All right, y'all, welcome back to the thing here.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is the great Anthony Gregory.
He writes for the Independent Institute at independent.org, the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org, lourockwell.com at lourockwell.com, and a lot of other great places as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, kid?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
I think we're probably both getting a little too old for me to call you kid anymore, but anyway.
Oh, that's okay.
Yeah.
All right.
So listen, you got this piece in the Future Freedom Foundation's Freedom Daily, which I don't guess is online, but it's still very important.
I want to interview you about it anyway.
Non-interventionism, the cornerstone of a free society.
It seems like that's a pretty important topic, especially when so many people are saying things like, well, I really agree with Ron Paul on pretty much everything except his foreign policy.
Well, certainly in the context of our country and our time, I'd say that if there's any issue that's more important than any other, it's war.
I like what Gary Chartier said.
I'm pretty sure he said when we're talking about politics, there's war, and then there's everything else.
And of course, everything else can be very, very important.
I mean, when we're talking about state power, it means life or death, or it means prosperity or poverty.
But when we're looking at the U.S., especially, and empire, war is it.
War is the issue that drives so much of policy in American history.
We've lost more freedoms because of war than because of any other reason.
And war expands the government.
And of course, war in itself is mass violence against the innocent.
Modern war is murder, mass murder.
And in fact, calling it mass murder is kind of understating it, isn't it?
Because when most people think of mass murder, they think about some loon shooting up 20, 100 people, which, of course, is about as terrible a thing that you can do, unless we're talking about war, which is that times a thousand or more.
And yet people really recoil at that.
I wrote a thing on my Facebook page the other day referring to war as mass murder, and a guy immediately went like, whoa, hey, now, come on.
How can you say that it's mass murder when it's clearly something entirely different?
Well, people are programmed to think that when the state does something, it's in a different moral category from when private actors do the precise same thing.
But with war, private actors don't do it.
I mean, there's small-scale acts of organized violence, but war is pretty much the state's, they've cornered the market on that.
And people think war is patriotic, or at worst, it's a mistake.
Many liberal opponents of Bush's Iraq War, I don't think ever really went nearly far enough in condemning it, because for them, it was this horrible kind of retreat from what the U.S. empire should have been doing.
It squandered resources, it made the U.S. empire look bad, it made the U.S. government look bad.
These are not the worst things about war.
In fact, making the government look bad might be the very best thing we can say about war.
The Iraq War wasn't just some sort of mistake or some tragedy.
I guess the only thing that's worse than war would be just outright genocide, you know, just deliberately rounding up hundreds of thousands, millions of people, and just killing them outright.
But war deserves to be put in the same type of category as genocide, rather than being put in the same type of category as some sort of great project for the fulfillment of the national will or whatever people see it as.
Well, you know, I guess to illustrate this idea is sort of just to show how absurd it is, but I think people really can imagine, and it's within my imagination, of a situation where, I don't know, the Europeans and the Chinese form an alliance and combine all their navies together, and they sail over here to drop nukes on us and kick our ass and kill as many of us as they need to in order to take our stuff.
Like when the aliens invade, in all those movies we see about the aliens invading, with no other motive but aggressive war against us.
And I could see how people would say, oh yeah, well, we're the Americans and we're going to fight back against that.
The only problem is, every bit of our government's aggression is dressed up as that.
Even attacking outright, just rolling into and invading Iraq the way they did, was sold as preventing you from getting nuked in your jammies in the middle of the night, which is, you know, we can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud.
This is not a preventive war, but a pre-emptive one, as though that European navy was on its way, when it just wasn't.
But people still to this day are caught up in that, where, I mean, come on, we're talking about red, white, and blue here.
How could it possibly be that our side are the aggressors, the war criminals?
It just can't be, to so many, it seems like.
Well, it is true that if an aggressive war is being waged against you, you have some moral right to resist, and people can defend their communities and their neighborhoods.
It's not always prudent to fight back, even, because it often is a failing endeavor and just exacerbates problems.
But certainly justice would be much more on your side than the aggressor in that.
The problem comes when rallying behind a state to try to defend you, because states are not defensive organizations.
States do not come to the defense of the people during a war.
At the best, they force the people to come to the defense of it.
The state is always the enemy of the people, and during a war, this becomes even more, this becomes clearer.
But what's interesting is, you're right, Americans tend to see U.S. wars as being synonymous to Americans fighting back against some empire coming in and, you know, cutting off our resources and maybe embargoing us and starving us, depriving us of what we need, putting up barbed wire, torturing people, rounding up Americans and disappearing them into the night, bombing civilians, killing many thousands of us in the streets.
The irony is, this is what the U.S. does to other countries.
Every U.S. war is somehow sold as being the exact opposite of what it is.
We say, look, the U.S. government is the Minutemen, or the U.S. government is defending against the imperial regime coming in.
Germans.
It's always the Germans.
The Germans, sure, but in any war, the U.S. is far more analogous to the German occupiers than it is to the Minutemen.
I mean, the insurgents in many of these countries fighting against the U.S., they're more analogous to the defenders.
And I don't even side without qualification with them, because they, too, engage in atrocities at times, and they, too, commit acts that are not just morally problematic, but very prudentially problematic, which shows that, again, in a war, usually both sides are wrong.
It's just that one side is usually more wrong.
So that's war.
And in most of these wars, the U.S. is more wrong.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know.
It's one of these things where the lie is so big that it's really dumb at this point.
I mean, come on.
We've been at war since 1941.
This country hasn't been invaded by another military, hasn't been attacked by another military since 1814.
You know, September 11th, while Pearl Harbor was an attack on a territory we'd only just stolen 20, 30 years before that, and or finished, you know.
Sure.
And September 11th, that was attacked by a band of pirates, not a state.
And yet our government has killed millions since the beginning of our intervention in World War II.
Millions of people.
So it seems like the kind of thing where maybe difficult and kind of easy to snap out of at the same time.
Maybe.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Anthony Gregory after this, y'all.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm speaking with my friend Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute, the Future Freedom Foundation and LewRockwell.com.
And, you know, Anthony, I'm looking at my Facebook feed here, and there's a clip going around from Fox News 10 in Phoenix of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department tasing a military veteran to death with their electric stun guns.
And I was wondering if that guy was wondering as he died whether all that killing he did over there was really for freedom or not.
Well, it wasn't for freedom.
But certainly when a veteran is in a civilian capacity in the United States and is being murdered by a police officer, in that instance, I side with the soldier.
I find it interesting.
We've seen increasing cases of veterans being killed by police officers and various altercations and being assaulted by police officers.
And many journalists will tend to note that these soldiers have come back fighting for freedom, only to be abused.
I try to resist the temptation of elevating veterans into some moral status, anything any higher than anyone else.
But I also don't condemn them for what they...
Although I'm very anti-war, I don't think it's morally any worse or any less bad for the police to kill them.
But it does...
No, it's just more ironical, you know, like...
It does speak to the irony.
You're right, Scott.
It is ironic because, of course, they're not fighting for freedom.
And the police state that's just getting worse and worse here at home is testament to that.
That these wars...
You'd think we'd have an awful lot of freedom by now with all these wars we have.
But in fact, the wars have just exacerbated the police state, made it worse at home.
Well, you know, I would think that people would not believe it anymore since it just so obviously isn't true.
No, war is not good for the economy.
Just look around.
No, war is not for freedom.
Just look at the laws passed.
I mean, these people used to say we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight over here, but they don't even pretend that anymore.
They say America's the battleground.
We can put Anthony in military prison forever if we want to.
I mean, hell, Michelle Bachman every day provides material support to the Mujahideen e-cult communist terrorist cult.
She could be in prison without charges.
Just basically, you know, if I had power on my own, say so right now under this system the way they're doing it.
How could anyone?
And you know what?
This goes for why we ought to bomb Iran.
It goes for everything else too.
It's all just slogans.
Nobody has a real argument for why we ought to bomb Iran.
Nobody has a real argument that, yes, Johnny killing people in Iraq is making me free here.
They never have an explanation.
It's like astrology.
Yeah, Anthony, you are the way you are because of where Jupiter was in the sky the day you were born.
I don't have any cause and effect that I could even pretend to explain to you whatsoever, but it's just the way it is.
I mean, that's how stupid and non-reasoning all of this is.
And we're talking about, you know, at least substantial minorities of the American people who are just, you know, will go along with this no matter what for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, and it's kind of alarming how people are falling for the Iran propaganda when just a few years ago, you know, the American people went along with this war in Iraq.
And now even most people who were for the war thought that, you know, that war wasn't the greatest idea and a lot of the reasons we went in.
Of course, the warmongers will say, well, everyone thought they had weapons of mass destruction.
Everyone thought that, well, you know, of course you didn't and I didn't and many others didn't.
But the point is, this propaganda works even as the other wars aren't even wrapped up yet.
I mean, here we are in the middle of a couple completely botched cataclysmic wars and they want to start another one and people should just say, no, I don't care what you say.
I don't believe you guys.
You guys are terrible liars.
You guys are war criminals.
Everything you say is a lie.
We're not going to listen to you.
And these people don't even come up with anything the least bit compelling.
They just lie again.
They say the IAEA says that they're minutes away from having a nuclear bomb and then they say Iran wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, wants to nuke America.
They just lie after lie after lie.
And I mean, that's all there is to it.
There's no nuance here.
They're just lying.
Right.
And you know what?
I actually saw a really great explanation of the Hitlerian big lie last week.
It was a clip of Norman Finkelstein talking about how Alan Dershowitz on the Harvard website accused Norman Finkelstein's dead mother of being a Nazi collaborator.
And Finkelstein says, I've seen this kind of thing before in Mein Kampf, where Hitler explains that if you tell a lie big enough, people will buy it because they otherwise they would have to believe that you could be so brazen to tell a lie so big.
And it's easier for them to believe the lie than to believe that they're being lied to.
And so and Finkelstein even says, and I know there are people in this room right now, even though just now for me is the first you ever heard of this.
You're thinking maybe there must be something to it.
There must be something to it.
His mother, who had gone through, you know, lived in the Warsaw ghetto and had survived Auschwitz.
Right.
Oh, there must be some kernel of truth to that.
I know you're thinking out there in the audience right now.
Same kind of thing with Iran.
Everybody knows they're making nukes.
Everybody knows they're making nukes.
And everybody does know that there's something nuclear over there.
And so it doesn't matter if there's a real argument.
It doesn't matter if Alan Dershowitz has a shred of evidence for his assertions.
What matters is it's out there and people just come to believe these things.
Yeah.
Even though virtually every major U.S. war has been waged on a mountain of lies.
I love Robert Higgs's article to make war presidents lie.
This is like a fact of nature that people need to come to terms with.
I remember when Colin Powell gave his talk at the U.N. in 2000.
I guess that was in the beginning of 03, right?
The big talk where he said, here, look at these chemical weapons labs and blah, blah, blah.
And a number of people I'd known that were on the fence before said, well, geez, you know, he looked at what he said.
He was in that big room, the big U.N. room.
And I just thought, well, he's lying.
He's lying.
The people who got him to say this are probably even lying more.
They're capable of lying.
Anyone who sees himself as being worthy of holding the moral calculus over when to bomb, who to bomb, who to torture, who to detain indefinitely.
You think these people see that they're above lying?
You think that Obama or Bush or Clinton thought that lying was beneath them?
Anyone who's willing to wage a war is willing to lie.
Right.
I mean, yeah, of course.
And plus, everybody already knew about Colin Powell.
He's a good soldier, man, which is a great euphemism for he will do whatever his bosses tell him.
And we all know that about him.
That's what makes him such a great guy is that he is one heel clicking son of a bitch.
Yeah.
And, you know, of course, the the the stories about how all that came about came out later, where Dick Cheney apparently had said to Colin Powell, you're giving the U.N. speech because your poll numbers can afford to take the hit.
And Powell said, OK.
Right, because somebody's poll numbers are going to suffer when it comes out that it's all lies.
And so they all knew they were lying.
And my funny anecdote of that day is I was painting a house with my friend Adam.
I wasn't even painting.
I was caulking the cracks in the side of the house, preparing to paint.
And we're listening to the the speech before the U.N. on NPR and point by point by point.
And you could ask my buddy Adam.
He'll tell you a point by point by point.
I debunked each and every assertion that they had.
And if it wasn't one that where I already knew everything about it, it was still just pointing out that like, what did he just say?
He has a drawing of what a mobile biological weapons lab might look like if such a thing existed like what the hell.
But when it came to aluminum tubes and the Niger forgeries and on and on and on and on and on, here I was painting the house.
And I knew better than all the people who immediately rushed to their microphones and their cameras and to their newspaper typewriters to proclaim what a great job he did and how convincing it all was.
It was like that time Adelaide Stevenson proved the nuclear missiles in Cuba back in 1962 or where 61.
Yeah.
People want to believe you think by now people wouldn't want to believe because look how expensive these wars are.
It's horrible.
I don't believe.
Well, hey, the Iraqi people are way better off now, even if we're not.
No.
OK, that's a lie, too.
Sorry.
You never run out of those.
All right.
Thanks very much, Anthony.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
That's the great Anthony Gregory, everybody.
FFF dot org.
The Rockwell dot com.
Independent dot org.
Anthony Gregory dot com to.
