11/11/11 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Next up on the show is my friend Anthony Gregory.
He is the leader of the American libertarian movement, actually, according to me.
Anyway, wherever you disagree with Anthony, it's because you're not libertarian enough, because he is walking six feet of libertarianism.
Plumb line.
The definition.
His picture is next to libertarianism in the dictionary.
He's a research associate or something like that at the Independent Institute.
That's independent dot org.
He writes for Lew Rockwell dot com and for Strike the Root and of course is a policy advisor at the Future of Freedom Foundation, FFF dot org.
And if you read all the stuff that he writes, you will be a better man or woman for it.
That's what I'm telling you.
All right.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
How are you doing?
Well, it's great to be with you.
Your introduction has become more exaggerated each time, but thank you very much.
Yeah, this guy makes Ron Paul look like Franklin Roosevelt.
All right.
Well, it's not like I like you very much or anything, kid.
All right.
So welcome back to the thing.
Armistice Day is the title of your blog entry at independent dot org.
Armistice Day.
I've never heard of such a thing.
What in the heck are you talking about?
Well, today is November 11th.
And up until the 1950s, the United States observed this as Armistice Day.
And a few countries still call it Armistice Day.
And many other countries call it Remembrance Day.
Americans often forget that not every holiday is owned by an American monopoly.
And this was an international holiday occasioned by the end of World War One.
And although it was it was commemorated by the Allied governments and we can kind of question the integrity and the motives involved in making this holiday, there was something very real to celebrate, which was the end of the worst war in world history up until that point.
And you know how much I hate war, Scott.
So the worst war ever is bound to be at least in the running for the worst thing ever, the worst event ever.
And to see that horrible bloodshed, the this this completely cataclysmic event where the world essentially tried to commit suicide, as one scholar described it, with no with no good purpose and with nothing but terrible consequences and horrible bloodshed.
The end of this was something to welcome and to be grateful for.
And in the 50s, it was turned into Veterans Day.
And now it's just another one of the many days in America where we're supposed to honor the military and not just that, but honor militarism.
So it's it's not quite the opposite of what it was used to be about, but it's getting there.
Well, you know, there used to be something that's gone now, I guess.
Maybe it's back.
Maybe it could be on on its way back.
It was called the Vietnam syndrome.
And more or less that sort of shorthand for the American people realized just how worthless their lives were to those who inhabit Washington, D.C., and that they're willing to have us fight no win wars to the tunes of tens of thousands of our own deaths and that we just don't trust them.
We don't want to do that anymore.
And I guess, you know, the great journalist Robert Perry says he believes that the overriding goal, the number one main objective of the first Gulf War Operation Desert Storm, with the trademark there, was to beat that Vietnam syndrome, to show the American people that war can be fun, war can be quick, war can be easy.
War is what we're about.
And to break that.
And I wonder now with just the headlines in the last few days, I don't know if people haven't seen at The Washington Post, especially these stories about the mistreatment and the desecration of American servicemen's bodies by the Air Force at Dover, including dumping them in the garbage, Anthony, in the landfill.
Do you think it's possible that people will finally break out of this, you know, wow, today's a day I'm supposed to love militarism type holiday mentality, and start feeling the irony of this a little bit, that they really don't care about American soldiers now any more than they did when they marched them into the mud trenches in World War I?
Well, the optimist in me thinks that there will be some of that effect, but the pessimist in me isn't so encouraged.
I came across this story through you, actually, looking at your Facebook, and I wasn't exactly shocked, but it does kind of say it all, doesn't it?
These are supposedly the best and the brightest.
These are the people that the government puts up as being superior human beings, in a sense, to the rest of the society, and yet, even they are treated like garbage.
But remember the Walter Reed scandal involving actual living veterans, and how poorly they were mistreated by the government, the veteran health system, and how that was spun, not as showing that the government, the state, the warfare state, the whole apparatus, was totally rotten and didn't care about these people.
It was either blamed on the Bush administration, in particular, or somehow, I remember liberals complaining that it showed the problems with private enterprise.
I don't even remember the logic behind that.
But one way or another, Americans have a tendency, maybe instead of Vietnam syndrome, now we have some variant of Stockholm syndrome, where Americans seem desperate to blame anything that's obviously the fault of the empire, the military-industrial complex, Washington, D.C.
It's somehow blamed on whether it's the conservatives say, well, it's because we have a Democrat president who doesn't care, or if the Republican president, the liberals say it's because we have a president who doesn't understand the importance of governance.
It's very difficult to get people to blame the entire system, and maybe with Vietnam, not just because of the vast number of Americans who died, drafted, and were killed in that war, but because we had such a stark, horrible experience under both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Maybe that helped people realize that the problem went beyond party, it went beyond any particular faction.
It was the war party, it was the war machine itself that was the problem.
And I had hoped that that would happen with Obama, and maybe to some extent it has, but on the other hand, I think a lot of the rabid discontent with Bush, a lot of the anger, the outrage, the understanding that the war machine represented the ruling class and did not speak or act on behalf of the American people, or foreigners or even soldiers, that understanding that we saw in a lot of Americans under the Bush years, I think kind of faded away under Obama, and now maybe it's just because of partisanship once again, but I'm not that optimistic that this will have a lasting effect.
People say, oh, that's a terrible thing that the military is doing, cremating veterans and putting the bodies and putting the remains in a landfill.
That's terrible, but what they don't see is that this is just what the system's all about.
You can't really take the atrocity out of war.
War crime, in other words, is a redundancy.
Yeah, well, you just look at what's going on in Libya right now.
Yay, victory, whatever, let's not pay any attention as all the blacks are rounded up and raped and murdered.
After all, Barack Obama's the first black president, so let's just pretend he didn't install the Ku Klux Klan-slash-Al Qaeda in power in Libya.
Let's just not even talk about the Libyan war ever again, in fact.
Anthony, what the hell?
Yeah.
All right, we'll be right back.
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, fittingly wrapping up the week with my friend Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute, LewRockwell.com, the Future Freedom Foundation, etc., etc., etc., and we're talking about his blog entry today, well, and other associated subjects.
His blog is at the Lighthouse blog at independent.org, blog.independent.org.
In fact, Armistice Day today, before it was Veterans Day, it was Armistice Day, and, you know, I saw on Facebook where they were passing around your article, I think a Brit said, this is about Veterans Day, what we still in Britain call Armistice Day.
They still celebrate the end of a war there.
As you said, it's an international holiday.
World War I wasn't all about us.
No, no, of course it wasn't.
In fact, although over 100,000 Americans died in that war, you know, 15 million or so foreigners died in that war.
You know, we talked with Jim Powell earlier about his book, Wilson's War, and how this really got the 20th century, American intervention specifically, got the 20th century really started off to be the worst century ever in terms of totalitarianism and war, genocide, and democide, and the rest of it, hundreds and hundreds of millions of people killed, and most Americans don't really think of it that way, because it was the American century, because you know, the Americans never got to have our country burned all the way to the ground like everybody else did during these times.
But you know, Powell emphasized in this one, part of the hyperinflation in Germany at the time of Hitler's first try to take power, the Beer Hall Putsch, it wasn't just the war reparations, which had a lot to do with it, as we all know, but it was the war socialism, the totalitarianism of the German government during World War I, and which lasted after World War I. That's why they were printing all that money, was to pay for this total state that they had invented, and I forget who I'm paraphrasing, but I read somewhere that Germany during World War I was really the first totalitarian state in history, and just the whole thing was a mess.
But you know, the way that America helped the British defeat the Germans basically left the Germans on a war footing even after the war.
You know, in times of crisis, only the central government can provide, and whatever, and all they did was dig the pit worse and worse, till the people of Germany were willing to let Adolf Hitler be the one to pull them out of it.
That's true, and you know, another point that Ralph Rakel makes is that the old order under Germany, you know, the kind of monarchical order of much of Europe, although not ideal from a classical liberal standpoint, it would have been very difficult for totalitarians like the Nazis to take over Germany in that context.
And in Russia, the czarist order, a lot of people to this day seem to think Lenin was some sort of improvement over that, but it wasn't.
The Bolsheviks were far worse, and Stalin ended up being probably the worst butcher in history when he took over.
And the consequences of World War I were, as you say, the worst regimes ever, the worst mass murders ever, and of course World War II, and then the Cold War.
So the 20th century, the so-called American century, where, you know, even Americans though should be a little bit more cautious about these two wars where over 500,000 Americans in World War I and II died, and the devastation it did to American freedoms at home, from which we've never recovered.
But yeah, Americans still didn't see a fraction, at least here at home, of the horrors that Europe saw, and so there's still this kind of glorification of those wars.
And it's rather depressing, because these wars have nothing to do with defending liberty.
On balance, they leave most countries affected less free than they started out.
They planned the seas, World War I in particular, did result in a 20th century of unspeakable and unprecedented horror and tyranny and darkness.
The internationalism of trade and migration patterns and goodwill that had existed up till World War I was destroyed and never really came back.
I read one economist say that the trade patterns that were destroyed in World War I weren't restored until the 1970s.
You know, that's half a century of international trade being set back.
And that's just one of many effects which has huge consequences on its own.
World War I was so devastating for the world, the end of it was the best part of it, and so that's why every Veterans Day I try to remember that instead of the pro-war implications that come in the Veterans Day emphasis, which is what we so often get.
Because now we've been at war constantly, haven't we, since World War II especially, and we always have more and more veterans to honor, but that's not a good thing.
It's not a good thing that we have more war veterans than ever.
Well, you look at the point we're at now, we've got nothing to be happy about at all except when the government kills somebody.
Yay, let's all celebrate in the streets that after 10 years they finally killed Osama Bin Laden.
USA, USA, we've got nothing left to cheer.
Like George Carlin said, can't get education to our young, can't get healthcare to our old, can't make a VCR or a car that anybody wants to buy, but we can bomb the hell out of you, and that's all we have to be proud of anymore.
Where back in the days in American history, there were a lot of wars, but people at least liked to believe that America was a peace-loving country, that we were the reluctant warrior.
If we ever did fight, it was only because we absolutely had to, and now, like you say, wars don't end at all.
Hell, there are probably kids listening to this show right now who are going, Armistice Day?
I don't understand, what do you mean a war ends?
I didn't know wars could end.
I mean, the context they're living in.
That's right, and you know, now that we've passed the 10-year anniversary of not just the War on Terror, but the Afghanistan War, which Obama has expanded beyond any level that existed under Bush, and so what's the deal there?
You know, there was a time when it would have been considered alien to American sentiments to have a war last for 10 years.
There was also a time when it would have been considered unusual to have almost half a dozen wars go, but these days, we'll just, there's just all these small wars going on alongside the big war in Afghanistan, the war that's kind of petering out, but not really completely ending in Iraq, and then Libya, as you said, yeah, I guess now that's behind us, because we don't like what, we don't want to pay attention to what's happening there, because it's rather embarrassing, isn't it?
I mean, we went in there, Obama sent, flew bombs there for the purpose of stopping massacres, he said.
Massacres that, you know, I think there's good reason to believe he just kind of made up.
It's, the war propaganda just comes every time, just like in World War I, there was the Bryce Report, which greatly exaggerated German atrocities in Belgium, and to this day, there's the war propaganda.
I heard, you know, you mentioned Iran earlier, and it's a great service that you do in exposing your listeners to Gareth Porter, who's been so great on Iran for so long.
I guess I shouldn't say I don't, it's hard to believe, it's not hard to believe anymore, but it kind of is hard to believe that to this day, all it takes is for someone to say something about Iran finally being on the brink of having nuclear weapons, and everyone assumes it, you know, the headlines repeat it, my friends talk about it like it's, like Iran's about to get a nuke.
I mean, what's the deal with this?
How come people don't understand that the establishment that pushes this propaganda are liars, that they take the smallest bit of, they take a kernel of truth, even if it takes that, and they blow it up into, you know, the Hitler number two is coming, and he's going to kill us all again, unless we go to war again.
You know, I don't know, I mean, you know, I would have thought that they wouldn't be able to lie us into Iraq the way they did because of Vietnam, but obviously that lesson was way lost by then, but now after 10 years of lying us into war, they can keep lying us in, they can lie us into Libya, they can lie us into Iran, and it really is that easy?
I just don't know.
I mean, hell, I can't get over that nobody even cares about foreign policy at all.
I would think that if the country's at war, at least it's the center of people's attention, partially sometimes, but no, it's peacetime now.
It's just a permanent thing.
Nobody even cares.
It's a normal, it's not a normal country.
Woodrow Wilson won after all, man, I guess.
And Mandelhaus, Edward Mandelhaus.
Yeah, exactly.
Philip Drew, administrator.
All right, well, thanks very much for your time, Anthony.
Appreciate talking to you as always.
Everybody, that's the great Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute.
That's blog.independent.org, luerockwell.com, and the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org.