Hey y'all, next Wednesday, January the 3rd, I'm giving a talk for Thaddeus Russell's Renegade University at thaddeusrussell.com on the history of the war in Afghanistan.
Of course, based on my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And it's supposed to last a couple of hours and you guys will be able to participate with questions and answers and all that.
So that's next Wednesday, January the 3rd at 8.30 Eastern, 5.30 Pacific.
And to register, just go to thaddeusrussell.com.
War is the improvement of investment climates by other means, Clausewitz, for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of bombs in the world today, my own government.
Yay, I got Eric Margolis on the line.
He wrote War at the Top of the World and also American Raj, Liberation or Domination, a war reporter of many years and a columnist too, and he writes at ericmargolis.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
Somebody sent me hate mail one time.
I hate it when you say that.
Well, you know, I'm trying to make it easy.
Spell it like Margolis.
I called him Eric Margolis for a long time because I never asked him how to say his name.ericmargolis.com, spell it like Margolis.
He also writes at lourockwell.com and at unz.com, unzunz.com, they publish his stuff there and we run it all at antiwar.com too.
And this one's called Sorry Chump, You Didn't Have It in Writing.
Oh, that must be the Americans talking.
Welcome back to the show, Eric, how are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm okay, but I felt very strongly about the column that I wrote, the Sorry Chump column, because I lived through that and I was in Russia at the time and I think it was a terrible act of deceitfulness that we in the West did.
Well, you know, I was gonna joke about how having it in writing wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference either, but so now we do have it in writing and this is something that longtime listeners to the show are familiar with this controversy.
And I've interviewed Jack Matlock, who is the second to last ambassador to the USSR and Ray McGovern, who was at the time CIA, Soviet division and all of these things.
And there was no question that this was the fact, but now we do have it in fact, in writing the notes from the meetings between Secretary of State James Baker, Secretary of State under President George H.W. Bush between 1989 and 93 and his meetings with his Soviet counterparts as they were negotiating an end really to the existence of the Soviet empire and the Cold War.
So go ahead and take it from there.
Well, George Washington University in Washington, D.C. released from its archives a lot of the correspondence, a diplomatic correspondence from this period, starting with the James Baker, but going on to all sorts of officials, Western officials, Britain, France, West Germany, et cetera.
And it all boils down to one point, as everybody said to Gorbachev when he was leading the Soviet Union in 1990, that if you will agree to German reunification and pull your troops out of Germany, that we will vow and undertake and promise not to move NATO one inch eastward.
That was the word, not one inch eastward.
And they all agreed, no NATO expansion towards Russia's borders and that all the East European countries that have been members of the Warsaw Pact will be put in a sort of a neutral position.
It was entirely a pack of lies.
As soon as the Clinton administration came into power, it was violated.
And today we find that far from having a peaceful, demilitarized Eastern Europe, we've got war planes, U.S. war planes, buzzing Sevastopol on the Black Sea and Syria and their talk about the town of a nuclear war.
Man, I'll tell you.
Well, so you already ruined my joke.
I was gonna say, yeah, but NATO just means peace.
And so what difference does it make?
Isn't that just good?
In fact, I read a piece about how, and I actually had not had a chance to go over the original documents here, but I read one of the articles about it at the American Conservative Magazine talked about how the point was, hey, we gotta keep Germany down and you don't want Germany being independent, do you?
So which do you prefer?
You know, a continued conflict over reunification and possibly an independent Germany that might attack you again like keeps happening or would you rather have NATO permanently stationed in Germany?
That's the choice you have to make.
And don't worry, we promise not to expand.
But so talk to us a little bit about then the Russians' point of view here because after all, I mean, these are the Russians who overthrew the communists for us, you might say.
That was the way George Kennan put it.
Hey, these are the guys who overthrew the communists for us.
We owe them a favor or two, but instead we treat them, well, you know, Putin.
He's just KGB, Eric.
We, they, Gorbachev and Shabarnabze, who was the Soviet foreign minister, I knew quite well in Moscow, did the West an enormous service.
I think they thought they were doing the right thing for Russia too.
But the important point is that when the risings began in the Baltic States, the Soviet hardliners had sent in the troops and crushed them.
Gorbachev refused to shed any blood.
If he had done that, there would probably have been the beginning of World War III.
The Soviets were at a huge amount of troops in East Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands of troops.
I think it was over 50,000 tanks.
It was, war could have started at any moment.
Gorbachev could have held things together in the Soviet Union by cracking down and crushing all the uprisers and the demonstrators, but he refused to do it.
It was a noble Christian act, if you want, and for which he paid the price.
Yeah, well, so listen, what was the motive behind NATO expansion in the Bill Clinton years?
Because if anything, it seemed like Strobe Talbot, his buddy, he'd written that thing in Time Magazine in 92 called The Birth of the Global Nation about how ultimately Russia would join NATO and we would have a one world white army of the North that would take over everything.
They had created this, the Russia-NATO Council and all this and that, and instead we've gone back to Cold War instead.
But was Bill Clinton actually, am I totally wrong about that?
He was pursuing Cold War all along or his kind of long-term plan kind of backfired halfway before it was accomplished or what?
Scott, I really don't have the answer for you or myself for that matter too.
I didn't see Clinton as someone who was interested in expanding American power to the Black Sea and to Central Asia, but I guess he had in his administration, he had enough neocons who did want that objective and Clinton just shrugged his shoulders and went along.
He certainly didn't put his foot down very hard.
Yeah, yeah, I guess I'd agree with that.
I never saw any strong ideological decision or way of thinking on his part about this.
It was instead, I guess, just Lockheed money and Polish votes in Illinois and this kind of thing, the parochial concerns.
That's right.
Oh, well, good times.
So then George Bush comes and what does he do?
George Bush Jr., I mean.
Bush Jr. does, expands on what Clinton is doing now, Clinton did, and now takes a more active role in pressing NATO, NATO's really a cat's paw for the United States, eastward, and he became imbued with this idea that what Cheney told him, that Russia, remember Cheney's favorite words, Russia's nothing but a gas station, and that we're gonna sweep the Russians aside, they're not a great power, they've collapsed, we won the Cold War, hooray for us, and let's reduce Russia to such a weakness that it could never again challenge the United States.
That was the neo-con mantra that led Bush Jr.'s foreign policy.
All right, so now I'm sorry, I started to ask you before, but I went off on a tangent, but so talk to us a little bit about the Russians and their point of view of all of this as it's unfolded in the 90s and 2000s, because I think I would even counsel them that, listen, this is just a big welfare program for a few selected military industrial firms like Lockheed and Raytheon and General Dynamics at the expense of the rest of humanity here, but don't you overreact, because we'd hate to see you really think that we're gonna start a nuclear war with you because we're not really gonna start a nuclear war with them.
So am I right?
I mean, and how do they perceive this?
Well, you are right.
The Russian view was that the US strategy was to slowly tear apart the Russian Federation, that is, the post-1990 Russia, post-1990 Soviet Union, and to do so by encouraging separatism in Ukraine, which was already a very strong force, and stirring up trouble in Georgia.
It was ironic that the then leader of Georgia, Edward Shevardnadze, he went from Moscow back home to Georgia at the collapse of the Soviet Union, that he was overthrown by a US-organized coup that put a US agent, asset, Shakhashvili, in power, and it shows you the ultimate act of ingratitude that Shevardnadze was the primary movers of Gorbachev's policies, Perestroika and Glaznov, and yet he too got overthrown by the US.
Hey, I'm Scott.
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All right, so I mentioned George Kennan there, and I always like bringing this up when I can because it seems pretty important, that he's the guy who wrote on the sources of Soviet conduct by Mr. X for foreign affairs back in 1946 or 48 or whichever it was that was arguing, really formed the backbone of the doctrine of containment of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War there.
And he wrote this piece.
Well, there's a couple of things, but most important I guess is, it's actually an interview of him by Thomas Friedman, of all people, from 1998 in the New York Times.
And it's called Now a Word from X.
And it's Kennan saying, man, we should not be doing this.
Here's exactly what's gonna happen.
We are expanding NATO, we're provoking the Russians, they're going to react, and this is where he says, these are the people who overthrew the Soviet Union for us.
These are the people who destroyed world communism.
We are going to provoke them into overreaction.
And then when they react, we're gonna say, see, this is why we had to do it.
And this is going to be all the people who are telling us now that it's not gonna be a problem are going to later invoke the problems and say this is why it's necessary that we have to keep expanding and provoking the fight because it's always in American PR terms, always in the name of containing their aggression, no matter what the reality is on the ground.
Well, that's certainly a well-reasoned argument.
I agree with it, but there were other thoughts too.
There was the neocon thinking that we can never allow any nation to challenge the United States' power.
We must be unrivaled and absolute in our world power.
So our objective is to stomp down any nation that could possibly offer a challenge.
Well, the only two were what was left of the Soviet Union and of course, China.
So, and I think that remains the worldview in Washington, particularly from Trump's people, who we just heard from the other day.
But there's that, and there's also the thing that for the neocons in Washington, Russia was the primary backer of the Arabs.
And a neighbor considering an enemy of Israel.
So there was another good reason to try and demolish Russia as quickly as possible.
Just leftover resentment from the days of the Soviet Union.
Yes.
Well, you know, Robert Perry also says that a big part of the reason that they had to, quote unquote, had to do the coup in Ukraine was to basically punish Obama and which, I mean, Obama and Biden were in on the thing.
Certainly Biden helped run the op.
They admitted that and everything.
So I don't know.
But they were trying to basically thwart this kind of rapprochement that was going along, the success of the reset between Putin and Obama because Putin had helped to convince the Iranians to do the nuclear deal and that they would help hold the Americans to it if they would go along with it.
And they had also come in and saved Obama from his stupid red line when Turkey and Al-Qaeda did their false flag sarin attack in Syria and Obama had said, oh no, if Al-Qaeda does a false flag sarin attack, I'll have to start a war against their enemy there.
Don't do that, guys.
And once he'd drawn his red line and they crossed it or made it look that way, then Putin came and saved the day and said, I'll get Assad to get rid of every last bit of his chemical weapons and that'll give you an out so that you don't have to go forward with the war.
And so the neocons were so pissed off about this in 2013, the fall of 2013, right?
And so then this was a big part then of doubling down on pushing for the coming coup d'etat at that point that finally took place in February of 2014 to, for the second time in 10 years, overthrow the elected Russian-leaning government of Ukraine.
And spoil any progress that was being made between Obama and Putin at that point.
Knowing that taking Ukraine away from the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for the Russians, that really gilded Russia's power to a large degree because Ukraine was so important from an industrial and strategic manpower point of view.
And now setting Ukraine against Russia was the golden chalice for the neocons.
Yeah.
All right, now, so listen, I mean, this is stupid, but hey, it's the context in which we carry on this conversation.
It's unavoidable, you know?
You, I know, are a proud army veteran and a proud American patriot from New York.
And you still consider yourself to this day an Ike Eisenhower Republican, as red, white, and blue as you could possibly be.
And yet you say all this treasonous stuff about Russia's point of view and America ever did anything bad.
And that means that you work for Putin and you're part of the influence operation that overthrew the preordained coronation of Her Highness Hillary Clinton last year.
And so how dare you be such a commie traitor?
I mean, right-wing Russian sock puppet of Vladimir Putin and his conspiracy against America.
You should add, Scott, that I am an ardent listener of Russian classical music.
Oh, man, well, see, that goes to show, right, the depth of your corruption in every part of your, every aspect of your being here.
No, seriously, so, no, there's a real question there, which is, what do you make of this, right?
Where you and I can't have this conversation without at least somebody going, oh, my God, I wonder if there's some kind of, you know, behind the scenes, the FSB has paid them some money.
Well, I'm waiting for my check to arrive.
I was gonna say, I take Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash.
For years.
You know, I'm one of these old-fashioned journalists, you mentioned Perry, who's a great guy, who really resents when the truth is abused and mugged, and unfortunately, unlike many of the American neocons who are now spouting all this anti-Russian hysteria, I have the misfortune of having been to Russia, knowing it pretty well, spent a lot of time there.
I was there during this whole 1990 period when the revolution took place, and I think I have a better understanding of what went on and what's going on now in Russia than these new reborn Cold Warriors do, and it's wrong, they don't know what they're talking about, but they're all feeding on each other to promote hatred and fear of Russia.
Yeah, and excuses for their own failures, which are limitless.
All right, so tell me then, just how evil is Vladimir Putin, and just how ambitious is he, in your estimation then, in real life?
Well, I followed Putin's ascendancy since he worked in the city administration in St. Petersburg, and you know, I was just thinking last night, I was the first Western journalist who got into the KGB headquarters in Moscow, in Lubyanka, and interviewed two senior KGB generals, or lieutenant generals, who were running KGB at the time, one of them was Karabinov, Karabinov, and- Hey, where can I read that archive?
Oh, I've got it somewhere, I'll send it to you.
Man.
If I can dig it out.
It was 1990, somewhere around there, and- So this is even before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but just after the wall came down.
And they said something to me that made my hair stand on end.
They said that, you know, they said, the Communist Party is rotten, and we have to get rid of it.
Kick him out, kick him out.
And we need somebody to run Russia like Chile's General Pinochet.
He said, we'll kick these lazy workers in the ass and make them work at bayonet points.
Those were their words.
They really startled me, sound like something out of the Wall Street Journal.
Yeah, doesn't it?
And that's exactly what happened, because who came along to kick the lazy workers in the derriere was none other than a KGB officer, Vlad Putin.
Yeah.
Well, so talk about the 90s then and the Yeltsin era, because of course, I mean, it's probably true.
I haven't read the books on it.
I really should.
I know there are a few, but I sure hear tell that America took every advantage of the Russians in the 1990s and kicking them while they're down.
And this shock therapy, this was no real free market economics.
This was just an excuse to liquidate all of their industrial capacity.
And what would they call it?
The Morgenthau plan for Germany to reduce them to bare subsistence?
Well, that's a good analogy, Scott.
I hadn't thought of that, but I think you're quite right.
We raped Russia.
I hate to say it, but we did.
All these carpetbaggers came in from Washington and these crackpot economists from Harvard, and their nostrums were applied to Russia, and all of a sudden, the Russian economy completely collapsed, and Russian pensioners were left with no money.
Russians were going hungry.
All these so-called oligarchs came out of the woodwork during that period, and most of them were mathematicians or people who had an understanding of the economy.
Well, most Russians didn't anyway, and they managed to take over these huge companies, which had been formerly state companies for nothing, for coupons, believe it or not, and aided by the U.S., and our intelligence people flooded into Moscow.
We corrupted the Russians with U.S. dollars.
These were the days.
I remember them.
I want to take a taxi.
I had to go and find pens and cigarette lighters and stuff like that to pay the driver because the ruble was worth nothing.
And so you're saying they fairly consider this to largely be America's fault?
Instead of being a good sport after whooping their ass in the Cold War, then we continue to kick them while they're down?
Well, we did.
We gave them very bad, quote, advice, unquote, and it was like a Weimar Germany to an extent, a worthless currency, a political chaos.
Nobody knew what was happening, and Russia's morale suffered terribly, and people were ashamed of their own country.
Even the KGB was designed to defend the Communist Party was calling them a bunch of idiots, thugs, and had no use for them.
So there was no KGB support for the coup against Gorbachev, which was very noteworthy.
So anyway, Russia reached its really bottom point.
They were broke.
Things were so bad that the Russians were selling their crown jewels of their military technology, like satellite nuclear power systems, to the CIA for peanuts.
All right, so now Putin comes to power in 1999, 2000, gets himself appointed, you know, basically to, I forgot if it was vice president or what exactly the position was, and then had Yeltsin resign on New Year's Eve, 99.
I remember this, and with the election coming up just a couple months away.
So just that right there certainly prejudiced it, and made it so that Putin would be a sure thing then.
And so I don't know anyone on any side of any of these other Russia debates who's ever argued that Putin is anything but the worst kind of right-wing Republican, crony, political and economic gangster, just like these other guys.
It's just he's more of a nationalist rather than working in the interests of a bunch of foreigners the way it was in the Yeltsin years.
Is that about right?
Well, no, it's not an accurate view.
Again, we always demonize here in the media to explain that foreign affairs, all foreign people, particularly some in the Middle East, but everybody turned into demons, and very much so for Putin.
Putin is a very capable, very tough, very intelligent man who pulled the wreckage of the Soviet Union together, and managed to restore, get the Russians off their knees, which was a major accomplishment.
He has over 80% popularity in polls in Russia.
Russians adore him, and they're the ones who count, not what the New York Times thinks.
And he's a really worthy opponent to the West.
He's very smart.
He outsmarted Obama.
It will take nothing to outsmart Trump, but he's, well, I tell you, in Western Europe, people are always saying, we wish we had a leader like Putin.
Well, yeah, certainly, as Raimondo put it years ago, he's Putin the patriot.
That doesn't make him an American patriot.
It makes him a Russian patriot, and that doesn't necessarily make him a good man, but it means, I think it negates the idea that he's on a suicide mission to try to reconquer Eastern Europe or anything like that.
I mean, do you see anything like that?
Like in the threats of the think tankers?
I mean, he would take advantage of tactical issues that might improve Russia's position, but he's not gonna unleash the Red Army against Eastern Europe, as we hear these NATO crackpots claiming.
There's one very good reason for that, whether they wanted to or not.
Russia has no military capability left.
You know, there's all this talk about NATO rushing troops to the border of the Baltic and might go into Ukraine to stop the Russians, but it's nonsense.
The Americans don't have any ammo.
We don't have any spare parts.
The Russians are short of everything.
They have no ammo to fight a war.
Their numbers are tiny.
The Russian defense budget, the American defense budget is, I think, it's six times larger than the Russian military budget.
The Russians are broke.
They don't have the wherewithal.
So no, he's not gonna do that, but he will take advantage of trouble in Eastern Europe to try and advance Russia's interests.
Well, you know, this is something that, and I'm so lucky that I've had you consistently for all of these years, Eric, to comment on all these things, because we can just go back to 2014, well, to 2013, before the coup even, when we were talking about how they were working on a coup, and then after the coup that they were working on took place there, and you already knew all about the economics of Ukraine and this and that.
I looked up, there's a picture of you hanging out with the gas princess, Yulia Tymoshenko.
Oh, yeah.
And so the thing, and you explain, and I think this is such an important example.
We're here, you know, from Putin's point of view and the national security establishment in Russia's point of view, do they want Crimea back?
Hell yes, they do.
Do they want Eastern Ukraine?
Do they want as much of Ukraine as they can take?
Obviously not.
They're willing to send in special operations forces to back up the rebels there who refuse to submit to the rule of the new coup government, but when the people of the Donbass in the East said, please incorporate us into Russia, they said no, and you had explained why on the show before any of that ever happened, which was the industry in the East, and that was part of why they were so hesitant to join the EU because their crappy old industry was not going to be able to compete with the fancy new production techniques in the West, and at the same time, it's because of those same problems.
It's a desperately poor region.
That's nothing but a liability for the Russians.
So here's, you know, Vlad the Terrible on the march, and the people of Eastern Ukraine are begging him to absorb them, which of course he could do just by saying so, and he refuses.
That's right, and well, he's a very clever and cautious, extremely cautious.
I think we should all give thanks that Putin is in power in Russia because we've been provoking the Russians so sharply in many ways, and there will be more provocations and crises, that I'm glad we have somebody with his steadiness of nerve who doesn't respond emotionally to these provocations, and who manages to hold things in control, unlike some of our American presidents who lack these gifts.
All right, hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, did you notice the new and improved show notes?
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You guys have been asking for that for a long time.
Well, we got it now.
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All right, hey, man, is it all right if I completely change the subject for a second?
Absolutely.
Good.
You wrote this important piece called Palestinians Get Out about what's going to happen because of the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital by the United States, and I guess basically making it a de facto cancellation of the pretension of the Oslo Accords, a recognition really of Israel's annexation of the entire West Bank, and at this point, I mean, the Palestinian state is canceled, and so, but here's the thing.
I was interviewed on a radio show of a right-wing libertarian, or a guy who comes from the conservative movement.
I guess he's getting more libertarian all the time.
I don't know, but so I explained this as best I could from kind of the Palestinian's point of view, or well, just my point of view about what's going on there, and he says to me, but man, and I could tell his cognitive dissonance here.
He says, but so you're saying that the Palestinians are the good guys?
And I says, well, you know, it's not so much that they're the good guys in meaning that you have to identify with them and defend all things about them or anything like that.
It's just a question of who's the aggressor and who's not.
Who's the victim and who has all the power?
This is what's going on, and so if you look at it from that point of view, I think it's pretty clear kind of a thing, you know, and I know that that's the way you look at it as well, but I think you got a lot better experience and credentials to explain the situation, and I guess I was just thinking, you know, if you had a conservative, someone on the right half, broadly speaking, of American politics and their political understanding and their kind of typical conventional understanding of the Israel-Palestine situation, as I know you get it, what they think, what would you tell them?
How do you explain the situation in Israel-Palestine to somebody who all they've ever heard is that, hey, look, the Israelis are white and speak English, and the Palestinians are screaming Arab Muslim crazies, and so they're the bad guys, and our guys are the Israelis.
That's the answer.
Mark Twain put it very nicely.
He said you can't talk somebody out of a position, mental, intellectual position, that they've arrived at emotionally and irrationally.
You can't talk them out of that using logic.
I'd say the same thing, because our poor conservative Republicans have been very poorly educated.
I gotta say one thing.
Most Democrats have a better understanding of the world than the Republicans do.
Half of them are born-again Christians who get their world information out of Christian TV, broadcasting Christian publications, and they present a very one-sided and inaccurate view of the Middle East, for sure.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
But okay, so, but in my hypothetical, though, the guy, he's willing to learn.
He's like, hey, I trust your judgment and the things that you say to be true on these and those kind of issues.
I'm willing to hear you out.
And in fact, he said to me at the end of the thing, wow, you know, I really have a lot of things to consider here about what's what.
Because I think his question about the good guys and bad guys, it was an honest one.
And then I think he accepted my framing, that you know, really, maybe that's not the right question to ask.
And that when you ask it the other way, that maybe you learned something here.
In fact, one of my arguments to him was that the Palestinians just have plain old property rights, just like anybody in the world.
It's not a matter of no God gave this land to us, no God gave this land to us.
It's only the Israelis who have to invoke the ancient mythology from 2000 years ago to say that now they have these, you know, defunct property rights that, you know, supernatural ones even, that now have kicked back in after being in exile for 2000 years.
And that the people who live there have, you know, much less of a claim then.
But the Palestinians aren't really in a position where they're forced to resort to such nonsense.
You know, their thing is like, hey, look, here's, this is my grandmother's house.
I can prove because I have the key, but you're living in it, kind of a thing.
So anyways, but back to my hypothetical, say you got a fair minded conservative who's willing to say, you know what, Margulies, you are an American Patriot Army veteran, New Yorker and Ike Eisenhower Republican, and you have a little bit different view than what I'm used to on this.
So what is it then?
Why should I not think that the Israelis ought to be able to just do whatever they want there, have their capital wherever they want, or however they construct it, whatever they're used to hearing, you know?
Well, I would say to this person, go there and look for yourself, open your eyes, talk to people on all sides, have their arguments, but what you have to remember is that, do you remember the Philistines from the Bible, from the Old Testament?
I know of them.
Well, the Philistines are, in Arabic, the word for Philistine is phalistine, and which is the word for Palestine, and the Palestinians are the biblical Philistines.
They were there before you guys were, and even the whole story of the flight from Egypt is now being questioned.
So, you know, forget all these biblical property rights and things, it's nonsense.
And you have to remember that when this whole struggle between Palestinians and Jews began, that the Jews owned 6% of Palestine.
Today, it's, you know, they own almost everything, and they will, and the question we're facing is, what are you gonna do with these Palestinians?
Are they facing ethnic cleansing, expulsion, worse?
We don't know.
Sorry for my voice, I'm sounding like Henry Kissinger today.
So, I don't know where to start on this.
Refer to my book.
Yeah, I'll refer him to this article.
Yeah, well, and I'll refer him to this article, too.
Palestinians, get out.
And, you know, I think, here's my take on this, and I'm repeating myself for the audience, they've heard me say this before, but, and I hope I'm right about this, honestly, I think Americans have no idea.
I think Americans think basically what I used to think when I didn't understand at all, and was sort of under the impression that Palestine was already the state next door.
It was constantly sending, you know, on the West Bank somewhere, or something, and they're constantly sending these terrorists to try to extort land out of the Israelis.
That's how they always frame it, land for peace.
Like, oh, we can't have peace unless we give up some of our land to you, from the point of view of the Israelis, when that is absolutely not it at all.
It's Israel, stop stealing the Palestinians' land, and back off some that you've already stolen.
Not even all of it, but just back to the 67 borders.
And not even that, but hey, maybe we'll make some land swaps, but they can't even get that.
And I just think Americans have no idea.
And if Americans really understood that, yeah, no, see, the people of the West Bank, never even mind Gaza for the moment, just have no rights, and have been completely conquered and ruled since 67, and have no options, and nowhere to go, and it's just grand theft land, same as any other circumstance like that.
I think people would be on our side.
I think the idea is still that always poor little Israel, what are they ever gonna do with these terrorist extortionists always after them like that?
Firing rockets at them.
That's right, airstrikes.
It's a horrible situation.
The whole world is disgusted by it.
But we can see for last week's or this week's vote in the UN that the United States, along with that awful creature, Nikki Haley, that swamp creature from South Carolina, or wherever she comes from, our UN ambassador, vetoed a resolution condemning Trump's plans to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, which was pretty meaningless in fact, but symbolically, it was tremendously important because it symbolized that there will be no two-state solution, that the Israelis own everything.
It's ours, we've got it, go to hell is what they've been telling the rest of the world.
Yeah, all right, so now, I always interview Ramzi Baroud about this stuff, and he's a refugee from the occupation in Gaza, and his point of view is that, look, man, two states was always nothing but a lie.
And it's not just a lie since Oslo, and it's not just a lie since Camp David, it's a lie since the foundation of Israel and the original UN mandate, that the Palestinians would have their state.
And it's not true.
And now Trump is saying, look, why are we pretending this?
And Ramzi Baroud is saying, good question.
So now that Israel has annexed all of Palestine, now we should all frame the question in terms of equal rights under the law for the Palestinian people, who are, in fact, subjects of Israel.
What do you think of that?
Well, that's one valid argument that can be made.
There were those who urged it.
They're gonna say, we're gonna force the Israelis now to address this question of equal rights for the Palestinians, who make up almost half the population now.
But it won't happen.
And the Israelis referred to the Palestinians as wild animals and cockroaches.
And I don't see how there can ever be an agreement.
There will be no South African-style situation where the whites relinquish power to the black majority.
And Israel's extreme right-wing governments, its opponents, the Israeli left-wing called them fascists, the Israeli government would lose power immediately if they gave votes to the Arabs.
So I think there'll be just a pretense of more talks, which has been going on for endless years about bringing democracy into the region.
And in fact, it won't happen.
And they'll say, well, we can't do it because the place is filled with terrorists.
Yeah, well, that was what Netanyahu says, right?
He goes, hey, look, you know, Hamas is ISIS.
And never even mind that Israel is on al-Qaeda's side, which if you wanna talk about al-Qaeda's ISIS, then you got a lot better argument.
Israel backs them in the war in Syria, even still.
Meanwhile, anytime Bin Ladenites poke their head up in the Gaza Strip, Hamas just murders them.
They just attack them and kill them in a military-type strike.
They don't even arrest them for a minute.
They take no prisoners at all.
And of course, for obvious political reasons that they want for that to be the fact that people have to refer to, that whatever it is you say about Hamas, they are not al-Qaeda or ISIS and have nothing to do with that.
But hey, well, like you're saying about them being animals and cockroaches, how else are you gonna justify torture in their children unless you reduce them to livestock?
You know, of course they demonize them because they have to in order to rationalize what they do to them.
If they were human beings, why this would be criminal?
Yeah, they're all part of, I don't know, ISIS or Hamas or Hezbollah, whatever's handy for the day.
This is for people who do not understand the situation well in the area and are easily confused by this kind of shameless propaganda.
Yeah, you know, I just saw a big fight on Twitter that I stayed out of, but it was about how Hamas, it's right there, it says so on some piece of paper that they wrote that they're going to take over the whole world and that's their plan is a new world order under, you know, Mullah, whoever.
And I'm going, man, you know what?
Like this guy has no idea what Hamas even is.
It's just a word floating in the air to him.
If he knew that they were the trustees of the Israeli concentration camp of the Gaza Strip there on the Eastern Mediterranean shore and nothing more, then boy, would he have a hard time.
But instead now they've supplanted the United Nations as the new world order coming for us, you know?
Hamas.
Well, there's no end of simple-minded people out there, particularly when it deals with the Middle East.
All right, listen, man, thank you so much for your time and it's good advice, the advice you give to read your book, American Raj, and War at the Top of the World.
Both of them are just incredible books and I really do hope that people will read those.
And listen.
And Merry Christmas to you.
Hey, Merry Christmas to you too.
All the best wishes.
I hope Santa brings you a Maserati.
I would immediately pawn it, but yeah, thank you.
You're welcome.
Have a great one.
All right, you guys.
Palestinians, get out.
That's at ericmargaliz.com and at Lew Rockwell.
I'm sure Lew must've run it.
And unz.com.
And then, listen, this one brand new.
It's running on antiwar.com today.
I think, sorry, Chump, you didn't have it in writing.
This is an all-important piece about the newly released documents on America's promises to the Russians that they would not expand NATO if the Russians went ahead and withdrew from Eastern Europe and allowed for reunification of Germany.
It's just a disgrace and it's so important and nobody knows about it except you once you read this article.
Sorry, Chump, you didn't have it in writing.
Ericmargaliz.com.
And you know me, scotthorton.org for the show.
Also, libertarianinstitute.org has the show there too.
That's my institute.
Antiwar.com for the articles you need to read and foolsaron.us for my book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
It'll link you through there to amazon.com as well.
Thanks very much, guys.
Appreciate it.
And Merry Christmas to you too.
