Bill Kelsey, libertarian activist and sometimes relief pilot for an NGO in Africa, discusses the crises in Congo and Sudan, what he learned about libertarianism growing up in the Middle East and how it relates to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
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Hi y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
And now joining me here in the Chaos studios in the penthouse suite of the JPMorgan, Chase Manhattan, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Frostbank Trust building is my old friend Bill Kelsey.
Hi Bill, welcome back to the show.
Well great, it's wonderful to be back.
Are we supposed to leave the name of your non-governmental organization nameless for the purposes of this show?
I forgot the rules about that.
Yeah, it'd probably be better.
I'm actually working for a Swiss company flying in the Sahara now between oil rigs.
Between oil rigs?
In the Sahara desert, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
Alright, now, and that's where you've been this whole time?
Well, I used to work for a humanitarian aviation organization up until last January.
That's January of 2008.
But I left that company after a very rewarding experience for a decade and switched to this Swiss operation, so now I'm keeping the oil flowing.
Well, I guess that's better than you're the guy blocking it up.
So, up until January, before January, you'd spent how much time flying relief missions and such in Africa?
Oh, probably over a ten year period, probably six years in between Chad and Sudan and Afghanistan, a little bit in Iraq and Congo, Uganda, Mozambique.
Can you tell me a bit about what's going on in the Congo?
I know that there's fighting there, or there used to be or has been or continues to be or something, but I don't know a damn thing about it and I don't know anybody who writes about it.
Well, even if I got you the information, it'd be outdated tomorrow.
It's very sad and I also don't know why it persists that the chronic warlordism that goes on in the DRC, people fighting over the coltan that goes into your cell phone, people fighting over diamonds, timber, gold.
Just lots of, well, even the material used for the Hiroshima bomb came out of mines in Shinkolagwe, down near Lubumbashi, so it seems like there's just lots of bad karma there.
The last article I read was complaining of all things about blood cows.
You know, you've heard of blood diamonds from West Africa that were involved in the wars there and were used to finance the war, but apparently now militias in the eastern Congo area are stealing herds of cattle and selling them to finance their activities, so that's the latest I heard.
Well, yeah, it just seems like one big continent of never-ending conflict there.
Now, let me ask you about Sudan, too, and I know it's been a little while since you were there, but most people don't know too much about it at all.
What we hear are the liberal activists telling us, never again, it's a genocide just like in World War II, and America must intervene to stop it, and your explanation, as you've told me over the years about who's who and what the conflict is about in Sudan, is so much different than what George Clooney and the guys would have me believe at the preview they put on the front of my DVDs that I read.
Yeah, it's a tough one, and what does fascinate me is the wars that are fought for good causes, where really decent people who have some decent principles are seduced into supporting a war, whether it's the pacifist abolitionists that got seduced into supporting the union side in the U.S. Civil War, whether it was the anti-slavery people who supported British colonization, colonization of Africa on the grounds that they were abolishing slavery, or the occupation of India because the British were going to abolish the practice of sati, where widows jumped onto the funeral pyres of their husbands.
It never ceases to end that while there might be some very nefarious reasons for a war, the war makers managed to seduce the nicest people among us.
In the case of Sudan, to get to the point, people rebelled.
The roots of it go into the question that's brought up in Genesis between Abel and Cain, does virtue lie with the people who plant the fields or those who graze them?
It would be a great one for libertarians to wrestle with on property rights.
If you've been grazing your goats somewhere and somebody else plants a tree there, who does that tree belong to if the goats are eating it where they've traditionally grazed?
It's not an easy question, and that's really the root of this particular fight.
In any case, people rebelled against the Sudan government, which I don't lose any love for, and the various people that rebelled, they fight against each other.
The government response was the same as government responses are when people rebel, which is to shoot up the town.
Whether it's the United States in Fallujah or the United States in Afghanistan or the United States in Waco, when you shoot at a powerful government, they tend to fight back with brutality.
So in Darfur, what you have is the farmers are basically the victims, and the central government in Khartoum backs the nomads and the Janjaweed militias, that kind of thing.
Is that it?
Right, but there are also stories that the various parties in the rebel conflict, they also hire Janjaweed.
Janjaweed basically means the ghosts of the horses or the ghost riders.
Maybe people remember a show, I Dream of Jeannie, that's the same word.
Janjaweed is the horses.
They're basically desert bandits who run around in the desert and steal and loot.
Really, the cowboys or the outlaws, I should say, not the cowboys, but the outlaws in the Wild West when we had people on horses that would steal from wagon trains, that's kind of what we're talking about.
Jesse James would probably be a Janjaweed, but I use the word fairly liberally.
It's a good word when I'm trying to take off from a runway in Chad and the tower tells me to stop.
There are some French fighter jets that need to take off.
Well, I tell my passengers we have to wait for the French Janjaweed to take off.
I wonder if they even get that.
In terms of the word genocide thrown around in the Darfur, describing the conflict in the Darfur region, I believe you told me before that both sides here, although the casualties are in the hundreds of thousands, both sides are Arabs, both sides are Muslims, it's not really a racial or ethnic conflict that's going on.
It really is a battle over resources and property rights and such.
Well, it's even more difficult, and this is what makes our tax difficult, is that when you can throw out an easy slogan like genocide and one side is bad, oh, it's Arab, it's Muslim, and the other side are just nice innocent people and out of the blue the bad guys are slaughtering the good guys, it makes it easy to come up with a slogan.
And then the truth is so much more complex, it's hard to get a banner up that says, hey, the truth is complicated.
But yeah, the genocide I don't think is a word that should be thrown around casually.
It's tribal warfare, and one side wins and one side loses.
The side that loses runs off to a refugee camp.
And by the way, a lot of the refugees are refugees simply because there's combat going on.
There are also refugees who are running away from the people who are rebelling, the three main tribes, the Zaghawa, the Masalit, and the Four.
I believe at the last count there were 16 of these tribes.
I am really concerned about the decent good people who believe in defending justice getting sucked in, like Mia Farrow went so far as to, and by the way, the company I flew for, we flew Mia Farrow around and Angelina Jolie and a number of do-gooder liberals.
Well, yeah, if they want to come see what's going on, that's fine, and maybe they publicize the issue.
But in general, they really tie up the logistics when people have to divert their airplanes and trucks and whatnot to help a politician or a movie star get their picture taken out in a disaster area.
But that's another story.
What could happen, I hear there's an advisor to Obama, a lady by the name of Rice, coincidentally, who is pushing very hard for the U.S. invading Darfur.
And Mia Farrow, I was saying, came out with a request that Blackwater should be contracted to occupy Darfur.
And this is the danger we can get ourselves into if we have a righteous passion that's not fully informed about the complexity of the area.
I do feel that the only reason the United States hasn't invaded is because we are tied up in two other wars.
Actually, it's probably more than two wars, two wars that we know about already.
And on the ground in Darfur, there are now, at last count, 16 different factions that are fighting each other.
So it's going to be difficult to know who to defend and who to shoot at if we did invade.
Wow, yeah, so that banner that says, hey, the truth is complicated, that sounds extremely complicated.
16 different factions.
And now we're completely excluding the southern portion of Sudan where the black Christian and animist Sudanese live.
That civil war is over.
They've had to cease fire there.
This is entirely in the western Darfur region that we're talking about here.
Right.
And let me back up to Darfur itself.
They are not both Arab.
You could say they're both African, the people, but they are both Muslim.
I mean, on both sides in the Darfur, they are both Muslim and they are both black African.
Maybe some of these so-called Arabs are lighter skinned.
The main thing that makes them Arab is that they do speak Arabic as a first language.
There's other definitions of the word Arab.
One is that they speak Arabic.
One is that they claim an Arab ancestor.
And in certain times and places, the word Arab has meant nomad.
So it does combine to all these three do apply in the case of Sudan for the people that are aligned with the government.
Now, the Zagawa and the Masalit and the four who are Muslim, when they go to school, they study Arabic.
And I've spoken Arabic with them.
And some of them speak it very well.
They are loyal Muslims.
So it is a fight between Muslims.
It is a fight between Africans.
The North-South one that went on for 30 years and captured a lot of people's imagination in the West, that Southerners, they tend to be Christian or say they are, which helps them get some aid from the West.
And they tend to speak English when they get educated beyond their tribal languages.
People generally don't get educated in their tribal languages.
They'll get educated in English if they're in the South and in Arabic if they're in the North.
But yes, there is a peace treaty.
There's a shootout every so often.
But by and large, I've landed at airports where there are soldiers from both sides that are guarding the airport.
And there are units that are made up of soldiers from both sides.
Or the officials at the airport might be civil servants from Khartoum or on the Khartoum payroll.
And the guards will be from the Southern Sudan Liberation Army.
And we'll see how that works out.
It is a state within a state.
For example, getting a clearance to fly into there, you work with the government of South Sudan.
And to get permission to land, it's the government of South Sudan.
And at outlying fields, they are the ones who shake us down for the taxes, not the Khartoum government.
All right.
Now, I'm terribly cynical about imperialism at this point, Bill.
I'm kind of beyond hope.
And it occurs to me that perhaps the American War Party would like an excuse for a foothold in Sudan.
And maybe if they can occupy the place, even in part in the name of stopping the violence in Darfur, that that's a step toward maybe reigniting the civil war against the South, the central government's war against the South.
And then maybe the creation of an excuse to put American forces in the South to protect those poor people.
And of course, the South being where all the oil is.
Am I just completely paranoid now, or what?
Well, there's oil all over Sudan.
And the people who extract the oil, be they Chinese or be they American or French companies, they want their oil fields protected.
And they will make a deal with whoever will protect their access to the oil field.
Now, in the case of Darfur, if there hadn't been 16 factions fighting each other and the Khartoum government, if one of these factions was very powerful, and was controlling the area where the oil was, and was cohesive enough to make a deal with an oil company, what we would have is a great declaration that the United States is going into Darfur to protect the oil.
The people of Darfur from a genocide, many of the people in the peace community and the liberals would be sucked into this thinking that they're supporting the liberation and defense of the people of Darfur.
And what would happen is, of course, the next layer of the onion would really be that it's oil.
The impetus in the case of South Sudan, this is a case where the powers that be are dumping lots of money into South Sudan, and they do not want the South Sudanese to start a war.
I mean, it's not in the interests of the powers that be around the world to have the war between the North and the South continue.
So whenever there is a flare-up, there are a lot of people that step in to calm everything down, because if there's a war on, it's hard to get your oil out.
So this is a case in which the oil companies are bribing people to behave themselves.
And that includes Chinese, French, and Western oil companies that are all kind of getting along and doing business there in the same region?
It's hard for me to give you details, except coincidentally, of all the UN forces that are in South Sudan, there's a huge contingent of Chinese soldiers.
You can put the pieces together yourself.
And now, can you tell me about Somalia?
Do you know a lot about what's going on there now?
I've read reports that say that it's a humanitarian crisis worse than Darfur.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees, warlords, the bad guys from Black Hawk Down now in the employ of Dick Cheney, murdering people en masse in that country.
Yeah, in the case of Somalia, I don't have any direct experience, and I don't know any more than what the news is saying to back up the...
There was a democratically elected, however, Islamic-style council that had things in Mogadishu somewhat under control, as best I remember.
But there was an Ethiopian invasion last year with a green light from the United States and with cooperation on an intelligence level.
So, that was a bad idea.
As far as humanitarian, yeah, it's a difficult place to be a humanitarian worker.
It's one of the toughest, and part of that is just the nature of the society there.
It's a very difficult area to operate, and whoever goes in to help out might not necessarily be appreciated.
Yeah, well, I could see that, maybe a little bit of blowback from some of the quote-unquote help that's been provided to them in the past.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking with Bill Kelsey.
He's a pilot for a non-governmental organization, has done a lot of relief work flying around in Africa and in Iraq.
And you moved to Jordan as a very young child, and you were raised in Jordan for quite a few years, and so you have at least some kind of background and understanding of the Middle East beyond what the average doofus Texan like myself might know, right?
Yes, but there's no harm in, I wouldn't call anybody a doofus, but this fragment of geography that I'm quite familiar with and still have a long way to go, I've been working on it for about 54 years since I first went over there at the age of a year and a half, and spent my childhood there up until I was about 15, and have been continuing to study it since then.
When you talk about the Palestinians and the Israelis, each of them represent one-tenth of one percent of the world's population.
And the fragment of geography, I don't know, but it's probably about the same percentage of the Earth's land mass, and yet this seems to be the focus of just so many things in the way of literature.
There's probably been more books and articles and broadcasts.
It's what controls, the best I can tell, the American political process.
So, yeah, it's also a main reason that I'm a libertarian.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm joined in the studio by my old friend Bill Kelsey.
He's a local libertarian activist here in town, and is a pilot who does mostly relief missions around the world.
Apparently he's been making some money flying oil workers around lately, which, hey, you've got to make your ends in order to help people too.
But before we went to the break there, Bill, you were explaining how growing up in the Middle East and spending as much time there as you have has really been formative in your life, and is a big part of why you are a libertarian.
I guess, first of all, what exactly do you mean by libertarian in the sense that it's made you, and what effect has the Middle East had on your perspective on political questions like that?
Well, my point here is that a lot of people get into our movement.
Let's say somebody gets busted for marijuana, and then they find out that we have tolerant views on the subject.
That will attract them.
Somebody is fearing that the guns will be confiscated.
They hear what our position is, and they're attracted to us.
So there are many people who come in because of one issue, and then they learn about others.
But I've counted up about eight reasons, eight positions, that libertarianism has in general that really appeal to me as someone who grew up around the Israel-Palestine conflict.
And in no particular order, but I'll start with the first one, which is that I saw a different narrative when I was growing up.
I learned different things.
I saw different things than what is accepted as common knowledge here in the United States.
And when I came to the States in 1967, there were a lot less people than now who had any inkling as to what the Palestinian side of the story was.
And whether it was in public or in the church or when I eventually went into the service, it was just amazing that there was a different narrative.
And mine was at times ridiculed and not respected by many people.
And in libertarianism, we do attract many people with minority points of view.
And it is a home for people who are experimenting with alternative lifestyles, alternative thought forms, alternative ideas.
And so for starters, libertarianism is a home where people can be listened to respectfully if they have an idea that isn't part of the common narrative, the common mythology of the society.
Well, it sort of seems like for anybody who really knows anything about anything, if they ever just read a major newspaper article about the one thing they know about, whether it's hang gliding or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or anything else, they're going to see, hey, wait a minute, this narrative is not the same thing that I know about.
These details are not represented in a way that brings across the real truth.
Anybody who really is exposed to media covering something that they really already know the true story of is going to be disappointed and then hopefully is going to be shocked, like you're saying, into a new direction.
Well, maybe there's something I need to figure out about why it is this narrative is so wrong.
Yeah, and well, actually, I wasn't going to spend too much time exactly saying what my narrative was.
And there was a very wise woman I listened to from Israel once named Deborah Bruce, and she says everybody who's been touched by this question has a very passionate idea of exactly how this problem started and what should be done and what the solution is.
And I'm no different.
I have my ideas, which I can articulate very well, I can debate very well, and I still have a lot more that I'll spend my life learning.
The point is, it doesn't matter if I am correct or if I'm totally hallucinating, if my entire memory is a false memory syndrome, I have a right to my hallucination.
So that's a very important thing to me.
And I have a right to now we can start moving on.
Thoreau said during the Mexican war that I don't grant the state the right to choose my friends and enemies for me.
And the first time I heard a libertarian speak, it was Carl Hess, and he quoted Thoreau again, I don't accept the right of the state to choose my friends and enemies for me.
And that resonates with me very much because politicians in the Washington regime, with the exception of our good friend Ron Paul and also Dennis Kucinich, do fall all over themselves, expressing their friendship not just for the state of Israel, but effectively the extreme right wing of the Likud party.
They are not my friends.
They are not people I wish to subsidize, and they are killing people where I do have friends.
So this is important to me.
I have my friends, right or wrong, and I'm entitled to my friends.
And I prefer not to think about enemies.
I wish no harm to anyone in Israel, and I do have many friends in Israel as well.
But for the United States to be subsidizing one side in a political conflict is also going to violate the conscience of somebody in the United States because we do have people from all over the world, whether it's immigrants or whether it's Americans, who've gone overseas and bonded with someone.
If my friends who are very enamored of Israel could imagine my situation, let's imagine we lived in a world where the Palestinians had the control in the United States and all Republican and Democratic candidates had to fall all over each other to express a desire to increase the welfare payment to a Palestinian state that was oppressing Jewish people.
You would understand how someone like me feels.
And so libertarianism offers a truce where if you believe in the Zionist project, fine, subsidize it yourself, but don't make me subsidize it.
I won't make you subsidize anything that I feel strongly about.
So that's another point there.
Well, this is something that you often hear from conservatives on the abortion question.
They say, look, you know, I'm anti-abortion, but here's what I'm really anti.
You're taxing me and spending my tax dollars on something that I am so morally opposed to.
And the thing is, that's a very decent, credible argument to me.
I just don't see why it ought to be restricted to the abortion question.
It's the same thing whether we're talking about wars or whether we're talking about the local sheriff's department.
Why should anybody be forced to pay for what they're morally opposed to?
Right, which then makes the libertarian position on income taxes very attractive because given that federal funds are used for so many things that violate so many people's conscience, the standard response is, well, you can't have everybody deciding and what the federal government should do and everybody has something they're cranky about.
Well, very good if you're cranky about something.
And if you if whether it's abortion or whatever war is going on in the world, whoever it is that the United States decides to subsidize or not subsidize in conflict overseas, there are going to be people here in the United States who have an affinity for the population that's not being subsidized.
So it's a very good one on that one.
We have we have more there that I'm thinking about.
We we in in libertarianism, we have we spend a lot of time discussing property rights.
And I brought up earlier the irresolvable question of the goat herders and the people who want to plant a tree or tomato plant.
And how tough a challenge that is.
If you really get into reading the both narratives of the Israelis and the Palestinians, you can get a very good education in the various concepts of what it means to own a piece of property.
How long do you have to live in a piece of property before it's yours?
How many centuries?
If a piece of land is, let's say, inhabited by Jewish people and the Jewish people convert to Christianity and then later to Islam.
And does that mean that they have forfeited the right to it?
I mean, it's there.
There's a lot to go into there.
I do feel that in the case of the Palestinians, their culture and Arabic speaking indigenous culture made up of many ethnic groups, including Jews who converted to Islam and Christianity 2000 years ago to Christianity.
And then 13 centuries ago, many converted to Islam.
They are indigenous people and they were done wrong by the Zionist movement that displaced them to place this modern state of Israel, however well motivated it was.
Well, and, you know, yeah, I appreciate that taking into account good motivations or just, you know, at face value, take them as good motivations.
But you're right.
I mean, you're talking ultimately about the bulk of the Israeli population are a bunch of Europeans who at the end of World War II came and said, well, we're going to invoke this God given property right from 2000 years ago against people who've been living here for 2000 years.
It seems like at some point, if we weren't talking about miraculous deeds, but simply human ones.
Well, the Jewish deeds had expired since the Romans had kicked them all into exile 2000 years ago.
And they didn't have the right to come in and take land by force.
They certainly had the right to come to Israel and buy property, which they did to a large degree.
But then they went ahead and used force over the rest.
And you could even fast forward and say, OK, well, fine, Israel's Israel.
And it's like, you know, what are we going to do?
Give Massachusetts back to the Indians or whatever.
OK, that part is unrepealable or shouldn't even be thought of as something to be undone or make amends there.
Obviously, you know the question of the right of return.
They'll never even entertain a legitimate discussion about that kind of thing.
But you can look at just look at the way they treat the property rights of the people who live in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank.
Now they'll say, well, we're taking this piece of the West Bank, but then we'll give you some extra over there.
But what they're doing is they're violating the property rights of one family.
One individual Palestinian family is getting half of their land taken away from them.
And then but supposedly it's OK because they give some different land to some different Palestinians somewhere else in the West Bank.
And say, well, we took from you, but then we gave to you, too.
But it's totally different people that are being rewarded on.
You know, it's a joke, basically, is what I'm saying.
The people of the West Bank are not treated as individuals, but as part of this collective of Palestinians.
Right.
And again, it's we have strong positions on property rights.
And I've already covered the income tax.
I'm troubled by my income tax going to subsidize the state of Israel.
Troubled by foreign aid since between one quarter and one half of foreign aid, depending on how you crunch the numbers, goes to one tenth of one percent of the world's population.
And the remaining foreign aid, by the way, if the Israelis are not satisfied with the aid package that they are getting, APAC has the power to veto the entire foreign aid bill.
So if there's aid going for landmine removal in Mozambique or somewhere and the Israelis are not getting what they ask for, the whole package will be vetoed.
So foreign aid is part of it.
So we've covered foreign aid.
We've covered the income tax.
We've talked about a little bit about property rights that moves into eminent domain.
The Israelis do use eminent domain for the purposes of displacing one village.
They'll say maybe this is an archaeological site or they'll say, well, your shacks are substandard housing.
You need to move them out or your village is not recognized.
We don't recognize your village.
And so under eminent domain, we have it here in the States, which is bad enough for a highway or for some special project.
But Israel is the one place in the world where the laws of eminent domain are used to displace one ethnic group and bring in immigrants from another ethnic group.
And so, again, the libertarian position on eminent domain catches my attention and appeals to me very much.
Yeah, and I guess that's kind of what I was getting at, too.
They take a bunch of land from some Palestinians here and then maybe they'll, I guess if they're lucky, if the Palestinians are lucky, they'll give some land to some different Palestinians somewhere else.
But this is something that's going on in Jerusalem, too, right, where it's sort of gentrification.
It's not I don't know if it's an outright government policy, but basically they just keep pushing the Palestinians further and further to, I guess, the east side.
Right.
And and they're basically, you know, step by step.
The Israelis are taking Jerusalem.
Well, Jerusalem and whatever else they can get their hands on on the West Bank.
But again, they have their idea of property rights, which is a strange mixture of the ancient biblical promises to Abraham, which, by the way, people who want to interpret it through that line would note that the promises are true.
The promises to Abraham would include the Arabs, too, given that his offspring on a mythological level anyway, were included, both the the Arabs, the Ishmaelites and the Israelites.
So that there's a strange synthesis between this God gave the land to us and therefore it belongs to us, along with an Eastern European quasi Marxist idea that people can be shifted around like pieces on a chessboard.
You can take somebody out of the village where they've been living for a thousand years and bulldoze the village just in the national interest and put other people there and shift people back and forth.
And to be fair, I mean, this happened to a lot of Israelis.
I do have one Israeli friend who was living in a village on on the on the Golan Heights.
And this village was actually depopulated of Palestinian refugees who had who were twice refugees.
They were refugees from Palestine.
They moved to Syria, had built a new village there.
Then they were depopulated again in the 67 war.
And he was living on the grounds of that village.
And we asked, well, what?
And he says, yeah, I feel sorry for them.
It's a shame.
But, you know, my parents got ethnically cleansed out of here and my grandparents got ethnically cleansed out of Lithuania.
And my great grandparents were ethnically cleansed.
I know it's a terrible thing, but that's the way history is shaken out.
And we have to deal with it and accept it.
So in his view, the fact that he had his family had to put up with being ethnically cleansed for three generations meant that it was fair for somebody else to get ethnically cleansed for him to have finally have a place that he could call home.
Now, that might make sense to him, but it doesn't make sense to the people who've been who've lost their property.
And it doesn't is does not make a safe home for him if there are disgruntled, dispossessed Palestinians that are looking at his house that's on their property when they're looking over the next mountain.
Well, I guess you just have to remember that when a Palestinian does something to someone, that's an attack.
And when the Israelis do something to someone, that's only a response to the aggression that they've had to suffer.
Right.
Well, that gets back into my minority view and just a little bit about the narrative.
There's no debate between any of the sides that 120 years ago, about six percent of the population of Palestine was Jewish.
And of that six percent, half of them were Arab Jews, Arabic speaking, culturally Arab.
And then the other half of that six percent were themselves relatively recent immigrants.
Now, somehow that increased to 50 percent of the entire population of Palestine.
And every Palestinian is either under military occupation or in exile.
And to read the narrative in the West at any given moment, you would believe that this happened entirely as an act of self-defense on the part of the immigrant community.
That somehow they took over this entire property, but it was all an act of self-defense.
And you still read in the newspaper when people are talking, oh, the Arabs invaded Israel the day it was declared its independence to wipe it out and drive it into the sea.
And they've tried five times, which isn't what happened at all.
The Israelis don't even believe that that's what happened.
But somehow our commentators, when just addressing the problem, they keep repeating certain major misstatements of historical fact.
Yeah, the poor Massachusetts Puritans have to defend themselves from those aggressive red men who are relentless in their aggression against the poor newly arrived Puritan settlers.
Doesn't that make perfect sense?
As long as you're a Puritan and not one of the red men.
Yeah.
Another point of libertarianism that attracts my attention and relates to this subject is the whole concept of the state.
Now, we are very comfortable believing as libertarians that the state is not the people.
We as people are individuals and the state is an apparatus that for better or worse, well, for better might take care of a few things.
For worse, tries to take care of lots of things and makes wars on our behalf and taxes us and so forth.
In the case of the broader population, I believe the word state has merged with the idea of the people.
And that's really a totalitarian concept that the people and the state are one thing.
And where you notice this is in the discussions of the conflict when politicians and editorial writers, they talk about the recognition of the right of Israel to exist as a state.
The recognition of the right of the Jewish people to have a state.
And there's always this word of state and you would almost damn yourself to something terrible if you suggested that, no, they don't necessarily and inherently have a right to a state.
And Israelis with a guilty conscience, when they want to talk about making peace with the Palestinians, their first reaction is, oh, I support their right to a state.
And that's something that's unfortunate.
I mean, I have Yazidi friends, Chaldean friends, I have friends from all sorts of ethnic groups around the world.
And I don't support their right to the state and they don't think I'm part of some genocidal plot that never occurred to Yazidis to have a state of their own.
They're a small minority in Iraq, by the way.
And I don't think people are off the hook if they say, well, I recognize a state for the Palestinians.
I think it's an unfortunate mistake on the part of the Palestinians to say, okay, as long as they give us a state, we'll accept it on whatever small portion of the property that they leave us for that so-called state, if it ever indeed happens.
And what does happen is that in going back to the property rights issue, many of the people who are partisan to Israel say, well, that's their state, they have the right to do what they want.
And I'm already reading things that say things like, as soon as the Palestinians get their state, all of the Palestinians that are not within the boundaries of that state should be moved to that state.
So I would prefer more discussion, again, of the right of a person to his orchard, to the trees he planted, to his ancestral home.
And it's not that important what flag flies over the property.
So rather than a two-state solution or even a single-state solution, you want a no-state solution, a property rights, an individual solution.
Well, there is a movement, and this would get me beyond my initial theme to just say where the libertarians fit in this, but yes, there is a very thoughtful movement in place of, they don't call it the no-state solution, they call it the one-country solution.
And some very forward-thinking Palestinians and Israelis, I mean, they represent the greatest hope, are saying it's too late for the two-state solution and there's no land left for the two-state solution.
Let's instead make it one country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River for all who love it.
And what that would mean is that the settlers would get to stay where they are.
I mean, they still have to address certain things like how they got each particular piece of property, but in principle they would be allowed to live there if they do so fairly.
The Palestinians would also have the right to return to the portions of Palestine that they lost in 1948, and it would be, some people say binational, but I think there are more than two nationalities involved here, there are several other small ones.
But again, that's an idea that I have, I will never ask anyone to subsidize it, I will not advocate the federal government giving it money, I will not advocate any congressman having to run for office saying that he thinks this is what should receive a subsidy.
This is just my idea that I share with a few Israelis and a few Palestinians, and it's in the talking stages right now.
Well, no, I completely agree with you, and I've thought that for a long time, that if the government of, well, what the hell, if the Palestinian Authority, if its only authority was to protect people's rights from aggression and crime and that kind of thing, you know, forced theft, fraud, or arson, or that kind of stuff, well then hell, the Israelis shouldn't even mind being ruled by the Palestinian Authority.
If their government is that limited to simply providing security for everybody, and you know, fair trials, and I guess keep the Syrians out or whatever, everybody ought to be perfectly comfortable if they have a government that has simply a libertarian, minimalist mission.
Right, well, many people dismiss this out of hand and say, look what happened in Yugoslavia, you're dreaming, you're hallucinating.
I respond, yeah, it could be Yugoslavia, but look at Switzerland.
I mean, the wars between the different communities in Switzerland were fairly severe 500 years ago, but they have found a way to live with some degrees of autonomy for each canton, each administrative unit that makes up Switzerland.
And there are four different language groups in Switzerland, and they found a way to live together, so that does present a model there, but it's still in the dreaming and talking stage.
There is one thing I would say about this and any other solution, when people are doing their own reading to try to sort through what's going on, look at, especially focus on the writings of Palestinians and Israelis who talk to each other, who have found a way to work together.
Obviously they have something to offer.
What is really discordant here in American society is that there is a strange belief that because the Israelis have been fighting the Arabs for so long that they are experts in how to get along with the Arabs.
And in fact, if you were trying to take a trip to Mexico, you wouldn't take your trip with somebody who talks so much about how he beats people up everywhere he goes and he wins all his fights.
You'd go with somebody who has a good time and gets along.
And yet, the way that our politicians vie with each other to increase what I call the welfare check to Israel, it's not going to a neutral, across-the-board Israeli.
It undercuts the Israeli peacemakers and it subsidizes and empowers the war makers.
Why?
Because the war costs money.
Being at peace does not cost anything.
It's the war that's expensive.
When you put in a settlement, that costs money.
Then you have to confiscate more land because wherever you put the settlement, you've made people angry, they're going to shoot at you.
So now you have to have a unit of the army.
You have to put in a new road, but the road has to be protected so you bulldoze all the olive trees on 100 yards either side of the road.
That makes more people angry, so now you have to have more soldiers.
All of these aggressive things cost more money.
And when the right wing of the Likud party is getting a blank check from the United States, where people like Obama, who by the way used to understand the Palestinian point of view on this, and he did used to hang out with Palestinians in Chicago, he's come around and gone for the blank check to Israel.
And it's not to Israel, it's again to the right wing of the Likud tendency.
Well, I was just reading something not too long ago about how Benjamin Netanyahu gets most of his money from America.
And I don't know if they're all just Lockheed executives or who it is that's giving them the money, but as much as people complain about the tail wagging the dog, here's Americans are the ones doing the most to put the Likudists back in power in Israel.
Well, I'll tell you one thing, let's be careful here.
As a libertarian, if an American citizen wants to give money to any particular Israeli movement, I would defend their right to do so.
And hopefully they would also defend our right to subsidize any Palestinian movement.
I'm actually not a fan of too many of the existing movement.
I'm not a fan of Hamas or the Fatah or the Palestinian Authority, nor are most Palestinians for that matter.
But there are many creative movements that are doing good things, whether it's relief work or reconciliation work, and these deserve our support and our subsidy.
And if somebody wants to send money to an unsavory group, well, that's between them and their conscience.
I don't want the state involved in telling anyone they shouldn't contribute to Likud.
There is the question of the tax break.
I mean, you can do stuff like subsidize the settlers.
You can give direct donations to the settlers who are causing havoc in Hebron right now and get a tax break for it.
That's a whole other issue.
Well, now let me ask you back about Mia Farrow talking about wanting to hire Blackwater to go and intervene in the Darfur region.
Is that the same sort of thing?
She's giving up on trying to send in the Marine Corps at all of our expense.
At least in this sort of intervention, it seems like she would at least be able to have better access to local information and decide whether she's spending her money in ways that are beneficial to anybody that she's actually really trying to help or not.
Whereas if you just send the Marine Corps, God knows what kind of disaster they're going to come up with.
Well, actually, I think the Marine Corps is a lot more disciplined than Blackwater.
And I would say that probably Blackwater is very expensive.
And when people talk about hiring Blackwater, they're talking about the U.S. government hiring it and sending it out there.
That's different, isn't it?
Now, if she was able to raise the fees that Blackwater commands from private sources and send them out to Darfur, I really would have an ethical dilemma and I'd have to scratch what hair I have left to figure that one out.
But I would just oppose it on moral grounds and scream and shout and ask to be on your radio show and convince everybody not to support that unfortunate idea.
Well, of course, you would always be welcome here.
Now, so is that your list of things about the Middle East that got you thinking libertarian?
Yes.
Well, actually, I'll take a real tough one right here.
You know, one of the ones that libertarians have a hard time about is our immigration policy.
You know, we were very generous to in our thinking towards immigrants.
Now, we of course, we don't want tax subsidies.
We don't want welfare for immigrants and free this, free that and the other for the immigrants.
But if I want to hire somebody from New York, it's my right.
If I want to hire somebody from an equal distance in the opposite direction, that's my right.
And so we have a policy towards immigration that many libertarians are uncomfortable with.
And they say, well, let's be quiet about that one.
It will weird too many people out.
How can we have how can we believe in open immigration?
And how can we do that?
Well, for me, that's very easy.
Growing up with the Palestinians and seeing what happened to them.
Imagine that you are an American.
And now Americans are very comfortable with the illusion that they own this continent.
But even though we didn't finish confiscating it till about 150 years ago.
But let's, for the sake of discussion, imagine that we were in a continuous community living here, say, for the last 2000 years.
More linguistically in our present linguistic configuration for about 12 centuries.
Say like Iceland.
Somebody, people have been here a really long time.
And a group of immigrants showed up and said that it wasn't enough for them to come here and join us.
But they have to come here.
God gave them this land a long time ago.
And it's in their holy books that they've been promised this continent.
And they're going to immigrate here.
And they're going to set up their own state.
If the people already living here want to stay here, they would consider it.
And meanwhile, they're buying up land, they're buying up apartment buildings and then evicting the tenants.
And gradually setting up their own state.
Now, I suspect Americans would get really outraged.
Intifada!
Well, I remember, in fact, in the early 80s, there were 300 Vietnamese fishermen that were given a chance to resettle in Houston.
And that brought out the Ku Klux Klan.
I mean, 300 Vietnamese fishermen.
They weren't trying to take over our country.
They wanted to live here.
So, the demographic impact.
And imagine that our immigrants were all from one community that was claiming the rights to either the entire continent or to part of the continent.
And they increased themselves to one-third of the population, declared their own state.
And then a war develops in which the indigenous people are displaced.
And when Palestinians have a hard time swallowing the concept of Israel, it's considered proof of their fanaticism.
Well, let me tell you that our position on open immigration, just allowing people to come here and work without welfare rights, without free this and that.
Just allowing them to come here and work and be part of our society.
That's considered extreme.
And yet, it's not at all extreme compared to what we expect the Palestinians to accept.
Well, and this really does seem to be the core of libertarianism, is being able to apply how you would like to be treated to other people in other places.
And even to enforce, at least in theory, your own personal moral principles that you apply to every individual to the state, too.
And that really seems to be the universal symptom of libertarianism, is their ability to put themselves in somebody else's shoes and see things the other way around.
With that, I think we're going to go ahead and wrap up this interview, Bill.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
