For Pacifica Radio, April 4th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
The voice of racism preaching the gospel is devilish.
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist.
Forgetting God is not religion, but a spiritual bond.
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Quran.
They bombed innocent people trying to murder Saddam.
When you gave them those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran.
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings.
Because Condoleezza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemings.
I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish.
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ.
Who murdered him, stole his religion, and painted him white.
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy.
Conservative political right wing ideology.
Glued together sloppily the blasphemy of a nation.
Got my back to the wall cause I'm facing assassination.
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration.
How could this be the land of the free?
Home of the brave, indigenous holocaust.
And the home of the slaves, corporate America.
Dancing off beat to the rhythm.
You really think this country never sponsored terrorism?
Human rights violations, we continue the saga.
El Salvador and the Contras in Nicaragua.
And on top of that you still want to take me to prison.
Just cause I won't trade humanity for patriotism.
It's like MK Ultra, controlling your brain.
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change.
They want to rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto.
The fourth branch of the government.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
And author of the new book, Enough Already.
Time to end the war on terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive just shy of 5,500 of them now.
We'll get to 5,500 next Friday, I think.
All that's at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And I'm very happy to introduce Immortal Technique.
Very special guest on the show this week.
How are you doing, Tech?
Thank you very much for having me on the show, man.
I appreciate that.
Really happy to have you here.
I'm sorry, let me give you a proper introduction here.
So first of all, there's Revolutionary Volume 1 and Volume 2.
That one's my favorite, I gotta say.
The Third World and The Martyr, there's great tracks on all of these records.
I hope people take a look at them.
And then The Middle Passage, whatever happened to that?
Did that never come out?
No, I mean, it's gonna come out hopefully as soon as I can finish these last couple of songs.
I've been working on it for an incredibly long time.
It's one of these projects that's more like an arc than a tent.
You know what I mean?
You're gonna throw up something to stay the night, that's fine.
This is an arc.
This is something that took years of research.
I had to double-check a lot of information.
There were people on it that I couldn't keep on it anymore because of not their position or political standing, but people that did things that were so outside the frame that I was just like, nah, I'm cool.
But I think it was a very, very important learning process.
There was a lot of information that I didn't know that went into this album.
So the thesis, or rather the entire mantra of the record, is a reclaiming of lost art.
And when people ask me about that, they say, what do you mean?
And I say, well, people don't know this, but during The Middle Passage, there were tens of thousands of African and indigenous instruments that were destroyed, specifically because they were utilized in education.
See, you and I, we have something in common, just like everybody who's watching or listening to your show.
We learn the alphabet not through a numerical scale, but through a musical scale.
And that's actually been the way that human beings have been teaching and learning to each other, or learning things for tens of thousands of years.
When babies are born, mothers sing to them, and it helps them to recognize the voice with brain development.
I think when we talk about the effects of sound on people, I think one of the most riveting things is, if you look in the past, one of the most interesting things about any movie from the past is, it has to be quiet if it's going to be real.
There's no iPhone, there's no radio, there's no nothing.
If you wanted music, you had to pay musicians to come to your house.
You had to have money.
You had to pay people to sing in your home.
I think what's interesting is that when we look at European musical instruments during the Renaissance, and then before that, you find much more of a Gregorian, like earlier side of Purcell, rather than the latter half of the Renaissance.
And then when you look at African instruments, you see that before the Renaissance, a lot of them had a very, very similar texture, and they were actually copied by Europeans who were practicing colonialism, probably for the first time in about 700 years.
That's really interesting.
I really know nothing about music or the history of...
But so then that's all in the songs too, huh?
Yeah, I mean, I think we have to recognize that hip-hop is in the lineage of that music.
It's in the lineage of the blues, what people used to call Negro spirituals, which are really African spiritual chant that has been reformulated to speak a Germanic language, which is the English that we have now.
I think what also is interesting is during the course of these conversations, we learned really interesting things about how many people were born on these slave ships, the fact that mothers would sew rice into the hair of the women so they would have food that they could take out of their braids later on.
When you hear stories about the Holocaust and the things that people have done to survive, I basically had a very similar instance, only that this is an extremely unreported thing, because unlike the Holocaust where we paint ourselves as the good guys in World War II, even though Russia did a lot of the heavy lifting, there's no way for us to paint ourselves as the good guys when it comes to slavery and reparations.
The best thing that people can do is just lean on audacity, which is basically the cheap fourth-rate lawyer trick of saying, well, I wasn't here when any of that happened, as if they don't bear the benefits of the system and the remnant of whatever's left of it.
Well, you know, even in my government schooling, I learned a lot about the horrors of slavery, but it does all come with, then Abraham Lincoln fixed everything, him and Martin Luther King, and it's been cool since then, though.
But, you know, at the same time, they did teach us Holocaust levels of horror about the institution of slavery in this country, because it is undeniable, if you're going to talk about it at all, you have the torture and murders right there the whole time.
Right.
I think, though, I'm going to be honest with you, maybe in advanced classes in college, but I've not seen many high schools that do it.
And also, we've all seen images of gas chambers and crematoriums multiple times on television.
And I think one thing we haven't seen is, sure, they've showed us the cotton plantations on television, but I'm going to be honest with you, those are the nicest plantations.
You know what plantations they never show us on TV?
Those are the breeding plantations.
The plantations where, when we talk about Jeffrey Epstein or we talk about these figures that are very, very prominent in terms of the recent media's obsession with child trafficking, because they didn't seem to care about it very much before, but their recent obsession with child trafficking, which is a serious offense, that's exactly what was going on.
Girls as young as 11 or 12 were placed into stables, where then they were mated with what they called a buck.
So I think when people then look at these things and they recognize, oh, my God, it wasn't just slavery.
You're talking about organized child rape.
You're talking about organized genocide.
You're talking about an organized cultural genocide, which is where I think hip hop comes into the picture.
Hip hop is in that lineage of, as I said before, the African spirituals, the blues, R&B, rock and roll, reggae, which is actually the direct lineage where it comes from because of cool DJ Herc, who came from Jamaica in 1972 with those records and then came here and reformatted it to be hip hop the way we know it now.
So it is in a direct part of that lineage.
And when I hear young artists rapping, I don't see it so much as just an expression of themselves.
Sure, it is, but it's also a reclaiming of those lost lessons and that lost heart that we had so long ago.
And I mean, I think it's beautiful because you can actually see the development of that, a naked art form that goes from rapping about nothing to rapping about everything, to rapping about nothing, to rapping about everything.
It just shows how time is not linear and not everything is just going to get better because it gets older.
Sometimes it's going to mature, it's going to splinter, much like any religion that's ever been invented by a man as well.
You know, so I was a little bit late to your music.
I first heard the fourth branch, I'm going to say in 2007.
I guess it was a couple of years old, two, three years had been out by then.
But when you put that out, this was a time where no one in music was speaking out against the wars, hardly at all.
I'll put it like this.
In this era, things are so polarized.
Could you, like a famous underground artist, put a picture of Donald Trump murdered, assassinated with everybody in there?
Sure, I think it would make headlines.
But I think the difference is that something people never questioned about me in my career was my sincerity.
They were like, oh, he's not doing this for shock value.
He really believes this.
He can talk about it.
Because I think something that wasn't ever brought up in a conversation about 9-11 was who are we doing business with out there?
That subject was totally skipped over.
I mean, people look at the idea that bin Laden used to work for the CIA as some kind of Facebook conspiracy theory that right wingers cling to now.
Because they've totally co-opted that struggle.
And it's because, in my opinion, Mr. Trump ran against Hillary Clinton with far left talking points in order to galvanize some of those people that were disenchanted with the Democratic Party.
So he didn't find just Republicans on his side.
He found disaffected leftists.
He found a lot of libertarians.
He found a lot of people that were extremely unhappy with the way that the Democratic Party had done business.
And kind of used their own ethos against them of saying, oh, listen, you guys back these horrible companies.
You want these clothing manufacturers to be made there.
It really reminded me, his campaign really reminded me of Brexit.
Which is, you know, what's interesting about Brexit is you have a lot of elites telling regular people that their enemy are other elite people.
Like, yeah, the founders of people who were sitting there pushing Brexit were the pallbearers of that dead idea which is now festering somewhere.
Its body is festering somewhere in Europe.
These people were elites.
Scott, these people went to Exeter and Oxford and they were telling other people, look at the elites.
So I think what's interesting now is you have the same thing in the United States.
You have a bunch of elites which are telling other people to beware of other elites.
Like, I'm a good elite.
Me and my right-wing cohort of people, we're good.
But these left-wingers are bad people.
Or me and my cohort of pretend social justice warriors are good people.
But these people, these God-fearing people are terrible people.
And I think that you have a point where individuals wouldn't know what to believe because it's different.
It's not a political perspective anymore.
I think a people's politics have become attached to their identity as a person.
So you're not asking someone to change their politics when you talk about or you introduce new facts that even may be riveting to their world view and their narrative.
But it's very hard for a person to change their politics in this era because it's attached to all their friends.
What are they going to tell all their friends, everyone who's a Trump supporter, they no longer believe in that, that Q was a lie.
And I had people who were intelligent people who fell for that trailer park Scientology and were like, hey, technique, how come you're not into Q?
And I'm like, because it's a sham, because it's a fraud, because, you know, I feel like I'm watching The Wizard of Oz.
And there's a guy behind a tent, like a curtain, who's waving to pay no attention to this idiot behind the curtain.
And I'm just like, why can't you see this?
Look, 10 years ago, it was we are the 99 percent, Occupy Wall Street on one side.
And we are the Tea Party.
And we're against bank bailouts, too, on the other side.
And now all anybody's arguing about is all this culture war.
And even as the liberals and conservatives in the center are discredited and people are moving further to the right and left in a populist sense, as you're saying, you know, in a classist sense, everybody's all diverted off into this identity politics instead.
I think about that the 99 percent.
How about even the ninety nine point nine percent against the people who are really in charge?
I think the part that other people forget is that the way our society is structured is it's a capitalist society.
So things are defined on how well certain amounts of the population do.
And I think that when people talk about these concepts like socialism or communism, a lot of times you find that you're dealing with people who use these words without really understanding what they mean.
Like the base understanding of socialism is that it's workers wanting to control the means of production.
And you have a lot of people who claim to be capitalists who have no capital.
And when you look at the American left, I think one of the great failures of it is that it used to be workers of the world unite.
You talk about the contrast in 10 years.
Let's talk about the contrast of 30 years ago.
Used to be workers of the world unite.
And now it's we want a bigger slice of the American pie.
And the American left has not asked the fundamentally moral questions that come along with politics, which are, well, how did this pie get made?
Were children on a conveyor belt for 20 hours making this pie?
How do we get this money?
How do we get this resources?
You know, I think one of the interesting things is when you look at the past two presidents, you know, Obama made liberals or neoliberals feel like progressives.
And Trump made stupid people feel smart.
And this is what we're left with.
And gone are the people in the center who weren't really the center.
They were really the left.
And because of the 9-11 effect, all politics were shifted to the right.
So now people don't even know what their politics are.
They're confused about who to talk to if they express themselves on social media.
They're automatically attacked by a legion of political agents.
And you can usually tell these people because they have no posts, no affiliation, and they're just sitting there waiting for someone and looking for hashtags so they can come in and punish someone for their political perspective.
And I don't know who gets intimidated by this kind of crap, but it's not me.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Well, that makes sense.
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Zippix Toothpicks Zippix Toothpicks In fact, one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you was about Israel and Palestine, because it's my belief that the American people at large, left, right, rich, poor, black, white, or town and country and whatever you got, people just don't even know anything about it.
If they do know anything about it, it's that the Palestinian terrorists just won't leave the poor little Israelis alone.
And I know that I certainly saw a video of you back from like 2014 during Cast Lead, where you were explaining the situation there and explaining it, go back to the creation of Israel and how the Palestinians got put in this situation.
People don't even know what situation they're in.
And I thought, well, great, man, it'd be a good thing to get more attention onto this subject by giving a microphone to someone like you to talk about it on a show like this and to get people more interested, you know?
Well, I will start by saying when we talk about Israel and Palestine, we're already at a disadvantage with some people because their mind is so made up and so stationary on a subject.
But I just want to introduce some facts to the conversation.
So historically speaking, the natural enemy of the Jewish people has never been Arab.
Consistently, they've lived side by side in that area.
And I'm not going to say that it's been like a 100 percent positive relationship every single moment of the day.
But in relative symbiosis, surviving lots of other people who have invaded that area, including Mongols, Persians, Turks, and a series of other people.
Now, the natural enemy of the Jewish people historically has always been right wing European governments.
And when I talk about fascist governments, we don't have to go into the early 20th century or mid 20th century.
We can talk about the 1800s, the 1600s, the 1500s.
Jesus, the Alhambra decree, which is when the Crusades were finally at some point over in the West.
And they passed a decree in which they disallowed all Jewish and Muslim people from owning property or even being there under the penalty of confiscation of person or you, which meant they would sell you into slavery.
And I think when you talk about Israel and Palestine, you see that there has to be some conversation about Britain here, because it was the British Empire that helped to create Israel.
And for the backstory that people would ask and say, well, why?
What is the purpose of all that?
And it's because the same thing has to happen in every former British colony, including the United States.
Every former British colony that they set up eventually has a civil war and they're set up to be that way.
India, Pakistan, the United States, Afghanistan, everywhere where Britain's been.
You can't leave them out of the conversation when it comes to Israel and Palestine, because after World War Two, all of the possessions of Britain were transferred to the United States.
So Transjordan, which is Israel, Palestine and Jordan, that used to be Britain's problem.
After World War Two, it became our problem.
When it comes to the World War One fiasco where Britain, France and Russia decided to chop up what was left of the Ottoman Empire, they call it the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
And in that agreement, France got Lebanon.
And I don't think people understand how big that was.
Sykes-Picot, if you look it up, is the division of the entire Middle East among European and Russian powers.
So the Russians for years had had wars with the Turks over the Caucasus.
The Caucasus are in no way contested now.
People would say, man, if you go to the Caucasus, you're in Russia's backyard, you're in Chechnya.
You're dealing with a whole new slew of crap up there.
So when you look at it in the Middle East, it's no different.
France took control of Syria, Lebanon, and England at that time was in control of everything, South Egypt, Persia as well.
So I think you can't take them out of the equation.
They stand to personally benefit, and they did so repeatedly.
They had an issue with what they called Jewish terrorism at the time, which they said were European Jews that were moving to the land of Palestine to fight for the independence of a nation state that didn't exist.
And then little by little, there were people who grew to become the propagandists for this era.
And I think their connection to modern day politics is interesting.
So people always see Theodor Herzl as the founder of Zionism, but he's actually a co-founder.
He came up with a lot of the base ideas for it in how they would connect now Zionism to Judaism to try and make them the same thing, even though they're not.
Because one is a 4,000 to 5,000-year-old religion, and the other one is a political ideology that was born in the 1850s.
And the real person who was, I would say, the foundational ideologue would be a man called Moses Hess.
And for those who love reading, he wrote a book called Roman Jerusalem, which outlined what Theodor Herzl would then co-opt, take, and use as his own.
And Moses Hess is famous because he actually used to be a huge leftist in France.
And then he found this kid, Theodor Herzl, who was writing what they called Faiton at the time, which is like page six from the New York Post, like a gossip column.
And he saw he was a good writer.
And at the time, Moses Hess was introducing his friend Ingalls to Karl Marx, his other friend.
So I think it's really interesting to look at these aspects.
And then when you look at the foundation of Israel and you see that they start out with a kibbutz system, they start out firmly in a Russian camp.
And before you know it, now they are here with the Americans 100 years later, and 120 Nazis have been prosecuted, and millions of Palestinian people have been displaced and killed.
Well, you know, I think part of the problem is for people who just take a cursory interest, you see that map, and it's an optical illusion.
When you see the space of the West Bank there, it looks like someone invaded part of Israel and took it, when really that's all that's left.
Yeah.
I mean, I think also it's because there is no safe space to discuss Israel.
As a matter of fact, I think that not corporate leftists, but the real left, see that in America as sort of a litmus test.
Like, sure, yeah, you could be progressive about everything, but if you're not progressive about gay rights, then you're not a real progressive in the United States, and the Democratic Party will not deal with you.
They will call you a homophobe, right?
You could be progressive about everything, but if you're progressive about everything and you're not progressive about women's rights and you're a misogynist, then the Democratic Party has to shun you and keep you in the back room like Cuomo until they can figure out how to get rid of you.
But if you're a Democrat that loves Palestine or just doesn't necessarily love it or just thinks it's inhumane to treat people like that, there is no safe space for you.
That's not a litmus test.
That's like a boutique political perspective to them.
To the rest of the world, it deals directly with human rights, but they've managed to make it, in this country, a non-safe space to have those conversations about that.
And unfortunately, it plays itself across there.
Now, with the right wing, it's different, because you have people who are religious fundamentalists, who they believe that the existence of Israel is connected to the rebirth of Christ and the coming of the Lord and the rapture and people dying.
And so there's a sense of prophecy that's involved for them.
So you have a huge percentage of the right wing who they don't even know anything about the history of Palestine, Israel, but simply because Israel has this kind of biblical background where, unfortunately, a right wing Christians, when they read the Bible, they don't understand who they are in the story.
They see themselves as the Hebrews, and they're not.
They're the Romans.
And I can't emphasize that enough.
None of you people are anything like any of the Hebrews.
You all belong to a Roman society, and that's what we live in now.
So you're right.
I was going to say Babylon, but OK.
It's a far-flung concept for some people to get.
But yeah, even among Latinos, even among indigenous people in my community, you'll find a lot of people, they don't know a damn thing about Israel or Palestine.
They don't know anything about the creation, anything.
They've just been told what the pastor told them or what the priest told them, that we should support one side and that the other side are all terrorists, and the sooner they die, the better.
And it's some of the worst propaganda in the world.
You said it earlier.
Oh, my God, these poor Israelis are being harassed by the Palestinian people.
Yes, the fourth largest army in the world against a nation of refugees.
That's some propaganda there, right?
I think that there's a master of projection that works there.
Very similar to Trump's politics, that's how Netanyahu and the modern right in Israel deal with things.
They say what their opponents will feel will happen to them.
So let's say, oh, my God, the Palestinian people, they want to push us into the sea.
And the people in Gaza don't have the power to keep the lights on in every district.
So how are they going to push you into the sea?
If anything, you're pushing them onto the sea, and you're bombing kids on a beach.
So how is this happening?
Also, let's not get it twisted.
Israel is also, and Palestine is also a very, very functional tool that major corporations use to keep certain people out of the mainstream light.
Like, even this conversation we're having now, some exec somewhere is rubbing his hand, saying, good, I don't need to deal with technique anymore because someone who's this educated about this stuff and doesn't agree with what I say isn't a person I really want to have a conversation with or whose perspective I want to have out there.
But I'll be real with you.
I've met with people who have been longtime fans of mine who are part of the music industry, and I've sat down with them, and I've said, listen, why do you think this?
And this is their question to me.
Why do you think this?
And I'll explain it perfectly.
Is this the way I'm doing with you?
Even better, because I'll have maps and everything in front of me, and they'll look at me, and they'll say, you know, you're not wrong, but I can't agree with you.
You know what I mean?
And I'll say, we have some very honest conversations, or at least we used to.
And I say, you know, can you be honest with me?
Can you tell me, are Zionism and Judaism the same thing?
And they'll tell me so honestly, and I love this, but it's just so sad it can't be said publicly.
They'll say to me, no, they're not the same thing.
But I can never say that publicly.
You know, as a person, I can't speak on it.
And these are prominent individuals, people who have political clout.
So even they understand the propaganda machine that they have to push.
Well, in fact, I mean, there's even a very pro-Zionist argument that we better let the West Bank and Gaza go, because over the long term, if we really keep that land and all those people, then the apartheid will be untenable.
So we're better to go ahead and give them independence than keep them and give them freedom.
Yeah, I think people forget that freedom can't be given to anyone.
It has to be taken.
And I shudder to think what the future of that relationship is, especially since, you know, the United States has done an incredibly good job of coming to other Arab countries and having conversations with them.
Now, when we involve other Arab countries in their complicated relationship with Israel, this talk gets more and more difficult for someone who isn't adjusted to the politics to understand or someone who's brand new to the subject.
So in order to create a long-lasting peace with Israel, we have the UAE and Saudi Arabia as primary partners.
Now, Saudi Arabia obviously has a huge amount of Wahhabist and Sunni militias.
These people, some of them are al-Qaeda.
And for some of your listeners that aren't as familiar with this, that's who they've been sending to fight against Bashar al-Assad and against the Houthi-controlled government in Yemen.
They've been sending al-Qaeda.
And I don't know how to say that any more plainly.
People will say, oh, look this up on Snopes.
He can't be telling the truth.
Who was fighting in Syria against Bashar al-Assad?
Not necessarily a sympathetic figure, if ever there was one, because he's still a legacy dictator.
But who was fighting?
No, you're totally right.
And listen, I'm sorry we have to stop.
Who was fighting against him?
We could start a whole new interview here, but I'll leave you with this.
There's a brand new public relations campaign about Jelani, the leader of Syrian al-Qaeda, that's about to start.
Frontline's going to put out a thing, and there's a whole new push to say he's been rehabilitated and is a moderate rebel now.
And all these things.
I'm so sorry we've got to go.
I'm all out of time here.
But it's Immortal Technique.
Viperrecords.com is the website, and I really appreciate your time on the show here, Tech.
Thank you, man.
Looking forward to coming back and doing some more stuff when the record comes out, man.
I really appreciate your time, brother.
Great.
Absolutely.
Look forward to it.
Thank you, sir.
All right, you guys, and that's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Again, I'm Scott Horton, editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the new book Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Find my full interview archive, almost 5,500 interviews now, going back to 2003, at ScottHorton.org and at YouTube.com slash ScottHortonShow.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
