10/07/13 – Michael Swanson – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here to talk to you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
In the book, Swanson explains what the revolution was, the rise of empire, and the permanent military economy, and all from a free market libertarian perspective.
Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation, says the book is absolutely awesome, and that Swanson's perspectives on the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis are among the best I've read.
The poll numbers state that people agree on one thing, it's that America is on the wrong track.
In The War State, Swanson gets to the bottom of what's ailing our society, empire, the permanent national security bureaucracy that runs it, and the mountain of debt that has enabled our descent down this dark road.
The War State could well be the book that finally brings this reality to the level of mainstream consensus.
America can be saved from its government and its arms dealers.
First, get the facts.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson, available at your local bookseller and at Amazon.com.
Or just click on the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is the Scott Horton Show.
My website is ScottHorton.org, I keep all my archives there, full show and interview archives.
More than 3,000 interviews now, going back to 2003 there at ScottHorton.org, and also you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash Scott Horton Show.
Alright, introducing our good friend Michael Swanson.
You hear his spots on the show every day for Wall Street Window, and also now for his new book as you just heard in that last break, his new book, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945 through 1963.
Welcome to the show Michael, how are you doing?
Oh, I'm doing great, thanks for having me.
Well, thanks for joining us, I really appreciate it, and of course I appreciate your support all this time, and I really appreciate this book, I've been looking forward to it for a long time, and now I'm really looking forward to the sequel and sequels.
But I guess first of all, I want to say about this book that I really got the idea, it's just an imaginary sort of a thing, but it occurs to me that if we could flood the society with millions of copies of this thing, then everyone would pretty much understand, and it would go from sort of a, I don't know if revisionist is the right term, might as well be from a kind of minority view, a critical view of a minority of the population, of the way things work in America, to the supermajority consensus, that yeah, of course everybody knows that, the form of our corrupt economy, it's the military economy.
And it seems to me like this is the book, this is the thing that could be, you know, push us over the tipping point, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
So great work, I really do appreciate it, and I really do have very high hopes for the success of this thing, not just for your commercial success and all that, but for the future of our society.
I really think that people, that this could really help get it through their heads finally.
This is not just what some libertarian thinks, or some leftist, or some rightist thinks, this is what everybody knows.
Yeah, well I really appreciate that, and the thing is, it's kind of funny you say that, because one of the things I had in mind when I wrote the book were the books Creature Jekyll Island, and then I was listening to you before, you mentioned that Nun Dare Caught Conspiracy book, and both of those, I'm not trying to endorse everything those books say at all, but the first book is much better than the other one, but what they do is really shed a light on the Federal Reserve, and you know, the Creature Jekyll Island book, it still probably is the best book for trying to understand that, and it brought that to masses of people, you know.
So that was kind of my hope, was to be able to do something similar, but looking at the angled military-industrial complex, in my mind, the Fed, and Wall Street, and this military-industrial complex, power elite, whatever you want to call it, are the two main forces really that are ruling our society, I guess you could say, I don't mean that in a conspiratorial manner, but they're just the most powerful groups there are.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned Jekyll Island too, that was my favorite book for a long long time, I probably recommended it more than everybody else has ever recommended it combined, thinking about all those years I spent driving a cab and all that, and it's another one where, while I was reading it, I kept thinking, man, if only everybody read this, and I think that's why it's got such great word of mouth, is because it really does shine such a light on the form of the corruption of the society, and the central bank of course, the greatest scam that anyone ever came up with, ever, and it's all right in front of our face, and they just print George Washington on the bill, and we all believe it, and it's just, it's incredible, but you know, another thing that I will credit Ed Griffin for doing with that book, is turning vast segments of the American right, that is, the ones without power, you know, the populist right wing in America, against war, because he explains, and these are people who would never take a give peace a chance kind of point of view, but he just explains the corruption of war, and all the ulterior motives, and how the power elite use war to enrich themselves at the cost of your boys, and etc. like that, and how war is the health of the state, and the central government too.
I think that, you know, that book probably deserves a lot more credit than it gets for its anti-war influence among libertarians, and especially among populist right wingers, you know, and it's the kind of thing where, again, it goes from, you know, a lot of people never even read Jekyll Island, but they don't even know the whole title, maybe, The Creature from Jekyll Island.
They just know Jekyll Island means, it's that book that proved that the wars in the bank are all evil, you know?
It's just kind of a byword for it.
It's reaching that consensus.
I think that the war state is going to be the same thing like that.
I hope so.
Well, I certainly do too.
One thing, if you look at the Jekyll Island book, and the None Dare Call It Conspiracy books or other books similar to it, because there's a couple, that one thing that's different about the Jekyll Island book, which I think makes my book different too, is I think we're doing something a little similar.
But if you take the None Dare Call It Conspiracy book, he, like, points his finger at the Rockefellers, and I remember that in particular, you know, he makes out there's this communist conspiracy and the Rockefellers are in charge of it.
And what people tend to do, whereas Jekyll Island didn't do that, what he did was he showed you it's the system of the Fed over-influencing everything, and it's more not just bad people, but it's a bad system, and that's what I'm trying to really do that I think is different in history books that touch on, you know, these sort of events.
Sure, well, I mean, you know, in the reference to None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which he's talking about what I was saying earlier in the show, the reference there is that they just printed a zillion of them and just polluted the damn country with them.
Not that anybody ever even read it, but just, they're everywhere, and that's what I really want to see, is just crates full of the worst state where you just can't travel without tripping over the damn things, you know?
Oh, it's amazing.
And we take it for granted or don't even realize the existence of it, you know, because we live in it and see it every day, we don't, you know, think of anything different, and that is what they put in the book, is how before World War II, the military always demobilized after wars.
After World War II, we never demobilized.
Right.
All right, now, before we get into all that, I wanted to ask you about, Mike, before we get into all that, I want to ask you about who you are and why you decided to do this in the first place, anyway, because this is going to be a whole series of interviews.
Okay, yeah, sure.
Until we're done with the whole book here.
It actually, anyway, I'm 38 years old, and that's real important, because I've been thinking about this since I put the book out, and I'm really, we're, I think we're about the same age.
That's right, right?
I think you're 37, aren't you?
Yeah, I'm 37.
Okay.
Yeah, just about the same age.
Okay, yeah, just about the same age, but I'm really a child of the Cold War and this military industrial complex, and I grew up, my father was in the Pentagon, and he had a, he was a chief of preventive medicine, he was a colonel at the end of his career, and so he was fairly high up.
And his job was to figure out ways to defend against chemical warfare, so he was a part of a forger, military maneuvers in Europe, they did this every single year to try to practice defending against the Russians if they were to attack, and so forth, and so I grew up as a child with the Cold War being real, and today, even though we still have this military industrial complex that's maybe more powerful than ever, it's different, because I don't know anyone who's really afraid of terrorists right now, whereas when I was a kid I was scared of nuclear war.
It was real to me.
Well, yeah, and of course, when we were kids, Reagan was, at least especially in his first term, he was kind of canceling detente, which was right before we were born, I guess, and moving back toward brinksmanship and a bunch of tough guy talk, you know?
So it was, I remember being quite afraid in, say, third, fourth grade when I was a little kid that, man, this Reagan guy's pretty reckless, huh, he could get us into nuclear war with these kooks.
Yeah, that's exactly right, and one of my memories is being eight or nine years old in 1983 that a Korean airliner got shot down by the Russians, and I remember my dad seeing that on the news in the kitchen and getting on the phone and calling somebody and saying he's got to go to work or if there's something going on, but he was scared, you know, when he saw the news, he was scared, and, you know, as a kid, that scared me, and he wasn't scared that the Russians were starting a war, he was scared this could lead to an accident probably or, you know, something, you know, he wasn't scared the Russians were going to sneak attack, but there would be an accident or something like he said.
Yeah, or it could just escalate with people making bad decisions.
Yeah, exactly, but one of the things that happened is my dad got towards the end of his career, he came to the conclusion that, and it's obvious now, but that the Soviet Union was, had no real capability to invade Western Europe and was basically a paper tiger of us, and he had attest to intelligence data that was, you know, showing him this in some parts of the military, but at the time, there was a book that came out by, I think it's Andrew Cockburn, is he one of your guests?
Yeah, yeah, Andrew Coburn, one of the three Coburn brothers.
Yeah, Coburn, that's it, yeah, he came out with a book in 88 or 89 called Soviet Power, I think, and it was basically an expose showing you how their military barely functioned, they were falling apart, when they were going to war in Afghanistan, they had supply problems, their soldiers were actually fighting each other because they had like ethnic Russians in charge, and then other groups, you know, didn't like that, so it was kind of like in the Vietnam War, you hear stories about, towards the end, some of the American soldiers throwing grenades that lieutenants didn't like and stuff like that, something like that, but the bottom line was, their military did not have the capabilities that were presented to the American people as it had in the early 80s and so forth.
There's a book that the Defense Department put out every single year in the 1980s, it's called Soviet Power, I think, I'll send a link of it to you, you can look it up on Wikipedia, but what it was sent to was all the members of Congress, and anyone could order it, and it had exaggerated information about what the Soviet Union had militarily, and their weapon systems and so forth, so some of it was basically essentially made up, like, for example, they had paintings and drawings of weapon systems that probably didn't even exist, stuff like nuclear missile platforms in outer space, just crazy stuff, but the whole idea was, this was presented to Congressmen to justify creating other weapons, you know, for us to finance building other weapons to counter their weapons.
Now, are you talking about the neoconservatives and the Team B project, or just the CIA in general, and their overestimates?
Well, it really grew out of that Team B thing, but this was done by the Defense Department, this is a little different, but I'm pretty sure it grew out of the same people.
But, I mean, these are the kinds of arguments where, you know, we spent all spring long looking for Soviet subs, and we couldn't find any, which just proves that they've got really silent propulsion systems, and more than we ever imagined.
Oh yeah, and one of the craziest stories along that line is, the Soviets developed an airplane called the MiG-25 around 1970, and once they constructed it, the intelligence community was saying that this was like a super airplane, it'd be able to defeat any American airplane, and, you know, it was just going to be the greatest thing in the world, and they built the F-15 to counter it.
In 1975 or 76, a Russian pilot defected with this thing, landed in Japan, the Americans went over there, took it apart, and found out that this thing doesn't even have modern computers in it, they're using vacuum tubes from the 1950s.
Which is like, you know, totally crazy, but the spin was, well, this is how sneaky the Russians are, because if you have a nuclear war, it'll destroy circuits and microchips and whatnot from the electromagnetic pulse, so this is how clever they are, they're going to still function afterwards, and that's what they do, they always spin everything to justify exaggerating the dangers.
So at the end of the Cold War, your dad's attitude about this, when you said that he came to the conclusion that the Soviet military had been sort of a paper tiger, did he come to the conclusion that it always had been, and was it his conclusion, or what did he think about what other American policymakers thought?
I mean, it seems like to listen to Chalmers Johnson, he seems to think, I guess, that everybody else that used to agree with him was just as deluded as he was about Soviet power, but then again, maybe some of these liars knew they were lying, I don't know.
Well, I don't know what he thought about the past history, and he's passed away like 15 years ago, so I can't ask him, but the impression I got looking back on it was that it was towards the end of his career, and he was in the medical corps, which is really important, because he's not interested in being a general fighting wars or doing whatnot, so he was around people skeptical of engaging in wars to start with, and also he's in the army, which is separate from the Air Force, and the way he interpreted it and people he knew was that the Air Force was super aggressive, and they were linked in with the new conservative movement, and they were the ones exaggerating everything, and blowing everything out of proportion to justify nuclear missiles, more defense spending, and so forth.
Talking with Michael Swanson, author of The War State, Part One, The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945 through 1963, and it's good, because it's real scholarly, and it's got everything you need, and yet it's also very readable.
It's not like taking a class at college or something.
You'll want to sit down and read this thing.
It's good.
You'll like it.
All right, so now let's see.
I guess we were talking about the origins of your critical look, I guess, at the American war economy.
You grew up in the Cold War.
Your father was a military guy.
You had exposure to some unique circumstances, like, for example, what you said, your father's concern over the shoot-down of KAL 007 there, that kind of thing, that gave you a unique perspective on the situation, and then at the end of the Cold War, I guess, maybe we can pick it up there, you know, and how it was, or just actually, and tell us more about yourself, and how it is that you came to write this thing, too, you know?
Yeah, okay.
Well, what happened at the end of the Cold War, my dad, he retired, and he got a job as a health director in a rural county, and anyway, once he retired, he asked more and more questions about, you know, for a year or two about his service, or whatever, and he started reading books about different things, you know, history books, and different things the military had done, or people he knew, you know, back, and that carried over to myself.
So, around this time, or it might have been, actually, a couple years before, one of the things I started studying, though, was Irene Contraffair, and all this, you know, conspiracy stuff, like reading the books, too, that one book we just mentioned earlier, and, you know, reading about Central America, and that JFK movie came out, just all kinds of different things.
You really are just like me.
Very parallel introduction to politics there.
Yeah, I read the same exact book, and I guess the difference would be, you know, you drove a taxi, went into radio, and I went to college, and...
Made some money, yeah.
And also, you're a good rider.
Well, it's because I ride every day.
It's practice, ride every day, and get better at it, but the thing is that I went to college with the intention of maybe getting, or I went to graduate school in history.
I was going to get a history degree, maybe teach, and when my dad passed away, I dropped out and wasn't sure what I exactly wanted to do, so I had some experience in academia, and, you know, reading, reading, reading all these books, and then I decided, well, I want to really write something about all this stuff, but I don't want to write an academic dry book that just focuses on one event, you know, like the Vietnam War or something, or Iran-Contra or whatever, because you can have a tendency to think, if you read all this conspiracy type stuff, to think, well, if I can find the answers to the Iran-Contra affair, let's say the JFK assassination or whatever, then you're going to discover something, and that's like the key to everything.
I don't think that's true at all, and there may not be conspiracies behind every single thing either, but regardless, I was just trying to think of some way to really understand all this, and at one point, I just kind of said, well, I'm going to just stop reading this stuff for a while, and let's start reading History of Ancient Rome, thinking, well, that's an empire, and study empires, and eventually, though, I finally came to the idea, well, all I need is a simple metaphor to explain everything, and that's where I came up with the concept of, oh, it's a war state, that's all, that's it, you know, and I think that's a good metaphor that kind of ties everything together.
Yeah, well, again, you know, that parallels my politics there, too.
I remember specifically a conversation I had with Rick McGinnis from thebumpersticker.com way back when about, well, how come all libertarians aren't conspiracy theorists?
I mean, how the hell do you think the socialists were so successful in nationalizing the American economy over the last hundred years if the conservatives weren't in on it with them to make it that way?
Come on, you know, and he says, okay, good point, but how come all conspiracy theorists aren't libertarians?
I mean, who cares if there's some cult in a basement doing some weird conspiracy eyes and whatever the hell they're doing as long as they don't have a pentagon to control, as long as they don't have a CIA to beat the rest of the world over the head with, right?
It's the state is the male fist of whatever conspiracy you're pointing at, so who cares who when the real question is what, and the answer is the state.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Fix my brain good, too.
Yeah, well, the thing is, what anyone who wants to read about this stuff, or I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican or believe, I don't care what you believe, if you really want to study this stuff with the idea that the narrative we grew up with isn't true, that the United States is a unique country in world history and just brings freedom and we're working for a God or something, if you just say, I don't believe that and want to find out the real history, you're going against what is the dominant narrative on TV or what you're going to read in textbook history or something, which when it comes to these different wars since World War II, it's either, well, we were simply defending ourselves or stopping threats, or we had good intentions to bring freedom to other people, and so you take, like, Vietnam, they'll say, well, the people either believe in the dominant theory, so we're trying to prevent that, or else we were just trying to keep democracy over there, and yeah, it was bad, but we had good intentions.
Well, if you're just skeptical of that, then you're going to go down a road, and it goes one or two directions, and the direction most people take, I would point as an example, and I haven't seen all of it, so I read the book, The Untold History Series.
Have you read that book?
No, you're talking about the Oliver Stone thing?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I haven't really looked at it.
I should.
I've only seen a couple episodes of it, so I'm not trying to bash it, but they came out with a book also, and I did read the whole book, and the book, everything in the book, I'm pretty sure it is.
It's true.
There's stuff in there I don't think is not true.
It's all based on academic sources.
You know, the JFK movie had things in there that were, you know, speculative, some stuff true, some speculative, and I've seen interviews where he says that.
I mean, this book is based on solid historical academic accepted research, but using it, and I did the same sort of thing.
I'm using many of the same sources he's using, or Tim and his co-author, but my story is a little bit different, and what he's doing is pointing a finger at a lot of the individual people, and you can get the impression, for example, if Truman wasn't there, and someone else was there, the Cold War may not have happened, and so you can look at all this history and say, well, Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles were the two big villains, General Curtis Lomé, and all these people are very fascinating, and I write about them too, but I think the idea that if it wasn't just about these individual people, that what you're really looking at is a bureaucratic system that really began during World War II, and I believe by the time Eisenhower gave his speech, was pretty much in control, and who the individual President was mattered less and less as time went on.
Today is amazing, because we got Barack, President Obama, and it's a lot of speculation if you look at current events, but by press stories, it sounds like he barely talks to anyone in Congress or the Senate, like he's just almost floating around, so that's a big contrast from the 50s and the 60s, so that's just how things have changed since then.
Well, and I think he's saying in the book that a President, if he really was determined to, really could rally a coalition of different people in the country to support him in making serious changes in foreign policy, but he would have to be one badass President, so it's easy to imagine, for me anyway, if Ron Paul had been elected, that he would have just told the Navy, get your boats away from Iran, and if you don't like it, you're fired, and that's it, and I don't care, shoot at me, what?
That would have just been his thing, no problem, and he would have told the American people, oh no, we're backing off Iran, and sorry if you don't like that, I'm sure the American people would have been fine with it, but that kind of, I'll never back down, so don't even try to bribe me kind of attitude, that could get it done, and you mentioned Richard Nixon and Franklin Roosevelt both, that well, and Roosevelt came, really he's the creator of this thing, but Richard Nixon, he was a strong enough personality that he was able to put his hands on it and make it do some things, this bureaucracy, this permanent war state, like, you know, he really secretly conspired with Kissinger to go and open up relations with China against the wishes of the establishment, the rest of the establishment at the time, right, or at least the right-wing half of it.
Oh, for sure, I mean, he essentially was at war with his own government in a certain sense, it's the executive branch that's mushroomed, and when we're talking about the war state bureaucracy, it's all in the executive branch, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, but for him to do, go to China, you know, he created, that's why he created the plumbers, was to stop leaks of what he wanted to do in Vietnam, and you know, I mean, he engaged in illegal activities to try to operate as the president of the United States, and I don't really, since Nixon, um, I don't know if any of them have really had a hold of things the whole time they were president.
I do think Ronald Reagan made some changes, and the proof of that is he was even attacked by the New York Conservatives in the last year or two of his presidency, but I don't really think any of the others have really done anything about any of this, they just kind of go along with it, and you know, I don't really understand what's going on in Syria the past couple weeks, but you know, Tom, it takes time to get records out, and I mean, you know, maybe 20, 30 years before we really understand what's happening there, but at least up until then, it didn't seem like Obama's made a single decision on his own.
Yeah.
When it comes to foreign policy, not that I could think of.
Well, you know, I think Gareth wrote that, and this makes a lot of sense to me, and in fact, I think he said on the show too, uh, the journalist Gareth Porter, that, you know, the military, they need time to rest and recharge and rebuild and whatever, and they don't want another land war in the Middle East right now.
They, they did their Iraq, and they got that off their chest, and now they would rather, and in fact, you know, of course, a lot of generals resigned over Iraq.
It was not widely covered at the time, really.
It was more of a silent kind of early retirement golden parachute sort of a thing, but a lot of them got out because they didn't even want it, but for right now, anyway, it's almost like post-Vietnam times for them.
They just want to chill and, and, you know, pick their targets a little slow or something like that.
I think that's a big part of why the thing in Syria didn't happen, and we're left here ironically, you know, praising the standing army for cooling the ambitions of the pinstripe suits, you know?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, in the book, an example of this sort of thing is all at the, at the beginning of the real creation of military-industrial complex, which is in, right after World War II ended, there was a couple of years, they were in flux and wasn't really sure, you know, what we're going to have is permanent military-industrial complex.
How is the Cold War going to be waged and so forth?
And one of the main thinkers was a man named George Kennan.
He came up with this containment doctrine to just block the Soviets, told them in Russia, don't let them expand.
And he claims, you know, to live to the 1980s, he claims that we implemented that containment doctrine and actually completed it in 1949, 1950, that Russia was totally contained, and after then, we didn't have to do anything but use diplomacy and didn't need this giant military-industrial complex.
And then what happened was a couple of Truman's advisors, Dean Atkinson, who became Secretary of State, came up with the idea, well, we want this big military-industrial complex.
We don't want to just contain the Soviets.
We want to try to make them surrender by outspending them or just being super aggressive everywhere and controlling the world, essentially.
And what he did is he got a study group to put together a national security document, NSC-64.
It's one of the most famous documents of the Cold War.
68, you mean, right?
68, yeah, sorry, 68.
And it said that the Soviet Union in five years is going to have the ability to launch an invasion of Western Europe and a nuclear strike and wipe us out and defeat us because they're outspending us.
None of this was true at all, you know.
They didn't even have the ability to launch an atomic missile at the United States.
They didn't even have bombers that could reach the United States and fly back.
So they're almost all completely manufactured and made up.
And he was creating this group to make this argument because he wanted more defense spending.
And Truman, back then, presidents and politicians were really serious about not spending too much money, you know, having big deficits and so forth, and he didn't want to do it.
So Ashton had an assistant, Paul Nitz, and the two of them called different people in the Pentagon and got them to inflate their intelligence estimates.
Then they create this report, so they build up all the support for it, and then they essentially present it to the Secretary of Defense and Truman, and they sign it because if they didn't, then they would have the whole government erupt in the press and, you know, leaks and everything.
And then immediately, by coincidence, the Korean War started, which helped justify all this, too.
So the point is, here's the President of the United States basically, you know, being maneuvered into this position.
Yeah, that was new to me.
I didn't realize that with NSC-68 that they had done such an end run and basically, you know, forced Truman to do it.
I always considered him, you know, well, he's the Butcher of Asia.
When did he ever want to not do something, you know?
But anyway, so I'm sorry, I forgot what I was just about to ask you.
I had a great question, too.
But oh, I know what it was.
I was going to bring up about Stimson.
You talk about Stimson in the book, just like Ken and both of these to try to put their own genie back in the bottle.
Like, hey, I said, make a nuke.
Don't use it.
Oops.
And yeah, yeah.
And and then or I said, use it, but don't build up a giant arsenal and get into an arms race and any of that.
I didn't want you to go that far with Stimson.
And then, as you say, Ken and said, yeah, we got to contain the Soviet Union, you know, for a few months until they're good and contained.
And then after that, we can be a normal country in a normal time again.
Yeah, right.
And what's funny, too, is and you talk about this in the book is how blatant this all was to somebody who wasn't an insider.
And I remember even George Carlin.
There's a great interview on YouTube with George Carlin talking about the the years between World War Two and the real rise of the M.I.C. and the Cold War as the the golden age of his youth and whatever.
And then Truman, the lying, evil dictator who ruined everything and created the evil, corrupt Cold War and whatever that apparently this was no secret.
You didn't have to be a commie to see right through this.
Maybe you had to be the son of a Madison Avenue advertising executive.
Well, that's what I do try to put in the book.
You know, I have what we're talking about.
Looking at it in hindsight, it seems obvious to us what happened.
But there were people at the time pointing all this out of all political stripes.
There wasn't just like some radical saying that.
So I've got in there people like C. Wright Mill, that he was a radical, you know, on the left.
But then you got people on the right, you know, saying the same thing, too.
So you'll see later on, I have a whole thing, Robert Taft.
And he was really the leading libertarian, you could say, at the time, politically.
The guy ran for president and came close to winning.
So you had people on both sides of the spectrum seeing what was coming, how this would be a danger to the country if the trend continued.
So anyway, you had people on both sides of the spectrum.
And then interestingly, one key figure put in there is this George Burnham.
He was one of the co-founders of the National Review.
And you could say he was a prototype neoconservative.
And he was seeing all this happening.
He was claiming that, well, what's going to happen is the United States isn't really going to be a democracy anymore.
We're going to become this empire with a bureaucracy that's really in power and controlling everything.
And he said this during World War II.
But in his view, he wanted to be a part of it.
He thought this would be great.
Well, then, of course, William F. Buckley wrote that in The Common Wheel, right?
The founder of the intellectual part of the New Right, or supposedly from whatever, 56 on or something.
Buckley wrote that, hey, we will have to accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores because of the present emergency, the Soviet Union, even with Truman at the reins of it all.
Yeah, yeah, it's incredible.
But in his view, that was good.
That was fine.
And so what about that?
Are you downplaying the threat of the USSR?
Because after all, Stalin and H-bombs.
Well, yeah, pretty much.
That's the thing that really shocked me when I read this, or did the research, wrote this book.
And even though I had, you know, telling you the story about my father's experience in the 1980s, I was scared of nuclear war.
And, you know, they had plenty of missiles that could get us.
That's for sure.
They still got plenty of missiles.
But in the 50s, they didn't.
They didn't have a nuclear missile that could reach the United States in 1960.
And then they only had four of them.
What they had by the middle of the 1950s were old B-2 rockets that the Soviets had.
They had taken that technology and upgraded it.
And they had missiles based in East Germany that could reach England and all of Europe.
So they had the capability to attack Europe, but not really the capability to do anything to the United States.
And we know now, you know, their armed services, mission forces were inferior to ours also.
So we were never really in any danger of being attacked by the Russians or even nuked by the Russians.
Well, what about our Western European allies, though?
I mean, wouldn't Stalin have wanted to roll west and take all Europe?
Well, the problem with Stalin was that Russia was devastated by World War II, and they were still essentially rebuilding.
And they, in fact, had trouble holding on to the empire that they had created in Eastern Europe.
So I don't think he was ever in a position to do anything, you know, real aggressive or warlike.
It was certainly not a major war, and he knew the United States could bomb him out with our nuclear bombers and everything, so it'd be complete suicide if he tried to do it.
I think what happened, though, was particularly after he died, there's the time period in the early Kennedy administration where, you know, the famous clip of Khrushchev banging his shoe, I think that was right before Kennedy came in, but from like, 59 to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians were puffing themselves up to try to force us, or to scare us, to try to negotiate with them.
They weren't ever intending to start a war.
This is kind of getting ahead of myself in the book, but they were intending to create a crisis that would force President Kennedy to negotiate with them, because they were at a position of weakness, the United States.
And I kind of wonder if this is something that will happen whenever you have one state that's overwhelmingly more powerful than another one, and they're trying to, you know, negotiate internationally.
If one of the weaker states has to create incidences or tensions to try to force the other one to come to some sort of agreement, and that could be like what's going on in North Korea, or any of these kind of hot spots that always get in the news, that we're always supposed to be scared of.
It's probably just these people.
One way they can try to do anything is just scare us into negotiating with them, otherwise we won't.
Right.
Well, and then, of course, the hawks on both sides always feed off each other, right?
Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.
You're never at a lack of, quote, scare quotes, if you want, from the other side, you know.
I mean, after all, and I think people can think back to just a few years, and I know that the USSR, at least it did exist and take up 15 time zones or whatever, but we just spent the last decade, we're still fighting the Islamo-fascist caliphate that never even existed, outside the attic where bin Laden was hiding, for crying out loud.
So it's not like, it's not like, oh, come on, our leaders wouldn't exaggerate a threat?
Right, well, actually, a good example, a better way to answer your question when it comes to Stalin is the Berlin airlift crisis, because in that situation, it's sort of the same deal.
He was trying to create a crisis to try to get us to negotiate over the future of Germany, but to do it, he did something very, you know, besides the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most aggressive thing the Russians did directly to the United States, you know, he blockades Berlin to try to get us to negotiate over the future of Germany, and the crisis lasted almost a year, and, you know, there's war talk and everything, and then he had to back down.
And after that, he basically did nothing, directly to the United States, or our Western European allies, he just kind of humiliated himself.
So that's what happened.
All right.
Now, again, I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Michael Swanson, author of The War State, the Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex, and The Power Elite.
And, of course, kind of back to the theory of, you know, what we're dealing with is not so much this or that particular group, although, of course, it's always notable when this group in charge are a bunch of Eastern establishment lawyers, or this group in charge are a bunch of Western arms manufacturer lobbyists, or whatever like that, it's always part of the story.
But a huge part of the story, too, is just the economics of the bureaucracy itself.
And how, you know, this is, it's always interesting to me, the relative power at play in the Iron Triangle, Gareth always puts the generals in the driver's seat, he says, at the end of the day, the bottom line is the real ruling establishment of America are the rulers of the army and the Air Force and the Marine Corps, etc.
Well, I'll back that up with one fact.
I've been reading to do this book, and I'm working on one about Vietnam as a sequel.
I'm reading lots of Pentagon histories, these are internal histories written in the Pentagon for them, that have been declassified.
And they're, they're really fascinating to read.
And one of the, you know, one of the most famous figures is General Curtis LeMay.
And he, when he's, he was there in the early 60s, President Kennedy, famous for talking about bombing everyone, and he wanted to bomb Cuba, and then on and on.
But he was the most powerful member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff politically.
And it wasn't because he was in charge of these nuclear missiles and, and the Strategic Air Command.
But because 40% of the defense budget was going to that.
So he had all these friends of the Capitol Hill that were tied into the defense industry.
And he would act boorish to the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and treat them like crap.
And he's just a crazy character.
But all the power he had, basically came from the simple fact that 40% of the defense budget went, went to the Air Force.
And but so for him, someone like that, it isn't profit, because he's not profiting personally, you know, as far as money comes from all this, it's just, it makes him important.
It gives them political power inside the Pentagon.
Yeah, you know, I don't know, I think probably more than anything, it's the commercials that play during football, they just scream, this is all legitimate, don't worry about it, or something like that, that somehow, we just the entire society somehow exempts the Pentagon from the credit, the exact same criticism that we would apply to any other government agency, which is that they thrive from crisis and failure, because they got a monopoly on it.
There's no one else, you can't fire them and hire somebody else for their failure.
All you can do is take at face value, their promise that with more power and more money, they'll do better next time.
And yet, they're the best example of the entire thing this whole time, whether it's the Cold War, the terror war, the Second World War, the one before that, you know what I mean?
Well, ultimately, what you're saying is their true source of their power isn't the money, it isn't corruption, the defense industry, it's the simple fact that they represent the safety of the country.
And they exaggerate that, but as long as people believe the exaggerations, then they are the vote, you know, that's where their power comes from.
So a good other concrete example, this was when Kenny was president, I put this in the book, and there's a link, so you can listen to this.
It's a really fascinating thing I found.
There was a tape cover of the National Security Council meeting after the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Kenny says, just brings up the idea of let's produce less nuclear missiles, we don't need any more.
We can do a first strike on the Russians, they couldn't even retaliate.
At the time, we don't need any more nuclear missiles.
So let's just stop building them.
And Robert McNamara says, uh, no, we can't do that.
Because if we do that, then General LeMay is going to go out there and say that you're endangering the country.
So the point is, the General LeMay is not going to go to congressmen and say this is going to cost you money.
He's just going to go out there and say, hey, the Kenny administration is endangering us.
And you could die, you know, so that's where the power comes from, is them able to say that if they choose to, and us believing it, you know.
So what would happen if Obama decided, well, I'm going to shut down NSA?
Will the NSA director get on TV and say, well, this is going to let terrorists come in here and do whatever they want, you know, launch an atomic bomb or who knows what.
And as long as we believe it, then you're going to have that NSA.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm sitting here talking into a dead mic.
What you described in this book is just the very beginnings.
The really scary thing is that everybody knows since September 11th, the national security state has tripled or quintupled in size, or nobody even knows what.
Now there's an entire homeland security state.
The entire thing is so far out of control.
It's almost immeasurable.
And I'm sorry, because with that, we got to stop the interview because we're all out of time.
But we're going to continue this and we're going to get through this whole book.
We're going to talk about this whole book, The War State by Michael Swanson.
If you go to scotthorton.org, just look for it in the right hand margin there.
The War State by Michael Swanson is available at your bookstore and Amazon and all that too.
And, you know, I'm ready when you are to continue.
We'll probably do this once a week until we cover the whole book.
Okay, great.
Thank you very much, Mike.
I sure appreciate it.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
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Man, I had a chance to have an essay published in the book Why Peace, edited by Mark Gutman, but I didn't understand what an opportunity it was.
Boy, do I regret I didn't take it.
This compendium of thoughts by the greatest anti-war writers and activists of our generation will be remembered and studied long into the future.
You've got to get Why Peace.
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It features articles by Harry Brown, Robert Naiman, Fred Bronfman, Dahlia Wasfy, Richard Cummings, Karen Gutowski, Butler Schaefer, Kathy Kelly, Robert Higgs, Anthony Gregory, and so many more.
Why Peace?
Because war is the health of everything wrong with our society.
Get Why Peace down at the bookshop or amazon.com.
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Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here?
Sick of it yet?
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Support the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and push back against the Israel lobby and their sock puppets in Washington, D.C.
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Fact.
The new NSA data center in Utah requires 1.7 million gallons of water every single day to operate.
Billions of Fourth Amendment violations need massive computers and the water to cool them.
That water is being supplied by the state of Utah.
Fact.
There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution which requires your state to help the feds violate your rights.
Our message to Utah?
Turn.
It.
Off.
No water equals no NSA data center.
Visit offnow.org.you