11/23/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Oh, ear goggles on.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Oh boy, I better hit the button to call the man, huh?
Beasties.
Yeah, I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And on the line, I've got the great Eric Margulies.
A foreign correspondent, Eric Margulies.
He's covered 14 wars and then some.
Jeez, there must be 20 by now, whatever, something.
Wars all over the place and going back for decades.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
That means empire, liberation, or domination.
That's the book, American Raj.
And he writes for LewRockwell.com and for his own website, EricMargulies.com.
And this one is at UNZ.com, UNZ, UNZ.com.
The first French masker giving us some history lessons here and some context for the current goings-on in Paris.
Welcome back to the show, my friend.
How are you?
Thank you, Scott.
Glad to be back with you.
Good, good.
Happy to have you here.
So, yeah, everybody said this is the biggest masker since World War II and I saw a couple, oh, it was Fisk and then you noticed Fisk, too, said, ah, slow down there, not quite so fast because it turns out there's been more than 130 people killed at once in a masker in Paris since World War II, one other time.
What was that?
Well, that was in 1962 when the large number of Algerians, about 30,000, were demonstrating in Paris and they, I'm sorry, 1961, were demonstrating in Paris and the Paris prefect, police commissioner, Maurice Papon, unleashed his riot squads, tough, brutal, brutal police on the rioters.
At least 200 were beaten to death and many of them were thrown over the, off the Pont Saint-Michel into the Seine River and it was a huge masker.
It was covered up completely.
Later French investigations only admitted to 40 dead, but there were bodies floating all over the Seine.
It's an incontrovertible fact of history now.
That's amazing to me even that any former Vichy police official would have been kept on in the government.
You'd think they would have denazified any of the collaborators with the enemy during the war.
They weren't purged.
This guy was in charge of the police.
Well, that's right.
The, you know, Vichy, the Vichy, pro-German Vichy regime was very popular in France and it is, look, back on many French, it's sort of a golden time in France.
Anti-Semitism was extremely high in France.
They equated Jewish people with communists and so there were many leftovers of the Vichy days in France right up through the 1970s.
Wow, amazing.
All right.
So now what's the problem with these Algerians?
You know, the Vichy police official here, he must have had a good reason, like radical Islam made them do something horrible to the innocent, right?
That's right.
They were horrible ipso facto because they were Muslims and Arabs.
That already is enough reason to throw them in the Sand River.
But this came at the end of the Algerian War for Independence, which began in the mid-1950s, an exceptionally bloody war where Algerians fought against French and each other and there were a million French settlers known as Pieds-Noirs, Blackfeet, who lived in North Africa, violently opposed granting independence of Algeria and this war dragged on until 1963 or 62 and an estimated up to 1 million Algerian Muslims died in this war, killed mostly by French security forces or by anti-French guerrillas.
All right.
So now, and you talk about the, you were there in Paris when this massacre occurred and you were there six months later when some right-wing fascists try to do, well, apparently they were running around everywhere, but some of these guys try to do a military coup d'etat against Charles de Gaulle because he was quitting Algeria.
That's correct.
That's correct.
De Gaulle, always courageous and brilliant, de Gaulle decided to buck the trend of the French history and end colonialism and the affliction of Algeria and he told the French people he was going to set Algeria, give it its independence.
In fact, a referendum was held and over 70% of the French agreed, but a violent minority of settlers in Algeria and certain generals of the French army, in fact, four leading generals who had been retired by then, backed by the intelligence services, planned to stage a coup, take over the government.
This was in 1962.
I was in Paris.
It was one of the most exciting things I've ever been to because the rebels were going to get aircraft, military aircraft, to fly the key elite units, paratroop units and the French Foreign Legion, fly them to France, land, seize the key airports around Paris and drive downtown and seize the government and install a military dictatorship.
I was in the streets.
I was off Place de la Concorde.
I remember vividly, you hear all the radios going and the paramilitary police there, heavily armed with submachine guns, were waiting for the fighting to begin.
You didn't know what was going to happen one minute to the next, but finally the French conscript forces, as opposed to the elite professional forces, refused to go along with the coup.
Very important point.
And then the French Air Force commanders refused to send their aircraft and the coup fizzled, but it was a close-roamed thing.
It was extremely exciting.
Well, you know, I got to ask, what was the CIA's role in that?
Don't tell me nothing.
Well, that's the subject of much debate.
In fact, I'm just reading a new book called The Devil's Chessboard about this right-wing factions of the government back to the days of Eisenhower, who tried to influence policy.
Certainly, there seems to be evidence that the CIA was in close touch with the French conspirators and there was talk they wanted to oust de Gaulle because de Gaulle wanted an independent European policy.
He refused to take orders from the Americans and this enraged Washington and they wanted to see de Gaulle overthrown.
Was he the one that pulled France out of NATO?
Yes, he was.
The Americans were not going to forgive de Gaulle for this, but along came Mr.
Sarkozy years later, who immediately put France back into NATO.
Oh, really?
It took that long?
I wasn't clear on when they finally rejoined.
It wasn't until Sarkozy, huh?
Well, the French tiptoed into NATO.
They had made all kinds of agreements with NATO, even though they were allegedly completely independent.
Imagine the nerve of them not wanting to die in thermonuclear fire just because Moscow and DC get into it.
It's just outrageous.
Those wicked French.
They declared independence.
Get them!
That's right.
The U.S. was very afraid that France was going to influence the rest of Europe.
There was a considerable passion in Germany on this subject as the former Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss put it so beautifully.
He said, we won't be foot soldiers to the American atomic knights.
All right, y'all.
That's Eric Margulies.
Hold on the line when we come back.
We're going to get into some more current history here.
The French messing around their former Empire in the Levant and what it all means.
It's the heroic Eric Margulies, author of American Raj.
Check out his website, ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
Back in a sec.
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Okay, kids.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with the great Eric Margulies, author of American Mirage, in this article, the first French massacre at the UN's review.
Before that, the City of Light Falls Dark, and before that, a vile crime, but productive.
That was the Islamic State attack on the Russian plane, presumed, I guess I should say, there.
The seeming one.
And now, so here's the deal, Eric Margulies.
I cite you all the time for a lot of reasons, but lately, the one that I cite you on more than any other is, oh, yeah, well, Eric Margulies said in the summer of 2011, he wrote it and I interviewed him about it, that French special forces and spies are screwing around in Syria right now, trying to drum up a revolution against Assad, an armed one.
And in fact, I went back through the archives and I found one that was from, I think, October, September or October 2011, but I'm pretty sure the original report was July.
So I need to go back and look again.
But anyway, you know, Phil Giroldi reported for Antiwar.com and the American Conservative that December, that Obama had signed two new findings, one for Syria, one for Iran, and that it was on.
Pretty much everybody else never cites anything earlier than 2012 when it comes to American and CIA support for the Mujahideen war there, but I'm pretty sure you were first.
And there was one other guy in the Observer, I think, too, who wrote a thing about Prince Bandar sending Mujahideen and money.
But anyway, so this is the thing that TV news people just can't get their head around at all, that it's not just that France has been bombing the Islamic State for a year and a half along with the Americans, although in Iraq, not Syria, but that doesn't make much difference to them.
They can't get their head around the idea that America and France, NATO and the GCC, they've been backing the Mujahideen and including the factions that, on this refront, that ended up splitting off and becoming the Islamic State, nothing but Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the bad guys left over from the last war.
And so TV news can never explain that.
We've been on both sides of this war now, and this is what has gotten France into this mess.
And I'll say one more thing before I turn it over to you, which is, I don't know if you saw, but at The Guardian they admitted publicly that they had a policy that banned any of their editorials from pointing to French intervention in Iraq and Syria for three days after the Paris attack because it might hurt people's feelings or something.
And so instead, oh, radical Islam did it, radical Islam did it, became the narrative and no one was allowed to contradict it, even in the Liberal Guardian.
So anyway, what do you make of the current, you know, the backlash, the reaction to the attack or maybe even the preceding policies that led to it?
Scott, as you quite rightly point out, France's mucking around in the Muslim world is virtually unknown.
In the West, thanks to our lousy and biased media, the French, it's very interesting, France is now under a socialist government and the French socialists have been the most imperially minded of the French governments as opposed to the French conservatives or communists and there seems to be a deep strain in the socialists that they want to restore France's very strong influence in the Levant, that is, Lebanon, Syria, which both of which were French colonies, France created Lebanon, and in Iraq, which France was supposed to get Iraq at the end of World War I, but somehow the wicked British outmaneuvered the French and they ended up with oil-rich Iraq and the French have never forgiven the British for yearing them out of Iraq.
Anyway, so France has permanent interests in the area, particularly so in Lebanon, where it's backed different factions.
It's been very active in Mali, where we saw an attack over the weekend that was not apparently done by ISIS, and it is active, it's supported the horrible government in Algeria, one of the most brutal military regimes, even worse than General Sisi's military dictatorship in Egypt, which was backed by the U.S. and France, but Algeria is the important determiner there.
Of course, there are millions of Algerians or people of Algerian descent in France, horrible bloody wars in Algeria.
In the 1990s, the French helped crush a democratic government in Algeria.
So France is deeply involved.
They're in the Ivory Coast, they're in Togo, they're all over in Chad, and of course the Americans are now in the same area too.
We saw with the Mali Hotel bombing, suddenly there were American special forces troops there.
So France is deeply involved and it's what the British used to call the price of empire.
Well, you know, I'm reminded of this old onion headline from I think 1901, you know, supposedly, where it says Zulu's hold Queen of England, that spear point, and it's all about the Africans invading England, and it was making a mockery of any pretense of defense on the part of the British, of course, and also just illustrating, you know, that the reason that they were able to get away with empire is because their victims couldn't possibly fight back.
And it seems like it's obviously the same kind of thing with the French in all their history, but old habits die real hard, even though now they can fight back.
They're not necessarily, in fact, they set off bombs within what one mile or so of the president of France who was attending the soccer match there or whatever, and it's not quite holding the Queen at spear point, but pretty close they can hit back.
And especially when France has been helping build up this Mujahideen army for the last four and a half years, and now they have to deal with it.
It seems like they better be careful about what kind of fights they pick because, you know, they might be able to take on Italy in a war or something.
They're prepared for a fight like that, but they're not prepared for a fight against civilians who sneak in and then make bombs out of stuff under their mom's kitchen cabinet, you know, or grab a rifle and do a massacre of civilians at a restaurant.
No one can prevent that.
Well, Europe and the United States and Britain have been very fortunate in that the people who are attacking them as in Paris are actually rank amateurs.
There's, you know, there's a huge outcry about the worldwide Islamic conspiracy and the tentacles reaching out from Raqqa, Syria and all training camps and all this baloney.
But in fact, these are a bunch of 20-something scruffy kids who are really very incompetent.
They have not been properly trained.
They're not properly armed.
Otherwise, they could have done much more damage in both areas.
So we're lucky in that sense.
This is not a professional enemy.
These guys, and we're not fighting, for example, like the Chechens when the Russians came in, in 1991, I think it was, invaded Chechnya, which declared independence.
These Chechens were real fighters, real soldiers, and they beat the Red Army on the first Chechen War.
We mustn't over-glamorize or over-emphasize these rebels or whatever you want to call them, violent extremists.
They are not efficient, not competent, but they are extremely useful to Western politicians.
The Pentagon will be asking for more money now.
Hollande's standing in France.
It's shot way up.
The intelligence agencies are cracking down.
They're a godsend in a way to the military police institutions.
Right.
Yeah, they will always exploit it as though they had done it themselves, because why wouldn't they?
It's in their interest to do exactly what the terrorists want, which is overreact.
I'll show you overreact, they all say, as they go into full effect there.
And at the same time, though, it shows that one handful of boobs, as you described them, can cause a hell of a lot of problems, 130 dead, and in a way where, you know, presumably it's going to depress tourism a little bit, create a little, you know, actually quite a bit more of a police state on the streets of France.
I guess we'll see how temporary, you know, troops on the street and door-to-door searches and all these kinds of things are.
But, you know, and this has been said all along, right?
As long as America is over there continually intervening, and France, for that matter, creating more and more terrorists, it isn't hard for anybody with an imagination to see what a determined young man with a rifle can get away with to cause a major reaction.
Just find a crowd, and then, you know, of unarmed people.
That's pretty damn easy.
Could have been hijack a truck and crash it into something or anything, you know?
Unfortunately, that is what's happening, and you have to be willing to die for your cause.
That's really the most important thing with these young extremists.
They know they're going to get killed, just the way Palestinians know when they attack Israelis with knives and things, that they're going to be shot down on the streets.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, let me keep you over for just one minute.
Is that all right?
Yes, sure.
Time goes so fast when I'm trying to talk with you here, and it's because I talk so much is probably the problem.
But anyway, I want you to hear this clip, mostly just because it's funny, and I want your reaction to it.
It's Hillary Clinton, after her horrifying speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
She sat down to a little bit of question and answer, and this is, I'm pretty certain it's Fareed Zechariah, but there's another guy that looks kind of like him from a distance.
I'm not sure, but I think she even says Fareed.
Yeah, it's Fareed Zechariah.
He frames the question really well about what we're doing in Syria and why, and leaves her with basically no real answer, except what sounds to me like a very planned answer, and I want to get your reaction to it.
So here's the audio here.
Let me ask a follow-up on that, Madam Secretary.
If the only way you could put together a moderate Syrian force is by having the United States cajole, bribe, arm, and train it, we are then looking for this force to defeat ISIS, then defeat Assad, then defeat al-Nusra, then defeat other al-Qaeda affiliates, keep at bay the Shiite militias and Hezbollah, take control of Damascus, and establish a pluralistic democracy in Syria.
Isn't that kind of a tall order?
Well, certainly described like that, and that's why I focused on ISIS.
I mean, because I think right now we have one overriding goal, as I outlined.
We need to crush their territorial domain, and we need to try to secure...
Anyway, so she goes on from there to say priorities, priorities.
In other words, we're not going after Assad anymore because ISIS, now finally, not after the fall of Mosul and the Declaration of the Caliphate, but now because Paris, we're finally reorienting the ship of the Empire here, and we're going to betray al-Qaeda again and side with Assad against them again.
Is that pretty much how you read that?
And do you think that's even really true, or she's just saying that?
Well, the stupidity and contradictions of our policies in the Levant have become too glaring to avoid.
Of course, we should never have tried to overthrow the Assad government.
It was a de facto American ally.
It was one of these corks-in-the-bottle, the way Saddam Hussein was, and Gaddafi was, that were repressing the Islamic militants and trying to overthrow him has led to this catastrophe of the region.
So it's right.
We should have been working with Assad to fight these different groups.
But if we send our forces, and you don't go into a war without having clear political objectives, and we don't have clear political objectives in that region, we don't know what the hell we want to do once we conquer all this empty desert.
We have to work out our policy objectives and there are too many competing influences in Washington for us to do it right now.
Yep.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for coming back on the show, Eric.
I sure appreciate it.
My pleasure, as always.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Eric Margulies.
He's at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
Also at lourockwell.com and unz.com, U-N-Z, unz.com.
This one is called the First French Massacre, and we'll be right back with Iona Craig in just a second.
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