All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Eric Margulies, why he wrote War at the Top of the World and also American Raj, Liberation or Domination?
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
I'm doing too many things, and of course, watching events in the Middle East with constant interest.
Yeah, there's so much going on.
But I want to talk about history.
Thirty years ago, last weekend, was the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And so that was about a year into the initial beginnings of the breakup of the USSR.
I think it was in the fall of 88, was when they first let people across the fence from Hungary into Austria, was it?
Oh, I don't remember the exact date, but I remember the event vividly because I was in Europe when that was happening.
I had been covering the Soviet Union, fascinating period, and what the French call fin de regime, or the end of the regime in Moscow.
All kinds of things were happening.
I was the first journalist to get into KGB headquarters and interview the heads of the KGB.
I saw things that people hadn't seen before.
I had a very good view of Moscow, and then I was in Western Europe, and just in time for the fall of the wall and that very historic event.
Yeah, that's amazing that you got to be there for that.
Yeah, I was just 14, I think, at the time, but I was aware that, wow, this is really cool to see on TV, the end of this massive empire.
And I guess for people who are too young to remember it at all, could you remind them about how many countries are we talking about got set free overnight here in this unbelievable, what they called it the Velvet Revolution, was the name, I think, just in Czechoslovakia.
But that really kind of stood for the entire thing, right, where the USSR just went poof.
Well, most prominent in the fall of the Soviet Empire, or the Warsaw Pact, was, of course, East Germany.
Russians used to joke that the only people who could make communism work were the East Germans.
And even they failed in the end.
The Czechs, Hungarians played a very important role, and of course, the Poles, who we mustn't forget, who really kicked the events off with the blessings and guidance of Pope John Paul.
So the whole Soviet Empire was shaking and eventually came crashing down.
You know, I think it's so funny that in this story, the communists were the crusty old conservatives and the right wing were the radicals who were trying to rise up and overthrow them in the revolution from below, a little bit contrary to the typical narrative.
It is indeed.
The Soviets had become the force of reaction in the world, and their sins caught up with them.
You know, everything was self-inflicted, and the peoples of Eastern Europe, who had been given to the Soviets practically on a silver platter by Franklin Roosevelt, suddenly had enough and rebelled and called out for the same freedom and the same lifestyle that Westerners were enjoying.
Well, and it really did prove, I mean, I don't think there was really much doubt in the United States, but there was really no question whatsoever that every single one of those states wanted to be free from the Soviet Union at their very first opportunity.
They weren't part of that alliance or communist system willingly at all.
Of course, Scott, I was traveling through Eastern Europe at the time when the Soviets were still occupying power.
And you know, I was in Budapest watching Red Army officers in boots and riding Jodhpurs, walking down the streets in Budapest.
It was really remarkable.
But you know, you can say that the Warsaw Pact was the enforcing mechanism used by the Soviets.
They didn't trust any of the members of those Warsaw Pact if war had come.
But at the same time, NATO was the enforcing power of the rest of Europe.
And I can tell you that the East Europeans disliked the Warsaw Pact more than the Western Europeans disliked the night NATO.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's pretty obvious.
But then again, so let's talk about that angle here, because, you know, there's this famous article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times from 1998, called Now a Word from X.
And X, of course, is George Kennan, the godfather of the containment policy from his famous article in Foreign Affairs on the sources of Soviet conduct, which was written anonymously, but everybody knew it was by him.
And this was the whole thing.
And it's a great piece.
I mean, everybody ought to take a look at it.
And it's about why not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe.
But the core of his argument is that, don't you understand?
These are the people who overthrew the communists for us.
This isn't still the Reds only sort of lesser.
The Reds are gone.
These people are our friends.
And we owe them eternal thanks.
And the last thing in the world we should be doing is rubbing their nose in the other guy's failure.
You know, when they're the good guys in this story, we should be doing everything we can to be getting along with them.
And I just wondered if anybody understood that, you know, outside of people who were that old.
It seems like the whole younger generation of Cold Warriors, led by the neocons, were the same ones.
And the neoliberal, you know, the Cold War Democrats, too, in the Clinton years, were the ones who were leading this whole push.
And just ignoring the fact that they're not the Soviets anymore, therefore we should treat them as our friends to the best of our ability.
Well, you know, at the same time, I wrote a series of columns that never became famous, but were nonetheless to the point of saying what a grave mistake it would be to extend NATO east, that we had a God-given chance to not only end the Cold War, but to achieve a peaceful stability with Russia and get rid of all our nuclear weapons.
But the worst thing we could do was to expand NATO to the most sensitive areas for Russia, which is the Baltic and along the Black Sea.
And I said these areas should be demilitarized, we should get out of the area completely, and establish a peace treaty with Russia, which Russia was asking for, that would be respected by the Western powers.
But that didn't happen, particularly because the Clintons decided that they wanted to be big shots and expand NATO into Eastern Europe.
The temptation was too great, and our people went even into Moscow, pillaging the secrets of the Soviets and suborning the communist leadership.
Hey, a quick message for you, Libertarian Institute subscribers.
I'm going to be doing some electoral campaigning type work with the Libertarian Party this year regarding the candidacy of Jacob Hornberger for president of the United States.
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So if you're interested in that kind of thing, you'll have to head over to scotthorton.org slash interviews and sign up for the feed there, and you'll be able to get all of that stuff there.
Thanks.
You know, what's a book I'd like to publish would be a collection of all your writings from like, say, 1988 through now, well, no, sorry, through, say, Clinton years, through, you know, from the end of the Cold War through the beginning of NATO expansion in the 1990s.
You happen to have those archives?
We're going to have to go to the Star and ask them to cough them all up.
I have all the articles.
In fact, I'm just in the process of putting them on the internet.
They were all erased when a newspaper I was writing for under the influence of neocons had all my old articles pulled off the internet.
Well, they're coming back, and there are a lot of them, too.
But I think it's a great idea, Mr. Publisher.
Thank you.
You want to do that?
I mean, it'll have to wait until next year because I'm kind of a little bit busy writing mine right now.
But after that, I think that'd be great if we could just get all of the Russia-themed stuff from that era.
That just seems like a great book.
We could call it, I Told You So, You Stupid Dummies, or something great like that.
And man, would I like to read that stuff.
See, I'm just selfish.
I just want a chance to have all that stuff collected in one place so I can read it myself.
That's all.
Scott, you know, I went through the entire Cold War, and I even have a certificate on the wall of my office signed by Donald Rumsfeld, proclaiming me a Cold Warrior.
And that was when he was the Secretary of Defense under Ford?
That's correct.
Wow.
So that's my Cold Warrior certificate.
So I keep it up to amuse myself.
But, you know, I remember when I first went to Moscow on my first trip, I was flabbergasted.
I looked at all the Russians, I said, my God, we were going to go to war against these people?
We were going to start a nuclear war?
I couldn't believe it.
And to this day, I still can't believe that we were so belligerent and that they were so belligerent in a war, like, and we came so many times within a whisker of actually getting into a real nuclear war.
Yeah, it is.
It's this whole level of unreality.
I actually was just talking with Daniel Ellsberg right before you here today.
And that's what we were talking about.
Part of our discussion is about how that whole situation remains.
We still have thousands of hydrogen bombs, enough to quite literally destroy all but the very smallest number of humans who would have to start our entire species all over again like we'd just been hit by an asteroid.
And what's the justification for this?
Absolutely nothing other than it's a government program that we've got.
And so we have to keep it and expand it.
And that's it.
It's a primitive childishness.
We need enemies.
I read Ellsberg's latest book.
It's very good.
And he points out in it, too, that if we went to war against the Soviets, that the strategic plan was also to nuke all of major Chinese cities in case they might be enemies, too.
It's really scary.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the way he puts it is if, you know, the trigger had been pulled in Berlin, that would have necessarily, no matter what it was built in, there's just the one blue binder or whatever it is.
And in there, it says we nuke every city in China.
That's right.
And he changed that.
That was his first job was to rewrite that plan to make it less worse.
But still, as he was just pointing out on the show, even a very limited A-bomb war between India and Pakistan right now could kill billions of us.
Well, so it says in my first book, War at the Top of the World.
That's what it's about, the primary threat to India and Pakistan.
And we're back to the same danger today.
Yeah, we are.
Well, and so, OK, let's talk about Kashmir for a minute.
What can you tell us about the recent changes in the status and, I guess, the backlash as it's played out since the announced change?
Do you have an update for us?
India has a new right-wing government whose basis, its foundation, was a Hindu fascist organization called the RSS that was started really during the fascist period.
It is the new Indian Prime Minister Modi is an ardent RSS member.
He's very much to the far right of Indian politics.
He hates Muslims.
He was the governor of Gujarat state.
And what he's done is he promised was that when he came into power, he revoked the status of Kashmir, which had sort of some, a tissue, a veil of semi-independence.
It was called an independent state.
And he revoked this.
He's now splitting it into two parts to the fury of the inhabitants, particularly the Muslim inhabitants, who are the majority.
And he's trying to crush the life out of any Muslim movement and out of the religion, religious practices.
He's really stirred up a hornet's nest.
And of course, this has exacerbated tensions between India and Pakistan.
And as usual, fighting has resumed along their mutual border in Kashmir.
Does it go without saying that if they really did have a war, that China would definitely jump in on Pakistan's side?
I think it would, because India is five times stronger than Pakistan in all military metrics.
And it's only a matter of time before the Indians would invade and annex Pakistan.
Why they would want, you know, over 120 million more Muslims in India, where they hate Muslims, is beyond me.
But there's a great uproar in India about recreating mother India.
The movement is called Hindutva, Hindu-ness, and they want, they believe that India was severely wronged by the 1948 division by Britain, and that they want to restore the greatness of a totally integrated mother India.
What's going to happen to the Muslims in India, whose plight is already serious, is not clear.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Now, yeah, let's get back to the fall of the Soviet Union some more.
Yeah.
You know, is that so interesting?
And you wrote this great article.
I should have clicked on it.
I have it.
Here it is, Miracle in Berlin.
And you know, I wanted to bring up Mikhail Gorbachev and his role, if you could describe a little bit about how this all happened at the time there.
And then I kind of want to ask you about some of the things he's been saying lately too.
Well, at the time, Gorbachev became party secretary because the Communist Party was suffering from sclerosis and it needed somebody young to, it was looking for a Soviet Kennedy or something to, because remember, it's three previous party secretaries had died or become infirm due to age and illness.
So Gorbachev came along and he was a man who was really a remarkable man.
He was a humanist.
He was very decent.
He was a man with good ideas that sometimes were a bit fuzzy, but his instincts were right.
And he wanted to sweep away the last vestiges of Stalinism.
His program of glasnost and perestroika, openness, truthfulness, was designed to revitalize Soviet society and make it very close to the West.
Gorbachev really wanted to integrate Russia into the West, as have previous Russian reformers.
So he succeeded in remarkably guided by his foreign minister, Edvard Shevardnadze, who I also knew, a Georgian.
Shevardnadze and Gorbachev proceeded to upturn the Soviet apple cart.
And as pressures mounted inside the Soviet Union, Gorbachev made the vital decision.
He refused to use the Red Army or the KGB main units to crush rebellions either in Russia or on the Baltic coast and East Germany.
And this was an earthquake that ended the Cold War.
And so in previous history, when there had been uprisings in say Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, the Soviets had crushed them, right?
And but this time they just didn't.
That's right.
They just sat there and did nothing.
And the Red Army commanders were demanding that action be taken.
Interestingly, the KGB, I interviewed the leaders, as I mentioned, the KGB really was somewhat supportive of Gorbachev.
They were disgusted by the Communist Party.
They told me, they said, it's old, it's rotten and stupid.
Those are the words that we use.
They said, the Communist Party is going to wreck the whole country and take us down with them.
So the KGB, even though it's vilified in the West, was actually the younger reformer element at the end of the Soviet Union.
And they wanted out.
They wanted the end of communism.
They wanted to become a more modern European party.
They knew what was going on in Russia.
And they were the cream of Soviet society and they traveled to the West and they knew.
Well, so does that mean that the KGB then, the FSB now, as exemplified by Vladimir Putin, that they were the ones who ended up inheriting the new state?
Quite right.
Quite right.
The KGB staged a coup against the successor to Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin was drunk most of the time.
He was right under the thumb of American advisors, both financially and politically.
And he was incompetent.
So the KGB got disgusted with Yeltsin.
They staged a coup against him in December and they put in, and I don't know the secret process of how this developed, but they put in a KGB, I think it was a colonel who had been serving in East Germany named Vladimir Putin, which was a very astute choice.
It turned out to be a brilliant man who was a very effective leader, most respected, and he became the new leader and he swept away the last remnants of communist rule.
And so now, in Putin's government now, in just the last two minutes here, and I'm sorry because I got a hard deadline, but in your estimation, someone who really has so much experience with Russia during the days of the Soviet Union and since as well, do you think that really he's the threat here or it's the US and NATO expansion and all these things that we talked about that's really caused the crisis?
I think it is not Putin who's a threat to the United States.
We should be lucky that we have him because he's sensible, he's conservative, and he's not reckless.
He's very careful in what he does.
What would be much worse is to have a so-called democratic leader there who is reckless and has all these nuclear weapons.
So no, we're lucky to have Putin.
And in my view, he's not the threat.
The threat is coming from the American and British military industrial complex, which is trying to crush the modern Russia and break it up into pieces.
Well, listen, I'm so sorry that I have to go here, but it's so great to have you on.
And I think, you know, maybe the next time we talk, we'll talk a little bit more about the new Cold War and the way things are shaping up now, because I have questions.
It sounds like you've got to go anyway.
Thank you very much, Eric.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is the great Eric Margulies.
He wrote War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
They're both so good.
Believe me, they're just incredible.
And you can find all of his articles at ericmargulies.com.
Oh, spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
