After the end of the cold war, the world could've had peace. The world could've listened to people such as Mikhail Gorbachev and created a stable international system. In America, a different vision appeared. It was a vision of global empire. It was a vision supported by Republicans and Democrats such as Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol. This was the agenda. It was not an agenda of justice for the world, it was an agenda of American imperialism. Eight trillion dollars of American money has now been spent on foreign wars almost all of which failed. Two million civilians have been murdered around the world in this campaign of imperialism, 50 million people of been made refugees, millions maybe hundreds of millions more have had their lives ruined. This has been the result of American imperialism. Meanwhile at home, the American people remain among the only people of any modern state who don't have national health insurance. America's leaders like to lecture the world about international norms but when it comes to international norms relating to humanity and the humane treatment of other human beings, America is a freak show. America remains the only state that doesn't have national health insurance and the citizens of America's capital are denied the right to vote in federal elections for some very ugly reasons. Meanwhile in terms of elections, two of the last four presidential elections in America saw the lunatic situation where the loser of the election actually got elected president. The majority of the American people voted for Al Gore. George Bush was installed as president. The majority of the American people voted for Hillary Clinton—Donald Trump was appointed president. Meanwhile little if any effort has been made by either Democrats or Republicans to get rid of the lunatic electoral college system. This is a reality.
Meanwhile, our world's planet is getting sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker. Climate change is just one part of a panorama of suicidal disaster. You have to look at the oceans you have to look at the global water situation and you have to look at the woman's problems produced by industrial agriculture. The green revolution was hailed as the great solution for everybody. Optimists claim this proved the environmentalists were crazy. Look at all this food? Isn't this wonderful? But we now have a terrible, terrible harvest of horror as a result. You have giant dead zones of the major rivers of the world, you have the world's water being pumped out water tables dropping all the world. You have unknown questions of having the most horrific pesticides sprayed all over crops and that goes into the water supply to. You have a total destruction of biological diversity in agriculture and the creation of synthetic crops, setting the stage for a rerun of exciting experiences such as the potato famine in Ireland and so on and so forth.
So, American imperialism is certainly been one of the biggest disasters if not the biggest disaster in world history. It probably shouldn't be necessary to mention this, but it's also been a total study in fraud and hypocrisy. America didn't bring democracy to these countries. America didn't bring democracy to Iraq it brought death and disaster. America didn't bring democracy to Afghanistan. Indeed Afghanistan is a really symbolic situation where America backed the Mujahideen against the Russians and they won, but after they won, America threw them into the trash and ignored them, allowing Afghanistan to descend into chaos. America invaded Afghanistan in 2002 and set up a puppet regime—and even though the Taliban did not have the support of external forces unlike the Mujahideen in the 1980s, the Taliban actually managed to defeat American imperialism—and under Biden, there was a humiliating and disastrous American withdrawal as the whole system of American imperialism collapsed in Afghanistan. Today, we see America having imposed sanctions on the people of Afghanistan. We're no fans of the Taliban, but there is a need to try to negotiate with them which America has not done. The end result is America appropriated $7 billion, which didn't belong to America, which belong to the Afghan people, and cut off all aid, which for the Afghan people was about 75% of the government budget. You don't have to be a foreign policy genius to see this is a process for killing the Afghan people which is precisely what it's doing. Under Biden, things took a particular macabre turn, where Biden allowed a lawyer who had Biden administration connections to conduct a sweet deal where his 48 clients got us a cool 3.5 billion of the Afghan people's assets, and he got a big deal on this, too. Hopefully this can be overthrown, but the point is this is a campaign to kill large numbers of Afghans. Meanwhile, Biden's promise to end the war in Yemen was not true, not true. He continued aiding Saudi Arabia, which was the bipartisan plan of Obama and Trump to side with Saudi Arabia against the people of Yemen... And that's killed 400,000 people so far, and counting... And Biden appears to be backing away even further to his idea of negotiating with the people of Yemen. Now the horror just goes on, the Biden brags about how he's given aid on Covid vaccines. Yes, he did get some made with the rescue package in early 2021, but every expert in the world told Biden, he needed to fund with at least 20 to 30 billion, a global plan for vaccines. He has refused to do that while endlessly bragging about how much he is doing. This is virtually certain to kill people, and may trigger even worse epidemics, may trigger even worse epidemics.
At home, America is number one. We're number one in death—900,000 Americans got killed by Covid... Hundreds of thousands of them were killed because of America's lack of health insurance, and there's bipartisan blame for the incompetence with which America has dealt with Covid. Which we don't need to go into now, but you can, you really need to give credit to both sides of the political spectrum, for the disaster that's occurred, and it's not over. Now, in 30 years America has refused to welcome Russia into a system of security, quite the contrary, due to people such as Madeleine Albright, Russia has been provoked, and an American imperialist agenda has instead been adopted by enlightening the Eastern European states to join NATO, in complete violation of the solemn promises made to Gorbachev by Bush at the end of the Cold War. There's been an effort to try to pretend these promises were not made, they were made. They were more lies. They were made. Understandably, Russia sees that as very threatening and at every step of the way, the American government has made every effort to exclude Russia from a system of international security.
In 2014 the American government overthrew a duly elected government in Ukraine, and working in conjunction with neo-Nazis and installed a puppet government. Now, understandably Russia saw this as a very threatening act, and moved to protect its naval base at Sevastopol, it's only major naval base on the Black Sea by the way, a very legitimate Russian action—and the people of Crimea had no reason to be part of the right wing government that had been established by America. At the same time, the people in the East, in Donbas, revolted against the American puppet regime. Rather than negotiate with Russia about this, the Biden Administration launched a campaign of economic war against Russia, and launched a whole series of sanctions. So, the road to war with Russia has been set in motion.
At the same time, Trump launched an economic war against China. So, you see American imperialism is getting farther and farther and farther, out of control, and more and more and more immoral. Now, evil breeds evil, and in 2022 the end result of 30 years of American Cold War against Russia was a totally stupid and criminal decision by the Russian government to attack Ukraine. We totally and completely condemn this invasion in the harshest terms, but the question now is: what to do? And what we need to do is to negotiate with Russia. It does not seem likely the US government is seriously interested negotiating because it hasn't been interested negotiating for 30 years. But our hope is that the US government will sit down and negotiate with Russia on the basis of the December proposals that Russia proposed. We're not saying we agree with these proposals. What we are saying is that if the war in Ukraine is not stopped soon, it is first going to be a humanitarian disaster but is also going to be a global national security disaster on a number of different levels. We believe it will be politically impossible for NATO not to intervene at some point, if they have to watch the Ukrainian people being slaughtered in living color on their internet screens and cell phone screens. We believe that is highly likely. Meanwhile, the economic sanctions are likely to destabilize the world economy, as well as killing large numbers of Russian civilians. There needs to be a major rethink of the whole concept of sanctions. Sanctions are acts of war.
Peace groups in the West that say they are opposed to war must also be opposed to sanctions. In Iraq during the 1990s, the American sanctions killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, celebrated that. She said it was worth it. So this shows the kind of people who make American foreign policy. They do.
In conclusion, we point out that wars have a tendency to destroy everyone who participates in, and the American Cold War now about to turn into a hot war with Russia and also China, threatens to completely bring down the already weak American economy. The already very sick American economy, and could very well do almost as much damage or maybe even more damage to America than it does to Russia. America's imperial delusions are completely out of control and not realistic. The American economy is very sick the trade deficit just hit $1 trillion. The American leadership it must be said is not very impressive. 50% of the American people consider President Biden to be mentally incompetent. His recent behavior at the State of the Union Address certainly was not very encouraging where he screamed: "Go get 'em!" Not in the script, at the end of his speech. Not quite sure what he is talking about, perhaps the White House could illuminate that for us. But this is all not very encouraging. So, America needs to come to its senses or the world as we know it is going to go into a further downward spiral. This downward spiral will definitely bring down America as well as Russia. So, urgent action needs to be taken. It's not enough for peace groups just to say they want to cease-fire. Cease-fire on the basis of what? Cease-fire on the basis of what Russia proposed in December 2021. Wake up people. This is serious. These negotiations need to begin as soon as possible. We need what we were denied. We, meaning the planet, aids a sound system of international security based on the respect for all nations, not the imperial lunatic delusions of people such as Robert Kagan. We don't need that kind of evil nonsense. So, hopefully sanity will prevail. Hopefully the horror of this war and the danger of this war will bring everyone to their senses and we will set up a stable system of international security so we can protect ourselves against real global threats such as climate change and the environmental disasters. That's the end of this lecture.