always drug. problems but you can focus on is the most ubiquitous going out there most police departments use it almost over stores and. sometimes. we were teaching these kids about racism about police brutality taking pride in there are these kids are a part of all history. hello and welcome the cross talk we're all things are considered i'm peter lavelle is

tromso america first agenda isolating the united states on the global stage sure looks like it and is the e.u. telling its citizens what to think again sure looks like it. cross talking some real news i'm joined by my guest here in moscow dimitri bobbitt she's a political analyst with sputnik international and in london we crossed alexander me curious he is a writer on legal affairs as well as editor in chief of the duran dot com all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want to i always appreciate let me go to i was going to be curious in london or all those programs is titled you know us isolate let me go through a quick checklist to back up what i'm saying here we have the pentagon announcing at a deployment of new intermediate range weapons interestingly the europeans haven't been told much about it the recent warsaw with the u.s. essentially stood alone. the issue of iran. rough handling of venezuela is

alienating western allies in the western hemisphere trump continues to support the king of saudi arabia when it comes to yemen that's a very unpopular position to be taking washington's allies essentially shut out of the withdrawal process or troop withdrawal process from afghanistan even though their contributors to it germany will not surrender its energy independence north stream moves ahead trump imposes a visa visa ban on i.c.c. staff probing u.s. war crimes in afghanistan and to top it all off next week president xi will visit italy to sign agreements regarding the silk road initiative here alexander make euro so. donald trump is kind of the odd man out. looking and you missed out to turkey which is becoming increasingly i miss that i love but i miss sound of laughter here but i mean it is a fact that i've never known a time like this in the united states seems to be striking out in all directions

and increasingly acting contrary to the interests of its own allies i mean the main some ways the two most extraordinary cases are on the street where it is cutting directly against germany konami interests and it's difficult if you don't know germany well to know how angry the german business community which has great political influence is about all of that and of course there's all this business with the kurds in syria which isn't taconite in turkey and it looks as if the you know i did states rather than heeding what its allies say is not doubling down all over the place so yes you asked the question is the united states are insulating itself if you want to. say that it's absolutely true i mean if you show you how to lose friends and antagonized meet will. lead and that doesn't

seem to be any wind. in the united states of the extent to which this is you know you don't even you know i certainly said in my introduction that you know trumps america first but i'm not sure it is an america first it's more of a bolton's unilateral ism is what this is here and it has this fig leaf of america first going well i think it's not just drawn in general that ideology of ultra liberalism is ait's isolating itself because we see its actions we see it's a deer's by. pushing this or neo cons absolutely they are the tools you know they are the guys who actually they are the front man if i may be allowed to use this expression agent toward that xander has just said ok you mentioned venezuela well crime first involved the perceived military or direct military intervention by the united states in august two thousand and seventeen and then all of

a legend america was against it mr santos the president of colombia colombia is the most of us and i'm a dural country. in latin america and saunders was against it i like the phrase how he framed opinion he said let in america is a quantity of peace and i just thought about it and i thought yes you know since the united states in the end of the twentieth century a stopped interfering directly suddenly we found out that you can do without civil war you know peril and and. you know peril. and ecuador are not bahraini and you miss you know they can leave somehow together and we had the north stream you know again coming back to late in america what changed in the last two years you know it was almost two years ago when when trump made that statement was that there was a lot of propaganda. the government and the propaganda

shift in opinions you know now. and brasil are taken a different position because you know i mean the because the the shock of regime change in venezuela is a failure yet and now you know going to the next level they're all coming to their senses realizing oh my goodness the man in the might have a white house just might invade yeah well both sinatra was not yet in power in brasil in two thousand and seventeen of course things changed for the war in brazil with a change for the was in other latin american countries still it's a combination you know it's a general shift towards neo liberalism in america and it's a lot of propaganda against my door against it's having its effect the same story with north stream to our i agree with that xander that it's against german commercial interests but it is also against the interest of european elites in it's

enough to look at the map what these in europe europe is a peninsula actually opinion so a stretch into there some of the west or only you you ration continent to use the nature of resources so if you're a shit in europe is madness it will make the net but i'm going to push back a little back to alan's enemy here is there is a logic to all of this it is madness and it went away but from a political perspective again it seems to me that this neo con faction that's in power in the united states see the sees america as you know polar moment closing this is why they're getting so aggressive because they're a bill would be to influence events around the world while meaningful now is with every passing day diminishing. that power and they know it and they're reacting to it i think iran and venezuela are perfect examples go ahead i think you're absolutely right and this is this is what gives this whole thing its frantic.

quality so we see more and more threats now against the germans to cancel north stream two because of course germany doesn't build the pipeline and that supposed at least going to cause germany to drift away from the united states so we're abusing the dollar system now to threaten our own our allies we are refusing to negotiate with north korea because that might actually reduce a convergence between north and south korea which might also threaten our political position so we're going against south korean interests and we're interrupting possibilities of south korean trade with north korea and the greater your asia and this is exactly what it is that he's driving it it is this fear that this moment is slipping out of the u.s. hands and so you double down you put more and more pressure you use all the leaders that you have sanctions dollar whatever you put pressure on your own our allies to

try to keep them in line and what you're actually hearing is you're antagonizing you know it's earlier say with alexander macarius here i think it's with us it's so telling that italy as a member of the g. seven is willing to start getting involved in the in china silk road i think that's of a huge story the italians have been openly rebuked in a in a rather rude way i would say and they're going to continue their power to be we're working with the chinese i mean they can it's basically the way the trump administration is treating europe as it gives them even more initiative to say no go ahead alex we need so and of course what people said because people can read the data they can see the they can read the runs so the italians understands that these union poland moment is is going and that's what makes them vulgar the europeans generally are starting to sense this which is why are there no . not falling in line with the united states over the why way affair the these

attempts by the united states to block europe from you know using chinese technology to develop their g five systems so or you see the rebellion spreading. and of course what the united states is doing is instead of working we need to analyze what's still it must be stressed once they want to be friends with the united states it's now threatening them and that of course changes the dynamic completely and accelerates the roasters of these countries peeling away from the united states more and more on top of that we have the rise of these populist movements on the left and right challenging the new the new liberal order here while at the same time you have washington antagonizing the center in europe go ahead well indeed if we look at their recent actions of the united states for

example exit in their eye and their treaty right it is now absolutely clear the americans had been preparing for this because they're going has nothing to do with russia no real or perceived absolutely imagine was it wasn't at all to this week that the united states are going to deport to a new miss south wind will be rated to fly within eighteen months and it will be start getting getting dust on in august one thousand nine hundred the other one will be ready in five years it will be longer range it will be three to four thousand kilometers most likely and the second one will be placed on go arm to it with rather than water china and russia and the first two are only be policed in eastern europe. i mean like in germany maybe in poland maybe all a bit of range so it's poland in or maybe that might exist not noticed in europe president poroshenko of ukraine has made there i think it's it's

a really dangerous statement he said that ukraine is working on missiles that would be able to hit mosque or ukraine was one of the center. building and you know the biggest block in music should go once you crane to become a target is that what he's doing. he's playing with fire because military people including russia are very nervous they don't know everything about politics they know where the danger is you know if there is a missile in ukraine and it can hit moscow in three minutes and you can place you know a nuclear warhead on it then. i want to thank alexander mackerras for joining us here on this edition of the program now we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on some real news stay with r.t. . breaks

it count down. they chase it as because that that has become a top forty iraq is still in the case if you it gives it not. one of a as to leaving. more figures forty eight odd because it's give feedback to the audience to be able to force.

welcome back to crossfire where all things considered i'm peter let me remind you we're discussing some real news. and now we're joined by john laughlin in paris he is a lecturer in political philosophy and i says the catholic university and john great having you on the program here this whole segment has catered to you from ideas that you sent to my producers which i'm very appreciative and very valuable the first one here is the european parliament they say that rushes to this information campaigns main source of dissent from ation in europe and also we have the european commission peddling their digital single market strategy which will go

into detail john out when i look at these two pieces of news here i'm not going to take the bait you know what it is it's censorship member citizens of the european union in russia is being used as the straw man go ahead john. yeah and this trend is quite an old trend now it's getting worse and these these resolutions and these decisions that you mentioned are very recent but the roots of this go back to a year or two ago for example to a couple of resolutions voted in twenty sixteen but also two debates that have taken place in the european parliament in january twenty eight hundred and the trend is to deal with what they call fake news most of which of course is blamed on russia to deal with it not by having a counter strategy for for example counter-propaganda or a what they call strategic communication but instead by having censorship and by

for example requiring social media companies to remove and i'm quoting now to remove suspect political content from social media platforms and we can see in all these various resolutions and legislative acts of the european union move towards the ever increasing ever more thorough tarion deployment of coercive measures of legislative measures against political opinions which are considered to be against the mainstream and indeed maybe well may well be against the mainstream the pretext being that they are somehow being expressed these opinions by people in the pay of moscow or people who are playing moscow's game and so we're entering here we can watch it in real time if you like we're entering into exactly the same totalitarian logic that ceased communist regimes themselves which were dictatorial because they

believed that they were under attack from forces abroad that was the whole cold reason for stalinist paranoia stalin believed that trotsky and his friends abroad were conspiring to bring down the soviet system which frankly they were but that's what caused the dictatorship. and in the same way the european union has got itself now into a psychological mindset according to which people that disagree with the mainstream are somehow fifth columnists a case of the let me stay here with john here and again coming from the european commission. this struck me as really quite bizarre and dangerous media literacy is a prerequisite for a vibrant modern democracy the problem is that who determines what media literate literacy is going to say which on here go ahead. well these are phrases like the

phrase i mentioned just now suspect political content which are obviously open to abuse and indeed invite to be these if you say literacy is required that is another way of saying that only intelligent people. people should be allowed to have opinions well if you say that that's a point of view but logically that means that those same people those illiterate people with suspect political views should not have the right to vote and should not be part of the democratic process now there have been part times of history periods of history in which universal suffrage did not apply but everybody all the same people who say that they should be literacy or whatever they have course say oh my god of course you know universal suffrage is the absolute cornerstone well it's either one thing or the other yeah and what we're trying to do is to introduce criteria to bypass the inevitable results of universal suffrage which is that not everyone is always in agreement and used as i say these legislative and or thora

tarion measures to put the screws on political dissidents political dissidents which incidentally is rising as we know and which has taken power in a number of european countries italy hungary poland and so on and of course that's why they're afraid of it you can't win team of the this whole approach to the public sphere in the exchange of ideas when you start saying media literacy is a prerequisite for a vibrant modern democracy this is only going to increase dissident thoughts and the rise of populist groups the this approach to the media is actually fueling it absolutely well movie and interesting it to my mind is a euphemism for political correctness. you know our political correctness discredited itself simply because so many people were called politically incorrect simply because they were right people who were against the war their the american invasion or iraq were called politically into incorrect so they invite this they

have invented this new term media literacy and it's a media literacy poorness approved by the european commission and who is one of the first victims of this kind of approach you know are muddying the panel was forced to undergo psychiatric tests what they did in the soviet union exactly. exactly and they like the for the formula that they use they wanted to find out if she's capable of understanding remarks and answering questions well tenderly and ten million francs of all person voted for this woman is she able to understand they remind us of that yes so you're trying to tell me that now there are psychiatry and psychologists i do believe go back to john here you want to jump in go ahead cicadas you get accused of spreading a fake news psychological testimony look and was muted but the suggestion was then withdrawn so it was actually living it out even as muted shows this this what i

want to say and to demonize this of course you're absolutely right that media literacy is in the midst of political correctness but the problem is even deeper because in the european union european parliament resolution on russia voted this week voted last week. the. proposal was to fight against governments and political parties who are said to be extreme right and populist and so on and who are of course said to be agents of moscow on the basis that their views are incompatible with the values of the european union as lay down in whatever article it is of the european treaty in other words the proposal to introduce a legislative legal and removal procedure against people who are you know accused of being in the pay of moscow this is a this is

a proposal not just to discredit people by saying your politically incorrect and illiberal and all the rest of it the problem is it's a proposal to start legislative criminal criminal proceedings against this medium and what is the path that we're going down watching this happen here we saw this with jordan peterson in canada now we're seeing in the european union we are going in the direction of enforced speech before it was things you probably shouldn't say in the public sphere now in for speech meaning you must say this and and there will be penalties severe penalties if you don't go. back to this decision to this statement by the european parliament which was voted by four hundred two votes against one hundred sixty three they took russia out of there out of the group or strategic partners or the european union well the what strategic partner now means

nothing because you either have allies so you have neutral conifer you have enemies but it's amazing that the european parliamentarians are doing everything to spoil their relations with russia i mean no one forced them i don't believe that the united states could force them you know just take this last seaborne he made the right downside in doing that ok i said it's a. it's hollow ok but would like we started out this stigma here once you condemn russia and its propaganda in its box and all that there is a logical continuation we're do we go next in this is what we're getting at here ok let's work what you just said in forced speech let me just give you one example you know first the biggest piece and the most harmful piece of fake news was about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of saddam hussein because it led to a war none of these people was brought to justice or even given moment that you know there were tens of thousands of people in the united states and in europe

involved in it and if we're talking about fake news you know the latest scandal india should be good with a report that closely lotos i deliberately chose this example because it's not about russia they sent him to the united states to write what e.d.s. are their marriage can still have voted for trump so he invented the whole story you know he went to a column called fergus falls which doesn't exist which exists about the he described it in a completely different form you know there were two civil society activists michel anderson and jake grown who just went after he is like asians and saw first there was no call electric power plant near there near the restaurant where he's supposed to saw it second he saw it he said that there were four chimey as you know same day in small print of there there was only vonn and it was thirty miles away also it's

just interesting there was no wild boar stuffed wild boar in the tallent hole because wild boars do not exist in minnesota and we get you we get your points of fake news can work in both directions or we could just like call them to write it differently if you wanted to write a bad thing somalia in the last page on it seems to it seems very disingenuous that this whole debate started on. watching the big tech companies you know looking at facebook and and google and now the european union its commission they want to be the censor they want the same control these big tech companies had they want to replace them for forty seconds go ahead. well what i want to say is that the the point about russia and the hostility to russia that dmitri babich has just rightly mentioned this is not some spin off this is not some pretext it's a pretext of course for political control in europe but it is the absolutely defining saying about how these people think these people who regard themselves as

liberals regard themselves as engaged as in a parliament battle against the forces of darkness. whether those forces of darkness are in moscow or in ghana or in budapest or wherever and that is what gives them that's what makes them get up in the morning and that's why they their battle as they see it is extremely day been here forever and out of time here but john laughlin is absolutely right but the problem is is that very are the darkness here many thanks and i guess here in moscow in london and in paris and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t.c. unix time and remember crosstalk roles.

i do think the number. they've matter to us is over one trillion dollars in debt more than ten white collar crime. eighty five percent of global wealth you want to be on the grid eight percent. world market vote for yourself some with one hundred would prefer circuit per second and we rose to twenty thousand. china's building two point one billion dollars industrial park but don't let the number. the only number you need to remember one one business show you know bored to miss one and only boom but. during the great depression which i'm old enough to remember there was and most of

my family were unemployed working class and it wasn't it was bed you know much worse objective listen today but there was an expectation that things were going to get better. there was a real sense of hopefulness there isn't today today's america where shape my the turn principles of concentration of wealth and power. reduced democracy attack solidarity engineer elections manufacture consent and other principles according to no i'm chomsky one set of rules for the rich opposite set of rules for you. that's what happens when you put her into the hands of a narrow sector of wilf which will is dedicated to increasing power for chills just as you'd expect one of the most influential intellectuals of our time speaks about the modern civilization of america.

oh. no. we've been a real good shots people gamers. but sometimes. young people decide if they want to not like their parents not. always struggle school again always. but. folks a lot it's the most ubiquitous gun out there most. subordinates use it almost over stairs in the school that they could get their hands on tunnels in twenty four hours. we were teaching these kids about racism about police brutality taking cried of them there are these kids are a part of all history. from

r.t. this hour three people are killed and five injured in a shooting on a tram in the duck city off the tracks police are hunting a thirty seven year old turkish bald man in connection with the shootings plus. after widespread looting and violence the french government is to ban yellow vests protests in the areas worst hit by violence if there's a radical element to the demonstrations. and new zealand moves to toughen it's going to swell pressuring social media to do more in its fight against extremism it comes off the most massacre that left fifty people killed on friday was streamed online with.