© Andre BortkoScott Ritter
There's a scene near the end of Elem Klimov's classic 1985 Soviet anti-war film
Come and See, where a member of a Nazi unit that had just burned alive hundreds of Belarusian villagers issues a hate-filled diatribe against the Soviet partisans who held him and his fellow murderers captive.
"You've got no right to be," the Nazi says, generating an angry roar from the partisans who have him surrounded.
"Listen!" Kosach, the commander of the partisan unit hisses. "Everyone, listen!"
The partisans fell silent.
"Inferior races spread the contagion of communism," the Nazi continued. "You have no right to be here. And our mission will be accomplished. If not today, tomorrow."
Listen. Everyone, Listen.In July 2022, Peter Ermolin, a producer with the Russian RuTube channel 'Solovyov Live!' reached out to see if I might be interested in a collaboration that would take advantage of their existing studio infrastructure to
create a podcast where I served as host. My job would be to interview Russian personalities - academics, military and intelligence professionals, politicians, and journalists. These interviews would be posted on YouTube so that they might become accessible to American and Western audiences who otherwise, largely because of the Russophobic cancel culture in place in the West, would be denied the opportunity to hear them. The interviews would be streamed live on RuTube and YouTube, to both Russian and non-Russian audiences. Although I am not, by training or ambition, a media host, I agreed, if for no other reason than I, as a long-time Russia analyst, would benefit intellectually from such interaction. If others could benefit from the same, so much the better.
Comment: Americans need to wake up to the human rights abuses being done in their own country. This is something you'd expect to see in Saudi Arabia, not a 'progressive western democracy'.
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