09/27/10 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

Alright kiddos, welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio, so I guess it makes me Scott Horton, yeah, that's right.
Will Griggs on the line, my buddy.
Welcome to the show Will, how are you?
Scott, I'm doing great, thanks again for having me on your program.
So, you know, usually I ask you about the cops, because usually you write about the cops, and man, I gotta tell you, your blog, ProLibertate at FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com is just a heart-breaking thing, man, I just hate reading it, I mean, I love reading your writing because you're such a great writer, but it's, man, it's just infuriating how many plain old regular American citizens are basically just executed by cops, you know, they're the judge, the jury, they're the cop, they're the judge that signs the warrant, and then they're the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and the executioner, all the way through the end of the case, just innocent civilians dropping dead-like flies from local cops all over the society, Will, you drive me nuts, man.
Well, it drives me nuts to write it as well, it's not a very pleasant thing to do, but it's something I feel almost compelled to do, although there are other people doing the same kind of journalism now, I'm happy to say, we're sharing the burden a little bit more, but it's a perfectly infuriating subject, albeit one that's ubiquitous, it's not going away any time soon, either.
No, yeah, and that's the thing that gets me, is it seems like everybody knows that we got a real problem here with the cops out of control, and yet nobody really knows what to do except write a great blog, you know, I don't know how we fix it, you know, we say no more, but then how do we enforce that?
They're the enforcement.
At some point, I think what's going to happen is that we're going to end up with almost an existential crisis for the current order of things as the economy completely craters.
The good news is that there's not going to be as much money sloshing around to be funding activities, the sort we're describing.
The bad news is you got people who are habituated to the use of violence in getting what they want.
So that's one of those crisis meets opportunities type situations, I think.
Yeah, well, and you know what?
Here's the thing, too.
The cops are our heroes.
They're here to protect us from the Muslims.
They're the real enemy, right?
Supposedly, yes.
Yeah, that's the way that the situation is depicted for our benefit right now, that our soldiers, either at home or abroad and right now, they're sort of amalgamated to one great big group of armed paladins of justice and the employee of our government.
That's at least how the depiction is presented to us.
They're the ones who are the thin line protecting us against the teeming Mohammedan hordes.
At least one segment of the supposed conservative movement seems to think that the loudest and most organized, the most passionate element of the Republican conservative constituency seems to believe that we're in a civilizational war with the entire Muslim world.
Whether or not that's the case, it could become it could very well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And it seems to me that there are people with an interest in promoting and exacerbating conflict that are trying to make this into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Well, you know, I'm reminded of the old John Birch Society maps of the world turning red because mostly a bunch of traitors in the American government making sure that Mao won the Civil War and all these kinds of things, which not that I necessarily agree with all that stuff.
But anyway, at least there was such a thing as the freaking Soviet Union and communist China.
Dude, there ain't no Islamic caliphate anywhere.
Every single state where Muslims are the majority is a puppet dictatorship of the United States of America, with the exception of Iran and Syria, period.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they're trying to pick up the spares there.
I think they've got a split that they're trying to pick up as if they're in a bowling alley.
And I think that the unremitting antagonism toward Tehran and Damascus has something to do with the fact that there is at least some element of independence there.
The rogue states, because they're not part of the seraglio of imperial concubines in the employee of Washington.
And I guess to a certain extent, London, the old Anglo-American elite, of course, is the nexus of this entire affair.
But one of the things that I find really remarkably when you talk about this idea of Islam being supposedly the new surrogate communist type menace, you can actually find that type of rhetoric in some elements of the Tea Party movement, some of the more militaristic elements of the Tea Party movement talk about some kind of Islam or Leninist conspiracy here.
One of the things I keep hearing is that this is a bigger menace because there are one point five billion Muslims in the world.
And supposedly they're all united by no desire apart from the burning and apparently implacable desire to kill us or to force us to convert to their religion.
And so they've drawn up this indictment against one point five billion human beings.
And supposedly the people are promoting this have detailed, intimate knowledge of what these people, every one of them, each and every one of them believes what they what they aspire to achieve and so forth.
And no matter how you run the math, it's just irrational to think that one point five billion human beings uniformly is that there's some kind of an ideological monolith are seeking to destroy the United States and that the United States, a population of 300 million people, is somehow withstanding this onslaught.
This is obviously something that loggerheads with reality is the way the rest of us understand it.
But that's the narrative which is being fed and eagerly devoured by people who listen to Republican aligned talk radio and people who are in thrall to the Republican Party.
I suspect that after November 2nd, on November 3rd, a lot of this loses its fizz, but it's going to be doing a lot of damage in the interim.
Well, you know, a friend and I were having this conversation about how people believe whatever the heck they want to believe.
It doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
They rather listen to they rather watch an hour long documentary about Nostradamus and magic powers than listen to this show.
They don't want facts.
They want to they want to believe nonsense, you know.
And he was telling me that his uncle is this brilliant guy.
He's a wonderful guy.
He knows a million things and he's always great to talk to and he's always rational and he always follows the rule of argument.
But when it comes to the conspiracy to enslave us all under Sharia law here in America, just forget it.
He won't define his terms.
He won't say where he found a single footnote.
He has no idea how to even pretend to begin to construct an argument.
All he says is it's all true.
And then he sticks his fingers in his ears and refuses to hear even a question about what are you talking about, man?
Yeah, well, when you take a look at the so-called war passages in the Koran, I've read as much of the Koran as I can get through.
Quite frankly, it's not organized in a way that makes it congenial to those of us who don't accept it as holy writ.
When I read the so-called war surahs, I've come away with the impression that a lot of them talk in terms of the non-aggression principle, that if you're not involved in an outright active war with a Muslim who takes that as authoritative, that there is not a mandate or a license in most of the Koran for what we would consider to be aggressive war, what we would call an ideological or religious crusade to force people to convert or to kill them as penalty for refusal to convert.
And one of the things that I find is that as I have conversations of the sort you just described, people who profess to be experts in Islam, who say that they have read the Koran, when they're exposed to the fact that most of these so-called war verses, when read in context, they're talking about defensive war, will say, well, that's what it says in Arabic, but you have to go back to the original Arabic.
You'll ask them, do you read Arabic?
Are you familiar with the original Arabic?
No, but that's what I have been told.
In other words, they don't know, but they're professing to know.
And the next thing that they will say by way of trying to amplify this argument is that it doesn't matter what it says.
The fact is, most Muslims are illiterate.
They don't know what the Koran says.
They believe what their imams preach.
So why are you bringing the Koran if it's not considered as authoritative by these illiterates that you insist are trying to kill us?
You see, the argument is completely unfalsifiable because it doesn't take place in reality.
Once again, the rest of us are exposed to it.
But for some reason, these people have constructed a narrative in which we're perpetually besieged and we're all but helpless.
They're reveling in a sense of helplessness and weakness.
Right.
And as you know, Scott, from your reading of history, that's dangerous because when that's used to authoritarian politics, helplessness plus a sense of empowerment through the state leads to totalitarianism.
And that's what I discern here.
It puts off a very familiar odor of a sort that polluted the early decades of the 20th century.
And given our parlous economic condition, we're dealing with circumstances that could precipitate into something genuinely awful, ugly and murderous here in the United States.
And it has nothing to do with an actual threat from the Muslim world.
Right.
You're absolutely right.
All right.
Hold it right there, Will.
We're talking with William Norman Grigg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at Freedom in Our Times.
Dot blogspot dot com.
He wrote the excellent book Liberty in Eclipse, which I'm begging you to go out and get and read cover to cover.
We'll be right back.
Talk some more about Islam and the American right.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates dot LRN dot FM and join us on Facebook at Facebook dot LRN dot FM.
All right, Joe, welcome back to the show, Tantai War Radio, I'm Scott Horton talking with my friend Will Grigg.
He's the author of the incredibly important blog, it's got to be in your bookmarks or your footnotes or where you ever keep them.
It's called Pro Libertate.
That's Freedom in Our Time dot blogspot dot com or maybe freedom in somebody else's time.
I don't know.
But it's got to be in your bookmarks or your footnotes or wherever it is.
Or maybe freedom in somebody else's time.
I don't know.
But also he wrote Liberty in Eclipse, which is probably a bit more accurate title for something.
And now, Will, I'm going to go ahead and characterize you.
You're a little bit right wing and you're a Protestant Christian, right?
And you love America, don't you?
I certainly do.
Well, I love it down to the marrow of my bones.
All right.
So then you're not apparently I learned from Frank Gaffney or one of these kooks that the liberals in America want nothing more than to be ruled by right wing conservative Muslims.
And so you you obviously are not part of that plot since you're a conservative Protestant Christian.
I don't believe in being ruled by anybody.
Well, all right.
Simple enough.
OK, but now.
So tell me now, why should it be that I mean, you know how it is, you know, us libertarians who, you know, see through these lies in order to get our point across, we've got to attack the left from the left and the right from the right.
Look at what a bunch of fascists the Democrats are.
And look at what a bunch of pinko commies the Republicans are.
And look at their their pathetic and cowardly and and and I would even say, you know, Marxist level of refusal to be interested in actual facts in order to go along with their agenda.
You know, attack these guys from the right.
Well, call them a bunch of sissies and wimps and cowards.
I think the most effective attack of that sort in context would be to point out that George W. Bush did more to promote Sharia law than any Muslim ruler since Salah ad-Din by invading Iraq and by taking down a secular government and then imposing upon that country a constitution written by American functionaries that enshrines Sharia law as the highest law of that land.
That long suffering country had been host to a very large Christian population that has been sent into exile now as the result of the supposed liberation of Iraq under George W. Bush.
The same thing happened in a sense in Afghanistan, which is really a country only in a geographic sense.
Those people don't have a sense of themselves as part of a uniform nation state.
Their loyalty is to tribe or clan, which I think is a far better arrangement, quite frankly.
But the Constitution inflicted on Afghanistan as the result of the supposed liberation of that country by the United States also when it's trying Sharia law.
But if you take a look at what happened in Iraq, it's particularly striking in that you had probably one of the oldest Christian communities in the world that has been devastated by the supposed liberation of that country.
Right.
The Assyrian and Chaldean Christians lived in Iraq for 2000 years, along with the Druze, the Yazidis.
There's all every single religious minority there has been thrown out.
Yet the Christians in Iraq spoke Aramaic, which, of course, is the language of the New Testament for the most part until it became, of course, Greek and Latin and translation and so forth.
But the point I'm making here is that these Christians were sent into exile as a result of the supposed liberation of their country by a president who conspicuously referred to himself as a Christian in a war to promote Islam that has been promoted as a holy undertaking by many, if not most, of the conservative Christian churches in this country.
They have these military appreciation Sundays in which they heap praises upon American fighting men.
I think that's a misnomer.
You're not fighting if you're bullying somebody.
But American military personnel are extolled to the skies at these military appreciation Sundays.
Every one of the troops that was sent to Iraq, every one of the military personnel dispatched to that country was involved in an effort that consummated in the enshrinement of Sharia.
They fought as soldiers of Allah.
That's the right-wing critique of the so-called right-wing Bush administration and its war in Iraq.
The fact that they have managed to promote and expand the compass of Sharia law is something that not many Republicans are willing to confront, largely for reasons of cognitive dissonance, whether you're talking about something that's congenital or something that's ideologically convenient.
But those are the cold, hard facts.
And we have a larger problem now with radical Islam than we had in the year 2000 or 2001 in large measure because of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Good job, George.
Heck of a heck of a job, Bushy.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I wonder, is there any place in America where Muslims have any political power whatsoever except maybe the city council in Dearborn, Michigan?
That's the only exception I can think of.
And that was the first one that came to my mind.
And I think that's as much a product of of long term sort of ethnic collectivist politics in the region coupled with just full or political corruption in that region.
Yeah.
So, I mean, when we're talking about Sharia in Iraq, that's one thing.
When we're talking about Sharia in America, give me a break, man.
You might as well say the sky is green and the grass is blue.
It's stupid.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is stupid.
It's really a form of derangement, but it's the sort of thing that happens every time we have a year that's equally divisible and you have people who are running for office on a Republican ticket.
One of the go to refrains that they always use, of course, is to try to rally people against some perceived and usually either exaggerated or completely manufactured foreign threat.
In this case, of course, Islam serves that bill perfectly.
Yeah, well, and, you know, again, back to the the Cold War thing, there is no caliphate.
There was a Soviet Union.
There is no caliphate.
There were communists in the State Department.
There are no Muslims with any power in this country at all.
Well, no, no.
The thing that I find really interesting about this manufactured controversy over the so-called ground zero mosque, first of all, is the fact that there is a ground zero mosque.
That is to say that there was in the South Tower of the World Trade Center designated prayer space where Muslim employees of the private firms that were represented in that building that had office space, that building they gathered to pray, they were probably overtaken in prayer when they were attacked on September 11th.
And so their remains are commingled with those of the other victims on that site.
So there already is, if we will, a ground zero mosque.
It's in particulate matter there at that mass murder site.
But when you're talking about Imam Raouf, you've got a guy here who really looks to me like a collaborator, to put it in blunt terms.
He's indecently close to the State Department.
He's been very friendly to the FBI.
As the New York Observer just a couple of weeks ago pointed out in a splendid work of investigative journalism, the people who put up the money for the Qaddafi Institute are hardwired into the CIA and the Pentagon.
And this guy is promoting a message which, as far as I can tell, is one intended to foment inter-religious amity and cooperation.
And yet every time you turn on Fox News, if you're silly enough to consume that or listen to any of the Republican-aligned talk radio programs and this subject comes up, we're always told that these people exercising some telepathic gift just know that this man lusts incessantly to impose Sharia law on this country from some secret readout on the 16th or 17th floor of this Islamic cultural center that may or may not be built.
When people have plied their trough, if you will, to a political party that is entirely propelled by a sense of being besieged and encircled and being helpless, that's the kind of fantasy they grab onto.
And it's almost impossible, short of some kind of Damascene conversion, to take somebody from that frame of mind into one that's more receptive to the way the world actually is.
And I'm finding that many of my relatives are suffering from a very bad case of what we're just describing.
Well, you know, it's been a while since you were a bircher.
And of course, everyone knows I always thought you were the really the only reason I liked the John Birch Society at all was because you wrote for the New American Magazine.
But anyway, going back in history, obviously you're a member with them for a long time.
And the John Birchers are conspiracy theorists.
By definition, the organization is about exposing the insiders who control the country, etc.
But it's always powerful people.
It's always David Rockefeller and the Bilderberg Group and and people who own, you know, massive military, industrial and banking firms and whatever.
So if you're if the birchers are ever demagoguing, they're demagoguing up at power, not down at the weak.
And what bothers I just can't get my head around how much like what I learned in history, this is this reminds me so much of of Germany in the 1930s, where the weak and the powerless Jewish members of our society, they all have secret telepathy and they all are out to get us.
And they're the reason that everything is bad is they're they're the fifth column destroying everything.
They're all in on it together to destroy our wonderful German nation or whatever.
This led to we know what it led to.
Well, yeah, we do know what it led to.
And I think that you can make a case that all you need to do is transpose the terms and some of the social circumstances very slightly.
And you've got pretty much the same ugly song, the same symphony of collectivist ugliness being performed in a slightly different key here.
When you talk about the idea of demagoguing the powerful as opposed to the powerless, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
The idea is that you're supposed to be, if you will, kissing down and kicking up rather than kissing up and kicking down.
Right.
And one of the reasons that I ended up where I am in the Birch Society ended up where it is right now is because we had a disagreement over that.
They wanted to join the ranks of people who were practicing the kiss up and down routine.
And that was the first organization that was supposed to come out.
Robert Welch, the founder of the group, said that whatever we say about the Birch Society, we were not a religious institution.
Right.
That's it, Will.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
Everybody has to go.
With Roick, William Norman Griggs, the book is Liberty and it Slims.
The website is freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
You're the best, man.
Thank you.
God bless you.