All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest today is Lew Rockwell.
He is the chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and he's the author of The Left, The Right, and The State.
He keeps a website and two great blogs at lewrockwell.com.
Welcome back Lew, how are you doing?
Great to be with you Scott.
I forgot to say mises.org is the website for that Mises Institute where there are, I don't know, 50 million pages of free text that you can read on everything that's most important about liberty and economics.
Lew, is that about somewhere around there?
Yeah, it's a fantastic treasure house, not only of free books, free papers, free articles, free videos, free audios, just it.
As you say, everything you need to know about Austrian economics and the cause of liberty of the related libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and classical liberal ideas is right there for free at mises.org.
And now, I didn't get to hear all of it yet, but I heard this thing this morning on your radio show page, the Lew Rockwell show.
Heil Obama, the fascist American state, a speech you gave in Phoenix, Arizona at the Casey Research Summit.
And I certainly couldn't ask you to repeat the whole thing for us or anything like that, but basically your bottom line is in this thing, as much of it as I heard so far, is that yes, America is a fascist state, according to you, Lew Rockwell.
Is that right?
Sure, and I think we've had elements of fascism ever since Franklin Roosevelt.
I mean, the New Deal was explicitly based on Mussolini's economic policies.
And so this is the first time when we really had fascism enter into the political bloodstream of this country.
But it's only gotten worse, and I don't think we're unusual, by the way.
You know, while communism was never a threat to us, fascism I think always was.
And really, all the countries in Western Europe, in Latin America and North America, I mean, these are by any rational definition fascist states.
That is, they're corporate states.
They're combinations of big government and big business against the rest of us.
The labor unions are not as much of a factor as they were under Mussolini.
It's just pretty much big business.
And big government, of course, also going along with that, the basic economics of fascism.
We have also the typical militarism, belligerent nationalism, and the demonization of the other, in our case Muslims, and erosion of civil liberties, exaltation of anybody in a government uniform, and excusing of torture, and every kind of horrible treatment of people.
They're using predator drones now internally against Americans, which is only a matter of time.
I mean, it's one of the things the good founding fathers pointed out, that you can't have an empire overseas and a republic at home.
That is, you can't have a limited government.
I'm an anarchist because I believe in no government, but the smaller the better.
And they argued you can't have a small government when the government feels free to do anything they want to people overseas.
It's only a very short matter of time till they're doing everything to us here at home.
And that's what's happening.
So, although we've had fascist elements ever since Franklin Roosevelt, today we see it just, we have galloping fascism, not only economically, but in terms of civil liberties, and just the constant ratcheting up of the police state, the warfare state.
How many wars is the U.S. waging now?
Six?
Seven?
I mean, it's tough to keep track.
And of course, military bases and so many different countries occupying and invading, destroying.
And of course, anybody whose country is invaded, occupied, and destroyed, if they oppose that, that is by definition a terrorist.
That person's a terrorist.
That's what the government defines terrorism as.
So, the British might very well have described, if they had the word, probably they would have described the American revolutionaries as terrorists for rejecting the rule of the government and wanting to get rid of the king.
So, this is the U.S. attitude to the whole world.
Anybody who rejects U.S. hegemony is a terrorist.
Reminds me a little bit of Genghis Khan, who had the view that the gods had given him the earth.
And so, if you resisted him, not only were you very foolhardy, but you were guilty of blasphemy, and therefore there was no punishment that could be, that was too much for you, your children, your spouse, your elderly people, and whatever.
He just felt free to kill everybody in the city that resisted him.
He would build a mountain of skulls outside the city as a warning to others, and never to resist him, because the gods, after all, had given him the earth.
It seems to the U.S. feels that God has given the U.S. government the earth, and everybody better obey.
So, we have sort of international fascism, as well as fascism here at home.
It's far, it's actually more dangerous than communism, even though they're probably, probably the Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot governments, you know, were probably the worst ever, in terms of mass deaths and property destruction.
Because, unfortunately, fascism is slightly less economically disastrous than socialism.
So, there are, it's not like a free market society, but it has elements of the free market, and elements of private property.
So, the government can do even more harm.
And, of course, we saw this, you know, under National Socialism, for the worst, but many other countries, and now we're headed down that path.
All right.
Now, a couple of things come to mind when you say these things.
First of all, most people, well, I don't know about now, but at least over the last, you know, say 10, 20 years, most people have only ever heard communists, either, you know, Soviet communists, or, you know, American leftists, ever call America an empire, or a fascist state.
And so, they sort of just didn't take it seriously.
In fact, Eric Margulies tells the story of Abdul Azam, Osama Bin Laden's mentor, saying, as soon as we're done with the Russians, we're coming for you next, you imperialist Yankees.
And he said, what are you kidding me?
Like, that's what the Soviets call us.
How could you call us that?
That's ridiculous.
That was his immediate reaction.
I think that's probably a lot of people's immediate reaction.
Another thing, and this happened to me while you're talking, fascism means guys in, as far as I know, gray coats, because it's all black and white footage, marching up and down the street.
And this, and over there on the other side of an ocean somewhere or something, it's hard for me to, you know, with my American upbringing, accept the idea that this very terrible and foreign system is actually what rules the United States today.
And one more thing, actually, too, which is, all those troops are over there fighting for our freedom.
And what pile of skulls?
And all they're doing is trying to do the right thing to keep us safe.
And what is all this American terrorism you're talking about?
Now, that's a lot.
We might have saved some until the other side of the break, but I'll let you go ahead and chew on that for a minute.
Well, you're certainly right that the way the left uses, the left uses fascism to pretty much define anything they don't like.
So, they throw that word around pretty liberally.
However, fascism is an actual economic and political philosophy.
Now, it may not be quite as clearly laid out as Marxism, Leninism is, but I think we can look at the countries in which it's been implemented.
And, you know, as I said in my speech, John T.
Flynn, in his great book, As We Go Marching, went over what are the definitions of fascism, and it definitely applies to the United States.
It is absolutely no question that this is a fascist state.
Now, I agree we all think, but think about the exaltation of the military in this country.
I mean, we're all supposed, when a guy who's paid by the government to go overseas and kill people walks through the airport, we're all supposed to stand and cheer him.
Now, I think a lot of these guys are victims.
They're not, either they're economic victims, and that was the only thing they could do, or they're tricked into it, or maybe your hormones of that age should take you into it, or whatever.
And, of course, also there are people who go in because they like killing.
There are people on this earth who enjoy killing people, and they don't become clerks at 7-Eleven.
They go into the government, especially into the military, the CIA, and all the various death squads that the U.S. government has.
It has a horrendous number of death squads, and feels free, of course, as Obama recently asserted, to kill anybody anywhere on the earth in this country or anyplace else if he decides that they're a bad person.
So, you know, did even Hitler make that public claim?
I don't know.
In fact, he felt free to kill anybody, but I don't know.
Even he didn't dare make that claim publicly.
Yeah, Judge Napolitano made the case on Fox News that not even Hitler claimed to have that power, though he exercised all the time.
He never said it was lawful.
But, anyhow, we'll be right back after this with more from Lew Rockwell, the chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking to Lew Rockwell from the Ludwig von Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com.
If you're a Ron Paul junkie like me, check out the Political Theater blog.
Great stuff all day long there.
And now, Lew, the break kind of interrupted your train of thought.
I think I'll let you get back to it if you like, or I got other ways we can go.
Well, just that I just wanted to agree with you that this does seem like, you know, something foreign, something out of the 30s, something that would have nothing to do with the land of the free and the home of the brave.
But, you know, we live under the most, well, certainly the biggest, richest, most powerful government ever to exist in history.
The government, by the way, with the most vicious tax system of, I'm told by the experts of any country on earth.
And, you know, where the police go around and, you know, practically in full body armor, where there are more and more government officials, more and more armed government officials, more and more uniformed government officials.
And does anybody, by the way, feel safe when they see, you know, the FBI or whatever, they go, phew, we're going to be okay now.
You know, it's just, of course, the reverse.
So all that we have secret police, we have camps where dissidents are sent.
Maybe we're going to have, you know, they're keeping rumors about FEMA camps.
And is this actually going to happen?
I don't know, but I will say this.
Nothing is morally beyond the American government.
There's no crime that they won't commit because they're going to think, well, gee, this is unethical.
If they don't commit a particular crime, either they haven't thought of it or they couldn't bring it off or they feel it's not in their interest.
So the U.S. government is moving towards being a totalitarian state, which John T. Flynn defined as a government that believes that there's nothing beyond its authority.
Maybe it's not doing everything, but it feels if it decides to do something, it has the authority to do it.
And certainly the U.S. Congress, the presidency, the courts believe nothing is beyond them, whether it's running your family, running your neighborhood, deciding about your children, running your business, you know, everything, pavings and everything.
But if you're talking about just Newt Gingrich, then obviously everybody agrees with that.
But there's a large number of people who think that who, you know, take it for granted that the Republicans are the party of the rich Christian business owning white elite people who own everything or whatever.
And the Democrats are the party of the little guy and the labor unions and the racial minorities and, you know, that kind of thing.
And yet to me, something that I really learned a lot from years ago was the book Philip Drew Administrator.
Great book by Colonel Edward Mandel House, which is kind of his fantasy of a fascist America run by him.
And this was Woodrow Wilson's Cheney.
He wasn't he wasn't a Republican.
He was a Democrat.
And if you read his program for because this is before Mussolini had a bad rap.
Right.
He bragged.
I anticipated Mussolini by several years.
And indeed.
And this is the Democratic Party platform.
This is the New Deal and the Great Society.
And I guess World War One during the war years.
This is Obama nomics right here.
Well, sure.
Of course, it's it's absolutely true.
The while the Republicans are are entirely rotten, with the exception of Ron Paul and about three other people, the Democrats are, you know, entirely rotten with the exception of three people.
As you say, Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat and Obama.
So people look at this as this is the government intervening because only the government is powerful enough to tell these billionaires, no.
So this is the people using their democracy to balance things out.
Well, as we know, you know, Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and Citibank and all these people backed Obama the last time over McCain.
They backed he he is the most wholly owned Wall Street candidate.
Now, I don't want to exonerate the Republicans since they gave us TARP, for example.
But Obama has.
And of course, Bernanke is a Republican.
So but Butler Schaefer always refer to the refers to the Republicans and Democrats as the two wings of the same bird of prey.
So I think I think that that's the way to look at it.
So maybe the Republican rhetoric is a little bit better sometimes.
And Murray Rothbard pointed out, by the way, this only change Republican rhetoric was horrible.
It was horrible.
It was horrible from a libertarian standpoint and from a pro-peace standpoint up until Franklin Roosevelt.
And the Republicans decided that there was nobody to they couldn't compete with Roosevelt on the left.
And I'm not talking about when Roosevelt ran for office because he ran in a very small government free market platform.
But once he got in power, of course, he revealed the cloven hoof.
And so Murray said the Republicans were in a quandary.
They'd always been the big state, big war, big tariff, big intervention party.
And so they they realized they couldn't run to the left of Roosevelt because that was only the communists.
And so then they became for that, you know, rhetorically and still to this day, oftentimes rhetorically the libertarian party.
But, of course, in fact, they're also a fascist party, a corporatist party and everything that we have, you just look at the Bush administration.
Everything was done for the benefit of big business.
I was just reminded, you know, that Gingrich, his for-profit lobbying firm got thirty seven million dollars from the big pharmaceutical companies to promote the Bush Medicare Part D up until that time, the biggest welfare program ever in the medical area anyway.
And it was a vast transfer of wealth from the average taxpayer to the pharmaceutical companies.
And Gingrich got thirty seven million.
That's how much of this, how much is at stake.
I can just pay this one guy, one lobbyist, thirty seven million dollars and they got it.
Oh, what a perfect example, too.
I mean, for anybody who believes in government health care, why in the world would the corporations you hate pay Newt Gingrich who you hate even more to promote that kind of thing other than it's for them, not you?
And we also know to the extent we have any transparency and we don't have much transparency about Obamacare, but the pharmaceutical industry was the key industry writing the law.
And what we're going to get with Obamacare is two minutes with a doctor or 30 seconds or whatever and 17 pharmaceutical prescriptions.
So it's all designed to enrich the vested interest, the pharmaceutical companies, also, you know, the AMA, the American hospitals and all the rest of the people feeding at the trough.
But the idea that the big corporation, you know, the idea that Obama is helping the little guy against the big corporations, he's owned by the big corporations.
But, of course, so was George Bush.
So, again, this is a we should always be bipartisan.
Both sides are evil.
Yeah.
All right.
Now I got to tell you, I got to tell you a story, Lou.
When I was in ninth grade, I thought the Gulf War was cool just because it was supersonic planes and explosions and cool stuff.
And I didn't care about Iraqis.
And I just want to bomb down the chimney and all that stuff.
Yeah, I was a boy.
I like exciting things.
Me and my friends, when we were in elementary school, always played guns in the woods and that kind of thing.
Red Dawn or whatever.
So I just thought it was great.
Whatever.
Fine.
I was in ninth grade.
It's all right.
I forgive myself for it.
But my point is that I had no idea that there was a single antiwar protest anywhere in the country until about a year and a half later or something.
I heard someone referred to all the hippies chanting no blood for oil or something.
I had never even been exposed to the idea that any organized group of people anywhere in the country thought it was a bad idea.
It was nothing but yellow ribbons and American flags everywhere.
And so my point is I can understand what it's like to just not be able to comprehend that your American government has the blood of a million Indonesians on their hands that you never heard of, that they build piles of skulls everywhere they go.
They talk about maybe tens of thousands of people died in Iraq when it was more than a million.
And people just they can't get their head around because they don't they're never exposed to it.
Six million in Vietnam.
Those names are not on a wall in Washington, by the way.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it really is.
And you talk about, you know, you lose count of how many wars there are.
That's because now they're spreading into sub-Saharan Africa.
We don't even know how many countries that is, but it's a lot.
And and any killing that goes on there will go uncovered and completely unaccountable.
Oh, I'm sure we're seeing the recolonization of Africa, at least those parts of it that have minerals and oil.
That's what that's what's going on.
And it's so it's fascism, really materially different from mercantilism and the old British East India Company and Jamestown Company and all those kinds of things.
No, I mean, you know, I would say it's related to mercantilism.
Certainly it's big.
It's mercantilism with a gun in its hands.
Yeah, but it's the the ideology of mercantilism didn't reach to the whole people.
It was just really for the upper class and the intellectuals.
The American people, by and large, cheer all this stuff.
They love, you know, executing some guy in capital punishment.
They love the idea of torture.
This is not everybody, but it's some amazing number of Americans are sticking up the foam finger.
We're number one when they hear about torture.
I mean, they they love it.
They love the idea of waterboarding, even though, of course, the U.S. actually executed Japanese officers after World War Two for waterboarding.
Yeah, well, Ronald Reagan actually prosecuted a Texas sheriff for it in 1983.
So it's always wrong if anybody else is doing it.
But when the U.S. government is doing it, then it becomes holy, of course, because we're the shining city on the hill.
We're, you know, the new Zion.
God blesses us and tells us to kill everybody.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm so sorry that we're out of time because I could continue talking with you all afternoon, but schedules don't allow it.
Thanks so much for your time on the show.
God, thanks for having me on.
Everybody, that's the great Lew Rockwell, chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
His latest book is The Left, The Right and The State.
LewRockwell.com.
And check out the political theater and the blog, the regular blog, too.
