All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
Back to it.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Dr. Brian Phillips.
He's a history, philosophy, and rhetoric teacher and serves as the pastor of Holy Trinity Reformed Church in Concord, North Carolina.
Can read him at Truth and Culture, which is, if I hover over it, truthandculture.wordpress.com.
And also, he's been writing for antiwar.com, five or six of them now, original.antiwar.com/B Phillips.
Today's piece is called The Imperial Boomerang Returns.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
Oh, doing very well.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I've been very happy to read your writings for antiwar.com lately.
Please keep it up.
Oh, absolutely.
I plan on it.
I really like it.
First of all, I want to talk about today's piece, The Imperial Boomerang.
What's that?
Well, essentially, the piece addresses some of the tools that have been used by the U.S. military abroad and how some of those tools are now coming back and essentially being used in what I would call imposing tyranny on the United States.
In other words, it's based on a quote from James Madison, which, you know, as a history teacher, I spent a good bit of time with the Founding Fathers anyway.
And essentially, what Madison warned us about is that the means of defense that we use against foreign danger, quote unquote, will eventually become the tools of tyranny at home.
And I think we're finding that to be true.
What's going on with some of our military actions in Iraq are now being and the drone attacks in Yemen are now threatening really to be used against us in the United States.
And the document essentially, or I'm sorry, the article essentially documents cases where you've had drug raids by the DEA, you've had warrants that are being served by police departments, and they break in and kill innocent people.
And the article documents five or six of those.
And this is the same kind of thing that's going on in Iraq and has been going on in Iraq for years now.
In the home raids that have been documented on video, the tragic deaths that have occurred because of that.
And so documents that and then of course, the drone attacks in Yemen and the frightening developments of how drones are actually being used now by police departments in the United States.
Mm hmm.
Well, now, it was Chalmers Johnson that said, I think it was in his third book, Nemesis, he draws the parallel between America and the British Empire and America and the Roman Empire.
And he says that the lesson here from these two that preceded us is that you either give up your empire or you live under it.
And the British, after wasting all their money in a couple of world wars, basically the people decided as soon as the war was over, they got rid of Churchill and they said, we want to keep our rainy little island more or less the way it was rather than having to impose a totalitarian state in order to extract from people the wealth required to maintain this empire.
They're over it.
They're done.
And so they decided to give it up at that point rather than change the entire nature of their own system.
Whereas the Romans just blew their own brains out.
Right.
And which path are we going down?
Are we going to give up our empire, live under it?
And I don't I just don't think you could have a better example than local deputy sheriffs flying around Reaper drones.
I mean, it's as predictable as can be, but it's outrageous as can be.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I've I've noticed some parallels, really very close parallels between the United States and the Roman Empire.
And actually, Edward Gibbons book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, actually a series of books addresses some of those things.
And of course, he didn't make that connection with America.
But in any American reading that can see that.
And I think that seeing how these tools are being brought from our our imposition, you know, we claim it's defense, but it's merit.
It's militarism.
It's imperialism.
And, you know, textbook definition of it when we go and occupy other countries and use these means against them.
And to find out, you know, here's the sheriff in the Houston area saying, yeah, we've got this armed drone, but don't worry, we won't we won't use it to violate anyone's privacy.
Yeah, of course, the government's never lied to us before.
So we're we're not exactly comforted by that.
I do think that we're headed in the direction of the Roman Empire.
It certainly seems to have a lot of parallel there, the way that our, you know, and it's not just in our militarism, but in our economic policies and so on.
But I mean, you can't how do you maintain 900 bases in 150 different countries?
How do you maintain multiple foreign wars?
I mean, nevermind just the fact that it's just blatantly immoral.
You know, but you add to that just the expense of it and the cost of human life.
I mean, it's just it's simply unsustainable.
Well, and, you know, part of the economic impact, of course, ties in with the militarization of society, really the million.
I forgot how many million Americans have served in Iraq, as they call it, serve in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the terror war in general just over the last 10 years.
Then these guys come home and like that song Born in the USA, there's no jobs because all the money that would have gone to employing them was wasted, arming them to kill people in these foreign countries.
So they come home and just like the opposite of the ads on TV, being a soldier actually makes them less qualified for many jobs in the eyes of many employers, not guaranteed the top salary like on the commercials.
And so then where do they get a job other than the local police department here in Austin?
They start at 80,000 a year.
By the way, they're already flying drones on drug raids here in Austin, Texas.
And and, you know, I knew a guy got home from peacekeeping, so-called in Bosnia in the 1990s.
And he had a thing in his mailbox saying, you want to be a cop?
We'll pay you so well, better than you'll ever make.
Come work for us.
It was it was waiting before he even got home.
And I've heard stories about that from people I don't know as well since then.
But this is part of it, too.
You got guys who are used to doing these night raids based on the same kind of bad intelligence, Iraq and Afghanistan style coming home.
Now they're going to be running our drug task forces in our local counties.
Right.
Right.
And so exactly.
You've got people who are trained in these tactics and they're going to come home and they're being given the same kinds of tools to do the same kinds of things.
And how many people have to be killed in this in the raids, in the so-called war on drugs?
And how many people have to be killed in using these SWAT team tactics with police forces that were that were never intended for this kind of thing to give the police this kind of authority and then to simply believe or trust that, yeah, it's not going to be used against you.
This is this is outrageous.
It's completely unbelievable.
But, you know, and the thing that is most disturbing to me about this is just how how easily much of the American public seems to be accepting us.
It's that was one of the things that I've noted in this article in the current piece, the interior, the imperial boomerang, and then a couple of others, drone strike on the Constitution and some of the other writings that I've done for anti-war, is that we seem to kind of have redefined our language in America, and it's desensitized us to what's really happening.
I mean, I think we forget that the drone strikes that have gone on in Yemen in particular, part of the quote unquote war on terror, have taken the lives of three American citizens with no charges, no due process, in complete violation of the Constitution.
And there was a poll done by MSNBC that, this was shortly after Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were killed in the drone strike in late September, and they asked, is it okay for the U.S. government to take the life of an American citizen without due process if they're suspected of terrorism?
And over, I believe it was over 71 percent said yes.
Over 71 percent.
And we're not talking about a small poll.
Normally you can kind of disregard that kind of thing.
But I mean, there were tens of thousands of people that responded to this.
And so it's really disturbing to see the kind of response that people have to this, to seeing this as just and acceptable, even when it's done against American citizens abroad.
And I think what we've done is we've been desensitized to the fact that this is happening across the world.
And so we're kind of comforted by the mileage, you know, that separates us from the U.S. to Yemen.
Yeah.
Well, and the fact that TV will never show the burning bodies, ever, ever, ever, ever.
Or the collateral damage, you know, the civilians that are killed in the midst of this as well.
Yeah.
Well, and that's where we're going to pick this up on the other side of this break.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's Dr.
Brian Phillips, original.antiwar.com/B Phillips.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Dr. Brian Phillips.
He's a history teacher and a pastor from North Carolina.
He's been writing for antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com/B Phillips.
And his website is truthandculture.wordpress.com.
And you're talking about the innocents killed in the drone strikes.
This is a parallel you make at least in one direction.
I may have skipped past it where you went back the other way about the bad intelligence that all these raids are based on.
There's a great piece by Gareth Porter today, which we'll be talking with him about it tomorrow on the show.
ISAF data night raids killed over 1500 Afghan civilians in less than 10 months in 2010 and early 2011.
He's reporting after going through all the data there.
And it sounds just like your article where raid after raid after raid here in the U.S. where you're talking about mostly local police dealing with so-called their own communities.
They their intelligence isn't any better than it is over there in Afghanistan.
And so that makes the situation here seems scary.
But to me, it also kind of shows just how cruel this war in Afghanistan is.
If your local sheriff doesn't have any idea who lives in whose house before he kicks the door down and starts throwing flashbang grenades around and things executing dogs, then how in the world is the Delta Force supposed to know who they're killing over there in Afghanistan?
Right.
Right.
And, yeah, the parallels are pretty obvious.
You know, in fact, in my article, I focused a little bit more on how those tools are coming home.
But, you know, I mean, we have we have records of these innocent civilians, the elderly women, children, innocent men, unarmed people being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as you said.
And the same things are happening here.
But, you know, the things don't get any coverage.
It's very rare that these things result in any kind of change.
I mean, one of the most horrifying things that or examples within my article is a 90 year old, 92 year old woman that lived in the Atlanta area.
I mean, she was she was killed off of bad information that the police got from from a different suspect and said, yeah, you know, I got drugs or whatever from that home over there.
And he was he was giving them bad information.
They they started to ram down the door and pry the bars off of her windows to get in.
Well, this 92 year old woman, she gets a pistol that she had to defend herself.
I mean, what's she going to do?
You know, and when they come in, they see the gun and they fired 40 rounds and killed her.
And she had done nothing, you know, and that kind of example is multiplied over and over and over again.
This has happened dozens of times in the United States.
Of course, you know, thousands have been killed in our foreign wars doing this kind of thing.
Thousands in Iraq, thousands in Afghanistan, you know, just through these home raids.
But as I was saying in the last segment, you know, the way that this is portrayed to us, at least what's going on overseas, what's going on in the wars, it's portrayed as, oh, well, this is simply collateral damage, which is just code.
You know, it's a kind of new speak.
So one of the things that I mentioned in this article is we've kind of engaged in this Orwellian idea of new speak, and we don't even realize that we're taking comfort in words like collateral damage and insurgent and terror suspect and all these sorts of things that we just sort of lump it all together and say, oh, well, we're at war, these things happen.
You know, well, what I'm interested in is finding out, you know, if America can very casually brush off these kinds of murders, which is really what they are, if we can brush off those murders and call it collateral damage, what do we do?
What are we going to do when the drones that these police forces have are used against American citizens and there's collateral damage then?
You know, what do we call it then?
You know, we were okay, and I'm using we as in the American public, the American public seemed to be just fine when Anwar al-Awlaki was killed and Samir Khan was killed, and then two weeks later, you know, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son is killed while he's out having, you know, doing a barbecue outside and a bunch of other teenage boys killed, too, in another drone attack in Yemen, and they chalk it up to collateral damage.
Well, what happens when that goes on in Texas, you know, when this Houston Police Department...
They'll call it a suicide.
I'll say, yeah, all these people burn their own kids to death, you believe that, right?
Yeah, well, there will be attempts, I'm sure, to repackage this in some way, in the same way that I believe it was when al-Awlaki's son was killed, they tried to reframe or reword it to indicate that he was somehow involved in al-Qaeda as well.
Right, and that he was an adult.
Yeah, and he was a 16-year-old boy going to visit family and having a cookout, you know.
Well, you know, Justin Romano had a piece a few back where he laid out his theory that he thinks evil makes people stupid, and it seemed like it made a lot of sense to me.
If you're going to go around cheerleading and tying yellow ribbons around trees everywhere for the mass murder of women and children in their homes for the most cynical of imperial reasons, you really have to suspend your disbelief.
It's like believing in Chewbacca for an hour and a half while you're watching The Empire Strikes Back.
You just have to go along with this fantasy world where Iran already, I guess, dominates half of Eurasia, where there's an al-Qaeda guy hiding under every bed, so you ought to hide under yours, although he might be under there, so maybe you shouldn't, or whatever.
It's a fantasy world that people believe in, in order to rationalize the evil that they're, at least rhetorically or emotionally, vicariously taking part in.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, I think that there's really no, there's a blind allegiance that is required in all of this, and there's no reason or logic that goes into it.
I mean, in fact, when I first wrote this piece that was The Imperial Boomerang Returns, I had let a friend of mine read it, and it ended up in one of those infamous Facebook debates, and basically the point they're making is, oh, well, yeah, those things are tragic, but remember, we're at war.
All these people killed, and a civilian kills, but remember, we're at war.
These things happen.
But there's such a disconnect where we are willing to turn off all reason, we're willing to turn off all sense of right and wrong when it comes to these wars, and essentially another piece that I've been working on, and I hope will come out soon, is what we've done is we've redefined patriotism.
Patriotism used to be a loyalty, a deep abiding loyalty that abided as a result of relationships and gathering around or commitment to an ideal, and now patriotism is really just nothing more than blind loyalty.
Just sit down, shut up, and raise the flag kind of thing, and it's really frightening, and I think that the founding fathers warned us about this.
The Constitution lays out very clearly how these things are to be dealt with, and it really is sad to see such a desensitizing going on in our own country, and as a result, it's coming home.
Yep.
Well, at least they were warned.
It's the Imperial Boomerang Returns.
That's the piece at antiwar.com today.
Also, welcome to the new America.
There's a great one there.
Dr. Brian Phillips, thanks very much for your time on the show today, sir.
Oh, thank you so much.
