All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Thanks for tuning in.
On the line is Lou Rockwell.
He's the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where they keep all the Austrian economists.
And apparently he's a writer now for Al Jazeera, too.
Welcome to the show, Lou.
Boy, what an honor that was.
I was just thrilled.
I mean, I love Al Jazeera, and so to have them reprint one of my articles was just like a medal on my chest.
I was thrilled.
And the article is called A People's Uprising Against Empire.
And, you know, I was wondering, I saw the neocons are divided, Lou.
Half of them say that this is the vindication of their global democratic revolution with America's help.
And then the other half of the neocons say this is the Islamofascist caliphate of terrorism that hates us because of Jesus and things like that.
And so I wonder, which camp are you in?
You know, isn't it funny that they talk about the caliphate, you know, this maybe some people actually believe in it, but when we actually face the world faces the American caliphate that's far more dictatorial than the old caliphate used to be and encompasses, of course, the whole globe, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned.
Yeah, I used to think that was funny when George Bush would say, well, you know, they plan to take over all the land between Spain and Indonesia and create this giant Islamic empire.
And I would think, hey, between Spain and Indonesia, that's all the land America controls.
Well, of course, that's right.
I mean, the U.S. believes...
Take our caliphate away.
No, also the U.S. believes it's ordained by God to rule the globe.
I mean, that we actually were God's chosen people and we're better than anybody else.
You know, the so-called American exceptionalism, that we're better and we have the right to run every other country to make it bow down to our own interests.
So what just a thrill to see what's happening in Egypt, because we don't know what the outcome is going to be still.
But to see all those people rise up demanding freedom, demanding an end to the dictatorship, they probably don't have the correct libertarian theoretical apparatus in every case, but they do hate the government.
They hate their own government, which was in existence ever since the Camp David Accords, which set up Egypt as a U.S. colony, also somewhat of a colony of Egypt, but mainly of Israel, but mainly a colony of the U.S., and which the U.S. would pay them a billion and a half dollars a year to set up a police state and an army to control the Egyptian people, to terrorize them, torture them, suppress them, make sure that there was no free speech, no free press, and so forth.
And so that's, you know, it's quite amazing that they're not blaming the Egyptians, aren't blaming us more for what the U.S. government has done.
But really, we can look at so many areas of the world, so many piles of skulls left by the U.S., so many maimed children and maimed old people, obviously women and men, you know, just every sort of person in society maimed or dead.
But Egypt, you know, for more than 30 years, it actually started when the U.S. installed Sadat, the predecessor of Mubarak as the dictator, and because he was hailed as a great guy, but he was not a murdering police state creep, I mean, like exactly like Mubarak.
He was assassinated with, you know, my guess is Mubarak knocked him off.
I mean, this was always supposed to be Islamists who knocked off Sadat.
I've never believed that.
You know, as Murray Rothbard said, whenever we look at these sorts of political assassinations, the first thing you do, he said, like any good investigator, the first thing you do, the first question you ask is you look to see who benefited.
Quibono is the old Latin phrase.
Well, that's interesting.
You know, I was just a little kid at the time, so I don't have any experience with that.
But back at the time, you remember saying, hmm, not that I'm saying you're that much older than me.
I am unfortunately much older than you.
But, yes, I thought it was clearly, and, of course, I have no proof.
That's just my supposition.
Sure, that's interesting, though, that it dates back to at the time it happened.
It never quite added up to you.
I like that.
That's good.
I had never heard anyone contradict the official narrative of that one before, I don't think.
But anyway, we have Sadat.
Whatever happened, then we get Mubarak.
And as we know from Bloomberg's estimate, this guy's got a personal fortune of between $40 and $70 billion.
That's a billion with a B.
So not only is he taking, I'm sure, a cut from all the foreign aid.
Why call it foreign aid?
I think we should always call it foreign bribes.
Because it's not – I don't want to shake anybody's civic faith, but the U.S. government is not a charitable organization.
When they, quote, unquote, give somebody some money, it's for purposes of control.
So certainly the whole USAID operation, which is an arm of the CIA, is all about – it's another arm of imperialism.
And that's always what foreign aid is.
So here we've given him all this foreign aid.
We've protected him.
We've made sure that he was empowered.
Now, of course, the U.S. is claiming, oh, we want democracy.
We want a free press, free Internet, and so forth.
But they're just lying.
Obama's lying.
Bush lied.
They're just – they're lying.
But nevertheless, starting in Tunisia, another U.S.
-installed dictator, by the way, another monster, killer, torturer, thief.
I noticed when he and his wife left the country, they took with them the entire gold reserves of the country, which was in the tons, tons of gold.
And I guess the old-age dictators wanted $100 bills.
Now I guess they just want gold.
That tells us something about what the Federal Reserve is doing.
Right, yeah, exactly.
$100 bills, they're worth something today, kind of, but I'm not so sure my vault full of them would be a good investment, which goes to something that you mentioned in your article as being really at the heart of the matter here, too, which is, of course, economics, that the poorest people can't afford to put food on their family.
Well, the two terrible things that the U.S.
– you know, the U.S. government has done many terrible things, but two terrible, horrific things it's doing right now.
First of all, through the – it's fooling around with the corn market in order to subsidize the production of ethanol and subsidize the farmers in Iowa and all the rest.
They've dramatically raised the price of corn and corn products all over the world.
So this has been very, very bad for poor people.
Then you have the quantitative easing, the massive money printing that the Federal Reserve did after its bubble blew up and is continuing to do now.
And one of the initial effects of this has been a vast increase in commodity prices.
Well, of course, if you're poor, well, the commodities you're caring about are food, and at least up 24 percent last year.
It's continuing to go up this year.
There's no way to tell where it's headed.
And when you've got people, poor people in a country like Egypt, where maybe 70 or 80 percent of their income is going to feed themselves and their family, it doesn't take too much of an increase in commodity prices to make fathers look at their children and think, my children are in danger of starving.
When people start to feel like that, then they want something different.
They want some answers, and thank goodness they want to get rid of the government.
And how brave these people were to – they had none of the many weapons.
Of course, the U.S. has seen to it that there's no right to keep and bear arms anyplace else.
So there's – people didn't have any weapons, maybe a baseball bat, sometimes against the guns of the opposition.
How brave to go out there and risk.
They knew from their whole previous life to risk torture, the destruction of their families, the confiscation of their home, the confiscation of what little few assets they had.
And there were people of all sorts in society.
I mean, poor working people, there were middle-class people, professionals.
Also, by the way, one of the great things is the unification of the Christians and the Muslims in Egypt, because for years there have been apparently vicious attacks by shadowy Muslim groups on the Coptic Christian churches, most recently a bombing just late last year.
So I've always been suspicious that that was the typical divide-and-conquer tactic of a dictator to try to keep the people separate and hating each other versus concentrating on the government.
Right.
He'd just re-stolen an election for the lower house of parliament in November and was under a lot of pressure at that time.
So, you know, folk would make everybody hate the Christians or whatever, but the people weren't fooled.
And I noticed that right after that bombing took place in a church, when that church and all other Coptic churches were having their Christmas masses, they had Muslim young people guarding the churches.
Just as the Christians were guarding the Muslims during their prayers in Tahrir Square last week.
All right, hold it right there.
It's Lou Rockwell from the Mises Institute.
Mises.org.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Lou Rockwell.
He's the president of the Mises Institute.
That's Mises.org.
And he runs the great website LouRockwell.com.
That's L-E-W, Rockwell.com.
And definitely check out the great blog there as well.
All day long it updates with wonderful things.
Also, Lou is the author of Speaking of Liberty and Left, oh, I guess it's The Left, The Right, and The State.
And we were talking about the revolution in Egypt and about how Christians and Muslims, young and old, poor and middle class alike, are all taking part in this revolution.
Christians and Muslims protecting each other from the state in ways that, I guess, are contrary to the way our American media would typically have us understand things to be over there.
Yeah, Lou?
Yeah, I remember seeing one young guy in the very beginning of it tell one of the American reporters that this movement was for Muslims, it was for Christians, it was for atheists, it was for anybody who wanted freedom.
So I thought, yeah, all right.
But that, again, is not what we're told.
Of course, Muslims are being constantly demonized here.
They're demonized for wanting to have their own society, their own values.
So they have to have American values, meaning they have to be subservient to the American state.
I mean, we all have to remember, when we hear the American government or people like the neocons that you mentioned earlier talk about democracy, they mean rule by the U.S.
Because if the wrong people, quote-unquote wrong people, win an election, that's not democracy, that's terrorism.
So it has to be a puppet state, the whole world has to be a puppet.
But I think the U.S. empire is cracking.
I mean, it's not only what we see in Egypt and, of course, Tunisia, and still this is ongoing, this is by no means finished.
There's a lot of anger in Jordan against the rotten king and his court there.
There's a lot of anger in Saudi Arabia.
We never hear that discussed.
We've never heard it ever discussed in the media until recently that there's actually unrest and unhappiness in Saudi Arabia, the normal thing.
And, of course, the U.S., which is always demonizing what they call Islamic fundamentalism, well, they're the most fundamentalist Islamic state in the world, Saudi Arabia, which doesn't seem to bother the U.S., of course, because it's a puppet state.
It used to be a puppet state of Britain.
Franklin Roosevelt during World War II was the American puppet state.
So there's great unrest.
I'd like to think that in all these countries there's going to be less torture, less fear, less knocks on the door in the middle of the night, and more economic freedom.
I mean, what led to the whole, what all started in Tunisia when a young man tried to feed his family and who didn't have the very expensive license to have a cart on the street to sell his fruit and the vast bribes that you had to pay in that regime in order to get the license, he wasn't able to do it.
The cops confiscated his cart and his fruit, thereby ending the economic life for himself and his family.
He reacted by setting himself on fire and killing himself.
Of course, that's not a good thing, but it was obviously a riveting thing, just as similar things were in Vietnam in earlier days.
We've had that sort of thing going on in Egypt and I hear in other places, although the U.S. press isn't reporting it.
But there's, I think, regime changes in the air, and I hope it's in the air in D.C., too.
I think it is, because the empire can't finance all this stuff.
They are about to visit us with maybe the most horrific inflation we've ever had since Civil War days.
I think a lot worse than what happened during the 1970s, and that was disastrous enough.
So when you have inflation of the sort that they're now engineering at the Fed and have been engineering for some time, it especially hurts poor people, old people on fixed incomes, people who live away from the imperial centers of power, and is a huge benefit, of course, to the state itself, the big banks, the big corporations.
So it's going to result in another big transfer of wealth, which is the government's prime thing in life besides killing people.
So we're in for some very unfortunate economic times.
So I hope when you have that sort of thing happen, it can be a revolutionary moment.
Now it can be a revolutionary moment for bad things, or it can be a revolutionary moment towards more freedom.
I must say I'm pretty optimistic.
I think that Americans more and more are distrusting the government.
They still have a long way to come on the military and war issues, unfortunately, which, along with the Fed, is the most important thing there is.
But I think the fact that the empire can't finance all this stuff is going to lead to much less support by Americans for the wars.
I mean, these wars which nobody thought cost anything because they were just putting up the dough.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, they're killing, of course, many, many people in Pakistan.
But there's, again, there's another place where there's huge unrest because of what the U.S. is doing there.
So they're not going to be able to fund it.
So we're living in the end times of the empire, I think.
And so it's a great opportunity for anybody who cares about individual freedom, anybody who cares about economic prosperity, free enterprise, sound money, all the kinds of ideals that libertarians stand for.
This can be our moment, and we better seize it.
Well, you know, my favorite part of this whole thing, Lou, is the irony where, you know, you talked about American values means submitting to American rule.
But really, no, American values are libertarian values, and that's the answer to the question, which way do we go from here?
Is it going to get better or worse?
It depends on what we believe.
And it's just so easy to imagine America not being an empire and America being on the side of the people of Egypt from afar, like John Quincy Adams saying, good luck to the Greeks, but we're not going to help you.
And, you know, that's how it would be, how to spread American values, would be to really be the light of liberty for these people to follow.
And yet we're the ones who are conspiring, our government's conspiring.
Bush can't go to Switzerland because he's scared he'll be indicted for conspiring with Hosni Mubarak to torture people.
I'm not for anybody being jailed, even George Bush, but I tell him I wouldn't have minded if he'd been arrested and put in the pokey for a while.
Yeah, it's too bad he got the leak of the indictment.
They should have waited until he got there and nabbed him.
Well, that was a great moment.
He shouldn't be able to travel anyplace.
He should be subject to arrest everywhere because, of course, he is a major war criminal and proud of all the torture that he inflicted on people.
So he's a very bad man.
But then, of course, he was an American president.
That sort of means you're a very bad man.
Yeah, well, it's just too bad to me.
Well, no, I guess I'll say this.
I think you're right that now, whenever there's a crisis, it's an opportunity to question people about what they really believe and which way to go from here.
It's the same thing that determines how the revolution in Egypt goes.
It's the power of ideas and the values of the people of Egypt and how hard they're willing to fight for them.
And it's the same thing here.
If we believe in David Petraeus, we're going to get David Petraeus.
If we believe in liberty, we'll have that instead.
Well, we might also take a look at the Declaration of Independence.
And, of course, the part that I'm about to mention is never quoted.
But what the Declaration of Independence is about is about as if a people have been subjected to a long train of abuses and usurpations by the government ruling over it, they have the right to overthrow that government.
That's a natural human right to overthrow the government.
So that's what, you know, maybe some Egyptians took a look at the Declaration, but those are great and eloquent words of Jefferson and they apply here, too.
One of the funny things about the neocons, thinking maybe of the Harry Jaffa school and the so-called West Coast neocons, who are very, very high on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but they also say, oh, by the way, the Declaration no longer applies to America because you can only have one revolution.
Well, no, you can't.
You can have two revolutions.
We've actually had a number of revolutions in this country, all of them towards more government since the 18th century.
That's just funny, too, because what he's really doing is he's overthrowing the idea that the core value that we'd like to see exported is the idea that human beings are born free.
If there's a state at all, of course we could argue about this, if there's a state at all, its excuse for existing is that the people created it to be their security force to protect their rights.
As you said, as it says in the Declaration of Independence, and if it's the violator of their rights, it's their duty to overthrow it.
And so, yeah, I don't know who this Jaffa guy is, but he sounds like a clown to me.
He's not just overthrowing the right of us in the future, but even the premise of the Declaration and the original revolution, Luke.
One of the last letters he wrote before his death, Jefferson talked about how there were two schools of thought, those who believed that freedom was a natural right of individuals and those who believed that mankind was born with saddles on their back and they were a select minority born with boots and spurs.
Well, we don't accept that sort of thing, and even poor Jefferson, of course, was not as consistent as he should have been on that exact topic, but still what he said was correct.
What it says in the Declaration is right.
We are born free.
We are everywhere in chains.
We need to cut those chains, and I think and hope that the Egyptian people will do it.
I think and hope that there will be no more foreign bribes to the military and the police state in Egypt, with all the blood on the hands of the U.S. government in many, many areas, but what they've done in Egypt is just so despicable, and let's fight for an end to it.
Everybody, that's Luke Rockwell.
He's the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He's the author of The Left, The Right, and The State, and he keeps the most important libertarian website that exists, lurockwell.com at lurockwell.com.
Thanks very much for your time, Luke.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
