12/14/10 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today, it's Anthony Gregory, my friend.
Anthonygregory.com is his website.
He is editor-in-chief over at the Campaign for Liberty website.
He's a research analyst at the Independent Institute, moderator of The Beacon, the blog there at the Independent Institute's website.
He's foreign policy advisor to the Future Freedom Foundation and columnist for LewRockwell.com.
He guest edits StrikeTheRoot.com as well.
His writings have appeared in such places as the Christian Science Monitor, the San Diego Tribune, Union Tribune, AntiWar.com, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Counterpunch, the American Conservative, Liberty Magazine, the Mises Institute blog, and my blog, the Stress blog, the Libertarian Enterprise and Liberty in Power, as well as in textbooks, journals, and other outlets.
It's been translated into several languages.
Welcome to the show, Anthony.
How's things?
I think they're going pretty good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on the show.
So, yeah, I was looking through your index of articles here at anthonygregory.com, and I see this article.
I actually read this one a little while back.
What if it were Bush?
How would the left react about Barack Obama?
And this is something that's really been getting me.
If you were to ask the people in the audience what I've been screaming about lately, one of the things is that the polls say that people who support Obama oppose the war, and the people who support the war oppose Obama, and I guess everybody's happy.
The people who love Obama get their Obama, and the people who love the war get their war, and you and me and a bunch of dead Afghans are left stuck out.
Right, because everyone either supports the empire or the emperor.
So that doesn't leave those of us who are just anti-imperialism in general.
We don't have that many allies, really.
It is a very unfortunate thing.
I mean, we were talking about this many times on your show, and I know we've talked about this just on the phone, how we kind of predicted this, didn't we, that before Obama even took power that this would screw up the entire dynamic of the anti-war sentiment.
I'm not talking about the real anti-war types, the good writers that you have on your show, but just the left in general, the voter types, the move-on types, the people who aren't that dedicated but who sounded pretty good under Bush when it came to war issues.
They all love the president, and all the people who don't like the president, not all of them, but a lot of people who really hate the president, one of their big problems with him is that he's not killing enough people abroad.
It doesn't make any sense, especially on Afghanistan, where you get all of these conservatives who've been saying that he's dithering or he's weak on Afghanistan, when in fact he's much more bloodthirsty on Afghanistan than Bush was.
Much more.
He's got 100,000 troops there now.
Yeah, yeah.
He's treating Afghanistan like it's Iraq.
No, it's...
Well, and even on Iraq, he's just going by Bush's agreed status of forces agreement timetable for withdrawal.
He's not doing it any faster like he promised in the campaign.
And on civil liberty, or on human rights and detention policy, you know, it's possible that Guantanamo would have been closed sooner.
I mean, now it looks like the policies are not going to close it.
But, you know, just a few months ago, the policy was, we're going to try to close it within the first term or so.
And before that, as you know, the policy was we're going to close it in a year.
But all of the relevant people in the Bush administration were saying by the end of the Bush years, yeah, we need to close this thing.
It's kind of a problem.
So, it's not clear to me that in the entire foreign policy, surveillance, torture, detention, it's not clear that anything is on balance improved.
And some things have gotten worse.
I mean, it's nice that the president is more anti-torture overtly, right?
But Bush never outright defended torture either.
We have the same kind of mistreatment going on.
Bagram is a huge mess.
It's really something.
I mean, you've got the WikiLeaks thing, where the right wing sounds so much worse.
But on the other hand, most of the establishment left, certainly all the Democrats, the media, they've been very quiet about this.
Or they've spun it in kind of a...
They've given way too much credence to the idea that Assange is bad or dangerous or mischievous.
Or they even blow it off as not very important.
Nothing to see here.
You've gotten that impression, haven't you?
There's just not much...
I mean, what if this happened under Bush?
When I wrote that column, it was a while ago.
What if Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell or any of these people, what if they had been revealed to be as petty?
What if they had the Hillary Clinton syndrome that came from WikiLeaks?
It would probably be considered significant rather than just a joke.
Right.
Or even the stuff about bombing Yemen and having the government of Yemen take credit for it, pretend it was them and lie to the people, claim that they're bombing their own country when really they're having us do it for them.
That would have been huge.
I mean, this is what Kent State was about, right?
The secret bombing of Cambodia.
That kind of thing.
If this was Bush's 10th year right now, certainly people would be absolutely...
Especially the escalation into Pakistan is far more than what Bush had done.
And then expanding into Yemen and now openly talking, not just covert action, but openly talking about further engagement in Somalia, threatening Eritrea now.
Yeah, I know.
We might have actually been able to get a protest together outside for this if it was George Bush doing these things.
Sure, and a few weeks ago when the TSA was a big issue and so much of the left, you know, their stance seemed to be, well, the TSA, it's kind of abusive, but all of this anti-TSA sentiment, it's right-wing opportunism, and even if there was some truth to that, I mean, I would think that's not really the point.
At the height of the Bush horror, the horrible eight years of Bush, when such abuses came to light, when the TSA was established and the first kind of folly and intrusiveness of the TSA became clear, I don't recall the civil libertarian position being, oh, well, this might be a concern, but most of the people who are voicing this concern are funded by communists.
I mean, that's what the neocons used to say about the anti-war movement.
And so I don't really, it's really sad, the TSA thing was sad to see happen.
The defenses of the federal government groping people as though there's a terrorist.
I don't really understand, has the left conceded the whole war on terror, the basic premise of the war on terror to the Bushies?
It's sort of like with the war with Iraq, that, you know, look, I know that they're just asking us to rely on secret information, they can't tell us this stuff, but Bill Clinton and Al Gore agree that Saddam Hussein is a real threat.
And if Bill Clinton and George Bush agree, then you know it's true.
So I guess if Obama concedes that lawless detention and aggressive warfare are necessary aspects of our security, whatever, then I guess Bush was right about those things.
Why would Obama continue it?
Why would we invade Iraq if they didn't do 9-11?
People just make up their own reasons to explain, to rationalize things, why they must make sense, even when, no, they don't, because they're wrong.
You know?
Alright, well anyway, hold on, we've got more like this with Anthony Gregory, right after this.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Chaosradioaustin.org, LRN.fm, antiwar.com/radio, and you know, a few years ago, Matt Barganier wrote an article for antiwar.com called, Dude, You Got Like Totally Plamed, a Glossary for These Times.
This was in October of 2003, and his definition of Democrat in Matt's satirical glossary here is, noun, a politician whose fevers of moral rectitude and fiscal restraint can only be cooled by inauguration.
Yeah, I thought that was pretty good.
Also, democratically, I made a bumper sticker out of this one, democratically, adverb, how civilized peoples loot, oppress, and murder one another, as opposed to the informal methods of barbarians.
But anyway, so, here's what I got to say to you, Anthony.
One, you're right, Obama's terrible.
Vote Republican.
They'll save us.
That's apparently what the American people concluded in the last election.
And then two is, oh yeah?
Well, what do you prefer?
Sarah Palin?
No.
In fact, aside from seeing Ron Paul become the chair of the subcommittee on monetary affairs in the House, there wasn't really anything that happened from the Republican takeover of the House this last month that I'd share.
I mean, in the past, I used to kind of share when one party got thrown out, but not anymore.
I'm not, I don't, I certainly don't recommend anyone support the Republicans.
What I do want is for people to stop supporting the Democrats or the Republicans.
I just want people to withdraw their consent, to refuse to defend these people.
And it sounds like it's not much to do that, but in fact, it does matter if every person who refuses to defend these people, whether you're at a party or you're at the dinner table or you're just talking to a neighbor or a friend, just don't support these people.
Don't support their war.
Don't go to bat for them when they're being attacked.
Let both sides just kind of make each other look bad, and everyone should withdraw their consent.
And it doesn't, it's not the most romantic strategy for peace, but I think that in the long run, it's what needs to happen.
The American people in our country, the Americans, just need to stop supporting a warfare state.
Well, you know, that really is the key, and this is the thing to me, is that really the recognition that the state itself is the warfare state.
That's what it's for.
That's what the government is.
It's the war power.
All the rest of this is window dressing.
And to me, the welfare state, the regulatory state, at least the parts of it which are made to seem like they're for our own good and that kind of thing, is really all just the window dressing, you know, to help pay for your kid to go to college and all that.
Really what it's about is getting our consent for them to be the warfare state.
And that's what their real business is, creating money and killing people.
Well, yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
Before the 20th century, this was what the main expense of governments worldwide was war making.
And that's what governments did for thousands of years.
They made war.
They prepared for war.
And that is the essence of the state.
This whole democracy fad of the last couple hundred years has just been window dressing, as you put it.
And the welfare state is a way to buy off the people.
Corporate welfare buys off the business interests.
The educational government complex buys off the intellectuals.
And the state always wants to have some sway over public opinion because that's what most matters.
And the state is a murder machine.
That's what it will always be.
So, don't enlist in the military.
Don't encourage people to enlist in the military.
Don't go to Memorial Day parades.
Don't support this in any way.
You can support the humanity of the troops, but don't support what they're doing.
Don't couch everything in terms of saying they're the best and the brightest.
I have a lot of sympathy for them as human beings, but don't elevate them either.
And this is a problem that some anti-war people, even anti-war people have.
They put everything in terms of And they assume that the U.S. government's war is legitimate in some sense.
Don't.
It's the empire.
It's the greatest threat to world peace probably right now.
It's definitely tied for the greatest threat.
It's got all these nukes and it's used nukes unlike anyone else.
It's a horrible machine of genocide and mass looting and slavery and torture and destruction.
It should just be opposed root and branch.
If people don't waver on that, then we'll have peace.
Anthony, you talked about how in the past we predicted this.
This is how it is always when the parties switch power.
The people who've been angry are appeased, and the people who've been happy this whole time now get to be angry for a little while, but don't worry, they'll get their pressure relieved in another eight or four years when we switch back again.
But the other thing that we were able to predict, and I think that has come true, is that every time that this happens, especially when the presidency changes party, people with eyes to see notice that things don't really change, that Bill Clinton was really just like George Bush, and George Bush Jr. was really just like Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama is really just like George Bush Jr., and in all of the worse ways, then we get new good guys.
There's a friend of mine who's a hardcore Austrian.
He's read Hans Baum Berwick and every one of these Austrian economists now, and a hardcore libertarian and anti-war guy, and he voted for Obama.
He heard Obama talking about, you know, we could save a lot of money if we end these wars, and he said, yeah, exactly.
Well, then Obama turned out to be just like Bush, spending even more money and expanding the war, even fewer in Iraq, but expanding the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then he heard Ron Paul mention the Austrian school.
Ron Paul seemed to be talking about stopping wars and saving money, and seemed to mean it, and mentioned something about Austrian economics.
Blim, brand new hardcore anarcho-capitalist on our side.
And so, there's a lot like that.
People washing out as the tide shifts back and forth.
People wash up on the shore and kind of can take a new look from a third point of view.
Well, what astounded me was how quickly so many people seem to forget how terrible the Republicans were.
In this last election cycle, this idea that the Republicans would be any better, it's like the Americans can't remember just a year ago, two years, well, it was more like let's say three years ago.
But I wonder if people are going to forget how bad the Democrats were for years.