05/28/13 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is our good friend Sheldon Richman.
He's the vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation and the editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom.
Subscribe today and you'll be able to read my articles coming up in the July and I hope, I think, August issues of The Future of Freedom.
That's fff.org/subscribe.
Welcome back, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
And thanks for having me back.
Well, you're welcome.
You have a website.
It's at SheldonRichman.com.
It's called Free Association.
And you've got an article there today about Revisionist History Day.
And one of the things you talk in there about, you quote actually from this movie, the Americanization of Emily.
And I got to tell you, well, you already know, you've been telling me to watch this movie forever.
You know, politely suggesting it to me for a long, long time.
Well, the wife and I finally sat down and watched it last night and it really is great.
And I usually don't like old movies and stuff.
I don't know.
But it's a good one.
And I hope that people will go to, at the very least, I don't know if it's on Netflix or what, but you can get it at the Pirate Bay.
Just Google that.
And if you know how to get a torrent file, you can get The Americanization of Emily there at the Pirate Bay.
And if it's all right with you, Sheldon, I wanted to go ahead and play this, not all of the best of it, because I don't want to ruin it for anyone, but this is a little bit of some of the great dialogue in the movie, The Americanization of Emily, from 1964, set during World War II, right before D-Day.
So hang tight right there.
All right.
My wife, to all appearances a perfectly sensible woman, encouraged me in this idiotic decision.
Seven months later, I found myself invading the Solomon Islands.
There I was.
And yes, that is Rockford.
Guadalcanal.
It suddenly occurred to me a man could get killed doing this kind of thing.
Fact is, most of the men splashing along with me were screaming in agony and dying like flies.
Those were brave men dying there.
These time they'd all been normal, decent cowards, frightened of their wives, trembling before their bosses, terrified at the passing of the years.
But war had made them gallant.
They had been greedy men.
Now they were self-sacrificing.
They had been selfish.
Now they were generous.
War isn't hell at all.
Man at his best.
The highest morality he's capable of.
Never mind all that.
What's this about a wife?
That night, I sat in the jungles of Guadalcanal, waiting to be killed, sopping wet.
It was then I had my blinding revelation.
I discovered I was a coward.
That's my new religion.
I'm a big believer in it.
Cowardice will save the world.
It's not war that's insane, you see.
It's the morality of it.
It's not greed and ambition that makes wars.
It's goodness.
Wars are always fought for the best of reasons.
Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity.
So far this war we've managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity.
Next war it seems we'll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity.
Not war that's unnatural to us.
It's virtue.
As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers.
So I preach cowardice.
Through cowardice we shall all be saved.
That was exalting.
Come on.
I don't want to ruin it.
Let that be enough of a teaser that people will want to go and finally, you know, make like me, finally go and watch this great movie, The Americanization of Emily.
It really is a good one.
And this is your Memorial Day tradition, basically.
Do I have that right, Sheldon?
That's right.
I've been watching it every Memorial Day for I don't know how many years now, but a few.
It just seems very appropriate.
It's a very, it's a funny movie.
It's a very irreverent.
I think it's one of the best anti-war movies.
And there's a great twist at the end.
You know, it's and James Garner and Julie Andrews are wonderful in it.
It's in black and white.
So anybody who has trouble with black and white, you're just going to have to get used to it.
It's worth it.
It will be worth it.
I promise.
I promise you.
Well, I know I did, Scott, that you finally got around to watching it and liked it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I really did.
And the wife did, too.
And she's so critical at movies.
She will get up and storm out of a movie after just a few minutes or whatever.
And at one point she decided that she did not like it.
And I made her sit for another couple of minutes.
And that was when this scene kicked in.
And then she decided it was one of her favorite movies she's seen in a long, long time.
So well, we should also mention the the screenwriter, the great Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote so many so much great stuff.
But this is just wonderful.
Just to set up that scene for a second.
James Garner plays Charlie Madison, who's a dog robber.
I didn't know what that was before I saw this movie.
But a dog robber was somebody who worked, was attached to an admiral or a general during World War II.
And his job was to make that person's life as comfortable as possible.
Those guys were constantly entertaining, visiting dignitaries or visiting high officers.
And so the dog robber's job was to make sure there was plenty of steaks and ice cream and all kinds of things on hand for wonderful banquets and setting up bridge games and things like that.
So he was very good at that.
He was attached to an admiral there and there.
And he meets a woman, Julie Andrews, in the motor pool who's driving him around.
And they kind of fall in love.
So he's now meeting her mother for the first time.
The mother has lost her husband and lost a son in war.
And she's kind of living in a fantasy world as if they're still alive.
And he, in a very charming way, basically throws cold water on her and makes her realize that she has to acknowledge that these people died and not for any great cause, not in any noble circumstances.
Right.
And now, well, geez, it's interesting to me.
Well, a couple of different things.
First of all, I don't think you could get that kind of anti-war sentiment into a movie nowadays or maybe, I don't know, man.
Like they kind of did that, Matt Damon did the Fruitless Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction movie, but it came out like seven years after they didn't find any weapons of mass destruction.
You know, so it's kind of a big deal.
Nothing that would come out in a way that's really challenging, I don't think, or what do you think?
Well, you know, this is, don't forget, this is about the Great War, the Good War, World War II.
Right.
And this was in 1961 or so.
So it's, you know, it's okay, it's a bit after the war, but it's not that long afterwards.
And, you know, except for Korea, there hadn't been another war at that point.
And yet here he is being, here's Trayevsky being very irreverent about this Great War.
There are a couple of other small, I wouldn't call them speeches, because they're not very long, where he talks about Europe, you know, constantly dragging America into wars and stuff like that.
There's some brilliant moments in this movie.
Well, in fact, the lady he's talking to in that scene, part of what he argues against, although her point is still correct, he just has a different point of view on, you know, where all the responsibility lays and that kind of thing.
But she says, you know, it's a sure thing that after this war, all the secret diaries of the generals and politicians will come out and show us that it didn't really have to happen at all, that it's just the same as all of them.
And that introduces his best sort of speechlet, you know, only a couple paragraphs.
But he says, and I'll quote, I won't quote too much, but he says, I don't trust people who make bitter reflections about war.
It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is.
And it's always the widows who lead the Memorial Day Parades.
And he ends up by saying, and at first she's, the girl, Julie Andrews is sort of offended that he's saying this in front of her mother.
But he says, you know, I don't really blame the generals and the ministers for the wars.
It's the rest of us who built statues to these generals and named boulevard after those ministers, the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields.
We wear our widows' weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.
His whole point is that if we did not exalt the sacrifices, there wouldn't be war because people wouldn't go to war.
They would stop believing it was noble and valorous and, you know, the moral thing to do.
And he tells the story about his own brother dying at Anzio in the war, and that he has a younger brother who's about to turn, you know, the right age where he can join the army.
And his mother, you know, is in fear that she'll now find out her youngest son is dead.
And in connection with that, at the top of my blog post, you'll see a picture of a casket.
This is from early, I believe, in the Iraq war.
A casket is draped in an American flag, and sitting at the casket is an AP picture.
Sitting there, I guess at a memorial service, is the widow looking, you know, very mournful.
And her young son, who looks like he's about two years old, wearing a full Marine uniform.
And I always think of the, when I see this picture, I think of James Garner's words about how, you know, his brother's going to turn military age, and he'll want to be a hero, too.
So, you know, what are the odds that this kid will grow up and die in a war someday?
To emulate his father?
That's the business about perpetuating war by exalting its sacrifice.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and, you know, it'd be nice if we had any kind of honesty.
It'd be nice if people could tell without it having to be, like, instructified to them.
But they could just tell the difference between a defensive necessary war and waging a world empire and dominating and pseudo-colonizing people from, you know, Congo to the Philippines.
I mean, this is, you talk about, in fact, I think it's in, yeah, it's in the movie.
Oh, no, it's not.
It's something, I'm sorry, it's something from the book where, I'm reading a Scahill's book where Admiral McRaven is giving a sheep or offering to slaughter a sheep for this family who, the Delta Force came in, or JSOC, some group of JSOC guys came in and killed three women and two innocent men.
And Admiral McRaven, the head of JSOC, says to them, well, look, you and me aren't really alike.
I'm a family man.
And, you know, I mean, I have kids, too.
But I've spent my whole life in the service of the military overseas.
Even in McRaven's own words, he's not a family man like the guy who he's apologizing to, even though he has a family, too.
But because he spent his entire career killing foreigners in foreign lands, right?
Not defending America, but being an imperialist.
And it's just, I don't know why it's not so stark and obvious to these people.
Even they call themselves the Jedi Knights.
But wait a minute.
Are they the Jedi Knights of the original trilogy who saved the day from the Sith?
Or are they the Jedi Knights of the prequels who destroy everything by conquering the galaxy and enthroning the stormtroopers and their emperor in power before all getting stabbed in the back?
You know?
Yeah, it's just, you know, I'm thinking of the great title of the book by General Smedley Butler, War's a Racket.
And yet we all play this game that somehow it's patriotic and it's the nation that's calling.
And of course, it's never the nation that calls, it's some hack politician that calls.
Because he's involved in, you know, he wants to get involved in a war somewhere, which is always for a combination of political and economic interests.
We need to de-romanticize war.
I mean, that's the point of this movie, the Americanization of Emily.
Take the romance out of war, gosh, and it's sort of what you're saying.
You would think you wouldn't have to do much to take the romance out of war, right?
War is slaughter.
War is murder.
It's blood.
It's gore.
It's getting, you know, injured when your buddy's head is blown off and it hits you.
Another book that people should read is Paul Fussell's Wartime, about World War II.
And, you know, he was in World War II.
You know, we say, war is hell, and people throw that line off like, yeah, I know what that means.
I don't think people do know what that means.
And Fussell's book will explain what it means.
It means being injured when your buddy's skull hits you after it gets blown off.
I mean, that's what war is.
There's no romance in it.
And the moment we take the romance out of it, people will stop fighting wars.
And the politicians might try to get a war going, but, you know, it's like, what if they gave a war and nobody came?
That's what we need to aim at.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and it's the same kind of thing where, back to the obviousness of it all, if we lived in a limited, temporary constitutional republic with the rule of law and all that silly stuff, then there wouldn't be such a thing as war profiteers.
Anything that smacked of a conflict of interest when it came to profiteering off of war would be immediately outlawed.
It would never stand one day of sunshine, right?
They'd be able to get away with it in secret for a minute until they got caught.
And then they'd be nailed to the wall for that.
If America was being invaded by the European Union, you wouldn't have to promise substantial profits and no-bid contracts and cost-plus ratios and all this crap for the industrialists of America to put out the necessary war machine for the American people to defend ourselves with.
Everybody would be pitching in, right?
Like in the propaganda or whatever.
The only reason they need cost-plus is because they're not fighting for their own daughter's life or something like that, her future.
They're just fighting for money.
They need assurance from Congress and from the Pentagon before they put money into developing this tank that you guys swear you're going to buy a lot of them whether you need them or not.
You're not going to leave me hanging on this big tank purchase, are you guys?
In other words, I'm sorry, I'm going on and on, but the system, the economy, is completely corrupted.
The system of government is completely corrupted by this military-industrial complex, and nobody over the age of eight has an excuse for not understanding that and opposing it.
But that goes back to the Revolutionary War, if we're sticking to American history.
There were profiteers, there were speculators in government debt.
It was always there as a potential.
That potential was always there in government.
And the Revolutionary War, they let the profiteers write the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton and his friends.
What this points up is that the written Constitution doesn't count for anything.
The real Constitution is in the hearts of the people, and it doesn't matter what's written down.
It can look really good on paper, but if people don't care about their liberty and are distrusting of the politicians, that written Constitution will be interpreted to the advantage of the war profiteers and other forms of rent-seekers.
And so there's no substitute for our being jealous, to use Jefferson's words, of the government, and protective of our liberty.
We already live...
Look, a friend of mine used to say that North America is already occupied.
It's occupied by the U.S. government.
We need to end that occupation.
Yeah, hey, cheers.
Hey, listen, here's this thing.
I oftentimes, probably talking with you and with everybody else, too, I always try to reference the way I learned it in elementary school and junior high, social studies class and that kind of thing, because I think that, you know, even if it sounds like I'm being jerky or whatever, I think that's a pretty typical and a pretty fair estimation of what regular Americans think.
You know, my seventh grade understanding, at least what they were telling me, not that I necessarily always bought it or whatever, but the message basically is that it's more or less a democracy.
And wherever there's things wrong, the people eventually fix it, you know, like civil rights for black folks and for and and, you know, not having enough government to save us from economic catastrophes and things.
And so, you know, we ended up with a new deal that everybody wanted.
And and we ended up with this giant government that we have and a containment policy against the USSR and whatever it all is, because that's what the people want.
And the reason that people want that is because they're adults and they're smart and they're right and they're Americans and they know what to do.
And even if they sometimes screw up, more or less, American democracy works.
And, you know, in other words, every decision that's been made by previous governments during previous generations are legit because they were made.
The fact that they weren't overturned, I guess, basically means that it was all OK.
And that goes for Eisenhower ratifying the New Deal, as well as it goes for Barack Obama ratifying Bush's terror war, that kind of thing.
And it means that the people who voted for Obama, who was as opposite as they were willing to go from Bush, basically they wanted for Obama to ratify what Bush was doing.
They didn't want to go so radical as to elect a Ron Paul.
They wanted to elect a Barack Obama.
And so they did.
And anyway, the point being that what are you bitching about?
Because it's democracy and it's good and true and it's the will of the people and all of that red, white and blue stuff.
So it kind of the burden is really on you to say, actually, my minority view of American history is much closer to the truth than, you know, the general consensus had it right at the time when they had it.
Well, I would say that these terms like self-government, as it's used in the textbooks, and representation and representative government and democracy and all that stuff, those don't have any reference in reality.
Those are incantations.
They're incantations to distract us and take our eyes off what's really going on.
Because I don't think there's any such thing as self-government, again, in a textbook, in the civics textbook sense, because when, look, when George Bush went to war in Iraq or when Roosevelt did his best to get into World War II, we weren't making that decision.
A small clique of people were making that decision.
And if they either kept it a secret from us or if it was done more openly, it was done on the basis of so much propaganda that the average person didn't have the time or inclination to cut through it and figure out what's really going on.
So the idea that we've made these decisions is just total nonsense.
The idea that we're represented makes no sense.
I mean, a congressman represents, on average, what, a district that has several hundred thousand people in it.
How the heck can he, can a congresswoman or congressman represent 600,000 people or whatever the precise number is, on average?
You can't do that.
Everybody's different.
They don't agree on things.
So what's this nonsense?
It's a fiction.
It's a fiction, as several stories have pointed out.
It's a fiction to keep us under control, because if we can be made to believe that there are representatives, then how can we get mad about what the government's doing?
After all, aren't we doing it?
And politicians love to say stuff like that.
Obama said it recently.
At Ohio State University, he gave the whole the government is us line.
That's what we have to break through.
We'll never break free on this stuff if people continue to believe that.
And yet, you know, people are brought up from a very young age believing it, and unless something really makes them question it, you know, something that crashes through their complacency, they're going to keep going with it, and that means they're going to send their sons and daughters off to war, and they'll come home in boxes, and that will just keep happening.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I just heard an anecdote, a guy who knows a guy who his son was a prison guard at Guantanamo Bay or whatever, some kind of thing, I just heard a little piece of out of context.
That was the whole story.
There was nothing to it other than this wasn't a shame that he had brought upon his family, that everybody at church was now looking at them weird, and that, man, are you kidding me?
You were a guard at Guantanamo Bay?
You know, whatever.
And it's perfectly acceptable to this day, even though I think in the polls most people think it's a bad idea and whatever, but the idea that you would be a guard there, yeah, whatever.
You know, serve your country, fight for freedom, blah, blah, blah.
Every slogan kicks right in, and the idea that we would ever cease exalting those sacrifices or whatever is, you know, it does take a back seat.
And that's the thing.
Like, James Garner's kind of right.
My fourth grade teacher's kind of right, right?
We do continue, people continue to pretend like they were the ones who voted for Roosevelt back then.
Yeah, we decided that we would reform the way things are, and we decided we would go take out Saddam Hussein.
People do love this stuff, and they do identify with it.
And I'm not saying that makes it right.
That's the spin of the state, is that that's what makes it right.
But people are very willing, when al-Awlaki says, and when Osama bin Laden says, that hey, the American people pay their taxes and love it, I'm not saying they're right, that therefore civilians are fair game for killing the way they say it, but they're certainly right about the first part, that Americans line up to pay taxes to the war machine, and in fact, they'll shame each other for not doing their fair share and all that.
Republicans and Democrats think that way, you know?
Oh, right, and they, look, the fact that you even have to, that you distinguish the two parties, I mean, I realize it's common parlance to do that, but it's really one party.
Well, I mean, on a tax issue, people tend to imagine Republicans are a little better.
That was why I threw it in that way.
Right.
Because you do hear conservatives still saying, well, I'm glad we have roads and a military and a blah, blah, blah, and so they really are a bunch of IRS lovers at the end of the day anyway.
Sure, yeah.
This idea that, and this is something peddled by, say, Chris Matthews on MSNBC, that conservatives hate government.
The heck can they hate government when they thought the US government could destroy and rebuild the Iraqi society?
You can't say I'm for small government, but I think government can do that, because that's like a superhuman effort, you know, that if government could do that, then why can't government do anything?
I mean, it destroyed a society, and then we were told it was going to be able to rebuild it and make it this friendly, liberal, modern society that would love the US and operate smoothly and be wonderfully prosperous.
Don't tell me someone who favors that is for small government or hates government.
That's total nonsense.
They just want government to do certain things and not other things, but that's not a dislike of government.
Right.
In my view, they're all on the same side.
Right.
I think I'm plagiarizing Anthony Gregory here.
I think it was him that told me that, yeah, conservatives are good on guns, but they're not really good on gun rights, because they don't believe in rights.
They just like guns, which is why it's perfectly simple for them to hate every part of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Eighth Amendment that bans torture.
They don't care about that.
They just like guns.
Yeah, it's enough to make you a little suspicious, isn't it?
Yeah, just a little bit.
And especially when people wearing the uniform of the United States government have some pretty heavy guns and go to the foreign countries and show them what guns can do.
They're especially like that.
Right.
Well, and on the other hand, liberals won't even take the lesson from Iraq that actually the armed civilians can fight off a foreign enemy.
It might take them a few years, but...
It's funny how the Republicans are getting so mad because of the speech that Obama made the other day at the National Defense University.
I read the speech very carefully.
I don't see where he's changing very much at all.
There's some rhetorical stuff, but it's the rhetoric that turns off the Republicans.
When he said, when Obama said, we can't use force everywhere, there's a radical ideology, Lindsey Graham basically is saying, but why can't we?
How dare you say that?
That's a test of an American.
If you think America should use military force everywhere it wants and not believe there's any limit to that, that makes you a traitor in the eyes of people like McCain and Graham.
But there was no big change, no big revelation in Obama's speech.
All right, now listen.
I'm sorry, because I meant to really give you a chance to go through these, but there's no way that we'll be able to now.
But I want to ask people to please go and look at SheldonRichman.com, the free association blog.
And it's Revisionist History Day 2013, and a great book list of revisionist history, I guess mostly of the 20th century, correct?
Yeah, I do have Jeff Hummel's great book on the Civil War, and I add books as I think of them.
I mean, that's a woefully incomplete list, so I'm constantly adding.
It's a little bit of a something, though.
So I sure hope people will take a look at it, because even though you're right that it shouldn't be, the burden is on you to stake your case out.
And so here it is.
It's at SheldonRichman.com.
Thanks again, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
You can find him also, of course, at FFF.org, y'all, and we'll be right back after this.
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Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights.
That's right.
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There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
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