05/30/11 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, it's anti-war radio.
On the line I'm joined by Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of the Freeman, the extremely important libertarian journal put out by the Foundation for Economic Education, and he's also a senior fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Welcome back to the show Sheldon, how are you?
I'm doing great and glad to be with you.
I'm very happy to have you here.
You know what, let me tell these people about your books too.
Separating School and State, How to Liberate America's Families, Your Money or Your Life, Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax, and Tethered Citizens, Time to Repeal, The Welfare State.
All of them are available at your favorite online bookstore, and probably at your actual bookstore too, so now you know.
All right now Sheldon, it's Memorial Day, and I was just wondering what you think of it really?
What I think of Memorial Day?
Yeah, what do you think of this Memorial Day?
Oh this one?
Well some years ago I christened Memorial Day personally, and then I promoted it on the web a little bit, Revisionist History Day.
I think it's a good time for people to at least take a few minutes of the day and read some revisionist history about one of the grand wars that the U.S. has been involved in.
Because after all, the official rationale of this day is what we're supposed to remember the fall, and people have given their lives in combat, and then of course they usually append the thought in an effort to keep us free or something like that.
But those of us who dig below the surface and look at what government actually does, and not just what it says, the pretty words it says, realize that wars are not to keep us free.
Certainly historically in the U.S. they weren't to keep us free.
There was always some political economic agenda, and even if some good motive could be kind of thrown into the mix, that was never the main reason that the government and the president took the country to war.
So I think that's the right time to contemplate the real reason, you know, the nature of war and the reasons that governments go to war, and in particular the U.S. government.
Well, you know, as long as we're at it, then let's pick on World War II, because that's the good war.
That's the war that never ends on cable TV.
I think everyone remembers how after September 11th, I don't know, the order must have come down from Donald Rumsfeld or something directly to every TV station and channel owner in the society, that you are to do nothing but play World War II for at least the next year straight.
They don't want to, you know, remind us about what happened in Korea and Vietnam.
Got to go back to World War II, but that was the good war, and it was the good war, Sheldon, for the simple reason that the Nazi regime and the Japanese imperialist regime were two of the most evil governments ever to have existed in the history of the entire solar system, maybe this side of the galaxy, and those Nazis needed killing, and nobody disputes that.
So I say, dispute it.
Well, I actually can't dispute what you just said.
Those are two of the most evil regimes, you know, in the history of the world, and that's why, you know, it takes a little more study and digging to understand fully what went on there.
Those were evil regimes.
Nothing would have been better than if the people in those countries had risen up and knocked those leaders off, those rulers off, and gotten rid of those governments.
They were terrible.
They did terrible things.
That, of course, has been amply discussed and documented, as you have said, but the war becomes a very more complicated question when you realize that another of the greatest, most evil regimes that has ever existed was an ally of the United States and England and France, namely Stalin's Soviet Russia, Soviet Union, and in the name of freeing Poland, which is really how the whole thing got started, of course, Poland was delivered to the Soviet Union for, what, the next 50 years, and half of Europe, along with the rest of the half of Europe, and so it's not quite the clear picture that the History Channel or the Hitler Channel, as I think of it, makes it out to be, and that's the way wars are, even when there's some good aspect to it, namely anyone of goodwill and decency and justice would have wanted to see the imperial Japan government fall apart, and Nazi Germany's government fall apart, and Italy's government, the fascist government fall apart.
Look how it actually played out historically, and the picture, again, is not so clear.
Yeah, well, you know, the thing to me that's the most important result of World War II is they turned the Americans into the Nazis.
The American government has killed three or four holocausts worth of innocent people since that time.
We just replaced the Germans.
Right, and because you don't want to overstate it.
I mean, we don't have a Nazi-style regime.
We have, certainly, especially in recent years, since 2001, we've seen maybe unprecedented violations of our civil liberties and, of course, an expansion of U.S. imperial policies, which have killed many, many innocent people, as you say, but, you know, we want to be a little bit judicious here and not say that there's no difference between the Nazi government and the U.S. government.
That's obviously...
Well, you know, on domestic, it's obviously different domestically, but, you know, there are places in Laos and Vietnam where so many people are dead that anybody who ever knew that they ever existed are also dead, you know, died in the same war.
They don't even know.
They guess when they talk about Korea, I mean, pardon me, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, they say somewhere between three and five million people killed because there's nobody even left who knew the dead people because they're all dead too.
They can't even count how many died, and so, you know, how much better our system of government is than the German one to them, you know?
Yeah.
No, I agree with you on that.
When it comes to foreign affairs, the conduct of the U.S. government in other countries, it's absolutely disgraceful, and I have lately been reading a new book about the Middle East and Palestine in particular, and you just want to hang your head in shame when you realize what was done in our name as Americans, even though it was before we were born, but it's still going on today.
It's just, it's absolutely disgraceful, so I, yeah, I'm not arguing with you whatsoever.
Well, the thing is, you know, under the old American system, I mean, there really was a lot of federalism.
It's taken a long time to go from, you know, FDR's state of emergency in 33 to where we are now where the states are really just big counties and the national government rules all.
It was a lot easier to centralize Germany than the United States, and of course, the wars were taking place in Europe, not here.
So, you know, if the wars have been taking place in the Americas, we probably would have gone much further down that road, but it seemed apparent to me, just going back and reading the history and just thinking, you know, these guys, what, 14, 16 million Americans came, well, a lot of them stayed overseas, but the ones who came home, 10 million Americans or something, came home from that war, and then instead of marching on Washington, D.C. and throwing Truman into the ocean, you know, tearing the State Department down, turning the Pentagon into a library like in The Promise, they all just figured, well, we won, we're the good guys, everything's great, and so, you know, fascism in America is fine.
We don't have to pay attention.
We don't have to worry.
We don't have, I mean, the Dulles brothers, the Rockefellers lawyers, one went to be the Secretary of State, the other, the head of the CIA.
I mean, come on.
No, absolutely right, and I don't want my earlier remark to be misunderstood.
I think it's one of the inexcusable attitudes of the American people, generally, because, you know, since they don't care about what happens beyond our shores, they don't even seem to care much about what happens, you know, within our shores, but the attitude is, well, look, things aren't so bad here, and, you know, they have such blinders on.
That's why it's so easy to have such bad things going on abroad.
Right, the most horrible atrocities can be going on by, quote, their government, but things aren't so bad here, so they don't care about that, and you're right.
You're absolutely right.
All right, well, it's Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of The Freeman, the Journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, and he's also a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF.org, and we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation and the Freeman from the Foundation for Economic Education, and we're talking a little bit about the American empire on this memorial day here, and, you know, the thing is, Sheldon, I kind of screwed that whole thing up because I overstated the whole thing in the first place, and then you had to straighten me out on the whole, you know, back up a step and a half, and then, you know, we're going back and forth about this.
I think we're pretty much agreed that we have participatory sort of fascism in America with, you know, somewhat civil liberties still protected in most circumstances, and, I mean, at least in terms of being arrested for something, you usually get to see a judge, right?
It's not like they're putting everybody in Guantanamo, but overseas, our government's just like the Nazis pretty much, and, you know, the thing that really drove that home for me was I read this guy, and he may be a commie.
I don't know, but I read this professor.
He wrote a thing at the History News Network about the war in Korea, and, you know, you talk about the forgotten war.
All any of us know about the Korean War is the show MASH mostly, but this guy made the case that the U.S. Air Force basically burnt the entire North, like the only people who lived were in caves, that they used napalm on every square inch, basically, of North Korea, that they wanted to use cobalt nuclear bombs to, you know, make the Yalu River area radioactive so the Chinese wouldn't want to cross it, and they bombed all the dikes.
They drowned people by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands, maybe by the millions, because if they hadn't, Sheldon, you'd be speaking North Korean right now.
Well, I always wanted to speak a second language, so, you know, look at the bright side of it, but you're right, and the more you read about this, you almost become jaded and think, okay, yeah, all right, I'm not surprised anymore by this stuff, and yet, of course, the average person never even ventures down that path, never wonders about it or reads anything about it, and so they're blissfully protected from all that, but they have no idea what, you know, the government has done in their name for many, many years now.
I mean, going back to the, well, the Indians, the Filipinos, I mean, you can start wherever you like.
It's not a good record, and of course, then something like 9-11 happens, and everybody says, everybody thinks it's out of the blue.
I mean, it's something you've spoken about many, many times.
We were just minding our own business on that day, and some people who don't like our freedom decided to fly planes into a couple of buildings.
How dare they?
Now we have to make war on the rest of the world to get even for this.
I mean, this is what comes of ignorance, just more atrocities.
Yeah, people have such short-term memories when it comes to this kind of stuff, and, you know, it's funny because, well, leaving aside the conquering of the land between Canada and what's now Mexico, aside for the moment, and just, you know, the overseas empire, you mentioned the Philippines, and, you know, the war with Spain there.
It's pretty much an unbroken chain of intervention since then, and in such an interesting way to me, it seems like it's all one chain of cause and effect, not just that, well, then we created a big navy, so it wanted to go find things to do, but in the sense that each time we intervened in pretty much any of these wars, it set up the circumstances for the next intervention.
I guess maybe the Korean War would be the exception to that, although there's probably ties I don't understand, don't know how to explain right, but certainly saving the Soviet Union in World War II then necessitated a giant Cold War against the Soviet Union, and then, of course, backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, backing the Shah in Iran, and all these things are Cold War policies that led to the revolution, and then support for Hussein, and then he got too big for his britches, so we had to occupy Saudi Arabia in order to bomb Hussein, which got us attacked on 9-11, so then we get to go do all this more stuff, and it just goes on, and on, and on, and on.
Well, it's the closest thing I think we'll ever find to a perpetual motion machine.
Yeah, I mean, they're talking about going into Pakistan now.
Who destroyed Pakistan?
The USA did.
Right.
Every step creates the justification for the next step.
It's a perpetual motion machine.
I think of it as the opposite of today's law, right?
It's demand creates its own supply, and you've used the quotation from McChrystal many times about, for every one we kill, 10 more pop up.
I mean, that's a perfect situation from the standpoint of the policymakers, from the people that are making huge amounts of money off this, and it's not just purely economic.
It's also political, and there's prestige.
There's power.
It's not just money.
It's not just oil.
It's not just minerals.
I mean, it is that stuff, too, but it's not only that.
I think it's simplistic to pick out one or the other.
I think it's a combination of all those things, and the idea is to keep things going, and it's a brilliant, you know, from their point of view, it is a brilliant strategy, because they'll never run out of reasons for why they must be intervening everywhere, and as long as people are ignorant, most people will think, yeah, they're doing it to protect us.
I mean, we didn't ask for this.
We hate to have this burden, but I guess we have to shoulder it, because no one else will.
We don't do it.
No one else will.
I mean, it's a perfect, it's just a perfect situation.
All right.
Well, sorry.
It's just that I got episode two out of the corner of my eye here, and it occurs to me that, you know, truth of the matter is, America's much more Anakin than Luke.
You know, Luke said, come on, man, I got responsibilities here.
I got to get home to my uncle and help him grow his crops, and then only after the stormtroopers killed his aunt and uncle did he say, all right, well, I guess there's nothing left for me here.
I'll go on your adventure, and I'll be the reluctant hero.
Anakin said, yeah, let's do it, and dropped everything and left, and couldn't wait to go intervene.
Yeah, well, that's an old story, and the...
Same thing over and over.
And, you know, the thing is, too, about Memorial Day makes, you know, I'm thinking red, white, and blue, and apple pie, and baseball, and all these things.
I mean, democracy.
We are all inculcated from birth in this society, into the civic religion, into confusing our society with our country, with our state, with, you know, the U.S. state, and, you know, I actually witnessed some of this in front of my eyes over the weekend.
I gave a speech at the Nullify Now conference in L.A., where the audience was mostly libertarian, but a bit right-wing, too, because it's, you know, nullification in the time of Obama kind of thing, and there were some people in that audience who just, man, they had their arms crossed.
I started with, we must stop the American empire, rah, and a lot of people clapped, and a lot of people were like, hey, man, that's my red, white, and blue you're stepping on there, and my son's a Marine, and these kinds of things are going through their heads.
And, you know, I'd like to believe, and I heard a couple of anecdotes about people maybe kind of nodding and conceding a couple of things, and maybe I did have a point after all a little bit at the end.
I like to believe that it's possible to get through to people that, especially when Democrats are in power, get through to right-wingers that, look, man, if Bill Clinton or Barack Obama declares that some foreign crusade is some holy thing that we're all supposed to give our sons up for, do you believe them?
Well, we need to remind them, and it's good to pull out the quotations from that great bunch of people that have come to be known as the old right, you know, starting with Robert Taft, who wasn't the hardest core of that group, but still, I would talk about those people, because it lets that kind of audience know this is not commie stuff.
Unfortunately, during Vietnam, war opposition was generally left to people who were considered on the left side of the political spectrum, especially, you know, the new left.
And so, being anti-war got this tinge of being, you know, pro-commie or something.
And we need to remind people that that's not the whole picture, and that there were good old Americans who believed in the Constitution and all that stuff, but who thought nothing was more dangerous to our liberties than a global empire.
And we have plenty of people to quote and eloquent quotations, so I think we need to teach people about these people.
I mean, you said that their memories are short.
I think you give them a little too much credit.
They don't have the memory at all.
They didn't have it to forget.
Yeah, well, it's true.
That's the problem.
It goes back to your book about the, well, tethered citizens is one, but the other about separating school and state.
I mean, this is our problem.
Hey, we have to do budget cuts.
The last thing we're going to do is teach people history.
And of course, if we do, it'll be the history of why all our wars were great anyway.
Oh, well, sure.
Right.
We can't look to them to teach.
I mean, every school, at least when I was growing up, there was always sort of one sort of quirky guy who was willing to say something negative about the war in Vietnam.
And I think he was always a suspect by the school administration.
Hey, he's going off the reservation.
And so he had to be careful, but that wasn't the general run of your history professors.
Most of them were good old, probably been through World War II, and we're going to teach you the orthodox view right out of coming out of the Department of War.
So it's a frustrating thing.
We have to keep fighting away on it because we're living with the problems.
I mean, just about every headache we're suffering today in foreign affairs is the result of what the British and the French did in World War I and after World War I by double crossing the Arabs and the Palestinians.
And that's all haunting us because we picked up the mantle.
Right.
Well, as you say in your recent piece about the death of Osama bin Laden, all of our worst sufferings, the national security state and all the infringements on our civil liberties, and of course, our bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of state and local governments all across the country, of course, unemployment lines of bankrupt individual citizens and a national debt that can't be paid off without some kind of Weimar style hyper inflation.
All this is because of our foreign policy.
We can't let any of this stuff go until we get over it.
Right.
That's absolutely right.
And it makes you despair, you know, on at least on your worst days, that there's no way out of it.
But we have to keep fighting because we never know.
We have to keep trying to convince people in every way we can.
And that's what you're doing.
That's why this is why anywhere radio is so important.
Well, thanks.
I appreciate that.
And you know, you remind me of what Ron Paul told me the very first time I ever interviewed him.
May have been the first time I met him.
I forget.
Anyway, it was at the Libertarian Party Convention in 2004.
And I asked Karen Kotowski what her question for him might be.
And she said she would ask him if there's only one Ron Paul and only has ever been one Ron Paul.
What hope do we have for any of this?
I mean, what are we going to do, you know?
And so I thought that was a hell of a good question.
So I asked him and he said, ah, all your job is, is teaching people about liberty.
And your job is not to doomsday and predict the worst for the future, because you never know what's going to happen.
And there were a few who predicted the fall of Soviet Union, but you know, they didn't know the time and the place.
And for the vast majority of us, and, you know, I was a kid, but still I remember the consensus when I was a kid was that this Soviet Union was going to last into the indefinite future.
And lo and behold, the thing just fell apart.
And without even a war, it just fell apart.
And millions of people were set free overnight almost.
And so it's not up to us to, to guess how bad it's going to be.
It's up to us to, you know, warn about possible negative consequences, but also just to get our principles straight and see if we can get more people to agree with us and, and to believe like we do, you know, then we'll have much less of a negative future to worry about, you know?
Well, that's what keeps you going.
You don't know, and some amazing things have happened, unpredicted things have happened in the past.
So it's, and also there's a measure of, you know, virtue is its own reward.
It's the good fight.
So all those things together is what I hope would keep us going and not despairing, not giving into despair.
As tempting as that can be sometimes.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, believe me, it's, it's sure nice to know that Sheldon Richman's out there, right?
And I'll tell you what, it counts a lot to me.
Happy Revisionist History Day to you, Sheldon.
Appreciate it, man.
Same to you, Scott.
Anytime.
All right, man.
Take care, everybody.
That's Sheldon Richman.
He is the editor of the Freeman, the Journal of the Foundation for Economic Education.
And he's a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation.
Their website is www.fff.org.
And you know what?
I really do have to recommend this excellent piece at New Jersey Today.
That's njtoday.net.
It's called After Bin Laden.