02/10/10 – Brendan O’Neill – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show Brendan O'Neill.
He's the editor of Spiked.
That's spiked-online.com.
And he's the author of Can I Recycle My Granny?
and 30 other eco-dilemmas.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good, thank you.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for joining us on the show today.
And, you know, I want to talk with you all about the Chilcot Committee and all this kind of review of how Britain got into the Iraq War that's going on over there.
It's most notable to me just for the fact that nothing like it is happening over here, except, you know, maybe on this show and a couple other places.
But unlike the rest of American media, I'm not over Iraq yet.
I still want to talk about it.
So, you know, hopefully we can cover some of that.
But I want to start off asking you about this article you wrote about Voltaire and how, well, American and British society, I guess you're focusing on your own there, your own society over there in England, but you're talking about these guys being prosecuted for free speech and how these Islamist crazies who hate the Enlightenment have really been able to co-opt it because the rest of us have abandoned it.
Yes.
This is pretty interesting stuff here.
Tell us the story.
Well, seven Islamists were put on trial last year for taking part in a kind of angry demonstration against British troops where they shouted at the soldiers, calling them baby killers and murderers and everything else.
And they were put on trial for basically inciting hatred and causing a public disturbance.
And it was a really interesting trial because the lawyers representing the seven Islamic protesters quoted Voltaire and said, they quoted Voltaire's views on free speech, which is summed up as I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
And I thought it was really interesting that these Islamists who, as you say, have a kind of instinctive suspicion of the Enlightenment and of Western tradition and Western democracy would be able to cite Voltaire in this fashion.
And I think it really demonstrates how much Voltaire has been abandoned by the mainstream in British society and in Western society more broadly when he can be kind of co-opted in this way.
And I think what the Islamists were effectively saying was they were effectively daring British society to override Voltaire.
It was a very clever move because they were saying, look, if you find us guilty, if you denigrate our free speech, you are writing off 300 or 400 years of Enlightenment traditions.
You are denigrating Voltaire himself.
It was a very clever thing for them to do to hold up this great Enlightenment thinker.
And then the trial came to its conclusion at the beginning of this year, and they were found guilty of causing a disturbance, of going too far, of using disturbing language.
And they were fined and given suspended sentences.
So they were right.
British society has abandoned free speech, and it was a pretty shocking state of affairs.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny, too, because you point out in here that one of them had a sign outside of the trial.
I forgot the exact quote, but something to the effect of freedom is a joke.
Look to Islam, that kind of thing.
And it seems like this is what always happens, right?
The best of us, the best of our principles end up taking the blame.
So if there's any amount of freedom in the marketplace, well, that's obviously to blame for whatever is wrong with the economy.
It could never be the fact that we've completely abandoned the ideas of free market capitalism if we ever had them, you know, here in the Virginia Company, otherwise known as the United States.
But it's always the freedom's fault, right?
And so here in this case, the people of England, like the people of America, have turned freedom into a joke.
And so, you know, the bin Laden lover outside actually can get away with it.
He's got a good point.
Yeah, I think I would say that it's the government of Britain primarily that has turned freedom into a joke.
But, you know, it's kind of overridden our right to free speech.
It's imposed lots of petty new rules and regulations about how we can behave and where we can smoke and where we can drink and everything else.
And it's denigrated some really important traditional civil liberties like habeas corpus, the idea that someone is should never be imprisoned until he's been found guilty of a crime.
All these things have just been written off over the past 10 years, both before 9-11 and also after it.
And I think what these is these Islamists were effectively saying outside the court was, you know, they had a placard saying, as you say, freedom is a joke.
Turn to Islam instead.
And, you know, lots of people in the West, lots of kind of pro-war activists and pro-war commentators will often say that these foreign Islamic Islamic people, these crazy Islamists are destroying our traditional freedom.
But what I think this case really showed is that it's our own societies that are rubbishing these traditional freedoms.
It's our own governments that are undermining them.
And the role of the Islamists, if they have one, is basically just to laugh at that process and to point it out to us and to say, look, you have no freedoms.
It means nothing.
So I think it's really inaccurate for the kind of warmongers and the scaremongers to say that these Islamists are destroying our way of life, because what's very clear is that we ourselves are destroying it.
And the Islamists just react into that fact.
Well, you know, here in America, we have a lot more kind of religious conservatism and more, you know, you know, fundamentalist.
You know, every word is literal truth kind of thing.
I guess you guys kicked all the Puritans out and they all came here.
So we have a much more conservative society in that sense than you guys.
But there are a lot of people on both sides of the Atlantic here that really you would think are basically the products of the Enlightenment.
Right.
We call it liberalism.
Just generally speaking, there are lots of people who value science and education and good arguments and whatever.
But you kind of attack liberalism in this article as sort of reactionary Enlightenment thinking where they've really kind of abandoned Voltaire and exchanged him for what?
I'm not sure.
Yes, I think that as well as the kind of mainstream governmental attack on Enlightenment values, there has also been a denigration of the Enlightenment by its defenders, which is kind of ironic.
Some of the people who claim to be defending the Enlightenment are actually kind of ossifying it because they're turning it into a list of ideas that you have to adhere to and a list of outlooks that you have to accept.
And ironically, they're turning it into a religion.
So these are the kind of people who will scaremonger about Al-Qaeda as the greatest threat to civilization.
And they will say, we're defending the Enlightenment and Al-Qaeda is trying to destroy it.
Or they will say that anyone who questions scientific truth or scientific reality in relation to global warming or anything else is a sinner and a denier and a heretic.
And it was never the tradition of the Enlightenment to treat its doubters and its critics as heretics.
In fact, the Enlightenment was the precise opposite of that, the opposite of the Inquisition, which was all about denouncing people as heretics and deniers.
And the Enlightenment was supposed to be something new.
So I think in those various ways, both in the way in which these Western liberals obsess with Al-Qaeda and present Al-Qaeda as the greatest threat to the Enlightenment, and also the way in which they turn the Enlightenment into a list of scientific truths that you must accept.
I think in the process, they are unwittingly denigrating the Enlightenment as well.
So I think we need to be careful about both the mainstream governmental attacks, but also the defense of the Enlightenment, which actually harms it.
Well, basically what you're saying is the liberals have become conservatives.
They've adopted the conservative means of using state power to keep things the way they are, that at least as much of what's good about the way things are that they think they can't.
Yeah, well, the problem with British liberals and the British left is they've often relied on the state to do their work for them.
So they basically see the state as the real agent of change and the real agent of social control and social management.
So they look to the state as the solution to social problems, whereas I think a libertarian, and I consider myself a left-wing libertarian, would not look to the state as the solution to all of society's problems, but would rather look to ordinary people, to social solidarities, to local communities, whatever you want to call it.
So yeah, I think liberals and left-wingers have become too reliant on the state to resolve problems, and that gives rise to new forms of control, new forms of censorship, but it tends to be done in very PC language.
So, for example, the new Labour government here, cheered on by some left-wing activists, introduced the Religious Hatred Bill in Britain, which basically makes it a potential crime to criticize or mock or laugh at other people's religious beliefs.
And it's presented in a very politically correct way to protect ethnic minorities and to protect Muslims in particular and other forms of religion, but it's old-fashioned censorship where basically our thoughts and our speech is being controlled in the name of protecting a minority.
So the problem in Britain is not that we have religious fundamentalists or Christian fundamentalists or a right-wing religious movement or anything like that, but we do have increasingly, and especially under new Labour, we have left-wingers and liberals who are pushing through new forms of PC control really.
Well, you know, we should get back to the original story here, which is kind of blowing my mind, honestly.
The First Amendment in the United States, which presumes to protect people's natural right to free speech, has been decided by the courts to stop at a compelling state interest or a clear and present danger like yelling fire in a crowded theater, which is kind of a silly argument anyway.
But that's the line as it's been drawn by the courts here.
But this court, according to your article here, said that this protest, where these guys were convicted, criminally convicted I believe here, their protest was disproportionate and unreasonable.
And you're saying here, if I understand you right, this is now the law in England, that disproportionate and unreasonable according to a judge is the limit of the free speech of an Englishman?
Well, we have so many new, the phenomenon of the new Labour government, which came to power in 1997 and is still ruling and will probably be thrown out of office this year, I expect.
But under the new Labour government, we've had so many new laws and crimes created.
And most of them are kind of directed at controlling what people can do and what people can say and how people can behave.
And there have been numerous amendments to laws or new laws which basically criminalize certain forms of speech.
So there have been amendments to laws on incitement.
So you now can be accused of inciting hatred by giving an inflammatory speech or by talking too loudly or by saying hateful or abusive things about other people.
There are new laws governing how loudly you can protest on demonstrations, what you can say on them, how angry your placards can be, all sorts of regulations governing our right to protest and our right to free speech.
And so, as you say, these guys were found guilty of unreasonable protest and disproportionate anger.
And so it comes to the situation where a magistrate, a kind of, you know, this individual judge can decide when someone's anger is good and when it's bad, when someone's protest is acceptable and when it's unacceptable.
So in other words, there is no real free speech and there is no real right to protest.
Because if a judge can say that protest went too far or that speech was too inflammatory, then it means there is no free speech and there's no right to protest.
So it was a very, very worrying case.
And as I said earlier, the fact that it was left to these seven Islamist individuals who don't really care about freedom, we can see that from the statements they've made over the past few years.
But the fact that it was left to them to wheel out Voltaire really showed that the mainstream British society is in a pretty bad state.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
And of course, I mean, as I learned this, you know, before I was 10 years old, I think that the whole point of the law is that even if it's Satan, you give him a fair trial.
Because it's not about him, it's about you and that kind of thing.
It's better to let a thousand guilty men go free than to destroy the life of one innocent man by locking him up in a cage.
You know, this is not, if this is the Enlightenment, I don't know what took humanity so long, but I learned it before I was in the double digits of years around, you know, times around the sun here.
And it doesn't seem so difficult for me to understand.
I can't imagine how anyone's really willing to just throw all this away over, of course, over wartime arguments.
We're dealing with this in the United States, too, this stolen valor thing where not fraud, right?
Not where someone pretends to be, oh, I was a Navy SEAL, and then they go and get a free car out of it.
But just saying, oh, I was a Navy SEAL in the bar or something is enough to now get someone prosecuted in the United States.
And we'll see if that stands.
It's extraordinary.
And I think the key thing with free speech, which people sometimes overlook, is that it's not only the individual speaker who's right to be an attack.
It's not only these seven individuals in the British case whose rights are being undermined.
It's everyone, because free speech is an attack on the speaker, but it's also an attack on the audience.
It's also an attack on the public, because what the state is effectively saying is that we don't trust the public to hear these views without going off and doing something crazy in response to them.
So speech is curtailed both as a way of punishing the speaker, because he's seen as having gone too far or said too much or whatever.
But it's also controlled because the state has this view of the public as a kind of unpredictable ticking time bomb of fury and hatred.
And if we hear an Islamic spouting nonsense, or if we hear a right-wing Christian guy, or if we hear one of your shock jocks, you know, Michael Savage is still banned from coming to Britain, because our government thinks if we hear his views, we'll go out and attack minorities.
So the argument is that the British public is too volatile and unpredictable and probably a bit stupid.
And if they hear these views, they will just react to them.
So it treats us all as kind of attack dogs, where we hear an instruction and we go out and attack people.
So it's deeply patronizing of the public as well.
So I think we ought to defend people's free speech, not because I think these Islamists have got anything particularly interesting to say, but because free speech has to be universal, either everyone has it or it doesn't exist.
And also because I trust the public to hear these views and to rationally decide whether they are good or bad.
Well, yeah, that's the real point, right, is whether we have a market of ideas or not.
And this is another thing that seems to be a basic kind of truth that we learn as kids, which is that, you know, at least this applies to the adults.
The theory goes that once you're an adult, you have at least somewhat a responsibility to, you know, know how things are and make them better.
And you can.
And, you know, we're not living in the age of the divine right of kings.
We're supposed to have, you know, you guys have a parliamentary system.
This is supposed to be a constitutional republic here.
And the whole theory goes that we all are capable of reason and self-government and figuring out what's best.
So censorship of arguments just leads to distortions.
You know, for example, it makes Holocaust deniers feel vindicated when they're outlawed from speaking, when actually someone ought to be able to defeat a Holocaust denier in an argument pretty easily, but instead they get to claim the moral high ground.
Absolutely.
That's really true.
The other problem with free speech is that all these ideas, which, you know, some of these ideas really are backward and crazy and stupid or untrue.
But as you say, the only way to defeat that, the only way to put it right is to have a full on public debate and full freedom for all views.
You know, John Stuart Mill said the only way a human being can know if he is right or not is by having a completely free and open public debate.
It's the only way in which you can know that you are right.
You can't ban other people and say, I'm right because I've banned them.
It just doesn't add up.
So, yeah, absolutely.
The danger with censoring things is that it just kind of pushes them underground.
It never defeats the idea or challenges it publicly.
So it allows it to fester like a puff on the side of, you know, on the side of kind of normal society.
And it gives them this kind of sense of glory.
You know, the people who have been censored have this kind of frisson of excitement.
You know, we are the good guys because the whole state is ganging up against us.
So it just creates this kind of strange situation where ideas are never had out.
Arguments are never take place in a public realm and therefore things are never fixed and sorted.
So it just leaves everything in a kind of strange stasis.
I'm talking with Brendan O'Neill.
He's the editor of Spiked Online over there in merry old England.
It used to be merry.
All right.
So now here's the other thing, too, is, you know, not outright censorship.
But, you know, there was a ton of a ton is not the right way to describe it.
There's a very strong sense of fear pervading people in media, which they only had to fear for their jobs.
I don't know what's so scary about losing your job.
But in the run up to the Iraq war, as Dan Rather called it, you'll get necklaced with the burning tire of not being a patriot.
You're there to question the government.
And this is something that you guys are going through, going back over the Iraq war and the lies that the politicians told.
But you had a great article in The Guardian about all the wide and varied people who bear responsibility, particularly in media, for shutting out real anti-war arguments and pushing the craziest of war propaganda on the people of England and the United States in the run up to that war.
And this is a war that has, as we'll be talking with Michael Schwartz about a little bit later on, has caused more than four million refugees, as many as a million deaths, at least hundreds and hundreds of thousands of deaths and wreaked havoc for Western society as well as that of Iraq.
Well, the problem we have in Britain at the moment is that at the time that the war was being discussed in 2002 and then when it started in early 2003, lots of the media were very uncritical.
They denied a lot of the propaganda.
They push forward all these kind of crazy stories that lots of us knew were untrue because we just asked some probing questions, as you ought to do.
But what's happening now is that the media is kind of rewriting all that.
And we have this strange situation.
I never thought I would find myself saying this, but I sometimes find myself almost defending Tony Blair because he's now being demonized through this Chilcot inquiry and through the media's reporting of the inquiry as the man who single-handedly took us to war.
He duped the entire public.
He warped our minds.
He poisoned our minds with all these crazy stories.
He led us astray.
It's all his fault.
And I think what's happening is that the media is turning him into a scapegoat for their own failures.
And other politicians are also turning him into a scapegoat for their own failures as well in relation to Iraq.
So I constantly find myself reminding people that 412 members of parliament in Britain voted for the Iraq war and only 149 voted against it.
Now those 412 members of parliament are not so stupid that they were just duped and brainwashed by Tony Blair.
They believed him because they wanted to believe him.
And the media believed lots of his stories as well.
So I now find myself in a very strange situation because I am an anti-imperialist and I am anti-war of saying look let's not just focus on Blair because that's going to distort the history of this war.
Let's have a proper understanding of why Blair could get away with what he did which is because he was believed by politicians who voted for his conflict and he was believed by large sections of the media who managed to convince some of the British public but not all of us that this war was worth fighting.
So that's the peculiar situation we find ourselves in Britain at the moment.
Yeah well and you know the whole run up to the Iraq war was such an amazing thing because really you know I remember a lot of the polls on the eve of war here were 50-50 where 50% of the people were going look man Iraq didn't do 9-11 and they're not really a threat and we don't trust these Bush people to you know line us into this thing and pressure us like this to do this.
And then the other 50% of people thought how could you all be opposed to a war against the guys who did 9-11?
You know and so you had I mean it wasn't just Scott Ritter and Justin Raimondo it was 50% of the American people knew it was bull.
And huge numbers of British people didn't accept it as well.
I mean it's worth remembering that in February 2003 just 3 or 4 weeks before the war started there was a demonstration in Hyde Park in London where there were 1 million people and that is a huge demonstration in a country of 60 million people and they all said we don't want this war.
So there was a lot of public reaction against it and the story I wrote about in the Guardian which came out on the eve of the war on the 18th of March 2003 Ann Cluyd who is a Labour MP here she published an article saying that Saddam Hussein had a people shredding machine where he would put his opponents shred them and then put their remains into plastic bags and then use them as fish food.
I mean the most lunatic story you ever heard and no one questioned it, no one challenged it and then I investigated it about a year afterwards in early 2004 and there was absolutely no evidence for it at all.
And what that story effectively was it was the modern day version of the babies being thrown from incubators because at the start of the first Gulf War in 1990 and 1991 there was this crazy PR driven story that Iraqi soldiers were taking Kuwaiti babies from incubators and throwing them on the floor and using the incubators electricity.
It was just completely invented and the people shredding story was the same thing it was used just as the war was about to start in a desperate bid to kind of batter the British public effectively blackmailing us into supporting this war.
The headline on her article was see men shredded and then dare to say you don't support this war.
It was a form of political blackmail and it's those kind of stories I think we need to remember just to remind ourselves that Blair and Bush did some terrible things the WMD thing was a whole load of rubbish but at the same time there were other propaganda stories that were widely disseminated across the media and we need to hold those to account as well so that we can understand the broader hysteria that existed in the run up to the Iraq war.
Well just for the record here because this is something that we haven't been covering very much on this show and it certainly has not been covered very much in the American press at all.
Has it in fact come out in this Chilcot Inquiry that the Tony Blair regime knew good and well that they were lying about missiles about Al Qaeda about mustard gas 45 minutes away etc.
Well it's very the Chilcot Inquiry is very I would urge American listeners not to get too excited about the Chilcot Inquiry because although you don't have anything similar in America it's important to recognize that it doesn't have the jurisdiction to find anyone guilty it's not going to press charges against any of these politicians.
It's basically we described it on my website Spiked as a kind of therapeutic talking shop.
It's basically therapy for the state rather than a real a real way of getting to grips with what happened and holding people responsible.
So it's an area for the state and the media to come and tell their stories and people have cried there and people have made passionate speeches and all this.
It's basically a form of therapy for the state to get over the crisis of Iraq which is really kind of narcissistic and self-serving.
But you know I think it's widely known now in Britain by the vast majority of the public and the vast majority of the media that Blair told lies and that he exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
And I think that's pretty much established and the role of the Chilcot Inquiry is basically just to allow the British government and the British state to kind of brush all this stuff under the carpet so that they can get on with business as usual and that business as usual will include more foreign intervention.
You know we're still in Afghanistan.
We still think we have the right to invade other countries.
So the problem with the Chilcot Inquiry is that it talks about Iraq a lot but it's not going to resolve the politics of interventionism that gave rise to that conflict in the first place.
Wow.
Well you know all you guys need to do is just elect a black guy with a funny name and then you won't have to go through all this terrible rehashing evidence and testimony and stuff because that's how America got over Iraq.
We chanted the surge works.
The surge worked about 75 times and then we changed political parties and skin tone barely of our executive leadership.
And now as far as the American people and certainly the American media are concerned Iraq doesn't even exist.
It never happened.
Don't worry about it.
And the fact that there are still 110,000 American troops there and plus God knows how many contractors just has nothing to do with anything anymore.
You can't find reference to Iraq on the news anywhere.
So I'm glad that you guys are going to have the chance to get through this cleansing and forget about it.
Well I think you'll feel great afterwards.
Yeah it shows the real danger.
I think both in America in different ways in America and Britain there hasn't been a real reckoning with what happened in Iraq.
And by that I mean a real proper debate about who was responsible.
What were the politics driving this war.
Why did the war go so horribly wrong.
All those serious questions have not really been addressed and signed off.
So the danger is that under Obama you're going to have more interventions.
You know he's very keen on the Afghanistan thing.
As you say they're still in Iraq.
You know you guys bombed Somalia recently.
I think there's going to be you know you're bombing inside Pakistan or very frequently.
And I think that's the danger of not resolving these issues in an honest open political fashion with principles and proper debate is that the responsibility for Iraq is never really decided.
And the problem of future interventions is never really going to be sorted out.
So we need to have a proper discussion rather than just having the Chilcot thing over here and rather than people over there just thinking Obama has fixed all those problems.
Yeah well especially as the heat and all the propaganda about Iran heats up more and more.
That's the most dangerous one of all.
You can kill Somalis all day with minimal blowback.
But messing with Iran is a whole other thing.
All right everybody that's Brendan O'Neill.
He's the editor of Spiked Online at spiked-online.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thanks Scott.
While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming to the hospital with guns.
They took the babies out of incubators.
Took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.
They had kids in incubators and they were thrown out of the incubators so that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled.
Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Well I think it's important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy.
Behind the conflict.
I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said for instance at CNN here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war.
And we got a big thumbs up on all of them.
That was important.
Should they have used more?
Should they use a Moab, the mother of all bombs?
A few daisy cutters?
And let's not just stop at a couple of cruise missiles.
The newest, biggest, baddest U.S. bomb.
We'll pound them with 2,000 pound bombs and then go in.
2,000 pound bombs in urban areas?
Oh sure.
The plan I'm holding in my hand here, the F-117 stealth fighter was used in these attacks significantly.
How do you steer this thing?
You have a stick, is that right?
The White House says it can prove that Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction.
Claiming it has solid evidence.
The White House insisted again today it does have solid evidence that Saddam Hussein is hiding an arsenal of prohibited weapons.
They might fight dirty using weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, or radioactive.
There are ties between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
Anthrax, smallpox.
Dirty bomb.
Iraq-Al-Qaeda connections.
Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda share the same goal.
They want to see, both of them want to see Americans dead.
The President is essentially giving Saddam for free.
The President is essentially giving Saddam 48 hours to get out of Dodge.
War now seems all but inevitable.
Short of a bullet to the back of his head or he leaves the country, war is inexorable.
Well, I think that's exactly right.
War is inevitable.
And it is approaching inexorably.
Is war with Iraq inevitable right now?
I think it's 95% inevitable.
You, at this point, right now, tonight, don't see any other option but war.
Do you?
I'm asking you, Ambassador.
I agree.
I don't think there's a viable option for the administration at this point.
We're way too far out front in this.
Send us over there, guys.
Let's get on with it.
Let's get it over with.
Showdown Iraq.
If America goes to war, turn to MSNBC and The Experts.
I must say, I was trying to think of something that would be appropriate to say on an occasion like this.
And as is often the case, the best you can come up with is something that Shakespeare wrote for Henry V.
Wreak havoc and unleash the dogs of war.
Did Colin Powell close the deal today, in your mind, for anyone who has yet, objectively, to make up their mind?
I think for anybody who analyzes the situation, he has closed the deal.
This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today, Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today.
Colin Powell was outstanding today.
I mean, it was lockstep.
It was so compelling.
I don't see how anybody at this point cannot support this effort.
He made a wonderful presentation.
I thought he made a great case for the purpose of disarmament.
It was devastating and overwhelming.
Overwhelming abundance of the evidence.
Point after point after point, he just flooded the terrain with data.
It's the end of the argument phase.
America has made its case.
The Powell speech has moved the ball.
I think case is closed.