and synchronized lips. This is the latest development AI re-engineered in Russia.
And I looked at, first there were just a few thousand viewers of that. Now there are 50,000, 60,000 Russians who are viewing these interviews. And I look at the comments, several hundred comments, and I can tell you they’re very violent. They’re very xenophobic. They’re very condescending to the West.
And so there are a great many Russians who are outraged by how the West has been abusing Russia and who are shocked at the, shall we say, timidity or lack of force of their president responding. I personally see it as very difficult for Mr. Putin to remain in office if he doesn’t do something serious now.
Farris:
And are you surprised that he’s held back for as long as this has been going on? Because I mean, do you feel like he’s been holding back?
Doctorow:
Oh, of course he’s been holding back. The question is, was he justified? Because if he did something dramatic, if the retaliations could be charged with being disproportionate, then we could well be moving closer and faster toward World War III. So this held him back. Besides, he was, with good reason, persuaded that the American leadership under Joe Biden was insane, that insane, drunk, whatever you want to call it, certainly the behavior of everyone around Biden, that Biden was somehow was beyond discussion, but that his immediate keepers, the subordinates who actually were running Mr. Biden, whether it’s Anthony Blinken or Jake Sullivan, from the perspective of Moscow, these people were insane. Therefore they were doubly cautious to do anything that might set them off. Now, I think they’re satisfied that Mr. Trump is not insane, that he is a rational actor, he’s a businessman, that the things that are said about him which are not flattering have nothing to do with his sanity, they have to do with his morality.
And so the Russians, I think, are satisfied that they are not dealing with a madman, which is a big change from where we were before the new administration came in. How will Mr. Putin react to this latest threat, which crosses the red lines of damaging part of the Russian nuclear triad? That’s what these bombers are. We’ll have to see.
But I’d say I venture to guess that he might declare war on Ukraine. Let’s remember that this is a variation on the question that some interviewers have asked me in the recent days, does Mr. Putin really want a peace treaty? And I have said unequivocally yes. He is a lawyer by training.
He thinks today in these terms. He wants to stay on the right side of international law. And just an attack on Ukraine, a decapitating attack more particularly, would not be his way of behaving if he didn’t have openly declared war on Ukraine. So I watch this closely. If in the coming weeks Mr. Putin goes before the nation and declares war on Ukraine, then I think a decapitating strike will follow the next day.
Farris:
What do you think of Putin as we sit here June 2nd today as a leader?
Doctorow:
He is a brilliant leader. I have various essays in this book and otherwise have said that he is a brilliant manager of human resources. His basic approach is that everybody is good for something. And even openly exposed, openly criticized villains, thieves who have stolen large sums from the Russian federal budget, had been retained by Putin, because they also could contribute unparalleled, unequaled services to the state.
So in this sense, he has been, in this sense, he’s been like Peter the Great, who did exactly the same thing, who was surrounded by a lot of scoundrels, whom he used very effectively for the benefit of the state. So that’s one aspect of Mr. Putin. But the single biggest proof that the man is extraordinary is that he has raised Russia from, in a phoenix-like way, from the ashes. What he took over from Yeltsin was a ruined country.
And it didn’t, it was a deeply corrupt country, and its economy had been smashed and had not reconstituted itself. And he turned this around, not at once, it took years. I would say that the complete recovery of Russia coincided with the start of the special military operation. Mr. Putin launched it because he was confident that his military had been raised to the level of the most efficient and strongest in Europe, if not in the world, ground forces, and because the Russian economy had been made sanction-proof in the preceding eight years from 2014.
This is all under his watch. So what he achieved speaks for itself. But there are, nobody is perfect and this has been said “horses for courses”, that a race horse is not good for the plow and a plow horse is not good for the races. And the question is whether Mr. Putin is good for today.
It’s an open question. Is Mr. Lavrov good for today? I’ve already said no. I think he should have been replaced two years ago, not just because he’s been here too long and has fallen prey to corruption, by corruption very specifically, raising his son in his path, this type of, this is very widely practiced in Russian senior positions.
And unfortunately, Mr. Lavrov has done that also. So in business, it’s a widely considered good management to rotate people. Now, some of them, they don’t gather too much moss under their feet. This is something that is a weak point in the Russian senior ranks.
Mr. Putin also, in 25 years, he is not irreplaceable. He came in, when he came in, everyone was asking, who is he? Because he seemed to have no merit to justify that position as president. Similarly, Mr. Putin will be replaced. Nobody lives forever. The question is how smooth that replacement will be, and will he be replaced by somebody who also has good judgment and isn’t too trigger happy. So this is the situation today. I mean, after all, Mr. Putin was almost killed. He was almost murdered two weeks ago by drones, which the Ukrainians sent against his helicopter. So the question is not something that I’m introducing as coming from nowhere.
We have to consider who runs Russia, for how long, and is there somebody around? Nobody has been groomed to replace Mr. Putin. But among those people who are at the top levels of the Russian government, who could fill his shoes without bringing us all into World War III?
Farris:
How much time, how much rope does Putin have before, say, the neocons and the people will demand an action?
Doctorow:
I’m sorry…
Farris:
I said how much time does he have for a proper response that will satisfy the people.
Doctorow:
Well, I wouldn’t expect it to take place tomorrow. He’s a man whose favorite word is akuratma, which Russian translates as carefully, cautiously. So he will do nothing precipitous. But will he do something? He has to do something.
Russian society will be deeply disappointed with him if he doesn’t do something. Just throwing a few more bombs at a few more underground factories making drones will not satisfy public opinion, considering the gravity of both the attacks we’ve discussed on the Russian heavy bombers and the terrorist attack, which we haven’t discussed, also this past weekend, where the Ukrainians blew up a railway in Kursk and blew up an automobile bridge in the neighboring region, just to the north of Kursk, Gansk, whereby the bridge collapsed on trains passing below and killed outright seven people on the train, injured 100 and sent 40 to hospital. Russian society is still reeling from this. Just imagine, this is within the Russian Federation, of Kursk. It’s nearby. It’s across the border from Ukraine.
Nonetheless, this is an attack on civilians which caused deaths and was attacking the transport infrastructure, which is vulnerable. You cannot have guards riding over every bridge in the country. And so the only way you can stop that is by stopping the people who are sending these saboteurs into Russia, which means destroying the Ukrainian government at a blow. That’s the only thing that can stop this.
Farris:
Well, and what I’m perplexed by is, you know, Trump comes into office. Shortly thereafter, Zelensky comes for a visit, and everybody saw that video, and he said, we’ll be out, we’ll be out. And yet they have not cut off funding to Ukraine, which could, I mean, ultimately wrap this thing up very quickly, but yet they haven’t.
Doctorow:
Mike, when we touch upon Trump, we’re touching upon a man who’s under fire from very big domestic opposition that is aligned with European opposition. And so it is quite strong. He has said many contradictory things, flip-flopping day to day, which make him look foolish, which make him look like a buffoon to those who are unkind.
I am not in the unkind group. I believe that this is all tactical, to keep at bay his enemies, to persuade them that “the fellow really listens to the last person who spoke to him. If we can get his ear long enough, we can bring him around to our position.” And for this reason, they don’t stab him in the back, which they otherwise would do. If they were confident, or if they were certain that he is in the enemy camp and could not be brought around, then they will be going after him with their daggers.
So this explains a lot of the peculiar behavior of Mr. Trump, including what you were just alluding to. He has effectively kept the Europeans out of all the negotiations. We don’t hear a word any more about the coalition of the willing putting boots on the ground in Ukraine. Dead, why is it dead?
Because Mr. Trump has kept them at arm’s length from the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations. Why has he not stopped the flow of money and weapons that were appropriated by Biden?
If he did that, then he would be seen to favor the Russians, and his enemies would all gang up. As it is, he has a big problem with the bill which senators– with a bipartisan bill, which has 80 signatures on it and is therefore not vetoable in the Senate, which is calling for imposing very harshly economic sanctions and financial sanctions on Russia.
This is the bill that was sponsored by Richard Blumenthal from the Democrats in Connecticut and the villain of the Republicans, Graham from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham. I expect that bill will be passed in Congress. And at that point, Mr. Trump can put lipstick on the pig, can claim that he has no objection to that new sanctions because the Russians have behaved badly, and these sanctions will help to temper the Russians and to bring them closer to peace.
At the same time, he will do what you were just suggesting. He will cut off all financial and military aid and reconnaissance aid to Ukraine, saying that will also temper them and make them more amenable to compromise and reaching a peace settlement, and he’ll walk away from Ukraine. That is how I see this end game of the United States, leaving the Europeans left with chaos and disaster, and the Ukraine probably having a coup d’état to remove Mr. Zelensky and to put in charge somebody who could negotiate an end to the war with the Russians. This is my reading of the situation and my explanation of why, to answer your question directly, why Trump has not cut off the flow of weapons and finance to Ukraine till now.
Farris:
So your estimation then kind of summarizing this to make sure I heard you correctly, this is all being tactically done by Trump, knowing the adversity he’s facing domestically and from Europe.
So he will do this, his bill will get through, at the same time he’ll cut off funding to Ukraine in order to remove the United States from this, and then it will get dumped onto Europe. And do you see, how do you see Europe and the rest of NATO then responding for Ukraine?
Doctorow:
I see Europe pretending to give assistance to Ukraine for two or three months, which will be a transitional period. They can’t just drop the ball. They need time to reformulate a narrative to explain why they are leaving Ukraine also.
For some of the European leaders, that would be easier than for others, because some are more invested in the continuing war than others are. Nonetheless, the end result will be Europe will also leave Ukraine under the bus, after a certain grace period so if they can find a common narrative to hand to the mainstream media.
Farris:
Then you see Zelensky getting removed. Then what will the future of Ukraine be? Because with the United States removing itself, NATO and Europe also removing itself, will they create a new government or?
Doctorow:
Oh yes, there will be an interim government, probably a military government, because there are no leaders from the past. Mr. Poroshenko, Timoshenko, Madame Timoshenko, who is known as the braided, she had wonderful braided hair. These people are no solution for Ukraine.
They are as guilty as Mr. Zelensky in bringing on this disaster. So I think the only solution for interim government will be a military government pending maybe a year or two when society can be brought back to reality in Ukraine, then there would be elections and a normal civilian government installed. This is how I see it.
Faarris:
Who would be overseeing? Would Putin and Russia be participating in this restructure to make sure that what has occurred over the last several years now never happens again?
Doctorow:
Well, I think the prudent thing would be for there to be a group of nations to oversee this transition in Ukraine, not just Russia. If Russia took that on singly, it would face tremendous resistance. So several major powers, the United States, China, Russia, and a few others, maybe from the global south, would be nominally supervising the transition to democracy over a period of a year or two.
Farris:
I know I’m running out of time here with you, but I do want to ask, what will the future of NATO be if the scenarios that we discussed play out this way?
Doctorow:
I think it will fade away. The United States cannot leave NATO formally de jure. That has, requires approval of Congress. Mr. Trump will not get that approval. But if he takes the stuffing out of NATO, the effect will be the same.
It will lose its value. I’m hopeful that in this period, as I described as a grace period of two or three months for the European leaders to reverse course and to move away from Ukraine and let it collapse, I think that hopefully in that period there will be a political realignment within the European institutions. And those who have been the most vociferous defenders, what’s so-called defenders of Ukraine, actually destroyers of Ukraine, because they’re promoting this continued war against Russia, I think that, I’m hopeful that they will receive the just desserts, which will be to be removed from office.
Farris:
As we’ve talked here for the last 40, you know, over 45 minutes, how concerned are you about all this, with everything going on? You know, what is in comparison to when we’ve talked previously? Is it higher now? Same?
Doctorow:
No, I wouldn’t say it’s fine. It all depends, of course, on what Mr. Putin does, how dramatic it will be. I’m fairly confident that Trump’s reaction to whatever Putin does will also be sensible and will keep us away from a progression to a nuclear war between the major powers. I trust in Trump’s judgment in that respect. I understand how many of the viewers of this program will be skeptical about that, because all major media have for the last six years painted Trump in the blackest terms. He is not a likable personality. I wouldn’t necessarily want him for a neighbor, but that’s irrelevant.
Machiavelli said it a long time ago, and these verities do not change. The morality of individuals is not the same as the morality of state actors. You like it, you don’t like it, that’s the way the world was, is, will be. And from this viewpoint, Mr. Trump is a realist. He’s not all that bad. Even if he doesn’t write his own speeches, he reads them okay. The speeches that he reads are amazing. Everyone, the last thing I’ll say, Ibecause I do have to go, is that everyone listens to Trump.
Don’t listen to him. Now he’s not addressing you, he’s addressing his enemies. Watch what he does. He closed down USAID, which was the main vehicle for regime change financed by the CIA. He is now purging the State Department of all the villains who have risen in the ranks and in the diplomatic service ever since Dick Cheney chased out decent people from the State Department at the start of this millennium. He made a speech in Saudi Arabia denouncing the whole fiction of America’s spreading democracy through its wars.
The speech he didn’t write, obviously, but he read it. And he knew what he was reading. So the man, I say, look at what he’s doing, what he has done. He didn’t make any speeches about closing down USAID. In fact, you’d hardly know that he was involved.
It was all Elon Musk who was saving government money. Don’t believe that for a minute. That was a political move which was approved, which was agreed between Trump and Musk. It was sold as a money saving venture. The hell it was.
It was all about dumping 40,000 neocons out on the street. And I say bravo to him, and I say please trust that not every US president is a villain.
Farris:
Where could people find you, Gilbert? Where could people find you? Are you Substack?
Yeah, Substack. gilbertdoctorow is just one word, my first name and last name, dot substack dot com. And you find me in the search box in Amazon.com .
Farris:
And I’ll put the description to people who want to order the book and then your substack on the show notes. So Gilbert, as always, thank you for making time to speak with me. We’ll follow these events and look forward to more conversations ahead.
Doctorow:
Well, don’t despair. We have been through worse times.
Gilbert Doctorow 