All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is Thomas Harrington.
He's written a couple of things for antiwar.com in the past.
Uh, in fact, I saw, I was like, Oh yeah, this is that hilarious satire.
Uh, from a couple of years back.
Uh, and I believe, uh, Thomas, you're down in Uruguay.
Is that right?
That is correct.
And, uh, Matt Borgeneer forwarded me an email where he said you had some things to say about the empire down in South America these days.
Well, yeah, it's kind of a nice perspective being down here.
Very interesting perspective.
You're in a part of the world, uh, that in many senses has been through a lot of what we seem to be entering into.
And there seems to be a calm that is involved with coming out on the other side.
You don't have to, for example, argue for a lot of things down here, such as the United States and empire.
It is, it is in the way that the tree is growing in the park down the street.
You don't have to argue about things like that.
You don't have to argue about whether the United States policies are insane.
It's just consensually agreed that they are.
Well, you know, the coverage of the empire down in South America has definitely taken a hiatus and I guess it's kind of seen that the, all the new Bolivarians and everything like that, that Latin America was gaining increasing amounts of independence from the United States, less Columbia.
And, uh, I guess a couple of others, uh, is that just not right?
Well, there's a real sense of that.
In fact, uh, it's a real exciting time.
The big news today, of course, is the death of, uh, Kirchner in Argentina, who was really one of those leaders from the new class of leaders who really cut their teeth through the social struggles of the seventies and eighties.
I mean, I was thinking about it today.
You're looking at people who most of whom have spent time in jail, uh, for their beliefs, and so you now have people in government who have been on the wrong end of things at an earlier time of their life and are governing with that, that consciousness and really want to take things to the next step.
It tends to bring, for all of the material problems, there are a real sense of earnestness about making democracy work, making sure that imperialism's strong hand doesn't come back here.
Well, how many, uh, or which, I guess, uh, Latin American countries include Central and South America, uh, are run by governments that are basically just puppets of the United States and how many are independent?
When you're looking at the South American continent, uh, very few are left.
You mentioned earlier Columbia.
Um, the question is an open one in Chile, but I think you could make the argument that in Chile, at least it's a sort of indigenous rightward leaning government that is indeed very favorable to U.S. policies, but it's not the only show in town.
As you know, Bachelet had been their president previously.
Um, in Uruguay, you have a former guerrilla leader as the president.
As I say, the Kirchner's husband and wife couple have really been running Argentina and they cut their teeth again at a sitting is in the movements of the seventies.
Boo in Brazil is another one.
And Dilma Rousseff, if you succeed him on Sunday, there'll be yet another.
Um, and then you have Morales and, and, uh, Correa and, uh, what am I missing?
Um, I was Correa and Chavez.
I guess, I'm sorry that I didn't, uh, you know, really introduce you properly here.
It says here in your antiwar.com bio that you teach Iberian studies at Trinity college in Hartford, Connecticut.
But, uh, I guess maybe that's old, not a date and you're teaching down there in Uruguay.
Is that right?
I'm done.
You want a grant, uh, actually looking at a question of immigration from the Iberian peninsula to South America.
And as you know, these societies were formed, uh, through heavy immigration, especially Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.
And I'm interested in a particular angle of immigration of a certain group, the Catalans from Spain who became, uh, important elements of the society down here.
That sounds interesting.
Um, and I have no idea whether this has an entire, entire story.
Yeah.
Well, it took us off in different directions.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
Well, yeah, I'm sure it is an interesting story, but yeah, I'm sure my next question doesn't have much to do with that.
Um, but it did kind of make me think of it.
And that was, uh, white supremacy in South America.
Like, it seems to me whenever I see coverage of politicians in, well, in all Latin America, or even like watch Spanish language TV or whatever, everybody's got blonde hair and, uh, like those are the people with the power, even though, um, that's usually not how most Americans think of, uh, Latin American countries.
I think it's a really, really interesting and great question.
And what we could spend hours on.
And it has all sorts of different variants in different countries.
I mean, you can talk about the Dominican Republic where there was almost, you know, during the dictatorial times, uh, in, in the past century, an almost worship of whiteness and the whole gradation of, of different colors.
I mean, that, that talking back to the colonial times, and then there are other, other attitudes, for example, in Uruguay, which is an overwhelmingly white society formed by mostly Italian and Spanish immigrants, there's a small African population and here this sea of whites, uh, nonetheless has cornered the African population into pretty disadvantaged position.
But perhaps more interesting is what you raise is the type of, uh, icons you see on TV, for example, of anchorman and the like, who all seem to be European.
And that's a real fascinating cultural contradiction.
And I think it gives us some real, real deep seated ideas of hierarchy internalized, although it'd be hard to get people to admit them publicly.
Well, you know, we haven't had this problem so much of white supremacy in America over the natives for 150 years or so, because the government back then just killed them all.
And so it's sort of, you know, we have the reservations and whatever, but it's sort of a small part of our society.
But I guess the scale of the European genocide against natives in Latin America was somewhat less.
So there's much more of a population that, uh, you know, is still mostly Indian or whatever, but it's the people who are the most European are the ones who rule all the states, I guess, is kind of where we're going.
You know, and again, it's from country to country because the demographics are so wildly different.
As you say, in, uh, Uruguay and Argentina, you're dealing with heavily European population.
Whereas in the Indian region, you're dealing much more with, with stronger, uh, indigenous populations.
So it's, it's a real complex mix.
So it's almost hard to talk about the continent as a whole.
Well, and is it right, would it be right for me to conflate kind of pro-native movements with pro-left and pro-independence from America movements or from the United States, I should say, movements?
No, I think, I think that's, I think that's right on.
And it probably gets to the fact that the Creole elites, as they call them, have for a long time, uh, served foreign interests oftentimes.
For example, Kirchner is a person who came up through the Argentine political system.
And he, he came after president Venom, who had served the foreign elite very well.
All right.
Well, no, no, hold it right there.
We'll get, we'll, we'll pick up with Argentina when we come back from this break.
It's Thomas Harrington, everybody.
Anti-war radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're on chaos.
We're on the Liberty Radio Network, antiwar.com/radio.
I'm interviewing Thomas Harrington.
He wrote this great satire about the war party back in the day.
New think tank seeks to regulate historical analogies.
And for some reason, have I ever talked to you before on the show, Tom's?
Cause I seem to remember a whole conversation about how these people took this seriously and sent you a note saying you better apologize.
They're going to sue you or something about this.
No, you're exactly right.
I don't think we ever talked Scott about it, but I was in contact with some of the people at anti-war and apparently it caused some troubles that I was dead panning news reports that, that made some people nervous.
I guess I must've talked with Eric or Matt about it, but yeah, I mean, I, the way I remember it was, was it Michael O'Hanlon, one of these guys, you know, Hey, you better stop saying that I said that, you know, after reading the entire thing, he still didn't get it.
That it was a joke at his expense.
It got re it got reprinted on a couple of places as, as serious news.
You know, my friend, which brought me great satisfaction.
My friend, Anthony Gregory once wrote a satire for a hardcore anarchist, hardcore anarchist website called strike the root.
And, and he's got a reputation as being a hardcore anti-government guy in every way possible.
And he wrote this article called, well, at least George Bush is still free to do whatever he wants.
And it was about, you know, all this lawless torture and, and war without declaration and on and on and on spying on us all, whatever.
And he got more hate mail for that, you know, for being a defender of George Bush and what people, I guess the humor just doesn't get across in the written word anymore.
You know?
Well, what happened was I had gotten to a point of exasperation when I began to realize that the language people use didn't mean anything any longer.
We, what, what else could you say to say the incredible things that were happening to our country?
And I figured the only way to attack it was to deform the language that we were using, or at least use the language we were using to deform it.
And I'm not sure it worked with everybody, but it worked with a few.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's what I like to do too, is accuse the right wing of being communist and the left wing of being fascist.
Cause well, in terms of the political parties, anyway, I mean the right and left wing people, but I mean the Republicans and the Democrats, you'd make just as much a case for Soviet Bush and German Obama as the other way around.
So I figure might as well try to mix it up because I guess as George Carlin would have said, the truth and the pain is all buried under jargon.
Well, well, that's it.
I mean, we're in a real crisis of, you know, from an academic point of view, a crisis of language.
We're in a crisis of labeling.
These things don't mean anything any longer.
And yet people put their lives together and make their political opinions and go out to their little voting booth around these labels.
And yet they don't, they're meaningless.
Now, to get back to South America here, Latin America, I think anybody could tell that I'm so ignorant about this part of the world and the American empire's influence there and the rejection of it and all the rest of these things.
I don't even really know the right questions to ask Thomas, but you were telling me something that you thought was interesting about the rise to power of this guy in Argentina.
What was that?
Yeah.
And Nestor Kirchner, who died yesterday, suddenly at the age of 60 there.
And on one level, they look like just like another Bill and Hillary Clinton.
They've run the presidency of the country from 2003 to the present.
And yet, when you look past the lights and darks of which there are a lot of always in Argentine politics, they're pretty interesting people.
Kirchner is a guy who came up through the traditional system, which in Argentina means the Peronist party, which grew out of the Eva Perón, Juan Perón, and that whole thing you've probably heard of.
And Kirchner did a very interesting thing that I think a lot of people were hoping Obama would do, which was come up through the system and then seize the moment and do the right thing.
In 2000, he told off the International Monetary Fund at a time of terrible crisis for Argentina.
And by doing that, he kind of helped Argentines and Latin Americans in general gain some of their sense of dignity back.
Instead of being these debt serfs for the rest of the world, they could stand up and say, no, we will pay or we will pay on our terms and when we can.
And since then, there's been kind of a recovery of the economy and a sense of autonomy down here.
And it coincides with a lot of other interesting things, which is these radicals or former radicals coming into office, dealing with the legacy of torture and mistreatment, which really gets scary when you begin to think of what we're doing now and how we're torturing the world and ourselves and how long it takes for a society to begin to heal from the dishonesty and horror of torture.
So there's a lot of interesting things going on.
Well, you know, actually, that's like the one thing I know a little bit about really is the way the banker mafia use the IMF and the World Bank.
And, you know, my buddy Greg Palast explained to me that, you know, the state has always owned the oil in Venezuela.
It was on nobody even lived on the land.
Not even Indians lived on the land where the oil is there.
And the guys in Houston, they do business with Venezuela.
And that isn't going to change.
And they're not worried about that.
What the United States hates about Venezuela, about Hugo Chavez, is that he took 20 billion dollars out of the basement of the Federal Reserve where it was sitting.
And then he turned around and he basically undercut the IMF and said, look, we'll give you loans at decent interest rates.
We're not going to use this to just exploit you and loot you of all your resources and all this, you know, economic hitman style, you know, imperial mafia.
No, we're just we'll loan you the money and we'll give you time to pay back and it'll be all good.
And that was what they really hated about him was he was really undercutting the international banking system in Latin America.
Absolutely.
I don't know all the details, but I have been told that he was part of Kirchner's ability to stand up to the IMF.
And that's another thing that you see here is a system of integration taking place.
And the real architects here are the Brazilians, the Brazilians.
There was a wonderful interview I read a short time ago with the foreign policy brain to Lula, a guy named Marco Aurelio Garcia.
And they have very detailed plans about Latin American integration, which they see as the first step toward achieving the place they deserve in the world.
And it's quite it was quite striking to me to contrast the vision of this man, Garcia, with the type of people we have running our foreign policy.
And it kind of made me sad to think at least there was a time where we had some smooth Machiavellians who had a vision of bettering the world in the United States.
And now we have the Holbrooks and the Clintons and the Elliott Abrams in there like running our foreign policy.
Yeah, three great examples, too.
Well, and, you know, I wonder about that.
I appreciate what you're saying about wouldn't it be nice if somebody even cared at all, had power in D.C.?
I mean, that's certainly important.
But I wonder about the integration and federalization of South America.
I could see the motivation for trying to be strong enough to stand up to the American empire and have independence.
But it also sounds like the state's giving up their independence to each other, to a new central government down there in the name of protecting themselves from us.
That's one of the questions that was raised, quite frankly, with Garcia in this interview, and he took it on quite, quite frankly.
He said, of course, I can understand those concerns.
But you have to believe, and there's where faith comes in, that we have a bigger vision here than we're not interested in being hegemonic in the in the Latin American world.
We're interested really in bringing everyone along.
Yeah, just warn them of the mistake that the American people made in listening to Alexander Hamilton.
Basically, our constitution started out as a big free trade agreement, mostly, and then they turned it into the world's greatest empire.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And they still pretend to have the same constitution.
That's what's hilarious, you know, and they keep pushing in Europe, too, to to centralize more and more to amend the the agreement so that no state can ever legitimately secede again and this kind of thing.
And it just seems to me like, well, and I think in Latin America it kind of shows that the the smaller the unit of power, the more likely that actual people can have an influence on it, you know?
Well, Uruguay is a real interesting study in that in that sense.
Uruguay is really a country that is jammed between two giants, Brazil and Argentina.
And through all of its history, it's struggled to make sense of its mission as a nation.
You know, there's this idea that it shouldn't exist at all, that is just a buffer state between two others.
And yet at the same time, Uruguay has developed a very characteristic culture of its own.
One, interestingly enough, that relies heavily on state intervention in the economy while remaining a fairly free market.
But it's always an interesting question.
Where does national sovereignty end?
On the other hand, I don't think you can deny that Uruguay's position between Argentina and Brazil, two economies that are booming right now, is lifting Uruguay up quite strongly.
So they're quite happy to take they're quite happy to take the advantages right now.
Right, yeah, well, I guess that really is the trick, especially from my point of view, I'm kind of a plumb line libertarian, all these things.
And so I'm always for free trade, but I'm always against things like NAFTA, which is really more government and further away from accountability.
And so I just want to see the repeal of things.
I love to hear about Uruguay's prosperous trade with their neighbors, but I just would hate to think that, you know, at some point then the judges in those neighboring states get to rule over the people of Uruguay, you know what I mean?
Keep that power local.
And that gets into a whole other series of questions that comes that you see more clearly, probably in Europe.
There are ways and there are ways to do NAFTA type arrangements.
You know, one way to do NAFTA is the way we did it, which was to basically use it as an endless source of cheap labor or the way that Europe has done the second phase of its expansion of the EU.
But the first phase of the expansion of the EU was pretty done fairly responsibly in the sense that the wealthy countries sent money to build up the infrastructure of the poorer countries.
At that time, Spain, where I spent a lot of time, was one of the poorer countries.
And that infrastructure got built up and it was very beneficial to Spain and it brought them up to a different level.
But we did it.
We didn't do it that way.
We did it in a way of saying, yeah, OK, well, we'll join together for your cheap labor, but just about nothing else.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry we're going to have to leave it there, but I hope we can do this more often.
I hope you'll send some more pieces in to antiwar.com, Thomas.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
I'll have you know, I listened to you on my iPod as I stroll along the waterfront here.
Oh, really?
That's very nice to hear.
Tell everybody here at Antiwar Radio says hi.
All right.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
OK, bye bye.
