PolitNavigator Interviews Graham Phillips

The news about Graham Phillips being wounded caught PolitNavigator reporters at a time they were making a transcript of the interview with this British reporter. It was recorded the day before Graham was wounded.

Graham Philips was working on the militia side and never hesitated to say what he thought about Euromaidan. He also said that the Ukrainian intelligence services consider him an enemy.

Graham Phillips: I was in Odessa when it all began. I remember well my impressions when I arrived in Kiev. I did not recognize the city: there was trash everywhere, fires, clashes, brawls and Molotov cocktails. It was a nightmare. You could see Bandera posters everywhere, some Nazis…

I previously lived and worked in Kiev for two years. It's a beautiful city with wonderful people. Those who stood on the barricades and brutalized Berkut officers were not from Kiev. These people came from Lviv, Ternopil and other places in Western Ukraine. They didn’t care about burning or breaking things, because they were not from Kiev. It was an act of terror, a real terror.

I was wondering back then: how could the US and the EU support this? How can the democratic West support terrorists? But that’s how it was. They encouraged them and provoked all these events.

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John W. Whitehead

If you dress police officers up as soldiers and you put them in military vehicles and you give them military weapons, they adopt a warrior mentality. We fight wars against enemies, and the enemies are the people who live in our cities—particularly in communities of color. - Thomas Nolan, criminology professor and former police officer

Should police officer Darren Wilson be held accountable for the shooting death of unarmed citizen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014?

That the police officer was white and his victim black should make no difference. In a perfect world, it would not matter. In an imperfect world such as ours, however, racism is an effective propaganda tool used by the government and the media to distract us from the real issues.

As a result, the national dialogue about the dangers of militarized, weaponized police officers being trained to act like soldiers on the battlefield, shooting first and asking questions later, has shifted into a largely unspoken debate over race wars, class perceptions and longstanding, deep-seated notions of who deserves our unquestioning loyalty and who does not.

Putting aside our prejudices, however, let’s not overlook the importance of Ferguson and this grand jury verdict. Tasked with determining whether Wilson should stand trial for Brown’s shooting, the grand jury ruled that the police officer will not face charges for the fatal shooting. However, the greater question—whether anything will really change to rein in militarized police, police shootings, lack of accountability and oversight, and a military industrial complex with a vested interest in turning America into a war zone—remains unanswered.

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