06/01/10 – Thomas E. Woods – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton show.
I think I'm going to call it today.
It's the third hour of anti-war radio here on the Liberty Radio Network.
And let me introduce you to my friend, Tom Woods.
Uh, he's the author of more books than I can name for you here, but here's some 33 questions about American history.
You're not supposed to ask.
We, who dared say no to war, the politically incorrect guide to American history, who killed the constitution, the church and the market.
And, uh, probably the most important, if I can choose would be melt down a free market, look at why you're broke.
Well, that's my subtitle there, but, uh, really I think the subject today is going to be, we, who dared say no to war, which, uh, Tom co-edited with Murray Polner.
And it's a collection of essays from all of American history in opposition to mass killing.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
How are you doing?
I am great, Scott.
Always glad to be with you.
Well, you know, let me just emphasize to you again, how important this book is to me.
It's a really incredible stuff.
And you have all of the very best things in there, everything I would have recommended plus everything I never heard of and, uh, beginning with, uh, Daniel Webster's denunciation of, uh, James Madison's attempt to conscript everybody for the, uh, the aggressive war against Canada back in 1812.
Right.
And that, that is such a great speech.
You can almost forgive all of the rest of Daniel Webster's career, just for that beautiful speech and for lines that you just cannot imagine anyone uttering today when he says something like, uh, where does it say in the constitution that the federal government can take parents from children or children from parents and send them to fight in any absurd war that the folly or wickedness of government may employ them?
I mean, no one would say that today, but what a great line.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I know you would say it today.
Well, sure.
But, uh, I'm not sitting there in that one.
And maybe, maybe Ron Paul would say it, but I was going to say, I'm not in the house of representatives, fortunately or unfortunately.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fortunately, for sure.
For everyone.
Um, all right.
Now, listen, uh, you and I both have something terrible about ourselves in common, and that is that at the time we supported the mass murder of Iraqis in 1991, based on what?
Well, based on, you know, in 1991, I was, uh, finishing my freshman year of college.
Uh, and, uh, so I have less excuse than you have, cause you were still in high school and nothing anybody does in high school can ever be held against it.
But I was in college and basically it was because I, I, I was a, without realizing it, I was basically a neocon.
I, I, I, you know, I sort of liked Rush Limbaugh and I didn't like the liberal and like Mike Dukakis.
I didn't like all the people I was told to dislike.
Now, some of those people I was told to dislike, I, I still dislike, like they were wrong, but I sort of thought to myself that, you know, if you're not some kind of commie, then you support American foreign policy.
I mean, what's the matter with you?
It's the military, it's the flag.
It's what made this country great.
I mean, it was every, every bit of propaganda that we were all taught.
I just, I absorbed it.
I mean, I didn't believe the propaganda about taxes and capitalism.
So I had some independent thinking, but when it came to the military, well, for some reason, everything I believed about government and they're liars and they're incompetent and they're evil, that just went out the window.
So whatever the Pentagon tells me, I'm going to believe that.
And I'm going to dig up evidence to support them, even after they've abandoned some of their lies, I'll still be out there trying to justify them.
Things that people do for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars today.
That's what I was doing back then.
But what hit me one day was I just, when I observed how this war went on, we got the impression that this was a, we got a very sanitized view of this war, right?
That, you know, that our, our guys hardly were hardly affected by it.
And that's basically true.
And that we had all these smart bombs.
And so they were just attacking the military installations and it was just super.
Well, number one, we now know that this whole, this whole, you know, that the smart bombs weren't so smart.
We know that the Patriot missile, that that was a whole lot of propaganda.
The Patriot missile is actually extremely inaccurate and did a lousy job, contrary to what we were told about that.
But in particular, what I just remember are images of, or just stories of retreating Iraqi soldiers.
I mean, a lot of whom are just kids who've been, you know, who are in the army because this, this is what they're forced to do.
And, you know, they're just scared kids trying to surrender and basically getting napalmed and killed in mass numbers, just a slaughter of people.
And, and even though, and obviously there were civilians killed, but even though these soldiers were soldiers and therefore by the rules of war, they're legitimate targets, well, they're still human beings and you kill them and you've created widows and orphans in some cases.
And so it still seemed to me like this requires some kind of moral justification.
And it just seemed grotesque to me that I don't know how many, but it's 150,000 or more people killed in this war.
And we're having these big parades in our first world country back home while we've just created a third world country in the Middle East that had been a reasonably flourishing, sophisticated country with a pretty good healthcare system, you know, reasonably decent civil society.
As long as you stay out of Saddam's way, you could live a decent life in that country that was destroyed.
And I thought, what are we doing?
Have a wave in our stupid little yellow flags, you know, I've got yellow ribbons and we've got Bob Hope specials celebrating what seemed to me to be a slaughter.
I like I, but yet I still felt like, well, the U.S. government did it.
It's got to be right.
And I went to one of my professors and one of my professors was one of these liberal new republic types who supported the war, even though he was on the left.
And I said to him, you know, how, how can we justify this?
I mean, this is an unbelievable amount of killing.
How in the world, like there was no other way to solve this problem.
How can we justify this?
And he could not give me an answer.
He started yammering on about oil and stability and whatever.
And I thought, you're going to tell me this.
You're going to give me words that somebody studies in international relations class.
And that's that's what you're going to put on the face of this thing.
But it wasn't for a few more years that I finally just decided if this government is run by liars and thieves and killers, and I don't trust a word they say on anything else, then I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their monopoly on the use of military force.
I'm just not going to do it.
And I don't believe that that's anti-American in any way.
Excuse me.
And so basically it was that.
It was just thinking over and mulling over, can I justify this?
Can I, can I think of any moral justification for doing this over something about some dispute that Saddam Hussein has with the emir of Kuwait?
I mean, come on.
All right, well, let me put my mea culpa in here.
I was in ninth grade and I just had the typical, you know, adolescent I like explosions because they're cool looking kind of thing going on there.
And Iraq to me was nothing but a shape on a map.
It wasn't a place where, you know, if you were there, it would seem like the earth was flat and you were standing on top of it just like anywhere else.
And there are people walking around and that kind of thing that didn't even exist to me at all.
And, uh, what cured me was one George Carlin and two, the very prettiest girl, so way too good for me by a million miles at my high school said, Oh, that war was a farce, a slaughter.
And I said, Oh, I have to stop.
And then I guess I saw George Carlin after that.
And he explained, you know, I don't get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags.
I consider those to be symbols and I leave symbols to the symbol minded.
He said that, that's, that's good stuff.
And, and, and, you know, you can't say these things because you're not, you know, you're, you're with the, the terrorists you're with the, I mean, this is, I mean, that is so unbelievably juvenile that I'm, you know, you can't even acknowledge it, but now I hold it, hold it right there, Tom.
Uh, everybody I'm talking with Tom Woods, uh, Mises Institute scholar, co-editor of we who dared say no to war.
We'll be right back after this break.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio, the third hour for the first time here on the Liberty Radio Network.
Thanks again to Mark and Ian and, uh, the whole free talk live circle of friends or whoever you people all are who, uh, help make all this possible, especially Ian, of course, and, uh, back to, uh, my friend Tom Woods on the phone.
He's of course, a scholar at the Mises Institute and the author of a great many books.
Uh, we're discussing today, uh, well, we're using as a basis of discussion, at least today, uh, the book he co-edited with Murray Polner called we who dared say no to war, a chronicle of the very best anti-war American anti-war writings from, uh, all of our history and our history is what I want to ask you about now, Tom.
Uh, Kelly Vlahos has an article today on antiwar.com called reflections on rolling thunder.
She went and covered this event in, in, uh, Washington, DC yesterday for Memorial day.
And she writes here that quote, except for a few stray years after Vietnam war is, and has been the apotheosis of what it means to be an American, the lifeblood of our collective experience, the test of our strength of a nation, it's a religious experience, one that demands sacrifice and unconditional faith and a set of beliefs, it provides idols and saints and holy days too.
And she's really hitting on, on the importance of war in the civic religion, such as it is in our country.
And it seems to me, Tom, that, uh, the more war we wage, the less bill of rights we have.
And that without the kind of ancient history that ties people together in countries around the world, we're supposed to, what we have in common, I thought was the declaration of independence and the bill of rights that we all commonly agree to those things as the bottom line, no matter what, that's our social compact.
That's what makes us Americans.
But instead we don't believe in the declaration of independence and we don't believe in the bill of rights anymore.
And it seems like all we have left is a ring of fire to believe in.
I mean, for example, when we've talked in the past about the fact that you're, you're flying across country and there's some military people on the plane and that gets announced and everybody applauds, everybody applauds, even the people, there have to be people on that plane that oppose the war.
Right.
But they, they applaud anyway.
So in other words, okay, I might oppose this particular war, but the idea, the institution is still good.
Even though almost just look back consistently at the interventions, they've all been for dumb or propagandistic reasons.
They've all led to unimaginable horrors.
I mean, just the very idea that a politician utters the word war and then all moral rules just fall aside.
Well, it's war, you know, it's war.
That's, and that somehow that's a, that's an answer to moral questions that suddenly what would otherwise have been murder just becomes public policy and everybody just accepts this.
And so, and it seems like just the other day it was Memorial Day.
We went to play mini golf.
If I had been active duty or retired military, I would have played free mini golf.
Now, I mean, it seems to me, I mean, like, why is this one profession honored above all others?
It's because people still have this lingering sense of two things.
One, that the military really is all about defending them and that without them, you know, we'd all be speaking Japanese or something, but the second thing is that they believe this pernicious idea that we are the government.
This, this old Rousseauian idea.
There is no separating the people in the government.
They are the government that whenever the government does something to you, it's really you doing it to yourself.
This is the sort of civic myth that keeps the thing going.
And it's, it's all us.
We are the government.
Barack Obama is us.
And so if we are the government, then well, the government shock troops, the military, that really, that's really, we, that's us.
Yeah.
Woodrow Wilson identify themselves with it.
Woodrow Wilson, when he signed the conscription act for world war one said, he described it as the American people volunteering at once and mass.
Yeah.
Isn't, I mean, how creepy can, can you get, I mean, this should be, I mean, if you really were like a really old time, old timey conservative of, of, of whom there are only a handful left, you would be appalled and creeped out by that type of language, whereas instead that type of language that would have been viewed as leftist and revolutionary in the old days is held up as pure 100% Americanism by the neocons today.
Yeah.
Afraid so.
Well, so, uh, where does that leave us?
You know, this is what they say that, uh, you know, weapons of mass destruction was the smokescreen.
What they really wanted to do was wage war for war's sake, because that's what they call national greatness is, you know, this is what defines us.
This is what William Crystal and all these weirdos believe.
It's all, that's, it's, it's not lamentable that this is what we all have in common.
That's, it is what's good about us.
No, I, and don't forget that, you know, if, I don't know how you can rank in terms of insanity and evil things that Jonah Goldberg says, but I, I'll never forget his statement back around 2002 or three or four that, uh, you know, look, the fact is, you know, going to war with Iraq, that's what we have to do, you know, because we, we all know we got to go to war with somebody and every once in a while, we got to just pick up some piece of crap, little country and throw it against a wall to show it.
We mean business.
Yeah.
Paraphrasing Ledeen.
That's the Ledeen doctrine as reported by Jonah Goldberg there.
And notice it doesn't mention anything about widows and orphans.
It doesn't, I mean, these people are garbage to them.
And in fact, with the Afghanistan thing, if there had been a terrorist cell in Cincinnati, would we have bombed Cincinnati?
We would have figured something out.
We would have figured something out short of bombing Cincinnati.
But when it's Afghanistan, well, you know, these are towel heads.
These are, uh, you know, these are weirdos, you know, they're just backward.
And so you would think that would be reason not to bomb them because they're impoverished and vulnerable.
Like that would be a reason not to bomb, but because they're different because they're, you know, they're not on this, on our side of the, uh, you know, they're not within our borders.
We can be, we can treat them like garbage, just rain bombs down on them, doing something we would never do to ourselves if we had to get rid of a, of a terror, an alleged terrorist cell.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Thomas Friedman explained to Charlie Rose that, uh, a lack of American intervention in the nineties, uh, had allowed this terrorism bubble to form just like the stock market bubble, where they had this inflated belief over there in the Muslim world, that they could just attack us without consequences for no reason, of course.
And that what America needed to do was bomb anybody.
He said it could have been Egypt, could have been Saudi Arabia.
It could have been Pakistan.
We decided to go from Baghdad to Basra, kicking in doors, terrorizing people and killing them just to prove we mean business.
And the fact that not one Iraqi had anything to do with the September 11th attack on our country had nothing to do with it.
From Baghdad to Basra, people have to, have to die to show how tough Tom Friedman is.
Yeah.
Who's, who's a respected New York times writer, respected author.
The most respected according to, you know, elite opinion polls.
Yeah.
And, and that makes you respected.
But if you are consistently against this and you say, I'm sorry, there is no cause that can justify this type of evil.
Then you are the crank, the extremist, the, the, the dreamy idealist to the whatever, you gotta be more like Tom Friedman, Scott.
Yeah.
Well, you know, uh, Chris Floyd wrote a great piece back then called Bush's Alderaan.
And it was about how, you know, Afghanistan is too remote to make an effective demonstration, but don't worry.
We'll deal with your rebel friends soon enough, which of course they never did get around to killing Ayman al-Zawahiri, not to compare him to Luke Skywalker or anything.
Uh, and then they went ahead and they blew up Alderaan, Iraq, to make an example where people could really see it, where there were actually buildings tall enough that it would be impressive to destroy them with bombs.
Whereas there was basically nothing to bomb in Afghanistan.
And then meanwhile, these people say, well, you're soft on terrorism if you don't support the war in Iraq.
Well, leaving aside the whole war on terror stuff, what in the world did that even have to do with the war in Iraq?
I mean, nobody believes that stuff anymore.
There was an Al-Qaeda tie.
Even if there wasn't an Al-Qaeda tie, does that justify displacing 4 million people, killing who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people?
Like there's no other way other than this.
I mean, you cannot, I cannot believe that a civilized person goes along with this, but you wave a few flags, you sing some songs.
And apparently people will believe anything and then talk about how wonderful, great Americans they are.
As I've said before, Scott, bankruptcy will be the best thing that ever happened.
Yeah, here, here.
All right.
Well, the books melt down and we who dared say no to war.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Tom.
My pleasure, Scott.
Everybody, the great Tom Woods from the Mises Institute.
We'll be right back after this.