07/28/14 – Joshua Hughes – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest is Joshua Hughes, joining us by Skype from the jungles of Costa Rica.
Welcome to the show, Joshua.
How are you doing?
I'm doing okay, Scott.
I'm a little tired, actually, and I kind of have a headache right now, but that's to be expected after a week of not eating.
Yeah, I was going to say, I got an email, everybody, from Joshua last week, announcing, well, first of all, explaining that he's a listener to the show, now an American expat down there in Costa Rica, living on a farm, and has decided to go on a hunger strike.
Exactly what for and for how long?
Well, I should maybe give you a little history about myself first.
I used to be involved in corporate America.
I lived in Oregon, and I was in the security industry.
I helped protect corporations from litigation by shredding all their information, everyone from Enron to Nike to Homeland Security.
So I was on that side of this fence for a little while, and I saw too much, and it really sickened me what was going on.
Really?
Shredding documents was your specialty?
It was.
I was in what started as a small company, and then 9-11 happened, and the security industry went nuts.
We didn't just militarize the police and everything else, we militarized the garbage, too.
Companies started taking that very seriously, because they needed to protect themselves from us.
I was a part of that, and it made me feel really bad once I opened my eyes.
The beginning of the Iraq War, I had a child at that time, my first child, my only child, and man, it really connected me to what was going on, and I tried to make a difference.
I got fired real quick.
They really couldn't have anybody on the inside in that business that wanted to make changes happen, so I tried to start effecting change up there, and man, I got the end of the billy club and the pepper spray more than a hundred times, and I kind of came to the conclusion that I needed to get back to the basics.
I moved to Costa Rica not just out of a real disdain for power and the bureaucracy that's going on up there in the militarized state.
I really needed to start getting down to the brass tacks.
I wanted to build infrastructure, get involved in some answers, not just telling people what they shouldn't be doing.
I came down here, and I've really focused on infrastructure building, like I said, and we've had kind of a free school here, helping people learn how to do back to the basics, get into food production, get into building community, doing politics again, getting back involved in local issues, and I have kind of stayed away from this stuff for a while, but this Israeli aggression on Gaza has really fired me up, and last month I actually had an issue with my own child needing an operation, and I just had a few days of scare where I felt like I might lose a child or what that even felt like, and it really connected me to the people in Gaza even deeper, and I decided last Monday that I wouldn't take in any calories until this current siege, the bombings from the air, land, and sea, sniper fire, all the things that are going on that you inform listeners of so well, I don't even need to really dive into most of that, but I can't take this anymore, and I don't know what to do to affect the people at the top, I don't think I can, but I know this has done something kind of amazing.
To be honest, I've had a thousand people get back to me that care about me, and I'm finding that although they may care about the children in Palestine, people weren't thinking about it personally enough, so I did this to stand up and get those that love me and love their other brothers and sisters in the US to start paying attention to our part in this war, and I read the media, and they say things like John Kerry and Obama say things about how we're not doing enough over there, but we're definitely doing something, we're giving between 500,000 and a million dollars an hour in military or support to Israel, military aid or support to Israel to do these things, so we are an active participant, you know that better than most, and I really honor you and thank you for the information you get out there and the amazing guests you have on, I'm more informed all the time by listening to you, you break through that media glass ceiling or whatever that all these other big mass prostitute corporations are telling us, and I can't believe how inactive so many people are in our country about this, but I can believe it when I look at the information they're fed for the last 66 years about this issue.
Well, thanks, as far as that goes, I appreciate it, I'm trying, I don't know what any ceilings I'm breaking through here, but to the point, I really understand your frustration because like I was explaining on the show earlier to the people, I don't know what to do either, that's why I have a radio show, because it's for lack of any better idea, which has always been the way I've thought of it for 15 years and counting now, man, it's the best thing I know how to do, but I think the reason that hunger strikes really are effective a lot of the time, I don't know every time or whatever, but a lot of the time they can be very effective because it's very clearly and obviously up front, it's a very serious thing, it takes a lot of commitment and at least it does, as you're saying, it piques people's curiosity as what does this guy think is so important that he's willing to do that.
So many people think these issues are like these age-old religious issues, I think that the media wants us to believe that so these are unanswerable problems, but these are very answerable things, we can do something about this, we can cut funding, we can stop arming massive militaries that are attacking people that are throwing stones and molotovs, and I know there's some rockets flying out of Gaza, but you've spoke about this and I wish people would understand how these things actually unfold, because rockets, these are responses to things, this is a symptom of a disease, not the disease.
And I've been hard at work in the infrastructure end here, so a lot of people around me know that I've been committed to creating viable alternatives, coming up with my own kind of anarchy slash socially conscious movement that can give people answers, but this is I've had too much, I can't watch another thousand innocent people and five hundred more children and women get blown into pieces without doing something, and you do one of the most important things you can, and that's educate people, I've learned through the thousands of people that have come through our place here, that once people start to see what's going on, they can crack the code so to speak, and then they can see through the media lies and start making sense of it themselves.
So yeah, this was something I did, not again to think I could affect something like Obama or John Kerry or any of these people, or Netanyahu, they don't care about me, they don't care about babies, they don't care about old women, they don't care about hospitals, they shot another hospital today with a drone, they shot a playground today in a refugee center, killed seven children I think, you know, this isn't something I'm doing to try and make them pay attention, it's something I'm doing to make the people that love me or know me to pay attention.
And I tell you, I've done a lot of actions in my life, and this is the one that's gotten the most attention.
And I don't feel very good, my body hurts, and my mind isn't as clear as it should be.
I'm sorry to rant a little bit, but I've been...
I was going to say, you sound okay.
Well so, you're on how many days into this thing now?
Since last Monday afternoon, and I drink a lot of water, and I have healthy, beautiful water where I live, but...
And I actually haven't felt hunger, I've just felt like a weird, you know, I'm starting to get dizzy, I've been really tired, but I've been conserving energy, so I've kind of kicked back my normal work, my pace of work, and fully committed myself to this issue right now, and educating people.
And I've had an interesting week, I've had so many amazing responses from people that are afraid to talk about this issue, and I've spoken about the American war machine for so many years, and gotten such wonderful response, even from people that don't agree with me politically, but when you talk about Israel, I mean, I've been called a KKK member this week, I can't believe it, how many times have I been called a Nazi?
Totally backwards, right?
And it's really an issue that needs to be reframed, and talked about in a different way.
Let me ask you, Joshua, how are people interacting with you there?
You have a website, or that's on Twitter, Facebook?
I'm really not a fan of the Facebook world, I haven't been on it for years, I think it's mostly a waste of time, and it's a way the CIA overthrows countries, but I have a website I run for my farm here, and it's mostly just been a way to spread the message of permaculture, which is something I do here as an answer, but I've turned it pretty much into my political soundboard for the last week.
Alright, well, hold it right there for a minute, and then we'll come back and get more with Joshua Hughes, American expat in Costa Rica, hunger striking for the gossips.
Don't worry about things you can't control, isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds, but you can fight back.
The Tenth Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is offnow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas, meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to offnow.org, print out that model legislation, and get to work nullifying the NSA.
The hero Edward Snow just risked everything to give us this chance.
Let's take it.
Offnow.org.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, hitting refresh on antiwar.com here.
This number's still 1,139 killed in Gaza so far.
I'm on the phone with Joshua Hughes.
He's an American expat down in Costa Rica, and he's a week now into a hunger strike for the people of Gaza until the Israeli government finally ceases fire, for this round at least.
So I'm sorry, at the break, we were interrupted there, Joshua.
I was trying to ask you, how is it that people are communicating with you?
You said you've got a lot of great response out of it from your community.
Your website is focused on, your typical primary focus is on farming and your certain methods and all that, but you have what, forums there, comment sections, and so you're talking with people about what's going on.
Is that it?
Yeah, we have a blog on there that normally pays attention to not just farming stuff, but yeah, building community, working together, all these things.
This is just the macro part of it, and this isn't something that I should ever leave out of my farming anyway, because it affects all of us.
We're in a pretty small world when you think about it.
Things like Fukushima have proven that we're connected, and there's no getting away from the big issues, even if we want to go live in little islands by ourselves.
So, but I've gotten a great response from most people, maybe 99% of the people have responded to me, have told me things like that they didn't have the confidence to talk about this issue because they would get beaten down by people or called racists, so I'm having a lot of people feeling that power, that it's okay to stand up about this issue now, and as long as you talk about it in the right context, you can talk about this.
So it's been mostly positive, and I'm doing the parts, the things that I don't even hardly believe in anymore, but begging people to call their congressmen and scream at them and call John Kerry's office and call the media organizations and demand some equal time at least.
We don't need to see Netanyahu for 28 minutes and one Palestinian getting carried out on a stretcher for one minute.
You know, this isn't working, this isn't framing this issue properly, so I'm begging people to do whatever they can, and I don't have a lot of faith in the democracy we supposedly have anymore.
We've been convinced one day every four years on a Tuesday is how we make a difference, but we need to scare our congresspeople.
We need to make them pay attention to us, and they may get a lot of money from AIPAC, but they're still afraid of us, and we can create movements.
So I haven't lost faith in that yet, and there's a lot of apathy out there, and there's a lot of misinformation, but when it comes to standing up for children that are being blown apart by the highest tech weapons in the world, we should take a moment, and we should tell our congressmen we're paying attention.
Yeah, no, you're right about that.
I'm not the biggest believer in the democratic process or anything like that, but at the same time I'd be the last person to say it's worthless and that people shouldn't try, because you're right, I mean, AIPAC money buys a lot of TV ads, but it really ultimately comes down to the votes.
And like you said before, with just a little bit of access to some real information, people change their minds real quick about what's going on here.
I've come to discover more and more, I mean, I'm just basically solid in my view now, that virtually everyone who takes the pro-Israel position is living in probably not willful denial of the fact that there's even an occupation going on.
People really do pretend like Palestine is the country next door, and it's a fair fight that they've picked here, and this kind of thing, and the whole kindergartner versus Mike Tyson kind of analogy, is not applied, because they just don't know.
No one ever really puts it to them that way, unless they really see the disparity in power between the two sides, and the facts of the siege and this kind of thing.
So I think you're right that ultimately the American people have access to the truth, and they want something done about it, they can get something done about it.
But this is a very difficult issue, right, because the world has been really set up since World War II, or like you talk about a lot, since World War I, we drew these lines in parts of the world where we needed to control petroleum, we needed to have access to the resources we needed, and we needed to take whatever we felt necessary so we could feel successful and secure.
And those things are coming around, the scale is going to balance, it always will, and it's not going to balance the way that Americans think it will.
It's going to bring us all down, not all up.
And I want to put my thumb on the scale in every way I can.
And again, I don't have a lot, or hardly any faith in elections anymore, but I do think that we can scare our politicians of us, and they should fear us, they should know that we can take control.
There's seven billion plus people, and just a few thousand very powerful people that are doing these things.
And things like Israel, this isn't an accident, it isn't a last moment decision, they must have spent months piling up these rockets and weapons and helicopters and prepping for this.
I've heard they were buying weapons as far back as April, so this didn't just happen.
And I even read this week from some reputable sources that Israel knew, you've talked about this, they knew that these kids were dead, the first three teenagers that were killed, they knew they were dead pretty much right away, and they knew it wasn't ordered by Hamas pretty much right away.
The police chief says it wasn't.
So this has all been propaganda to get us into it again.
And once we're into it, it's too late.
And then like in Israel, man, people there that are resisting it, there are amazing people in Israel resisting this, and they're being beaten.
But you know, it's really insane what's going on over there, actually.
Some of my favorite journalists live in Tel Aviv, and they have bodyguards right now.
Because they're getting threatened by their own, they're not in danger from Hamas, they're in danger from the regular folks in Israel that are whipped up into a lather about this war.
There were buses full of peace activists that were basically blockaded on the road and prevented from attending a peace rally in Tel Aviv, I think just a few days ago.
You know, also there's something that we really need to not miss, and you talk about this a lot, but we're not talking about a democracy in Israel that they're going for.
They're going for a Jewish-only state.
What does that mean to people?
People need to take in what this means.
What if I said we had a Christian-only United States?
That wouldn't make very many people happy.
That would scare the hell out of most people.
So we need to talk about it in that context, too.
This movement, Israel's movement, hasn't been to create a democracy in the Middle East.
If it was, they would let the Arabs and the Palestinians vote that are in their borders, and it wouldn't look like it looks right now.
The government would be much more balanced, and they wouldn't be able to pull this off.
Israel isn't the beacon of hope in the democracy in the Middle East.
In fact, Hamas is one of the only truly elected governments ever in that part of the world, maybe the second or third ever.
So we're helping bomb one of the only.
Not that it was the most open and honest election ever or anything, but yeah, they won it.
They did.
And every time the guys, we don't want to win, win, we go against them.
So we need to get this in context is all.
And I'm not saying Hamas are my favorite people in the world.
I'm about as anti-religious as it gets.
But I find myself allied with people that are suffering.
And it happens to be people in that part of the world right now that are getting the worst of it.
And this is worse than apartheid South Africa.
This is like trying to exterminate people.
And you just have to look at the maps.
Look at the maps of Israel, of Palestine since 1947.
It says it all.
You barely need to talk about it once you look at the map of how their country's dissolved and been turned into these cantons.
And you can't go from one place to another without going through checkpoints and maybe getting shot or thrown in prison without charge forever.
There's thousands of children in jail in Israel without charge.
These are real war crimes going on.
And the mass media doesn't use those words.
And even when they do, they kind of say there might be war crimes unfolding.
Like we need to take a stand on this one on the media.
And again, I applaud you and a couple other people.
I mean, democracy now has been spot on this last few weeks.
I was pissed off at Amy Goodman when she did the Libya thing.
But she's brought me back with this.
She's been solid.
Right.
Yeah.
They've done real good work over there.
And, you know, I mean, come on, if you're like you're saying any honest appraisal, this thing is just a canned hunt.
You know, this is horrible.
This is like the New Jersey State Police versus the prisoners of Attica.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a prison.
It's an open air prison.
It's amazing how out of context this is.
And we need to bring it back into context.
So I took it.
I took this opportunity to suffer a little bit myself.
And I don't even hardly use that word suffer.
But, you know, I'm I come from a privilege.
You sound like you're doing pretty good for a week into this thing.
I was going to say, you know, I hope you don't take this too far.
I'm fired up, Scott.
Where, you know, you're really risking your health because you have I've not been feeling that great, man.primary responsibilities to your own, you know.
Well, you know, but my own includes you and it includes others and it includes it includes children all over both in both Gaza and Tel Aviv.
And I don't I don't want this to lead to the thing it can lead to.
I mean, we're pulling in other countries now to try and we're trying other countries are trying to bring some resolution to this.
But it's like Israel's asking for Iran to get involved.
It's like they're asking for Turkey to get involved because they want regional chaos.
It keeps the war machine going.
And we need to stop that.
And I feel I may sound like I have energy.
But trust me, this is really just because I've been excited to spread this message at when this is over, I need to go lay down.
Yeah, well, and it is over now.
But I thank you for your time, Joshua.
And I thank you for what you're doing.
Thank you, Scott.
And it sounds like it's working, too.
Like you're you're really getting some positive results out of it.
So I really appreciate that, too.
My website is BearDennerHia.org.
Great.
Thanks very much.
Thank you, brother.
All right.
That's the show.
See you all tomorrow.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom.
The monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Edited by libertarian purist Sheldon Richman.
The Future of Freedom brings you the best of our movement.
Featuring articles by Richman, Jacob Hornberger, James Bovard and many more.
The Future of Freedom stands for peace and liberty and against our criminal world empire and Leviathan state.
Subscribe today.
It's just twenty five dollars per year for the back pocket size print edition.
Fifteen per year to read it online.
That's the Future of Freedom at FFF.org slash subscribe.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
You probably prefer taste good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at Darren's Coffee dot com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world.
All specialty premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee.
Order now at Darren's Coffee dot com.
Use promo code Scott and save two dollars.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented Liberty Stickers dot com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Liberty Stickers dot com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And well, everything that matters.
Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.