02/19/07 – Justin Raimondo – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Well, my friends, it's been pretty tough times for the neoconservatives lately.
Scooter Libby's trial is wrapping up.
Closing arguments are expected tomorrow.
Douglas Fyfe has been criticized harshly in his policy department at the Pentagon by the Inspector General.
And they've, frankly, just been roundly discredited by anyone who even knows who they are.
And yet they're still beating drums for more war.
So, I thought I would bring to you a special guest today, Justin Raimondo.
He's author of Reclaiming the Right, the Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
He's the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
And he's probably one of the world's best experts on these neoconservatives, who they are, where they're from, and how they got so much power in our government.
So, welcome to the show, Justin.
Great to be here.
Now, you wrote an article quite a few years ago, I believe, called Attack of the Trotskycons.
Now, what's that about?
What do the neoconservatives have to do with Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army and the Soviet Union?
Well, you have to remember that these guys are all ex-leftists, supposedly ex-leftists.
And so, what happened was that during the Cold War, the neoconservatives were kind of pissed off at the Democratic Party for going McGovernite.
So, what basically happened is that they left the Democratic Party.
They were the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party.
People like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, familiar faces, were aides to Scoop Jackson.
So, they were nurtured in that kind of left-wing Democratic, but very anti-communist and very interventionist milieu.
Now, that seems like a contradiction.
They were anti-communists, and yet they had come from the Trotskyite movement.
Why, if they were Trotskyites, why were they so much against the Soviet Union?
Well, because the Soviet Union was controlled by the followers of Joseph Stalin, the mortal enemy of Leon Trotsky.
So, it was a family feud.
This isn't right versus left.
This is a battle between leftist factions, basically.
Yes, basically.
And what happened is that their leader, Max Zemo, Max Schachtman, who was Trotsky's, I won't say right-hand man, I would say his left-hand man in America, the leading intellectual spokesman for Trotsky, split with Trotsky on the eve of the Second World War.
And the question was, should the Soviet Union be defended?
Was it any longer worth defending it?
I mean, after all, these people had imprisoned Trotsky in the Gulag.
They had assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico.
They had killed Trotsky, assassinated Trotsky's son, Leon Fedov, in Europe in the 1930s.
So, a bloodline was drawn, as the Trotskyists like to point out, between Stalinism and Trotskyism.
It was a family feud, a civil war, as we know, that can be the most vicious kind of a war.
So, there were two factions of Trotskyists.
Trotskyists love factions, by the way.
They're always splitting over this question, that question, whatever.
Anyway, the big question was, on the eve of the Second World War, was Hitler allied with Stalin?
Was it okay to defend the Soviet Union?
Trotsky said yes, the Soviet Union must be defended, unconditionally.
And, Chapman broke with Trotsky and said no, a new form of what he called bureaucratic collectivism has arisen in the Soviet Union.
And, in some ways, it's much more dangerous than capitalism, even.
Because, you have to understand, they still believed in the myth of socialist efficiency.
So, they thought, well, if you have a socialist or quasi-socialist ruling class consolidating its hold in the Soviet Union, these guys were going to be even more dangerous than the capitalists who were doomed anyway.
So, Chapman split with his former comrades and moved in what's called an anti-communist direction, actually anti-Stalinist.
And, over the years, his workers' party became sort of a halfway house for people who were on their way out of the left and into the anti-communist right.
For example, James Burnham, one of the founders of National Review magazine, one of the original editors, Buckley's right-hand man, started out as a Trotskyist.
Now, he's the guy, I think I even learned about him in high school that he wrote about the managerial revolution and all that.
Right.
His book, The Managerial Revolution, and I would have anyone who was listening to this go out and get a copy of that book.
Very interesting.
It made quite a splash when it was published, which I believe was in 1941, 1940.
At any rate, Burnham came out with his own version of Chapman's theory, which was that capitalism is doomed, and what we're going to be subjected to in the coming years was what he called managerial revolution.
Now, of course, Chapman called it bureaucratic collectivism, but it's just different names for the same system, which meant basically a mixed economy.
You had the managers in control.
I mean, basically, Burnham said that capitalism had escaped the hold of the capitalists, and that basically the people who were the managers had taken over the means of production and were shaping human society, and that it was no longer the capitalists, individual capitalists, you know, the old robber baron, et cetera, so-called.
Right, replaced, really, by corporations and middle managers.
Right.
And, you know, like the Organization Man, the famous book from the 1950s.
And, anyway, Burnham, see, all these people, I mean, politics is really not about what you're for, but about what you're against.
It's about hatred.
Who do you hate?
So these people hated Stalin.
They were for socialism.
They had kind of a vague theory of, oh, yeah, you know, once we have socialism, everything's going to be great, you know, the birds will lay down with the bees, and the lion will lay down with the lamb, and everybody will look happily ever after.
But it was all very vague.
I mean, basically, they hated Joe Stalin, Uncle Joe Stalin.
They hated the Stalinists.
They hated the American Communist Party, because they were being kicked out of the American Communist Party.
And so they wanted revenge.
I mean, it's all very human.
And so they carried out their long feud against the Stalinists, and it eventually turned into stuff like the Jackson-Bennett Amendment, which, you know, ran the way of trade between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and led to the Cold War, and all kinds of complications.
I see.
So, basically, what you have here is, in these neoconservatives, is what we're talking about here, these people who basically are the third- and fourth-level managers in the current Bush administration, these guys come from a strain of Trotskyism that is split from the Soviet Union.
They became Cold Warriors, basically, because they took America's side and Trotsky's side, really, against the Soviets.
And that's how, basically, we end up with a bunch of guys in, say, the early 70s who are Scoop Jackson, Cold Warrior Democrats.
Is that it?
Well, yeah.
I mean, think of it this way.
Trotsky said that you cannot have socialism in one country.
So these guys long ago gave up any idea of socialism.
The only thing that actually remained of their original ideology was anti-Stalinism, which translated in the modern world, since Trotskyism was completely irrelevant, which translated in the modern world into anti-communism.
So that these guys became fanatical anti-communists.
And they joined, say, the editorial board of National Review, many of them.
Like, for example, Willy Schlam, who was an early editor at National Review, and ex-editor of the German Communist Party newspaper, Röte Feine, all these guys turned against Stalin.
And in turning against Stalin, they joined the American right.
But they actually had very little in common, other than anti-communism, with these conservatives, who were quoting Ludwig von Mises and all kinds of people, that these neo-cons had very little use for.
I mean, they didn't stop being statist far from it.
They just switched allegiances, kind of like Christopher Hitchens today.
I mean, Christopher Hitchens is a perfect example of a neo-neo-con.
I mean, here he was, what?
He was the literary editor of the Socialist Worker newspaper, which is the newspaper of the Socialist Worker party in Great Britain, a Trotskyist group which can trace its history directly back to Shakman, except they take a different kind of a line, they say that the Soviet Union was capitalist, and it was just state capitalism.
Whereas Burnham and Shakman said, no, no, it's bureaucratic collectivism, but that's just the terminological kind of nitpicking.
What matters is that these guys hated the Soviet Union with a passion, and they wanted to destroy it.
And so they all jumped on the Cold War bandwagon.
And then, of course, when the Cold War ended, these guys were out of lock arms, significantly out of jobs.
You have to understand, I mean, these guys were professional ideologues.
So they made their living on the basis of, basically, their anti-communism.
But anti-communism was kind of like phrenology after a while.
I mean, after the Soviet Union ended, then the market for anti-communism was somewhat limited.
So they had to find new jobs.
They had to find, in short, a new enemy, and the new enemy is Bin Laden.
Bin Laden, Islamism, Iraq, the Muslim world, after 9-11, these guys were back in business.
Just professional warmongers is really all they are now.
Right.
Yes.
This brand of Trotskyism is kind of like a virus.
I mean, it keeps metastasizing.
It keeps morphing and mutating into different forms.
But, I mean, it's basically the essence of the war party.
Okay, now I'm afraid that we're being a little collectivist here and throwing around a little bit too much we and they.
Let's name some names.
Is it that Paul Wolfowitz and Steven Hadley and Scooter Libby are actually ex-Trotskyites themselves?
No, no.
Actually, Wolfowitz knows about all that.
You know, you cited that article by me about the Trotsky con, and that article was basically an answer to an article by Steven Schwartz, who is an ex-Trotskiist and is also, I wouldn't say leading, but a neo-conservative ideologue.
And in the article he was talking about the relevance of Trotskyism to contemporary neo-conservatism.
I mean, he was basically coming out and saying, you know what, Trotsky was a great guy, I'm not going to renounce him, these guys are attacking us for being Trotskyists, and we kind of are.
That's what he said.
And he even mentioned that Paul Wolfowitz, whose biography he was supposedly writing, so I guess that project has been put on indefinite hold, knows all about this Trotskyist stuff, like the history of the neo-conservative movement, the early history, and is well acquainted with it.
So, I mean, these guys know who they are.
For example, look at Joshua Muravchik, who is a leading light over at the American Enterprise Institute.
Muravchik is the former youth leader of the Young People's Socialist League in the 1970s, and of course the Young People's Socialist League, I shouldn't say of course, like everybody knows it, but for your information, they are the youth group, or were the youth group, of Shackman's organization.
And so, I mean, these guys know who they are, they know their history, and of course they're denying it, except for Ford, who's kind of basically very out of the closet about it.
But, I mean, this is all known.
There was a movie called Arguing the World, which you can see online, put out by PBS, in which Irving Kristol talks about his early days as a Trotskyist, and so, you know, all of this is common knowledge.
So is it really the case then, Justin, that the modern conservative movement, really since the Cold War days at least, has been defined by ex-Trotskyites then?
Basically, yeah.
Yeah, you know, with Bill Buckley presiding over it all.
Well, you know, what happened basically was that these Trotskyites, or ex-Trotskyites, turned into kind of left-wing social democrats.
So they started, you know, moving what's called rightward.
So instead of being like militant socialists who wanted a nationalization of all industry immediately, which was the old Trotskyite position, they kind of reconciled themselves to, well, you know, let's just socialize, say, the steel industry and healthcare and stuff like that.
But what they emphasized, they never talked about this stuff, because back in those days, it was all about anti-communism.
It was all about the Cold War.
It was all about, was war going to break out in Europe at any moment?
So those were the issues of the day.
And on those issues, they stood foursquare with the old conservative movement, or rather the new conservative movement of Bill Buckley, which was devoted to interventionism and, by the way, big government in the name of interventionism.
Yes, the totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores just for the duration of the emergency, right?
Right.
I mean, that is what Buckley said, or rather wrote, in an article, I believe, it was 1956 in Commonweal Magazine.
And now when you mention the social democrats USA, that's another connection with a lot of these modern-day Bush administration types, too, isn't it?
We have to understand what social democrats USA is.
The old Chapman organization.
Let me just explain to you some of this arcana.
Okay, so Max Shachman was in Trotsky's, Trotskyite party, it was called the Socialist Workers' Party.
It split on the eve of World War II.It's a two-faction, two groups.
The Socialist Workers' Party, the old Orthodox Trotskyists, and Shachman's group, which called itself the Workers' Party.
And then Shachman, moving rightward, moving into the social democracy through the 1940s, changed the name of the group to the Independent Socialist League.
And the name change kind of had a symbolic meaning because these guys were becoming more delanophobic, as the Trotskyists like to put it, meaning more anti-communist, more militant in their foreign policy prescriptions.
And then finally, Shachman reconciled with the old social democracy and actually joined the old Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, which by that time, say in the 1950s, was completely decimated.
It was a few old guys and a few young guys.
One of the young guys was Michael Harrington, by the way, the famous socialist and author of The Other America, who was a big influence on the Democratic Party.
But that only came later.
So they joined the Socialist Party and they basically changed the name of the Socialist Party to Social Democrats USA.
And then Shachman died in 1970, I think it was 75 or 72, I'm not quite sure which.
So Social Democrats USA is Shachmanism, organizationally.
And now I know that Gene Kirkpatrick, for example, is a member of the Social Democrats USA and I believe I remember that Stephen Hadley was one of those guys, too.
Are there more in the current Bush administration that can be traced to that group?
I don't know about Stephen Hadley, but here's an interesting thing.
Carl Gershman, who was the first head of the National Endowment for Democracy, was an official of Social Democrats USA.
And he appointed a number of SDUSA cadre to positions in the National Endowment for Democracy.
Now, a lot of hay is made also about the connection to Professor Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago and people who studied under his colleague Albert Wolstetter.
And people like, I believe, Richard Perle, was he ever a radical leftist in his youth or was he just a University of Chicago Rand Corporation egghead type?
Who I'm not sure about, but I do know that Wolstetter was a trust gift and that he was a former member of the Socialist Workers' Party who joined an obscure split-off from the Socialist Workers' Party called the Fieldites.
I mean, that's really our K&M, I don't even really go into it.
But, I mean, most of these guys were old commies and they either got kicked out of the Communist Party or they joined the Trotskyite movement and then they became disenchanted with orthodox Trotskyism and became enamored of Shachman.
Shachman had a lot of personal charisma.
He didn't write much, but he never wrote really a book.
But his kind of influence was mostly through personal, you know, like relationships.
And just talking to him, apparently, was the main method that they used, lectures, stuff like that.
And now the reason this is all relevant is because of what Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Palisade, has called the Chaney-Neocon Cabal, this small group of people, eight or nine guys, as Seymour Hersh says, who came and, with George Bush's, the President's cooperation, took over the executive branch and took us to war in Iraq.
Is that not the case?
Yes.
And, I mean, basically what they did, I mean, these guys switched allegiances early on from left to right, from the Soviet Union to America.
And what they did was that they simply took the method of Trotskyism, which was the idea that socialism cannot exist in a single country.
It has to expand.
It has to be militant.
You have to conquer the world, basically.
I mean, that's what they believed.
No matter what, you know, like, official ideology you're upholding, whether it's socialism or capitalism or, you know, Americanism or Sovietism, their basic insight was, we need to go to war.
That's the one consistency.
The permanent revolution, the forum has stayed, the details have changed, but the policy is still the same shape as it always was.
Well, you know, I wouldn't talk about permanent revolution.
That's a misconception.
The whole idea of permanent revolution has nothing to do with foreign policy.
That's a Marxist idea that is more internal than having to do with foreign policy.
But anyway, you get the idea that these guys are basically war-mongers.
I mean, they're into conflict as a way of life, as a political ideology.
We're saying that men's interests basically conflict, and that conflict is therefore the normal state of human affairs.
Their whole, their core is the opposite of what Lucid Ron Mises and all the free market economists say, which is that there is no inherent conflict of interest between human beings.
That we don't have to live in a permanent state of war of all against all.
And that basically men's interests don't necessarily come into conflict.
That's such a thing as trade and, by the way, human civilization, which mediates these disputes and solves them before they become violent.
So we're the forces of civilization.
We are the forces of barbarism.
Mises' idea being that if there's a business transaction, the assumption should be that both sides benefit.
Exactly.
And these guys have never understood that.
That's why they've never been really all that enthusiastic about capitalism and the free market.
Remember, Irving Kristol only gave two cheers to capitalism, and some of these guys maybe even just won.
They're enamored with capitalism because capitalism is winning.
See, these guys go with the winner.
When it looked like socialism was losing, they felt, well, why should we get involved with these guys?
They're just losers.
They're just doctrinaire to run the fringes.
They always want to be on the inside.
Yeah.
There's a lot more money in sucking up to Washington, D.C., I guess.
There you go.
All right.
So now what has the trial of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, revealed about these guys?
Well, what it has revealed is that they're very persistent.
Not only that, but they're way up there, high in the administration.
They basically took over the office of the vice president, and they commandeered the foreign policy apparatus of the country.
They made sure that George Bush didn't get any information that contradicted what they wanted him to hear and to know.
And they, in classic, I mean, these guys excel in internal intra-bureaucratic warfare, faction fighting.
That's what Trotskyites have always been good at, forming factions, fighting enemy factions.
It's all internal, and it's all done in the dark.
That's very important.
Secrecy.
Secrecy and then, of course, giving them a shiv right in the back.
So they did that to Joe Wilson.
They did that to the CIA.
They did that to their enemies inside the U.S. government.
The realists who were saying, hey, wait a minute.
They didn't want to wait a minute.
They didn't have a minute.
It was very important for them to go to war when they went to war, before it came out that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
Before it came out that there were no wings to al-Qaeda.
Before it came out that their whole scheme was bogus.
Now, you don't really think these guys fooled George Bush.
I mean, he was shopping for a bill of goods, and they sold him one, right?
Well, I mean, George Bush, from what I can gather, is not that smart.
Well, I have no argument with you there, but it always seemed to me that, well, as Sidney Blumenthal wrote, the reason that Donald Rumsfeld got the job was because his dad hated him.
And, you know, he had this idea that he was going to be tougher than his dad.
He was going to go all the way to Baghdad and that kind of thing.
The neo-cons for him were, you know, a good help for what he already wanted to do.
Right.
So, I mean, his motives hardly seemed to me to be ideological.
Yeah, they're more personal.
Personal and religious, also.
So, I mean, he was the perfect empty vessel waiting to be filled by the neo-cons.
And they filled him.
I mean, actually, the President, for all these long, tiresome, bloody years, the real President, as we all know, has been Dick Cheney.
He is the real President of the United States.
He's been running the foreign policy of this country.
His henchmen have been firmly in control until recently.
And this is the true significance of the Libby trial.
I mean, basically, what Woodward said in his book, that the neo-cons, actually, he was quoting Colin Powell.
And he said that they came in and they set up, in effect, quote, a separate government, unquote.
Well, that separate government was headquartered in the office of the Vice President.
And Fitzgerald took aim at this second White House, this shadow White House, this real White House, and shattered it.
And he has delivered, I believe, a mortal blow to the Cheney White House.
A bit late, but better late than never.
Well, now, are you sure that it's really going to be that fatal of a blow?
It seems like there's been so much news about Iraq and Iran and everything else in the news that, really, the Libby trial has kind of been, you know, pretty low on the totem pole of news stories that the TV's covering every day, don't you think?
Well, I mean, that doesn't really matter.
What matters is that Libby is out of commission.
Well, yeah, but Wormser and Hanna are still there.
I mean, look at it as a chess game.
So the king's bishop, or actually the queen's bishop, is out of commission.
And that's a pretty big blow.
And it's pretty late in the game, too.
So Libby is out.
I mean, Libby is going to be convicted.
He's going to be convicted.
And he's going to be sentenced.
And I don't think they're going to go easy on him.
So this is going to be a tremendous blow to the vice president, his prestige, and his policies.
Now, there's been a push recently.
The neoconservatives like Joshua Muravchik, who you mentioned earlier, wrote an op-ed for the L.A.
Times saying, we've got to bomb Iran.
Benjamin Netanyahu recently, according to Arno Debegrav, gave a big speech in Israel saying, we've got to focus all our attention on propagandizing the Americans.
Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state for starting wars, or whatever he is, is on antiwar.com's headlines this morning saying, our policy is exactly in line with Israel's policy concerning Iran.
You've said many, many times in your writings in the past, Justin, to never count these guys out.
It's not over yet.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I am by no means counting them out.
I mean, they're in trouble.
They're going to lose a few guys.
But they're a long way from checkmate.
And what's happening is that, look, the minute we invaded Iraq, war with Iran was almost inevitable.
You can't contain these wars.
National borders don't respect the flow of humanity over them during wartime.
These things go over.
So unless we get out of Iraq fairly quickly, we're going to be sucked into a conflict with Iran.
It's almost inevitable.
Of course, nothing is inevitable.
People have free will.
But what I'm saying is that if you look at the simple fact of geography, that long border between Iran and Iraq, you've got close to 175,000 American troops breathing down the Iranian's neck.
This has always been the plan.
And it's working.
Well, and in fact, it has always been the plan, right?
From the neoconservative point of view, really, they only wanted to do Iraq because it was the hardest case to make.
But they always intended to carry this plan out.
They're telling Bush now, aren't they, that you can't just do Iraq.
You have to do the whole plan or else it doesn't work.
Right.
As Michael Wadeen says, faster please.
So these guys are moving onward and upward.
And what's kind of sad is that the anti-war movement and the Democrats in Congress, some of whom are sincerely anti-war, are just a little late, you know, in all this.
I mean, they're talking about Iraq.
Iraq is over.
I got news for them.
That's over.
That's yesterday's war.
We have to concentrate on tomorrow's war and that is Iran and Syria.
Watch Syria and Lebanon.
The first outbreak of the war against Iran was actually the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, or rather, re-invasion.
So it started out as a proxy fight, Israel being our proxy, Hezbollah supposedly being the Iranian proxy, which is true to some extent.
And next you're going to have a direct confrontation.
I mean, George Bush, as you know, has already given the order for Americans to attack the Iranians on Iraqi soil if they find them.
So it's only a matter of time before we are at war with Iran.
And of course, everyone's predicting this, but it's going to happen.
It's going to happen fairly quickly, too.
There have been some writers who have speculated that it's got to happen before Tony Blair leaves office this spring.
What do you think of that?
I don't think the neocons make plans based on such contingencies.
I think that they'll move when they want to move.
My own personal opinion is that Bush has already decided to move and that they're just trying to exhaust the diplomatic possibilities before actually giving the order to strike.
And it's probably going to come about as a result of alleged Iranian intervention on Iraqi soil, like the Ummul raid in the Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
There was a raid, if your listeners aren't aware of it, a couple of weeks ago by the U.S. forces on what was apparently an Iranian consulate or an Iranian consulate in the making in the Kurdish city of Erbil.
And they took those Iranians, basically hostage, and now they're screaming about, yes, the Quds Brigade is in Iraq and blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, well, and they want us to ignore the fact that the factions that Iran is accused of supporting are the same factions that America's supporting.
So what's the big deal?
Well, I mean, we installed, well, right, but you see, what the war party is counting on is that, I mean, most Americans don't know this.
We don't know that we installed a pro-Iranian regime in Iraq.
To most Americans, Iranians, Iraqis, Saudis, they're all the same.
They don't know that Persians are not Iraqis and that Iraqis are not Persian and they don't really speak the same language.
They have no idea, never mind all these internal political differences, the Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army.
I mean, this is something that we talk about, but most Americans don't have time to know about.
So, I mean, this is what the neocons and the war party are counting on.
Ignorance.
They're the elites.
They know better.
The masses know nothing, and it's better that they don't know anything.
Yeah, rather than even trying to, you know, so-called inform our opinion, they'd rather just buffalo us into it.
Right.
I mean, that's their method, of course.
You know, something that was brought up by a former State Department intelligence guy, Wayne White, when I interviewed him last week, was that there's no endgame.
This is some Philip Giraldi, the former CIA officer, said as well.
There's no endgame for a war in Iran.
What are we going to do, bomb them for a week and then tell them, okay, we're done bombing you now, don't fight back anymore, the war's over?
But that's kind of a naive concept anyway.
These guys just don't understand the neocons.
There is no endgame.
These guys want to conquer the whole world.
I mean, that's what they said in their foreign policy prescription published in, where was it?
It was the article by Bill Kristol and- Yes, toward a neo-Reaganite foreign policy that they wrote for foreign affairs and the Carnegie Endowment.
Right.
I think it was 1996.
I mean, these guys came right out and said, we are for a benevolent world hegemony by the U.S.
Now, let me ask you, when you're talking about these guys want no endgame, that's why they never have an endgame because they don't want an endgame, they want permanent war.
Do you think that it's a deliberate plan to provoke a full-scale war of civilizations between East and West?
I saw a poll the other day that said most people around the world think that it's completely unnecessary that the West should be in some sort of permanent conflict with the Islamic world.
It's not necessary really at all.
It definitely looks that way from my point of view and yet it seems like our government is pushing us to the point where these people in the Muslim world are going to see white people, Europeans, Christians, the West as the enemy forever.
I mean, that's the idea.
So, I don't think that they really are – I mean, now they're focused on the Muslims, but I have news for you.
There's a new enemy on the horizon and he's very much like the old enemy.
Yeah, I know where you're going.
Oh, Russia.
I thought you were going to say China, Russia, huh?
No, no, no, no.
Okay, let's talk about Russia.
What do the neocons want to do with Russia here, Justin?
Oh, these guys hate Russia.
They hate Russia for a number of historical and personal and ideological reasons.
And the fact that the Soviet Union has fallen means nothing to them.
No.
They hate Putin just as much as Khrushchev.
Oh, they hate Putin.
They hate his guts.
And the thing is that they're screaming, wow, he's restoring authoritarianism, blah, blah, blah.
Actually, unlike Boris Yeltsin, who dismantled the Duma at gunpoint, he's never done that.
He didn't fix the elections like Yeltsin openly did.
I mean, Yeltsin – look – Well, so what's Putin's crime?
What's he done that's made them so angry then?
He's sober most of the time.
Unlike Yeltsin, who never came to work sober, Putin is very sober intellectually as well as alcoholically.
So they don't like that.
I mean, Russia, their whole idea was to break up Russia into its constituent part, ethnic, much like they want to do with the Middle East.
I mean, that's their whole plan with the Middle East is to atomize all the Arab and Persian countries there and split them up into little splinters so that none of them is really a threat.
And all of them can be easily controlled from afar.
And they basically have the same program for the former Soviet Union.
Yeah.
And it's not even just breaking up the former Soviet Union, but even breaking up what we now call the Russian Federation.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I have to say, Justin, I was pretty impressed when I read Pat Buchanan's article for Antiwar.com.
This is a guy who was a Nixon speechwriter to this day, an avowed cold warrior if it was back then still.
Here he writes this article completely defending Russia from the American empire and saying, how would we feel if the Soviet Union, you know, interfered this way and that way in South America and that kind of thing?
And I thought, you know, times have really changed when Pat Buchanan is arguing the pro-Russian position in defense from the American empire.
Well, you have to understand that conservatives were anti-Russia back during the Cold War era because of a little thing called communism.
I mean, communism, in their view, was a military threat to the United States.
It posed a threat.
They wanted world domination.
They had an ideology that, at least formally and officially, was for an international revolution.
They wanted to overthrow capitalism, which meant they wanted to overthrow the United States.
So these guys were a threat.
But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the end of communism, after communism was found to be unworkable, and in fact nobody really believed it anymore, it ceased being a threat.
So, I mean, after Gorbachev, Russia was rendered harmless, but not to the neo-cons.
Because to the neo-cons, any other power anywhere on earth is a threat.
I mean, that's why Wolfowitz wrote that infamous strategic paper back in the 1980s.
It was 91, right after the Gulf War.
Right, where he said that our goal must be military preeminence on every continent.
Every continent, which includes, I guess, Asia, which includes Europe.
I mean, why should we be an Asian land power?
It's a crazy idea.
So, obviously, you know, every other major nation in the world stands in the way of this ostensible goal.
Right, which brings us to China as well.
If I remember the first nine months of the Bush administration, these guys were working as hard as they could to try to get us into some level of conflict with what the guys at Lew Rockwell now call capitalist China.
Right.
The problem with that was that, and still is, that they're buying our debt, as you know.
So there's too much money involved in that.
China truly is the capitalist nation now, far more so than Russia.
And it's wealthy, and their trade with us is worth far too much.
So that the neo-cons would have to come into conflict with big financial interests in order to provoke a war with China.
So that's not going to happen.
Right.
So no matter how bad the warmongers want to start something, somebody on Wall Street is going to pick up the phone and say, oh, no, you don't.
Exactly.
I mean, there's too many interests involved, financial interests.
So they're picking the easy guys, just like they picked Saddam Hussein.
I mean, they picked Saddam Hussein.
Why?
Well, because as Paul Wolfowitz famously, rather infamously, said, it's doable.
And so is Russia.
Russia is doable.
Russia has money now.
I mean, that's what they hate.
Russia, you know, the price of oil has gone up.
Russia is no longer a beggar asking for foreign aid from the USA.
And Russia is united.
They have a strong leader.
He's popular at home.
Putin is a nationalist.
They hate nationalism.
That's what they hate most of all.
The neocons hate nationalism.
Among other countries.
They like American nationalism when it suits them.
Well, I mean, that's a complicated question, which I'd rather not go into.
I mean, they don't like the old-fashioned American nationalism, which puts American interests first.
They like, you know, this kind of faux nationalism, which is an expansionist nationalism, not an internal inward-looking nationalism, but an internationalist nationalism.
Right, right.
America right or wrong, that kind of thing.
Right.
When you talk about Russia and how powerful they are now, it's mostly because of these neocons and George Bush and their policy, which has, you know, doubled or in some cases tripled the price of oil.
That's what's made Russia and Venezuela and the rest of these people's arch nemeses more powerful.
Right.
There's a lesson in the unintended consequences principle right there.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, let's leave it at that.
I appreciate your time today.
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of antiwar.com.
Thanks.
Thank you.