This Interview is 30 Years Old. As Important Today as it Was Then.

Richard Mellor

An excellent discussion with Henry Kissinger and former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock. It is moderated by Robert MacNeill on PBS. Matlock wrote a book based on his time as a diplomat in the Soviet Union titled: Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. 

 

Matlock was opposed to NATO expansion and much of US foreign policy. He opposed the settlements the Israeli government was building in Palestine and that NATO expansion would provoke Russia. His Wikipedia page states: “Matlock was surprised by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, and thought that it could have been avoided if the United States had not advocated for the admission of Ukraine into NATO.^[80] He sees the current policy as an abandonment of a commitment not to expand NATO, which he says was made to Gorbachev.^[81][82] In late 2021, he argued that Ukraine is a state but not yet a nation, because of its deep ethnolinguistic divisions, saying it "has not yet found a leader who can unite its citizens in a shared concept of Ukrainian identity. [....] it is not Russian interference that created Ukrainian disunity but rather the haphazard way the country was assembled from parts that were not always mutually compatible [...], not by Ukrainians themselves but by outsiders.”

 

Matlock comments on the promise made to the then Soviet Union about NATO expansion in the video at 11.50 minutes in.

 

It is understandable why Matlock is not a well-known figure in US popular culture as despite the US reminding the rest of the world that it is the home of free speech codified by our First Amendment in the Constitution, the tightly controlled and censored mass media decides which free speech the rest of us should know about which we shouldn’t.

 

After reading some comments on various social media lists on subjects ranging from Ukraine, to Palestine, what is genocide and what isn’t; it reminds me of the absolute necessity for the working class, of which I am a proud member, to take the time to delve deeper in to the resources that are out there about history and how humanity reached the point we are at now. Social media is a positive just like technology or AI, it depends who owns it and for what purpose. We are not Luddites, we don't need to smash it up.

 

Some of the comments I have read are staggering in their sheer ignorance of the real world. I was in my 30’s, before I fully understood the importance of the Eastern Front in defeating Nazi Germany. I only knew of the allies or British side with regard to the war against Japan and why it occurred, just a couple of examples.

 

Enjoy football season by all means but you can read and we have class consciousness, we must use it. That means overcoming class oppression and the lack of confidence that leads us to look to “their”experts for our understanding of the world and our history in it. Remember, the letters behind their names are not divine and that universities, though very important institutions in society, are primarily capitalist think tanks.

And by the way, the other guy is Henry Kissinger. If you want to know more about this war criminal read, The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens. This is not a blanket endorsement of Hitchen’s entire body of work.