04/15/11 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is the great Jim Bovard, the most accomplished libertarian journalist in the history of the world.
He's the author of The Fair Trade Fraud.
And geez, I should have gone over this in my head in the beginning.
Jim, you got some JPEGs out on your website here, man.
Freedom in Chains, Lost Rights, The Bush Betrayal, Terrorism and Tyranny, Attention Deficit Democracy, which is so awesome.
Have you not read Attention Deficit Democracy yet?
Maybe you should read Attention Deficit Democracy.
He's also a writer for the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org and keeps the website at jimbovard.com and has a great blog there as well, jimbovard.com/blog.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for your kind words.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
We got two good articles to talk about.
One of them is in the Washington Times about Uncle Sam's big plans for our hard-earned tax dollars.
But first, I want to talk about this thing that you wrote in the Future Freedom Foundation, the absurdity of trusting foreign policy makers.
And the thing is about that is that most Americans don't know the first thing, really, about the rest of the world at all.
Certainly not about American foreign policy.
So what else can they do except trust the experts to decide?
And after all, if the experts and, say, for example, both parties agree on a particular policy or a particular set of facts, like even Bill Clinton and Al Gore agree there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or, you know, even the right-wing Republicans support Obama's war in Libya or whatever, then they apparently have achieved consensus.
What's there for a regular person to object to?
Well, people have to recognize that it is a consensus of rascals and people that have, you know, had one foreign policy disaster after another, one devil-coiled war after another, and that the folks we have deferred to have produced almost nothing but misery and death.
Yeah, but the last war we fought was World War II, and we whooped everybody's ass, and it worked out perfect.
The last war we fought, yeah, except for all the undeclared ones.
Well, I mean, talk to the Czechs, talk to the Poles, talk to the folks that were under Stalin's thumb after the war, talk to the folks in the big cities in Germany and Japan that were flattened.
I think they would not share the same enthusiasm.
Oh, yeah, but I saw on, especially right after September 11th, I saw reruns of dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds of World War II movies that say that it was all great.
Well, I guess you haven't seen the best thing that ever happened.
Well, it worked out well for Hollywood.
Yeah.
It worked out well for Washington, you know?
Actually, Jim, have you seen that movie, The King's Speech, that everybody makes such a big deal about?
No, I haven't seen it.
Is it good?
No, I haven't seen it either, which, you know, is kind of stupid to bring it up, but I heard tell from a friend of mine that the whole point is the king's trying to get over his stutter, and then at the end, the whole point is that he succeeds, and thank goodness, because if he had stuttered, then the British war guarantee to Poland might not have been, you know, taken so seriously, and World War II might have been avoided, and that would have been horrible, and so this is the end of the movie, is thank God that the king said his thing, right, because it caused 60 million people to die in the worst thing that ever happened to anybody.
That was a very expensive stuttering cure.
I know, man.
Think about that, and I just like how, I mean, assuming that that interpretation is right, which I think it is from what my buddy was telling me, just think about the mindset of the people that gave this all the Academy Awards and everything else.
Like, they really think that if World War II hadn't gotten started, that that would have been the worst thing ever.
Well, it's just, it's bizarre that there's this consensus that World War II had a happy ending.
I mean, there were a lot of horrible rulers throughout Europe, but, I mean, after the war, there were a lot of horrible rulers throughout Europe as well, so it's like, and a lot of people died, probably would not have died otherwise, so I don't quite see the cheering.
Yeah, well, anyway, so what we, as Americans, what we really know about World War II is some John Wayne movie where they beat those dirty Japs and everything's great, and then basically, I think World War II is still the model for every war that we've gotten into since then, right?
Like, when we got into Vietnam, they didn't use our great experience in Korea as the benchmark and say, come on, America, we're going to do Korea again.
They sold it as World War II again, right?
Pretty much, yeah, and it's interesting on Facebook every now and then, folks will get in, make a bunch of comments on some of the things I post there, and the folks who are pro-war or pro-intervention or pro-bombing everywhere almost always go back, well, you know, think of Hitler and Mussolini, Hitler and Mussolini.
I'm thinking like, you know, yeah, they were both bastards, and it would have been great to see both of them get whacked, but it certainly didn't work out well for either country to have the U.S. going through and blowing the hell out of them.
Right, well, you know, in the name of Hitler and Mussolini, since the end of that war, the United States empire has killed how many millions, do you think?
10?
20?
I don't know the numbers on that, but it's, and almost always, it's been unnecessary and counterproductive.
That's the real tragedy.
I mean, killing people in the name of freedom, you know, results in a lot of, it's good for the undertaker and not much else, and the military-industrial complex, and politicians.
Well, now, one of the things that you talk about in this piece, and one thing I really like about this piece is you go back over the last few wars since World War II, Korea and Vietnam and whatever, and you talk about these whiz kids and the dream teams and the wise men and how, you know, they really do sell us that there's, especially, I guess, during the days of Bob McNamara, that there's a scientific, you know, Algebra II kind of way of figuring out, you know, how to implement these policies, a quantitative way to contain communism in Asia at whatever cost and whatever.
These people really are too smart for our own good, right?
Well, and the interesting thing was, these were folks who were, who had their formalism, had their, you know, their catchphrases.
What they did not understand was the history of Southeast Asia.
They failed to understand how the Vietnamese had basically stymied or defeated the Chinese for like, you know, several hundred years when the Chinese tried to take over that area.
They failed to understand the wake of the French peace, French surrender in Vietnam, what the lay of the land was, but they were so arrogant, and they had such swagger, and I've seen that in a lot of Washington intellectuals.
The neoconservatives are prominent recently, but this is a trend that goes back a long ways, and it's fascinating to me to see how, see folks that think that they're so smart that they don't have to stoop to consider the facts.
Well, you know, one thing I learned reading Dan Ellsberg's book, Secrets, is that when you have access to secrets, then forget about it.
There's nothing you could possibly learn from Jim Bovard that would matter.
You have access to secrets, and Jim Bovard doesn't, and so forget it.
You know, why would, I mean, you think about how much better informed Condoleezza Rice, to pick one, would have been if she'd been reading antiwar.com just for our collection of news stories and, you know, perspective on the neoconservative movement and whatever, things that she didn't understand about Iraq, all kinds of things.
Like these people get in a tiny little bubble and believe their own nonsense and only talk to each other, you know?
Well, it becomes a closed circle, and you have a part of the trouble, too, is people like Rice.
She's surrounded by people praising her and, you know, polishing her boots and blowing smoke up the, and so thanks to that, folks, you know, folks don't realize, well, it doesn't matter how smart you are, how much power you have, there are certain facts that could trump you very easily.
That's what happened in Iraq.
That's what happened, is happening now in Afghanistan, and it doesn't matter, you know, if all your advisors went to Harvard or got a Kennedy School certification, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what they scored in their SATs, but this is the mindset in D.C., and I've seen that from a lot of, I mean, there are guys in D.C. in their 40s, and they'll tell you in the first two minutes, well, you know, I went to Harvard, and I think, and what have you done since then?
Yeah, not made money for anyone in the marketplace, probably.
Well, and, you know, the thing is, too, is the people believe in this stuff so much, you know, in the run-up to the Iraq War, you know, TV coined the phrase, but regular people I met all over the place repeated like minor birds that George Bush must have secret information that we don't know about, which, you know, the premise of that statement is they haven't convinced me yet.
They haven't said anything to make me believe that this is really necessary, but other than they're saying that it is, so they must know things that they just can't tell us that would justify what's going on here.
We have to trust their expertise.
Like Kevin Drum wrote in Mother Jones, if I'm in a room and I disagree with Barack Obama about something, I, you know, bow down to his superior judgment on all questions, and so if he's for a war that I'm not, I'm for it then, because he's my dear leader.
Same thing, and interrupted by the break, Jim will be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio, which I guess must mean I'm Scott, and I'm on the line with Jim Bovard.
He wrote a hundred books, and you should read all of them, especially Attention Deficit Democracy, and no, he's not some ignorant liberal who thinks America is supposed to be a democracy and needs a giant email from you about how, oh, it's a limited republic and all that.
He, it's in there, okay?
Just read the damn book, all right?
Thanks, Scott, that's very kind.
Yeah, I've got a lot of emails like that.
Yeah, well, come on, man, it's a title.
Read the thing.
His books aren't for looking at the outside of, they're for looking at the inside of.
That's my theory, anyway.
Pretty damn radical notion, if you ask me.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to your next one, by the way.
When's that coming out?
Well, you know, I've been asking myself the same question, Scott.
All right, well, get yourself an answer, and then let me know, would you?
Shall do.
All right, good.
Now, so here's the thing, man.
Part of this, you know, I don't want to be like, you know, two John Birch conspiracy guy, counsel on foreign relations, trying to destroy us from within, sort of thing, but I can't help but notice, as you pointed out, that all of America's wars are just gigantic wastes of money and lives.
There's never real victory.
There's just only endless madness, the destruction of our liberty at home and whatever.
And at some point, we've got to wonder, right, whether this is stupidity or the plan.
You know, Robert Higgs can write Crisis and Leviathan.
Every time these guys screw up, they get more powerful.
Well, how come bureaucrats can't read that and then say, yeah, that's a good idea?
You know, he's got it figured out.
This is our plan.
You know, read George Orwell and say, right, this is what we need to implement.
That's why is it?
Why is it just that they're idiots?
I mean, look at this war in Libya.
This any any kid could have thought, well, OK, so once you say you're protecting the civilians and that means you must have a successful regime change.
But then after that, then what you're going to have to do your whole purple finger elections and train up a new army and the rest of this Iraq stuff, or else how are you ever going to get out of there without everyone saying you lost Libya and whatever?
You could see that right off the bat, how stupid intervening in Libya was.
And yet they all did it anyway.
So maybe they're not stupid.
Maybe the plan is to destroy America.
What do you think?
Well, you know, it's important for people to maintain faith in the system.
Yeah.
To what end again?
So they can destroy us more effectively.
Well, you know, that's something which I wrestled with and I've had good questions, some good, good comments, critical comments on the email that this piece got posted.
It's hard to know how much this is ignorance, how much of it is arrogance and how much of it might be malice or some kind of devious intent.
Certainly after 9-11, I think there was a lot of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment in Washington that was often driving U.S. policy.
Flip side is I don't think there was that much anti-Serbian sentiment in the late 1990s when the U.S. did the same kind of idiocy and the criminal killings of Serbs in Belgrade and elsewhere with the bombing of Kosovo in Serbia.
So, I mean, there are plenty of folks who have made foreign policy who I would not trust to, you know, borrow a wooden nickel from.
And I think part of what the problem is, you have these folks who are brazen liars and they're still treated respectfully.
I mean, Henry Kissinger is one of the most prominent examples.
Henry Kissinger has a column in the Washington Post editorial page, which is one of the few non-right-wing venues which still insists that George Bush did not lie at the end of the Iraq War.
The Washington establishment acts as if these policymakers have an unlimited right to lie to the American people.
And because of that, which tends to compound ignorance and makes it very hard to figure out who in the hell was doing what for what reason.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny because Henry Kissinger is really one of the reasons I used to be such a conspiracy theorist, because I thought that, hey, look, if all empires fall and every idiot knows that, and this country, this world is run by people like Henry Kissinger, who are so smart with all their credentials and IQ points and volumes that they've read and written, they must know that too.
So what else explains their behavior other than they're working for somebody who really hates America, you know?
But the thing is, I realized, I guess I just got a little older and I figured out this is why all empires fall is because they end up being run by selfish, narrow-minded nitwits like Henry Kissinger, who think they're so smart.
And what they end up really doing is they run the country into the ground.
Well, and again, it goes back in part to the, these are folks, many of these folks think they're smarter than everybody else.
And because of that, they don't need to stoop to consider the facts.
Because of that, it doesn't matter that the French failed in Vietnam or the Russians failed in Afghanistan.
We are better, we are smarter, we are good-hearted, so on and so forth.
And plus, we have perfect SAT scores.
So you have that mindset.
And often in some of these foreign policy debacles, you've had bureaucrats at the mid or lower levels who understood that the government was driving over a cliff, and yet they were completely disregarded.
You had that in Iraq.
It's one of the great things about WikiLeaks.
We have seen that there were a lot of U.S. government employees who laid out, well, you know, this is a really stupid policy because of ABC.
Well, actually, the president says this, but the reality is this.
And by the way, we're screwing things up here.
And it's great that WikiLeaks has had the courage, and some journalists have had the courage, to pick up the ball and publicize it.
I would bet that there's a lot more facts in the WikiLeaks cables we've not seen that would do a lot more to destroy the credibility of the U.S. government.
Yeah, well, certainly there's no doubt about that.
You know, I'm reminded of, like, back in 2002, I had a show called The Way It Is, the best I can tell.
And I would sit around with Bianca Oblivion from Chaos Radio and my other friends A.J. and Ed, and we'd sit there.
I mean, they were lying us into war with Iraq for a year and a half.
They gave us a year and a half warning that they were doing it.
And we just sat there and talked about it over and over again.
And it was pretty obvious, just thinking back on those conversations in the old chaos garage that we had, of how much better informed we were and how much more important our questions were about what was happening and what was going to happen than the brightest minds, not just the hairdos, but the brightest minds being interviewed on TV.
The conversation that they were having was so narrow and so retarded, really, that, I mean, we were really way, way ahead of the curve sitting there in the chaos garage, drinking Lone Star and smoking bowls and B.S. and back and forth, reading antiwar.com.
Yeah.
And a part of what I recall from that period, I was running off beds on that.
I had a few published in various places.
But the headwinds for getting anything in print that criticized the rush to war or criticized the basic rationale or brought up the fact that the government's already lied about this, that, and the other, the headwinds became far, far stronger after 9-11.
So I'm sure that there were other folks who were writing pieces that never got in the print that laid out one, two, three, four.
This is why Bush's plan is going to fail.
This is why you cause carnage.
This is why you're going to end up subverting the U.S. Constitution if you do this.
However, I mean, the op-ed editors, the editorial pages, they, for the most part, they simply stuck their heads in the ground.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and since today's tax day and you have this piece at the Wall Street Journal, Uncle Sam's big plans for your hard-earned tax dollars.
Not quite the Wall Street Journal.
Washington Times.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I was thinking Wall Street Journal because I was reading David Beto's piece a minute ago and I...
Okay.
Same difference anyway.
But yeah.
So let's talk about foreign spending.
And other than the war budget and the military budget, tell me a little bit about the National Endowment for Democracy and Foreign Aid and these kinds of extras that we spend money on and how much, if you can.
Well, just to what the piece is, is talk about this is tax day.
It used to be, anyhow, your tax payments, the biggest purchase of the year, roughly $20,000 or more per household.
And with the money that that's raised, for instance, it could pay for the cost of bribes to two Afghan tribal leaders to sway them to publicly endorse an anti-corruption drive.
It could pay for a National Endowment for Democracy grant to a third world political party to enable its members to hire a Washington consultant to teach them how to better con their voters.
It could pay for running a TSA whole body imaging X-ray machine for three shifts, not counting the cost of the sexy color photos, photocopies of hot female travelers.
Well, you know, it's not just I really like this piece because it's not just the horrible things that our dollars are spent on, but you could really think like if you in certain context, you know, maybe all the tax money you've ever paid in your life just got completely wasted on one plane that they built and then crashed or God knows what, you know what I mean?
One missile, you know, that went and blew up some, you know, truckload of rebels in Libya.
Yeah.
And then, but you think about the value that you traded, what you could have spent that money on instead, your own family, your own life, the rent, you know, people living in their Toyotas because they got to pay one tiny percent of one ridiculously evil, wasteful thing that this government's up to.
Yeah.
And, and yet people in Washington simply don't give a rat's batui.
Instead, both parties are conspiring to perpetuate this absurd spending level and all this waste and all this corruption simply because it maximizes their own power and their prestige.
And it also maximizes the prestige of the Washington political, the pundits, the media.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I sure wish people could do a little bit better job breaking through that illusion and, and see the state for what it is.
I'll, I'll give you a recommendation.
You want to, you want to beat your friends and neighbors over the head, beat them over the head with the tension deficit democracy by Jim Bovard, man.
I'm telling you that thing will work on them.
I promise.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time, Jim.
Gotta go.
Really appreciate it.
That's a great Jim Bovard, everybody.
He wrote a hundred books.
Go look them up and check out his blog at jimbovard.com.