01/07/15 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I hate to change the subject on you so quick, but this is an important one.
It's our good friend Will Grigg, one of the most important libertarian writers in America.
Right?
I mean, come on.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com for his great blog, Pro Libertate.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
He insists.
Great article here, Will.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing very well.
Thank you so much, Scott.
I appreciate your generous word.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I like you.
I like reading the things that you write.
I enjoy promoting the things that you write as much as I enjoy reading them.
Brian Fisher and the Gospel of Genocide.
Well, go ahead.
Teach me some history.
First of all about Brian Fisher.
He used to be the chaplain for the Idaho State Senate.
He's not native to Idaho, but he lived here for a number of decades and became one of the more prominent spokesmen for what's usually called the Christian Right.
He was quoted hundreds of times in the Idaho State newspaper, which is the only significant newspaper in the only significant city in Idaho.
As it happens, I have a little bit of personal history of Mr. Fisher.
About five years ago, we took part in a debate over the supposed merits of the Iraq War, and he insisted on making this debate a discussion of the merits that he saw them or the liabilities of the Islamic religion, which, of course, wasn't the advertised topic.
I'd sort of expected him to go in that direction, but not knowing him, I didn't know the vehemence with which he would address the unworthiness of Muslims to exist, supposedly.
And that somewhat surprised me.
I'm happy to report that at least a few people who were in the audience who had attended his church decided to worship elsewhere after the debate.
So it was a net positive, I think, for the cause of truth and freedom and toleration.
He has been with the American Family Association since 2009.
He went to Mississippi in that year to become the director of issues analysis for that group.
That's the Reverend Don Wildman's organization.
That's a name some of your listeners might remember from the culture war of the 1980s.
I most prominently remember him as putting out a perfectly demented press release in 1988 talking about the Ralph Bakshi cartoon, The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse, supposedly promoting drug use.
So that's the sort of thing that obsessed him back there in the 1990s.
Mr. Fisher has become sort of a one-stop shopping spot for all your demagogic needs, whether you're somebody who needs a booster shot as a Christian rightist or somebody who profits on alarming people about the Christian right, Brian Fisher will provide you with that service.
He was, about four years ago, for some reason, he was the author of a newspaper column.
He does a radio show for the AFA called Focal Point and a newspaper column and blog that discusses the same issues.
He was the author of a piece that talked about the idea, very common over a century ago, that the American Indians generically, there's not by all means a monolithic group of people we're discussing, they're not homogenous, that population, but they had generically disqualified themselves to exercise what he called sovereign control over the land here in North America.
And because of the fullness of their iniquity, the righteous European American settlers who arrived on the eastern seaboard and proceeded westward with a vengeance, were acting on a divine mission because they had to smite and punish these people for their iniquity.
And this column attracted the same kind of attention that Fisher had predicted it would, meaning most people looked at it and wondered if he'd just been recently extracted from a glacier.
And the AFA, which previously hadn't displayed a moral gag reflex regarding anything he had said, decided to take this column down, but not before it had been archived, and it's still available if you know where to look for it on the web.
And he's gone back to this subject on several occasions over the last four years, most recently a couple of weeks ago on his radio program, or a couple of months ago rather, on his radio program.
And one of the objectives I had in writing this piece, not only was to explain that you don't have to embrace this gospel of genocide, this eliminationist theology, in order to be a Christian, a serious Christian, or even a fundamentalist Christian.
That's the first thing I wanted to disabuse people of, is that this is not in any way coterminous with Christianity, any more than some of the stuff that you see associated with ISIS is in any way an innate part of Islam.
But secondly, I wanted to point out that the ideology he's promoting here was of a piece with what ended up being exported by the United States government after Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed in 1890.
And post-Wounded Knee, the U.S. government began to export that kind of benevolence to places like Cuba, and the Philippines, and Hawaii.
And it was based on the same sort of dumbed-down, rigid, kipling, white man's burden philosophy, or ideology, better stated, that we had to go abroad in search of savages to Christianize and to civilize.
And one of the things I wanted to highlight as well is that there was a brief period at the founding of our country, back in 1789, I quote Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War on this subject, where it was understood that the new United States government, the new republic called the United States of America, was engaged in foreign policy with these Indian tribes it was encountering on the vast, massive land west of that small sliver on the eastern seaboard where the colonies had taken root and created the Confederation.
And Henry Knox said, wait a second, these people were here first.
They're in possession of the land, and if they want to sell it to us, I'm paraphrasing of course, if they want to sell it to us, that's fine, but we can't pretend as if we simply have the right to take it from them, because we're dealing here essentially with peers.
Yeah, or just buy it from Napoleon.
Yeah, or buy it from Napoleon, which is one of Jefferson's great sins that said, manifest destiny in emotion.
One of the interesting things about Fisher, by the way, is that he namedrops Lewis and Clark and says that their journals are replete with descriptions of the savage and immoral conduct of the American Indian tribes, who've actually read Lewis and Clark's journals, and I have, not recently, I've recently reviewed some of them.
Apparently Fisher hasn't.
One of the persistent themes in the journals is the astonishment on the part of at least some of these Indian tribes at the brutality of discipline that characterized the core of discovery, and the fact that these people insisted on getting plastered as their preferred form of recreation.
Some of the Mandan Indian leaders, for instance, didn't consider Lewis and Clark to be their friends because they insisted on applying them with alcohol, and they had no interest in it.
Of course, that's something that would change, unfortunately.
But one of the things that you adverted to there, Scott, of course, the idea that these grand imperial designs often ended up transferring control over these vast tracts of territory here in North America that were already inhabited by people that didn't realize that they were under new management, so to speak, that they were now under the new sovereignty, as opposed to of imperial France.
Now they're being controlled by the Americans, or up here in the Northwest, there was a near war between the United States and Great Britain over control of lands that had been occupied by the Flatheads and by the Nez Perce and other American Indian tribes, and suddenly these people found themselves under the control of a new sovereign.
And of course, they didn't have a concept of sovereignty of that sort.
Many of these American Indian tribes, particularly in the Northwest, were what we'd call agorist in outlook.
Their leadership was defined by people who had better ideas in terms of conducting commerce with other Indian communities, or they had better ideas as to how to exploit responsibly, in most cases, not all, but in most cases, exploit the natural resources.
They knew where to hunt and to fish, they knew where the camasorts were to be found, they knew how to cultivate some of these crops, that gathered themselves in an assembly in an agorist style, and a leader would propose a plan of action, or somebody who wanted to be a leader proposed a plan of action, and they'd follow him until somebody came along with a better idea.
So it was completely alien to these people that suddenly these people with strange habits and superior technology showed up and said, okay, well great, there's a great father back in the town you never heard of called Washington, and he sent us as your rulers, as his emissaries, to prescribe the conditions under which you'll now be permitted to live.
Now Brian Fisher is typical of people who think that that's just the way that the world should work, because the Euro-Americans came here as the divinely commissioned agents to civilize this continent, and in doing so, of course, they committed horrible, horrible atrocities that no standard of decency would consider to be appropriate, you know, starting with many of the things that happened during the pre-colonial era, the Puritans were not necessarily on good terms with the Indians of the eastern part of the landmass, but progressing through this exercise and conquest called Manifest Destiny, which was, if you will, the original foreign policy of the United States government, which is why I consider it so significant.
They started out with announced intentions of conducting affairs on the basis of commerce and diplomacy and mutual benefit, and as soon as they had the power to do so, they began to exercise sovereign control in ways that resulted in the death of tens or hundreds of thousands of people through violence and disease.
All right, hold it right there, we'll be right back with the great Will Gregg, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Will Gregg.
You know, back in history, he was the greatest writer at the New American, one of the leaders of the John Birch Society, and yet the closest terminology I can come up with to approximate what you're talking about here, it comes straight from Noam Chomsky, Will, and that's this saltwater fallacy that Americans engage in, where even anti-imperialists can't acknowledge that America's been an empire since the Constitution was ratified, at least, and that somehow it's not an empire until it's Hawaiians or Filipinos or Japanese that you're killing.
But, you know, tell that to the Sioux if you can find one, right?
That's the whole thing.
And why I think this article is really so important is, you know, it's facing up to the unface-up-to-able, and I don't know, in my experience, they teach you that, yeah, the Indian Wars and all that, that was really pretty bad, and collectively, we Americans, we're sorry about that now that it's 130 years later or whatever, kind of wish that hadn't happened, but that's still at a young enough age where they don't really teach you the disgusting, you know, the real worst stuff, not usually.
And here you're making it really plain that in so many conservative mythologies, and whatever's wrong with America just started going wrong the other day when, you know, the liberals did this or that or whatever it is, this nation was founded on brutality, the likes of which Americans can't even imagine, even Iraq War veterans maybe don't imagine some of the stuff that they did to the American Indians to take this continent.
One of the little affectations of every empire is that they always try to appropriate the valor of the overmatched societies that they conquered and absorbed, which is one of the reasons why Queen Victoria always liked to get about in Scotland, affecting the attire of the Highland Scots who'd been wiped out at Culloden in, I believe it's 1746.
And you have the emissaries of America's imperial benevolence today flying Apache helicopters and having Geronimo weapon systems and things of that sort.
They recognize the valor of these overmatched people who fought with doomed courage against being assimilated into the empire that is now being promoted using, if you will, the brand names of all these conquered tribes and conquered societies.
And Chomsky, of course, gets a great deal of it right, would agree about a great deal regarding history because history is already established and settled.
Now that there's a decent interval, there's a decent gap of separation between our current time and those events, people can acknowledge that these things were done.
At the time, there were many courageous people, including, as I mentioned in the article, a few people in government service who actually condemned what was going on in real time.
There was this 1869 presidential commission on the American Indians that said in so many words that the burden of American history, at that point, this is just when Manifest Destiny was really starting to get nasty.
But up to that point, the rule was that the American settlers, the American government were the aggressors, and that the Indians were the victims.
And the exception would be when the Indians would act as aggressors.
And even in those situations, it was usually by way of retaliation, as opposed to seeking to conquer the Euro-Americans.
They really didn't entertain designs of conquest.
They just retaliate in ways that would end up killing innocent people, like what happened at Fort Mims.
I talk about that during the Red Sticks War, the Creek Uprising, where Andrew Jackson first distinguished himself.
And Jackson, of course, is considered to be a hero not only by the conservatives, but by the neocons.
The Jacksonian foreign policy, we're told, dictates involvement in foreign affairs and the use of unfiltered brutality in dealing with those who resist our intentions.
That's something that we had the Council on Foreign Relations talking about a decade ago.
Well, Jackson, in his retaliatory raids following the Fort Mims attack, and as I point out in the article, the Fort Mims attack was brutal.
There were terrible things done by the Creek warriors.
But for the most part, they focused their attention on people under arms who were part of a recognizable, hostile foreign military force.
And on a couple of occasions, they actually liberated some of the black people being held as slaves there at Fort Mims, which is an ironic bit of history that gave rise in the next couple of decades to these constantly reiterated sort of proto-Fox News alarmist stories about the Indians and the black slaves conducting a servile uprising, wiping out the white population there in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and so forth.
But during the retaliatory raid conducted by Jackson, one of his lieutenants being a frontiersman from Kentucky by the name of Davy Crockett, who was disgusted by what he saw, there was an episode where they wiped out an entire village and then found that there were survivors who had taken refuge in a cabin.
And they locked the cabin, they surrounded it with armed troops, then they put it to the torch.
And for the next couple of hours, of course, these people burned to death, and they were prevented from exiting by the fact that there was a military force surrounding this cabin.
And I said that this is sort of an ancient, if you will, shakedown cruise for what was done at Waco in 1993.
And so contemporary American conservatives, for the most part, can recognize that Waco was an atrocity.
But they don't understand that what happened at Waco was really an adaptation of what had been used as a method on more than one occasion during the conquest of the continent that they celebrate as one of the defining aspects of American greatness.
But once again, there were people even in government in the 1860s, and some in the military, I mentioned elsewhere, not in this article, but in the podcast I recently did, George Crook, who was considered the paramount and most accomplished Indian fighter, he actually allowed himself to be sued in, I believe it was 1879, by Chief Standing Bearer of the Ponca.
And the Ponca, this is something Brian Fisher wouldn't appreciate.
Brian Fisher of the American Family Association is the blathers guide who inspired my most recent article.
He seems to think that none of the Indians accepted Christianity and that they were all heathens of an irredeemable sort.
And so this justifies this jihad that conquered them.
The Poncas were Christians, for the most part, Chief Standing Bearer was a Christian, his son was a Christian.
When the troops showed up to dispossess them, there on the banks of the Navarre River, they had to tear down an entire village.
And in doing so, they burned churches, they burned churches where these people worship to drive them to Oklahoma, which was sort of the 19th century equivalent of Siberia.
But as all this is going on, there were people across the region, Euro-American settlers, American settlers and government officials who were mortified by what happened.
And when Chief Standing Bearer wanted to go back to his homeland to bury the body of his teenage son, he was arrested and put on trial and he filed a habeas corpus petition.
And he was told, you can't do that because you're not an American citizen.
Where have we heard that line more recently?
Well, Chief, forgive me, General Crook allowed himself to be sued in order to establish as a matter of law that an American Indian is a person under the 14th Amendment and as such is protected by the habeas corpus guarantee.
So, you know, there were a few people of conscience who did that sort of thing.
I quote Kit Carson in this piece criticizing the Sand River Massacre and the abominable figure John Chivington, the ordained Methodist minister who wiped out a couple of hundred completely peaceful Cheyenne who were under the lead of Chief Black Kettle, who is probably the bravest man I've ever read about.
There's a wonderful biography of him talking about his career as a peacemaker.
And peacemakers tend to be insanely brave men.
And he was probably the most distinguished in that company.
But they flew an American flag over their encampment that had been given to them by the army as a sign of good intentions.
They said this will protect you against the army.
Well, it didn't.
Chivington waded in and hacked everybody to death, then returned to Denver in triumph, showing curios and artifacts that they had made from the genitalia of their victims.
And he hailed himself as a great Christian Indian fighter.
And Kit Carson, when he heard about it, said in so many words, this man is a rad bastard.
And he doesn't deserve to be anywhere in civilized company, he said.
And Kit Carson pointed out he'd fought Indians.
He wasn't proud of it, particularly.
He said they used to own this land.
And now they've got practically nowhere to go.
And he ended up becoming disgusted.
And he strangely enough, after a long career as an Indian fighter, he became a very devout Catholic and spent a lot of his time and his declining years regretting a lot of what he had done.
But as you say, Scott, the westward course of American expansion was the western course of empire.
No ab initio, the United States government has had imperial ambitions, and they have pursued them like any other imperial power in history.
And we were supposed to be exceptional.
No, our exceptionalism was supposed to be defined by the fact that people were ruled by law, and that law was essentially an elaboration on the golden rule.
And this was something that was lost very quickly.
Because as soon as the government in Washington and its outward outposts had the ability to inflict its will, it did so pitilessly.
And the only reason why the body count of 19th century American expansion westward, I can't really compare to the body count of the Soviet Union's imperial consolidation phase, I think is technological.
I think that if the technology had been comparable, the body count as well would have been comparable.
If you take a look at it in adjusted demographic terms, it really there really isn't that much difference.
And that's, as you say, Scott, a truth that before which a lot of our pretenses meld.
And that's one of the reasons why so many people I'm thinking of you, Dinesh D'Souza, don't want to address this, honestly.
Right.
Well, you know, part of this, too, is, you know, like you say about the exceptionalism, where we're not exceptional because we have morality.
We're exceptional or OK, let's pretend that that's what it is.
But now that we're exceptional, that's the name on our license.
That's exactly that's now our permission to commit any crime, to commit any sin and get away with it clean.
And that's I think, you know, what we what we do is virtuous because we're the ones who do it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And, you know, with any kind of tribal identification, any kind of us versus them, even if you're talking about, you know, cities, football teams versus each other, whatever it is, people love, you know, glomming on to things like that, being part of things like that.
But when you add, oh, no, we're the only ones who are saved by the grace of God.
And we're the only ones who are going to heaven forever.
And everyone else is a heathen and half a demon at best.
Then that's a whole new level of permission to slaughter them and anything that Jesus ever said about not slaughtering people, notwithstanding.
Yeah, that's all I guess, just a set of footnotes in their auditory rather than mandatory.
But one of the things that I find myself commenting upon frequently is the fact that people who profess to follow the Great Commission at the end of the book of Matthew and Brian Fisher would be a pretty good example of such.
They seem to have this indecent eagerness to send people to hell when the whole point of the Christian gospel is supposed to share with people how they could get to heaven, because it's not supposed to be exclusive.
It's not supposed to be a club that you beat people into, which seems to be the way that Brian Fisher approaches things.
He's a big proponent of torture, no surprise there.
And as I said, at the end of my piece, it seems to me that he wants to get on with the really satisfying business of seeing people consigned to eternal torment.
And failing that, he likes to celebrate episodes in our history where hell has been anticipated or created here on earth in the name of the triumph of the faction that he identifies with.
And I don't see how that can in any way be reconciled with universalist claims of the Christian gospel, in which all these tribal considerations make no difference at all, at least they shouldn't.
Right.
Well, you know, it's kind of like George Carlin talking about he worships the sun because, hey, at least I can see the sun, and that kind of thing.
I think that's how it is with these state worshipers.
I mean, they exactly where Christianity is.
That's the imperial robe they're wearing is, oh, yeah, and it's all blessed by Jesus, etc.
But the state, hey, that's a real thing that they can push, especially you mentioned the Christian right.
I mean, what does that mean?
That's a political movement.
That's a movement to seize the power of the state and use it to make things their way.
And so, you know, that's just something it's it's it's just easier.
It's more accessible for the worship.
That's all.
Yeah.
If you've read the Bible at all, seriously, recognize that that's the Babylonian concept of a rule that we're supposed to be avoiding.
And my belief is you're called to come out of Babylon.
And that means that if you're a Christian believer, you're supposed to make the invisible love of God real and visible and tangible.
And that's not something you can do at the point of a bayonet.
And that's certainly not something you're doing when you're conferring a blessing, a benediction on that kind of behavior.
All right.
Well, listen, I've already kept you over time.
I need to let you go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show and for writing all this great stuff like you do.
Thank you so much, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
I appreciate it, too.
All right.
So that's the great will, Greg.
And listen, he's got a PayPal button at the bottom of each of these articles.
He's an independent journalist here.
He needs your support and you need his work.
And so, you know, when it comes to facing up to things, face up to what you owe will for what he does.
Pro libertate freedom in our time dot blog spot dot com.
This one is called Brian Fisher and the gospel of genocide.
Right back after this.
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