Robert Kennedy Jr: America needs a revolution (2)
When Mr. Kennedy agreed to speak to UnHerd, instead of re-rehearsing familiar arguments over vaccines, the reporter thought he’d actually pursue to understand the way Kennedy thinks, and why he appeals to so many people. Does his curious basket of views — on the environment, Ukraine, corporate power, cultural issues — hang together? Below is an edited transcript.
Read the first part of the article
FS: Something you talk about a lot is that America is in a permanent state of war and you want to put an end to that. With regard to Ukraine, how do you propose to do that?
RFK Jr: Settle it. The Russians have repeatedly offered to settle. If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, they look like a really good deal. Let’s be honest: it’s a US war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world. President Biden has said that was his intention — to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army. What does that mean, “exhaust”? It means throwing Ukrainians at them. My son fought over there, side-by-side with the Ukrainians and we’ve sacrificed 300,000 of them. The commander of the special forces unit in the Ukraine, which is probably the most elite fighting force in Europe, has said 80% of his troops are dead or are wounded and they cannot rebuild the unit. Right now, the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of either 1:5 or 1:8, depending on what data you believe.
FS: If you became president you would inherit the situation as it is. Would your policy be to say that Russia can keep the territory it has conquered? You would be accused of surrendering.
RFK Jr: What I’m accused of is irrelevant to me, as you may have figured out by now. Let’s do what is sensible, what saves lives. This was supposed to be a humanitarian mission — that’s how they sold it to us in the United States. But that would imply that the purpose of the mission was to reduce bloodshed and to shorten the conflict, and every step that we’ve taken has been to enlarge the conflict and to maximise bloodshed. That’s not what we should be doing.
If you look at the Minsk accords, it sets the groundwork for a final settlement. The Donbas region, which is 80% ethnic Russian — and Russians that were being systematically killed by the Ukrainian government — would become autonomous within Ukraine and would be protected. Let’s protect those populations with a United Nations force or whatever we have to do to make sure the bloodshed stops. In addition to that, we need to remove our Aegis missile systems, which house the Tomahawk missiles — nuclear missiles — from 70 miles from the Russian border. When the Russians put nuclear missiles on Cuba, 1,500 miles from Washington DC, we were ready to invade them, and we would have invaded them if they hadn’t removed them. The way they got removed ultimately is: my uncle and father made a deal with Ambassador Brennan and Khrushchev, who they had a close relationship with and they could talk directly to at that point. The deal was: we will remove our Jupiter missiles from Turkey, on your border, because we know that’s intolerable to you.
Russia has been invaded twice in the previous 100 years. One could see why they wouldn’t want nuclear missile systems in hostile countries on their border. We should also agree to keep NATO out of Ukraine, which is what the Russians have asked. I think based upon those three points, somebody like me could settle this war. I don’t think the neocons are capable of settling it, nor the people who surround President Biden — because they were the ones who created the problem. I don’t think they’ll ever recognise that. I think part of a settlement is to recognise that, with some of the history that went into this war, there were geopolitical machinations on both sides. And by the way, I am not excusing or justifying Vladimir Putin’s barbaric and illegal invasion of the Ukraine. But my uncle always said, if you want to actually achieve peace, you’ve got to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes and you’ve got to figure out the local pressures on him too.
FS: You mention the Cuban Missile Crisis and your uncle’s strategy: you could argue that’s an example of the opposite approach. He stared them down. He played chicken and he won, in a sense. He took a firm stand. And there are lots of people who feel that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is just such a moment and that somehow a stand needs to be taken and Putin can’t be rewarded for invading. What do you say to those people?
RFK Jr: You can argue the history of it. My uncle was surrounded by joint chiefs of staff, by an intelligence apparatus that was trying to get him to go to war. And the fact that there was one confrontation, where the Russian ship that was carrying supplies to Cuba stopped before it hit the embargo wall of US ships, that wasn’t the end of the crisis. That was just a midpoint, and it could have gone anywhere from there. The end of the crisis took place because my uncle reached out to Khrushchev directly, and said: “Let’s settle this between ourselves.” And their settlement was secret, and it remained secret for many years. But my uncle wanted to settle it, and he understood that he had to put himself in Khrushchev’s position and that Khrushchev didn’t want war, and neither did he, but they were both surrounded by people who did want to go to war.
FS: So what is the wise, equivalent action that the US president should have taken when Russian tanks started rolling across Ukrainian borders from three directions, headed for the capital?
RFK Jr: We should have listened to Putin over many years. We made a commitment to Russia, to Gorbachev, that we would not move NATO one inch to the east. Then we went in, and we lied. We went into 13 NATO countries, we put missile systems in with nuclear capacity; we did joint exercises with Ukraine and these others for NATO. What is the purpose of NATO? This is what George Kennan asked; this is what Jack Matlock asked. All of the doyens of US foreign policy were saying: “Russia lost the Cold War. Let’s do to Russia what we did in Europe when we gave them the Marshall Plan. We’re the victors — let’s lift them up. Let’s integrate them into European society.”
FS: So you would have had Russia inside NATO?
RFK Jr: I think that that’s something we should have considered. What is the purpose of NATO other than to oppose Russia? If you’re addressing Russia in a hostile way from the beginning, of course their reaction is going to be hostile back. And if you’re slowly moving in all of these states, who we said would never become part of NATO. What occurred in the Ukraine is that the US supported essentially a coup d’etat in 2014, against the democratically-elected government of Ukraine. We have telephone call transcripts of Victoria Nuland, one of the neocons in the White House, handpicking the new cabinet that was hostile to the Soviet Union. If you look at that, and you put yourself in Russia’s position, and you say: “Okay, the United States, our biggest enemy, is treating us as an enemy, has now taken over the government of a nation and made them hostile to us, and then started passing laws that are prejudicial to this giant Russian population.” If Mexico did that and then started killing — they killed 14,000 Russians in Donbas, the Ukrainian government — if Mexico did that to expatriate Americans, we’d invade in a second. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents. And it doesn’t mean saying that Vladimir Putin is not a gangster — he is. Or he’s not a thug — he is. Or he’s not a bully — he is. But going to war is not in his interest, either. And he repeatedly told us: these are red lines, you’re crossing.
FS: Day by day, we hear news of atrocities taking place within the Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine. The idea that a peaceful settlement will be reached seems very distant at this point. Should we take it from what you’re saying that your support for NATO as president would be different?
RFK Jr: That is something that I’m going to look at as President. I’m going to look at how we de-escalate tensions between the great powers: between China, between the United States and Russia. How do we let these countries deal with their neighbours without pressure from the United States that makes them feel like they’re going to have to go into a military mode. I’m not saying that’s what occurred here. I’m saying that’s something that we need to look at, and the reason that we need to look at that is we have institutional problems in our country.
This is something my uncle discovered in 1960/61. He realised during the Bay of Pigs crisis that the CIA had devolved into an agency whose function was to provide the military-industrial complex with a constant pipeline of new wars. And my uncle came out of one of those meetings as the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed, and he realised the CIA had lied to him, and he fired Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, Charles Cabell, Richard Bissell, the three top people in the CIA, for lying to him. And he said at that time: “I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.” We have to recognise that it’s not just our civilian agencies that have been captured by industry — the military agencies, the Pentagon, and particularly the intelligence agencies have been captured by the military-industrial complex. We have to recognise that and we have to say, “We don’t want constant wars in our country; we can’t afford them.”
FS: So do you see yourself finishing the job they started then — do you want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind?
RFK Jr: I think the CIA needs to be reorganised. Most of the people who work at the CIA are patriotic Americans. They’re very good public servants, and we need them to function. But I think we really need to separate the espionage functions of that agency and the Plans Division, the division that actually does dirty tricks, that kills people, that makes wars, that involves itself in actions. Because what takes place is that operations tail begins to wag the espionage dog. That term has been hijacked — it means information gathering and analysis, and that is the function that we want, that the CIA was created to perform. And very, very early on, Allen Dulles, essentially corrupted the purpose of it by getting the CIA involved in assassinations and fixing elections.
The CIA has been involved in coup d’etats and attempted coup d’etats in about a third of the countries in the world, most of them democracies. So if our national policy as a country is to promote democracy, the CIA’s policy has been the opposite. It has been at odds with the United States. My father recognised this too: his plan was to reorganise the CIA along those lines to separate the espionage and the analysis and information gathering functions from the black functions, because otherwise the espionage section sees its job as justifying all of these nefarious activities they’re involved in, and there’s no accountability. There’s never any accountability. You overthrow a government in Iraq, and what happens: you create Isis. You then get involved in Syria, from Isis, and you drive 2 million refugees into Europe which destabilises democracy all over Europe and basically causes Brexit. That’s the outcome of what the CIA considers a successful operation to depose Saddam Hussein. Is it really successful? I don’t think so. We have a 60-year war with Iran and that war began when the CIA overthrew the first democratically-elected government in the 6,000-year history of Persia. And we are still living with the blowback from that operation. And there’s no accountability and these agencies need to be accountable, and I would break up the CIA in a way that would make them accountable.
FS: The way you talk about the CIA and other agencies, saying that these organisations are corrupt, that the media is corrupt — at the same time, you talk about how you want to bring people together, and you’re worried about how divided society is. Is there not a sense that your rhetoric is divisive? It leads people to believe that a big chunk of their own country is against them? There is an enemy within, in the RFK world view, that needs to be destroyed. Isn’t that divisive?
RFK Jr: The way that you bring people together is by telling people the truth and getting them to agree on facts. If I’m wrong in any of the facts I told you, you and other people should challenge me. Because I feel that my job is to search for empirical truths, and then to be honest with people about it. If you try to censor people, if you try to lie to them about what’s happening — that our government is broken — if you try to lie about that, it just divides them further. You have to acknowledge there’s a problem. I’m a former drug addict and the first thing that you do if you want to deal with drug addiction is you admit there’s a problem and then you can deal with everything. We need to admit there’s a problem in our government before we’re able to heal our country.
FS: The rot, by your account, goes deep and wide. It almost feels like a revolution when you talk about it, because there must be many thousands of people who are in positions of power who you would want out. Do you think of it as a revolution?
RFK Jr: We need a revolution, I would say that — a peaceful revolution, and a revolution that brings us back to the values that have been robbed from us over the past 40 years, systematically, which I watched taking place. I was watching what occurred in 1980. We had a functioning government and we were in the middle of the Great Prosperity and most Americans trusted the government and we all trusted the media. And today, 22% of Americans trust their government and 22% trust the media. And the reason we have this blizzard of misinformation — or what is called misinformation — is because people are looking for other sources of information that they can actually trust, because the people who are supposed to be giving us good information are not. It’s spin; it’s propaganda. It’s government-orchestrated, and people know it.
Everybody knows we were lied to about covid. Everybody knows we were lied to about Vietnam. Everybody knows we were lied to about Iraq. “Weapons of mass destruction.” My opinion about these agencies is not happening in a vacuum. Everybody knows that Pharma lied to us about opioids, and about Vioxx. These aren’t conspiracy theories: “Robert Kennedy is crazy, because he thinks a corrupted FDA helped the pharmaceutical companies create the opioid crisis.” This is a fact that is well-known, well-documented, and that happened. And the question is: how are we going to stop it from happening again? And the answer to that is we’ve got to start by telling the truth about it.
FS: Speaking of truth, and returning to the subject of vaccines for a moment, do you acknowledge that you went too far at any stage? Do you think that you yourself might have lost perspective?
RFK Jr: Here’s what I would say: show me where I got it wrong. Show me one fact that I’ve said in all of my virtual communication networks postings that was factually erroneous. If you show me that, I’ll fix it, I’ll change it. And if it’s appropriate, I’ll apologise for it. But, that’s not what’s occurred. What’s occurred is, the media has said: “Oh, he passes misinformation.” And I say: “What piece of misinformation?” Everything I post is cited and sourced to government databases, and to peer-reviewed publications. I have probably the most robust fact-checking operation in America today. I have 320 MD physicians and PhD scientists, including, until recently, Nobel Prize-winner Luc Montagnier, on our advisory board looking at everything I post. If I get something wrong — and I will ultimately get something wrong — but so far, nobody’s been able to show me anything that I’ve gotten wrong. I wrote a book on Anthony Fauci — the biggest bestseller in America for a year, not reviewed anywhere, not acknowledged, but nevertheless — it’s 240,000 words, and nobody’s been able to find one. There’s 2,200 citations, every one of them with a barcode on it, so you can look up the citation while you read the book. Show me anything I got wrong. And we’ve had 12 or 15 editions, so if there was something wrong, we would correct it.
FS: You talk a lot about the corruption of America, at home and abroad. Do you even think a good version of America is achievable at this point?
RFK Jr: I do think it’s achievable, and I think it’s achievable very quickly. I think my ultimate ambition is to restore the faith and the love of America, and the pride in America, so that my children can grow up with the kind of pride that I felt about my country. I can restore our moral authority around the world, and restore the reputation of America as an exemplary nation, something that the rest of the world can look to as an example, one that people will want to copy rather than as a threat.
My uncle believed that America should be a leader, but we should not be a bully; and people understand the difference between those two aspects. Because my uncle steadfastly avoided war, and instead said: “I don’t want the picture of Americans around the world to be somebody with a gun, I want it to be a Peace Corps volunteer. I want it to be the Kennedy milk programme, in all the countries in Latin America and Africa; USAID, which was built to foster the growth of the middle class in those countries; and the Alliance for Progress.” And because of that, people around the world love John Kennedy more than any president in our history. There’s more boulevards named after him, more avenues, more statues to him, more universities and hospitals, in Africa and Latin America and all over the world than any other US President. That’s because he had a different vision that was not based on conquering people, but on helping them.
You can watch the whole video interview here.
yogaesoteric
June 15, 2023