Episode Details

No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design. The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades have invested heavily in controlling the public narrative. The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor. The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions. Medea Benjamin, who along with Nicolas J.S. Davies, authored War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, place the war in Ukraine its proper historical and cultural context, warning that a protracted war in Ukraine threatens open warfare between the United States and Russia and nuclear Armageddon. Joining me to discuss her book is Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink and author of Drone Warfare, Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection and Inside Iran.