01/09/08 – Charles Featherstone – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio and Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today is Charles Featherstone.
He is formerly a reporter and an editor for major news wires and is now seeking a Master's of Divinity.
He lives in Chicago, Illinois, writes for LewRockwell.com, and has his own blog at thefeatherblog.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show, Charles.
Good morning.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
How are you doing this afternoon?
Good to talk to you again.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you, too.
I think it's still close enough to the New Year I can say Happy New Year to people I haven't talked to in a while.
Yeah, so you're on Chaos Radio.
Let's talk about some of your recent articles here for LewRockwell.com, and it's so great to see you writing for LRC again, and I guess you've been working hard on that Divinity Master's degree there, and we haven't seen you in print in a while on LRC.
Your most recent one is a critique of an article in the Washington Post, arguing that...
Well, I mean, basically, I think the argument that the guy's making is that we're a reluctant empire, that the world demands American empire, and we are reluctantly coming up with the supply for them.
Is that basically it?
That is basically it, and I recall, I remember popping onto the Washington Post website this morning, that morning, and reading that piece, and my jaw just dropped at the utter stupidity of it.
It is 2008 now.
I mean, where is this clamor that he apparently has seen in the world?
I see absolutely no evidence of it.
And now who is this we're talking about?
Naeem is editor of Foreign Affairs, which is the monthly policy publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Oh, you mean Foreign Policy, then?
Yes, yes.
Foreign Affairs is the Council on Foreign Relations.
That's right, it is.
I get these things confused.
Same difference.
They're easily confused.
And I've not met the man personally, but Foreign Policy is one of those publications that pretends to be serious.
It's how people talk about solving the problems, or at least administering the problems of the world.
They may not necessarily deal with solving, but it's managing and administering.
And that's sort of what Carnegie has devoted itself to since it was founded.
And so he wrote this piece about the world wanting American leadership, and the United States would effectively have to stand up, because for the last seven years or ten years, the U.S. has been disengaged from the world, which is a stunning assertion on his part, because for the last decade, we've fought three wars, four wars, if you count the three-day air campaign in Iraq in 1998 as a separate war, plus there was the ongoing military operations in Iraq.
Sure, plus you got, I don't know if you count, you know, the proxy war in Somalia and stuff like that.
Yes, indeed.
So, and I'd spoken to some people who I'd known in Washington, and there was just sort of a chuckle.
But I think what was more stunning is that the Washington Post would consider something like that serious, but any talk of non-intervention is not considered serious.
Right.
You know, Mike Huckabee the other night, in the debate that Ron Paul was excluded from, they busted his chops about what he wrote in Foreign Affairs, where he kind of attacked Bush for his bunker, arrogant bunker mentality.
And in defending himself, Huckabee used as an example that we should have invaded with 400,000 troops rather than 150,000, like Donald Rumsfeld did it.
And that was the example of Bush's arrogant unilateralism, where we should have listened to, I guess, the Colin Powell's of the world and somehow convinced the rest of the world to help us invade and to use twice as many troops, then everything would have been fine.
That was his example of the arrogant bunker mentality of the Bush administration.
Should he use more troops, Charles?
Well, there's always the question of where those more troops would have come from.
I'm not sure the United States could have put 400,000 troops on the ground in Kuwait at the time, but it still wouldn't have gone much better.
Yeah, well, we just need a bigger army like Barack Obama's.
My disagreement with the war, and I think a lot of the disagreement with the war on those who have been opposed to it from the beginning, is not that it wouldn't work, although many of us have argued that, it's that we just shouldn't be doing this.
Well, why not?
For moral reasons?
Not practical ones?
Well, for me it's for moral reasons.
That the kind of place I want to live in, the country I want to live in, is not a country that goes around dictating terms to others.
I don't want to live in an empire.
But doesn't the world demand one, like this guy says in the Washington Post?
Well, I clearly don't think so.
But to be fair to Naeem, there are some people who are demanding American leadership, there just aren't very many of them.
Right, I saw some protesters in Liberia asking for us to come and invade and do a regime change there one time.
Well, I'm thinking more of a few sort of elites, primarily the kind of people who Naeem would have lunch with on a regular basis, and this is probably what he's referring to, but there are probably people, there are people out in the world who say the United States does need to lead, but they also are making that conditional, it's sort of like, Scott, I want you to beat me up, but I want you to be nice about it.
Yeah, no punching in the face.
It's sort of like, you know, they expect the United States, for example, to pay for almost the entire operating costs of the United Nations, for example.
Exactly.
And if the United Nations is to be useful, and I worked there for a summer, if the United Nations is to be useful, and I think it probably has some uses, the costs ought to be picked up by anyone who wants to participate, and not just subsidized by Washington.
Now, to what degree is this guy at the Carnegie Endowment just trying to get a job in the Hillary Clinton administration here, do you think that he really even, I mean, I'm sorry to ask you to speculate, but I guess you could, based on how tight his argument was, whether the guy even really believes this nonsense.
You know, it's hard to tell.
I think he probably definitely believes in intervention, or else he would not have written it.
And quite clearly what he is arguing for, if maybe not a future job for himself, that at least people in Washington in power will listen to the people at Carnegie, rather than being ignored.
And I think the large think tanks, in particular the sort of, I hate to almost say this, the left-leaning ones like Carnegie, have not been listened to.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we all ridicule the neocons when they say that the people of Iraq and Iran want us to bomb them.
I mean, we all know that that's crazy on its face, right?
Yep, it is.
Well maybe they want our leadership, but not outright regime change?
What exactly is he arguing for here?
I mean, leadership is pretty vague.
Well, I think what he is probably arguing for is sort of the United States being the first among equals in a community of nation-states, of governments, or in an international order by which Washington listens to and allows others to participate, but Washington is in effect both the muscle and the moral force.
Well, you know, here's the thing.
I mean, really, Charles, the burden is on you here, because the fact of the matter is that the super-majority of the American people would agree with the Washington Post editors that this is a credible argument and that a non-interventionist argument is not.
I mean, I think the polls showed it last night.
I think that's unfortunately true.
So the American people apparently believe, in great numbers anyway, that we have to keep our military elsewhere in order to keep elsewhere from coming here, or something along those lines.
So, you know, do you deserve to, for example, be published in the Washington Post arguing for non-interventionism when your view is such a minority point of view in this country?
Well, quite clearly the editors of the Washington Post have made that determination that I don't.
You know, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing, as long as enough people have determined, both in the media and in government, have determined that non-interventionism is not serious, then it's not going to be discussed so that it can become serious.
The only thing I can say is that those of us libertarians and anarchists and non-interventionists who believe fervently in non-intervention, we just need to keep saying that there are consequences to intervention, there are continuous consequences to intervention, and that not intervening is an acceptable course of action.
Right.
You know, I think it really comes down to narratives, right?
It comes down to the story.
I heard somebody on the radio one time talking about how his six- or eight-year-old kid could explain World War II.
Well, you had the bad guys in the form of Germany and Japan, and the good guys in the form of the US and England, not so much the Soviet Union anymore, and the good guys beat the bad guys.
And, you know, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and protagonists and antagonists and everything, and it's great.
But if you ask the kid about World War I, he'll go, eh, not so much, because there's not really a narrative there to help him get through it.
And it seems to me like, I guess in my own mind, I have my own narrative from World War I through today, where all these interventions have this cause and effect, and lead to the next, or at least lead to the excuse for the next intervention down the line.
But I guess if the American people, kind of in general, aren't ever exposed to that narrative about how these interventions are interrelated, and each one is left sort of to stand on its own, then I guess we're never really going to learn that lesson, that the only thing to do here is just, at some point, quit.
Whether there's going to be some immediate negative consequences or not, there's going to be anyway.
We have to just stop this.
Yes.
I am in complete agreement with you.
But there's actually something else at work here, and as someone who is studying to become a pastor in a very liberal church, it's one of the things that I confront on a fairly regular basis, that doing nothing is considered the immoral action, while doing something is considered moral.
And I think when it comes to foreign policy, because the United States possesses, the United States government possesses power and resources to do something, then doing something is better than doing nothing.
Even when doing something results in consequences that will be unforeseen for decades.
Like that British sitcom, Yes, Prime Minister, something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You know what's funny?
It's almost like the golden rule would really be better if we turned it inside out, instead of do unto others as you would have them do unto you, it really should be do not do unto others as you would have them not do unto you.
Because look, I mean, you think about that, the golden rule is basically William Crystal's excuse for killing everybody in the world, that he looks at them sideways, right?
It becomes part of this morality of action, if we can call it that, that I would want to be liberated, so I am going to liberate.
Yeah, and we can just call anything we want liberation at this point, and apparently it doesn't matter.
Exactly.
You know, turning you over to the Iranians, yeah, well, that's the same difference, right?
In the end, I end up being something of a pessimist, in fact, I end up being a fairly significant pessimist, in effect, I believe only the constriction of resources will stop our ambitions, meaning when we actually go broke and aren't able to do this anymore will be the only time we quit.
Yeah, well, I guess that would be better than the way the Japanese and German empires were ended, huh?
Yes, most certainly.
I have to say, I'm kind of in the same position, I'm hoping that we'll have a Great Depression before the world just finally gangs up on us and bombs us, an oblivion.
Yeah, it would be nice if, I look again at the experience the United States is going through right now, and I make a comparison to Britain and France in the 50s.
Anthony Eden did an awful lot of hyperventilating over Nasser and the Suez Canal, and even a couple of subsequent British governments talked at length about Britain's role in the Gulf, with the Gulf states, as absolutely essential to British security.
But in 1968, Britain pulled out unilaterally, and nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
What was essential a decade earlier to Britain's security was not even significant.
Britain could leave the Gulf, and nothing changed.
Now, granted, that's because the United States assumed much of Britain's duties in the Gulf, on terms that were acceptable to the people running Britain, but still, a British government could say this was essentially significant, that we maintain a presence in the Gulf, and then decide not to, and it wouldn't hurt Britain.
So there is hope, but I don't see enough of the people in charge of the United States saying that this power, we can't wield it anymore, and we need to somehow negotiate an end.
Right, well, because it's not in their personal interest.
It's not in their ideological interest, and there are some other...
They sort of have bought away the world as constructed in which they see American power central.
I find it very, very interesting, for example, to listen to Madeleine Albright these days, who is some kind of advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign, talking about a more humble foreign policy, and it's just funny when one compares it to what Albright was saying ten years ago.
Yeah, we're the indispensable nation.
What good is this giant military if we can't use it?
Exactly.
And now we've used it, and we see what good it is.
That's funny.
Did she actually use the phrase, humble foreign policy?
I don't know if she uses that phrase in particular, but she's been very, very critical of the Bush administration and how it has conducted a foreign policy, and I think she would probably be on the page, well, closer to singing the song that Moises Naeem is singing, but in effect she's talking about a different kind of American leadership, a more multilateral one, to use the language, more cooperative.
But it's still leadership.
It's still empire.
Like if you're going to invade Iraq, you have to share the oil fields with the Russians and the French to get the UN to say it's okay.
Basically.
And do what you can to get the Dutch and the French and the Germans involved in the actual invasion.
Well, you know, I read something the other day.
I think it was just a comment on a blog entry somewhere, of course, about the Ron Paul campaign, and someone said, listen, you non-interventionists and Ron Paul supporters make a pretty good argument about problems created by American intervention, but you never explain how it's going to be after you get it your way.
If we don't rule, you know, I guess brackets here, the Middle East and Central Asia and Africa, somebody else will.
There will be a power vacuum.
Would you rather it be filled by Russia or India or China or Europe?
If we're not the world's hedgeman, someone else will be the world's hedgeman, and you don't want that, do you?
What about that, Charles?
I would be quite fine with someone else running the world.
There are plenty of tiny little countries in the world where life is reasonably free and reasonably well off, in which they don't rule the world and things still generally work for them anyway.
That's a good point.
So I would be perfectly happy, so long as I were not being taxed, I would be perfectly happy with China or Russia running the world.
What if China invaded all those little happy little countries you talk about and took all their happiness away from them?
Wouldn't that be a bad thing?
Well, lots of those happy little countries are very far away from China.
That's sort of like talking about a Chinese invasion of the United States.
Yeah, someone, who was it on the show last week, saying, They don't have the ships!
Well, here's another one.
I saw, actually this was a YouTube, a cartoon that someone had made about Ron Paul's Cowardice, and it showed a map of the world, and it was just like, I swear, it was just like 1960s John Birch stuff about the Communists taking over and the whole map turning red, only in this case it's the whole map turning green, and the Islamo-fascist caliphate that's going to take over the entire world if we don't stop them.
You lived in Saudi Arabia for a while, right?
Or keeping 30,000 troops in Afghanistan is keeping the militants at bay is, that kind of at bay is foolish.
They may have big dreams, but they are in no position, and won't be in any position.
Now, how are you so sure about that?
What do you know?
Well, I was Muslim for a number of years, and I got to know a number of militants, aspiring militants and otherwise, and almost actually myself went off to Bosnia to fight.
Really?
Yes.
And so I know something of what it is that they believe in and are aspiring to.
But I've also spent enough time in the Middle East to know just how genuinely little traction they have, especially when they get murderously violent.
There really is something to be said in Iraq that the Al-Qaeda militants overreached themselves just as they did in Saudi Arabia in 2003.
They're suffering their own blowback now.
They're suffering their own blowback.
And the fact that you've had this kind of war going on, the revolutionaries started trying to topple Middle Eastern governments in the 70s, and they weren't able to get much domestic traction.
About the only place that Islamic revolutionaries really got domestic traction is where they had foreigners to fight.
Afghanistan and in Palestine.
Or at least in the case of Palestine, it was an Israeli occupation.
The perception of foreigners.
When they went head-to-head against local governments in Syria, governments with Islamic legitimacy as opposed to foreign governments, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, they eventually overreached by engaging in murderous violence, and that gave governments leverage to, yes, engage in murderous violence themselves, but that government violence was seen as more legitimate or acceptable.
And now this is why they turned on us and said, this was bin Laden's argument about the far enemy, was all of our local jihads are not effective.
We've got to all band together in one big jihad against the U.S., and then we'll be able to take out our local governments, he promised.
That they could leverage American occupation in order to sway Muslim opinion.
Now, how's that work?
Because it seems to me that the United States has basically fallen completely into bin Laden's trap in terms of wasting money and breaking the army and doing all the things that he was trying to get us to do.
But has it really done for bin Laden what he thought it would?
Yes and no.
I think bin Laden expected it to be considerably more successful, and I don't really think that bin Laden and the jihadis expected an overreach in Iraq to go so badly against them.
On the other hand, what they have done, and this is the legacy, for example, of the war in Afghanistan in the 80s.
The legacy of the war in Afghanistan were contacts and training so that you had this organization, this semi-organized organization or self-organizing, this Al-Qaeda, which is more of an ideology than an organization, that was able to mobilize people for years afterwards.
And those who have gone to fight in Iraq, the foreigners who have gone to fight in Iraq, who can come back with a couple of things.
They're not afraid of Americans.
They know how to fight, and they're ready when they need to be called upon.
So we don't know.
We'll probably be living with the results of that for another 10 to 20 years.
But for the most part, the jihadis are, I suspect, failing, and probably understand the nature of that failure.
So rather than govern, I think what they would rather have is ungovernability so that they can fill kind of a vacuum.
For example, Pakistan becoming a failed state, if that's what happens in Pakistan.
They don't want to govern Pakistan, but they want the space between effective government and non-effective government so that they can fill it and engage in their activities.
All right, well, so let's walk it back the other way.
If the United States were to get out and cease falling into bin Laden's trap of helping him turn the war from the near enemy to the far enemy, and we just leave him up to his near enemies to deal with, are they going to be much more likely to be able to deal with the problem?
Since we've only made it worse, apparently.
In Iraq, yes.
In Afghanistan, no.
I went to a couple of lectures at something called the Middle East Institute when I was at Georgetown, and one of them was given by somebody who'd done a tremendous amount of study on Afghanistan.
And this is when the Taliban had just...not long after the Taliban had taken control of Afghanistan.
And he said that the Taliban were an expression of Pashtun nationalism as much as a religious expression.
Right, the Taliban aren't, to me, aren't to be necessarily lumped in with the Mujahideen as all one and the same.
Well, no, and as a matter of fact, in the early 90s, many of my Mujahideen friends were followers of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the Taliban had just begun to emerge, and there was no trust of the Taliban.
They were essentially considered a CIA creation.
Their view was that the whole goal of the Taliban was to take control of Afghanistan and prevent Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from governing the place.
So there was no love for the Taliban.
And he's the guy who at least claimed that he helped bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, right?
Yes, yes.
And he was a very, very influential Mujahideen commander during the war against the Soviet Union.
Now, you know, there was an article to what you say about the jihadists kind of recreating the Afghan war against the Russians and giving basically battle experience to new jihadis.
There's been a couple of articles in the Christian Science Monitor along these lines.
One of them was from, I guess, three years ago now, or almost three years ago now, sometime in 2005.
They did a report about Saudi and Israeli studies that were undertaken at the same time about the jihadists who were going to fight in Iraq.
And they said that literally 1% or less of these guys had anything to do with the Afghan jihad, that they were almost all early 20s or late teens, you know, young men who were radicalized by the invasion of Iraq itself.
Or maybe they were already radical, but they decided they were going to go fight only after the United States invaded Iraq.
Oh, and then further today, or was it yesterday?
I'm sorry.
January 7th, there's this article by Gordon Lubold in the Christian Science Monitor, a new look at foreign fighters in Iraq.
And it's about how they're almost all from Libya and Saudi Arabia, and other countries that are allied with the United States.
It's not that they're coming in contrary to American propaganda from Iran and from Syria and other countries we want to have wars with.
These young men who are brand new mujahideen, who are going to Iraq to fight the United States, are all from countries where the local governments are our friends.
Yep.
And that's not surprising.
It's been a while since I've been in Saudi Arabia for several years.
But it's when I was there in 2003, the two compound attacks in 2003 really radicalized Saudi public opinion against the mujahideen and against al-Qaeda.
Prior to that, there had been some residual support, because there was some residual sympathy with al-Qaeda's claims.
I'm sorry, you're referring to attacks within Saudi Arabia in 2003?
Within Saudi Arabia itself.
One would expect, and I'm just speculating here, that the Saudi government would be happy to see radical young mujahideen go off to Iraq and get killed.
Yeah.
Because that solves several problems at once for the Saudi government.
Although at the same time, some of them are going to come back and be experienced, as you said.
Yep.
But that will also cause other problems.
There have been, you know, the amount of violence has dropped off.
It was fairly heavy in 2003 and 2004.
In fact, when I was there, there was a fairly significant shootout in Mecca, and the discovery of a fairly large arsenal.
On the other hand, the Saudi interior ministry has good enough intelligence.
Most Saudis, at least the Saudis I came in contact with, for the most part said, yeah, we don't like the bearded people we have, meaning the religious authorities, but we also know these other bearded people, and we'd rather have the bearded people we have than these crazy bearded people.
Yeah.
So there is at least something of significant support that the Saudi government can then leverage.
Because the last thing Saudis really wanted was violence against other Muslims, and that first compound attack.
That second compound attack in Riyadh in November really hit Saudi society hard.
When you were there, the guys that you were familiar with, they were the new crazies with the beards.
By this time, I was working as an advisor to a newspaper.
My flirtation with radical Islam was something that happened in the early 90s.
So by the time I was in Saudi Arabia, I was no longer involved or interested in this.
Oh, I see.
So at the time that you were interested, where were you then?
I was in, actually, Columbus, Ohio.
Ah.
Center of radical Islam in the United States.
I'm just joking about that.
I don't know to be perfectly honest.
I was going to say, you know, there's Mulder and Scully, and the rest of them are on their way now.
Sorry, those are the only FBI agent names I could come up with off the top of my head.
Interesting.
So tell me about Islamofascism.
These guys, you say they have big dreams.
Is George Bush right?
They want to create a caliphate from Spain to Indonesia?
That, to be perfectly honest, is what one might call a far dream.
I think the initial dream, if there is an initial aspiration, it is to create somewhere a pocket of Islamic rule.
And the point of terrorism, of these kinds of actions, I think goes back to something Sayyid Qutb wrote in the introduction of his book, Milestones, in which he wants Muslims to be in a position where they are forced to choose between Islam and the West.
And my understanding of why terrorism has taken place is because Al-Qaeda and its associates and affiliates and franchisees, all those who subscribe to the ideology, want the United States hip deep in the Muslim world, so that Muslims are then forced to choose between siding with America and Islam, in the hope that enough Muslims will choose siding with Islam so that they can make the revolution work.
Does anybody in American foreign policy understand this?
That it all comes down simply to a battle of ideas?
And if they do understand that, does anybody outside of the American enterprise believe that the way to get them to choose us is by putting marines in their neighborhoods?
I don't know what anyone in the American establishment understands about this.
I mean, damn, man, I'm just some kid, honestly, here in Austin, Texas, and I could have told you, you know, I did, on these airwaves on Chaos Radio in 2002, that, you know, the way to handle this is to kill as few as absolutely necessary, to use the minimum amount of force to get the job done and get it done as soon as possible, and then to tell the whole world, hey, look, we're your friend, the United States.
We're not an empire.
We're not on the offense.
This guy, bin Laden, is on the offense, and make him the bad guy.
And instead, what have we done?
We said, oh, you want empire, huh?
We'll show you empire.
You want war, huh?
We'll give you war.
Yeah, you want to claim you're fighting a defensive jihad to protect your holy Islamic land?
Yeah, well, we'll see about that.
What I do find most bothersome, because there were some opportunities, but in effect, after September 11th, the Bush administration, and enough Americans bought into this, it effectively became all about us.
They hate us because we are free, because we are rich.
It all became about us, and we're going to go now do something noble.
We're going to go free a people and prove how good we are.
None of this was about winning any kind of war.
It was all about sort of making a point.
As I look at this war, Al-Qaeda is going to lose, because they're selling a product no one really wants to buy.
In the 90s, when we looked at places to aspire to, it was Hassan Tarabi's Sudan, and that part, I think Golda Deen Hikmatyar was actually in charge of Afghanistan, at least nominally for a little bit.
Those were the places that were looked at as sort of the exemplars of the future.
And I can tell you that no civilized Saudi, no civilized Syrian, no civilized Egyptian was in their right minds going to look to Khartoum or Kabul and say that's the future.
There was no way in hell they were going to.
So, wow, this is great.
It's like someone who really knows what they're talking about saying exactly what I've been saying all along.
So what you're saying is that basically bin Laden is the lunatic on the street corner shouting that nobody pays any attention to until we start bombing the region, and then all of a sudden he seems a bit prescient to the average guy.
Yep, but not enough.
He still can't muster enough followers to do much more than cause chaos, and that may be enough.
I've also long predicted that the ideology known as Al-Qaeda is going to morph into a criminal enterprise, simply because that's the only direction for them to go.
Well, right, because all their money and everything is on the black market anyway, right?
That's the only way they can make money is illegitimate enterprise.
But there was a point to the violence.
The point to the violence is getting something to happen.
At some point in time, the point to the violence will be the violence itself.
Right.
And that's when they will become the criminal enterprise.
Sort of like the United States.
Yes, exactly.
We're waging a war in which both sides are going to lose.
And it will in the end be a wash.
It will be a much more expensive wash for us than it was for them.
But both sides will still lose this war.
Hey, let's wrap this up back on us again.
Okay.
You wrote this article about we're all Prussians now.
Yes.
Where you turned around the Frenchman, I forget his name, who said we're all Americans now after September 11th.
And you talk about how, well, no, really we're not.
And somewhere in here you make this great argument.
You quote this guy, Ferdinand LaSalle, talking about the difference between the way an American or an Englishman would treat a tax collector compared to the way a Prussian would.
And which category we fall in nowadays, for example.
Yep.
Well, I just thought it was a fascinating argument for LaSalle to make because he was talking about a situation in the 1860s in which Bismarck was spending money without any authorization from Parliament, violating the Prussian Constitution.
And he did this for years.
He waged two wars doing this.
And LaSalle essentially looked at this and said, and Prussians continue to pay their taxes because Prussians believe in the paying of taxes and in the necessity of the state.
And he made this comparison and I thought, and we are Prussians today because if an American government, a U.S. president, behaved in an unconstitutional way.
Let's suppose we had no budget and the president continued to spend money and the IRS continued to collect taxes.
Most Americans would pay their taxes because they would believe it was their duty.
Right.
In effect, that description struck me as, damn, he is talking about the United States today.
Well, and the comparison was the United States back then or England back then where you'd be tarred and feathered, Mr. Tax Collector.
Better not come back to this neighborhood.
Yes.
Which was very, very interesting.
The nature of personal government, particularly under Bismarck, it was just fascinating to see how the author of this particular book wrote about how Bismarck wielded power.
And seeing how he was able to leverage his opposition to support things.
It's just been a fascinating history.
I remember reading John Taylor Guido's Underground History of American Education and he talks about the significance of Prussia as a model for the United States.
Right.
And because of the First World War, when all things German were bad, we don't get that anymore.
But that was apparently one time very, very significant.
We've been withdrawing books at the library, the seminary, and prior to 1914, you can't find a bad book about Germany.
And it really is the inverse.
See, this is the thing about it too.
Whatever, ideas are ideas and you can like them or not.
And Prussia might have bad forms of government, but you could have great Prussian thinkers and whatever.
It's not where it's from.
The problem is this is the Declaration of Independence upside down.
This is the idea that the people as individuals are born free and come together to create governments for the purpose of protecting their rights.
And the government is allowed to do what the people's representatives authorize it to do within the limits and bounds of the Constitution, which grants its authority in the first place, etc.
It's completely upside down.
It's the John McCain view of the world, really, which is everybody is born owing their allegiance and some undefined debt to the state.
Yep, absolutely.
And that is where I believe we are and I believe it's where we've been for some decades.
And we don't know what the lasting effects of the Ron Paul candidacy will be.
It could be that it will spark some kind of change.
I'm not hopeful about it, but it could be.
We don't know.
But I think most Americans would probably fall into this.
The government is necessary.
Presidential power is necessary.
The state is the agent of the common good.
These kinds of things.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I thought Ron Paul said it real well on the Jay Leno show the other night.
I wish it had bought him a couple of thousand extra votes in New Hampshire.
But everybody is demanding change and all the politicians are promising change.
I don't know if you saw in the Colbert Report where they did a montage of all the times somebody said the word change at the Democrat debate.
It was just hilarious.
And it ended with Bill Richardson saying, I'm not against change.
But anyway, so Ron Paul told Jay Leno, hey, look, everybody wants change.
But what kind of change do we want to change in foreign policy or not?
Are the Democrats or Republicans offering a change in foreign policy?
Are they offering a change in our monetary system?
Or will they even talk about it?
Are they offering a change on anything really important here?
What's happening to our Bill of Rights, our system of federalism and checks and balances and so forth?
No.
If we want change, there's only one way to go back to the Constitution.
This is why we've got everything all so screwed up is because we've let government out of their chains.
And it seems like that auto appeal, this is America.
We all still celebrate on the Fourth of July.
We all learn this basic stuff in first grade, right?
I mean, it seems like that would really ring some bells.
It seems like it would, but it apparently doesn't.
And I don't know what to say about that.
This is what happens when you have 100 years or thereabouts of some kind of welfare warfare state.
Yeah, and the American education system that John Gatto documents so well to go along with it too, I guess.
Yep.
That's why I speak of American school children as being catechized into the state.
That's what the school system does.
And the welfare system as well.
You point out in your article the purpose of Social Security.
Was it to save people from drowning in the gutter when it was invented not by Franklin Roosevelt but by Otto von Bismarck?
No, the purpose was to tie people to the state, that's all.
To make the needs of the least similar to those of the most so that people would support the state.
There it is.
And that's why it's not just the warfare state but the warfare welfare state.
Yep.
Absolutely.
You know, I met a kid at Camp Casey in 2005 when Cindy Sheehan was trying to get a meeting with the president.
But he was busy riding bicycles with Lance Armstrong.
And the kid said to me, he was on leave.
But he was expecting that he was going to be recalled and have to go back to Iraq and kill people some more.
And he didn't want to go.
He was against the war.
Hell, he was at Camp Casey cheering on Cindy Sheehan.
And I said, but kid, why don't you just go AWOL and refuse to go?
I mean, what are you doing?
And he said, well, they already loaned me $50,000 for college and already spent most of it.
And I owe them.
I have to.
So, I mean, that's not just Social Security payments and what have you.
I mean, that's the direct connection right there.
Yep.
I mean, he was a good kid too.
I felt so bad for him.
Well, even central to the welfare warfare state is the entire Federal Reserve System.
Because without that, you can't have the federal government manipulating the U.S. economy and, in turn, the global economy.
Isn't that the key?
Isn't it funny about liberals and leftists who hate the corporation so much that they never, ever, ever, ever talk about central banking?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I take that back.
Counterpunch.
But that doesn't count.
Yeah.
Or it does count, but it's the exception that proves the rule.
Why is it that the people who hate the big corporations and see the evil capitalists and the profit motive and so forth as the root of all evil, why don't they focus on where that money comes from in the first place?
Isn't that what Nixon said or somebody said about Nixon or whatever?
You've got to follow the money to figure out what the hell is going on here.
Why not follow it back to its actual source?
Well, for most on the left, they have bought this government power coming to the rescue of private people, individuals against capital.
And so if the Federal Reserve, and they probably see it as nothing more than just another government agency, which it kind of is, but it's also a private consortium, they see the Federal Reserve as just one more agent of providing the good life for as many people as possible.
I don't know.
This is another thing about the Paul campaign that's been sort of frustrating to me is that I think he almost every time explains the problem with paper money and its connection to problems with health care, to the war, to everything else.
I think he almost every time does a pretty decent job of summing up what it means to have paper money and why it's wrong and the connection, the problems that it creates for us.
But it seems like people are just not able to catch on to it.
Well, and I suspect a lot of people, for them, for many people, it's an esoteric argument.
And for many people, they probably can't envision living in a world that's different.
How to live in a world without Federal Reserve notes?
Yeah.
I'm just picturing everybody holding hands and singing songs and passing joints around and being happy.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Everybody, Charles Featherstone, he writes for LRC again.
Yay.
And his blog is thefeatherblog.blogspot.com.
Appreciate your time today, bud.
Thanks, Scott.