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Music Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Next guest is Charles Featherstone from LewRockwell.com.
Music And yeah, this is the part of the show where we pick on little kids, stupid little kids.
Welcome to the show Charles.
How are you doing?
Not bad.
How are you doing Scott?
It's good to be back.
I'm doing good man.
I appreciate you joining us.
Hey listen, so we're not really picking on this little kid.
We're picking on the people what brainwashed her and what they brainwashed her into believing.
Although, you know, how old is she?
She may be getting to the age where she could be responsible for her own stupid things.
In some religion she already would be.
Alright, well if this was fair I would have invited her on the show to debate you or something, but it's unfair.
We're just going to pick on her.
So what is this?
The littlest liberal warmonger at LewRockwell.com.
Yeah, I was listening to NewsHour, BBC NewsHour podcast a couple of weeks ago, and they had this interview with this girl who, she was 13, she's a Canadian, her name is Elena Padmarov, and she'd started a charity where she helps Afghan women go to, Afghan girls go to school.
And nothing sort of inherently wrong about that, but there was just something in the tone of her voice, sort of a sharp, brittle certainty that this was the right thing and she calls herself a human rights activist and believes that school is a fundamental right.
And there was just something a little wrong about just hearing her talk.
So I went and looked a little bit and found that I'm not the only person who's questioned this, but this is, you know, it's that kind of certainty.
We're going to help people because we know exactly what's right for them.
And it's Afghanistan, so we're not just dealing with helping people, we're dealing with helping people who at the same time we are bombing.
And I'm not entirely sure how that's helping, but there are a whole bunch of people who do, especially in the light of that Time magazine cover, I think it was what, last month, late July, early August, the young woman with the nose that had been cut off, and apparently her ears had been cut off too, and the caption, this is what happens when we leave.
Not failing to note that this is what happened when we were there.
Right.
Yeah, never mind that.
It has nothing to do with it, I guess, for some reason.
This is what our occupation looks like, could have been the caption, and there you go.
Yep.
And so there was just, there is just very, very much a, it's sort of wired into Western thinking, and it's more a liberal thing than a conservative thing, but conservatives have it too, because it's very, very much a Christian ethic, which is the wrong that other people perpetrate, if we can stop it, is worse than any wrong we may do in stopping that wrong.
Did that make sense?
Yeah, in other words, the ends justify the means.
In essence, yes.
I don't think Christian ethicists would put it that way, but it ends up being a cornerstone of Christian and Western ethics, that it is worse to watch someone else do a wrong than to do a wrong yourself.
Yeah, well, that's funny.
I don't know how you quantify these things, right?
I guess it depends on the circumstance, doesn't it?
So it's perfectly okay then for us as Westerners, as Americans, Canadians, Western Europeans, to engage in violence, to drop bombs and occupy, than it is for us to stand back and do nothing while they hurt themselves.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, you have so many assumptions built into this wrongheadedness that it's hard to even know where to begin, really.
I mean, first of all, to say that everyone has some unalienable right to education implies that they have the right to initiate force on others in order to make them provide themselves with education or something, which is ridiculous.
So that couldn't possibly be right just from the very get-go.
But then, secondly, Canada is the world government now, and Canada is now the world policeman and the arbiter of women's rights in their neighborhoods, in the Hindu Kush mountains.
I mean, come on, man, what are we talking about?
This is madness.
Well, I have known many Canadians, and they are very nice people, but Canada, based on what I have heard, is a place that has gone a little bit overboard, in part because the Canadians can't piggyback on American power.
So they don't actually have to do a lot of the hard work themselves internationally, although Canadians have, to the extent that the Canadian military has participated in UN actions and taken some casualties.
And as I understand, Canadian casualties in Afghanistan have been a political issue in Canada.
But the Canadians are like a lot of sort of progressive, liberal, left-wing Europeans who demand more than they are capable of forcing the world to do.
But getting back to this insistence on universals, and I am trying to remember who said it, and I read it recently, but anytime you make a claim to a universal, you are also, in essence, beginning imperialism.
Well, I mean, the thing is, I don't really agree with that.
It depends on how you go about it.
I mean, I guess it's always easiest to just cite Rothbard, because he already went over every bit of this, right?
Universal rights locally enforced.
Of course, we believe, and I don't know whether Rothbard ever really got around to proving this in the Ethics of Liberty or not, or what, but at least we can settle for the Declaration of Independence.
It's self-evident truth to us.
That's as good of an argument as we're coming up with, but we're sticking by it.
And that is that everybody is born with just as much divine right to rule their own life as King George III had, and that's what we all believe, and that does go for everybody in Afghanistan.
But that has absolutely nothing to do with, or it shouldn't have anything to do with necessarily taking a step and saying, therefore, let's empower our national state to, first of all, destroy all of our liberty in order to go and masquerade like they're protecting the rights of anybody anywhere else in the world, which is never even their purpose anyway.
Of course, it's all window dressing in the first place.
But this girl, she's 13 years old, I think you say in the article, right?
And so when you're 13, you just trust the government, especially the whole myth of democracy is that what the government does is what the people want it to do, and whatever it is that the people agree on in majority is the right thing, or else they wouldn't have agreed on it like that.
And so, of course, the Canadian government's efforts to protect women in Afghanistan are legitimate, or their efforts to protect women in Canada are legitimate, so why not export that?
Of course.
You know, it all just goes without saying.
In a way, I guess you're right.
It's the first step toward imperialism, if you don't stop for a minute and break it down a little bit.
Or consider the means that you are using.
And like you, I am an anarchist, and so while I happen to believe that freedom is the highest value, I also happen to believe that there are going to be people who are going to understand what it means to be free differently than I do.
Of course.
Well, and you're also the kind of guy who's traveled the world to all different cultures and lived there and experienced them too.
So you really know how that is, huh?
Yes, yes, I do.
And, you know, in a great many ways, Saudi Arabia is a very free place because it's a good place to be Saudi, if that doesn't sound strange.
And I didn't meet many Saudis who were pining over what they couldn't do.
Well, I mean, it's a hell of a police state as well, though.
That cuts your head right off in the town square, right?
You know, I wouldn't call Saudi Arabia a police state.
I think in order to be a police state, you have to have a lot more police than Saudi Arabia does.
Saudi Arabia doesn't have a lot of police.
But they don't need them, I guess, huh?
You know, there are all sorts of different ways to maintain and ensure security.
And I think that when it comes to dealing with the Islamists, they do a pretty good job of gathering intelligence.
And I think there's a certain amount of discretion involved.
If you are discreet in what you do, no one's really going to bother you.
All right.
Well, you know what?
I don't know.
I'm kind of out of questions for this whole.
Hillary Clinton-esque.
Well, on one angle, I'm not out of questions entirely.
You know me.
But this whole, like, Hillary Clinton bomb the women to liberty thing, like, I don't really know what else to go over here as far as that is concerned.
I think a way to keep some support going for the Afghan war from quarters that are most likely to support this, given that support is flagging otherwise.
I mean, it's not a particularly popular war.
The right is elements of the right are going to support it because it's a war.
And that's what the right does.
But it's also Obama's war.
And and and.
Oh, music.
But yeah.
Well, here we'll just end with this for this segment.
It's Charles H. Featherstone from LewRockwell.com.
I was just going to work in here.
Remember, the WikiLeaks posted that CIA document that said this is how to keep the French involved in the war in Afghanistan.
Emphasize women's rights.
Apparently, that's what they have to do for the Democratic population as well.
Everything you think is a CIA plot out there.
You better you better work it over.
Make sure.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates dot LRN dot FM and join us on Facebook at Facebook dot LRN dot FM.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and we're wrapping up this segment, this hour, this show for the day.
Happily, with the help of Charles Featherstone from LewRockwell.com.
Now, Charles, back to the whole Saudi Arabia thing.
OK.
I was wondering if you could, you know, say something wise about Islam and Islamists, as you just called them, and the mosque controversy in New York and the clash of civilizations between us and them and we and they and hydrogen bombs and what's going on on this planet.
Well, there's part of this I don't quite know what to make of, but I think the general unease and it's not just the Cordoba house in lower Manhattan, but it's it's about Islamic centers and mosques all over the country.
There are protests, attempts to stop them.
And I think part of it, part of it's just a way to keep the Republican base going.
But that's probably not all of it.
I think a good deal of this has to do with some frustration, even almost despair that the war isn't working and hasn't worked, that we've been at war for almost 10 years now, attempting to dominate people and they are still resisting.
All right.
Well, you know what?
I think I want to ask you what I was going to try to ask Juan Cole before the music started playing on him and ruin the end of that interview.
And that was that most Muslims live far away from North America.
And and a lot of times even the ones that live here, they dress different and they wear funny hats and they seem kind of different than us and can't understand what they're talking about if they're next to us on the bus or something.
And so it's kind of easy for this picture to be exaggerated on to the conclusion that for some or that permanently Western civilization and Islam are incompatible with each other, that September 11th was just the beginning of our new Cold War, if we're lucky, against this new giant Islamic Soviet that's coming to get our ass.
And I got to know whether that's really true or whether it's possible that the West, if the West survives one way or the other, can continue to to exist in a compatible, copacetic type way with Islam for the long term future, Charles.
Well, I don't believe that this should be the beginning.
It should not have been the beginning of a new Cold War.
Most Muslims don't care.
And by not not caring, they are not angry enough to want to engage in this particular kind of violence.
Islamist organizations like Al-Qaeda and organizations similarly motivated have attempted to sell violence and use violence, and every time that they have, it has been exceedingly counterproductive.
They just engage, they have Sharia and their understanding of what Islamic law is doesn't have enough support.
Nobody's going to vote for it.
And nobody really wants it.
So the whole notion that there are people, it's grounded in some fact, but they just don't have enough support to do anything but engage in some violence, and some pretty horrific and destructive violence, but not violence that's going to take over the world.
Or even it sounds like a single state in the Middle East.
No, they've not been successful.
The only place Islamist movements have been terribly successful is that is where they have had external enemies.
And even in Iraq, where they had an external enemy, Al-Qaeda in Iraq engaged in such horrific violence that the Iraqi Sunnis turned against them.
But everywhere they've managed to do violence, they have survived in Egypt, but they had to stop doing the violence.
But in Palestine, they managed to do it because they managed to survive.
Hamas has managed to survive because they are able to position themselves against the Israelis.
And the Taliban manages to survive because they are able to position themselves against the Americans.
But every time an organization like this fights a local government, they lose.
Well, you know what?
Maybe I have it wrong.
It seemed to me that what we're talking about with, you know, the so called war on terrorism and all that, basically is that for very earthly political reasons, such as support for kings in the region and the strangulation and bombing of the Iraqi people off the face of the earth and all of that, that, you know, we got ourselves in a fight with this militia that used to be friends of ours back in the days in the 1980s.
And that, sure, they dress up what they're doing in kind of religious veneer, but what they're really about are earthly political things.
But maybe it's the other way around, that they're Islamists, and they're motivated by their extremist form of Islam.
And they just drape themselves in politics in order to try to cast some legitimacy on what's ultimately their crazy religious belief that really is their motive.
What do you think?
No, I think the politics comes first.
And actually, probably, I would say one of the most important and influential political figures of the second half of the 20th century is Franz Fanon, who wrote Wretched of the Earth and I Think the Damned.
He was the Afro-Caribbean doctor from Martinique, who was in Algeria.
And his language of resistance to Western colonial rule has become the language, and it's even the language Al-Qaeda uses.
If you read English translations of Sayyid Qutb's Milestones, he talks essentially in the language of socialism, because that's the audience he was writing to in the 50s and the 60s, people who understood the language of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, and the language of socialism that was abroad in the world.
So that was the language he spoke.
And it's very much a political vision.
It's a political vision rooted in revolutionary violence.
It's a political vision that is as much inspired from the left as it is anything else.
And it's never had any particular broad currency, because those who have espoused it have engaged in pretty horrific violence almost as soon as they can.
And when given a choice between their governments and the revolutionaries, even people who don't like their governments, for the most part, will go, well, they are at least the enemy we know, and we can at least live under them.
Well, I think the polls verify that, right?
The recent Pew poll had it where, you know, the average guy on the street in the Middle East is not very likely to respect his government at all.
But he doesn't respect Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri either.
If anything, they like Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Yes.
And that's Islamism in a Shia context, and that is different than Islamism in the Sunni context, because it has worked differently in the Shia context.
But Hezbollah, again, has basically positioned itself against Israel and manages to, like the Ikhwan al-Muslimi in the Muslim Brotherhood, or like Hamas, have managed to deliver in, you know, social services and things that people need that they can't get elsewhere.
Well, it's interesting, you know, when you talk about the kind of radical revolutionary part of the bin Laden ideology reminds me of Loretta Napoleone's book, where I think she describes him like if you read his stuff about economics, he really sounds like a Leninist.
And that's what it is.
And I could see why Leninism wouldn't be all that popular in the Middle East, maybe.
I think, in fact, if I scratch my forehead and think back, Charles, I think maybe that's why the British and the Americans worked so hard to support right-wing religious parties all across the Middle East and Central Asia, whether radical or conservative, to be the alternatives to the socialists.
In the 1950s, for example, Bernard Lewis, who, you know, 10 years ago was counseling support for democratic revolutions, Bernard Lewis was telling the United States to support the Saudis and the Hashemites, because Gamal Abdel Nasser and Arab nationalism and Arab socialism was the boogeyman.
Nasser was at one time the next Hitler.
With the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Nasser was the next Hitler, and that's why the Suez War was fought.
All right, so now, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm beating this dead horse with every single guest on the show today, and I think I'm going to keep going after it.
It's an argument I feel like I should have won years ago, based on simply the number of times I've made the same argument over and over again.
I should have won by now.
But we're still having this argument about the motivation of those attackers, and the War Party wants us to believe it was because of their religion, even if it was a radical interpretation of it.
And it seems to me the parallel the other way, if it was like the new Red Dawn movie coming out and the Chinese-occupied America take Islam out of it, it would mostly be the most right-wing Christians with guns who would be the militia guys fighting them, maybe even trying to get to China to kill people there, but it wouldn't be because Jesus mandates it the most or whatever.
It's because people who are right-wing religious types with rifles are the most likely to do that kind of thing, you know, no matter where in the world they are.
It is my belief that this is primarily a political struggle, but it uses the language of religion.
And for many people it is a religious struggle, but it is also a political struggle, and I think it's primarily political.
Well, I sure hope that somebody learned something from that, because, you know, it really did.
It's such a terrible metaphor, but it's just the same.
It's straight from the image.
The attack came out of the clear blue sky.
There was no explanation for it, and there hasn't been this whole time, really.
And the fact that, you know, you and I have ours and it makes sense doesn't mean it's filled the void.
No, we got to keep working on it.
And a lot of people want to believe they did it because they hate our freedom.
Yeah, well, we got to get over that.
But don't think about it.
It's more than halfway through 2010 now.
We got to get over it.
All right.
Thank you, Charles.
Charles Featherstone, everybody.
LewRockwell.com slash Featherstone.
See you tomorrow.
Thanks for listening.
I really do appreciate it.
