Lew Rockwell, founder and Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, discusses the American cultural acceptance of torture, Ron Paul’s ability to instill libertarian ideals in young people and the uphill battle to convince Americans that Iran is not a threat.
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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
First full week of the new three-hour show here.
You can stream from lrn.fm.
Our next guest on the show today is Lou Rockwell.
He's the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and of course keeps the great website and blog and radio show at lourockwell.com.
That's lourockwell.com.
Welcome back to the show, Lou, or I guess welcome to the show, Lou, for this new show.
Great to be with you again.
By the way, congratulations on your third hour.
Thank you very much.
I hope that Limbaugh is looking in the rearview mirrors.
Oh yeah, well, we'll see about that.
If only I could pick one side over the other, I might be all right, you know?
Well, it's trouble in the U.S. media to be truthful and not to be a partisan of one one criminal group or the other criminal group.
Oh, come on.
I can't think of any examples of that.
Well, you know, you're supposed to be for the Bonanno family or the, you know, or the other mafia family.
But you can't have problems with the mafia.
That's actually a terrible thing to say, because the mafia, of course, is a far better organization than the U.S. government.
Yeah, yeah, they can accomplish their goals with the same methods and not as good PR.
So, you know.
All right.
Well, I got to tell you, Lou, I saw you pick this up on your blog, too.
I was hoping for some wisdom along this count.
I talked with this guy, Nick Bowman, from Mother Jones yesterday, and I just talked with other Scott Horton heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer from Harper's Magazine.
And it turns out, apparently, George Bush and them did a bunch of torture experiments in order to define where the threshold of too much torture is, the pain equivalent to organ failure or death, so that then they could write memos saying that any torture up to the limit of the same pain as organ failure or death is perfectly legal.
And I just wonder what in the hell has happened to us.
Was it always this way or are we just we the American adults have all just shrugged their shoulders in unison and decided, whatever, just let them do whatever they want now?
You know, I think that there's always been torture, certainly in world history.
Virtually every regime is engaged in torture.
I don't think it was particularly widespread in the U.S., but certainly since World War II, maybe since World War I, and especially with the Bush administration and its continuation and the Obama administration, we have torture.
I think it's the other Scott Horton has pointed out that it's not a good thing if torture is a career path within the regime.
I mean, regular politicians are bad enough, but people who actually like torturing other people, you know, they're not a good bunch.
And so certainly we've had this vast increase in torture.
And, you know, as you say, the very disturbing seems to be Americans either ignoring it or approving of this.
You know, they watch various Fox so-called new shows, or they watch various Fox allegedly fictional shows and about the glories of torture and the glories of killing people who oppose the U.S. regime.
And they, you know, a lot of people seem to cheer.
Yet all good things happen with minorities.
Minorities achieve everything.
Minorities pretty much achieve everything for evil, too.
So we don't actually have to have the majority of people.
And people like you are helping wake up the good people in this country to exactly the kinds of horrors that are going on.
Maybe because I used to edit a medical journal many years ago, it especially bothers me that doctors are involved in this.
They're supposed to take the Hippocratic oath, which, you know, the first line of, you know, which is first, do no harm.
And so the fact that they've got the CIA as apparently a whole lot of contract physicians who guide the torture, maybe they're not doing the actual torture, but as you say, they're telling the torturers, go up to this point, but we don't actually want to kill the guy.
Maybe they want to kill him later, but they don't want to kill him while the inquisition is going on.
So it's, you know, the whole thing is sickening.
It's useful for us to know it because it's a peek into the kinds of people in power in Washington.
And these are, again, the people who want the total police state.
They want to control every bit of economic activity.
They want to control and abolish your privacy, financial and otherwise.
And they want to just control us, humiliate us.
They love it.
If you like the U.S. airports, that's what they want to make all of society.
Huh.
Okay.
Well, that's a, I think I'll have a nightmare about that, you know, starting right now.
Well, look, here's my problem, I guess, is that, and maybe this is a character flaw of mine, that I spend too much time in the past instead of just, you know, plotting my own life out for the future.
And, you know, it has all kinds of different consequences.
But one of the things is that I just remember too well being a child in the 1980s.
You know, I turned 10 in 86, right?
This is, that was my era there.
So, and what I learned was that the USSR is bad.
And the reason why is because they torture people and they raid houses and take people away in the middle of the night.
And, uh, and they tell everyone what to do, but our way is that you're free.
And the only time you can get in trouble with the government here is if you do something wrong to somebody.
Otherwise we got eagles and red, white, and blue and all the things that we believe.
And let's add the bill of rights in there.
And so it's, uh, you know, on, on a couple of levels, I got the whole, you know, dichotomy between the way I was told and the way things really are.
But I also have the thing where, wait a minute, if this was my, you know, inculcation into the American civic religion as a 10 year old, then wasn't it everybody else's and why do you need any minority of people to be outraged about torture, to be outraged about prison without trial, Lou?
This is supposed to be what we all assent to at the very least that you get a fair trial before you go to prison.
You know, Scott, most of the literature that was promoted during cold war days by the regime is not worth looking at.
But Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which is available at paperback, the three volumes, although I especially would recommend the first volume about what it was like under Stalin in the camps is very, very much worth reading.
It's full of interesting parallels.
For one thing, the Soviets cared nothing about, they might jail them, but they cared really nothing about actual criminals.
In fact, they were the ones, they always made the trustees, they got the most food, the privileges within the camps.
Because of course, they were not seen as attacking the regime by raping, murdering, robbing, and so forth.
But the political criminals, so called, the people who had, in Solzhenitsyn's case, told a joke about Stalin for which he was sent to the camps for many, many years.
You know, and we, in this country, you couldn't be put in jail for telling a joke about the president.
I mean, there was a case of a man in Colorado who told a joke when Bush was in town, this was in Denver, at a bar, and I don't know what the joke consisted of, but the punchline is something with a burning bush, making reference to the Old Testament, burning bush, and the then current president.
He was arrested, and I've never been able to find out what happened to him, but he was taken off, and you know, he told a politically incorrect joke.
But this Gulag Archipelago book, I mean, the whole, the way that the regime thought, the way they acted, the way the prisoners thought, what they had wished that maybe they'd done before they got arrested, and so forth.
Very, very alarming, fascinating, great literature, and I'm afraid it has certain parallels to what's going on in this country.
Yeah, and in 1984, he just couldn't see quite as far as he needed, or well.
All right, y'all, we're talking with Lou Rockwell.
We'll be right back, Antiwar Radio, on Liberty Radio Network.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Antiwar Radio, on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
FM, talking with Lou Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and keeper of lourockwell.com, and lourockwell.com slash blog, I should not neglect to mention, and well, basically we're talking about how bummed out I am at how terrible all the news is, and the American people's reaction to it, as well.
Help me out here on this side of the break, Lou.
Give me the case for libertarian hope, because I'm about out.
Well, I think, you know, we were talking most recently about, not on air, about Ron Paul.
I think Ron Paul represents a case for libertarian hope, not so much through electoral politics.
There's only ever been one Ron Paul so far, as I can tell in American history, and my guess is there only will be one Ron Paul.
But the example that he's set, and the sorts of ideals that he's personified and has taught for more than three decades, have had a vast effect.
I mean, I see it among young people, very, just a huge amount of waking up to the war and peace issue, to the sound money issue, to the police state issue.
I mean, Ron Paul, you know, doesn't get listened to much in Washington when he discusses the fact that Obama claims the right to assassinate anybody anywhere in the world, including American citizens, if he classifies them as bad guys.
But when Ron Paul talks about that kind of thing, young people hear him, and young people care.
So I think there's, I just think there's a whole lot more knowledge.
I think it's all, of course, many, many great men and women, whether we look back at Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand or Isabel Patterson, Henry Hazlitt, just many, many great men and women who fought for liberty and had a huge influence, and it's a growing influence.
So even though in the media, which is pure evil, I mean, the official media, they're just typically lying and propagandizing for the regime in every single thing they say.
They're twisting the truth, and they're just a bunch of criminals.
They're like Pravda, although probably there was more truth in Pravda than there is in the American official media.
So you can't believe the government, you can't believe the official media, but below our rulers and all the bureaucrats and all the bad guys and the parasites, there's a lot of good stuff going on among regular Americans.
And you're helping, by the way.
Well, thanks.
I like to believe that's true, although I'm not sure the numbers really verify that, but yeah, whatever.
We all do what we can.
And you know, the first time I ever met Ron, and this was the discussion off the air there that you were just referring to, the first time I met Ron was at the Libertarian Party Convention in 2004, of all places, and it was the first time I ever got to interview him, and I just put a tape recorder down on the table and talked with him.
And my last question was actually Karen Katowski's question, and that was, what's the case for libertarian hope if there's only one Ron Paul and only ever will be?
And what he said was, hey, look, man, a few years ago, we didn't think the Soviet Union was about to cease to exist.
We thought it would exist throughout our lifetimes.
Millions of people were set free.
And never mind the fact that the American government has made them all yearn for the old Soviet days now.
That was a good thing, whether they realize it or not at this point.
And he said, we didn't predict that.
And so our job is not to predict bad for the future.
It's to focus on the present and just keep teaching people about liberty.
And you got to just be happy with that.
And really, you know, I guess that's the best thing to do is just hope for, you know, those individual conversions rather than well, like, for example, I'm sorry, I'm just complaining at you now here, but I've debunked the lies about the Iranian nuclear program on my show virtually every day for three years straight.
And my effect on the conversation in the country about that nuclear program is less than zero.
It's nothing.
And so, you know, I've taught people, individuals, the truth about it.
But as far as whether it's made any difference in the larger sense, you know, who could know, I guess I can have faith in ripples and ponds and whatever if I want, but I don't see the evidence for it, you know?
Well, it's absolutely true that, you know, that that that that lie, just as like the lie about the Iraqi WMDs seems to go on challenge.
Part of the reason is the people telling the lie, they know it's a lie.
I mean, the Christian right types and all those that who want to go to war against Iran, murder people in Iran by the hundreds of thousands, maybe more, maybe even use nuclear weapons against Iran, a country which is, of course, in hundreds of years since they attacked anybody else unlike the U.S. and its various allies.
But I don't know.
I mean, I think there's progress being made.
But I'll agree with you on this on that particular issue.
It's very, very tough.
And of course, the whole media is constantly lying about it.
And they never I'd like to have somebody explain to me what exactly is the problem if Iran has a nuclear weapon.
Now, I don't believe any country ought to have nuclear weapons, whether it's the U.S. or Britain or Russia or China or Israel or Pakistan or India or any of the rest of them, because these are all, as Murray Rothbard argued, fundamentally immoral weapons designed to kill civilians.
So it's actually not permissible from a moral standpoint to have them, let alone to use them.
And of course, the U.S. is the only government ever to use them.
But let's say that Iran got some primitive atomic weapon.
What would that actually mean?
It would mean exactly as with Korea, it's tougher to attack them.
And I never get over the fact that it's considered a fundamental evil for any country to defend themselves against the U.S. Right.
That's what a threat is.
It's the ability to possibly resist at all.
Well, they were describing as an act of terrorism the fact that Iran bought from Russia a year and a half ago anti-aircraft guns.
Well, you know, aircraft guns have a very short range.
They're only a purely defensive weapon.
But to defend yourself against the empire, you know, it's a sin.
And so you're supposed to be crushed.
But in some sense, there are people, by the way, who argue every country ought to have a nuclear weapon.
It would be the end of war, at least mass war.
So I don't know whether I agree with that.
In fact, I don't agree with it, but I sort of see it.
I sort of see the point.
And I can understand why some people in Iran want to have an atomic weapon to defend themselves.
It actually, you know, back in old Cold War days, they used to talk about, you know, these things were just defensive and because they would be mutually assured destruction, that there never would be a war.
And indeed, thank goodness, there never has been a hot war between the U.S. and Russia yet.
So I don't know.
Well, there have been at least 20 very close calls.
And of course, as with any demonized people, we're never shown any pictures of the Iranians.
We know nothing about their cities, their culture, their people, their homes, their nothing about them, their businesses, their universities.
It's all kept carefully hidden.
So so much the easier to incinerate them.
Right.
That's such an important point, because Iran and the people of Iran end up being reduced to pretty much an inaccurate blob of a shape on a map in people's minds rather than, you know, land where people are standing.
And it seems flat from there and all that, just like here, just like where you are.
Well, this has been a civilized, a great civilized people for, what, 5000 years.
I mean, it's, you know, but from the typical person who's believing U.S. government propaganda, they're a bunch of, you know, crazy mullahs wanting to kill everybody and they want to commit suicide and write all the same stuff they used to say about China back in Korean War days.
They always demonize the opponents of the U.S. government are never human.
They're always subhuman.
They're the under men.
And therefore, of course, they should be killed and all their women and children, too, because they might grow up to be terrorists as well.
Yeah.
Nits make lice.
In fact, that kind of brings me back to one of my original points here was when I was a kid, everybody felt bad about what happened to the red Indians of America.
And I wonder now whether maybe, you know, genocide is back in style.
Screw it.
I'm not sure my thumb is not on the pulse of America at this point.
I don't even know.
Maybe Custer's a hero after all.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, certainly back in the day when that was happening, it seemed like most people approved of it and they approved of what General Sherman referred to as the final solution to the Indian question.
This is typically thought of as a Hitler quote in talking about the Jewish people.
But it isn't.
It was actually an anti-Indian quote from 19th century America.
Yeah.
Well, they also called it the Indiana procedure when they tied a woman down and cut her ovaries out, too.
Well, that's that's our government.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank God there's a lot of Mises Institute.
I'll tell you what, everybody, that's a Mises dot org.
Lou Rockwell dot com.
Thank you so much for your time on the show.
Lou, I really appreciate a lot.
Great to be with you.
