12/07/11 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest today is Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute, the Future Freedom Foundation, LewRockwell.com and other places like that.
He's got a new blog up at blog.independent.org.
Seventy years of infamy.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
Hey, Scott, can you believe it's December 7th again?
I know it really goes fast.
Yeah, it seems like it wasn't very long ago that it was the anniversary of Hiroshima.
Yeah, well, and, you know, I was just thinking it was a year ago I interviewed Robert Stinnett for my KPFK show in L.A.
And that just seems like yesterday to me.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's what happens when you get a bunch of gray hairs on your chin.
Time starts going faster.
And 70 years must have been must time must be really flying for Robert Stinnett.
He fought in World War Two.
And we didn't get a chance to talk about this on the show today, but I've spoken about it with him in the past as well.
You know, he still justifies FDR's treason at Pearl Harbor by saying it was absolutely necessary to convince the American people to who were wrong that we needed to intervene in the war in Europe.
Yeah, he told me that and I've heard him say that, too.
I believe he still thinks it was completely unconscionable that they threw Kimmel and Short under the bus.
But I think as bad as that was, it's not as bad as the Pearl Harbor set up itself and U.S. entry and the maneuvering and all the shady diplomacy.
I think this is actually a common view that that, of course, FDR lied Americans into the war and he had to for our own good.
And for some reason, a number of people will defend this.
It wouldn't defend it in the case of, say, Bush or Nixon or Johnson or other presidents.
FDR gets a pass because he's the one who got America involved in the worst war ever.
And I think, you know, he it was the war that stopped some of the worst villains ever.
That's what makes it so great, right?
Yeah, it eventually stopped some of the worst villains ever after they effectively committed their worst crime, which I think is always has to be remembered that you look at the terrible toll of Hitler, for example, and the argument is that this is what would have happened if the U.S. didn't enter the war.
The argument is the U.S. entered the war and then this happened, which shows that the other side was so evil.
And so the U.S. was justified inciting with Stalin and killing so many innocent people itself.
You know, the thing is, too, I don't know if maybe in my case isn't, you know, this is just the truth.
It's not an overstatement or whatever.
I don't know if this really applies to everybody the same way, but when I was very young and I first learned that God's rule number two or three or whatever is you're not ever allowed to kill anyone because killing somebody is wrong.
I also learned that there was an exception carved out of there, which is if you're wearing green and you're fighting for Uncle Sam, like in World War Two, well, God will look the other way because that's a totally different thing if you're fighting for your country.
And it was the World War Two and the goodness of it was the absolute loophole and you shouldn't go around killing people.
And then you can kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Yeah, exactly.
You can set their cities on fire from the air.
Yeah, that's right.
And as I point out in my piece for today, the thing about World War Two is that was the beginning of the permanent empire, the permanent U.S. warfare state, the military industrial complex.
All of these things that many Americans are uncomfortable with started in that war and never really went away.
You know, I know that you've talked about this too, that with wars before World War Two, there'd be this terrible war, huge expansion of the military state, and then it would recede quite a bit.
And there was some retreat from the war stance after the mid-forties, but it wasn't very long before the U.S. embarked on the Cold War.
And that military industrial complex that FDR created by courting all these corporate interests that he had alienated in the late New Deal, it's been with us since.
It was this humanitarian liberal that created this.
What do you know?
It wasn't Dick Cheney.
This has been going on for a long time, 70 years.
Well, and after the next red alert, when Muslims and dissenters are rounded up, the FDR's rounding up of the Japanese will be invoked as what makes it all OK.
FDR did it.
Sure.
Even, you know, in the last week when they were discussing detention policy for American citizens on American soil, some critics of this extreme policy were saying, yeah, but we're not necessarily opposed to doing it to aliens and we're not opposed to doing it in all circumstances.
And they would cite these precedents, including not just Japanese internment, but what FDR did to some of the alleged Nazi spies.
Probably were Nazi spies, but one of them was a likely American citizen and he was deprived of habeas meaningfully.
The courts stepped in and said, yeah, we can't really do anything.
And although, you know, if I have that right, that guy had gotten off the German U-boat.
He wasn't an American who had met them here.
He had come with them here.
So that was quite a bit different.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But the fact is people are defending these precedents, including the precedents taken against an American citizen in one case, which notably even Scalia thinks that the court was too deferential to presidential power in that decision.
Well, I remember in the early terror war, Rush Limbaugh on the radio saying that, oh, all you Democrats who criticize Bush for rounding up all these Muslims on material witness warrants.
Remember that, everybody?
You don't have a leg to stand on because after all, you love FDR.
And FDR did it to the Japanese, which, of course, all he was admitting was that George Bush, his hero that he was defending is just like FDR, which I would have thought would be a bad thing for a Republican pontificator like Limbaugh to brag about.
But there you go.
So it's my justification.
As long as FDR did it, we can do it.
Anybody can do anything, I guess.
Will both sides do this?
You know, people defending Obama today say, oh, yeah, well, Bush did it.
People under Bush said things I remember before the Iraq war.
They said that about Clinton and Kosovo.
Clinton went to war with Kosovo.
And it's really frustrating that both sides, the people who see themselves as part of the Republican or Democrat team more than as committed to any sort of principles, will always do this.
They'll say we're allowed to do it because the other side did it as though this is some stupid, you know, game.
Right.
And that well, and, you know, for an Obama fan and Obama defender to say, well, Bush did it has got to ring a little bit of cognitive dissonance in his or her own ears there.
I mean, come on, man.
Bush did it is the justification for anything.
Come on.
Nah.
Well, I guess it's just I want my president to be at least marginally better than the worst president from the other side or something like that.
So you see this or I'm sure about it was in Huffington Post.
I think they were citing the Washington Post about how these corporate profits on Wall Street have already under Obama exceeded the profits under Bush for the whole two terms.
And, you know, there are there there are caveats to be made about the financial collapse, cutting profits down and so forth.
But still, the the trend is everything about Bush we see continuing with Obama, the corporatism and the war.
And I don't understand why.
I guess I do understand it.
Well, and of course, with the economy, too, he did nothing but invoke the Roosevelt's yesterday in order to justify his position, the one you just described.
It's made Goldman Sachs richer than ever, ever.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Anthony Gregory from The Independent is to independent.org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute.
About 70 years of infamy since FDR's great treason at Pearl Harbor and the worst thing that ever happened, the Second World War, which I think and we talked about this year's back, Anthony, to me, the great founding myth of America now is World War Two.
It's not the Pilgrims and it's not George Washington or anything like that.
It's World War Two.
That's when I mean, for people who most of the time history just started yesterday, to ask them to go back more than 70 years, I think, is a stretch.
But they show us World War Two on TV nonstop ever since September 12th.
And it doesn't look like they're ever going to let up.
That's the one thing that makes us Americans is we can all believe in this great crusade, World War Two together.
Oh, I agree.
I don't think it's even Lincoln's war anymore, is it?
It really is World War Two, the most popular, beloved war in American history.
The most important myth, I think Robert Higgs has said it's encrusted in myth, this war.
And every major political myth relies on World War Two.
You know, the entire liberal views of central planning are all based on the idea that World War Two got America out of the Depression, that it was this great public works endeavor.
And, of course, World War Two is the last war that, you know, 80, 90 percent of Americans are actually proud of, isn't it?
I mean, what war in the last 70 years, or 65 years, I suppose, comes close to being as popular as World War Two?
What war will...
And yet Munich and what Justin Logan at Cato called the fallacy of 39 is in play in every one of those wars, Korea, Vietnam, the whole Cold War, really, the containment policy is based on the theory that it's always 1939.
And you know what happens when you give in to the terrible dictators.
They grow and grow and then start a war with Russia.
Yeah, I like to point out that Hitler is simultaneously the dictator that we're supposed to think of as completely unparalleled and unmatched in world history.
He's a unique evil.
But at the same time, somehow, every enemy of the United States is compared to Hitler.
So the entire mythology of World War Two is based on the singularity of Hitler's evil and danger that he posed to the world.
And yet the mythology of every war since then relies on the fact that we defeated Hitler.
And if we don't go to the next war, the new Hitler will emerge.
Yep.
As you said, that includes the war at home, as we just saw in the Senate last week.
Lindsey Graham and John McCain and the rest of the supporters of the legalize what Bush and Obama have already been doing.
Bill, we're arguing as though America was at war with the Nazis.
They really that's all they had to invoke.
They couldn't invoke actual Al-Qaeda as it exists, which, according to The Washington Post, on days that they're bragging anyway, they say has been reduced to two men in Afghanistan that they're done, that they won the war, that Al-Qaeda is no longer operationally effective and whatever.
Here now they got a pick on Al-Shabaab in Somalia that's only had rifles and used them for five years, you know, and only because of American intervention there in the first place.
And yet still now we're fighting against the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo.
Well, of course, because that's a worthy adversary compared to everything that's followed.
And, you know, I must say, though, that I'm grateful to McCain for reminding me that things wouldn't have been any better if he won.
Because Obama does an awful lot of terrible things that sometimes make me think maybe things are worse than they would have been.
Now, we never know which one's going to be worse.
I mean, now, if Newt Gingrich gets the nomination, I'm sure I'm going to be rooting for him.
I mean, you know, me, Ron Paul's the only one in the Republican lineup that doesn't seem at least as bad as Obama to me.
You remind me of something else that I learned about World War II as a very young kid, which was why didn't the Jews all run before it was too late?
Why didn't they get the hell out of there?
And I'm thinking maybe that lesson needs to apply right here, right now, talking about Newt Gingrich getting the nomination.
Well, of course, many of them, by the time the death camps were in full swing, I think about three quarters of the Jews in Germany had fled.
But many of them ended up being caught up in the other theaters of the war.
Yeah, because FDR wouldn't take them.
They tried to head west.
Yeah, FDR wouldn't take them, and Britain ensured that the war was even wider in the West than it probably would have been.
And yeah, of course, this is the big issue, is that no one at the time was saying that the U.S. was waging war on Germany to stop the extermination of Jews.
That was something that was argued much later, and it doesn't make any sense because Hitler almost succeeded.
And there was nothing the U.S. did actively to stop it.
Well, yeah, at the Independent Institute, your colleague Robert Stinnett, our previous guest on the subject of the Pearl Harbor attack, the first time I ever talked to him, he told me he was in the middle of researching.
He just brought up about the Patriot Act.
He was in the middle of researching FDR's orders to the Air Force that no matter what, the Army Air Force, that no matter what, they not bomb the railways to the death camps.
And I said, are you kidding me?
Which this has actually already been reported other places, but it was the first I heard of it.
And I said, well, why?
And he said, well, that's what I was trying to find out going through the historical record.
But then the Patriot Act reclassified all the materials, these 60-year-old at the time documents that he was going through that explain the motivation.
But, you know, if there is cloud cover and you miss your first target, you're supposed to go to your secondary target.
Well, the railways to the death camps were on the no matter what, do not bomb these, even if you've got to come home with all your bombs list.
Well, thank God that the Patriot Act classified that stuff again, because we would undermine support for the government that's trying to protect us from the modern day Nazi Hitlers out there.
Yeah, right.
But, you know, I wonder if I'd like to think that it's not time for everyone to flee this country.
And unfortunately, if you go to another country and the U.S. government has it in for you, they'll just drone attack you.
And, you know, Bill Hicks used to say, if you don't like it here, why don't you just leave?
What?
And become a victim of our foreign policy?
I'm staying here on at least the calmer side of the wall, man.
All the fires, most of it's directed out.
You're not even going to escape taxes, because the U.S. is one of the only governments on Earth that taxes people who leave the country, claims the right to tax your income.
It truly is the world state.
It seeks to be the world state.
Conservatives are always worrying about the U.N.
And I have a lot against the U.N., but this idea that there's some foreign state.
Another creation, by the way, of FDR and World War II and that whole enterprise is all this nationalist, internationalism.
But the U.S. government is truly the institution that claims to be the world state.
The whole world.
In fact, you know, it strikes me as ironic and unsettling that as much as I agree that the government being able to detain American citizens without charge on American soil is particularly tyrannical, this idea that many Americans seem to have that that's worse than the government going to some other country and detaining aliens without charge for 10 years.
I mean, why is that worse?
Why is why is the assumption that our government has the right to do whatever it wants all around the world, except in the country in which it actually claims jurisdiction?
Where does that come from?
I guess it comes from the idea of war and war, of course, turns all normal principles of law and ethics on their head.
Right.
So so in this country, the only people that even, you know, even some conservatives are concerned about American citizens being targeted.
But many, many people have been detained without any due process who aren't citizens and they should be let go to.
Yeah, well, and that's the thing is just like Chalmers Johnson says in his book Nemesis, the third one of the blowback trilogy, his second to last book, he said, you know, you have to either give up your empire or live under it.
And he said the Romans wouldn't give theirs up.
So they lived under it and became such a horrible police state.
Eventually, the whole thing collapsed altogether.
The British, on the other hand, decided, well, at least we can keep our rainy little island.
And I mean, they were forced for economic reasons to give it up, but they could have adopted a complete police state in order to tax the hell out of every last Briton in order to pay for the foreign empire.
But, you know, the people really had enough say over it, I guess they fired Churchill and said they wanted to keep what they had there, you know, more or less they gave the empire up.
And, you know, what we're doing is we're going down the Roman path here.
There's just no question about it.
We're importing the very same Bagram justice type system that we've set up, you know, outsource you can only outsource torture to dictators for so long before that's your law to the other Scott Horton, who, you know, is a real lawyer and sat on the on the was the chair of the New York Bar Association's committee on international law and these kinds of things.
He's saying this is like Carl Schmitt in Germany, making up the law of exception.
Everything is about setting the precedent that in this circumstance and in that circumstance, always empire circumstances, the law must be broken.
The president must be able to wage this unlimited authority and that this is how republics die.
There's just no question about it.
It's the war.
You know, conservatives always say, well, we haven't declared war since 1941.
We ought to start declaring war.
How about we declare an end to the war declared in 41?
That's why I haven't declared this war this whole time.
An end to it this whole time is because it never ended.
It's still I like I like your boss, Eric Garris's idea that the US should have a 50 year moratorium on wars as a start, just no more wars, you know?
Yeah, well, and look, and you know, you could have a thing.
I forgot who was in history proposed the constitutional amendment where there has to be a national referendum before they can get us into a war.
Of course, we're really attacked.
You could get your national referendum on war passed.
No, no worry about that.
If there was actually some invading force we had to deal with.
Well, I think that an additional safeguard is anybody who votes for the war has been left.
Yeah, that sounds fair enough.
Although then there would just be a bunch of old guys and they would try to get out of it, you know, that way.
Well, you know, I actually am very sympathetic to Ron Paul's argument that why is it the younger people that are always expected to die for these wars when they've they've they've had less time to live and get the blessings of American freedom or whatever than the old people?
He says it's though he says it's older Americans who owe the most to the country.
Yeah, we have before you see John McCain and them trying to carry a rifle up a hill up there in Afghanistan.
Yeah, don't tell me John McCain did his time.
He was just a fighter pilot.
Only he was flying a fighter bomber because he didn't have anybody to fight in the air.
So he's just dropping napalm on women and children on the ground.
Sure, I think that the only you know, we've only had a handful of presidents who would have actually liked to be in the wars, you know, Teddy Roosevelt and maybe Jackson or something.
And we'd probably be a freer country and a safer country, more peaceful if politicians had to fight the wars.
But I'm always opposed to this idea that politicians, kids should have to.
Should be drafted.
Of course, I'm against drafting anybody, but I don't like targeting their kids because it's not their fault that they have criminal parents.
I don't believe in the blood, you know, the guilt of blood or whatever.
People should be, although it really is interesting to me.
And I wish somebody and I wouldn't even care if they didn't give me credit.
Just go ahead and rip it off.
Somebody asked Mitt Romney, how can you convince the American people to volunteer to fight these wars that are so important to send their sons off to go fight these wars that are so important to our future security when you've proven that you've been unable to convince any one of your five army aged fighting male sons to go and participate in this war?
Obviously, you're not very effective at making this argument.
How or else how do you explain the fact that they all have jobs?
Yeah, that's a that's a much fairer argument.
I mean, you know, I'm not saying he should force them into it, but I think it just shows how little he really believes in all his own schtick about this clash of civilizations.
We have to fight against the Muslims.
He's not willing to give up a single one of his five sons for it.
Notably, I think Huntsman has kids in the military, and he, second to Ron, seems the most reluctant about war.
I mean, he is no non interventionist, but compared to the rest of them, he he seems to be, wouldn't you say?
I mean, at least he occasionally says this war should end.
Yeah, well, he does have, I guess, a more realist foreign policy than a, you know, right wing nationalist or neoconservative foreign policy, but that doesn't make him a libertarian only in comparison to the rest of the monsters on the stage.
Does it make him reasonable at all?
I was reading George Will's piece on on Gingrich.
Did you see that?
And Will is is not exactly a classical liberal type, either.
He's some kind of I don't know if he's a Straussian, but he's a whole statecraft type guy.
He's a national great.
You know, he's a he's a pro state conservative.
But reading his critique of Gingrich, Will comes off as some sort of Hayekian or Burkean by comparison, because he's right.
Then he really dismisses Ron Paul with a smear in one sentence.
What a joke.
Hate that guy.
That's true.
Anyway, hey, listen, we're over time.
I got to go.
Thank you so much for your time on the show, man.
You're always great, Anthony.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that's a great Anthony Gregory blog.
Independent.org is where you can find his piece.
Seventy years of infamy.
I think it's also running today on antiwar.com in it.
Yeah.
See right there in the viewpoints at antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.