05/25/15 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the social network and community-based publishing platform for the liberty-minded.
Liberty.me combines the best of social media technology all in one place and features classes, discussions, guides, events, publishing, podcasts, and so much more.
And Jeffrey Tucker and I are starting a new monthly show at Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire.
It's just four bucks a month if you use promo code Scott when you sign up.
And hey, once you do, add me as a friend on there at scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the thing here, man.
I'm Scott.
I got Jacob Hornberger on the line.
He's the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
And today at the Future Freedom Foundation, that's fff.org, they're featuring all World War II articles today.
So Jacob's article is called The Much Coveted World War II.
I like that title.
That's interesting.
But then Richard Ebling, The Causes and Consequences of World War II, The Consequences of World War II by Sheldon Richman, World War II in the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex by Robert Higgs, the great Robert Higgs.
And then even more, Was the Good War Unnecessary?
That's, I believe, Anthony Gregory's review of Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill.
And more.
Oh, even got an article about the internment of the Japanese-American citizens here, too.
So great stuff there today for Memorial Day.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jacob?
Hey, fine.
It's nice to be back, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Very, very happy to have you here.
What exactly do you mean by The Much Coveted World War II?
Well, this is the war, as you well know, it's called the Good War.
It's the war that the interventionists always fall back on.
When you point out that 58,000-plus American soldiers died in Vietnam for nothing, and they were sacrificed in the Civil War in Korea as well, and you've got them involved in all kinds of foreign interventions that have turned out to be fiascos, they always go back to World War II and they say, but what about World War II?
So it's the war they covet.
It's their protective device.
It's one that they fall back on and say, well, if it hadn't been for World War II, we'd all be speaking German today.
You know, that's what I mean by much coveted, that they really covet it because it's the only war that even they pretend makes their case.
Right.
And you know, it's funny because, I guess to me anyway, I don't usually hear that term very often except, you know, in the context of the commandments, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife and that kind of thing, which is a big motivation of war a lot of times, right, coveting what your neighbor's got, that kind of thing.
But then also, World War II, it turns out, as you're using the term here, World War II is the one that is always carved out as the exception to God's rule that thou shalt not kill.
And you're right.
It's not about Vietnam or Korea.
It's always World War II.
And so, you know, I definitely learned when I was a little kid that, you know, yeah, you're never, ever supposed to kill anyone ever, you know, other than immediate self-defense kind of situation, unless you're wearing green and you're serving the flag and the eagle and Uncle Sam, in which case, like that one time when they stopped Hitler, then that means it's OK to kill whoever they say to kill because now they're the authority and more or less saying they're the substitute for God's will, the democratic will of the nation.
And after all, Jacob, how in the hell can you second guess the democratic decision of the American people to take war to the Japanese imperialists and Hitler's Nazi Germans back then when they're the definition of evil and aggressive, you know, action on Earth?
They had to be stopped.
And we're the goodest guys ever, the best ones to do the stopping.
Why not?
Yeah, you make some interesting points.
I mean, there's a sense that the Bible long argued that many Americans have just elevated the federal government to the level of a god.
So the Christians have two gods, one, the real God, and then side by side with the real God in partnership with him is the federal government.
And that's why the welfare state, for example, they're involved in coveting and stealing what doesn't belong to them, taking money from those to whom it does belong and give it to others.
People say, oh, that's not stealing at all.
That's our federal God that's doing this.
How can it be stealing if it's the government doing it?
And it really wasn't a democratic decision to get involved in World War II.
In fact, it was the exact opposite.
The American people, after the horrors of World War I and the total waste of American life in World War I, were almost, not unanimously, but predominantly opposed to getting involved in the European war.
Even after England and France declared war on Germany, the overwhelming sentiment was stay out of this war, don't do it again.
And it was Roosevelt that said, no, I know better.
And he lied to the American people in his 1940 campaign.
He said, I'll never send your boys into another foreign war.
And he was lying.
He was trying to provoke the Germans into attacking so that he could say, we've been attacked, we've been attacked.
This is a defensive war.
And when that didn't work, he goes into the Pacific.
He provokes the Japanese.
He imposes an oil embargo for the specific purpose of having the Japanese attack us so that he can say, this is a defensive war.
We don't have a choice now.
They've attacked Pearl Harbor.
Give me my declaration of war, which, yes, at that point was a democratic decision.
But I would argue, not a truly legitimate one, since it was Roosevelt that provoked the attack in the first place.
Yeah, but Jacob, the Nazis would have taken over the whole world.
Yeah, that's the argument that's always used.
I find it kind of interesting because there's certainly no evidence of that.
The Nazis certainly could not even conquer England.
They could not cross the English Channel with their forces to conquer England.
And the Soviets, I mean, the Germans were always interested in moving east toward the Soviet Union.
They had acquired the Soviet Union as an enemy long before the United States did in the Cold War.
So that's the real irony here, is that the U.S. and Nazi Germany end up with the same official enemy, the Soviet Union.
And so we end up with the Soviet Union winning the war.
I mean, they were the true winners of the war.
They got all of Eastern Europe, half of Germany.
And yet we survive in a war, in a world with the Soviet Union there, you know, promising to bury us and all this.
And yet, you know, we coexist.
I always make the argument the same thing would have happened with Germany.
There would have been a dictatorship over there, just like there was a dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
That doesn't necessarily mean that one nation is going to end up conquering and invading and occupying another nation.
Now, yeah, it always seemed to me that if, like in Pat Buchanan's argument, if the American, if the British, and in fact that FDR is urging too, hadn't turned Hitler West against themselves first, and the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union earlier on and not given Stalin two years longer to arm up after they had divvied up Poland, that surely would have led to war one way or the other between the two totalitarian powers.
And then in that case, the Nazis would have had, it seems to me, I'm just making up stuff, counterfactual kind of thing, but it seems like the Nazis, since they almost succeeded, they would have had a much better chance of actually succeeding in destroying the Soviet Union.
But then nobody can actually, no foreign power can actually occupy Russia for the long term anyway.
So it seems to me like the Nazi empire by then would have been so overextended that it wouldn't have been expected, I wouldn't have expected it to last anyway, or certainly not to outlast Hitler's lifespan.
Yeah, I agree with you that, you know, there's this common conception that war and conquest and occupations of foreign lands make a nation stronger.
Actually it's the exact opposite.
It weakens a nation.
And we see that weakening the United States today where we have this overextended empire all across the world.
We got out of control spending and debt, inflation around the corner.
And the same thing would have happened with Germany.
And Russia's cold.
Yeah.
It's really cold.
Really cold.
And to maintain supply lines that long, it would have been extraordinary.
But let's face it, even if it had been the case where Germany stays in the Soviet Union, why does that matter?
That doesn't make them stronger.
It doesn't mean that all of a sudden they're going to cross the oceans.
I mean, people forget how enormously difficult it is to cross the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean with sufficient military force to invade, conquer, and occupy the United States of America.
It's virtually impossible.
You need hundreds of thousands of ships, millions of troops, airplanes, and everything.
Germany certainly never had that.
The Soviet Union never had it.
The Chinese never had it.
And they still don't have it today.
There's absolutely no danger of that.
All right.
Hold it right there.
When we come back, we're going to talk about saving democracy from totalitarianism, though, in the war.
Right?
It's Jacob Orenberger, FFF.org.
Democracy.
That's what Obama said this morning in his speech.
We're fighting for democracy.
Hey, Al Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at Darren'sCoffee.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'sCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and you get free shipping.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Talking with Jacob Orenberger.
It's Memorial Day.
And we're trashing American participation in World War II.
The holy war.
The good war.
The best war.
And I got to get back to this because I'd like you to address it more ways if you could, however you can, Jacob.
We're talking about the Nazis here, man.
Is there never a time in the Imperial Japanese?
They were the Nazis of China.
You know, they're freaking horrible.
These guys are meaner than anybody since Tamer Lane.
Murder.
Men, women, little bitty babies.
You know, Gestapo rounding up people in the center of town and machine gunning them to death all damn day long.
Is there never a time when Americans who we at least like, think, are better than that might just go ahead and bring violence to somebody like the Nazi regime and put an end to their existence and consequences be damned?
They got to be stopped and then we'll worry about what happens after that.
No?
Well, the problem is, is that whenever the government does that, the results are always worse afterward.
I mean, we end up getting rid of Nazi Germany.
But guess who controls Poland, Eastern Europe, half of Germany?
The Soviet communists.
And then we get this huge cold war with ever increasing military budgets and then the war in Korea and Vietnam and then the war on terrorism.
So, you know, just because you get rid of one bad thing doesn't mean that you're going to end up with a good situation.
You always end up with a worse situation.
And I like the vision of our founding fathers.
They said, look, America recognizes that there's a lot of bad things in the world.
There's dictatorships, there's famine, there's tyranny, there's horror all around the world.
But that this government, and this was expressed by John Quincy Adams in his Fourth of July address to Congress in 1821, he says this government, the American government, is not going to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
That instead we're going to build a model society of freedom here at home, but we're going to have open immigration so that if people are suffering tyranny, oppression like in Nazi Germany, the Jews, etc., they have a place to come to, no questions asked.
Now what happened was the exact opposite.
When Hitler offered to let the Jews out in the 1930s, the U.S. government said no.
This was under the Franklin Roosevelt administration.
They said now we have immigration controls, we have immigration quotas, so no, we will not let the Jews from Germany come to the United States.
So they've perverted our values.
They've turned them upside down.
They want to isolate the American people, the private sector, with embargoes and sanctions and so forth, and they want to unleash the national security establishment with bombs and missiles and assassinations and torture on the people of the world.
I think our founders had it right.
So tell me this, how come after World War I they were able to more or less, I think, so the story goes, dismantle the military industrial complex and turn the weapons factories back into tractor factories for productive use?
And how come after World War II, no dice, they had to stay, they had to just keep finding enemies and build their nuclear arsenal and, you know, threaten all of mankind with extinction with their madness and all their welfare collection that they've done this whole time.
What was it about World War II, just the size?
That is an absolutely fascinating question.
I wish every single American would ask that question and then reflect on it, because the tradition was that there was always this antipathy towards standing armies in American history.
If you go back to the founding fathers, we've got quotes by the founding fathers on our website at www.fff.org, just type in Standing Armies FFF and you'll see them.
They hated standing armies.
They understood that big standing armies are a threat to your society, to the freedom and well-being of your society.
So whenever there was a war, there was a dismantling of the standing army, the wartime army, after the war was over, because Americans understood, we don't want this way of life in America.
If it's necessary for war, fine, but once the war is over, everybody goes back into the private sector, or most everyone.
That was the case with World War I as well, as you point out.
In World War II, the militarists, the Americans that wanted a military way of life in the United States, realized that this was their opportunity to have a permanent military establishment, just like the Soviet Union, just like the totalitarian countries that we were opposing.
In fact, a little known fact is they started building the Pentagon, the largest building in the world, even before we got involved in World War I, even before World War II, before Pearl Harbor.
So as World War II is winding down, the military establishment, the OSS, the intelligence element in the government, said, we don't want to dismantle.
And so they come up with the Cold War.
They start provoking and antagonizing and insulting their allies in World War II, the Soviet Communists.
And they order them to vacate Eastern Europe when they had turned over Eastern Europe to the Communists as part of the deal at Yalta and Tehran and the other conference that they had had.
So now they had the perfect opportunity to say, we have to change America's way of life here in a very dramatic way, a very fundamental way.
Big standing military establishment, military industrial complex, CIA, later the NSA.
And Eisenhower pointed this out in his farewell address several years later.
He had been the commander of all Allied forces in World War II.
And as he's leaving the presidency, he says, this way of life is totally new to the American experience, this military industrial complex.
And of course, he was referring to the CIA as well.
He says, this is not part of America's structure.
And make no mistake about it, he said, this is a grave threat to our liberties and democratic processes.
And of course, it is.
Yeah, and you know, the thing is, too, for Americans, they're just never exposed to anything like a body count of how many people their government has killed since World War II.
And it is in the millions and millions.
Just of Iraqis, it's at least a couple of million in the last 20 years, especially if you go back 30 years to Jimmy Carter hiring Saddam to invade Iran back then.
But and all the Kurds that Ronald Reagan paid him to kill and all of this anatomy, it adds up big time.
People just don't want to confront that whatsoever, that, you know, our flags are a different color than the German Nazis flags.
But and, you know, it's not really Nazism, but it is fascism.
And it is.
And what do you call, you know, mercantilism at war, at permanent war?
It's a fascist empire.
It's exactly what we claim we were trying to kill.
Yeah, it's it's a fascinating phenomenon, this glorification of the militarism.
In fact, I want to recommend a great book that I just finished reading.
I mean, this is a fantastic book on World War II and the aftermath.
It's called The Good War That Wasn't by a guy named Ted Grimsrud.
And it's it really puts everything we're talking about in a in a nice, easy to read synopsis of what was going on with World War II in the aftermath.
And he talks about this militarism as part of our culture now.
There's this glorification of the military.
It's a cancer that that and it's been a fantastic propaganda and indoctrination campaign by the national security establishment.
It starts in the first grade where children are inculcated with this notion that the military, the soldiers are doing great things, you know, a force for good in the world.
And so people don't they they lose this ability to critically think, to analyze, to say, hey, wait a minute.
The United States invaded Iraq, a country that had never attacked the United States.
And they glorified it and said, look, man, these are good soldiers that are killing people that are that are resisting their their invasion.
And the whole idea of of you don't invade countries that don't attack you.
This is wrong.
This is what other totalitarian nations do.
That has just been wiped out.
There's been this this perversion of American values, of American principles that Americans don't do these kind of things, torture, regime change, operations, assassinations.
Now everything is praise the troops, praise the troops just, you know, one breath is praise the Lord and the other breath is praise the troops.
And it's really perverted our values and our principles.
Scott.
Yeah, man, it's the most cynical thing.
I mean, in Democrat years, too, but especially under George W. Bush, where he just basically demanded that the entire right half of all of American political life line up behind him to defend torture and a bunch of people who had never been in such a position to defend torture before said, yeah, you're damn right, you wimpy Democrats.
Torture's great.
And all this and just, you know, corrupted the hell out of tens of millions of people by demanding that they line up.
Otherwise, you're Michael Moore, you know, big fat communist, hypocrite, coward.
And so, you know, it worked.
It worked.
And, you know, you can't calculate the degree of corruption of the, you know, whatever so-called collective psyche of the people of this society.
It changed who, quote unquote, we are.
And I mean, we in a way much more literal than when people say that referring to the government.
But I mean, our society became just at the very least, people don't care about it.
They take it as a given.
I couldn't agree with you more.
I mean, as Americans, we stand, we're supposed to stand for something bigger, something better, something more noble.
And they, they perverted it all with this torture, rendition, invasions, assassinations.
They've turned it all upside down.
And now get this.
You're not going to believe me, although, yeah, you will.
But it's shocking enough.
President Obama marks first Memorial Day in 14 years without a major U.S. war.
We still got troops in Afghanistan.
We got troops in Iraq.
We got air wars in Iraq, fighting on both sides in Yemen.
Still drone bombing Syria, supporting the fascists, no longer supporting the the Mujahideen in Libya.
We're now switching back to the fascist military dictator Qaddafi style dictatorship there.
Still supporting the Mujahideen against Assad in Syria while we're supporting the Iraqis against the Mujahideen in Iraq.
And but not that we there are any wars on or anything like that.
We got we're training the Ukrainians so they can go back to war with Russian backed rebels and in eastern Ukraine.
But thank goodness it's now the return to normalcy, according to Barack Obama.
We can celebrate this Memorial Day at peace.
Jacob, what do you think?
Well, the people on on whom the bombs are falling, they would probably disagree.
And the assassination attempts and the drones and so forth that maybe he defines war is that if American soldiers aren't getting killed, it's not war.
If all they're doing is killing people with with the drone assassinations, the bombs that are dropping in Iraq, that maybe that they consider that's not a real war when foreigners are dying.
But but it's killing nonetheless.
I mean, it's getting people increasingly angry at the United States.
So you have this constant threat of a terrorist attack out of retaliation, which means they got to take away our freedoms and need the secret surveillance schemes.
They need the NSA and so forth and and increasingly infringements on our privacy and liberties.
You know what we're trying to do, Scott, I mean, really, the libertarians are the light out of this darkness is all you've got to do is come to the realization that you don't need this huge Pentagon military establishment, CIA, NSA, to keep the nation secure, that in fact, they are the root of the insecurity, that if you dismantle this thing, you've actually got a more powerful nation, because history has shown that when you've got a weak government, you have a powerful nation.
When you have an overarching, powerful government, you have a weak nation because you end up with weak citizens.
That is Jacob Hornberger.
He is the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation there at FFF.org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show, Jacob.
Good to talk to you again.
It's always an honor to be with you, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Phone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, XKeyscore, Boundless Informant.
Hey, I'm Scott Hornberger here for offnow.org.
Now here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
In the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again, and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy, but the offnow project of the Tenth Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place, in state after state.
I've lost count.
More than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something.
Something important.
Something that can work, if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.
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 libertystickers.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.
Libertystickers.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.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
Since 1989, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty, and free markets.
Sign up now for the Future Freedom, featuring founder and president Jacob Horenberger, as well as Sheldon Richman, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and many more.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's fff.org slash subscribe, and tell them Scott sent you.