10/29/09 – John V. Walsh – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is John B. Walsh.
He's a frequent contributor to Counterpunch and Antiwar.com.
He's a member of the Green Rainbow Party of Massachusetts.
He's a member of Physicians for National Health Program.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
It's nice to be back.
And now you're a professor of something at somewhere, right?
Yes, I'm a professor of physiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Ah, there you are.
Actually, I want to congratulate Antiwar.com.
The only trace I saw in the U.S. media, and maybe I'm wrong here, of the fact that a province in Afghanistan has been lost to the Taliban.
I mean, they run it now.
There's no U.S. presence or other presence there as in Antiwar.com.
So, I picked it up from the Asia Times, so I think that's very interesting.
Wait, which story exactly are you talking about?
The Asia Times story?
Asia Times, that there was a province where some short while ago, a U.S. outpost was attacked.
Oh, right.
Some soldiers were killed, and then that also happened in a nearby province.
But the place where the second attack occurred is now ruled, according to Asia Times, completely by the Taliban.
There's no government presence there.
There's no U.S. presence there.
They've taken over, and it's right on the border with Pakistan.
People who think the situation is bad now, just wait until winter comes.
It's going to get much worse there.
Well, worse in terms of the ambitions of the empire.
Here, all my tabs left open are stuck from yesterday's news, but what you're referring to there is the top headline today in Antiwar.com.
Yes, yes, yes.
The U.S. gives up Afghan province to Taliban.
Yes, yes, exactly.
We just had an hour-long discussion with Eric Margulies.
Much of it was about the insanity of the continuing Afghanistan policy, and, well, you know, we have this problem, John, as you've written about before, where the majority of the American people agree with you and me about the Afghanistan war.
It should be over.
I think polls also say that we're just kind of, the American population has just resigned to the fact that we don't have any power to do anything about it, and our government's going to keep waging war there anyway.
But, you know, at the same time that the percentage of people who say that they're opposed to the war is growing, it seems like the seriousness with which they take it is kind of being diminished.
And the anti-war movement, I don't know if there ever really was an anti-war movement, if there is really an anti-war movement in America, but whatever there was, it seems to have almost evaporated.
You have kind of a general consensus against it, but no real activism.
It's all gone.
Well, again, I should, before we get to the main topic here, again, I think that progressive Democrats of America, so-called progressive Democrats of America, who claim to be an anti-war movement within the Democratic Party, among other things, they have just fallen apart since Obama won the election.
And he's not just a Democratic candidate, he was their candidate.
He was the candidate of the left wing, so-called, of the Democratic Party.
And he has failed miserably.
There are more troops in Afghanistan and Iraq now than there were when Bush left office.
So, I think, and it's strange that Code Pink, and again, I congratulate you on the interview you had with Medea Benjamin, because I think she stood, her views stood exposed.
She really was an interview in which the hypocrisy of, she's a board director of progressive Democrats of America, and of certain elements, not the rank and file, but she and certain elements at the top of Code Pink came right through.
It was there in her own words, over and over again.
There was no denying it.
So, I don't know.
Norman Solomon is another one.
He's another PDA board member.
I think he might even be the president right now.
And he's over there in Kabul, too.
The whole thing, they seem to be caucusing in Kabul.
And I don't know what these busybodies are doing over there, whether they really believe that sending soldiers can advance the liberation of women.
I don't think foreign troops can do that.
And I think there's a heavy air of hypocrisy hanging over the whole left-wing operation, cruising in and out of Kabul.
As a matter of fact, last week there was a public beating of a woman in India as a witch.
And maybe we should give up our nuclear alliance with India and join China and bomb India to save the women.
Maybe they can go and caucus in Calcutta or something.
I don't know.
Well, now, I want to add a little bit of nuance.
Not that it makes any sense, but she was against the occupation.
She wanted all the soldiers gone, but she wanted somehow for the American government to still be able to build an Afghan nation, just without any soldiers, as force protection.
But that is the dream, too.
I mean, what business is it of ours to determine how and other people will be ruled?
And what possibility is there, really, for a puppet government to be a representative government?
It's impossible.
You know, they're talking about corruption now in Kabul.
Consider this.
You have an occupying force that has to have a friendly, quote-unquote, friendly government.
That means a puppet government, by whatever means.
And a puppet government means that the people in that government have turned their backs on their own people to side with a foreign occupying force.
Now, people who have such motivations, what are the chances they won't be corrupt?
What motivations can there possibly be other than self-serving ones?
And so that they take money and bribes and all the rest?
That's a foregone conclusion.
There can't be any other kind of puppet government but a corrupt one.
It was true with Chiang Kai-shek.
It was true with Diem in Vietnam.
And it's going to be true whether they put Abdullah Abdullah in power or keep Karzai in power.
It's also true increasingly in Pakistan.
There is no other choice.
A puppet government will be a corrupt government.
It's inevitable.
Yeah, but with all your criticism, you're objectively helping the Republicans.
Well, too bad.
I know.
I'm probably also helping them subjectively.
What does it matter?
I don't care.
But the thing that I wanted to talk a little bit about, because it's an upcoming item on the President's agenda, is his visit to China and the state visit of the Prime Minister of India to Washington.
All right.
Let's talk about that.
So I was in China a few weeks back, and I recommend that people go there.
The amount of energy and the amount of activity that's going on there is absolutely stupefying.
And although in the major cities, I don't think people will suffer much culture shock, because it seems like now you go to any major city in the world, it's all pretty much the same.
But it's clear that China is not a rich country, but it's no longer a poor country.
And the pace of its development is absolutely extraordinary.
And so Obama will go there, and then as soon as he returns, he will host the first state dinner for the Indian Prime Minister.
And I'm afraid that the United States has to make a choice here.
I think that what we see unfolding is a U.S.
-Israeli-Indian alliance directed against China.
Now, if China becomes a major economic power, the major economic power, and I don't see, if you do the numbers, how there's any denying that, then what is the United States going to do?
Are we going to say, okay, we're not in a unipolar world any longer?
Or will we try to defeat the Chinese, which seems crazy, in the only way we possibly could, which would be militarily.
And for that we need bodies in the neighborhood, lots of them.
Yeah, well, let me stop you right there.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
The Chinese can deliver hydrogen bombs, or at least atomic bombs, to the United States with their three-stage rockets.
Therefore, we have to be best friends with them forever.
That's it.
End of argument.
I won.
Right?
Look, I'm living in Los Angeles.
Now, maybe if somebody's living in Virginia or something, they might be out of range.
But I'm sure as hell not out of range right now.
I'm not so sure that that's true, that you couldn't have proxy wars stirred up between India and China.
I don't think India is capable of doing that.
But India is now tied in militarily with joint exercises with the United States.
It's tied in also with Israel, with the weapons delivery from Israel.
In the minds of some people, that's the plan.
The plan is an insane one.
And I think that, actually, for libertarians, China is quite an attractive place in terms of its foreign policy now, because it seems like China's answer to everything is, let's trade.
Let's trade more.
India threatens China.
China says, okay, we make an excess now of power-generating equipment.
We'll ship it to you.
Let's trade more.
And it goes on and on and on like that.
Every time there's a threat or something, China says, well, let's trade.
We're busy with this stuff.
Let's forget about the military stuff.
And if the United States persists in what it's doing, we will certainly hurt ourselves worse than we've hurt ourselves before.
And the worst thing we may do is we may force upon China a more military outlook than it has.
And that's one thing I learned when I was there, is that China's history, and this goes back to thousands and thousands of years, China's history is one not of invading, but of being invaded and trying to hold together the Middle Kingdom, as they call it.
And in the history of China, one of the most interesting things was that a few decades before Columbus came to the Americas, China sent out a fleet of hundreds of ships, much, much bigger than anything the Europeans had.
And they explored the east coast of Africa.
They went up into the Middle East, and they looked around, and they came home.
They were never interested, for some reason or other, in colonizing.
Well, you know, we just had this conversation with Eric Margulies about Afghanistan policy and things like that.
And he brought up that the Chinese, well, we were talking about the American empire and the future of a multipolar world and that kind of thing.
And he was saying, look, the Chinese have enough supersonic missiles for use on the oceans that the days of the American empire just floating their star destroyers around and getting away with whatever they want is just over.
The fact is, they can't invade America, but they sure as hell can defend themselves from the American Navy.
So, I mean, you're right, it's all about proxy war.
Here's a front in the proxy war.
China is paying for our war on their western border.
How long is that going to last?
And especially when they're already trying to diversify out of their dollars.
You talk about their policies to trade with everyone.
They're trying to get out of American debt and instead buy up real assets around the world.
They've got to have something to do with all that money they're making.
And they don't want to spend it on worthless American debt anymore.
I mean, this game is already up, John.
Well, to some degree, I think that China just caught the United States elite sleeping, sleep at the switch.
But remember, going all the way back, what is it, the 90s sometime, Sam Huntington wrote this piece, The Clash of Civilizations, and his prediction was that the Arab world, and he called it the cynic Chinese world, and the East Asian world would be, but mainly China and the Muslim world, China and the Muslim world would be pitted against the United States, West Europe, and Israel.
And that would be the great conflict of the future.
And that was something that the United States should plan for.
Well, I hope that that idea is still very current in a lot of forms.
I mean, the other day, when Robert Gates was in Japan, he was almost livid, I mean, visibly disturbed by the fact that the Japanese are now opening to China.
Well, why shouldn't they be?
They have a common culture.
They don't like the new ruling party, the new ruling party doesn't like America's militaristic foreign policy.
So they're moving in that, and they have a lot economically to gain by that.
So they're moving in that direction.
And the United States doesn't seem, at least Robert Gates doesn't seem to be able to come to terms with that.
Well, you know, it's strange too, it's like, you know, I guess if you're a statist and you live in D.C., then, you know, the entire Enlightenment is lost on you or whatever.
Still, I mean, here we have a bazillion dollars a year worth of trade with China.
These people still haven't learned anything that we can get along with them just fine.
It's been since Richard Nixon.
What the hell?
And actually, from a right or a libertarian point of view, I think it's not really understood that, in many times, that the Chinese Revolution was not a socialist revolution.
What it was was the overthrow of a feudal system in China.
And when they celebrate the 60th anniversary, that's what they mean by liberation.
That was the end of the feudal system.
Now, where it's going to go from there is anybody's guess.
But there was an interregnum there with the Cultural Revolution and so on.
But other than that, the basic thing that happened in China in that revolution, well, two things happened.
One, it was the end of serfdom.
It was the end of feudalism.
And two, it was anti-empire.
That was U.S. and British Empire mainly and Japanese.
That was the key to this revolution.
There was nothing really in that revolution in and of itself, called themselves communist, okay, that would have threatened the United States.
And now it's kind of played out that way, where wherever China is headed, whatever you might think of its restrictions on civil liberties, which I think are, by the way, exaggerated, it is a player in basically a capitalist world economy.
I know a guy who talked about going on business trips to China through the 1990s and saying that over the space of ten years, you just would not believe what happened to Shanghai.
I mean, you're literally talking about a podunk town basically turned into a couple of downtown Houstons combined.
And it's not all just bubble economy crap.
They're actually really producing things and making money and then investing that in all this expansion.
He said it's like a miracle.
It's unbelievable.
The standard of living for the average Chinaman is, comparatively speaking, it's immeasurable.
It's that great.
But there are some things that are really very interesting.
If you compare, for example, India's development to China's development.
Now, India never really pulled free of empire.
It never got a full independence.
And today, the literacy rate in India is about 60%.
In China, it's over 90%.
So that's a big difference.
And actually, the literacy, the discrepancy in literacy.
Is it over 90% in China?
Do you know what it is in America?
No, no.
The official figure in America is about 99.
It's quite good in America.
That doesn't seem like people.
I guess they can read a memo from their boss.
They can't read a book, though.
Well, that's another question.
Yeah, that's a different question.
I shouldn't conflate these things.
And there again, India, you know, women are in a much inferior position.
So I would ask Code Pink.
Again, it's a good reason to go bomb India with China to get the women more literate.
The ones that don't die in the bombing.
The ones that don't die in the bombing.
Right.
So, and I'll tell you another thing.
To me, one of the most impressive things in Shanghai was, well, here I am talking about China, but one of the most impressive things, actually, was the darn subway.
It's the cleanest, fastest, even at rush hour, subway I've ever been on.
Well air-conditioned and roomy.
And I've been on just about every subway in the world.
This is a really good subway.
So, you know, the Chinese view of the world is, as far as I can see, they're really not interested in military competition, but they're a little bit worried about it.
For example, one of the things that's impelling them to develop energy independence is that there's some worry that the United States might, superior naval power, could interdict their energy supplies on the high seas.
Well, that shouldn't even be a fear.
That shouldn't be even a thought.
But of course what they're doing is saying, okay, we have to worry about that.
What could they do?
They could launch a navy or they could become the world leader in solar panels, and they're doing the latter.
And building a huge railway between Guangzhou and Calcutta to have some, I believe, their natural gas reserves up in that part of India.
So to take the libertarian side, this is a time, at long last, where we could stop thinking about international relations in terms of military and start thinking in terms of exchange of trade and goods and education and knowledge.
And the United States is ideally placed for that.
We're an island.
We can really be, and I like the term, an isolationist power.
We don't have to worry about what the rest of the world is doing.
And we could be very, very happy and rich and prosperous and in some respects civil liberties, for example, a model for the world.
So why don't we get busy with that and stop this craziness of military bases all over the globe?
I'm so with you.
It's insane.
As long as you bring up libertarianism and all that, it's the whole mantra, really, among at least the Austrians, about the seen and the unseen, and that when you know that a trillion dollars has been wasted on the war, you can see what happened, a bunch of dead bodies and all the different consequences, the wounded and the terrorist blowback and all that.
But the unseen is where that trillion dollars could have gone instead.
And it's just so great to hear you talk that way about, well, I guess my paraphrase of what you just said is it doesn't have to be this way at all.
I mean, it's not like you have to be some kind of utopian who believes in the new communist man who is never selfish again or anything like that.
You just look at the fact that there's no real enemy for America to deal with anywhere in the world.
We could be the Chinese are the perfect example.
There's no reason for there to be any acrimony whatsoever between us and the Chinese, unless you're just in the interest of selling F-22s or F-35s, you know?
Yes, and so we actually have, in a sense, stepped into a period of history which I thought we were stepping into when the Cold War ended.
But no, a new enemy had to be created.
And it's really...
I don't know, you could paraphrase Auntie Mame, life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.
Well, no one needs to starve to death anymore.
Life can be a banquet.
And it really is not being realized.
And I think people would...
I think it's a tremendous opportunity for both...for any isolationist or anti-interventionist political force, if we could only stop quarreling about parties and forget this Republican-Democratic divide, which only divides the people, and get moving on this.
You know, personally, I'm very frustrated because we don't seem to be able to do that.
There was an anti-war rally here in Boston, and it was dominated by the conventional left-wing anti-war forces, and there was, once again, this is nothing new, we've talked about this, I've written about this, there was going to be no room for libertarians on the speaker's platform.
There was no room.
And that's crazy, dogmatic stuff, and that too has to go.
PBA is an expression of that at some level also.
So...
Wait, what was that?
Progressive Democrats of America.
Oh, right, right.
So, you know, somehow or other, and I don't know how it's going to happen, but somehow or other, we, the people of the United States, have to somehow end this division among us and just start demanding that the troops come home.
Yeah.
Well, now here's the thing.
Well, it's my little project, and I know that it won't have happened by the time I'm old and dead or anything, but what I want to see, and what I believe is possible within the realm of possibility, is a real realignment where, you know, here you come from the left and take somebody really good from the right, like Will Grigg or, you know, some of the guys at the American Conservative Magazine, Phil Giraldi at antiwar.com, for example, where, you know, libertarianism, which is, you know, complete abolitionism, anti-everything libertarianism, is the center, the real moderate center, of good leftists like you and good rightists like Phil.
And what we all agree about is our moderation, and all we want is peace and trade and the Bill of Rights and all that great stuff.
I mean, because the left-right thing is never going to go away in terms of cultural differences and whatever.
But if you can have an understanding that it's the abolitionists who are the moderates, not the people that we call the centrists now.
They're the extremists.
They're the ones who are the lunatics, who are against liberty and for war in every circumstance.
And if we can somehow, in people's minds, I think, replace the, you know, Joe Lieberman, John McCain center with the Lou Rockwell center, then, you know, that would be a big step toward having the libertarian-leaning factions dominating on both the left and the right.
Bipartisan then means against government doing something instead of, you know, you can have your war as long as we get our welfare in the way it works now.
Well, let me, and along the lines, I want to go back to something about China that really, two things that really surprised me, and conclude with this, is that first day I was there, I was sitting in a hotel in Beijing, and there were these, there was a wedding going on, these little kids were playing in the little tea garden area, and one girl, little girl, she must have been about nine, ten, was obviously the leader.
And I had this biography of Mao Zedong, it had a picture of Mao on the cover, so I figured, geez, does this little girl know who this guy is?
So she ran by, I pointed to the book and to the picture, and I said, what's this?
Just, you know, I put it out in English, I said, what's this?
And she looked at me, and I thought, she was going to say Chairman Mao, and she said, it's a book, she said.
All these kids in China are learning English at a fantastic rate.
They want to have their population enabled to, this goes back to your literacy, to engage the West, because we don't speak Chinese, and there's a big gap in the two languages.
The other thing I was quite surprised at, I sat in the hotel where anybody could walk in, the hotel lobby, which had wireless, one of the hotels I did this at, in Shanghai, as a matter of fact, it had wireless, anybody could walk in and get a cup of coffee and use the wireless, and I googled things and tried to bring them up.
The National Review, antiwar.com, Counterpunch, the New York Times, I said National Review, the American Conservative, I tried everything, and it all came up.
Really?
So maybe things are blocked in Chinese.
Maybe things are blocked, I also googled Tank Man, you know, for Tiananmen Square?
I got a ton of references on Tank Man, I accessed them all.
Now, I asked people, they said, well, sometimes they only do that on certain memorial days, like the Tiananmen Massacre Memorial Day.
Well, maybe, but, there's no question that China's under one-party rule, although there are, just like between the Republicans and Democrats, there are factions in that party that are obscure to us, just like I think there are factions in the Democrat and Republican parties, which we don't understand at the top among the elite.
But the restrictions, as far as I could see, I was operating in English on the Internet, but a lot of people speak some English and can at least type it and read it.
Well, now, wait a minute, were you plugged in at the hotel or something, or this was out in the world out there?
Well, the hotel had this coffee shop bar in the lobby.
I wonder if that's just for appearances for the tourists and stuff.
Well, perhaps, but there were Chinese walking in and out, sitting down, meeting, and whatever.
As far as I could see, anybody could walk in there and buy a cup of coffee.
Now, I don't know about other places.
I don't know.
But even at that, it's not like if somebody wanted to, I don't know, cruise the Internet throughout the world, if all they have to do is walk into a hotel lobby and buy a cup of coffee, that's not so very restrictive anymore.
So I'm not sure where things stand in China.
I think they're dealing with an ever-savvier population.
They understand government propaganda when they see it.
I think we can understand ours when we see it.
So I don't know what's happening there.
Maybe just the technology is blowing these restrictions away.
I don't know.
But whatever is happening, it is a much looser, freer society than I had imagined.
The guys we met and the people we met, they had no reservations about railing against the government.
Sometimes it got tiresome, to tell you the truth.
But it was, for me, an eye-opener.
A lot of things I never expected.
And they love Americans.
I mean, people would stop to take my picture with them, because I was the only American around.
I mean, it was quite amazing.
So I think there's hope there.
And I wouldn't say, you know, human nature has its downside, and you can never tell.
But I think the worst thing that could happen is if we got militarily aggressive, with or without India, with China, and turned their economic development on a more militaristic path, because then they'll have their own military-industrial complex, which will get big and powerful.
And then we'll have done the same thing all over again.
Well, that's the good thing about empires.
It always creates the excuse for the next intervention, too.
The blowback from the last one.
Well, what do you think about my crazy project of...or my crazy idea about a realignment here in America, where people, instead of having John McCain in the center, we have the abolitionists in the center, and we all recognize that.
At the American Conservative, at Antiwar.com, and at Counterpunch, we're all singing the same song here.
Peace and liberty first.
Everything else matters later.
Absolutely.
I mean, can that happen?
Do you have hope for that?
I have hope if we can...
It's finding the resources and figuring the way to do this.
It's difficult because...and I'll go back to this again.
In the end, the two big problems with empires, number one, there are too many people making too much money from it, and number two, there are do-gooders that think that we can bring civilization to the world, advance civilization by force of arms, or being the biggest and the best.
And I'll tell you, that was an illusion.
I believe that was even an illusion with the Soviet Union, that the Soviet Union collapsed from within inside because it wasn't successful.
It had almost nothing to do, from my point of view, with military power.
I don't believe that for a second because I was there in the old Soviet Union, and if you just looked, you could see the damn thing didn't work, for whatever reason.
What were you doing there?
That's an interesting time in that story.
I was there in 89.
I was there to work with a colleague, and it was the end of the Gorbachev era.
I didn't know it was the end, and I was very excited because of all this openness, glasnost, and perestroika, and the whole business.
It seemed like a very hopeful time, and in fact, to their credit, Reagan and Gorbachev, and after them, after Reagan, Bush I pursued a very good policy.
That policy only started to turn around under Clinton, and Clinton and Bush II turned a policy of peace into a policy of confrontation.
It really is enough to make one sick.
That's not true.
The worst thing Bill Clinton ever did was have fun with that girl, like in the headlines.
I never heard of the branch civilians being burned to death by the Army's Delta Force, or the war in Serbia that he launched just to celebrate his acquittal in the Senate, I guess.
Any of the other crimes, the bombing on average of every other day, or every, actually you should take the conservative estimate by Jeremy Scahill, every three days, Bill Clinton bombed Iraq for eight years straight.
I mean, this guy is nothing but a Dick Cheney, and yet history will remember him as the peacetime president who presided over a bunch of really good times before that terrible George Bush came.
Well, you know, when I was there, when I was in Moscow at that time, the thing that really struck me was when you looked out over the city, there were cranes, there were building cranes, you know?
And, but they never moved.
So here was this, these cranes had been built, and that takes a lot of, you know, that's, Karl Marx would call that labor, past labor crystallized.
That's a lot of human effort that went into making those cranes and devising them and getting the materials together and creating them, putting them in place, and then they stood there.
And the only way you could get construction done rapidly was by importing a farm from Finland.
You could see that it didn't work, that that kind of centrally planned economy, at least to date, didn't work.
There was no, and it wasn't going to work, and it didn't matter one fig whether we had armies all over the world or not.
It was the system we had then, and it was better than the system the Soviets had then.
I'm sorry, that's the verdict of history.
Well, and now we're turning our system into their system.
Well, I don't know what we're doing with our system, but we sure have an elite on top that's robbing us blind and has no sense of patriotism in the sense of, you know, I mean by patriotism, a concern for the whole country, not just oneself.
So in any event, what counts is really the economy and the economic development, and that's also what counts for preserving our liberties in the end, too, I believe that.
You know, Scott, I'm sorry, I have to go.
Okay, well, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Okay, well, thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your time.
Keep up the great work.
All right, appreciate it.
Take care.
All right, everybody, that's John V. Walsh from Counterpunch.