00:00Well, it's always a good day when we can welcome into any studio, but especially this studio, Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, long-time foreign correspondent.
00:10I shouldn't give it away, but more than four decades now, sir.
00:13I don't believe it, Pepe.
00:14No, but it's been great all these years to talk to you on the screen. Now we have you in person. You know, it's fantastic.
00:21A lot of dignitaries, world leaders here today, including Brazil's president, making the effort to cross halfway across the world to come here for it.
00:30What does that tell us?
00:32Well, I think we have to be very clear about the gravity of the moment.
00:39This was an extremely serious celebration of something extremely serious in the history of the 20th century.
00:47How to subdue fascism and Nazism.
00:53And obviously the Soviet Union was up there.
00:56Whatever the West, the fragmented West says about it, the Soviet Union was up there.
01:02So we had this precise, meticulous, outstanding ceremony.
01:10Very, very serious, but at the same time, not ostentatious at all.
01:14You know, everything was quite simple in the end.
01:18And we had a great deal of the global South, or global majority, here in the square.
01:25That tells us everything we need to know about, I wouldn't say alliance, but this embrace between the two leaders of the world that is being built now,
01:37who were seated side by side by the way, President Putin and President Xi Jinping, and the global South around it.
01:46I love the fact, for instance, when we had the contingents from the old Soviet space.
01:52That was fantastic to see all the stands, Azerbaijan as well.
01:56But we also saw Vietnam, and very few people make the connection between World War II or Great Patriotic War with Vietnam.
02:06So this sends a message, it's like the global South was sending itself a message, with, of course, Russia and China in a privileged position, but don't take this as, you know.
02:23We are building the new world, and we won't let that happen again.
02:28This is the number one message.
02:32Fighting the Third Reich and winning now is replicated in historical terms with fighting against a budding force Reich.
02:44And it pains all of us to say, especially all of us who have European backgrounds, that once again it's in Europe.
02:52And it's not populations in selected European nations.
02:59No, it's an analytic bureaucracy in Brussels.
03:03It's the, I would say, Kafka-like mechanism of the European Union and European Commission.
03:09They are trying to install a variant of the Reich, a Fourth Reich, which we can describe very succinctly as liberal totalitarianism.
03:19So this was the message that came from here.
03:22That's why it's, at the same time, we are dazzled, the blinding beauty of the ceremony itself, but we need a moment of trying to understand the much bigger picture.
03:34And I'm sure those two sitting side by side, especially after their meeting yesterday, they knew exactly what's going on.
03:42You know, picking up on what you said, not just foreign dignitaries, but also the foreign military personnel who are going through.
03:50And you obviously mentioned Vietnam.
03:52I mean, Laos was there as well.
03:54I mean, we had Myanmar.
03:56I mean, a whole range of countries.
03:57Egypt, actually, the first ever personnel from the African continent to walk across Red Square's Cobble.
04:03So really a historic moment in that regard.
04:06But I was thinking, I was looking, think about ties that bind so much of what brings these nations together is obviously the Soviet Union, right?
04:16And the offer that it helped in their own battles against colonialism, well, in Vietnam as well, Laos, and still to this day trying to help with that unexploded mines as well and bombs.
04:30The Soviet legacy is strongly felt in those countries, isn't it, as much as it's disregarded in Europe.
04:36It is.
04:37And we see that in Vietnam, in Laos, in Cambodia, in a great deal of Southeast Asia, especially Southeast Asia that was conquered by the Brits.
04:48And then they had to fight a war that was not theirs in the end.
04:52And, of course, under subjugation of the Japanese empire at the time, which, after that, decided to invest in all these economies.
05:01They're like, OK, we're going to pay our Japanese retribution.
05:06We're going to be a car factory for you.
05:09OK.
05:10These are distortions of history.
05:12But all across East Asia and Southeast Asia, not to mention in China, China considers the Japanese domination as, let's say, the last bit of the century of humiliation.
05:30The thing is, they were so strong mentally that they overcame it completely.
05:34And now China is a mega superpower.
05:37I just came back from Shanghai a few weeks ago.
05:39And when you see that in front of you, it's beyond astonishing.
05:45They are self-assured, self-confident.
05:49At the same time, they are not bragging about anything.
05:52But they say, look, we overcame all that.
05:54And now this is our drive to become the great power of the 21st century.
06:00So it was great to have them all here in the square as well.
06:04And these, let's say, these little touches of having Africa as well and South America, priceless.
06:13Even someone who didn't send a military delegation, but he was in the audience like in awe.
06:22Captain Ibrahim Traoré from Burkina Faso.
06:25He's probably the greatest indigenous, progressive African leader nowadays.
06:32And he was there.
06:33And you could see in his eyes that he understood perfectly the large symbolism of what was happening.
06:40They get that, don't they?
06:41They get the history.
06:42They understand, as Saskia said, the colonial links and overcoming that.
06:49But contrast that to Europe and Kaya Callas, the EU foreign policy chief, we can listen together, in fact, Pepe, to what she said.
06:57As we have the 9th of May tomorrow, which is a Europe day, then I want to stress that all those who truly, truly support peace cannot stand side by side by side by Putin.
07:14Should be in Ukraine rather than in Moscow tomorrow.
07:18Back to Pepe, and just to remind you, we obviously had that soundbite from Callas talking about the 9th of May and basically chastising people, saying you all should have gone to Kiev.
07:31I mean, where do we start, Pepe?
07:34Are we allowed to laugh?
07:37Yes, today is a celebration.
07:38With our audience.
07:39We should laugh with our audience.
07:41This woman doesn't have the skills to run a grocery store.
07:46And she represents 450 million Europeans.
07:52This in itself spells out how Brussels is run.
07:57She's there because she's a Russophobe.
07:59That's it.
08:00There's no other reason.
08:01She's not, it's beyond incompetent.
08:05And why she's there?
08:06Because of that person that I call the toxic medusa.
08:10And I'm sure our audience will understand who I'm talking about.
08:14So nowadays we have this budding pre-forced right gang, which more or less hijacked the structures of the European Union,
08:27which was never created as an European Union for the peoples of Europe, was created as a bureaucratic mechanism from the beginning.
08:35Of course, the Americans were there.
08:38Okay, this is what you're going to do.
08:41Nowadays we have the internal collapse.
08:44And in terms of moral clarity and spiritual clarity and power itself, not only of the European Union and the European Commission, but also NATO.
08:57But in the case of the European institutions, it's even worse.
09:01They are legitimizing a genocide in the 21st century.
09:07This is unexplainable.
09:09And that's it.
09:10This is the final verdict.
09:12You won't recover for that.
09:13And historians in the 22nd century, when we're writing about our times, they will say, how could they possibly do that?
09:22Just backtrack a little bit to what was happening a little over 80 years ago.
09:26There you go.
09:27You know, I asked this question earlier, but I also I want to ask you specifically, because, of course, you are the absolute king when it comes to emerging world orders.
09:36Because 1945, it was era-defining what we saw in Yalta, the way it was decided, the foundations that were laid for everything that's come since, the world as we know it, really, and the frameworks we've worked within, the Ukraine conflict.
09:54Vladimir Putin obviously sees parallels there.
09:56Do you think it's going to bring about a similar shift in terms of global structures?
10:02Okay, let's think in an Asian way and think about the most auspicious scenario.
10:09There will be Yalta 2.0 with President Putin, President Xi, and President Trump.
10:16Preferably, it could have been today if he came here to be in that square and understand the role that America played in solving the Second World War, American terminology.
10:29But the Great Patriotic War is, compared to the Second World War, it's a much, much bigger concept.
10:37But Trump, he should have been here.
10:40He respects Xi and he respects Putin.
10:43So at least he will sit down to talk, not obsessed with art of the deal, because there will be no deal.
10:49And obviously, if there was a deal, it would spell out the great powers of the 21st century are Russia, China, which, by the way, have a strategic partnership, which was reaffirmed yesterday in the first meeting between Putin and President Xi.
11:05But the American ruling elites would never allow Trump to do that, even if he wanted.
11:14He wants to pose as the circus ringmaster.
11:16No, there are very powerful people behind him, and they will never allow it, because this would mean for the whole world to see the end of unilateralism.
11:25Yalta 2.0, we will see you there, Pepe.
11:31I had you by my side in Kazan with bricks.
11:34We had you here.
11:35So there is no way that you are not going to be there.
11:39And there's no one I'd rather have alongside you, of course, by my side.
11:43Pepe Escobar, of course, a formidable journalist.
11:47It is always a pleasure to have you with us.
11:50My pleasure.
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