04/26/13 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
Live here on No Agenda Radio from 11 to 1 Texas time every weekday, last Thursday.
Though we're working on that.
And, of course, you can find the full interview archives at scotthorton.org, and you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashscotthortonshow.
All right, so we're way late, but our next guest, our final guest on the show today, is our good friend Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for inviting me back.
I hope you're doing all right.
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And I always appreciate your writings.
At the very least, you write one every Friday at fff.org.
TGIF, the goal is freedom.
Liberty, security, and terrorism is the latest.
And I guess you're trying to give us some sage advice about how not to knee-jerk and mess ourselves up here.
Well, yeah, there's actually two parts to the article.
The first one is about just trying to caution people that giving up our freedom and what's left of it to the government is no path to security.
It's a false promise.
We wouldn't be safer.
In fact, we'd be in more danger because the government would have all this extra power.
Yeah, but you know what?
What if there weren't all those cameras around to take pictures of the bombers?
It's a good thing we have a surveillance state.
We need even more.
I saw Field Marshal Blomberg, the mayor of New York City, said we just need more power, obviously, because we almost didn't have enough in this case.
Well, isn't the funny thing, though, that these were private cameras that were mainly relied on?
Yeah.
The cameras, the Lord and Taylor cameras, they weren't government.
I don't think the government should have cameras everywhere.
Let's talk about how you have no expectation of privacy when you walk down the street.
Well, I'm sorry, I have an expectation that the government is not recording my every movement when I walk on the street.
I don't care what the Supreme Court says.
That's my expectation.
If I go into a private store, I probably have an expectation that they have cameras around the Gordigan shoplifting and whatnot, although I think they should put a sticker in the window, and a lot of them do anyway.
We have surveillance cameras on site, but I don't think the government should be doing that.
Well, look, the local gas station doesn't have the power to imprison you and hack your bank account and ruin your life and do whatever they want.
They're simply cameras in self-defense and have no other purpose, unless the executive order of 2017 that mandates that all cameras centralize their feeds straight into the NSA stream or something like that, but we're not there yet.
No, as I say in the article, it's not a coincidence that every dystopian novel and movie like 1984 and you name it, Brazil, include in their ugly picture of those societies 24-hour surveillance.
We identify that with something bad, something horrible, so why are we slipping into this?
We need to think very carefully about this.
Actually, before you go further, let's stay on the cameras for just a second here, because it's been 10 or 15 years since we all got cameras in every American city, right?
It's been quite a while that the American people have already decided that, hey, really, they tend to just seem to use them for traffic control and maybe to give you a red light ticket, but we haven't seen in the 15 years of a martial law crackdown that used the cameras.
Apparently, they were put there for the stated purpose, which is just to help you find the quickest route home from work, that kind of thing.
The American people have internalized that, really, what's the big deal?
I should point out, too, and I've said this before, but they never held a vote on it anywhere.
They never even asked any population of any town.
They just did it in every jurisdiction in America, 18,000 counties or something like that, went and just put the cameras up, which is something, but they got away with it clean, I think.
Well, there's many precedents for the government to begin something very small-scale and gradual, get people used to it and then have it grow over the years.
The income tax is a great example.
Go back and look at what the income tax was like when it was first passed, the current one, in 1913.
Only the very richest were going to pay.
Even they were going to pay only a little bit, and we were assured that it would never be any big deal.
Same thing with Social Security.
The tax was very low, and the people were told, don't worry about this, and then over the years, it grows because people get used to it.
Same thing, get the cameras there, mainly for traffic purposes, catch speeders and people running red lights.
But then they're there, and you can put more up when something like this happens.
One thing, I don't want to sound alarmist, I don't really see a lot of talk about this now, or gaining much traction, so I'm hoping any hysteria over Boston has now passed, and we're not going to see some big rush to turn us into a total surveillance state.
We're already a partial surveillance state, but as I said on Facebook, if we turn into a full surveillance state, the terrorists win.
I mean that seriously.
Well, of course, that's the whole thing.
Like Will Gregg was trying to teach us back in 2001, the action is in the reaction.
So the terrorists, if they can't either chase us away by attacking us, they can try to use judo and slam us into the wall, bleed us to death with 10,000 cuts, that kind of thing.
But another part of it, as Will Gregg explained in 2001 in the New American Magazine, is to get our government to clamp down on all of us in their desperation to prevent this kind of thing from continuing to happen on their watch, and then to turn us, therefore, obviously, all against them.
But maybe one day we'll all wake up and say, hey, government, if the choice is leaving the Middle East or continuing to enforce this Orwellian police state on us, we'd rather just call off the wars.
And that's what they're trying to get us to do, and I guess it just so happens that we've got no right to wage these wars or back these kingdoms in the first place, and so it's the right thing to do anyway.
It's the wrong thing that's provoked the terrorism.
But so this is part of it in the first place, is to get us to resent all the new security measures and the changing of our society into this new, worse thing than it used to be.
Well, I think that reaction point, Will Gregg, is very good, and it's worth making over and over again.
It's certainly true.
I mean, if they quote, they hate us for our freedom, which I don't believe, but if they hate us for our freedom, the government has a very efficient way to make sure they have no cause to hate us anymore.
Exactly the wrong policy.
It's a point that's been made over and over again, but it's more than just a laugh line.
Yeah, if they take away our freedom, then I guess they'll have no reason to hate us.
Right.
I don't know how that logic went out, but I guess it did.
It seems to me, just stop killing people.
Well, yeah, and of course the real problem is that that's not why anybody hates us.
You know, as I said in an earlier article earlier this week, there was all this interest in the motive for the Boston Marathon bombings, but I sort of predicted that the interest and the motive would evaporate, especially official interest, if it really does turn out that it was resentment against the wars and the general trashing of the Muslim world by U.S. foreign policy, not just the wars, but everything else, including the continued oppression of Palestine.
Then suddenly I think we won't be talking about the motive.
That will disappear.
Yep.
Well, and it's already pretty much happened as far as TV goes.
And the thing of it is that I think the war party would, you know, David Frum or some guy like that would have an argument that, hey, listen, we had to do these wars, and if we have to suffer some blowback, I mean, guys died in the Battle of the Bulge, right?
But that didn't mean that we're going to stop marching toward Berlin.
You know, these things happen.
There are casualties in a war, but they started it, and so we have to finish it, and what we've been doing is toward that end.
It seems like probably if they made that argument on TV, they'd get away with looking like they were making sense or whatever, but they don't even want to have that argument at all, because apparently they're scared that it just rings too hollow at this point, that the American people know that actually, nah, we started it.
It was Bill Clinton murdered all those people from bases in Saudi Arabia is what brought this on.
Yeah, that's an interesting point.
I mean, I don't know why they don't forthrightly say, you know, okay, this is the price we have to pay, although we can, you know, crack down at home to make sure we minimize the price, but this is the price we pay for our just foreign policy of fighting wars and supporting Israel, you know, no matter what, and go down the list.
Let them be forthright and lay it all out.
Nah, they'd rather just ignore it.
They're obviously afraid to do that.
They don't want a reconsideration, because that could possibly set off a reconsideration of foreign policy, and they just don't want that.
I mean, it's just taken as a given that the U.S. is the world policeman.
Look what's happening in Syria now with the, you know, alleged reports of use of sarin gas, which we don't know, maybe true, maybe not.
We don't know.
But it's just a given that if they find out that the sarin gas was used, then we're in one way or another, may not be putting troops in, but no-fly zone and drones maybe and so-called lethal aid to the right people, of course.
They know exactly who the right people are.
And it's just taken as a given, and I don't hear Americans saying, oh, hold on a second, why do we get into it if they use sarin gas?
I mean, first of all, you can kill, you know, bombs are weapons of mass destruction, too.
Somebody pointed out today, you know, why pick on chemical weapons?
I mean, obviously they're terrible, but they're not the only terrible weapon.
The U.S. has a whole bunch of terrible weapons it uses.
Well, you know, there was even a case, and a judge finally said no to this.
There was one case where a guy was charged with shooting four or five people with a handgun, and the prosecutor, and it wasn't even political, and he wasn't even a Muslim, and it was just, you know, regular run-of-the-mill American crime kind of a thing.
And the prosecutor tried to charge him with using weapons of mass destruction in that case, under that statute, and the judge said, come on, there's got to be a line somewhere as to what counts as a weapon of mass destruction.
I mean, presumably you could use a handgun and a lot of magazines to kill a lot of people if you were in a real big gun-free zone somewhere or something.
But WMD is supposed to mean nuclear bomb.
That's what it means.
You could kill a city all at once, 100,000 people or worse at once.
That's a weapon of mass destruction.
And really, we were talking about this earlier on the show, about how when they conflate pretended Ebola weapons or canisters of mustard gas with atom bombs, they're lying in the first place.
They want to conflate a pipe bomb or a handgun with that.
We're now way off into ridiculous land here.
Well, this came up during, maybe you remember this, this came up during the buildup to the Iraq war, when WMD became such a popular phrase for the American people because we heard it every day, 100 times a day.
And I saw, I forget who wrote the article, but it said, wait a second, they've broadened the definition of WMD.
WMD meant nuclear weapons, where you could, like you said, wipe out a city.
And so it's interesting to see that point revisited.
It's just like the Democrats with assault weapon, right?
They take assault rifle, oh, that means fully automatic rifle, pretty simple.
And then they go assault weapon, oh, that means a gun that looks scary to a Democrat.
Right, right.
Just like Orwell with the cameras, Orwell with the language, too.
That was my favorite part of 1984, was the dictionary.
Everybody should read that book or reread that book once a year and pay close attention to the language aspect because that's just so important.
I mean, the word terrorist, I mean, I talked about this in the piece that you referred to.
The word terrorist is used that way, too.
For one thing, it's sort of by definition can't be applied to anything the U.S. or its allies do.
So even if the U.S. uses or Israel uses violence against noncombatants for political purposes, which they do every day, for God's sakes, that can't be terrorism.
So terrorism has to always apply to an enemy of the United States or an enemy of one of its allies.
And then I also made other distinctions.
Terrorism does have to have a political aspect.
I would argue that we don't yet know that the bombings were terrorists in the sense of having a political objective.
Maybe we'll find that out.
There's indications because we have statements coming out of the hospital room.
But the guy was sedated, and we don't know who's doing the leaking and what purpose the person might have.
I mean, I think we still need to wait.
I mean, I'm feeling sort of confident that it had a political purpose, and it was a reaction to U.S. violence against Muslims.
But that doesn't mean I know that.
So I would still wait.
I mean, we don't talk about the Boston Strangler as a terrorist.
He wasn't a terrorist because he didn't have a political goal.
And the same thing with the guy that climbed up in the University of Texas tower back in whatever it was, the 60s, and started shooting people, Charles Whitman.
He wasn't a terrorist, but he terrorized people, but that's not enough to be a terrorist.
Right.
Yeah, the Unabomber, on the other hand, there's your cookie-cutter example perfectly, right there, attacking civilians in order to influence culture, et cetera.
It doesn't seem to be part of the definition that you're hitting noncombatants.
I mean, it seems to be at least implied in the official definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, and that would rule out, as I pointed out in the article, the Fort Hood shootings.
That was a military installation.
That's not terrorism.
If you attack the military, that should not count as terrorism.
It seemed like it because it was such a massacre because it was a gun-free zone there at Fort Hood.
Clinton had forbade them to carry their firearms, their sidearms, in a military installation.
So, yeah, there's another gun lesson there, of course.
How far would that guy have gotten if everybody had a sidearm?
Maybe he would have killed one person.
You know, Bill Clinton, speaking of Clinton, here's the quote from an interview he did with foreignpolicy.com a couple of years back.
I think we've talked about this before.
Terror means killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority.
And, of course, he means our state, right?
Because the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is just some kind of special forces in Iran, oh, no, that counts.
Those are terrorists because they're Iranians.
It doesn't matter if they work directly for the Ayatollah or not, you know?
Yeah, I think that's pretty funny because it looks so obviously rigged if you say it that way.
But the first guy I read taking apart this concept of terrorism was Noam Chomsky, and that goes back, I think, to the 80s or early 90s.
He was pointing out how it's a rigged definition.
It's what Iran would call an anti-concept because it's really politically motivated, right?
It does exempt the U.S., Israel, and America's other allies in their official actions, no matter how terrorizing their conduct and no matter how large a population they terrorize.
It's for a political purpose, but that can't get counted as terrorism.
Terrorism is only, you know, back then it was Palestinians who were trying to get attention and retaliate for the harm they've suffered, which isn't to justify it when you're hitting noncombatants, but it does help to try to understand things.
Well, yeah, and, you know, the thing is about it is it's a shame because the term very well applies to some private stateless terrorist groups who murder civilians, and al-Qaeda is just one of them.
But you're right that it's still so loaded because, by definition, in its definition, it excludes not just state terrorism, but especially the very worst terrorism in the world, the terrorism of the U.S. government, which quantifiably causes more grief and pain and death than any other force on the planet.
Combined, probably.
Here's an experiment.
Next time you're at a cocktail party or something and you hear some discussion, say the Boston bombings or something, just say, hey, you know who else commits terrorism?
The U.S. government, and see what kind of reaction you get.
There's a good test.
Yeah, and if you need examples, just stay tuned to this show because we'll be continuing to cover Iran sanctions and Pakistan drone strikes and outraged widows and farmers in Yemen and people in torture dungeons beneath Mogadishu in Somalia and on and on from here on out.
We'll never run out of examples.
In fact, one of my favorite to this day, favorite in a dark, evil kind of way, is the one that my wife, Larissa Alexandrovna, she busted them that the torture dungeon in Poland had been a Nazi base.
And then it was a Soviet base.
And then it was an American CIA torture prison.
How do you like that?
Oh, it seems to make sense.
I mean, man, that really bothers me in a way.
You know what it does?
It challenges the kind of my very, very like early age public school brainwashing about there is something to believe in about this country, damn it.
And I just that starts getting threatened when it comes to stories like that, that there's anything worth salvaging here, damn.
Or it just shows you the degree to which these political leaders have disgraced the United States, anything noble about the United States.
They have so stained it.
And I was, you know, I was just sickened this week watching the festivities and ceremonies at the George Bush library.
In fact, I can't even say that term without getting a bit nauseated.
But everybody was up there, all the ex-presidents and the current president lauding this guy.
You know, because when push comes to shove, the ruling class sticks together.
Got that right.
And power above party any day.
That's Sheldon Richman, everybody.
He's vice president of Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
And check out his blog at SheldonRichman.com, too.
Thanks very much, Sheldon.
Great, Scott.
Thank you.
Anytime.
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Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
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