All right 'yall welcome to the show. It's Antiwar Radio. I feel guilty to the people listening on the kaos stream right now. Only got to listen to the beginning of 'Gates of Hell' by the Bruisers. And if they're anything like me they wanna hear the whole song so maybe i'll just queue that up for the next one too. Hey waitaminute, is that the whole thing? Yeah, i guess it is. It's got a really long intro that song, y'know.
Allright anyway so i'm Scott and this is my show, AntiWar Radio. This is where I oppose war. Uh, yeah. I'm really really sick and tired of the government killing people all day and every day. And since our government is made up of the bad guys, they don't have any legitimate reasons that they can cite whatsoever for why they kill people -- every day. So, they have to make-up _lies_ in order to get _you_ to - i don't know - shrug and not care. Or even better, you know, get you as excited about killing people as them. So that then they can kill people some more. I'm pretty sure that it's really just about "It must be fun to kill people", you know? Like when I was a kid me and my friends used to play guns in the woods. And it was fun! Because we were 10! And we had awesome toy guns back then, not some of this democrat-mandated orange tip on the end. Oh i guess the cops were less likely to just shoot a child to death back then. That was how they came up with the orange caps for the toy guns, you know. Cause cops kept KILLING CHILDREN -- for no reason. So they said "Oh well, we'll better blame the toy gun instead of the cop". Because Americans are pathetic that way and so now all toy guns have orange caps on the end. But anyway the real point is, we didn't have orange caps on the end of our toy guns and we had a _great_ time pretending to kill each-other. Really for years on-end, I think, in my neighborhood. But I guess we got it out of our system then. And the rest of you people were playing with your blocks until you gave up toys entirely or whatever, you become adults and now you just want to run-around and play guns in the woods - OR you're too big and fat and cowardly and your hands are too soft, and so you just want to hire other people to do it for you. And then you can have your blood-lust satisfied vicariously. I think that's the american way right there. Mom and baseball and apple pie? No. Vicarious Bloodlust. That's what it means to be an American now. So anyway, that's why I do this show, cause I hate all of that. I hate all the murder and I hate all of the lies, and I'm over it. Oh also, and I got what my high school history teacher called "The X-ray eyes", which means that, you know, they're not really x-ray (that'd be cool) but, you know, it means that these lies don't work on me; I see right through them. So my job is to, you know, catalogue the lies and then, you know, interpret what the truth is for those of you who are interested in knowing what the truth is.
One good way to, you know, get a leg-up on the truth would be to listen to Ron Paul say things. And that's what I think you should do; listen to Ron Paul say things.
[que Ron Paul Quote]
I THANK YOU, MADAM CHAIRMAN AND WELCOME, DR. ROMER. I'M NOT VERY GOOD AT THE PARTISAN BLAME GAME...I THANK YOU, MADAM CHAIRMAN AND WELCOME, DR. ROMER. I'M NOT VERY GOOD AT THE PARTISAN BLAME GAME BUT I AM VERY INTERESTED IN THE BUSINESS CYCLE AND WHY WE HAVE UNEMPLOYMENT. AND ACTUALLY, I'M INTERESTED IN THE MEASUREMENT OF OUR PROBLEMS AND I THINK SOMETIMES WE DECEIVE OURSELVES BECAUSE FOLLOWING SOME FREE MARKET WEBSITES THAT MEASURE UNEMPLOYMENT SOMEWHAT DIFFERENTLY THAN OUR GOVERNMENT THEY COME UP WITH A FIGURE OF 22% OF UNEMPLOYMENT AND ALSO EVEN THE WAY THE BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS MEASURE IT THEY LOOK AT ALL THE PEOPLE NOT LOOKING FOR WORK AT THE MOMENT THAT IS 16%. SO THINGS ARE NOT VERY GOOD. ALSO, THE GDP IS WHAT WE MEASURE F THE GDP IS GOING UP, EVERYBODY IS SUPPOSED TO FEEL GOOD. YOU KNOW IF WE SPEND $1 BILLION ON A MILLS AND WE BLOW IT UP THAT INCREASES IN THE GDP AND DIDN'T GIVE US A HOUSE AND DIDN'T GIVE US A HEALTH CARE OR EDUCATION SO THERE'S A BIG DIFFERENCE. AND ALSO, THE INFLATION RATE IS VERY IMPORTANT. IF YOU GO BECOME AND USE THE OLD CPI MEASUREMENT OF INFLATION, WE HAVE 6%, NOT 2% SOME THERE IS A LOT OF DECEPTION AND THE PEOPLE SENSE THIS. I THINK WHEN -- I THINK THEY WOULD RATHER HEAR, YOU KNOW, ACCURATE INFORMATION THAN TO TRY TO BE BAMBOOZLED INTO THINKING THINGS ARE HUNKY DORY WHEN THEY KNOW THERE IS A LOT OF INFLATION OUT THERE THE OTHER THING THAT I HAVE CONCERN ABOUT IN MEASURING THE GDP, IF YOU LOOKED AT THE GDP IN A PRIVATE WAY, SOMEBODY HAD A $200,000 JOB AND HE LOST HIS JOB AND THE FAMILY HAD 2 OR $300,000 IN DEBT, FOR THEM TO BE TOLD THAT WHAT THEY NEED IS $1 MILLION LOAN AND SPEND IT, BUY A HOUSE, A BUY A CAR AND LIVE HIGH, THEIR PERSONAL GDP GOES UP. BUT THEY NEVER MEASURE THE DEBT. WHEN THEY GO TO THE GOVERNMENT, WE SAY THE GOVERNMENT'S IN DEBT THEY SPENDING TOO MUCH. WHAT WE NEED DO IS SPEND. WE NEED TO BORROW AND THE GDP GOES UP. YOU MEASURE THE GDP THAT GOES UP BOWS BECAUSE OF BOROUGH, INFLATING AND SPENDING, LOOK AT THAT WITH A BETTER PERSPECTIVE, I WOULD SAY THAT YOU KNOW, MAYBE THE REAL GDP ISN'T GOING UP AND MAYBE THAT'S WHY WE ARE NOT HAVING REAL GROWTH. THERE IS A BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PEOPLE WORKING HARD AND PAYING THEIR BILLS AND ACTUALLY SAVING SOME MONEY. I THINK THE BIGGEST FALLACY WE HAVE, WE DON'T HAVE A CORRECTION WE DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW WE GOT HERE, WE HAD TOO MUCH DAT, TOO MUCH MALL INVESTMENT AND WE HAVEN'T DEALT WITH THAT. WHEN YOU GET TOO MUCH OF THAT YOU LIQUIDATE IT, YOU GET IN OVER YOUR HEAD, YOU CAN'T PAY THE BILLS, CLAIM BANKRUPTCY, WORK HARD OR TAKE A NEW JOB, BUT WE CAN SEE THIS AS AN INDIVIDUAL OR COUNTRY BUT EVIDENCELY, OUR ECONOMIC THEORY NOW THAT GOVERNMENTS ARE EXEMPT FOR THOSE KIND OF ECONOMIC RULES AND I YIELD BACK THE BALANCE OF MY TIME.
Yeah, right on. "I thank the gentleman from Texas." Ok now I know that might have sounded like a bit of a non-sequitur from my introductory rant there about how much I hate the wars and the lies, but it is pretty-much all the same thing that we're talking about. Like Von Klausewiecz said, "War is the continuation of politics by other means." Well, what's politics? Well, as my high-school history explained, "Politics is people fighting over who gets to control the state so that they can use its police power authority to determine who gets what resources."
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a guy at Free Radio Austion probably ten years ago now, and I said, "Come on man, you have to admit it, socialism with a police force is communism." And he said, "Fine, capitalism with a police force is fascism." And I said, "Touche, that's right." As long as there's a state - whoever's got the most 'savings' I guess you could call it (if they own a bank, then they have a magic wand that saves the same purpose as having savings) - they can spend that money bribing the state to use its authority to decide that they get more of the resources than whatever they could obtain voluntarily, through free exchange.
And war is just a continuation of the same process, only at the cost of, you know, exploding people to death all of the time.
And lying even more than usual.
But you know I saw something yesterday, that uh, ahh, geez and I guess I probably should have jotted down and saved the link and maybe even interviewed the guy about it or somethin, but it was, euh, whatever. Anyway, point is it was a story that said that there was a record amount of money spent lobbying Congress last year; Thirty-seven billion dollars. Thirty-Seven billion dollars, that's all? So, different people, different companies, different factions in the United States spend 37 billion dollars a year to determine how 4 trillion, FOUR TRILLION (I'm sorry my enunciation and emphasis was on the wrong word there) -- they spent 37 billion to decide how 4 TRILLION will be devided up. See how that works? You're a company, you can go in there and buy congressmen (they're a dime a dozen), senators (two bits) and then you get _them_ to give you _billions_ of tax dollars for doing nothing. Or for building weapons to kill people. Or for building a smart grid to enslave people better. Or whatever the contract is. So if you hear Ron Paul talking about the deception in the economy - you know the way they measure the consequences of their policies, their wars and their economic policies, it gets right to the heart of the mess we're in. And how they can't even tell the truth about how many jobs it costs; ten percent or twenty out of the...
[audio cuts off]
[break]
It's AntiWar Radio, I'm Scott Horton. Appreciate y'all tuning into the show today. Pardon me, I got too many screens and too many things I'm trying to get together. It's somewhat together. It's coming together.
S: Hey guess what? My producer Angela Keaton's on the phone, hi Angela how's it going?
A: Hey Scott.
S: What's happening?
A: Very very grim realization over the past few days.
S: Yeah, what's that?
A: Well, it never occurred to me to see it from the other person's side, but to _really_ imagine what occupation is like, apparently people really don't like it when agents of foreign governments are running around on their soil telling them what to do.
S: No?!
A: They don't.
S: Something specific brought you to this realization last week?
A: It's it is just that feeling, "What would it feel like to be one of those people who has a foreign, foreign government occupying your soil." I mean I don't know, Americans don't know what means. Citizens of the US don't know what that feels like. We can't even imagine, it wouldn't even occur to us to know what that feels like.
S: Yeah. Well "Red Dawn", we all saw that, right?
A: Eh, yeah whatever. You know, crappy 80s movies are one thing, but I'm really trying to picture this, like I'm trying to picture what the Costa-Ricans feel like at this moment when the marines are doing whatever the hell it is they're doing there.
S: Yeah, well, you know that's a very important story that I haven't talked about on this show cause, I don't really know much about it, other that some massive fleet of Navy ships showed up, and they're building a new Marine base there. And, you know, Costa-Rica is the 55th state after Japan and Germany and Poland and the others... Israel, uh it's long been sort of a.. just a spot where America has their way and not too much gets in it. And of course a place a lot of ex-pats go to to try to run away from America to be free, or run away from the United States to be free. But um, I don't really know much about the puppet government there or anything like that, but certainly thier government is a puppet government of the American Empire. And I can't imagine that the people of Costa-Rica feel any need to have a massive military presence there. I guess the only question is, "What are they doing there? Eliminating some of the CIA's drug-sales competition. Or are they preparing, you know, to bomb Caracas?" Who knows what with these kooks.
A: Well would you like me to find someone on Costa-Rica who can tell you about this?
S: Yeah, please!
A: Well let me go do that, and you'll probably be hearing from me soon.
S: Word. That's the show production that we're always referring-to folks, right there.
A: Yeah. Well I'm off to go find a Costa-Rican expert. And watch the Occupation man, occupation's a crime. Talk to you later.
S: Ok, appreciate it. Yeah, and you know she's right. Think about what it's like to live in the Gaza Strip, or in the West Bank, well, Gaza's, you know, they pseudo-unoccupied it by pulling the settlers out, and then just turning the entire place into a prison. So I guess you don't really have Israeli soldiers running around everywhere in Gaza, except during their, you know, periodic raids. But in the West Bank, for example, the Isreali soldiers, they can just do anything they want. They can kick-in any door they want. They can kick any family out of any house they want, "We decided we want to use your house as a base for the next few weeks." Whatever. Laters for you. Hell that even made "60 Minutes".
I saw video just the other day about Israeli refuseniks; young men and women who say "No, I will not be conscripted and I will not occupy the West Bank. Or Gaza. I will not subject these people to inhuman treatment. Put me in prison, I rather go there." They say. And that's what they were talking about, was "Man you know, jeez when I first joined the army, one of the first things they did was have me occupying Gaza." And man, it's just like 'no rules' - you can do to these people anything you want.
And of course for, you know, angry young soldiers, that means war-crimes.
It means the abuse of human beings.
I'll tell you something that'll open your eyes up to what it's like to be occupied, watch Robert Greenwalt's film "Rethinking Afghanistan", and particularly watch the last segment of it. I think it's in three or four parts on-line, and you watch the last segment of that movie, where it's the women of the refugee camp begging for God to just come and kill them, because they rather die than live-on like this. And worse. Go watch that, go show that to your pro-war brother-in-law. No, don't fight with your family. Go show that to your, you know, pro-war everybody else in your life except your family.
Better, read "Collateral Damage" by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian. And it's edited by them because what it is is it's just _statements_, and they did the journalistic, you know, integrity there and went and tried to verfify as absolute much of these guys's story as they possibly could. And it's just first-person accounts of American soldiers about the war-crimes they committed in Iraq. You know, what's it like to be sent-out on a mission by the great American democracy to go play the IED lottery. Driving around patroling just waiting to get bombed by a landmine. And then when you do get bombed by a landmine, if you live through that, now you're outside of your aluminum HUMMV which has been torn to pieces, your friends are dead and or missing limbs and dying around, and you have a rifle in your hand, and you have _nobody_ to shoot at.
You're at war against a ghost who planted a land-mine, and you don't even know when. And so what do you do? You make ghosts out of whoever happens to be around. That's what you do. And that's what American soldiers did over and over and over again. In Iraq. It's great, man, the way they have it divided by, "Here's some atrocities that happened from the convoys driving around Iraq" and "Here's some of the atrocities that happened from the house raids driving around Iraq." and "Here's some of the atrocities that happen when frustrated young men start firing in all directions after being blown-up by a homemade IED" and "Here are some of the atrocities that happened in the Prisons" and "Here's some of the atrocities that ha..."
And that's how it's divided, the different aspects of the war, like that. And it's just american soldiers, telling their stories. It's called "Collatteral Damage" by Laila Al-Arian and Chris Hedges. And maybe it will inspire you to, sort of, you know, feel the soldiers' point of view a little bit better. But there's, you know, plenty of Iraqi actors in these stories too, right? There is no war-crime without the family that lived in the house that you raided and killed.
And I don't know if anybody wrote any really good books from the Iraqi point of view, along those lines. But, yeah, think about it seriously, and I know that they tell you all day that, "It's a dangerous world, a dangerous world!" And, "Only our government's _fire_ keeps them at bay!" And whatever, all day. And that's really a _lie_. There is no State in the world that is an enemy of america. Not one. Certainly no major power. Not even any. I mean, what. Venezuela or somethin? Gimme a break, they're not even our enemy anyway. It's not a dangerous world. They tell you that all the time. But you know imagine, if it was possible that, i dunno, the chinese, the europeans, the russians all team up, they hire some traitors from the democratic party to turn the government over to them and the occupy our country, build military bases in our counties, fly robots in the skies above our towns and neighborhoods, killing us. What _would_ that be like? Having a foreign army with a different language, a different religion kicking-in our doors - humiliating us in front of our wives and daughters.
[break]
Alright y'all welcome back to the show. It's AntiWar Radio, which makes me Scott. The host of the show, Scott Horton.
You can find in the archives all of the foreign policy interviews of this show at AntiWar.com/radio. Find all of my interviews going back to 2003 at scotthortonshow.com, and find all the bad news on the front page AntiWar.com. Today I got a whole Somalia/Uganda section going-on but it's gonna have to wait because Leslie Lefkow from Human Rights Watch is going to be on the show later-on. She's really good. I talked with her about Somalia before and she was, like, smart. And knew stuff. And I found it beneficial to my own understanding.
So you know, if you guys to get to listen-in to me learning stuff from her, then that's pretty good, right? Alright. By the way, you know, maybe you're young and full of government education and you don't know (I don't know who's listening to this thing right? It's such a strange thing doing a radio show). Anyway you might not recognize that America has debatably been an empire all along, and has certainly (and I guess this is really the start of my revisionism, when I was a kid) was certainly the whole Cold War was a big bogus manufactured crisis. Well first of all, America went and had just finished fighting a war to _save_ Joe Stalin and made sure that he got eastern europe, and then turn-around and freak-out about it.
Now Joe Stalin was a sick, evil bastard, and the Soviet Union was, you know, a threat but not to America. And anyway they came-up with this bogus United Nations and this bogus doctrine of "collective security" wherein if anybody gets into trouble, everybody has to jump-in. And we've been at war, really, since 1941. There's been very little exception. I guess a couple of years in the seventies, where we didn't have a war, but of course we were backing communists and anti-communist rebels in various countries around the world, even in those days. Like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan's support for Pol Pot in Cambodia for example. Ronald Reagan especially. But anyway, um, the fact of the matter is that, before World War II, the people who opposed it said "We are never gonna be ok again after this, this is gonna be too big". Look at the changes our society had to go through as a result of World War I. "This time there will be no return to normalcy."
You might have learned that in government school, that when Woodrow Wilson had his stroke and his dillettante wife took-over the government and fired Colonel House and finished running the rest of his evil policies into the ground, the people elected a Republican. Sick and tired of the Democrat's wars they were, at the time. And they elected Warren G. Harding and he presided over what was called "The Return to Normalcy". First order of business, let Eugene Debbs out of prison for giving a speech against kidnapping and mass-murder.
You know, there wasn't much of a return to normalcy really. But relative to how the end of World War II workd out, absolutely. They basically disbanded the army. They de-militarized, turned their swords back into ploughshares, just like they'd done after every other American imperial adventure going all the way back.
But after World War II? Nope, forget it. After World War II, the armaments industry was permanent. After WWII the northeastern liberal establishment (as they liked to call them selves), the old waspy wasps that ran everything, created an empire so big, that had so many vested interests attached to it, that they couldn't control it any more. And now it's just a big free-for-all in washington DC, basically.
And as you can see with just minor kind of crises, or, uh pardon me, minor scandals - things that used to, would have been a big deal. Nowadays everybody just shrugs. You know like, i dunno, John Murtha, the now-dead congressman from Pennsylvania. The guy's nothing but a military-industrial complex whorebag. That's all he did was just outright go to DC and say "I'm here to reach my hand in the moneypot and give it to the people of pennsylvania who otherwise wouldn't be employed making things out of steel, and I'll have them make _weapons_ out of steel, so that they can have _steel_ _jobs_!"
And everybody just shrugs, because that's what we are now. That's... It's not even considered corruption, because the armament industry is permanent. It's hilarious isn't it sometimes? You hear neocons make fun of people who use the term "Military Industrial Complex" like that's some insane conspiracy theory. Well you tell me, Dwight Eisenhower, the republican president and former Supreme Allied Commander, on his last day in office in January 1961, said "Hey, look out, because the people who make the bombs like to try to make the policy, and they have a lot of influence over the congress, and they'll keep you at war if you let em. They'll destroy our republic if you let them."
Well he was the one who let them. He had just presided over eight years of cold war. Although he had tried, he had at least wanted to end the cold war, Dwight Eisenhower did. But now we're supposed to believe, that 50 years later what, the military industrial complex went _away_ at some point? [laughs] I dunno, you shouldn't believe what Neocons say about anything. They're always wrong.
But the point is that this isn't the USA anymore. This is The Homeland now. This is just an Empire now, and it's been this way. It wasn't the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the unipolar world, and the wars of Iraq, since 1991. It was since 1941, or at the very least, at the very very least, since 1946-47-48. And Harry Truman. And the United Nations. And the creation of NATO. And, so just because you were born long after that doesn't mean that it's not already too late, you know like if this was Star Wars, then we're somewhere in the middle of the Empire Strikes Back era. The Republic fell a long time ago. The Rule of Law was a sham a long time ago. Hell Harry Truman _enshrined_ the destruction of the Rule of Law in the National Security Act of 1947, I urge you to go read it, it's not that long. It says that the CIA from time to time shall "do things" that the President shall determine that they shall do. Hohoh really, huh? And that means they get to do anything they want, kill anyone they want, break any law they want. And that's not just the CIA, that's the entire National Security State.
And you know as somebody was commenting on the show last week, or maybe earlier this week, "The only reason they let us dissent is because nobody cares. The only reason we still have free speech like this, is because 'what does it hurt'?" OH, it was Sheldon Richmond, he said "Yeah, if anything, you're a pressure-valve, Horton." "We tune-in, we listen to the show, we rage for a little while, and then we go back to our life." "Revolution averted, thanks a lot, Horton.". But you know other than that, most people don't even care at all. They're already over it. And besides, the flag is still the same flag. Although you might wonder how it got _so_ many stars. [laughs] You know, might have been some aggressive warfare going on there, ask the people of Hawaii.
Anyway so, yeah. Maybe you're young, maybe you just got out of government school, and you just don't know that america is an evil empire - america is _the_ evil empire, and - like the israelis - based on this myth that rather than living in the most powerful nation-state in the history of the universe, rather than having the most powerful military ever ever ever - rather than living in a world where the other major powers (that is all of europe, russia, china) are our friends - where, you know I guess the south americans are declaring independence more and more, there's no combination of states in the southern hemisphere that could possibly theaten us, other than hijacking our planes and crashing them into our buildings. We're the ones who are ruining earth. We're the ones waging all the wars on earth right now. Even the thing in Sri-Lanka is over now. Peace breaking out all over africa, in the congo. Except where we spread it.