All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show is William Bupert.
Bupert?
Bupert.
Yeah, I said it wrong.
Of course I did.
He gave a great speech at the Freedom Summit over the weekend, and I got to sit there and watch it and listen to it.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, thank you.
And thanks for all the work you do for us, Scott.
Oh, well, you're welcome, and thanks for saying so.
I should also mention people can find your archive at lewrockwell.com, and you've got a lot of really good essays here.
I'd scanned down at the very beginning and read the first one, and it's all about the Iraq War.
And it's from 2003, and it's about how the war's already lost.
And I remember you said during your speech that you are an Army veteran and a counterinsurgency expert.
I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that, and maybe we can start with your insights into the Iraq War way back then.
Certainly, and it's so kind of you to go back in my archives.
They can also find my re-flagged website, which is zerogov.com.
Zerogov.com.
I like that.
Yes.
You and me are going to get along.
Okay.
Terrific.
I am a retired Army officer, and I served in a number of positions in both paratroop and elite formations.
And I was also an intelligence officer and a special forces fellow.
And during that time, of course, one has to be something of an expert or expert in unconventional warfare, guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency, insurgencies, those kind of things.
And I did have occasion during my long period of my adult life, which I spent in the military, to do those kind of things, mostly in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Southeast Asia.
Not Vietnam.
I'm not that old.
Wow.
When did your career in the Army end?
2003.
As a matter of fact, I was just set for retirement, but I was thinking about continuing on.
But what I saw blooming with the Iraq War and what I had seen in the two years in 2003 with our invasion of Afghanistan, I saw the writing on the wall.
And I saw that it was a disaster of biblical proportions in the making for both our war and our occupation in both of those places, which, of course, as you're well aware, Scott, has been expanded globally to Yemen and Pakistan.
And Lord knows what, we're not privy to yet until Assange lets us know where that is.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, yeah, I used to pay a lot of attention to David Hackworth back in those days.
He would be interviewed quite regularly on the AM station in San Antonio that blasted really loud.
You could hear it from Austin just fine, 5.50 AM there.
And he was just laying it down and saying, you know, all I care about is the soldiers.
And that means that they should only ever be made to go and fight when it's absolutely necessary.
Not only is this unnecessary, it's going to be an absolute disaster.
And let me count the ways.
You know how Hackworth was.
He's just hardcore.
And, you know, Brooke, no argument whatsoever.
I remember him even telling Hannity, you be quiet, boy, and you listen to me.
And Hannity going, yes, sir, Mr. Hackworth.
But still, not enough people would listen.
You know, there were some who it got through to.
But it sounds like you're coming a lot from that same point of view from the inside of the Army going, well, you know, I don't know what Paul Wolfowitz thinks is going to happen here, but it's not what I'm looking at.
What the history is going to show is that from 2000 and 9-1-1 and Afghanistan and Iraq, in the first 10 years of this conflict, there was practically a junior officer revolt in the U.S. Army and the other services because they saw that of the 21 causes that Bush gave us to go into Iraq, none of them made sense.
As a matter of fact, the director of the DOD Public Affairs Office published a five-volume study showing conclusively and definitively there was no linkage whatsoever between the events of 9-1-1 and Saddam Hussein.
And, you know, we know that you were very kind to point out that the daytime stamp on my first essay I wrote for Lew Rockwell showed that we hadn't even declared victory yet, yet I was telling everybody that an insurgency would come and that we would fail in quelling that.
But the problem is this, is that since the end of World War II, there is no Muslim insurgency that has been quashed, none that have failed.
They've all succeeded, or at least they're still in the middle of a conflict now.
We have not conducted a successful Western coin against Muslim insurgents since the end of World War II.
Now, are you a William S. Lynn fan?
I am.
I think Lynn is terrific.
All right, because, I mean, it seems like what you're saying is what he says about fourth generation war.
We're fighting, he says, I guess, the shock and awe invasion of Iraq, you could call that third generation warfare, Blitzkrieg, Hitler's brand of warfare, but then...
Which is technically third generation.
Right, but then the rest of the war is fought basically on the French World War I model, second generation warfare, while we're fighting against stateless groups that he says are fourth generation warfare, which you could also just call negative one, back pre-state, bands of people who they only fight together because they really mean that much to each other, not because they're organized by a state to do so.
All right, you know, Scott, I think you're dead on, and for you to have Bill Lynn on your show would be a great boon to...
Yeah, it's been quite a while.
I should do that again.
He's almost the godfather of fourth generation warfare.
As a matter of fact, I taught a coin seminar last week, and you know how these little bits and pieces of evidence come out where you say, wow, we have really screwed the pooch on this one.
Imagine this.
I'm getting reports now from the field in both Afghanistan and Iraq, more so for Afghanistan.
We have young soldiers there under the age of 25 mostly because it is my personal opinion that if you're going to conduct these wars, and I don't think we should conduct any of them, but if we do, no male under the age of 25 should be permitted in theater because of the way they behave and misbehave.
Imagine throwing Gatorade bottles filled with urine by our soldiers to children in these places.
The problem with that is not only is it morally outrageous to do that kind of thing, but we're talking about societies that are bonded by blood, by clan, by ancient feuds, but also if you set one house against you, set a hundred against you, these are multi-generational households.
These are households that have very sophisticated and complex clan and blood relationships that reach horizontally across the area.
So by their Muslim culture, which is an Arab artifact because most Muslim culture, even in Indonesia, is informed by the way Arabs behave, they have a duty and obligation, his father, his uncles, his brothers, everyone, to do something to remedy that wrong just by putting urine in a bottle and offering it to a child.
Yeah, well, and so now this gets right, I think, to the heart of your speech, which was we are reenacting the last days of the Soviet Union here internally and externally, and Afghanistan would seem to be clue number one.
Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, now claims anyway that he sent a memo to Jimmy Carter the day that the tanks rolled into Afghanistan and said, now we're going to give the Russians their own Vietnam.
Well, now we are giving it to ourselves again.
We are, you know, quite a bit, and the parallels that I drew as far as between the Soviet Union and these United States were deeper than that, not only because of what you're pointing out with what happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan, the British in Afghanistan, and what will inevitably happen to us in Afghanistan, because that's one of those countries on planet Earth, and I have to say I have a tinge of admiration for this, in which they can never have a president, they can only have a mayor.
And that being the case, we cannot defeat that kind of spontaneous order, especially with a warrior caste that prides itself on single combat, that prides itself on defending their honor and virtue as they see it and perceive it with the point of a gun, you know, using 19th or 20th century rifles against this military hyperpower that's, that's, you know, on the globe or on the, but it goes deeper than that.
In my speech, what I talked about was that in 1917, quite literally, Woodrow Wilson and B.I. Lennon were in a foot race to establish that perfect Soviet Union, that perfect central planning state.
Now, the Soviets, the Russians, went by way of communism and socialism and such.
We started that, didn't quite work out too well.
We did have golden years between 1920 and 28, in which the market was almost left unfettered.
But from Hoover on to Obama today, it has been an uninterrupted cavalcade of economic calamities as a result of fascism.
And I think you may have had Butler on where he gave a really great definition of fascism in which he said simply, it is the, I'll continue after the break.
All right.
Yeah, we'll do that.
Everybody, it's Bill Boopert.
He's a former army officer and a hardcore libertarian writer for lewrockwell.com and zerogov.com.
What a great web address.
All right.
We'll be right back after this show.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Bill Bupert.
He has a great archive at lewrockwell.com, keeps the blog at zerogov.com, and he gave a great speech at the Freedom Summit 2010 over this last weekend in Phoenix.
The video of it will be up at some point, and it's about Soviet America.
Right now, just before the break, he was at the part where Woodrow Wilson, the progressive liberal Democrat, was a right-wing conservative fascist, and he turned America into a fascist country.
So I don't want to waste any more of this 10-minute segment.
You go right ahead.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
And I don't want to go into it in detail because of the brevity of time we have, but I would urge all your listeners to look up the American Protective League if they want to see just how bad Wilsonian America was at the time.
American Protective League.
What I was saying is Butler had simply said that fascism is where we all own private property, but through regulation and taxation, the entire transactional behavior of all that property is covered by the state.
You and I essentially may have our homes and a note on our homes, but we don't own them.
We bear property taxes and such.
And of course, the Federal Register is massive.
And what it speaks to is that Stephen Molyneux, another guy who was at the Freedom Summit who did a terrific speech, he talks about us being cattle on a feedlot.
And I think what happened is, from the American political perspective, they said, how will we get more tax revenue and more bounty and tribute from our cattle?
Will we get it through communism, or will we get it through fascism?
Well, they get it through fascism because what they've done is they've given us a modicum of illusion in thinking that, yes, we're free.
This is the land of the free, home of the brave.
And that isn't quite the case as we've discovered.
Well, and the brilliance of liberal statism is making it seem like all this pressure comes from below.
Like it's the people who are so sick and tired of freedom that they demand that the government regulate the economy to make everything fair when it was always a plot of the Hamiltonians.
And if you'll read my stuff, because as a matter of fact, in July, I debated Dr. Daniel Walker Howe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from UCLA, on what was better for America, the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution.
I championed the Articles.
And it was very clear to me from the audience that a lot of them had, because it was a self-selected audience of anarchist libertarians and folks like that who would attend that, but still a lot of them had drank the constitutional Kool-Aid.
And I think that that is a major step once one has distanced yourself from that document.
You see it for its flaws and you see that it's what has delivered us into the hands of the massive Leviathan state we are in today.
It's an enabler of that state.
It's not a stopgap measure against it.
All right.
Now, please continue with the Soviet thing.
I guess what I'm really concerned about is the end of even the pretension of the rule of law and the rule of the Constitution as it binds the power of this government, at the same time as Charles Goyette's speech is coming true here with the collapse of the dollar.
And it seems like, you know, the next Constitution is going to be a lot worse than this one.
We're going to probably end up with an Emperor Petraeus for quite a while before we get anything like the Articles of Confederation back.
That's my fear.
That would certainly be the case, unless we dissolve and devolve and decentralize and break apart like the Soviet Union did in 1989.
And I pointed out in my speech that all the intelligence communities in the Western world, and I would say that the chattering classes were caught flat-footed by that failure, by that complete collapse of the Soviet Union.
And I think that kind of black swan event, that kind of unpredictability of that event is precisely what's going to take us down.
Now, Scott, that can happen tomorrow.
It can happen in a month.
It could happen in a year.
It could happen in five years.
But you and I both know from the economic perfect storm, from what happens to every fiat currency in world history, and simply from the behavior of us making war on the world, that when you take that hybrid cocktail together, we cannot sustain what we have developed.
Well, so how do you think it's going to look?
You know, Tommy Frank said to Cigar Aficionado a few years back that if there's one more real, you know, large-scale terrorist attack like 9-11 in this country, we'll have a military form of government.
Simple as that.
I think that's very possible.
And of course, you know, the menu of possible futures is unknown to all of us, but I think it's just going to take one state, one governor, one state legislature to step up and say, you know, enough is enough.
We're not dancing here anymore.
We're going to take all our toys, we're going to bundle them up, and we're going to go away, and this is our divorce settlement.
Take it or leave it.
With the departure of that one state out of 50, an entire cavalcade is going to follow.
There will be many...
Now, of course, you're going to have your typical reactionaries who, much like we had with the Lincolnians, who will say, well, the Union must be preserved at all costs, even if that means a complete abolition of our freedom and liberty.
But I don't think that the U.S. government being as essentially bankrupt as it is now and being as fractured and fissured across these United States, as far as the respect people have for the central government, I think they're going to have a hard time containing that genie when it happens.
Yeah, no, I agree with you about secession, and I hope it can be done peacefully, and I hope people also don't get too wrapped up in the propaganda about, you know, the neo-Confederates who just want slavery back and whatever.
You know, there's a lot of peaceful secession movements of all different political stripes across this country.
Oh, even before the Civil War, the North threatened to secede three times or something, right?
Well, you know, Tom Woods puts that entire argument about neo-Confederates and stuff to bed with his latest book on nullification, which I urge all of your audience to read.
You know, and people say, well, secession, that's awful.
Secession's a four-letter word.
Well, it's not, because when you look at the entire formation of nation-states that we have in our 5,000 years of Western history, the creation of all of these new nation-states that have blossomed over time, I think we have nearly 250 around the globe right now, they are all a result of a form of active or passive secession.
Including these United States.
Including these United States, and both revolutions, and the one that started in 1775, and the one that started in 1860.
Yeah.
What can individuals do?
What do you recommend individuals do?
Is it time to panic?
I don't want to sound like one of those right-wing kooks where the sky's always about to fall, and Y2K, and all that.
You know, the only two things I always recommend to people, and one of them may sound a bit banal, but I think it's important.
The first one is G3, which is gold, guns, and groceries, and the preparation that you and I, Scott, as fathers and husbands owe to our families, and to our close friends in our community, because no man is an island.
Number two is critical thinking is hard work, and Americans, because we are so exposed to this huge electronic panoply that's in front of us that offers all these easy alternatives to thinking, people need to tune out, turn off, and start thinking.
And critical thinking, as I said in my speech, is very simple.
It's nothing more than thinking about thinking to improve your thinking through better thinking.
That's all it is.
That's all it is.
And that's what people have to concentrate on, because if you have that, you have a fishing pole.
I can give you all the fish you want, but if you can think critically, and of course, I think most people who do think critically, especially in the political and philosophical sphere, will find them on the same end of the spectrum that you and I are at, which is where we are opposed to aggression of all types, initiated aggression of all types, and we wish for a peaceful, involuntary, and cooperative society that's based on persuasion.
All right, everybody, that is Bill Bupert.
He's got a great archive at lewrockwell.com, and he keeps a website at zerogov.com.
And now, I don't think that, I think the Stephen Molyneux speech is out, but I don't think the rest of the videos from the Freedom Summit are out yet, but Bill's was one of the most engaging and interesting of that whole thing.
I highly recommend that everyone check it out.
It'll be on your YouTube at some point or another.
And I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today, Bill.
Well, you're very kind, Scott, and keep up the great work.
Bye.
