05/03/12 – Marc Guttman – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and now I'm joined on the phone by Mark Gutmann.
He's the editor of two books, Why Liberty and Why Peace.
Welcome, Mark, how are you?
I'm good, Scott, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
I'm sorry, do you have a website here I can mention?
I do.
You do.
It's y-peace.com.
That's right.
Alright, good.
Wow, what a book.
And cool, I like sometimes when I introduce somebody on the show, I get to shame myself in front of everyone.
I could have been in this thing, and I blew it.
You should have been.
I completely blew it.
But I thought that I had to write about myself and why I was a peacenik, but it turns out that there's all kinds of different stuff in here that's not like that at all.
So maybe I could have gotten away with just sending in the kind of thing that I wanted to write instead, but I don't know.
Oh, man, I encouraged you.
I was prodding you a few times there.
Yeah, yeah, no, I completely blew it.
But I was really busy.
I know.
So that'll be part of my excuse.
Anyway, what a great thing.
Here, let's talk about, well, you just talk about who all is in here, and then we can go through and you can tell us all about your favorites, etc., etc., like that.
Sure.
Well, it's a great collection.
I'm really happy with how it came together.
I got a lot of interesting and intelligent people with some pretty compelling stories, having to do with state aggression and the wars they've been involved in, police abuse they've suffered, or just people like me and hopefully you that maybe hasn't suffered too much but is aware and alert to what's going on and has some pretty important ideas about what's going on.
I got people from 34 countries, or stories from 34 countries, 5 continents, dating back to the early part of the 20th century to current events.
Hey, cool, I'm right here in the introduction.
Yeah, oh, yeah.
The anti-war radio has been a big influence for me.
Wow.
Well, good.
Cool.
Thanks for the mention.
That's very kind of you.
And then here's chapter one.
It's by Philip Giraldi.
Yeah.
Yeah, he writes a great article about just how he kind of, for a long time, thought U.S. hegemony around the world was a good and positive thing and happened to see this picture of a small boy killed by a U.S. bomb in Iraq and he was sitting having breakfast with his grandson and started tearing up and realizing that everything we're doing is so great.
Well, boy, has he become an important asset to the anti-war community in this country.
Yeah.
Well, life's just a bunch of moments, ain't it?
Tell you what.
All right, well, so yeah, now go through and tell us, hell, you got 20 minutes, well, 15 anyway, to tell us about who all's in this book, what all awesome things they wrote.
Give us your best infomercial for why peace.
All right.
I don't know if I was quite prepared for that, but I'll give it a try.
We've got people from across different spectrums, different cultures, genders, religions, political spectrum.
We have some progressives and libertarians, maybe some former conservatives.
One great aspect of the book is there are several stories of people with very dynamic changes in their outlook, people who either believe in some sort of intervention or favor some sort of government policy, and then through experience or witnessing the experiences of others, you know, dramatically changed their opinion and became activists.
Yeah, I was always a reluctant activist.
This isn't something, you know, I was happy to go on and live my life and snowboard and travel and backpack, and after a while just, you know, learning and seeing what was going on in the world, realized that state aggression is just too harmful to too many people, and felt like I needed to get involved and thought a book like this would, you know, much like your show, you know, raise awareness all in the interest of discovery and truth and peace and prosperity.
And like I said, I think the book came together great.
I think I've got a lot of fantastic feedback so far.
People are really happy with it.
And yeah, I encourage all your listeners to grab a copy.
It's on paperback.
It's also on Kindle, iBook, Nook.
And it's a great collection of 78 people, like I said, from around the world.
Yeah.
Well, and tell us some of these names of some of the authors in here because I think that'll pretty much get a lot of your sales done right there.
If we're going for some notoriety, like you said, Phil Giraldi, Les Roberts, he writes a really incredible piece just about his doing his research in war zones and things he's uncovered.
Dahlia Waspie, Francis Boyle, international humanitarian lawyer, Ross Caputti, Harry Brown, you know, the late great, Stephen Horowitz, Lou Rockwell, Richard Cummings, Yeah, see now, I was going through earlier in the show and I saw Richard Cummings in here and I got all excited and I spent the whole rest of the segment selling everyone on going to CorpWatch.org or getting their hands on this book and reading his important article that he wrote originally for Playboy.com, Lockheed's Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
That piece alone is worth the price of this book, whatever you're charging.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, like you said, it's free on the internet.
But yeah, it's a great addition to the book.
You know, I contacted Richard to contribute and he said he really wanted to use Lockheed's Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and I thought, you know, what a great way to include something about the military industrial and congressional complex and just how intertwined corporatism is with the Congress and our war efforts.
And yeah, it's a great collection.
It's great in the collection.
Let's see, Malou Innocence in here, James Payne, Barbara Higgs, of course, Charles Goyette, some close friends who have experienced some pretty traumatic things overseas.
I have a friend who I was friends with in New York for a while.
He's Japanese and he got involved in aiding North Korean refugees escape through China into Thailand.
And he had a couple of successful missions and then on his very last mission he got caught by the Chinese authorities and was put in jail for nine months.
And there was an effort here and an effort abroad to get him out and after nine months he was free.
He's still involved in the movement but I don't think he's allowed to leave Japan or enter China.
There's a lot of personal accounts in here and it's not just about, you know, U.S. government state aggression.
It's about governments all around the world and how they harm innocent people.
You still there, Scott?
Yeah, I'm listening.
Okay, sorry.
Go on, no problem.
I should be interacting better, sorry.
War and Inflation by Lou Rockwell.
You mentioned that he had a piece in here and it's sort of become a running joke on my show.
Whenever I interview Lou, we end up talking about war and inflation and he likes to joke that we don't know at this point anymore.
It's all gotten confused.
We're not sure whether they inflate so that they can wage war or whether they wage war just so they can inflate.
I don't know if he makes the exact same joke in this piece but those two things certainly go hand in hand right there.
In fact, we just played on the show the other day a speech by Joe Salerno at the Mises Institute where he talked about the only time he could ever find wars that weren't waged with inflation was the Napoleonic Wars where somehow the French stayed on the gold standard during that.
But for everybody else, they start printing money.
He makes the case earlier on in the piece that did they create the Fed so they could war or did their interest in war have them create the Fed?
Well, I mean, hey, it was the very same men.
You go back and look at the history of the origin of the Federal Reserve and the Woodrow Wilson administration and the men who got us into war on the side of Britain and France in that one.
Well, there's a strong correlation in the personalities at play, let's say that.
Yeah, I'll just read the first couple lines of his piece here.
It says, The U.S. Central Bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913.
No one promoted this institution with a slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans would die in battle in foreign lands along with millions of foreign soldiers and civilians.
Damn right.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Mark Gutmann, editor of Why Peace.
This thing is awesome.
This belongs on your shelf.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We got Mark Gutmann on the line.
He is the editor of Why Peace.
And it's something else.
This thing is, what, 500 and almost 600 pages here.
600 pages with notes.
A collection of essays by a great list of authors, many libertarians, and many other great people, experts, and people with first-hand experience.
Of course, here's one by Peter Van Buren, the renegade from the State Department, occupying Iraq State Department style.
You want to talk about that, Mark?
Yeah, he just talked about the huge embassy in Iraq and the State Department's private military and just how we're going to have a long-term presence there for a long time.
We'll get a good bit more involved in that, but it's a really good piece in the book, too.
And this book isn't only about military aggression.
This is all about state aggression on every level, down to the most basic level of authoritarianism.
I mean, there's a story of campesinos in Colombia being pushed off their land because their crops are all dead from drug war fumigation and trying to kill cocoa crops and things like that.
I mean, there's a big array of discussion here.
Like I said, it's a great collection.
Yeah, that Joe Biden is one hell of a terrorist, isn't he?
He makes bin Laden look like a nobody.
Here's one by Pepe Escobar.
This will get some copies sold.
Hey, everybody, there's an essay by Pepe Escobar in here.
It's called From Guernica to Fallujah.
I've never read that.
That sounds interesting.
Sounds really, really important.
There's a story that, you know, I think Fallujah, that's really important to a lot of people in the world, but maybe not so much to Americans.
But boy, it should be.
Oh, it really should be.
Ross Caputi, who was a U.S. soldier in Fallujah at the time, writes an incredible piece in the book, too, about his experience in Fallujah.
He's married to Dahlia Waspie, actually, who's also in the book.
Oh, I see.
You know, I actually saw that Josh Stieber has a piece in here, Battle for the Mind in the Heart of War, and people might remember his name.
He's been on the show before.
He and his buddy Ethan McCord were, I guess, one or the other.
I guess it was Ethan McCord was the guy that's one of the people on the ground in the collateral murder video, the slaughter of the Reuters reporter and other innocents by the Apache helicopters there in Sauder City in 2007.
But it's their division as well that's featured in the book, The Good Soldiers by David Finkel, and both Josh Stieber and Ethan McCord both said on this show, to confirm sources, that they both heard and saw with their own eyes and ears, their commander, Lieutenant Colonel, I believe it was, Koslarich, that if an IED goes off, they are to kill anyone around.
360-degree fire, that's the price they pay for not stopping somebody from planting a bomb.
That kind of thing, which of course is a war crime, and of course nobody cared, but I think it's important.
I guess Iraqis cared, no Americans cared.
He ended up leaving the Army as a conscientious objector, and he talks about how he was treated by his platoon leader for a long time, pretty terribly, while he was undergoing the process, and then when he finally is leaving, how he gets a lot more respect.
Yeah, there's several soldiers in here.
There's actually some former generals, who was involved in putting down insurgencies throughout his career, North India and Bangladesh and parts of Pakistan, and then when he was helping Kashmiris in their insurgency, kind of surreptitiously against Indians, he realized just how horrible what he had been doing to the insurgents for all these years had been, and he had a real about-face in his thinking.
Wow.
And then there's another, what's his name?
John, another U.S. soldier, John Turner, writes about his PTSD and how hard it's been for him.
Yeah, I see two members of the Schaefer family are in here, Brittany Schaefer and her father Butler Schaefer.
Yeah, and her piece is one of my favorite in the book.
And, you know, she's not writing from any experience.
I did say her name wrong, I'm sorry, I'm horrible.
What's that?
I said her name wrong, I'm horrible, I'm sorry.
Well, I wasn't sure.
Yeah, well, now I don't remember anymore.
I think you were right and I was wrong.
I'm sure she's used to people getting it wrong.
Her piece actually is available on Lew Rockwell's site.
Oh, good.
Just look up Brittany Schaefer, Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World, and I strongly recommend reading it.
It's a terrific piece.
See, David R. Henderson, our wartime economist, is here, How George W. Bush Changed My Life.
Yeah, there's one line in his piece I really like.
He talks about a lot of different things.
He talks about how George Bush changed his life because he got him to think about foreign policy and start researching and writing about foreign policy.
But what he found in his research is that governments tend to be a lot more aggressive overseas because their own citizens who vote for them and fund them won't put up with it at home.
So they can get away with it overseas where people are less likely to understand what's going on.
Well, yeah, and especially when we're all here safe in North America.
They say we're not, but yeah, we are too.
Which means our government can just sit there and blast people on the other side of the planet from here.
It might as well be Mars, as far as the American people care.
If anything, we get to enjoy watching explosions on TV, but we never have to smell the burning corpses or really hear the wails of the grandparents of the dead, etc.
Yeah, we're not holding the orphans here.
Right.
And, you know, it's funny too, because occasionally, if you watch a documentary or something, they'll say, hey, look, here are some pathetic, weeping Afghan survivors of dead people.
And only then do you realize that you never get to see this.
You know what I mean?
You might go your whole day without ever thinking about that kind of thing until somebody puts it in your face.
And then only then do you realize, wow, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, whatever, they don't ever show the aftermath.
You know, I mean, hell, even you look at the Bales massacre there in Kandahar and whoever else helped them do it, I don't know exactly.
But anyway, all the questions in the media became about, the poor guy, I wonder what drove him to it.
And no coverage whatsoever about, yeah, here are the little kids that he killed.
More than half of the people were kids.
And they just, yeah, they're still like basically, you know, figments of Wolf Blitzer's imagination, something like that.
Nothing to really be explored.
No, you're right.
It's definitely sanitized.
It's too bad.
But, you know, the Internet has been so good, I think, at exposing so much of this.
And it's helped me realize just really what's going on.
Yeah, you know what it is?
The Internet, it's like the Second Amendment for the First Amendment.
It's what guarantees the ability to talk back.
It used to all just be so one way.
And now, hell, it can't be me, but I see how Glenn Greenwald, for example, uses Twitter as a weapon against the mainstream media and use it in a way where the Chuck Todd's of the world have to respond to him, at least in part, you know.
A little bit of pressure along that.
And, of course, always just granting people somewhere else to go.
Granting people a place to see that a lot of other people are doing it, too.
And they can, too.
Like you, for example.
Look at this book you put together.
It's incredible.
Yeah, I'm really happy with it.
I'm really happy with the way it came out.
I'm really happy with the response I've gotten so far.
It's my second book.
My first book was Why Liberty.
And that was just more about mostly libertarians and how they came to appreciate the non-aggression principle and just treating each other peacefully and peaceful interaction and not using government to achieve your agendas.
But then I thought, you know, something's missing.
The most important issue is just war and police aggression and civil liberties infringement.
And I need a book dedicated to that.
Well, you know, I apologize to you for not having sat down and really gone through this thing yet.
I've been really bad about catching up on my books lately.
But I will read it.
And I will highly value this volume.
This is really something else that you've done here, Mark.
And I really appreciate it.
Thanks, guys.
Everybody, that is Mark Guttman.
The website is y-peace.com.org.
Anyway, and the book is Why Peace?
A great collection of essays.