03/31/15 – Todd E. Pierce – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, kids, welcome back to the show.
All right, well, now we go to our friend Todd Pierce, a former judge advocate general in the, uh-oh, now I forget, the Navy.
Here he is writing for ConsortiumNews.com, neocons, the echo of German fascism.
He was a, I know I'll get this right, a former defense attorney at Guantanamo Bay, who resigned rather than participate, continue to participate in the farce down there.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
You were in the Army, not the Navy.
Sorry about that.
Yeah, for the Army.
Let me correct something first.
No, I didn't have to resign.
I'm still actually on a case before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Oh, really?
As a JAG, though?
As a retired JAG, no.
Oh, that's interesting.
But still, oh, but in the civilian court system.
Is that right?
Exactly.
Oh, I see.
Okay, that's what you said.
Yeah, no, I didn't resign because as a defense counsel.
That part of it was too important.
If I'd have been a prosecutor, I would have resigned.
I see.
And so, but you're representing a Guantanamo inmate right now?
Correct.
I see.
Well, as long as we're on that subject, who?
Well, I'm on a team and we're representing Al Balul before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
And the only remaining issue to be decided, and it's under consideration yet, is whether or not conspiracy is in fact a war crime under international law, which we argue it is not.
Right.
We've already, the court has already ruled that material support for terrorism and solicitation are not war crimes, as they are not.
So we're just waiting to see how they're going to rule on the conspiracy issue.
And since it's still under consideration by the court, I don't want to say anything more about that.
I see.
Okay, no problem.
All right, so let's talk about this great article.
This is so interesting.
I forget if it's on antiwar.com today, or we ran over the weekend, I guess, at antiwar.com.
It's written for consortiumnews.com.
Neocons, the echo of German fascism.
And you pick your words very carefully here.
You're not talking necessarily about German Nazism, but a different flavor of German fascism from the time leading up to the rise of the Nazi Party and the beginning of World War II.
Is that correct?
Exactly, and very deliberately so, because you talk about and make an analogy to Nazis, and immediately people realize that that's just too extreme.
We may be on a continuum, a spectrum at the lower end where the Nazis would be at the highest end.
But obviously there's a lot of distance between wherever we are at and the Nazis.
But you don't have to look at that.
There's a variety of fascist parties and fascist movements, particularly during the interwar years.
And one of those was, in fact, basically the German military allied with the conservative revolutionary movement and then the Deutsch National People's Party, as I point out.
All of them together would constitute a fascist movement if it was in any other country other than Germany where it was held up comparatively to the Nazis and not seen as bad.
But it led to the Nazis.
And these were the groups that were the coalition that supported the Nazis' rise to power when Hitler, of course, as everyone knows, never did have a majority in the Reichstag.
Correct.
They were competitors with the Nazis through the 20s.
But as power was shifting and success was shifting to the Nazis, they were being brought into the Nazi orbit, you could say.
So when the 1933 election occurred, the Deutsch National People's Party was part of that coalition and voted with the Nazis to give Hitler the enabling act and these extraordinary powers.
A couple of them, like I say, they had been seen as competitors before, and a couple of them lost their lives during the Night of the Long Knives, so-called Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler wiped out a number of his enemies.
But many others remained and remained in government throughout until the end of World War II.
All right, so now break this down exactly.
What's the difference between, I don't know, American conservatism and this German revolutionary conservative movement, or are there any differences?
Well, quite honestly, yeah, as of today, I don't think there are many differences.
Obviously, different time and place, and we speak different language.
But you look at what the Republican Party is saying, and this is what I started reading about the conservative revolutionaries maybe five, six years ago in reading about Carl Schmitt.
And so I was aware of them for a lot of years, and we've just evolved, as you can see, in Republican rhetoric, where today I don't think you could say there's any distinction other than time and place and language.
But same foreign policy agenda, the conservative revolutionaries, and when I say that, I'm going to include everybody now, the Deutsche National People's Party, the German army, they all believed in expansionist foreign policy.
They believed that Germany, being an exceptional nation in Europe, had a right to expand and actually rule over all of Europe at some point, and we've expanded that.
Although we disguise it a little bit better, we actually believe that we rule the world, and I go back to Dick Cheney's 1991 draft policy guidance that I've written about elsewhere, where he essentially says that now we rule the world with the defeat of the Soviet Union.
So we have been acting as if we have a right to rule the world, both directly and indirectly.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Not just acting like, but believe that we have the right.
This exceptionalism is straight out of this German fascism.
Is that correct?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I don't mean to waffle in any way.
But explain that.
I mean, elaborate on the exceptionalism as they characterized it.
So as they characterized it, again, they held themselves up, and Germany, as you know, was probably the most sophisticated country in Europe at the turn of the century, and obviously you've got all these various Bach and Beethoven and others who had created this rich culture.
So they had a very superior attitude toward everyone else, and we've got that today, as you know, and you can hear it every time Michelle Bachmann opens her mouth or others, you know, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, on and on.
And, you know, we're the world's sole superpower, the exceptional nation.
You know, everybody here listening, you know, knows what I'm talking about.
So we go on.
We have this firm belief that we are an exceptional nation.
I mean, I was at a law school, University of Minnesota law school one day on something and was invited to listen to a speaker that happened to be coming too, and in the course of that he was saying, sort of soliciting an opinion.
He said, well, I'm thinking of writing another book, making the argument that the United States and Israel, standing as exceptional nations, our motives are always pure in war, going to war, and yet we're always in war because of that.
We're always having to fix these things.
Therefore, we should be subject to a less strict law of war, you know, so that our soldiers aren't going to be charged with war crimes.
And he was seriously saying this, that we should, you know, because we go to war more often, we deserve a lighter standard of conduct.
And that's an example of how we have elevated ourselves, and in this case you're Israel too, and I would say the Republican Party would agree with that, including Israel, that we're above the rest of the world.
We're exceptional not only in being superior, but we're also exceptional in not being subject to the laws of the world.
Let me ask you a little bit more about that because my understanding when I was a kid, as I was raised in government schools about exceptionalism, was America's exceptional because we put freedom first.
We believe in justice and in liberty, and that's what makes this society the best society is because these are the organizing principles of our society.
Where every other society is, you know, we are the this or that ethnicity, or we are the this or that religion, and that kind of thing.
But I never understood it to mean that therefore our sins become virtues, and therefore we have the right to murder and kill and steal and lie and undermine the very principles of liberty and justice that we proclaim.
So where did this go off the rails?
Or was I just fed a very kind of sugar-coated version of this when I was young?
Well, I think, you know, I was fed it too, and I believed it, and I still believe it in that sense, the way you described it.
But it was a little bit sugar-coated.
As I mentioned in the article, you know, certainly Native Americans weren't treated, you know, charitably and whatnot.
We've always had a faction, and a faction that was varying in strength at different times in our history that was always militaristic.
But where we went off the rail, I would say, and I would really date this.
We've always had this.
You go back during, and I used to call myself a conservative and even a neoconservative back in the 80s.
But during that time, in part in rebellion against the loss of Vietnam War, and I can quote some Vietnam generals and how they talked about how next time you have to be more authoritarian and lock up anti-war dissenters, et cetera.
But I think that was sort of our stab in the back, the beginning of our stab in the back to a certain faction, you know, the right wing, the extreme, more extreme right wing.
And I don't mean the Nazi Party and those, but I mean the more extreme right wing of the Republican Party like Dick Cheney.
And to them, we were sort of stabbed as an ace in the back by the anti-war activists and the press.
And the military is replete with writings such as this.
And so we have our own sort of stab in the back legend.
But we never, it was never manifested as it has been since because we're always sort of checked by the Soviet Union.
And I'm not holding them up as a virtue, you know, as something that was good to have around because they were a check upon us.
With their collapse, I think we saw sort of Dick Cheney's mind comp with, like I say, and Paul Wolfowitz very much in Straussian with their 1991 draft defense planning guidance.
But they basically said… I'm sorry, Todd.
Let me interrupt you here and stop here.
We actually went into this break a little bit, but I don't want the live audience to miss too much of this.
So hold it right there, and we'll be right back in just one second, okay?
Yeah.
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Okay, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Todd Pierce, former Army JAG lawyer, but still a lawyer representing a Guantanamo inmate in the civilian court system.
He's got this incredibly interesting and important article at ConsortiumNews.com called Neocons, The Echo of German Fascism.
And, well, so we kind of went a little bit into the break there, talking about the stab in the back theory, just like Hitler's stab in the back theory after World War I.
We have our own after Vietnam about how, oh, the liberals sold us out and all this, and how this is part of the basis of the modern American right-wing nationalist point of view as represented especially by Dick Cheney and then his acolytes like Paul Wolfowitz.
But now, so, Todd, you can tell we're just so compressed for time in these segments here.
See if you can draw a line for us from Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and through to the neoconservatives in America today, please, sir.
So I think probably everybody listening here most know of the neoconservatives.
But jumping ahead then, 9-11 was what, you know, this convergence of circumstances.
Dick Cheney in the vice president's office, et cetera, and then this attack on the United States is what allowed the neoconservatives, many of whom were in office and had been pushing for various wars, you know, for at least a few decades.
But all of a sudden, all the circumstances came together.
The authoritarianism came out in the various Office of Legal Counsel opinions written by Robert Delahunty and John Yoo, arguing that the president has these extreme dictatorial powers under the war powers.
So all of this came together.
Strauss had always been an influence, and when you, you know, the other Scott Horton of Harper's Magazine is, in fact, the one who translated that piece about Strauss' letter to Carl Leavitt, I believe that's how it's pronounced, saying that I'm a fascist, basically.
So, and then here Strauss comes over, contrary to many of the German emigres, Jewish emigres during World War II who were, you know, liberal left, Strauss was right-wing and has been very influential in conservatism ever since.
And so all these things came together at the same time.
You had the Straussian influence, which, again, was very fascist.
He always hid it, and I think this is relevant because people like Victor Davis Hanson writes a lot on war and why we need to, and he goes back to the Spartans and celebrates war.
And they hide it, you know, they hide their fascism because the Spartans were a fascist, you know, early version of fascism.
So they hide their fascism by going back to the ancients to try to pretend that, well, here we have to look up to the ancients, and here's how we should model ourselves.
So it's diabolical in a lot of ways, but with 9-11 it all come together.
And then wartime itself has its own psychological effect upon people, where attitudes become more and more severe, it's extreme.
As Carl Schmitt talks about, you have to have the friend-enemy distinction, and nowhere ever is that more evident in wartime than it seems.
So we've got the enemy now.
It's not the Jews like the Germans had, the Nazis came to have, and then Hitler had it from the beginning, the end of World War I, but rather it's Arabs.
And we can see this by a lot of neoconservatives going on, and, you know, the Islamophobia against any Arab, against any version of Islam.
So everything is coming together, and the Republican Party epitomizes that.
Everything comes together in the Republican Party.
And the Democrats too, I'm not leaving them out.
Menendez, Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Warren even, you know, we have a benevolent, generous view of her because of her criticism of Wall Street, but she's been quoted here a couple of different places, probably on antiwar.com today.
She's very pro-war.
And so this has become the American, you know, worldview now.
And like I say, it's exactly as you could have seen in Germany in the 1920s, espoused by the conservative revolutionary movement.
And now, I'm sorry, one slight correction for you here, and it's mostly not your fault.
John Pilger screwed this up and I guess never corrected it, but it's a quote from Michael Ledeen at a meeting at the American Enterprise Institute where he says, this is total war, and if we just let our vision of the world go forth and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage total war, our children will sing great songs about us in the future.
You can just tell that that's a Ledeen quote there.
Richard Perle talks quieter than that.
Oh, okay.
The point is still the same for sure, yeah.
And in fact, Michael Ledeen is actually like a pretty open fan of at least Italian fascism, if not avowedly a fan of German fascism.
He even wrote a book about it.
And what all positive things we can learn from Mussolini and his group.
And that proves my point, which you would agree with, I have no doubt.
Ledeen represents the Republican view today.
The Republican Party, you know, starting off at 9-11, it wasn't entirely this way, but it's evolved to where now you could say it's 100%.
And in part that comes with a connection, I would say, to Netanyahu.
We don't see him as a fascist, but his roots are, you know, ideological roots are fascist, as I point out in this article.
We saw that particularly on display last summer with all the rhetoric going on in Israel, as people like Max Blumenthal have documented, on how extreme that rhetoric has become in Israel.
And I've talked to a couple friends who have said, you know, they're not sure that we're not past that tipping point, at least Israel.
And I would say that may be, and I think it may well be true of the United States too.
I don't know how we're going to reverse this.
We've now got a person, Rosa Brooks, who used to write very eloquently against the Bush administration.
She's written a piece recently basically saying that, hey, we're stuck in this permanent war.
Get used to it.
Let's just put a couple rules on it to make, put a little lipstick on it.
But let's just get used to it.
Right.
You know, I was going to say, Todd, well, maybe if we just lose another few wars, that'll help.
But actually that just makes matters worse, right?
Because then it's all your fault for criticizing, pal, or else we would have won.
That's true too.
And that goes along with that fascist viewpoint.
Anybody, any internal enemy, any internal dissent is the enemy.
And so it requires this very oppressive police state to suppress any dissent so that the wars won't be lost.
But, of course, I have argued elsewhere that, in fact, that's a strength of the United States as it once was, democracy, is that we can have that internal debate.
If you look at the Vietnam War, you had people, generals, who wanted to fight that war to the last dollar, to the last American dollar that we could spend.
They would have bankrupted us, and they wouldn't have won the war.
Whereas the peace movement said, hey, get out of here.
It's unwinnable, et cetera.
And fortunately we did eventually for a number of reasons, but I would say in most part because of the peace movement.
And instead of bankrupting ourselves, we had a number of years of prosperity where, at least for a few years, we were willing to live in peace with the rest of the world, at least to a larger degree than we had been.
Well, and it seems like a very important point, as you say, that the Democrats are just about as bad as the outright neoconservatives and avowed right-wing nationalists, you know, Dick Cheney-ites or whatever you call them, the Cheney-Rumsfeld types.
So we lived through eight years of Bush Jr. and this way of thinking.
Then Obama comes, and it's just a ratification of the exact same set of principles rather than any kind of real rollback.
And then as we move further on, next is Jeb or Hillary or whoever comes next.
And the longer we go on like this, the less connection the American population has to how things used to be and what exactly it is that we're giving up here.
The Bill of Rights is a dead letter.
Of course it's a dead letter.
It's been a dead letter for 20 years, so now it's too late to even fight for it, kind of an attitude.
It seems really dangerous here.
You're exactly right, Scott.
I mean, you said it far better than I could have.
The more time goes by living under this world war paradigm, this notion that we're locked in this long war, as the neoconservatives love to say, the less likelihood there will ever be that we can get back and restore the Bill of Rights.
And I would say looking at it militarily, that's the worst thing that can happen to us because we gradually centralize all decision-making authority into the very people who are the least broad-minded, the least able to understand the larger issues, so that we become a militarized state just like the Soviet Union was at its worst, Germany was at its worst, and the only thing they can think of is one more attack and everything will be well and good.
And finally they get to Stalingrad or Afghanistan as the Russians did, and everything collapses.
We just finished talking with Karen Katowski on the show, and she had a front-row seat to these neoconservatives, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams and their acolytes in the Pentagon, lying us into war back in 2002 and 2003, and the discussion ended on how they're idiots, these guys.
They only talk to each other.
They really don't know anything about anything.
Not one of them speaks a lick of Arabic, for example, or anything like that.
And they're not even willing to listen to the CIA.
They're not even willing to listen to anybody from another think tank who thinks they're wrong.
And so this is how they were so easy for the Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmed Chalabi, his agent, to manipulate into getting rid of Saddam Hussein for them.
They thought it was going to be good for Israel.
They thought that democratic Iraq was going to be Israel's best ally and build an oil and water pipeline to Haifa and all this complete nonsense, because they don't know anything, because they're not interested in knowing anything other than what confirms their bias.
So they can only bring us to Stalingrad, right?
They can only destroy us and never succeed.
That's exactly right, and that's what the American people need to realize.
We've come to celebrate militarism and the military so much, but we don't realize that they're the least, the most narrow-minded group of people, starting off with the idiocy of the neoconservatives, which is in the extreme, but it's infectious.
And so you can see the same idiocy in the CIA, like if you read the torture report.
It was a clown show.
These people, the CIA running the, and I would say the military too, the Senate report only covered the CIA, but these people who were genuinely clowns, they thought, you know, if we just torture this guy a little bit more, he's going to reveal where Osama bin Laden is or some other nonsense.
And they didn't even know that these guys are maybe just farmers or, you know, or whatever.
They exaggerate everything because they're fearful.
They're the most fearful people we have in society, instead of brave, courageous warriors as they like to see themselves as.
So we need to begin looking at them as clowns again.
You know, we used to have some great movies back in the 60s, you know, like Dr. Strangelove and Catch-22, where it was routine to, you know, make fun of this military mindset, and I'm including that.
I mean, again, the neoconservatives, Republican Party are equivalent to the Deutsche National People's Party.
The CIA, the military, they're equivalent to the German army of the time, each very narrow-minded and not understanding things very well, and leading, as I say, to Stalingrad.
So that's what we've got going today.
But we've got to realize that these people are genuinely idiots and clowns.
Other than you give them a very narrow, specific mission, they may be able to find that.
But once you give them too much discretion, and Scott Horton, the other Scott Horton, has written a great book, Lords of Secrecy.
Let me put a, you know, tout that book.
And they can cover everything up with secrecy, though, over-classifying information, etc., making a crime for anybody like a whistleblower to reveal to the American people what idiots they really are.
And, you know, that's what the Bill of Rights was really about to begin with.
It wasn't about giving us rights to have fun, but it was about giving us the means to keep an eye on our government functionaries, because the framers understood that giving them, you know, rain, free rain to do whatever they want, would lead to catastrophe.
So ultimately it was meant to be the American people using the Bill of Rights to keep an eye on those government functionaries, like the CIA, the military, Congress, the president.
And that's been turned upside down.
All right, with that, we'd better leave it, but I'm going to beseech the audience, please go and look at this very important article, and, you know what, give it to your professors.
Post it, spread it around.
This is the kind of thing that really needs a thorough examination.
It's called Neocons, the Echo of German Fascism.
It's by Todd Pierce at ConsortiumNews.com.
Thank you so much, Todd.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Appreciate it.
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