All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm looking at antiwar.com/blog where Jeremy Sapienza's got me laughing my ass off here.
And now I click back to the viewpoint section where Matt Bargainier has put together quite a bit of reading material for us today.
Welcome back to the show, Matt.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And thanks for posting this Grant Smith article it made for a great interview a little while ago.
Oh, great.
Yeah, Grant Smith does amazing work, really following the money, you know, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, calling the IRS, you know, really tracking rather than just speculating about what AIPAC primarily does.
Right.
Yeah, he really does the work.
And boy, there's some powerful stuff in that one today, including a link to a thing by Steve Rosen, where it looks like Keith Weissman emailing the head of AIPAC with information he got from Larry Franklin about the Bata Brigade and about Israelis up in Kurdistan.
It was like right out of the indictment.
Yeah.
And Smith makes the point that the title of the article is does AIPAC have only two major donors?
And he's gone through their IRS filings.
And their most recent one shows that virtually all of their money comes from two donors.
We don't know who those two donors are.
You'll have to read the article for his explanation of that.
But he points out why that might be, why some of the donors of the other big donors may have fled.
And it partly has to do with this uncertainty about AIPAC's future, given all of these revelations about its possibly illegal activities.
Yeah, well, it's good to hear.
I wonder, I wonder how many of those donors, those former donors have gone over to J Street or just quit?
Yeah, I'm curious about that, too.
I don't know that there's any way exactly of finding out, since, as he points out, the IRS list just gives the amount of the donation from each contributor, not the name.
But yeah, if anyone can find that out, Grant is probably the person.
Yeah.
It's just amazing when, you know, earlier I talked with John Glazer, our assistant editor now, a new one, about the sanctions on Iran and how they got 92 senators lined up for some new sanctions, or they've written a letter to Obama saying they're proposing these new sanctions.
And that's, as we all know and have known for years, that's because of the influence of AIPAC.
And here it turns out AIPAC is two people who happen to have a whole lot of money.
Geez, that don't seem right.
Well, one of the things that Smith points out about the consequences of just having two people donate the vast majority of the funds is that this has undoubtedly pushed AIPAC in a more extreme direction than it had before.
You know, if you really only have to satisfy two people, it's a lot different from having to satisfy a hundred, even if their priorities are basically the same.
You know, more extreme voices can make themselves heard when there are only two voices.
Yep.
Now I got another question for you here.
Don't you like it when Chris Floyd writes stuff?
I do.
Chris has a style that's passionate and very moral in its tone.
And you have to have some of that.
You know, it's one thing to go through the numbers and to analyze things coldly and dispassionately.
You have to have that too.
But Chris really brings the passion and the moral sensibility into discussing foreign policy.
Yep.
This one is called Ishaqi Again, Another Day, Another Atrocity in the Endless Iraq War.
And, you know, just that title is enough.
That ought to be a slap in the face to people out there.
What do you mean, endless Iraq war?
But it's it's not just that we still have troops there.
They're still fighting.
They're still bombing people over there.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Twenty one years we've been at war with Iraq.
Who would have thought that, right?
It's a weak little fourth world country over there, made up a desert, you know, since Genghis Khan salted all the crops back a thousand years ago or whatever.
And this is who we got to fight this whole time.
It's just it's ridiculous.
Now, we often run Becky Akers as well from LewRockwell.com and the New American Magazine, right?
She writes some good stuff.
Right.
She has one up there today about the CSA.
It appeared on The Daily Caller.
And when she's talking about the new interrogation plans for air travelers, Justin Raimondo talked about that last week, I believe.
And and it's certainly worth a read.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of Raimondo, his piece today is about the riots in in England.
And I was kind of surprised they didn't really focus on, you know, really, I guess, kind of both sides of what he calls the left and right argument there about, well, whether this is welfare status mentality or it's the fault of the austerity taking some of that welfare statism away, that kind of thing when it's obviously both.
And it's obviously the war that's, you know, led Britain into this.
They've been the junior partners in our terror war this whole time.
And therefore, they're suffering the same kind of economic dislocations.
They've got the people of the country feeling that their Democratic voice doesn't count, doesn't mean anything, just like over here.
And, you know, they're frustrated as hell.
Yeah, that's the recurrent theme through a lot of the pieces that we find lately, including on Monday, we had a great piece by Ron Cohen, who reports from Israel, where he's talking about the same feeling in Israel, among young people, especially that they don't really have a voice anymore.
And although their protests are largely economic in nature and pretty easy to figure out, unlike what's going on in England, he notes that part of the problem there is that the Israeli state has been so dedicated to the occupation, while promising people that that dedication to the occupation would not interfere with the provision of social services that they have come to expect, that they have run head on into a big problem that they're no longer able to provide those things.
Right.
And so they're being made to, well, I guess they it would seem like they are being made to face the same choice that the Americans and the British government are both ignoring, too, which is choosing between the warfare state and the welfare state.
They still just want to have both and keep whistling past the graveyard on this, it seems like.
It does, indeed.
The Anglo-American-Israeli empire of bankruptcy.
And, you know, it really does worry me.
I don't know if as bad as it worries Justin, you know, the way he writes it in this piece today, but I do think that we could have some pretty bad social disruption in this country and that the economic dislocation is, you know, the huge part of it, man.
You know, we saw through the 90s, admittedly, it was kind of a bubble and whatever, mostly a bubble.
But, you know, we've seen crime rates in America drop really for a generation.
And, you know, now we don't seem to be able, they don't seem to be able to reinflate the bubble so well this time.
And so things start breaking down.
And just think of all those trillions of dollars wasted in the Middle East.
I mean, the fact that the entire country isn't unanimous, that it's the Pentagon and their bases that need to go is amazing to me, you know, that any politician could talk about cutting Medicare, Medicaid or anything else while we are occupying the world out there.
That's true.
Unfortunately, people are not yet seeing this as a dilemma, as a choice, you know.
And the establishment in Washington, on both the, you know, the liberal side and the conservative side, insists that difficult choices really don't have to be made.
They like to say that they're having to make difficult choices every once in a while to make themselves appear more statesman-like.
But when you boil it all down, what they're really doing is just insisting that choices don't have to be made.
Matt, around this time every year, we run a bunch of articles about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reminding people, maybe providing them with a little bit of revisionist history about what really happened there and how it's different from the way they tell it.
And I was hoping maybe you could tell us a little bit about some of the different articles that we ran last week and this week about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Sure.
On Tuesday, yesterday was the 9th, and so that was the anniversary of Nagasaki.
And so we ran a great piece by Ralph Rako, which is actually several years old.
We usually run it around this time of year, though, because Rako takes a very scholarly approach, but it's one that you probably didn't hear in school, and you certainly didn't hear on CNN or Fox or MSNBC.
So I recommend that one.
I actually read the whole thing on the air yesterday.
I only left out the very last line because I ran out of time.
The music was playing.
It was, if Harry Truman isn't a war criminal, then no one ever was.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, most people are afraid to say that, even if they think it.
I mean, there was the classic incident with Don Stewart a year or two back where, you know, he actually said on the air that he considered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be war crimes.
And then came back a day or two later and, you know, disavowed that courageous statement, acting as if he were under the influence of something at the time he said it.
Yeah, it was funny because, of course, he had no argument for why it was okay after all or anything.
Just, no, of course I don't think that.
No good people think that.
Right.
That's the most annoying sort of disavowal.
I mean, people can change their minds.
That's fine.
But if you change your mind after you've already stated a cogent argument for something, you also offer some sort of argument to the contrary when you disavow your previous statement.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, we all grow up with the atomic bombings and they're part of the civic religion.
It's sort of a test for whether you're a true American or not, whether you rationalize and justify that or don't you.
Are you one of us or aren't you?
Right.
Blame America first, liberal hippie types like Ralph Rako.
Well, except for liberals, most self-described liberals are, you know, enthusiastic or at least comfortable with Chairman's actions.
They certainly don't want to piss on a Democratic president.
Right.
Yeah.
And apparently that's the only difference that matters as this piece that we're running today makes the case.
Another Gene Healy piece, Obamaphile still longing for Camelot.
You know, it's it almost goes without saying that partisans are going to be partisans.
But, you know, somebody has to point it out.
You know, somebody who's because when the Republicans point it out, you know, it's easy enough for the Democrats to point out in return that the Republicans were the same way just a few years ago.
So it's good to have some people who stand outside of the two party game and and point to the ridiculousness of both sides there.
Yeah, that's the great thing about being libertarians.
We don't have to be wrong half the time.
Yeah.
Everybody else, they just switch off back and forth, you know, and actually it's probably more than half the time for them.
But anyway.
All right.
So and actually, I'm sorry, because that's a trail off.
I wanted to give you a chance to say something more about some of the other Hiroshima Nagasaki articles, because we ran a few and they must have been making different cases there.
Yeah, there was also on Monday we had a piece by David Krieger.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes.
And there was some over the weekend.
Saturday was the anniversary of Hiroshima.
So, yeah, we we definitely are not afraid to touch hot historical controversies.
Yeah.
And by the way, when you go to antiwar dot com, look at the left margin there and you'll see last seven days and you can click on any of those days of the week and go back.
And also if you just look at the viewpoint section smack dab in the middle of the page, you'll see the link more viewpoints for everything that didn't quite make the cut for the six that we feature every day, not including any of our in-house writers and also the viewpoints from the past week and two weeks and three weeks back.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
We have the six we have the six viewpoints on a normal day and the step out of the spotlight.
But there's there's a whole cache of views, usually under more viewpoints.
So the columnist.
So, you know, especially on the Hiroshima Nagasaki thing, if there's anybody who's kind of new out there and you're just sort of shaking off the fog of your, you know, state religious indoctrination in school and you want to look over some revisionist history about the atomic bombings of Japan at the end of the Second World War, I highly recommend just go to antiwar dot com and click that more viewpoints link and you can go back and find all of those, especially read Ralph Rako, Hiroshima and Nagasaki for that.
Well, speaking of speaking of state religious indoctrination, I know that you've had sort of an M.E.K., Rigahedein-e-Kalk theme this week.
And religious indoctrination, for sure, those guys.
Right.
Statist religious indoctrination.
We have a couple of pieces today on that topic, which present somewhat different views.
We had a piece by Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative where he talks about the Christian Science Monitor's report on the M.E.K. and Larrison makes a lot of great points.
He has some great commentary in the reporting.
And one of the things that he says in his piece is that it would be extremely unwise to remove the M.E.K. from the foreign terrorist organization list that the U.S. government has maintained.
Now, as a sort of counterpoint to that, Ivan Ehlen, one of our regular weekly columnists, had a piece today titled U.S. Terror List Should Be Downsized, in which he argues without sugarcoating the M.E.K. at all.
In fact, he says most of the same things about them that Larrison does.
He simply makes a somewhat different argument that the foreign terrorist organization list should only include groups that are engaged in terrorism against the United States and the M.E.K., as terrible as it is, should be removed from it.
Now, the M.E.K. should probably put on another list because the damage that it's doing to the U.S. or attempting to do is not of a terrorist nature.
It's of a lobbying nature.
It's lobbying to get the U.S. involved in a war with Iran.
But I think that those two pieces are an interesting point and counterpoint to some extent.
Yeah, yeah.
I was really glad to see that piece last night, actually, by Ivan making that case because, first of all, it shows what an open-minded editor you are, but also he's right, really.
I mean, hell, I don't even think there should be a State Department at all.
How do you like that?
I just don't want to be listed right now when, you know, in the real world there would be severe consequences in terms of our relationship with Iran and the slightest ground that's been tread that, you know, closer toward being able to negotiate our differences will be pushed back.
I mean, it'd be a disaster.
I read something actually by Scott Peterson, that same Christian Science Monitor reporter, that he wrote in 1997 or something that's linked from the new piece, where he talks about how listing the MEK actually was the number one greatest thing for the warming of relations between Iran and the United States.
It was the number one, you know, best chance we had to, you know, make clear to the Iranians that we did not seek, you know, some kind of short-term regime change in their country.
Doing the opposite would certainly have the opposite effect, it seems.
Yeah, no, I think this is a good example of an issue on which there's room for debate, so long as, you know, we're not receiving anyone about the nature of the MEK, but Larrison's point is well taken.
If you delist them, that does send a certain signal, and the people who are behind the delisting have an agenda, you know, and it's certainly not the libertarian one, or the constitutionalist one, or just the foreign policy realist one that Ivan Eland has filed.
And we also have a piece from Jacob Hornberger, as we often do.
This one's running today.
Why expand the drug war?
A very important subject, one we've been covering more and more, and this is about Mexico, right?
Yes, it is.
Yeah, oh, I'm sorry, we're all out of time, but we've been covering Mexico more and more.
That drug war is becoming more and more of a war down there, and I'm glad you picked this one up.
All right, well, listen, we're all out of time for today, but I appreciate yours, Matt.
All right, thank you.
All right, everybody, that's Matt Bargain here, editor of antiwar.com.
See you tomorrow.
