back to index#AIS: Antonio Garcia Martinez & Glenn Greenwald debate Ukraine, moderated by David Sacks
Chapters
0:0 David Sacks tees up the show: Debating the US intervention in Ukraine
1:49 Opening statements from Glenn & Antonio
15:29 Debating US involvement, regime change motives, & more
32:1 Final word & wrap
00:00:00.000 |
All right. This segment is on Ukraine and we're calling it the Ukraine debate because we have two great writers and thinkers up here who are on slightly different sides of this issue of the U.S. involvement in Ukraine. 00:00:14.600 |
Antonio Garcia Martinez is the author of the bestselling book, Chaos Monkeys, about Silicon Valley. He writes a sub stack called Pull Request and also has a great call-in show. 00:00:27.480 |
And Glenn Greenwald is back with us from yesterday. Also a phenomenal writer, has an amazing sub stack all of you guys should check out as well and a great call-in show. 00:00:39.040 |
So in setting up this topic, let me just say I think that in thinking about the U.S. involvement in Ukraine, there's not a lot of debate about this topic. 00:00:51.940 |
And in that sense, it's pretty similar to other wars that the U.S. has gotten into. 00:00:57.460 |
Many of you probably are not old enough to remember when the U.S. got into Iraq or Afghanistan. 00:01:03.900 |
And I'm not old enough to remember the U.S. getting into Vietnam. 00:01:08.580 |
But the thing to understand about all those wars is that they were incredibly popular at the time that we entered them. 00:01:14.140 |
And by the time that they ended, they were not. 00:01:16.740 |
And now I'm not saying I'm not prejudging Ukraine and saying it's one of those. 00:01:21.640 |
I think there's important differences that we should get into. 00:01:24.280 |
But I think we should at least have this debate and we need more discussion. 00:01:27.440 |
And so for that, I'm grateful that Antonio and Glenn have decided to participate. 00:01:32.040 |
So what I'm going to do is kick it to each of them for kind of five minute opening statements. 00:01:52.720 |
And then we'll just get into sort of more of a back and forth. 00:01:59.540 |
Thanks for skewing the moderation from like literally the first second comparing it to Iraq. 00:02:03.180 |
Because I came up here to say it's not about Iraq at all. 00:02:06.500 |
But yeah, so let's just start off with I think probably most people here know that I actually spent some time in Ukraine. 00:02:13.120 |
Unlike a lot of the independent voices who decided to opine from afar about Ukraine, 00:02:17.900 |
I felt that the American media discourse about Ukraine was completely skewed and it just smelled kind of bullshitted to me. 00:02:23.120 |
And so I thought I had to go and actually see it. 00:02:25.120 |
And so I spent some time on the Polish border with Ukraine. 00:02:26.280 |
And so I spent some time on the Polish border with Ukraine. 00:02:26.280 |
And so I spent some time on the Polish border with Ukraine. 00:02:26.300 |
And so I spent some time on the Polish border with Ukraine. 00:02:26.300 |
And so I spent some time on the Polish border with Ukraine. 00:02:26.300 |
And so I spent some time on the Polish border with Ukraine. 00:02:27.800 |
This was kind of in the earliest part of the war, kind of early March. 00:02:30.460 |
And the western part of Ukraine, which by the way is not particularly dangerous or anything, 00:02:33.480 |
is probably no more dangerous than walking across San Francisco these days, to be honest. 00:02:37.800 |
But it was interesting to actually go and see. 00:02:41.080 |
I wrote two sub-stack posts about it that I want to share with you. 00:02:48.420 |
It is something that you have to see to believe. 00:02:51.400 |
And even then, you can't quite understand the scope of it. 00:02:54.080 |
Ten million Ukrainians, fully a quarter of the country, 00:02:58.020 |
Something like six million Ukrainians have left in the span of two months. 00:03:01.940 |
When you stand at the border at Medica, which is one of the border crossings with Poland, 00:03:07.360 |
what you see is you're at it and you realize you're at the fringes of sort of normal, 00:03:13.260 |
And you've entered, on the other side of that is hell that people are escaping. 00:03:17.420 |
You see, again, the men can't leave because they're prohibited from leaving 00:03:22.240 |
And so what you see is old people or women with children. 00:03:25.020 |
Imagine a woman in her 30s with two kids, a little rolly bag, and like a cat in a bag. 00:03:30.580 |
And just a line of them going over the border again and again and again, right? 00:03:34.520 |
And the Poles have been amazing in how they receive the Ukrainians, literally millions of Ukrainians, 00:03:39.740 |
Everywhere you go in eastern Poland or western Ukraine, that's a big open area. 00:03:42.920 |
It's basically a refugee camp, whether it be a train station, repurposed warehouses, all of it. 00:03:47.520 |
The human situation is just kind of mind-boggling. 00:03:50.400 |
The other thing I'd like to share, I crossed the border. 00:03:53.600 |
There's this line of people looking to leave. 00:03:55.020 |
And there's like you with my little Starlink and my little bag and my little body armor, 00:03:59.460 |
like walking across the other way, because you can't take cars across. 00:04:03.340 |
And everyone's looking at me like I'm crazy, right? 00:04:05.340 |
Because why are you walking in the other direction, bro? 00:04:07.260 |
And so anyway, I walked in the other direction, had a driver pick me up, 00:04:09.700 |
experienced a little bit of western Ukraine for a few days. 00:04:12.620 |
And I experienced what I think probably nobody here has experienced directly, which is total war, right? 00:04:17.760 |
A society that's completely and totally mobilized to repel a foreign invader, right? 00:04:22.740 |
I was in a city called Lviv, which is one of the western cities. 00:04:26.720 |
And everything there is either men and weapons and trucks going east or women and children 00:04:34.420 |
And all of society, from the interpreter I had, because unfortunately I speak no Ukrainian, 00:04:38.660 |
to the driver who would drive me around, to the hacker I interviewed who was like DDoSing 00:04:43.040 |
Russian websites, all of them would punctuate their statements with "We will win," right? 00:04:47.540 |
And that's when I realized that the big mistake that everyone had made, I think particularly 00:04:50.380 |
in the U.S. discourse, is underrating Ukrainian resolve and their zeal for the future.