02/05/15 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
And on the line, I got Sheldon Richman.
He's the vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
Hey, Sheldon, how's things?
Things are going fine, Scott.
Great.
Glad to be with you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
Man, you got in some hot water with some morons.
Wrote yourself a thing comparing Chris Kyle, the American hero.
American sniper to Adam Lanza.
And not Benjamin, Adam Lanza, Netanyahu, but the actual Adam Lanza from the horrible Sandy Hook masker there.
What could you have possibly meant by that?
Well, what I meant by that, I said I didn't see an essential difference.
People mistook that to mean I didn't see any difference.
Well, obviously, there are lots of differences.
We could spend the day reciting the differences.
For one thing, Kyle was much further from his targets than Lanza was.
But what they had in common was the following.
These two men invaded a place they had no right to be with hostile intentions while heavily armed.
They proceeded them to shoot people who never threatened them.
And these people were defenseless.
Now, that last point probably really gets under people's skin because obviously the kids were defenseless in the case of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting by Lanza.
In what sense were Kyle's targets defenseless?
Well, they didn't know they were being viewed through Kyle's sight when he was performing as a sniper.
He was many yards away.
In the movie, I don't know if it's true or not, in the movie, he shot his nemesis, Mustafa, the Syrian sniper, from more than a mile away.
Yeah, no, that was make-believe just for the movie.
Well, look, Kyle was a stranger to the truth in many areas.
Let's not jump to anything.
Well, actually, I think he's honest about that in the book.
That was the movie that embellished that part.
But the point being that, you know, in the movie, they got to come up with some kind of equal opposite enemy for him to confront.
When in real life, Mustafa was just a rumored sniper out there somewhere.
Otherwise, he's Mustafa, right?
When it's Iraqi snipers killing Americans by shooting them in the back over there, think of how unfair that is.
Well, as I understand it, you know, he only gets a paragraph in the book anyway.
So it wasn't Kyle's doing.
But my point is, his targets were defenseless because they didn't know they were targets.
So they couldn't shoot back in self-defense at Kyle.
And look, if they knew they were being targeted, they would have run into cover.
They were taking cover.
So in that sense, there's a common element between Lanza and Kyle.
No, I didn't say they were identical.
I didn't rank, you know, which was worse.
But I think that Kyle was a fanatical killer.
If you watch the movie, and I'm reading the book now, I understand.
I understand the portrait of Kyle in the book is much less sympathetic than the portrait of Kyle in the movie.
I know people who have read the movie, watched the movie, read the book, and actually thought, you know, that Clint Eastwood, maybe in an attempt to make a good movie, gave him some sympathetic elements, where in Kyle's own telling of the story, along with his co-writers, of course, or probably the real writers, he's not a very sympathetic figure at all.
Anyway, that's why I made the comparison.
And you're right.
It made people mad.
But you know what?
If that sentence had not been in my original article, people would have been just as mad.
If you say Chris Kyle was not a hero, he protected an invading force.
That's what his shooting was all about.
People would have gotten just as mad.
I don't think the Lanza thing made a difference.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the whole thing about it.
And what do you think about the larger phenomena surrounding this movie, compared to, say, I don't know, every other Iraq War movie anybody ever made?
Well, you know, I watched the movie.
I had read a little bit about it.
I didn't read a lot of reviews, but I read some commentary.
And so I went to see it yesterday, so relatively late in the game.
And I tried to go in it without any baggage, just to judge it as a movie.
And I didn't really think it was a great movie.
My attitude was, if this had been completely nonfiction, or as somebody put it, if this had been set on another planet, you know, so there was nobody to recognize or identify with, I don't know, it wouldn't have been getting the kind of attention it's getting.
The fact is, it's about Kyle, whom people do regard as a hero.
It's about a recent war, and it's Clint Eastwood.
But I don't think it would have been nominated.
You know, I didn't see these as an Oscar-winning performer.
But I'm not a movie reviewer.
That's not my main interest.
Look, and I don't think if you judge the movie on its face, you'll necessarily come away with thinking Clint Eastwood was intending to glamorize the Iraq War, which he says outside of the, you know, in interviews, he says that was not his purpose.
He was against that war.
And I don't know that he was trying to really make a hero out of Kyle.
I mean, he has people, look, he has characters saying he was a hero.
People believe he's a hero.
So it's not surprising that would be said in the movie.
But if you look at what Eastwood puts into the movie, it's not all that clear.
I think you can come away with different interpretations, which is what a good, maybe a good movie does.
It lets people argue about whose interpretation is better.
Maybe one's not right, and one's not, you know, and others aren't wrong.
But it's a close call.
You could go in as pro-war and say, and trial and say, I don't like how this was portrayed.
Or you could go as anti-war and say, either good, I like how this was portrayed, or I don't like how it was portrayed.
I think it's like an inkblot.
And there's a lot of stuff there.
You know, there's a key scene that nobody has talked about to my knowledge.
And I've read, I've read a bit about this.
When he's going back, I think, for his third tour, you know, everybody knows there's detention with his wife.
And by then they have at least one child.
He ends up with two children.
She doesn't want him to go back.
They almost divorce.
I saw an interview that he gave on YouTube where he says, I resented my wife telling me not to go back.
We almost divorced.
And even when I came back, we almost divorced.
But there's a scene where he's having a conversation with her.
And I think it's when he's getting ready for the third tour.
And she says, why do you have to go?
And he says, for you.
And by that you, I took not only for her personally, but for America.
She looks at him and says, that's wrong.
That's not, that's not true.
She doesn't buy it.
All his fans believe he was over there protecting America, his own wife, if this were true.
And I need to check the book and see whether he says this.
But according to the script writer and Clint Eastwood, she wasn't buying it.
That he wasn't doing it for her and the country.
He had some other reason to go over there.
And it was a personal reason.
He had some demons.
It's like the guy that says, look, I don't have time to take care of my family.
I have to go fix Iraq.
You know, there's like a phony set of priorities there.
Like you're doing something important.
He's not going to fix Iraq.
Meanwhile, his young kids are growing up without a father.
So that's what I think is going on there.
I don't think it's a movie of hero worship.
Yeah.
Well, and I haven't seen it, but from what I've read of it, they make it pretty clear that.
So I guess it's the funeral of the guy that, you know, his doubt killed him.
Once he stopped believing in the righteousness of our cause, that's what got him killed.
That sounds like a blatant manipulation.
And when his own brother, he sees his own brother getting ready to leave the country.
And the brother idolizes Chris.
He's a younger guy who went into the Marines, not the Navy.
He's clearly kind of messed up and he looks subtly like he's really been shaken.
And as his brother saying goodbye to him, he says, the brother says to Kyle, F this place.
Although he didn't say F.
And Kyle gets him to repeat it because he didn't quite hear it.
And it's like the look on Kyle's face is what happened to him?
How could he possibly say that?
And the brother goes off and goes home.
We never hear any more about him.
I don't know what.
So I don't know.
I mean, you're saying this is the mark of a great movie.
But to me, it just sounds like Clint Eastwood is a coward.
So everybody's supposed to take it as an inkblot.
And so the lesson isn't look at this idiot still refuses to see what's going on here.
The lesson can be taken just as good either way if you're John McCain or if you're Ron Paul.
Well, I didn't say it was a great movie.
I started off saying the opposite.
I don't think it would be getting this kind of attention if we're if we're a completely fictional movie with a fictional war and fictional people set in another time.
I don't think the acting was didn't blow me away.
I mean, I think it was like a fantastic movie.
But it was interesting.
And as and judging, trying to judge Eastwood, it seems to me you can kind of find what you want.
Like I said, a pro war person, a pro war pro Kyle person could love the movie or hate the movie.
And then any war person could love this is good.
Marketing basically is what it sounds like a kind of noncommittal movie about.
And yet, well, we'll talk more about it.
And we got other things to cover, too.
We show the Richmond on the other side of this break.
Check out FFF dot org.
Subscribe to the future freedom.
He's the editor of it.
Sheldon Richmond, FFF dot org slash subscribe.
We'll be right back.
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Man, you should have seen all the liberal journalists.
Worshipping at the feet of the divine King Abdullah for being so brave that he flies his own fighter missions.
Delete, delete, delete, delete.
Yeah, he never did that.
Anyway, talking with Sheldon Richman about so-called American hero Chris Kyle and the movie about him and the reaction to it and all of that kind of thing.
And, you know, very often Sheldon reminded of the phrase of of old Robert Gates when the collateral murder video came out that, oh, yeah, well, all you're seeing there is war through a soda straw.
And that's just a very limited view.
And so basically it doesn't count unless, you know, everything I know, then you can't comment on what all is going on here.
And of course, he had top secret clearance.
But of course, the funny thing about that is all the pro war people, all they look at and certainly all the soldiers, all they're doing is looking at war through a soda straw.
That's why the army makes these small units the way that they make them so that everybody is a blood brother and everything they do is in order to protect each other.
And then it doesn't matter whether you drop them in the middle of outer Mongolia or anywhere else.
The mission doesn't have a damn thing to do with Wolfowitz's stated goals or his actual goals or anything else.
It's all just about keeping Johnny alive, because that's what you owe him for keeping you alive, too.
So how heroic is that?
I don't know.
I mean, in a vacuum, it's great, right?
That's why everybody loves war so much.
There's a brotherly love there that can't be beat, they say.
But again, as you point out, in the larger context, who's invading who here?
Even in the Brian Williams story, that's the big scandal today about him pretending to be shot down over Iraq.
In the story, the guys who were actually shot down told Stars and Stripes, yeah, it was farmers, looked like local regular people who were the ones who shot us down with the RPG.
It wasn't the Baathists.
It was just regular people defending their homeland.
And that was during the initial invasion.
Yeah, and of course, McCain was shot down over Hanoi when he was trying to bomb a power plant in central Hanoi.
He wasn't delivering pizza, and he wasn't even trying to hit a military site, even though that wouldn't change the fact that the U.S. had invaded Vietnam.
So that's true.
You're right.
But at the same time, there was an article by a former sniper in Iraq that was in Salon, I believe, last week, where he said, that's not the war I saw.
So he had a different sort of straw, one that was not quite as complimentary to the U.S. government's efforts as Kyle's.
I mean, Kyle says different things during the movie.
I mean, he says he makes it sound like he's going over to protect America and his wife, and other times he says he's protecting the Iraqis.
He tells her when she says, you need to stay, you have a family.
He says, we have time.
They don't.
Now, that sounds like it's altruism, you know, to help the Iraqis, not what happened to protecting Americans.
So he shifts around and then he goes back to avenge his buddy who got killed.
So he's got all these reasons, different reasons, but they're not based on anything, right?
He watched on TV the towers being hit.
He was already in the military by that time, the Navy, and he believed, I guess, that Iraq knocked down the towers.
But, you know, that's not discussed.
They show him in one conversation with a fellow Navy guy, I guess, a SEAL, who says, like, I don't know what we're doing here.
It's pretty senseless.
And he just, he makes some kind of argument back, and then that's the end of the conversation.
But Kyle gets the last word.
So, look, this is not a movie to see, you know, the merits of the war debated.
So, you know, people shouldn't go to it for that purpose.
It wasn't a documentary.
It was a study of Kyle, fictionalized Kyle.
And, of course, a lot of Kyle was fictionalized by Kyle himself.
So it's hard to know what's true and what's not true.
I mean, it shows him, it shows him, a kid is picking up a grenade launcher off the ground after an adult, after Kyle shoots an adult who's holding it, and it was about to fire it at Americans, American troops.
A kid picks it up, and he's saying, don't pick it up.
Don't pick it up.
Because it makes him out to not want to shoot this kid.
So it gives him this humanity.
I don't know if it ever happened.
I don't know if it's in the book, but it's certainly in the movie.
And he's saying, don't pick it up.
Please don't pick it up.
And then the kid drops it and runs away.
And he's relieved, and he's crying.
He just has this emotional release because he came close to shooting this little kid, but he didn't have to.
That's why I said the movie was very balanced, to give us something to debate.
I think that's what, maybe a good movie maker does that.
He doesn't hammer us over the head with a message.
People generally don't like message movies.
Yeah, but you know what?
The problem is, is you're really smart.
And so you're looking at all this in a real subtle way.
But that doesn't seem to be the popular reaction at all.
From what I read about it, he beats the bad guy, Sniper, and the whole crowd roars.
And then when the movie's over, everyone's all reverent.
This one guy wrote this funny blog about how everyone was whispering on the way out of the theater and all this crap.
They just have a giant Pentagon phallus stuck right in their brain where their thinker is supposed to be.
And now, wow, it's true that somebody who kills people for the US government really is the greatest kind of human.
And hail to the chief and a bunch of, let's go kill some ragheads and a bunch of crap, Sheldon.
You know, when the movie was already in the works, I don't think it was shooting yet.
When it was already in the works, so the script was written, Kyle was then killed at the range by the vet that he had taken out to help.
In fact, that guy is about to go on trial in Texas.
And so they had to append the scene, which in a way, I think, from a movie maker standpoint, probably was, you know, probably wish he didn't have to do that.
And apart from, you know, I don't wish, I didn't wish death on Kyle.
So I'm sorry he got shot at the range.
But in another way, the movie would have been better if he hadn't been shot and killed.
Because the movie was supposed to end and you see the scene.
The movie ends the way, kind of the way it begins, with father teaching son to shoot deer.
Okay, there's an early movie, there's an early scene in the movie where Kyle's father's teaching him to shoot deer.
Now at the end, what would have been the end of this movie, Kyle's teaching his son how to shoot deer.
So it would have left the message, you're right, not everyone would get the same message.
But for me, it would have been, well, here we go again, this kid will grow up to be in the military and kill foreigners too.
The whole ethic all over again.
Now that scene ends up getting overshadowed because Kyle was shot.
They don't show you that, but they then show you the scene where he's going out to the range with this guy.
And then the next thing you know, there's a funeral for Kyle's.
So it overshadows the scene of him teaching his son the way his father taught him.
And anyway, that's what I would, I think that's an interesting point that that scene got lost.
And now I guess, again, I haven't seen it, so I guess I should have something before doing an interview about it.
But from what I've read about it, it's really seen, maybe it's an accident, but regardless, people will definitely be left with the impression that Iraq did 9-11 the way that it's portrayed in here.
And of course, a movie like this gets ideas across in a much more profound way than anything that people just absorb regularly from, you know.
Most people don't pay attention to this kind of stuff, read about this stuff, just kind of everybody knows they found the weapons or everybody knows they didn't or everybody knows Iraq did 9-11 or everybody knows they didn't, that kind of thing.
And it seems like we're going to lose some percentage points to the Saddam did do it after all kind of thing.
And people might not even remember where they learned it from again.
But you know what I mean?
Like movies about history can be really powerful at leading to misconceptions about the way things really happen.
Well, yeah, that's true.
It could leave that impression and it's never set out right.
There's certainly a juxtaposition of his getting ready to be sent off to Iraq after 9-11.
I've been reading the book and in there he's in a unit which he expects will go to Afghanistan after 9-11.
And that's where he wants to go.
And he's mad that they lose out to another team that gets sent instead.
And so they end up having to wait and then they hear they're going to Iraq.
But in the book, I don't recall him saying, oh, good, we'll go get the other nation that knocked down the towers.
I think he just goes where the government sends him.
You know, Jeanine Pirro, the former prosecutor in New York, who's a Fox commentator and a big fan of Kyle's.
She was just celebrating how popular the movie is because people know a real hero when they see it.
She said he was clear who the enemy was.
Those were the ones the government told them to go kill.
This is her defense of Kyle.
She didn't say he knew who did evil to the United States.
No, he knew whom the government told him to go kill.
That's the definition of the enemy.
Well, thank you, Jeanine.
This is the kind of point we've been trying to make.
I'm very happy she sees it, although it doesn't keep her from praising Kyle.
Or the government, right?
Yeah, no, it's occasional.
It occurs to me that people never really get out of that brainwash they learn as children that to kill is wrong unless the government dresses you in green and sends you to do it, in which case it's perfectly great.
And there's nothing to question.
And even God will put his rubber stamp on it, man.
It's all right.
Just like that time they killed all the Nazis.
Don't you remember that?
And I mean, I internalize that is true when I was seven or whatever the crap all I was whenever they taught me that.
But then I figured out better than that by the time I was 15 or so.
But I I sometimes, you know, forget and have to realize again that no, really, people are that stupid.
They're stupid as I was when I was seven.
And I believe that stupid lie that that people aren't human anymore.
If they live somewhere across water from here and your government tells you to explode them to death with a gigantic bomb, it's perfectly good to do that.
It's not only OK to do it, but, you know, like license.
It's a mandate.
That's how you prove what a good citizen you are.
The more than you kill, the better.
And just look at the American people.
You know, Clint Eastwood got him right on that funny bone, you know, got him to react in the right way that the other Iraq war movies didn't quite get him to react.
It seems like to me.
Well, I think it all gets back to nationalism, which I'm writing about now for tomorrow.
Nationalism is a poison.
I mean, in a way, it poisons the brain, poisons the mind, and it distorts thinking.
If you believe that the nation that includes the government, the country, all this is a package deal is sort of a quasi mystical entity that you somehow because you were born here or even if you moved here and became a citizen, somehow owe this reverence and pretty much unthinking loyalty, then you're going to you're going to think the way Kyle apparently did about those, you know, quote, savages over there.
And by the way, he doesn't just mean the people he's shooting.
You know, there's a scene in the movie where his buddy, who ends up getting killed, bought a diamond ring from someone in Iraq for because he wants to propose to his girlfriend.
So he bought a ring there and he's he's razzing him about it.
He said you bought it from savages.
So he's not just talking about his targets.
He's he meant all Iraq Iraqis.
People have criticized me for and other people were saying he meant all Iraqis when he said that.
But I think he did.
All right.
Well, listen, I've already kept you over time and got to go.
But thanks for coming back on the show.
And everybody go and check out Sheldon.
He's at FFF dot org.
This one is reprinted at Reason magazine's website.
Reason dot com.
America's James Bond complex.
The U.S. government acts as if it has a license to kill another great one.
And then brand new out today at FFF dot org is another great historical piece on Smedley Butler.
And the war is a racket book and set of ideas, et cetera.
So please go and look at that, too.
Thanks very much for your time, Sheldon.
Good talk to you again.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Scott.
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