10/08/09 – Jonathan M. Kolkey – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest on the show today is Jonathan Martin Kolke.
And he's got a project called World Wide War.
It's at WorldWideWarProject.org.
Welcome to the show, Jonathan.
How are you doing?
Thank you so much, Scott.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I'm looking at this website.
I barely had time to go through it.
Is this list of 300-plus wars you're basically attempting to have, you know, some kind of interactive source material on every war anybody's ever heard of, or what?
I'll explain what the project is.
One of the problems with the antiwar movement is nobody really agrees why we have wars.
I mean, if you ask 1,000 people, you get 1,000 different answers.
Everybody's got their pet theories.
And I guess you're aware of the usual suspects.
It's religion, ideology, aggression, balance of power, economics.
But the problem is that the World Wide War Project has decided to try to look at as many wars as we can and find the common link between them all.
And that's what we're doing.
There's about 300 wars.
I know the common link.
Men.
Well, there is this idea of sexual frustration or gender domination.
Yeah, the old George Carlin bit, right?
Oh, I love George Carlin.
I'm sorry he's gone.
Yeah, we won't quote that directly right now.
Actually, okay, here's the deal.
There's about 300 wars, going back to the ancient times, where there's enough information to reconstruct what happened, kind of like solving a crime.
Let's just call these the ultimate cold cases.
What you do is you kind of go into the archives, you set the stage, you find out who had the power to make the decisions, how they do it, what do they say to the public, like what's the supposed reason for the war?
And then the best part, what do they say to each other in private?
And it's astounding.
The archives don't lie.
You catch them in the act.
At the moment they pull the trigger, they're thinking about one thing, saving their own skin, advancing their own politics.
There's no idea of national interest or common good.
You ever see that movie Wag the Dog?
Oh, yeah, sure.
Wag the Dog was kind of an over-the-top version of that.
Of the 300 wars, maybe 40 are that blatant, where literally a political leader in trouble at election time starts a fake war.
In most cases, the leaders kind of stumble into it.
But you know what?
All along, at the moment they decide for war, they're thinking primarily, how is this going to play politically?
Is it going to help my career?
Is it going to save my tribe, my party, our dynasty?
The whole idea, and there's something fishy about every one of them.
What you're doing basically here is you're starting with the premise that political leaders are actually individuals and that they think about themselves.
They're not these we the people kind of like Voltron or something.
We all just project a little piece of ourself into this alpha head or something.
That's not true.
They're just people and they do what they do for whatever reasons.
Scott, why would you assume that the guys back then are any more honest than the guys today?
They're politicians.
That's what's hilarious is reading about ancient Rome and things, where everything is exactly the same.
The rhetoric is exactly the same.
We're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here.
The more we occupy them, the more they fight back.
It just proves how we've got to occupy them more so that they'll stop.
Everything is the same.
The same lies, weapons of mass, spirit collection, or whatever it is.
Those are the official reasons, but it's all politics at a very deep level.
Miro, I've done 30 years worth of research, and it's going to be a real mother to write this up.
But in the meantime, I've got a website up and I've solicited hundreds of scholars all over the world.
Thank God Al Go invented the Internet.
It's fantastic because I would have had to write to people.
Where would we be without it?
I'd have to write to people.
I've got the world's greatest historians emailing me, and they're posted on the website saying, Hey, you're right on.
This is exactly what's going on.
You know what they tell me?
They say, Look, I always knew the wars in ancient Rome or Aztec wars were fake, but I never knew they all were.
That's what I've done.
I've collected them.
I've collected all the best stuff from the greatest historians in the world, and they're all vouching for my ideas.
It's really kind of scary.
Look, I've got a problem.
When I go into the archives, I get amused.
I'm amazed at the skullduggery, and then I have to stop myself and say, Hell, a bunch of innocent people died for nothing.
It's amazing what's out there.
You cannot believe what these guys said to each other in private and committed to paper, of course, never expecting it to see the light of day.
Why don't you give us some examples?
Pick some wars people have heard of and what was really going on there.
How about the pastry war?
That's one of my favorites.
Which one, the pastry war?
It's the 1830s, and there's a French king named Louis Philippe, and the previous rulers, Napoleon Bonaparte, had led France to great military glory.
Well, Louis Philippe was not a military man.
He wanted peace, but the masses, the crowds were saying, Hey, this guy's dull.
So they decided to pick on Mexico.
What happened was there was a typical revolution in Mexico, and there was a French citizen who owned a bakery in Mexico City, and during a riot he had some of his pies stolen.
And so the French government decided that they were going to press the issue, so they demanded compensation for the pies.
And when the Mexican government didn't do it, the French sent their fleet down and blockaded Veracruz and bombarded it.
It's known as the pastry war.
A lot of wars are fought for silly reasons like that just to get points at home.
Well, of course, it's just a part, but I think it's actually a matter of record now that Karl Rove was saying we have to make sure we're in a war in 2004 to guarantee our re-election, that that was certainly part of the equation, at least, for the invasion of Iraq.
You're absolutely right.
You know, from the mind of the political hack, right?
If there was a movie, he'd be played by Martin Short or something.
He's not the strategy guy in terms of running the world.
He's the strategy guy in terms of how to handle TV today.
Well, let's face it.
We're really not going to know the truth for 50 years until those archives, but I bet my last dollar that that kind of conversation went on.
I can feel it on my bones.
You know it.
If the other 299 wars had that kind of skullduggery, believe me, this one did.
I mean, look at the crew in the White House.
Look at those people.
Clearly, it was done for Bush's re-election.
There's no doubt about it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this is how Senator Palpatine took over the galaxy in Star Wars.
That's how I learned about foreign policy when I was a kid.
And notice they have the Senate and all that stuff.
Yeah, obviously.
Yeah, and emergency powers that he promises to relinquish as soon as the crisis is over.
I know.
That's kind of what happened with Hitler.
Hitler took over to stop the Depression.
I mean, nobody voted him in to start World War II.
What happened was he solved the Depression.
It ended by 1937.
It was forced to have a series of foreign policy crisis to keep himself in power.
And he ended up inadvertently tripping off a world war.
It was all done because the Depression was over and Germany should have returned to normal.
You didn't have to have this Nazi dictatorship.
I mean, if you actually reconstruct it, you can see this stuff's going on.
And it's utterly fascinating.
I've spent 30 years looking at this stuff and it's been a real joy.
You know, something that I wish I knew about but I don't is the beginning of the Japanese invasion of China.
They're part of World War II there.
And I think I remember hearing somewhere that they blew up their own train and blamed it on Chinese guerrillas or something in order to conquer Manchuria or something like that.
Can you tell me about that?
That's true.
Well, you had an army out of control in Japan.
And, yeah, they definitely staged an incident.
They staged several incidents.
One in 1931 and one in 1936.
So they could force the government into intervening.
Absolutely.
And, by the way, are you aware that the Navy, the Japanese Navy, was the one that instituted Pearl Harbor?
They didn't even tell the Japanese Army until just before the blow was landed.
The problem was the Japanese Army was getting glory in China and the Navy felt left out.
So they wanted their war.
Oh, no.
A lot of wars are fought because of a rivalry between the service branches.
But it's all politics, self-interest, private advantage.
It's all over the map.
Well, you know, if you look at just recent news, say, especially second half of the Bush years through now, and the push for war with Iran, it's the Air Force which is basically sitting out and mad on the bench in the occupations of the helpless nations of Afghanistan and Iraq that can't possibly field planes in the sky to fight the Air Force.
So the best they get to do is bomb people from six miles away or whatever every once in a while.
And they want to do something exciting.
And so they're the ones, in terms of all the people in the military, they're the ones who are on board for the war more than anybody.
I'll be perfectly honest with you, Scott.
I'm surprised Bush couldn't have contrived a war to help McCain.
I think he tried.
I just didn't think anybody bit the bull.
I just didn't see that.
I think he would have liked it.
I think they were planning something.
It's just sometimes you can't plan it.
Sometimes the cards just don't, the stars don't line up in the right order.
Well, there are certainly a lot of people watching for them to come up with a provocation.
And, of course, there was the whole thing in 2007 about Admiral Fallon threatening to resign over it and all that seemed to really, you know, and Cheney has said just in the last few weeks that, yes, indeed, and the rest of the members of my faction in the government were pushing for strikes on Iran.
We couldn't get Bush to do it.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I hate to think that I might have misjudged Bush into having more.
He may well have had more character than Cheney and Rove.
Nah, he's just more of a coward than them.
It just gets applied in different ways.
Remember on September 11th when he went and hid deep underground in a bunker in Nebraska and didn't come back to Washington, D.C. until like 7.30 that night Eastern time?
So that wasn't the single biggest disgrace in all of American political history right there.
That's the reason he didn't bomb Iran.
But I've got to give you guys credit in the anti-war movement because by shining a light on this kind of stuff, I think you intuitively understood there was a danger of cooking the 2008 election.
And you guys kept a fire.
You kept the idea of a fake war, of wag the dog, right front and center.
And I think you kind of intimidated them against doing it.
I mean, we didn't have a Gulf of Tonkin.
We didn't have any of those other events.
I think the public was aware of this possibility.
And I think guys like you did a good job of at least raising the issue, raising the threshold, raising the awareness, and I think you did a good job on that.
Well, we try to revise history in real time here on the show every day.
I just spent about 15, 20 minutes debunking the lies about Iran's nuclear program.
And I guess that's the real goal here.
You kind of must be somewhere, and this isn't just your love of history.
You're trying to teach people a lesson here that we don't have to go along with these things.
We should never believe the reasons they're telling us because those are never the real reasons.
That's the point, right?
If you get on my website, you'll see an old picture of me with Ronald Reagan.
And I was a lot better looking younger and thinner then.
And I interviewed him for my doctoral thesis at UCLA.
I had a few moments, and I tried to interest him in this idea of the wars.
And he didn't care.
His mind was kind of lazy and complacent.
But I've got to tell you, I do like Barack Obama, and I think he's ultimately teachable.
I think he's teachable.
I think if you presented this stuff to him, he could grasp it, unlike a lot of people.
I think he could grasp the idea that there's something fishy about these wars.
Well, and since he's the center of the universe, he might just take it as a how-to manual.
I know.
I'm actually kind of a Barack fan, although I actually thought of voting for McCain, if only because things were so bad, I was fearful that the Republicans would escape from the mess they made and drop it in the lap of the Democrats.
Thank goodness the economic meltdown happened before the election.
Yeah, although that memory is becoming more and more distant.
And by the way, that's another tactic.
If a war goes bad, like Germany in 1918 or Vietnam in 1968, there's an art in getting out of it where you drop the responsibility in the lap of the other party.
I mean, that happens a lot.
If you notice, nobody ended up taking the fall for Vietnam.
The Democrats had repudiated Johnson.
The Republicans said it wasn't ours.
I've got to give Pat Buchanan credit, although I don't always agree with Pat.
Pat was right.
He says nobody paid the price for Vietnam.
It's like nobody was ultimately held responsible for it.
He says 55,000 Americans, their lives went down an Asian rat hole for nothing.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that ought to be the teachable thing for Barack Obama right there, that he can get out of these wars and say, look, the loss isn't mine.
It was George Bush.
He got us into messes that couldn't be won with military force, so now we're doing the smart thing and getting out.
And he can follow that Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, not my problem thing and lose.
It would be great, and then the wars would be over.
If the public was a little more sophisticated, I'd agree with you.
The public needs a lot more education on this stuff.
At the moment, there would probably be a backlash of who lost Afghanistan or Iraq.
I could see Barack sticking it out for a while simply because the Republicans will jump on this to get out of the responsibility for a failed war.
Well, and if he was any different as a politician than all these people throughout history, he would say, you know what, I don't care if I serve one term.
This is the history of the world being written here, and this is millions of people's lives in the balance, and I'm just going to end the wars.
And if the American people are such warmongers that they wrote Republican in 2012, well, then they'll have a lot of work to do to rebuild the empire that I brought home.
But, of course, he's just as self-interested as any of the rest of these politicians on WorldWideWarProject.org.
You know, I'm really sad to say that I can't find very many people I would call a statesman who at a critical moment said, look, I'm not going to send the boys to war.
I'm not going to save my political career.
Woodrow Wilson came close to that.
He really agonized about bringing us into World War I.
He even admitted to a colleague, he's making a mistake, but he did it anyway.
I wish there were more statesmen.
I can't find very many who have ever at that critical moment.
In fact, a lot of politicians kind of wind up leaving their countries into war they don't really believe in, hoping first to save themselves politically, but also hoping, okay, if I'm at the helm, I'll limit the damage, and I'll kind of fight a half-assed war.
I won't go all out.
There's some of that in some of the wars.
It usually doesn't work that way.
Usually events get carried away, and they can't control it.
But you can see a lot of, I think Lyndon Johnson in 1965 probably threw a few bombs at North Vietnam, and he kind of got sucked in, even though during the election he said he wasn't Barry Goldwater who would do that.
The best laid plans go awry, but I think there is some of that.
Guys who don't really believe in the war, but they figure, all right, it'll start on my watch, but I'll limit the damage.
That's a dangerous delusion.
Well, you know, in fact, Pat Buchanan wrote in one of his most recent articles anyway at antiwar.com, he says that he thinks Obama probably will not do the McChrystal insubordination escalation in Afghanistan, but he's certainly not going to withdraw either, and he ends by saying, look for Obama to dispatch a lot of forces to train up the Afghan army.
That'll be a nice way to kind of split the difference and put off any real decision-making until later somehow.
Yeah, it's always getting by the next election cycle.
You see that from time to time.
We even had an American president once by the name of James Polk who had offered to buy California from Mexico, and the Mexicans had actually agreed to it, but then there was a revolution in Mexico City and another government came in, and if Polk had been a little bit patient, those guys would have been out in six months and the deal could have been done.
But Polk wrote in his own diary that the elections are coming up and he needed something.
So, I mean, the election cycle has a lot to do with whether we have wars or not.
The two-year election cycle in the U.S. and, of course, the four-year election cycle.
I mean, you can almost look at this stuff and chart it.
It's just amazing how this stuff works every time.
Well, in fact, that's a major part of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's thesis in his book Democracy, The God That Failed, that because there is no inherent long-term interest and the benefit of the whole society on the part of these people who have these short-term elections to look forward to, they can reap all the benefits of their office without ever having to pay any of the consequences themselves.
This is sort of the argument about letting the central bank stay quote-unquote independent because the theory goes, and probably correctly, that if it was just up to the Congress, they would do nothing but inflate from now until forever and they'd try to never let there be a recession because they all have an election coming up, and that kind of deal.
Oh, yeah, you've got to get those guys' hands off the printing press for paper money.
That's another historical problem.
I won't even go into that.
But yes, short-term goals, that's all they care about ultimately.
Well, in fact, let's go into that a little bit because that's a big part of this history, isn't it, that the governments always put the face of the ruler on the coin and that becomes what makes it legitimate instead of the precious metal in it and then they proceed to debase it in order to finance their wars, right?
Isn't that the history of the world right there?
Well, you know, there's a myth that poverty causes war.
The truth is wars are expensive.
Look at what nations have caused the most wars the last 500 years, Britain and France.
You've got to have the jack.
You've got to have the money to finance wars.
So war is a luxury of wealthy countries that can afford to waste it.
Ah, that's a very good point.
Yeah, we get as much war as we can afford.
Or as often as you want.
Wow, and so maybe we're missing something here, Jonathan, in focusing in this kind of analysis.
Maybe something else is going by.
We're talking about through the centuries, war after war after war, millions and millions of people killed, and is it really a matter of what amounts to almost kind of an economic analysis of what it means to hold executive power and what incentives you have to get in conflicts like this?
Is this basically the sum of it?
I don't see economics as behind it.
No, I mean economics in the basic sense, the economics of being the president.
You know what I mean?
Political capital, however you call it.
I would say that's true.
The problem is that wars don't happen statistically that often.
And a lot of times people won't go to war because they don't have the money.
It's not always a money-making aspect.
And remember also, if you go to war, you better make sure you win.
There's devastating penalties usually for a loss.
So usually the typical scenario for a war is you have a weaker power that gets into a conflict with a stronger power, and the weaker one tweaks the nose of the stronger one, like Iraq tweaked us, figuring they could get away with it, score points at home, and they don't expect the stronger country to respond.
A lot of countries blunder into wars like that.
The weaker country provokes the stronger country, doesn't realize the stronger country has its own problems.
That scenario happens all too often.
But I'm not a great believer in economics.
Economics is a background noise.
It's always present.
The problem is that wars don't happen very often statistically.
Ninety-nine percent of the times when guys are in trouble economically, they don't start a war.
It has to do with if the economic issue is involved in the war, it kind of gets gummed up in the politics.
It's all about politics, legitimation, all that stuff.
The wars aren't caused by issues.
Whatever the issue of the day is, it gets ground up in the machinery of the politics.
And so you could have a real provocation not leading to war, or a minor one that does.
It has to do with how the politics plays and the perception of the leaders.
Are they in trouble?
Can they make hay out of it?
It's kind of hard to start a war out of nothing.
I mean, it can be done.
But historically speaking, you've got to usually have some kind of a serious irritant.
The public doesn't always want wars.
And by the way, the business community doesn't always want wars.
Because when you make war, there goes the customer or supplier.
Now, when war is threatened or when it starts, then, like jackals, they jump on.
But the business community, historically speaking, has been fairly peaceful.
They're not the ones pushing for the wars.
It's the politicians that are pushing for the wars.
Look before World War II.
The business community didn't want a war with Germany and Japan.
They were our good customers.
In fact, about the only group in America that didn't want a war against Japan was the business community.
Everybody else did.
But we had a good, thriving business with Japan.
You know, the anarchist writer Randolph Bourne wrote, I guess in 1916, on the eve of American entry into World War I, he said, war is the health of the state, I guess in parentheses, unless they lose and get conquered by the opponent.
But other than that, it's basically, no matter what, it's a no-lose situation for politicians.
I mean, maybe a certain one or two or one group of congressmen or something will lose out on it.
But the state, on its own, never loses.
And it's what Robert Higgs calls the ratchet effect, where every time there's a crisis, there's no gains.
And when the crisis is over, it never quite goes back again, even if there's a so-called return to normalcy, as after World War I.
Never quite goes back again.
So we live in a society now where we pretend to have the same Constitution from 1789.
But we all know that in history, the only contact that many Americans would ever have in their life with the national government would be the post office.
That was it.
It had nothing to do with their life.
It just occupies the whole world and passes laws about everything that you could imagine.
And it's basically been, more than anything else, the wars that have centralized that authority, not just in the national government, but in the presidency.
Well, Scott, you talked about the state.
But look at Europe.
What happened to all the kings and queens?
The dynasty or the world wars?
They blew their brains out.
The losing side in all the world wars, and Germany, and almost Russia, all those dynasties have fallen.
There's severe penalties for losing a war.
Huge penalties.
There's hardly any royal families left.
If you're going to lead your country into war and sacrifice millions of lives, that's the penalty for losing a world war.
They're all gone.
Well, yeah, that's certainly true.
In Europe, the world wars were fought to complete exhaustion on all sides, basically.
And Germany ended up kind of inheriting the thing.
But then again, for the centuries leading up to the French Revolution, the kings of France got France into wars all the time, and it usually benefited them rather than cost them, as you document in this passage.
France is the strongest country in Europe.
Plus, also, they had a restless nobility, a warrior class.
The kings of France understood they had to provide war to get the nobles in line.
And so France is starting these wars under Louis XIV and XV, starting the wars to keep the nobility occupied.
But that's a different kind of political system than we have today.
I'm looking at wars in the past where they have some kind of politics that resembles ours today, where you have factions, maybe elections, public opinion, political parties.
Not an absolute monarchy.
You want something in the past that has relevance today, where you can draw lessons.
The politics of France counted years ago, an absolute monarchy.
They have factions within the court, but there are not a lot of lessons you can draw for today.
But that's always a problem.
You've got a restless warrior nobility that needs wars, or they're going to cause civil wars.
That's a recurring theme, too, but I'm not particularly interested in that for this project, because that has no relevance today.
Alright, well, listen, I'm sorry we're all out of time.
This has been very interesting, and we'll certainly be keeping an eye on your website here.
As we just mentioned, it's worldwidewarproject.org Yeah, I was about to say that.
It's Jonathan Martin Kolke, worldwidewarproject.org.
Thanks again for your time on the show.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care now.