07/05/07 – Chris Floyd – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
What's going on over there in the United Kingdom, if that's alright, Chris?
The biggest hoorah-rah since, I don't know, the last no big deal terrorist attack, I guess, in the TV news has been these failed car bomb attempts.
Yeah, of course that's pretty big news, although I believe it's actually been bigger news in the United States than it's been here.
Yeah, it seems like it.
I saw some clips of American reporters asking the British, so how is this going to change your life from now on?
And the people are looking at the American reporters like, what are you talking about?
What are you, a sixth grader or something?
Well, of course, I mean, you know, you have to remember, that's all the British remember is that these terrorist attacks and failed terrorist attacks and these terrorist plots, they don't come anywhere near the actual honest to goodness terrorism they had for years here with the IRA.
I mean, you know, they were blowing up department stores, they were blowing up pubs.
My wife lived not too far from Guilford where they blew up that pub several years ago in that famous case.
But, so I mean, this kind of thing doesn't really throw them as much.
I mean, they made a pretty big deal of it here.
No, I would say they didn't actually.
I would say there wasn't nearly as big a deal as made of it as say the last time.
For one thing, this new Gordon Brown administration, government as they say over here, they've downplayed it just a little bit.
Whereas the Tony Blair gang tended to do the Bush route, you know, and just whip it up to high heaven and then come out, you know, three days later with some new laws.
So they sort of downplayed it, I think, in a fairly good way.
I noticed that the New York Times, I think it was, said that Gordon Brown's downplaying of the events served him very well, that his poll numbers went up.
So apparently, at least in Great Britain, column sells as well as fear.
No, absolutely.
No, I mean, you know, this happened, I think, the day after he took office.
Could have been, no Thursday, it came and happened the day after he took office.
And so, no, I think they played it very well.
And yes, of course, what he did was, so far, now I'm not saying, you know, who knows what would come of this.
I'm not sitting here giving a blank endorsement of Gordon Brown by any means, but what he did in this situation was he treated it as they did the IRA bomb as a law enforcement matter.
You know, it's like, okay, this is a danger.
He made the usual statement, this was a great danger, and blah, blah, blah.
But, you know, our police are looking into it, we're looking into it, we're making some arrests, we're doing this and that.
It wasn't, let's go find another country to bomb, or it wasn't, you know, the same sort of histrionic reaction that Tony Blair tended to have.
Of course, Gordon Brown is a bit of a, he's one of these doer scots, you know, he's a sort of a much more phlegmatic man, he is sort of doer, he's sort of dower, you know, and he doesn't have that sort of flippity-jibbit quality that Tony Blair did, you know, sort of, you know, grinning sort of silly stuff that Tony Blair had.
So that's a more calming presence anyway.
But no, the most remarkable thing about all this, besides the fact that these bomb plots, just like most of the last plots over here, are completely amateurish, you know, as you probably know, although I don't know if the CNN watchers over there know, that none of these car bombs, because they actually, were actually very explosive, I mean, the ones they found in the London Club, if it was packed with gasoline and nails, and it was rigged to explode, but it didn't have the sort of accelerant that car bombs have, the real car bombs have, say, in Iraq, you know, you have to have something like a, you know, a grenade or something that would really explode it out, but what would happen here is these things would just probably, if they managed to detonate them, which they didn't manage to detonate them, they would just caught on fire and burn on the sidewalk.
And just as those guys that broke into the Glasgow airport, their car bombs didn't go off either, they set themselves on fire or something, I'm not quite clear what they did there.
But no, I thought the most remarkable thing to me about it was the, you know, watching the American press and observing the American press from over here, and the difference, you know, I mean, as far as I could tell, you could, you know, you tell me if I'm wrong, but for a couple of days there, you had 24-7 of this over there, you know, CNN, you know, ticker tape, but in the end it was a failed terrorist attempt, and as I said before, they've had many, many successful terror attempts over here in the last 30 years, and the people tend to know that, you know, the sky doesn't fall if a bomb goes off somewhere, even the big bomb, even the big one they had here a couple of years ago, you know, the subway bombings, you know, the next day there were people riding around in the same areas and stuff, you know, they got on the same buses, and my wife was working in London at that time, and so, you know, she was having to go to work the next couple of days, and so there's just not this sort of life shuts down and we must give all power to the government sort of thing, amongst most a lot of people, although of course there is an element over there, we have our neo-conversions over here too, but they're much more muted.
It's really strange, the media thing, now I can't correct you on CNN's coverage, I think you're right, I watched about five minutes of it on MSNBC, and I turned it off, and I'm not going to sit here and watch, oh boo hoo, a car nearly caught on fire somewhere 3,000 miles away from my house, give me a break.
Well yes, I know, it caught on fire 3,000 miles away, which obviously means we have to pardon Scooter Libby, you know.
Yeah, exactly.
They don't save our country unless they pardon Scooter Libby.
Right, and you know, Ashley, the little bit that I saw was the news lady saying, they actually showed a clip of apparently they have some kind of ray gun that answers back to its computer and can show you the inside of somebody's car, looking, you know, through the steel doors on the side of somebody's car, and they actually show a couple of frames of pictures of this, and they say, well see, the technology exists, but unfortunately it's just not feasible to do complete scans of every car in America, so what are we going to do?
Oh God, I know, that's the whole attitude, you know, it's like, if we could do it, we would do it.
I mean, that's the most scary thing, of course, you know, this is a cliché by now, but it happens to be true, so far as I can see, the scariest thing about the war on terror is our reaction to it, you know, and what it has shown of great swaths of the American people, you know, this total sort of, this panic mode, this willingness to give over our liberties, this willingness to, you know, give power and trust these transparent poll prunes, you know, in Washington.
You know, it's not been a very edifying spectacle, actually.
Well, I'll tell you, I have this fantasy that, you know, someday I'm going to have a flux capacitor, and I'll be able to go back in time and somehow do something to make sure Harry Brown wins the presidency in the year 2000, and I have a feeling that if Harry Brown had been the president then, and had told the American people, listen, don't be afraid, you're not in danger, you're more likely to be struck by lightning a few times in the same place, or falling in the bathtub and hit your head, or something as to be killed by a terrorist, you don't really need to fear, personally, and also furthermore, let's understand how terrorism works.
The action is in the reaction, we're talking about people who are basically powerless, people who, in order to attack us, have to hijack our planes to do it, and what they want is for us to freak out, and so what we're going to do instead is be grown-ups and not.
And what do we do?
We act exactly like the terrorists want us to act.
It's insane.
I mean, absolutely, it was the most, you know, strategically it's absolutely the worst thing you could do, psychologically it's the worst thing you could do.
Yes, absolutely, we did, we followed their plan completely, and as you say, the reason they resort to terrorism is because they have no power, they have no power to actually change our system, which we're not trying to do anyway.
They actually have no power to make us change our behavior, as we can see, you know.
A terrorist attack didn't keep Bush from invading the very heart of the Muslim world, so, you know, I mean, no, absolutely, if someone had said something like that.
I think the American people would have bought it.
I think the American people would have said, hey, you know what, this guy, Harry Brown, he's right, this is a reasonable thing to say, and I'm going to listen to him.
I think that, you know, people are willing, like any, even in the UK, as these Gordon Brown poll numbers have shown, calm sells too.
It's just a matter of, you know, which brand of emotion your politicians try to force on you.
Absolutely, well, I mean, yeah, what sells is, you know, I think what sells is a confident tone, you know, you can say you can be confident and rational, which they've done so far in this thing, just in this instance, and as you say, we could have done in 2001, or you can be confident in your, you know, idea that we're going to attack the whole world, and people will go along with that confidence, you know.
And also, confidence helps too, you see, because they arrested four or five people suddenly, and it also helps that they caught, you know, those guys set themselves on fire, so they caught them.
They caught them, but, of course, they've done much better this time around than they have in the past about getting in their alleged this and alleged that.
You know, over here, they've done the same thing that they've done in America, and some of these terrorist scares, you know, people are arrested, and it's automatically assumed they're terrorists, and they have these long stories about, they talk to their families, and, you know, what makes this person tick, and it turns out later on, well, they weren't a terrorist in the first place.
You know, they were just caught up in this gigantic net that's thrown out every time a Muslim gets caught for jaywalking, you know.
But they've done a lot better this time about not convicting them beforehand, which, you know, you absolutely never do in the United States.
As soon as someone's arrested, then, you know, terrorists were arrested today in Lackawanna, New York, you know, this sort of thing, and it turns out later they're paintballers or something, but, yeah, so they've done better on that.
What do we know, what do you know so far about the accused in these cases?
I'm reading stories say that they're doctors that were hired by the National Health Service.
Yeah, I haven't, you know, I haven't delved into that deeply, because one reason I haven't followed all the media stories is because in all these terror cases here in, I feel like George Bush terror cases, terror cases over here in England, and in the United States, the initial reports are almost all wrong, or it all shakes out differently, you know, in a few weeks or a few months.
And so that's one reason I actually haven't been following that closely to, you know, all the ins and outs.
But yes, what I do know is that, as you know, I think seven people arrested have been doctors.
Yeah, they're doctors from the Middle East, from Iraq, I think, Lebanon and things like that.
Yeah, they've come over here to work in the NHS.
Well, I don't understand.
What possible motivation could an Iraqi have for wanting to bomb anything in England, Chris?
Gosh, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know if England's ever had anything to do in Iraq, have they?
Well, they hate us and they want to kill us because they hate us and they want to kill us.
No, no, I was reading a very good column today by Seamus Mills.
I don't know if you've heard of him.
But he was making the point that England had not been hit by any, Britain had not been hit by any of these Islamic terrorist attacks until after the Iraq War.
Now, see, Blair used to try out the same excuse that Bush does, you know, when people would say, is there no connection between, don't you think there's a connection between the invasion of Iraq and these terrorist attacks?
And Blair would always say, you know, there were terrorist attacks before the invasion of Iraq.
There were terrorist attacks before 2001, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But Mills was pointing out today, he says, yes, that might be true because the Islamic terrorists used to attack the United States, installations and so forth.
But there was no attack on Britain until the Iraq invasion.
Right.
And he made the further point, which I thought was very good.
Here's one thing Gordon Brown did do that I didn't agree with and I thought was a bad thing to do, because they asked him this question.
They say, Mr. Brown, don't you think this new attack has to do with the war in Iraq?
He said, oh, no, no, it's an attack by, you know, an evil ideology, a perversion of Islam, and they're trying to destroy our way of life.
Of course, this is bull, as Mills points out, is that if these people are against, you know, the so-called liberal Western way of life, why aren't they attacking Sweden?
Why aren't they attacking Denmark?
Why aren't they attacking Germany?
They're attacking the countries that invaded the Muslim heartland.
That's what they're attacking.
So Brown is bought into this, or he's using this, you know, cynical Blair Bush ploy of pretending that there's no connection between these terrorist attacks and the Anglo-American war in Iraq.
If Brown keeps going with it, this is going to be a very corrosive element, because this is what helped leech away support for Tony Blair, because if you hold this completely transparently in the same position, you're going to lose all credibility.
Even if you agree or disagree with someone's policy, but if you sit there holding something that's transparently inane, then you lose all respect on top of everything else.
And so they are following that line.
But of course, of course, why would an Iraqi doctor, you know, he may just, you know, why would he want to take revenge for?
We know, what was it, almost two years ago, 650,000 dead civilians.
It's probably very close to a million dead civilians.
Now, you know, we're talking about a million people out of a nation of 25 million killed in this war.
So, you know, no, I mean, it's not, no one condones terrorism, no one condones dousing yourself a gasoline and driving into Glasgow Airport.
Although I've been to Glasgow Airport, you might want to dash yourself a gasoline after a couple hours in there.
But no one condones it sort of thing.
But to say that it's not understandable or there's no reason for it or that it's just tied to some sort of blank, you know, seething evil, it's just stupid.
And it doesn't serve anybody very well.
Well, you know, I like the way Ron Paul says it.
He says, listen, when somebody commits a murder, presumably, at least the police investigate the motive of the murderer and that doesn't excuse what he's done.
A murder is still a murder.
Well, absolutely.
That's part of the main, otherwise why investigate the murder?
Of course they investigate the motives of the murderer.
They want to try to find out why the murder happened, you know.
And you certainly want to do that in case of a criminal organ gang that started operating in your neighborhood.
You find out who are these people?
What do they want?
What are they after?
You know, this is how you combat them.
This is how you understand them.
This is how you break them up by figuring out what they're doing.
But this is supposedly the most important thing that's happened in the last 5,000 years, you know, Islamic terrorism in the United States.
We're not supposed to think about it at all.
We're not supposed to investigate it at all.
We're not supposed to question anything about it at all.
I mean, it's just, I don't know, I mean, we talk about this and you and I know this is really, really stupid.
But in the end, you know, it is so dangerously stupid, really.
I mean, it's sort of easy to kind of shrug it off and say, well, what can you do?
We got a stupid president, a stupid group.
But, you know, this is really dangerously stupid.
And it's going to come back on us in a really, really bad way.
You know, it's not going to, anyway, but that's another story, perhaps.
Well, we are past the era when Britain and or America or any other European imperial power can go around the world killing who they want and not have to suffer consequences.
I was reminded yesterday when I was reading up on this story a little bit of the Onion headline from 1901, which was the Zulus have invaded England and are holding the Queen at Spear Point.
You know, showing how silly it is, the idea that, you know, it's OK for England to go around mass murdering Africans in the south down there in the Boer War and all that, as though somehow these people are a threat to England.
And the joke is right that a Zulu could have even gotten anywhere near England or near the Queen to do anything to her at all.
And yet now we're in a different time where, you know, well, I guess if the Boer War was going on now, there would be Zulus trying to figure out how to get to England to commit acts of what they call terrorism against people in that country.
Of course, because they have been part of the same reason why there's so many Muslims and Pakistanis in here because of the empire.
They went over there to conquer this country and of course, a lot of people came back over here.
I mean, no, yes, we're past the time of a sort of imperial immunity or impunity to all these sort of the consequences of their actions.
And it's just, I mean, I think the payback is going to be horrific and we just keep going on and on.
If we stopped right now, if we stopped right now and adopted the most enlightened policies and the most, you know, effective policies and quit killing people everywhere all around the world, even if we stop right now, we've got generations of blowback coming for all this.
I mean, even if we stop right now, I mean, you know, you could mitigate a lot of the effects if we did, if we reverse policy or whatever.
There's going to be people out there who are going to say, oh, great, it's fine now, you've changed the way, but you killed my father, you killed my grandfather, you killed my child, you know, I saw them blown apart in my eyes.
I don't care what your policies are now, I'm coming after you.
I mean, you know, I'm from the South, there's people that are still mad about the Civil War.
I mean, they'd probably go up north and blow up a building, you know, if they wanted to.
You know, they're still mad about that.
You know, you killed my great granddaddy down there in Chickamauga, what you talking about?
But again, it's all right for us to hold these grudges, but we think no one else is going to do it.
We're going to think all these people are going to just, I don't know what, actually, I don't know what these people think, I don't know what the Bush people think.
I guess they really think that they can just cow people into submission, you know, if we just keep killing enough of them, you know, if we kill enough of them over and over and over again, they're just going to give up finally.
And I suppose there is some historical basis for that.
I mean, to me, it looks like to me just replication of what we did to the Indians, you know, because I sometimes wonder if the circles of power, they actually have this idea, they actually have this conversation, you know, that, you know, if you do go hard enough on these people, if you do go hard enough on people, if you do keep killing them, you will eventually break them, you will eventually wipe them out.
So I think that's what their idea is.
Certainly, that's the idea the Israelis have in Palestine, is to treat them like the Indians.
But of course, the only problem with that is that the Indians were already decimated by disease and stuff that had been picked up when the settlers first came.
I mean, their civilization was already decimated when we began our Indian Wars against them.
So it was easier to conquer them.
It sure didn't work in Vietnam.
No, it doesn't work.
It doesn't work if, you know, it doesn't work if the, you know, if the people are already half wiped out with disease, but I just wonder if this is what's in their mind, because that's the only rationale I can see behind such a strategy.
If we just keep killing enough of them, if we're just badass enough of them, they're going to back down.
Well, and that is the only rationale that the war party offers when it comes down to it, is that, look, these people only understand one thing, force.
And of course, it's people who only understand one thing, force, who say that about whoever it is they're using force on.
But that is their excuse that ultimately, the Arabs will never stop being your enemy until they're so frightened of you that they dare not fight back.
Well, of course, you know, what is it, you know, let them hate us, but let them fear us, you know, that sort of Roman crap they come up with.
Well, the point now that, yeah, I mean, there is, there's a half truth in that, and the half truth is that the Arabs are not going to stop hating you until you get out of their land and quit killing them.
And then they will stop hating you, and they won't care what happens to you one way or the other.
That's the sort of thing, you know, I don't understand why we don't, I think we should cultivate a little more mutual self-interest all over the world.
We should say, well, I don't care what happens in the Middle East, I don't care what the Arabs do to each other.
And the Arabs would say, I don't care what they do in the West, I don't care, you know, they wouldn't, they don't care, they don't, I don't care if they let the women go unveiled over there.
I mean, they don't care what's going on, you know, we shouldn't care what's going on over there.
Why not let them, let them decide their own fate, you know, fight their own battles.
So why are we in the middle of all these battles, you know?
Yep, I guess it was Rothbard who said it, universal rights locally enforced, you can't have, you can't have, you know, this gigantic enforcement mechanism for universal rights.
Of course, they will be the greatest violators of it.
If you want to have individual rights, you have to secure them yourself from the bottom up.
Well, what we've got here is we've got local rights universally enforced, we're trying to, you know, put this local, parochial American version of crony capitalism, and we're supposed to, we're trying to force it on the whole world, you know.
So, you know, what Bush once called, what did he call it, the only sustainable model of national success, he said, is our sort of, as I say, you know, crony capitalism, which is that supposedly free market that skews in the favor of your corrupt pals, you know.
And that's what he thinks, it's the only workable government system, that's what everyone should be made to fit into.
Well, you know, everybody doesn't want to fit into that, and I just don't understand why they can't be allowed to fit into whatever they want to fit into.
I mean, again, you know, of course, we all, I mean, on a level that's true, you know, I am concerned about every human being and I hope they're all happy, but on the other hand, as an American, as a citizen, you know, as a government, what's it to me what's happening over there, you see?
I mean, I don't mean that, you know, I don't mean to be as selfish as that sounds, but we can't take responsibility, you know, I can't take responsibility for bringing up my neighbor's children, you know, I can't force myself on them, and you know that.
So, I mean, all of this is run off of a, you know, very false assumption, it seems to me.
Yeah, well, and a lot of it's just window dressing for, you know, wanton violence.
Oh, absolutely.
So, you know, I would say 99% of it is window dressing for, you know, the ever, ever profitable business of war profiteering, you know, profiteering off of actual war profiteering off the fear of war profiteering, especially nowadays off the servicing of war, the privatizing of war and its services.
I mean, that's 99% of it.
Another 1% of it is just the little fairy tales these guys tell each other when they, you know, get together in the club, or maybe they stay in the mirror in the morning, you know, allow them to go on living, you know, well, I'm just, I'm serving the good or something, and then it's back to cutting some deals with Duke Cunningham or somebody, you know.
Yeah.
Now, let me ask you some more questions about the former empire there, Airstrip One, I guess they call it now.
Around here, we hear a lot of, gotta keep the Mexicans out, they're changing our culture, they're changing our culture.
And we also hear a lot of hype, particularly from the war party about Londonistan and how poor little Anglo-Saxon England is being overrun by these weird alien people who, you know, cover their sisters and wives from head to toe in black.
And I saw on your blog, chris-floyd.com, where you've written about this terrorist plot in England that's got no coverage that I've ever heard of here in the United States by some English neo-Nazis who were planning on setting off a chemical bomb in an attempt to get some, you know, racial, ethnic strife going on in England there.
What the hell is going on over there, man?
Tell me.
What do you mean about immigration?
Well, you know, you pick and choose, whatever.
Well, I mean, immigration is, yeah, I know there's the right-wing tropes that you're talking about, this idea in the United States of, you know, Londonistan and all this sort of thing.
Well, of course, the fact is, London is the most cosmopolitan city in the world.
I mean, it's got a huge, even more so than New York, I imagine, by now.
It's got huge immigrant communities, foreign communities, and things like that.
I mean, but again, we're, relatively speaking, we're talking about a city of about 12 million people.
And you're talking about a country where, what's really odd is that Britain, as a nation, is far more white than the United States.
I mean, the Muslim population, the Muslim population, which would be the largest minority population, again, it's these sort of Asian Muslims, Pakistanis, and so forth, is about, I'm not quite at the number here, the number is somewhere between 3 and 5%, probably on the low end of that, you see.
And the rest of it, it might be 2% something else, and you're talking about the rest of it, like 90%, 85%, 90%, just, you know, white Anglo-Saxon, you know, pasty-faced, pale people you could possibly see, you know, especially over here in England.
So, all this is really hyped out of proportion, you know, but...
Well, what about the argument that American Muslims, for example, feel that they have a lot more stake in their community a lot faster than Muslims in Europe and England, and in the mainland too, and France and Germany, and those, they say that, well, they keep all their Muslims, I guess France is the one that I've read the most propaganda along these lines about, where they say that they brought in all these people, a lot of them from Algeria and from other places in the Muslim world, but they won't really let them become Frenchmen, they're not really part of the society, they're kept in ghettos, and they're made to do the menial jobs that the government pays actual French people to not do, and so now they have these people who basically have set up little alien communities all through their culture, that kind of thing, and again, you know, some people portray this as some kind of real threat, so I guess in terms of Britain and or, you know, mainland Europe, if you can give me some insight there?
Well, I mean, there's some truth in the fact that, as far as I know, I mean, that the Muslim community, and again, we're talking very general terms, because each Muslim is an individual person, but, you know, as many quirks as anybody else has.
Absolutely.
But the Muslim community in general in the United States, I think, is probably more assimilated or more, do probably feel more of a stake in the nation, and that's probably because the United States is, at least in its ideal, and in its laws and constitution, you know, it's not a people, is it?
It's not a racially based state, it's not an ethnically based state, you know, what the state is based on is you're loyal to the constitution, and so, I mean, that sort of permeates that kind of thing, whereas you have these old nations in Europe, as you say, in France, well, you know, only you can be French, you have to be born in France, right?
So they don't have the same kind of tradition of assimilating all kinds of different people.
And of course, we had a great, we had over 200 years of great trouble assimilating various communities.
You know, the same thing that we hear now about Mexicans was said about the Irish and the Jews and the Italians and everything else 120 years ago, but even said about some of the English when they first came into New York, you know, take it over from the Dutch.
You know, these horrible English with their diseases and their, you know, but...
What a great anecdote.
Thanks for that one.
I'm gonna have to research that and plagiarize that one from you.
I like that.
The Englishmen are changing our Dutch culture in New Amsterdam.
I love it.
Yeah, I mean, there's some truth in that.
In the fact that the, a lot of the Muslim communities in Europe, as you said, you know, they're part of the sort of, I don't know how you want to put it, backwash of the old empires, you see, I mean, and they don't want to accept them very well, just like, you know, the United States didn't want to incorporate the African slaves in this society very well, you know, for 100 years.
It's almost like if you've done something to somebody, you know, then you oppress them because of that, you know.
What's just like the old joke, right?
You know, the Germans will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust, you see.
But they're making us do that to you.
But again, but I don't know how, but there's part of that, but I don't know how accurate all of it is, especially in regards to how aided a lot of these communities are.
Well, I mean, they're aided to some extent.
But such in France, all those people who rioted in France last year, which, you know, gave all our right-wingers such a big thrill, you know, they were Muslim in descent, you know, they were North African in descent, but they weren't religious at all, very most of them were just, you know, they were young people out of work with no hope.
The same kind of people that would riot all over the world, the same kind of people who rioted in our cities, you know, the African Americans who rioted in the 60s, you know, that we have no, we have no jobs, we have no hope, we have no, you know, we're not allowed to have a stake in society, we don't have anything else to do, something sparks us off, we riot, that's the main thing happening in France, and it had very little to do with, it had almost nothing to do with, you know, Islamism or any sort of Islamic fundamentalism.
But, and again, I say all these things are happening in enclaves of, especially in England, you know, a huge white majority, which I find is really odd, you have these people like Mark Stein and all these Melanie Phillips, they're so obsessed with Muslims breeding, you know, outbreeding everyone in Europe, and the birth rates among the white, and you get this, you hear this in America too, but...
Yeah, it's the death of the West, government must do something or else white people cease to exist because the Muslim hordes from Asia are all headed this way, and if it ain't them, it's the Mexicans too.
But as I say, you know, Western civilization has been dying, quote, you know, for basically as long as it's been alive, I suppose, you know, you're talking about Oswald Spengler back in the 1930s, obviously, you know, the death of the West, you know, we're dying, at that time it was in Germany, you know, Western civilization being inundated with all these dirty Jews from Poland and things like this, you know, they come with their primitive barbaric rituals, their weird clothes, their weird skull caps, you know, they don't marry our people, what's wrong with them, you know.
I mean, there's always somebody, as you say, it's the Mexicans, it's the African Americans, it's the Irish, it's the Italians, you know, someone is always coming, someone's going to always out-breathe somebody, it seems to be like some sort of fixed trope in the human mind, I don't know, there's probably some center in the brain that controls this kind of thing, because it happens in every civilization, it happens in Russia, but you know, if you went down to Africa, it'd be the same thing, you know, there'd be like, you know, this tribe holds this territory, but oh, we're going to be inundated by the other tribe, you know, I mean, it just goes on and on, there's always somebody being inundated, but what I find it odd, though, if I could just, don't mean to go on about this, is that the people who are most fixated on this idea seem to me to be the Anglo-Saxon people, you know, the Americans and the British, who actually went out and did take over other people's country, you know, they're so afraid of other people coming to take over their country, when they actually did do that, you know, we actually did decimate the Indians, we actually did out-breathe the Indians and take over the country, you know, the British actually did sweep all over the world and take over countries and things like that, so part of it maybe is a little bit of projection going on there.
Yeah, hence the term Islamofascism, you know, to describe a band of pirates who don't control so much as, you know, a county in Pakistan.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And also, as you said before, too, why are there so many Pakistanis in England?
Well, because Pakistan is formerly part of the British Empire.
Part of the British Empire, of course.
Same thing here in the United States of America, too.
In fact, this is a big push on now.
Even if you're one of these dastardly illegal aliens who, after all, are illegal, then it's just fine.
If you want to join the Marine Corps, we'll give you a giant bonus in citizenship.
Yeah, if you go out and kill the Abbots for us, you know, we'll give you the keys to the city.
Unbelievable hypocrisy.
Now, listen, I'm sorry, I could just, well, I don't know, I guess it's still along the same theme of this racism.
You've done the best job of anybody in the West that I know of, Chris, of keeping track of what the hell is going on in Somalia.
For the people who don't know, America backed the Ethiopian proxy invasion at the end of December, and there's been killing going on there ever since.
And we've spoken about this a few times in the past few months, but I go through your blog here, and I just, you know, it's Iraq.
This is what Justin Armando called it at Antiwar.com.
He said it's Iraq writ small.
Oh, yeah, everybody's Al-Qaeda, and oh, yeah, it's perfectly fine to back this group of death squad killers versus that group or what have you.
And at the same time, we're doing nothing but create a bunch of terrorists where there weren't any before.
Oh, absolutely, yes.
I mean, that captures the whole thing pretty well today.
Yeah, last time you were on the show, you said, basically encapsulating that same bigoted point of view that, hey, there are a bunch of darkies.
Who cares about them?
Kill them, take their stuff.
No, absolutely.
I mean, as we say every time that we talk about this is that this whole episode has gone on with practically no notice whatsoever from the mainstream press, unless there were a couple stories in the New York Times, I think we talked about once, where they really hyped the American side.
Right.
And a couple of weeks ago, there was a story in the New York Times where they came out hard against the Ethiopians after the Ethiopians arrested a New York Times reporter.
Well, he was trying to report down there.
So suddenly, the Ethiopians were bad guys after being, you know, our staunch allies in the terror war because they added to manage to arrest a New York Times reporter.
Which was good because it actually shook some decent reporting out of it, but, you know, put the fear of God into him, I guess.
But no, as you say, this is a regime change operation that's gone on, backed by American money, backed by American training, backed by American bombs, where we bombed refugees fleeing from the Ethiopian invasion.
And, well, I mean, it's just a very sordid episode, you know, and it is, as you said, as Justin said, too, it's Iraq writ small, with the exception that we don't have troops on the ground there.
Because, as you say, we wouldn't actually put our troops on the ground for a bunch of Africans, for God's sake.
But, no, it's, you know, and what we've done, as you said, what we've done, and that, yes, it was a cute, we're doing the same thing right now.
All the enemies in Somalia of our, you know, of our pet warlords and our pet Ethiopian proxies, our al-Qaeda and so on, but there is now, there is now in Somalia a very, a growing violent insurgency, you know, that is using terrorist tactics, you know, against the occupation regime and all this sort of thing.
And that's just as Bush has introduced, you know, this virulent Islamic sectarianism in Iraq, where it didn't exist before, into this, you know, fairly cosmopolitan, fairly modern society that they had before, secular society that they once had.
And now, forgive me, Somalia wasn't a secular society entirely.
But now, what we have done is that they have introduced the same kind of chaos and corruption and warlordism that was there for the last 15 years.
And it is now, it is now, and it will be now a breeding ground for terrorists, because it's going to be another, it's going to be a failed state.
There'll be no control over anything, and people will be moving in and out, and there'll be new atrocities against innocent Muslims, which people can point to as proof that, you know, the West is out to kill all Muslims.
And, you know, I don't know if they're far wrong about that, it's the way some of our leaders actually act.
But, so yes, that's what's happened in Somalia.
And this is, as we were talking about before, this is something else that's going to blow back on us.
This is something else that's going to redound on our head, you see, for years to come.
And this is another nation, and more generations of people who can be radicalized, and of course not everyone is in Somalia, radicalized by, but all you need is a hardcore people to be radicalized by this kind of, you know, slaughter of their loved ones, destruction of their country by foreigners, revenge for the loss of their loved ones, their loss, you know, honor codes.
You just need a hardcore people to be radicalized by that.
And, you know, to cause a lot of damage later on, and that's what we've done.
Once again, we've put up, now we've got Afghanistan, now we've got Iraq, now we've got Somalia, now we're getting Gaza.
You know, all these places that we're destroying, we're just breeding, you know, we're just breeding terrorism for the future, asymmetrical warfare, you know, blowback, whatever you want to call it.
Well, and there's no doubt about that, and in fact, you know, this is something I try to mention on the radio show pretty much every day, and pretty much every time that I say something to this effect on the radio, one of the headlines on antiwar.com the next day is from some intelligence agency somewhere on earth saying, hey, look, the war in Iraq has made everything worse for everybody.
There's the, you know, Lawrence Wright that wrote the Looming Tower about the September 11th plot and all that.
He said in an interview recently with Texas Monthly that Al Qaeda was beat, they were gone, they were destroyed, that September 11th, what they thought was going to be such a great PR move was a PR disaster, that they were ruined, that the CIA pointed their laser pointers at them and the US Air Force blew them to hell, all maybe 2,000 of them.
And it was really only bin Laden and Zawahiri who escaped, they were in exile, they were completely powerless, and yet what have we done?
We completely brought Al Qaeda back from the dead, we've turned it from a group of a couple of thousand people at the most into a movement that has adherents who don't even have to talk to each other, they just want to, you know, commit an act of violence.
We've made this whole thing worse, and forgive me, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm going off my medium term memory here.
Wasn't it just a month or two ago that the American press was actually basically levelling the accusation that there were three Al Qaeda operatives in Somalia and that that was the justification for this regime change?
Three Al Qaeda guys, is that right?
Am I crazy or do I remember right?
That's what the Times and the Post said was, oh my God, there are three Al Qaeda guys, that's why we're doing this.
Yeah, early on the justification for the United States taking part in launching their airstrikes on the fleeing refugee civilians, fleeing the invasion was that yesterday, I think it was at that time three alleged Al Qaeda operatives who were allegedly involved in the African embassy bombings back in the 90s.
Now, that was a cover story for several, for a few months, and then later on when we kind of kept going on and the war took up again, you know, in April it started up again when Ethiopia tried to consolidate the conquest and Mogadishu, that's when 400,000 people fled Mogadishu and the United States was still involved.
Then that's when they started up to, oh, there's dozens, hundreds of Al Qaeda people there, you know, and that's why we're helping Ethiopians with the hundreds.
And of course now it just goes on until everybody who's against the government in Somalia is Al Qaeda.
But no, you're absolutely right, I mean, this is a very important point you made is that of course 9-11 was for Al Qaeda as a disaster because it turned the entire world against them.
I mean, we had Iran on our side, we had Syria on our side.
They said, what do you want us to do?
How can we help you get rid of these guys?
You know, these guys are nuts, let's get rid of them.
Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop right there, Chris.
Hey everybody, listen real closely and now say that again, we had who on our side after September 11th?
We had Iran on our side, we had Syria on our side, we had all these countries on our side.
I mean, you know, as you know, and it comes out every now and then, you know, 12 paragraphs in a story about how, in the present stories about Iran, how at that time Iran was helping us with intelligence, they were helping us round up suspected Al Qaeda operatives.
I mean, they had no use for Al Qaeda either and they had no use for the Taliban.
They were glad to see the Taliban get rid of them.
They were cooperating in that.
And so, of course, you know, and as you said earlier, we have intelligence reports and we've always had intelligence reports that the course we're following now and have been following for five years will only exacerbate terrorism, only make it worse, only save Al Qaeda from its own, you know, incompetence and nastiness and brutality, which would put most people off otherwise if we didn't overmatch it in competence and brutality and nastiness.
But see, our leaders have known this.
And as you say, every few days there's a story where an intelligence agency will say this, which just comes back, if they know it, then what is it they're actually doing now?
It just goes without saying, I don't say anyone can believe that the course, the policies we've been following are actually designed to fight terrorism because they're designed to exacerbate terrorism.
So what is the actual aim?
You know, seems like to me the aim is to foment terrorism for whatever reasons they think that they can get out of it.
Well, if that's the case, it's obvious the reason is because if they can create stateless movements of dangerous individuals that will pose, you know, real threats to life and liberty, we saw 3000 die on September 11th, for example, then that is the perfect enemy to have forever to fight.
Well, you talk about a war on drugs is a great excuse for regime change in Latin America and that kind of thing.
That's nothing compared to the golden egg that's being laid here.
But, you know, that's the kind of thing that I struggle with.
I mean, I guess on one hand, it's obvious that that's what's going on here.
But then on the other hand, there sure is a lot of evidence that these people are just dumber than rocks.
You know, George Bush yesterday, Chris, I don't know if you saw this.
George Bush yesterday compared America's war in Iraq to the American Revolution.
And, of course, entirely missed the point about who the redcoats are and what's obvious to anyone with with a mind that, you know, can fire neurons at all.
But he said, you know, the similarity is that there was a period in which it wasn't certain that we'd win that war.
So it's not certain that, you know, there will be no so-called victory in Iraq, at least according to what they say would be a victory there.
So what a ridiculous argument.
But here's the real point.
He said now, two decades later, we can look back at the American Revolution and, you know, mistakenly believe it was a foregone conclusion.
And so here's the president of the United States thinks that a decade means 100 years.
Well, maybe he thought the American Revolution was 1976.
Maybe that's what he was.
No, I know.
Well, I mean, of course, that's completely stupid.
And, yeah, if he's comparing this to the Revolutionary War, you mean he's comparing the world's greatest superpower fighting a ragtag insurgency, you know, a superpower led by some crazy guy named George fighting an insurgency?
I think we're going to be on the wrong end of the stick there.
Oh, no, no.
The only lesson to draw from that is you don't always know in the middle of the war how it'll be at the end, and it might work out great.
Well, that's really great.
I mean, you know, you could say that about everything.
Well, why don't we compare this to the Iran-Iraq War?
Which one are we in that?
You know, halfway through, which one was going to win that?
And I thought two decades.
Was he talking about the death squads in Nicaragua or what?
Well, they were freedom fighters, just like our founding fathers, too, you know, the conference.
Oh, sure.
Oh, and also bin Laden and jihadis were freedom fighters back in the 1980s, too, you know.
Oh, you don't say.
Yeah, you know, you can never have enough freedom fighters going around.
Hey, you know what's fun on a Saturday night, man?
Get real drunk and watch Rambo 3.
That's a great movie about the heroic Mujahideen warriors.
Yeah, I know.
It's incredible.
Hey, listen, I know that you're running short on time, and I know that I'm not even going to be able to ask you about Iran at all, but if I can just get another five minutes or so from you here, Chris.
I want to know about, I want basically whatever you can give me about the situation in Russia in terms of diplomatic relations and so forth between the United States and Russia.
I know you lived there for a time.
You wrote for the Moscow Times, correct?
Yeah.
Tell me this.
Is it the case that Vladimir Putin is the new Russian Stalin and that he's a terrible threat to life and liberty and must be contained?
And then I guess secondarily, besides internal Russian situation, if you can give me your snapshot point of view on the expansion of NATO and the deployment of anti-missile missiles in Eastern Europe to protect from Iran.
Right.
Well, I mean, Putin is, also we should have a different name.
His name in Russian is actually Putin, which sounds kind of silly.
But, well, I mean, Putin and Russia as it is today is not a threat to the United States unless we make it a threat.
I think that's another question of, I mean, yes, we're concerned about what's going on in Russia.
We want people to be free everywhere.
But in terms of United States policy, if we leave Russia alone, Russia is not going to leave us.
I mean, it doesn't, they don't get anything out of a new Cold War.
I mean, one reason they lost the last one was because of the strain of militarism put on their economy.
But, no, I mean, so it comes down to that Putin's Russia is not a threat to the United States unless we make it a threat.
And to get back to the other part of your question, it seems to me that our policies are directed very clearly at making it a threat.
This expansion of NATO and this idea of putting missiles, you know, along Russia's border, what else are they going to think it as?
I mean, everyone knows it doesn't have anything to do with Iran's missiles.
It has to do with Russia.
Everyone knows that they're putting, I mean, Putin's not stupid.
He's much smarter than George Bush.
He's probably not as smart as Stalin, actually, but he is much smarter than George Bush, which doesn't take much.
Everyone knows that this encroachment of NATO, putting NATO in the Baltic states, putting NATO planes, putting American missiles all around the former Soviet bloc, you know, the Warsaw Pact states, is aimed squarely at Russia.
I mean, how stupid does Bush think they are?
How stupid do they think they are?
Of course they are.
Just as if Russia was planting missiles in Mexico and Canada and sitting offshore of America with, you know, 17 aircraft carrier groups or something, we might think that was a bit of a threat.
You know, we think, gosh, gosh, I think maybe they're coming after us.
But, I mean, obviously that's what's happening.
And what they're doing is they're turning Russia into a threat, because the Russians, you know, they just don't take kindly to that kind of thing, and they're not going to be capped.
They don't have to be capped, because they do have a vast nuclear arsenal.
You know, they're not like Iraq or Iran, who don't have anything to fight back with.
They have the second most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, and they have seas of oil.
You know, they have a very strong economy.
They got, you know, endless amounts of money they can draw on, and they're just not going to be capped by all this bluster that Bush is doing, you know, for no reason, as far as I can tell, except that it's just like a reflexive step.
Oh, there's Russians.
We've got to surround them with something, you know, and it's a really stupid policy.
As far as what's going on inside Russia, I don't know that much about it anymore.
I was there during the Yeltsin period, and so the Putin period is somewhat more opaque to me.
I mean, obviously, Putin is, you know, he's trying to consolidate.
He's done what Karl Rove has always wanted to do, and he's consolidated in sort of a one-party state there.
They have other, they have parties, but, you know, it's essentially all controlled by one faction, the politics.
And, you know, but again, I mean, it's still a situation that's in a lot of flux, and I mean, I don't have that much to, can't really expand on all that quickly, but that's just a quick take on it.
Okay.
Well, I'll let you go ahead and go with that.
I really appreciate your insight on that.
Maybe some other time we can spend a lot more time talking about Russia.
Yeah, because there's, I mean, it's going to be, in the coming years, it's going to be another big thing we'll have to deal with, because they're getting us into deep trouble with that end, too, you know.
All right.
Chris-Floyd.com.
He's Chris Floyd.
It's Empire Burlesque is the name of the blog and the name of the book, and really appreciate your time today, Chris.
Well, thanks a lot.
I really appreciate it, too.
Thanks.