Brand opens up a great discussion here.
As it's him some will dismiss it and carry on abusing people with a different opinion to theirs in here.
This is long but it's hard to respond to a 16 minute video with brevity.
I actually watched this entire thing in the spirit of open mindedness that Russell Brand would no doubt endorse, so I'm going to take the time to just pull apart a few things. You may or may not bother taking it in, but maybe someone else will and we'll have saved another from thinking he's some sort of intellectual.
Firstly the premise of the video "WE CAN'T TALK ABOUT THIS" aka "Did NATO expansionism cause this" not the forbidden topic that Russell Brand tries to portray it as. For example, you don't need to go to some "non-mainstream" website to find this opinion like Brand has,
this article was published in the guardian. It was also debated pretty freely in this thread for the first few hundred pages.
It has however been comprehensively disproven as a theory and only exists as a Kremlin propaganda line to justify the war, so while you're certainly allowed to say it, you might get judged.
Reasons it's bullshit.
1) Ukraine was no closer to joining NATO now than it was 10 years ago, in fact NATO rules actually meant Ukraine couldn't join since 2014 due to the ongoing conflict in Donbass, so Russia did not think it was going to join.
2) Russia has infact had NATO garrisons on its border since 1949, so what Brand describes as "antagonistic" is actually just how things have been for 75 years.
3)In 1975 Soviet leader Leonard Brezhnev willingly signed on to the Helsinki Accords, which stipulated every country is free to choose it's own alliances. So the USSR/Russia explicitly endorses every countries right to join NATO if they want and has done for 50 years.
4)The fable of "not 1 inch east". This quote by the US Secretary of State was made during negotiations about Germany. They were trying to come to an agreement about how to reunify Germany and Russia wanted assurances that the massive NATO forces still garrisoned in West Germany weren't going to rush to the new Eastern Border with Poland.
However this was not actually possible because NATO wouldn't have been able to defend Germany under Article 5 of NATO, so it was resolved and made no appearance in the 2-plus-4 agreement that the USSR agreed to.
5) Russia has the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world. That makes them absolutely invulnerable to attack, because (as they so often threaten) it risks nuclear apocalypse. No NATO troops on the border changes that.
So now I come onto why Brand is a fucking moron (in this video in particular.)
1) He goes on a rant about how "The West wants Ukraine to be in NATO" and "Russia wants Ukraine to be an ally" and no one ever asks the poor old Ukrainians, and isn't it always that way?
This is just incredibly ignorant. Ukrainians decided. They rebelled against the Pro-Russian government in 2014, and elected a pro-EU government, and then did it again in 2019 when Zelensky was elected. Ukrainians overwhelming want to be in the EU and NATO.
2) He several times during reading Freedland's article disregards Putins stated beliefs as Freedlands opinion, which is dishonest.
He also sums up the objective of Freedland's article as persuading us "We must support our government's actions" which is not a reasonable interpretation of an article titled "We're appalled by Putin but the west gave him the green light, the article is really clearly arguing that prior refusal to act has lead to this war.
That was weird, but what's really weird and where the lying kicks in is that he then claims this article that explicitly criticises our governments lack of action in the past as propaganda that "Asks you to support the existing power structures in your set of systems or nation".
So at this point he's not even arguing against the Freedland article, but something else.
3) He gets upset that Freedland considers democracy a good thing and a better system of government than Russia's dictatorship...
The irony in this section is that he's too ignorant to realise that the problems we've had with our democracies lately - Trump, Republican's trying to steal an election, mask protests, anti-vaxxers vs normal people, Brexit....
Half of them don't exist in Russia because Putin detains and arrests and kills those people. The others - Brexit and Trump - were funded by Russia to cause disharmony.
There's a lot of "all people are people" in this video, but at no point does Brand consider that's not true in Putin's Russia, is it?
The problem with Russell Brand is that he is so desperate to define himself as against "the man" or government, or "the mainstream" that he will elevate whatever those establishments oppose to be an equally valid point of view, and unfortunately for him it shows how out of his depth he is debating these topics, because sometimes there is actually a clear right and wrong.
