Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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A huge and sometimes the most important and dispositive element in military work is actually the civil affairs, is actually the political and civil society topography of the target country and its regional interests. partners, allies, and adversaries. And then oftentimes it's that the political, which determines the military result much more so than the military activity itself.
We're seeing this, for example, with Georgia's Q, right? NATO wants to build the military base right there and just point like a gun out at Crimea. This will obviously put the people of Romania, put a big fat kick me sign on their back from Russia the moment this goes operational. Okay. Well, NATO doesn't want that to happen.
NATO, could NATO roll into Romania right now and run a, you know, Yugoslavia run back like 1995 and 1999 and Georgia gets elected, you know, gets elected head of state, decides to cancel the NATO air base, kick everyone out. Kind of a diplomatic incident if they roll in and, you know,
napalm raid from fighter jets and drones, the sitting government of Romania, just because that party won the election and decided to cancel a military base. So the military can't do that directly. What they need is the civil military. They need the civil side of military operations to make that election result not happen. And you see the same thing. It's not just always about tilting elections.
Sometimes it's about the passage of a law. For example, Ukraine, there was a lot of tense debates about the post-2014 Maidan revolution government's in Ukraine's stance towards the Russian half of the country.
The Russian ethnics, the Russian speaking portion part of the country, the representation of the Russian side of the story on Ukrainian TV or social media or culture or the religious issues around the Russian Orthodox Church. Well, every bit of pro-Russia institution, institutional
affinity link that's cleaved out of Ukrainian politics or civil society helps further achieve the NATO goal of folding Ukraine into NATO and of helping Ukraine at that point militarily achieve reconquest of the breakaway Donbass and Crimea region. But the problem is if Zelensky didn't want to do that, for example, in May 2019 when he took office or April 2019,
If he didn't want to do that, it would kind of be a diplomatic incident for NATO if they ran strafing air raids over Kiev until he promised to kick the Russian language off of Ukrainian TV, effectively ban or place extreme limits on the Russian Orthodox Church influence. If he... defied the IMF and its privatization plan for Ukraine's energy assets.
NATO wants that done, but NATO can't be the one to do it. They can't have their fingerprints on the gun. So what they need is a sprawling civil military, whole of society capacity to have that political result achieved, but have it come from the civil institutions in and around that. And that's how you have the scandal of things like the Red Lines memo. 70 U.S.
government-funded NGOs, all signatory to the U.S. aid-funded, as well as NATO-funded and U.S. State Department-funded Ukraine Crisis Media Center, crisis management. This is the U.S. and NATO-funded organization umbrella arm. We talk about this 90% of Ukrainian media. Well, a lot of this is run out of these centralized U.S.
umbrella groups that coordinate the media surround sound of all these different NGOs and media organizations. And one of the major ones is called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. Well, I've talked about this before. One month, Zelensky takes office, April 2019.
In May 2019, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center issues Zelensky a red lines memo saying that Zelensky will suffer political instability if he crosses any of the 25 listed below red lines.
that touched Zelensky's ability to negotiate with Russia about energy affairs, negotiate with Russia about security affairs, block the privatization efforts of major Ukrainian industries, deviate in any way from the path to accession into the NATO and surrounding EU bodies.
It had a section for their education, for their culture, for their language, for their media, for their energy policies, for their security policies. It's not just the USAID Truman Show in terms of what us as civilians think are organic institutions, but are in fact USAID proxies. It's the policies of sitting governments.
Zelensky only became the head of state for Ukraine because of the political instability this very same USAID network inflicted on Viktor Yanukovych, however you feel about him. I'm not even opining an opinion, but the fact is he was run out of office in a rental riot operation where... All of the major groups involved were USAID funded. So, you know, easy come, easy go.
And what they're saying is, twice in that memo, the top line of it says, these are red lines, cross them, instability. They say it right again in bold in the memo right before the 70 signatories. Message received, but NATO can't say that directly because, hey, that's an attack on democracy. If NATO says it, we're supposed to have a civilian-run government.
So you need a civilian front for the military consensus. That's why the U.S. Department of Defense pays over a million dollars a year to the Atlantic Council and why they have seven CIA directors on their board to juice the capacity to create this civilian front for a military monster.
Yeah, well, USAID does grant funding. USAID builds thought leadership. So academics, academic universities function as a kind of super turbocharged NGO. They are 501c3s. They are nonprofits, just like the NGOs are. They are not for profit. You can give them a lot more money without the unseemly blowback of looking like USAID is picking winners and losers in private sector markets.
private sector partnerships. And so USAID funds research grants. USAID funds departments and centers and institutions in order to make all these things happen. So for example, with the Wuhan lab, how did USAID end up paying $15 million effectively to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create bat-borne vaccines
jump from animal to human, gain of function, SARS-CoV-2, Frankensteinian freak monster viruses. Why are there USAID fingerprints on that work? Well, it's because it's run through universities who then put the pass-through funding in order to do that. That money initially went to, for example, I believe it was UC Davis. It was the University of California funding
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