10/11/07 – Jon Basil Utley – The Scott Horton Show

It is my honor to welcome back to Anti-War Radio, John Basil Utley from Americans Against Empire.
He has an article today on antiwar.com called America's Armageddonites.
But most importantly, I wanted to talk about the recent events in the story of your parents, your family's experience under Soviet communism and so forth.
So I was wondering, I guess, I'm sorry, I should have said for the audience's benefit, you're the son of the famous anti-communist author, Frieda Utley, who wrote the China story, the high cost of vengeance, the dream we lost, an illustrated history of the Russian Revolution.
Last chance in China, lost illusion, incredible books about communism, well not just Soviet communism but Chinese communism and so forth.
I was just wondering if you could start us off by kind of telling us briefly a bit of your family history, your parents moved to Russia in the early part of the last century and so forth.
Well, my mother was born in 1898, she went through the First World War and after that, she was active academic world and became a socialist.
If you recall, England had terrible times in the 20s, they were trying to go back to the gold standard and some things after the First World War, the First World War ruined England, of course.
And she met my father who was with the Russian trade delegation in London and they fell in love and it ended up with her living with my father in Moscow.
Although before that, she'd been a year with him, he was with the Russian embassy in Japan, the Soviet embassy in Japan and Tokyo and she'd been with him there.
And then they went back to live in Russia when it was six or seven years where I was born.
And your father's name was?
Arkady Berdachevsky, but I don't use it because when I was born, no Russian child was allowed to leave the country.
So if my mother put my Russian name on the birth certificate, she would have been able, she knew she'd never get me out.
And by then, when I was born in 1934, it was already very difficult for travel, but she kept her British passport and with that she could travel.
When my father was arrested, she could get out with me because I was on her passport.
And that was in the spring of 1936?
Yeah.
And why was your father arrested and who was he arrested by?
Well, the secret police in Moscow came one night, the way they did it at two o'clock in the morning, the secret, they'd knock on the door.
He was arrested, she never was given reasons.
He was arrested when they were investigating.
His office was for another issue and exporting coal.
But he had lived overseas for many years.
And in that time, Stalin was very paranoiac about Russians who knew the outside world.
And he was arresting the whole upper level echelon, and my father was the chief financial officer of the Export-Import Trade Organization.
The whole upper level of Russia's bureaucracy and elites were arrested, many of them, in the late 30s.
The Stalin thing, you know, the whole general staff of the army, most of the generals were executed.
He had a paranoia about everything.
And then my father, there was a short trial, and he was sent up to the northern Russia, Siberia, to the prison camps.
And now after that, did your mother take you and flee immediately?
No, she tried for several weeks to do something to get him out.
And she had some influence, as she was a well-known writer by then.
And she was very close to the British socialists and Marxists in England.
And actually, after she got out, she got a letter, including signed by George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and many of the top English socialists to Stalin.
And interestingly, when I was in Russia and tracked down the documents, in the files was the copy of the letter to Stalin.
By these people, it was never answered, of course.
Wow.
And can you tell us more or less what the letter said?
Oh, that they were sure that my father had not done anything wrong, and would Stalin look into the case that this was unjust.
They were representing the British socialists.
And it's interesting, there's a book by an Englishman called Stalin's British Victims, which includes a chapter about my mother, four British women, who went through the Stalin times.
And it's very interesting how the foreign communist parties would come to Moscow, and the Soviet communists wouldn't give them the time of day.
They couldn't get telephones or cars, all the basic things you needed in Russia.
Including, of course, it showed with this letter, it was all useless.
And so, how long after your father's trial did your mother decide, that's it, I've got to get my child and get out of here?
She got out actually about two weeks later because she had a book coming out in England, and of course, that gave a legitimate reason to the Soviet authorities.
And she got out with me, then she actually went back to Russia one time for several weeks to try to do something.
But he was in the prison, and there was no way, except she could stand in line, all the relatives of prisoners could stand in line to take food.
And clothing, a change of underwear and clothing.
And one of the things she did do was to take, coming back from England, she took some, she brought chocolate, and all that was very scarce.
If he got them, thinking that then he'd know that she got to England, with me most likely, so he'd know that I was safe.
But he had to assume that one would never get out.
But then he was arrested, he was sent up to Archangel and then north to Borkuta.
And Borkuta was one of the worst camps, it's very close to the Arctic Ocean, and tremendous, nobody lasted more than a couple of years.
People died of starvation and cold.
And my mother never knew where he'd gone, except she did get a letter in the 60s through the U.S. ambassador, as her father asked one of the Russian, Mikoyan, one of the Politburo, and she got a letter in the 60s saying that my father had died in the state of Komi.
Komi is a vast northern region of Russia, the biggest France, where all the camps, many of the camps were.
There's this article by Georgie-Anne Guyer recently that she wrote about you and your search, your journey, attempts, and travails, and getting the former KGB to the FSB to turn over documents and to take you around.
It ends with you at the actual gulag where your father died.
Yes, what happened was that in the early 90s, there were many stories that one could find out what had happened to one's relatives in the camps before it was all secret stuff, and the Russian government was allowing research.
And I met a Russian professor, a defector from Russia, but knew Russia and a translator, and he said, let me look and see if I can find some records.
Anyway, then he wrote a letter to the secret police archives, the FSB it's called now, what used to be KGB, and they answered and said, yes, there are files here.
So he went and I subsequently went later with him and found the files of my father in the central archives in Moscow of the KGB.
And there were the arrest records and what had happened, including this letter from Stalin, several pictures, and they said that he'd been transferred to the north.
And then in the process, they said there are other files in Uchtar as a city in northern Russia.
Uchtar was the central city for the command of all the concentration camps.
Millions of people went through this.
And actually, I visited Uchtar later.
It's a major industrial city with oil refineries and so on.
And anyway, we then got we wrote to Uchtar to the archives and got an answer, which came through the Russian embassy in Washington with notice that there were more files, et cetera, and more information about him.
So with that, I went with my friend translator.
We traveled up into northern Russia and I found the files in Uchtar, where one of the there wasn't much but the small card, the five by seven card with what happened.
And the last part of referring to my father was transferred to the third department.
And the third department meant execution.
So he did not have the elements.
He was well, that was the question.
What happened?
And because my mother assumed he died of hunger and cold.
And it looks it turns out anyway, we got more documents that he was executed as one of several leaders of a hunger strike in the concentration camps and that he had been shot at a place called the Brick Quarry.
And no one had heard of that much, except Solzhenitsyn's first book, the Gulag Archipelago, had mentioned a place called the Brick Quarry where several thousand were executed of Trotskyists and troublemakers in the camps, in the concentration camps.
And so we went to Vorkuta and started looking for that.
That's the story Georgie Hentgier referred to.
Wow, and you know, in one of your articles that you wrote for the Foundation for Economic Education, you talk about 40 degrees below zero.
That's where Fahrenheit and Centigrade meet.
Yeah, I never knew that before.
That's unimaginable.
That was life in a Soviet gulag, 40 degrees below zero.
Yeah, in the winter, the places up there are actually impressive to visit.
There's one, they built a railroad to Vorkuta, which had a lot of coal, and there were coal mining, shallow coal mining, where the prisoners worked.
And Vorkuta then, in one area, when the war started, when Germany attacked Russia, they finished up a railroad, rushed to finish the railroad to bring coal from Vorkuta to Leningrad in those days.
And according to the report, 75,000 men died in the process of their finishing the railroad.
They didn't have food, they just worked them to death.
In any case, my father was executed before that.
And when I heard that, my first thought was, would I rather die of hunger and cold or be shot?
And I thought, well, I think it's better to be shot.
If one hasn't experienced that kind of misery, it's just unbearable.
Yeah, well, and if you have to pick between those two, being shot for being a so-called troublemaker in a gulag is probably the best thing to be shot for in a situation like that, standing up for what's right to the very end?
Of course.
Now, the article that you mentioned, which is available on the internet if you search, my name Utley, U-T-L-E-Y, and Vorkuta, which is this town, the northernmost city in Russia, B-O-R-K-U-T-A, it'll come right up, the article I wrote about finding the documents and going out there.
And we then discovered that he'd been executed at this place I called the Brick Quarry.
And there wasn't time then, but after my visit, the local group that concerns itself with these issues is called Memorial, M-E-M-O-R-I-A-L.It's a Russian group that tries to catalog what happened in the gulag and keep the memories alive of all the misery and death.
And their representatives were volunteers to a man and woman in Vorkuta, then started looking to try to find the Brick Quarry, because I say Solzhenitsyn had mentioned it, and they did discover where it was.
And I went back last year to hike there.
It's about a five-mile hike from the railway that I mentioned earlier.
And we went out to this place, and the Memorial people, it was their second or third trip.
No one had visited it before, and they used to make bricks there, and then it turned into a regular labor camp.
And then they had prisoners, 2,000 to 3,000 were executed in 1938, that was, in groups of 40 or 50 by machine gun fire, taken out in the tundra and shot and just left there, of which my father was one.
And the ones who were not yet executed could hear the machine gun fire and knew what was happening.
And they took out these groups.
So today it's another and just another of many chapters in the Soviet communist history.
Besides those who died fighting in external wars like World War II and so forth, how many people within the Soviet Union were killed by what's called their own government?
Well, in the camps, the number one here is about three million people, and that's Robert Conquest who's written books about that.
The Black Book of Communism.
Yeah, I think that's about three million over a number of years.
After the Second World War, people survived, because you'd hear of people with five or 10-year sentences who actually came out.
But in the 30s, almost everyone died, and it was a death sentence, one or two years, because as long as people lived, there was cold, you know, just the misery of it.
It was one of those chapters of history that not much is known.
The reason Georgie Ann Geyer wrote about this, and you can find it in her columns on the Internet, is that Boston College decided to make a documentary about the camps, and they have a program up there, the Department of Fine Arts at Boston College, that does documentaries.
They teach students, so they have some volunteer labor, and it doesn't cost so much to make documentaries about human courage, and they picked up on the story of my father, and they've done others on Northern Ireland.
Oh, wow.
Is that video available to watch online?
It's not yet online.
It's hoping to show on PBS in the future now, but it was just finished.
What accounts, John, and I'm sorry, for the audience's sake here.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Basil Utley.
His father was murdered by the Stalinists in the Soviet Union in 1938.
What accounts for the disparity when you say about 3 million died in the camps?
We often hear numbers of 30, 40, 50 million people killed by the Soviets of their own internal purges and so forth.
What accounts for the disparity?
There are many executions.
First, directly, some of those figures involved in the Second World War, where they took prisoners out.
The prisoners in the camps who were not political prisoners, the common criminals, were taken out and used in fighting the Germans.
They'd use them to clear minefields, often without arms, and as cannon fodder against the German army, and most of them are killed.
The political prisoners generally were kept up there.
The 3 million is over that period of time.
Beyond that, that's not counting, for example, the first takeover when the Communists took over in 1918.
There were millions killed there.
And then the wastage that they had constantly.
I mean, when you're including that, it's all the people executed.
The famine in Ukraine, too, I guess.
Yeah, the famine in Ukraine was 8 million people died.
It's not included in the numbers in the camps later, although some of the survivors were sent to the camps.
The first prisoners in the camps were coolbacks from the Ukraine.
And there are various other massacres along the way.
And you have to add, many of the casualties in the Second World War, Russia suffered 20 million dead, at least, was because of the incompetence of their own government.
You know, they'd send men out with no food and the whole thing.
No weapons, even so?
No, not to mention.
Well, now, let's talk about your mother, Frida Utley.
I guess after the Communists kidnapped and murdered her husband, your father, she decided that she was no longer sympathetic to Marxism.
Is that right?
Well, she was not sympathetic before that, but she couldn't do anything about it.
She was living in Moscow.
I thought that she had been in favor of communism.
Well, she had been before that in the 20s.
This was after she got to Russia the last five or six years.
I see.
I mean, when she lived there, she turned against it, but she couldn't do anything or say anything inside the system.
But she had become a communist after.
She was very active in the British Labor Party and was the leader of a trade union of her workers.
When she'd been in the First World War, she'd been a clerk in the War Department as its typist secretary.
She became elected as leader of her union and was active in the trade unions.
And then in 1928, she went with the British delegation of trade union leaders to Russia.
And in that period, Russia was doing very well.
Lenin had, after what they called war communism, Lenin had allowed private property and freedom to a degree, and the Russian economy was suddenly doing very well.
So it looked sort of like communism was working.
And then once she went to live there in 1929 when Stalin took over and then started the collectivization of the Ukraine, suddenly then there was no food because the peasants were all stopped producing and all that story.
And Stalin clamped down on all the freedoms they had.
Then the economic efficiency just went out the window at that point.
But I have to say one of the things when you visit Russia, in these railroads that went by train, Russia also, when the Germans attacked, they moved a large part of their heavy industry back to Siberia to another city, Perm and Kirov, two cities I also visited, where the artillery was Perm and Kirov, where tanks were manufactured.
And this is in Siberia, the beginning of Siberia.
And the engineering, I think, of moving these whole factories back there at the time when the Germans were attacking, that mainly came from St. Petersburg, Leningrad.
I mean, the other thing you do get in Russia is a respect for tremendous work and the engineering that they've done.
These cities were built out of nothing in the Arctic.
As I mentioned, the engineering, there's a tank on a pedestal at Kirov.
The name now, that's a communist name, it's another name now, is still there where they produced thousands of tanks.
I mean, the society works, you know, in a way, even with the communists, they produced certainly war material.
Right, right.
The forced industrialization worked, I guess, with a lot of Western help, too.
Yeah, there was.
Probably you guys have to starve a few million Ukrainians in order to keep those military workers fed.
Yeah, I mean, well, we know they'd be fed better if you let the Ukrainian, if you let the peasant keep alive, too.
But the collectivization, all that, was part of the communist system to prevent anyone from having enough money or freedom to be independent.
That was always part of the system.
And now, can we talk a bit about China?
How did your mother, Frida Utley, end up in China?
Well, she'd studied at London School of Economics, and her studies had been about the Far East.
And then she wrote a book called Lancashire on the Far East.
Lancashire was the British cotton industry.
And she'd become an expert on that.
And then after my father was arrested in 1937 in England, she was offered a job by the London News Chronicle, it was a major newspaper, to go to China where she was a war correspondent, then when the Japanese in the war was Japan.
And she wrote a book called China at War, which is all these are on the Internet, by the way, FridaUtley.com, F-R-E-D-A-U-T-L-E-Y.
And by the way, the blog entry for this interview will have links to all the relevant reading materials as well.
And on the website, FridaUtley.com, her books are all there, and my article about visiting Russia, now getting the documents, all that's there.
And she was an expert on the Far East, as I say, and then was there at the time of the war.
And the book China at War is still very interesting.
Anyway, further on China, then she'd also been an expert on Japan, where she lived a year, and she wrote a book called Japan's Feet of Clay, which became a bestseller in England and America, and got her prohibited entry into Japan, saying that the Japanese war machine wasn't as strong as it looked.
And this was in 1938, three years before the Pearl Harbor attack.
And through that book, she had a lecture tour in America, and that's how she first came to America.
And as I say, she'd been a communist for idealistic reasons in the 20s.
And when she got to America, it was sort of everything she'd dreamed about, the ideals of communism, of equality and fairness and justice, which they did not have, of course.
But she found in America, she fell in love with the country, that she thought this was so great, especially coming in from the West Coast, I might add, not New York.
And that really is, John, if I might say, doesn't it seem that that's the mistake that the communists and the socialists make, is that they're trying to achieve liberal ends with conservative means.
They're trying to use the state to create all the wonderful benefits of real liberalism, of laissez-faire and individual property rights and so forth.
Absolutely.
They're taking a shortcut and a brutal one.
Yep.
And anyway, after visiting, she thought the war would destroy England, which it did, of course, the Second World War.
And then we came with me.
She went back for me.
I was in London, where she left me with friends and family.
And we came on a Dutch ship to America in 1939, emigrated here.
And the ship, incidentally, was sunk a month later by the Germans in Rotterdam.
So timing is everything, as they say.
Of course, I grew up here since 39.
And to go on a moment with her, she went back to China in 1947, wrote a book called Last Chance in China Against the Communist Threat, explaining some U.S. policies which were really driving the country to the communists.
We often say communist victories were made in Washington in those days, just as we gave half of Europe to the Soviets.
Now, let me ask you, because I often read, and I think that this is fair, people say they kind of ridicule the debate who lost China by pointing out that China wasn't America's to lose and that this sort of betrays this imperialist mentality in the first place.
But as much as I think I agree with that, it still remains the case, doesn't it, John Utley, that American communists did do everything they could to help Mao Zedong win over Chiang Kai-Shek after the war with Japan had ended?
Absolutely.
The communist influence was so strong in Washington as Joe McCarthy came about.
And if you look at the Second World War, we went to destroy the Nazis, and we end up giving half of Europe to the communists and put them in tremendous power.
But what's forgotten also is that the Japanese army in Manchuria, all its weaponry, when they surrendered, was given to the Chinese communists.
And that's how the Chinese communists got started conquering China.
So it may not have been ours to lose, but we certainly helped it along.
And then she wrote a book, a bestseller in America called The China Story, about how the U.S. was holding back on aid to Chiang Kai-Shek and sending one kind of artillery and the other kind of ammunition and stuff like that.
Well, the communists had all this weaponry.
Now, further, if you get into that, Japan had tried to surrender six months before through the Swiss embassy, if you get into the history.
And some people say that the U.S. purposely, one of the reasons the communists didn't want Japan, us to accept the Japanese surrender earlier, because the Russians had no army in the Far East through the sword, spy stuff and all that.
They needed time to get there.
Yeah, they needed time to bring their army from Europe, fighting the Nazi Germans, to the Far East.
And they had no army to accept the surrender of the Japanese, this vast army of Japanese in Manchuria and in that area.
So they then, after the victory over Germany, they were sending troops, which is a slow process over the Trans-Siberian Railroad, to get them to Russia.
Anyway, when Japan finally surrendered, we had the Japanese army was turned over to the Russians.
And all those Japanese soldiers, by the way, also ended up in the prison camps, and most of them died.
Were they allowed to just retreat back to Japan?
No, they were taken, everyone.
After the war, they were taken by the Russians?
Yeah, everyone the communists got.
And where they died in the camps also, but their weaponry was then given to the Chinese communists.
That's another story.
Well, and that's a big part of it.
Now, Chiang Kai-Shek was a pretty brutal right-wing fascist butcher himself, is that not right?
Well, I don't think so.
He was a ruler.
I mean, there's a lot of brutality out there that goes around, but I don't think so.
Particularly during World War II.
But he wasn't.
He didn't have the power.
China was ruled by warlords, similar, if you will, to Iraq in a certain way.
The tribes, they were called warlords in China, who ruled over different groups.
And then there was a tremendous inflation, and the war had terribly hurt Japan.
Per China, I should say, and Japan later.
And my mother had quotes, the Japanese used to say, win or lose, we'll set China back for 20 years.
When they attacked China, they thought one day it'll be a powerful win, and that was their attitude as an imperial country.
And the country was devastated.
And Mao Zedong promised the peasant's land, the famous communist in Russia.
Lenin had once promised that.
Well, it's another story, the whole thing.
Well, and the consequences are pretty well known, or maybe they're not.
I guess they should be well known that another 40-something million people killed by their Chinese communist government, the reign of Mao Zedong and his Gang of Four and all that.
You know, those of us who come from refugees like myself, you look, the greatest threat to anybody is one's own government.
It's sort of funny, in America we all trust the government, but when you look at the history of these countries and others, they were more likely, most people were more likely to be killed by their own government than the foreign ones.
Can I tell you something?
I made a Nazi situation also, of course.
I had a neighbor who moved to China working for Dell, and he came back to visit.
I think he's back in China, living in China now.
And he told me, John Utley, that it's just horrible.
He said, if you think of the most shallow, navel-gazing, self-interested, narrow-minded, spoiled, rotten Americans, the worst of American culture, that that's how China is.
That basically, that Chinese communism absolutely destroyed thousands of years of Chinese culture, and it has left it absolutely hollow.
He was horrified, and he said, remember, keep in mind when the Warhawks talk about the threat from China, tell them, yeah, get back to me in 150 years, give me a break.
And he blamed it all on communism, he blamed it all on Mao Zedong.
He killed so many people, the people who were the repositories of the previous culture, they were the ones who got it first, and now what's left is a hollow shell of a culture, according to my friend and neighbor who came back from there.
I mean, there's a couple of factors.
First, the overseas Chinese kept those traditions, and they're very heavy, the most of the early industry, etc., with overseas Chinese going back and investing.
And for the Chinese, if people had literally starved most of their history, now there are millions and millions, but enough food to eat, and they're taller, and there's beginning to be a little, you know, a little surplus.
So, I mean, that's the first thing.
It may be shallow, those cultures, and I mean, I'd similarly say in Russia, one of the things you notice is how rude people are, and that all came from the communists.
There was no manners, nothing, and it still carries today, but first, I don't know enough about China.
I was there a long time ago, but certainly it seems to be leading in the, you know, people are better off relatively than ever before.
Oh, no doubt about that.
I mean, he was singing the praises of the new capitalist revolution there.
Yeah, I mean, and it's changed the world for people who used to be in such misery.
I don't think you can comprehend the poverty, you know, but it's after they gave up communism, of course, I mean, when it happened.
In fact, I could...
I mean, it's not communist.
Lew Rockwell wrote a great article about this recently at lourockwell.com, I guess a couple months ago about, you know, you complain about poison toothpaste and lead paint on your matchbox cars.
Let me tell you a story about what China used to be like.
Pretty powerful stuff there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, the misery of these countries just can't...
I don't think we can comprehend what it was.
But in any case, whatever it is, it's not communist now.
I mean, it's the free market allowed to have property.
And they started with the peasantry, allowing the peasants to have private plots and to have a little surplus and to sell it in the towns.
And that's how it all got started.
Now, John Basil Utley from Americans Against Empire, you have an article today on antiwar.com called America's Armageddonites.
John Utley, who are America's Armageddonites?
Let me just say, with the communists gone, I question all these wars, and we were against, of course, the war with Iraq.
The Armageddonites are people who've, what I call, who've changed from forecasting Armageddon to trying to bring it about.
And there's several million of the fundamentalist evangelicals, mainly, and some others.
And the movement, they got enthused with this idea, it's the end of the world, end times, mainly because Jews have returned to Israel, which is prophecy, depending on the interpretation from the Bible.
But then they've gotten so enthusiastic about it, and they're trying to promote the end, if you will, by undermining any peace movements in the Middle East.
They hated Rabin, the murdered former general, one of the top Israelis who made the Oslo Accords and the peace treaty.
Peace for the Palestinians was hated.
And they look at any peace as thwarting God's will to hurry up and end the world with Armageddon.
And that's the left behind books, you know, and all this.
And they're a major influence on foreign policy, trying to undermine the peace, any peace in the Middle East.
And Tom DeLay was one of them and said that the war in Iraq is a prelude to Armageddon, helping along this chaos in the Middle East, which they look upon favorably.
Well, now, John Utley, I know you live in Washington, D.C., but you have acquaintanceships and so forth with pretty influential people.
You understand how things operate in that city, let's say.
How powerful a lobby is this group of Armageddonites?
I mean, this is pretty delusional stuff.
Don't tell me that they're really influencing the policy.
The policy is made more by neoconservatives, by people with a vested interest in the war or in conquest, et cetera.
The Armageddon, sort of, they provide the votes and the power, a lot of political power.
And there was an article in the Village Voice, which is a link to in this article today on antiwar.com, about when Sharon was getting out of Gaza, namely, Israel was withdrawing its soldiers from Gaza, there were 200,000 emails from fundamentalist American Armageddonites demanding the White House that we stop trying to get Israel to leave Gaza, because that would thwart God's will about Armageddon.
Namely, Armageddon comes when Jews return to Judea and Samaria, which is the West Bank.
And the U.S. government, the White House, was explaining that Gaza is not part of the West Bank, it's not part of the biblical Judea and Samaria, Sharon leaving Gaza would not stop God from destroying the world, according to his plan.
I mean, this is how loony it gets.
Yeah, this is the White House having to reassure people that, don't worry, we're still going along here.
And then Hagee, John Hagee, who's one of the big ones, he's going to be on, I think CNN has an interview this weekend with him, is one of the big, he has a group, Christians United for Israel, and he's demanding that America attack Iran as quickly as possible.
Although every estimate of Iran, if they ever have a nuclear bomb, it's many years in the future, he's demanding that Iran attack.
And at his conference is Tom DeLay, and top Republicans are there.
Recently their conference, Christians United for Israel.
But they're only united for Israel to save Israel now, so God can destroy it later with Armageddon.
And then all the Jews who don't convert to born-again Christianity will be killed.
Now that's the part of the story that they don't like to emphasize.
Well, I mean, it's preposterous, and the Israelis, particularly the Likud, the right-wing Israelis, play along with this.
And these are the kind of stuff we have.
Whether Bush himself believes in the end time stuff is not quite clear, you know.
Right.
All right, well, we're all out of time.
I really appreciate yours today.
Everyone, John Basil Utley, Americans Against Empire.
It's World Empire.
Oh, I'm sorry, Americans Against World Empire.
FridaUtley.com, and he's got a great article today on AntiWar.com, America's Armageddonites.
I really appreciate you sharing your story with us today, sir.
Scott, of course.
Thank you.