All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
On the line is Lou Rockwell.
He's the founder and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He keeps the most important libertarian website in the universe at lourockwell.com.
He's got a great blog, if you add slash blog to the end of that, and also check out his podcast show, which is lourockwell.com/lourockwell dash show.
Or you can just find the link from the top of the page at lourockwell.com or the blog there.
He's the author of Speaking of Liberty and also the Left, the Right and the State.
Welcome back to the show, Lou.
How's things, Scott?
Great to be with you.
Things are terrible.
Yeah, well, so we got another war, a war in Libya.
What's it all about, Lou?
Well, it's about it's about a number of things.
First of all, it's about oil.
The eastern part of Libya, where just by pure merest happenstance, the former officials of the Qaddafi regime who became the rebels, this is where they are and that's where the oil is.
So there's that.
Although it's not so much that the U.S. wants the the physical oil, they'd be very glad to have it.
But they mainly want to be able to control that oil to prevent it from going, as it now goes, mostly to China, mostly China that buys that oil.
So they want to be able to be in control of it.
This is why they're in Iraq, they're why they run Saudi Arabia and all the rest of these countries.
They want to be able to deny oil to countries who may not be obeying them, may not be buying enough Treasury bonds or whatever the latest order is.
So there's that.
There's also the the people in the Pentagon, you know, like shooting off these weapons and killing people and dropping bombs.
And so they they're like that.
They're all going to everybody will get a medal, all give each other a medal.
And so that's fun.
There's contracts for the military industrial complex.
And then there is an expansion of the American empire.
They're bringing Libya or at least the oil rich part of Libya under the control of the empire as an additional province.
So those are the things that are going on.
Very bad.
All right.
Now, so on that first point, control of the oil, does policy originate in Houston or is this just, you know, strategy on the state level, a little bit of both?
Well, I think, you know, I think the seven sisters, the big oil companies are are involved in policymaking.
So there is that.
But also this is a it's a political imperial thing that it really builds the empire and gives we gives us opportunity for many ripoffs and bribes and so forth.
If they're in control of the oil, if they can decide who is to get the oil from the Middle East, they're already at least putatively in charge of the Mexican oil, of course, American oil, Canadian oil.
If it ever came to it, they would happily order Mexico and Canada to whom not to sell the oil.
And so they get the Middle East, too, which is what the empire has been doing ever since the attack on Iraq, first Iraq, first attack on Iraq by George H.W. Bush.
This is a very, very powerful thing.
On the other hand, of course, the empire is going broke as we speak.
So I don't know.
It's like the Romans.
I mean, the greatest point of outreach was sort of the beginning of the end.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like they've had to.
Well, and this goes to our favorite subject on the show with you, Lou, and that is central banking and inflation.
They have to destroy the money in order to get the empire over there.
And then it's no use.
The whole thing falls apart anyway.
If you can't pay your soldiers, then you're done.
And that's come in here pretty quick, it seems like.
Well, you know, the government's typically find a way to pay the soldiers because it's dangerous if they don't pay the soldiers.
But they're also creating all these riots against all their puppet dictators in the Middle East by driving up the price of basic food stocks.
Sure.
No.
And of course, also the Fed.
Another way the Fed operates is they don't have to worry about an appropriation for a war.
Of course, they're not going to ask Congress.
And I admit this is a process question and a declared war is just as evil as an undeclared war.
But still, you know, they don't even have this is a sort of a new level of executive dictatorship the way Obama has done this this time.
And he doesn't have to worry about an appropriation.
They just print it.
Federal Reserve just is already printing vast sums, just prints another billion or whatever, whatever this is going to cost in the short term.
Mm hmm.
Oh, I was gonna say, you think about the precedent set to like since 1990 in the first Gulf War, you had one country invade another.
And of course, there was the whole James Baker holding the red flag for the bull and everything there.
But that was one country invaded another.
Then with Clinton, you had a civil war in Serbia where he intervened in that one.
But at least they had a lie that 100000 people had been killed in this genocide that was taking place.
It wasn't true.
They never found those bodies.
But that was, you know, the lie.
Then, you know, Bush comes in with this, you know, just someday Iraq could be a threat thing.
And now Obama going into Libya based on, you know, a few thousand have died.
Basically, his whole speech was about how many could die.
I think Raimondo highlighted all the possible future tenses in Obama's statement about all the terrible things that could happen in Libya when really so far it's been a relatively small scale civil war, especially for Africa.
If we're comparing like that and and it seems like the the level, the threshold, you know, Bush Senior talked about, well, our values are threatened, our interests are threatened.
Now they don't need anything.
They were down to will intervene if we feel like it only for some.
Well, you know, I myself, I want to I don't believe anything they say.
So if they're claiming that there have been 3000 people killed, maybe that's true.
Maybe they've been 30000.
Maybe there's been nobody.
I mean, we can't actually believe they're lying.
War propaganda about anything.
That was is Muammar Gaddafi a bad guy?
Yeah, sure.
He is.
He's the head of state.
But is he crazy or more?
I mean, how many people has he killed as versus how many people Obama has killed?
Obama is a far bloodier dictator than Muammar Gaddafi.
Bush, of course, even worse than Obama.
And, you know, then we go back to FDR and Truman and Wilson and Lincoln and all the rest of the guys in this office.
So it's true.
That's a crazy element to Gaddafi.
But I think it's because anybody who holds the power of life and death over his fellow human beings, which no one should hold, becomes highly crazy as well as evil.
And that, of course, is 100 percent true of Obama and Bush and all the rest of them, just as it is of Gaddafi.
So, you know, of course, it's none of our business.
We don't.
And this, as you say, this so-called revolution is entirely fomented by the CIA and and related intelligence groups.
So but again, I just would advise everybody don't believe a word they say about anybody they're demonizing, any country they're demonizing.
You can't believe it.
Now, maybe this stuff will turn out to be true, but our past experiences, it never turns out to be true.
They will say and do anything to gin up the American people to, you know, enjoy another another war.
This, of course, is the kind of war the U.S. really loves, this kind of war where they can't fight back.
There's absolutely no danger of any U.S. plane being shot down or cruise missile or bomber or whatever.
They can just they can just go in and blow up everything with a total impunity.
That's what they love.
And then they'll give themselves all medals afterwards.
Well, you know, that's what got the headline from your Russia Today interview when it got posted up on YouTube.
And I think that's a very important point, though, how fun war is to the American people and especially to the American politicians.
They showed actually RT also I saw on Facebook had a thing where they walked around Washington, D.C., asking people what they thought about the war and then asking them to see if they could find Libya on a map.
And of course, they love the war and they can't find Libya on a map.
Well, of course they can't.
They've been to public school.
They can't find Wyoming on a map.
But they like knowing that people are dying.
They love that.
Well, of course, they don't want Americans to die since we're the uber mention, but they definitely want the intermention to die.
The under men, the gooks, whatever they're calling, you know, whatever they call Arabs and blanks and, you know, cowl heads and all those horrible other descriptions.
So, yeah, they they the American people are more hysterical about so-called terrorism or about Arabs and Muslims than they even were about communists and Russians and whatever.
I think that they were every bit as hysterical about the Japanese during World War two.
But I wasn't here then to know that.
But certainly from my own experience, as hysterical as the Cold War was, it's nothing like this one where it looks like every member, every boob is Americana is worried that there's Osama bin Laden under their bed.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Anthony Gregory and Butler Schaefer had an interesting little back and forth on your blog the other day about the prime motivating factor, fear, love.
And Schaefer said, no, it's love.
It's love for the state and confidence that even after all this, think it's just what we've been through in the last decade, you know, that still at the end of the day, if they say Gaddafi is a bad guy and we got to go get him, then ultimately, you know, America is still Superman over there.
We can only do right.
We never tell a lie.
And it's always good.
It's always for their own good or else we wouldn't be doing it.
You know.
All right.
Well, we got to hold it right there.
It's Lou Rockwell.
Lou Rockwell dot com.
That's L.E.
W.
Rockwell dot com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Santi War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Lou Rockwell from Lou Rockwell dot com, founder and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where they keep the Austrian economists, that is the ones who actually understand economics.
And he's got a piece.
It's actually a YouTube video is the top link at Lou Rockwell dot com today.
Naked aggression against Libya.
His interview with Russia today from, I think, yesterday, which is really good.
Always like seeing on TV, Lou.
So now on the question of how much fun it is to bomb Libyans.
When I was in fourth grade, Ronald Reagan bombed Libya and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
And I still remember on the back of my worksheets when I finished my work early, I would turn it over and I would draw pictures of I'd never heard of F-111s before, only F-14s and stuff.
But apparently there's such a thing as a F-111.
Cool.
So I drew pictures of F-111s.
Dropping bombs and blowing people up.
They'd probably have me committed now for that.
But, you know, war is a lot of fun if you're a fourth grader or if you're a Washington, D.C. type, too.
I saw Tom Rick's blog at Foreign Policy talking about, wow, look, everybody.
This is the first air war ever conducted by a female general.
We're breaking that glass ceiling.
And this is this is a precedent setting thing.
Hillary Clinton and and this general lady in the Air Force.
They're bombing the hell out of Libya.
It's great.
Well, you know, it's the whole thing is unbelievably sickening.
And as usual, of course, the U.S. is the headquarters of political correctness.
I mean, that's that's that's part of the imperial ideology.
You know, we have to take over Afghanistan in order to bring women's rights.
Well, I'm all for women's rights, although I think they're only individual rights.
But I'm I'm obviously all for women as well as men having individual rights not taken away from them by the state.
But, you know, they've murdered how many people in Afghanistan?
I mean, why isn't this up to those people?
It's again, the U.S. is an extension of the Yankee empire.
I mean, of the way New England was as against the Indians and then against the rest of the country.
They are absorbed and dedicated to running other people's lives.
They love running other people's lives.
Most of us normal people think it's enough of a trend, enough of a problem to run our own lives.
We don't want to run the lives of the guy next door or the guy in the next town, let alone the guy in the next country.
But, of course, there are people who want to do that.
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, you know, Samantha Powers, who I only found out from Justin Raimondo, is the wife of the the ultimate evil in the Obama administration, Cass Sunstein, who's who's like to be the commissar of the American Internet.
Like to be the commissar of the American Internet and the big promoter of spy operations and false flag operations and very, very nasty, nasty guy.
And so the government is full of these people.
Well, Powers is the one who got in trouble for calling Hillary Clinton a monster during the primaries and had to leave the Obama campaign for a little while.
Now here they are teaming up, apparently.
She wasn't all wrong.
Yeah, no, not at all.
I was like, hey, that's what Lou Rockwell would have called her, I think.
Wow, yeah.
So what do you think?
We're going to be there for decades now, like Iraq?
It's a brand new thing.
It's never going away, this Libya war?
It's never going away.
I mean, just the other day, the White House said, well, really, the mission is to bring, you know, a democratic system to Libya.
Oh, well, there you go.
What does democracy mean?
It doesn't mean, by the way, free and fair elections.
And I'm not that big a fan of free and fair elections from a democratic standpoint.
There are problems there, too.
But what they're concerned with is elections that result in American-picked candidates winning.
That's what they mean by democracy.
And where people who are not for the American domination are not allowed to participate.
Eric Margolis says that the American elections, American-run elections in Iraq and in Afghanistan make the Soviets look good from the days when they ran their elections.
It's just, you're allowed to vote for a candidate who is in the total control of the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon.
So it will be the same thing in Libya.
This is going to take a long time.
A lot of people in Libya are not going to want to be run by foreign occupiers and bombers and killers.
So, you know, there's something funny about humans.
We don't like to be run by foreigners.
And we put up, this may be a bad thing, with far more tyranny from our own kind than we do from people with a different language, different heritage, different religion, different ethnicity, and so forth.
So in order to have the Americans be accepted, it's going to require a lot more killing.
A lot of, you know, CIA troops.
Of course, the contractors.
Mr. Engel, who's the NBC correspondent in Cairo, commenting on this, and he said what the rebels are asking for is contractors.
Oh, sure, the rebels are asking for contractors.
I mean, if they are, they're being paid to do so.
So, of course, XE and the rest of these companies are going to be paid like a zillion dollars additionally to what they're already getting to go and make trouble and keep things roiling in Libya.
Because the U.S., by the way, never wants peace in any of these countries.
If there is peace, then there's a risk of everybody getting together against them.
So just like the Romans, whose slogan was divide et impera, divide and rule, the U.S. seeks to divide in order to rule.
So there will be endless trouble, endless civil war in Libya as we continue to liberate them.
Same with Iraq.
Same with Afghanistan.
Because we're bombing Pakistan.
I don't know where that's going to lead.
We're bombing Yemen.
Who knows where that's going to lead?
Well, they're not going to stand.
I think they're buying their time waiting to see what happens in Egypt.
But they're not going to let an anti-American group come to power there.
No, but, of course, Egypt has a military dictatorship.
I mean, it's not just one guy.
It's a junta.
And that's why we stopped hearing about Egypt.
Because for whatever reason, they wanted to get rid of Mubarak.
So I'm wondering whether we should reconsider Mubarak.
Anyway, the CIA and all the, you know, the Mossad and so forth wanted to get rid of Mubarak and install a military dictatorship.
And so that's what they've got.
We'll see what happens.
But I don't have things really improved in Egypt.
I mean, I can understand why people wanted to get rid of the tyrant.
I mean, you can certainly applaud that, and that's great.
But what's replaced them is a continuing tyranny, sort of a faceless continuing tyranny that's run by the U.S.
And I notice they're also continuing the death blockade against Gaza.
I heard Mrs. Alan Greenspan on CNBC, excuse me, on MSNBC the other day say that, well, it's great the Egyptians are keeping the weapons from going into Gaza.
Well, you know, they're also keeping the baby formula from going into Gaza.
So it's a terrible thing.
It's a crime under international law.
It's certainly a moral crime.
So as long as Egypt is maintaining the death blockade of Gaza, we know they're not representing the Egyptian people.
So we've not seen any progress, I don't believe, in Egypt.
Mubarak is still living happily in his palatial seaside mansion in Sharm el-Sheikh.
What has changed?
And I noticed just yesterday that a bunch of, you know, they didn't explain what was happening, but the files of the Ministry of Internal Security, that is the spy operation, were set on fire.
So some people are portraying this as the good guys, not the good guys doing that, it's the people from the state who don't want anybody being able to look at those files to see who was a spy, who was turning who in, who was doing what dirty deed to their neighbor on behalf of the government.
So, you know, we can only hope and pray that things get better for the Egyptian people.
So far they've not.
And they held this big plebiscite of a sort that Hitler or Stalin used to hold, but I wouldn't say that's any reason to applaud either.
There's been no significant change in Egypt.
All right, well, I'm sorry we've got to leave it there, but I really appreciate your time on the show as always, Lou.
Good stuff.
Scott, great to talk to you.
Everybody, that's Lou from lourockwell.com.
Slash blog, too.
