I am coming to you from Charlottesville, Virginia, which is where I live the rest of the time, and is a Charlottesville University town, it is also a home of the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, a community that is a lightning rod for Nazis in the USA.

We have Nazis marching here, we have a governor witch is considered to be the frontrunner to be the vice presidential candidate for Donald Trump at various times, we have a part of the government that is very happy to implement what Trump would like to do…and I would like to go there, about the mechanisms, stressed says Heather Roberson Gaston, human rights expert, University of Virginia, USA, at the second panel of the international conference “Ukraine and the World: Resisting Aggression, Defeating Authoritarianism” entitled “Defeating Putin and Authoritarianism: The Quest for Peace, Justice and Democracy”.

I have an American friend who reports from Ukraine. And he recently asked: Well what have you learned since beginning of this war?  And it made me think about that, the attack on Ukraine and when it began, and what people thought about it. And even I thought about it, at the time, I was a typical American intellectual who is a member of all sorts of organizations who care about people and justice, who study foreign policy, all of these kinds of topics, and the orientation of an intellectual as me, is often, to be very skeptical of US foreign policy, as our job is to keep an eye on the US, skeptical of our imperial ambitions, suspicious of our military complex – we are the people who are going to complain when the US does something like send billions of military aid, and so you must spend it with our military contractors.

In the last decade, Americans become interested in issues social supports, like childcare, instituting paid leave, and you see the rise of Bernie Sanders as part of that.

When the US government started talking about the morning that Russia is going to attack Ukraine, it was really unbelievable, and many people called it “ a red scare”, as if Russia somehow stood up for values of socialism and social justice… what the government was really trying to do, is really to mash these ideas in the US, it’s now really hard to believe that I really thought that way, or that so many intellectuals thought that way, and it would take time for the larger population in the US to really understand what is actually happening.

Last night I talked to somebody and I had to explain that Trump is not coming with ideas for social justice or economic justice, but for conservatism, hatred and Nazism, and that this is what is really represented here.

And we are really isolated from the rest of the world on this matter, we need to be educated and to listen. I think that in terms in the situation now in the United States, that know that Trump is lying, that know that he is very much under the influence of Putin, he is just repeating what Putin says.

D. T.

Camera and editing: Arian Mehmeti

Photo: B. Tahiri