All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our guest on the show today is Will Gregg.
He keeps the blog pro libertate at freedom in our time dot blogspot.com.
He's the author of Liberty in Eclipse available at Amazon and your local bookstore and all kinds of things like that.
And he is, uh, I would say as far as I know, anyway, uh, America's foremost chronicler of police abuse of, uh, what will calls us mundane's in this society.
Although his English is a lot better than mine.
Welcome to the show.
Will, how are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing very well.
And it's always a real pleasure and privilege to be with you.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
And, uh, I was really astounded by this piece that you got written here.
Uh, I always wondered how it could be that the military, uh, officers especially believe such crazy things and act in such lunatic ways.
And I think you found my answer.
Who in the world is Bill Gothard and what does he have to do with how crazy the military is?
I think that Bill Gothard has done a great deal to set the cultural dials of particularly the evangelical Christian segment of the American population to the default of deference to authority.
He's somebody who sort of appointed himself the great father of evangelical Christians.
He's never been married as far as I can tell, but he professes to be the go to guy with respect to how to organize the home in a hierarchical fashion.
According to his model of society, which is this severely hierarchical structure, a chain of authority in which rights are essentially a fiction.
And the highest value is submission to those who are given responsibility for you.
He's been preaching this line for about 25, 30, 35 years.
He was somebody who was seen as a hero by some evangelical Christians who felt overwhelmed by the counterculture of the late sixties, nearly 1970s, he used to be able to command audiences of tens of thousands of people at these seminars he would teach.
He has a little red book, the same way that Mount St.
Tongue had a little red book.
But the difference is that in order to get a copy of that book, which is actually, if I understand it correctly, a binder rather than a pocket sized booklet, is to be an initiate in the program.
And it gives detailed and supposedly scriptural based instructions for how to deal with any set of human circumstances.
And they all have to do once again, with this idea of the chain of authority.
And in 1991, this is where the story gets really interesting.
This guy who was supposedly the paladin of the permanent values against the lefty communist subversive subculture of the seventies was actually hired by the Soviet government to go and open up a satellite branch over in Moscow, is given acreage and given the means to set up a type of institute in Moscow based on his teachings here in the United States.
And a year after that, one of his disciples who headed up an oil and gas business in Oklahoma started a shoot off or a branch, an offshoot, however you want to describe this.
It's basically a sibling, stepson, or some other type of relationship to this Gothard Institute for Basic Life Teachings, as he calls it.
This other offshoot is called Character First, and it's been involved in what's called character instruction and leadership training for corporate interests and business interests, but also for police, the military, people who work in correctional institutions, things of that sort.
Both Gothard and this step to the side relation called Character First have been involved in promoting what they call cities of character and designations of the same in scores of cities across the country and also in cities around the world.
This is something which is ongoing, sort of parallel, sort of a parallel track.
You've got these two efforts, but they teach the same program, which is based on 49 key attributes, character attributes.
These are the things that are supposed to be the innate values that distinguish people of good character.
And they all, once again, are based in this idea of obedience and submission to authority.
And nowhere in this matrix of character values can you see recognition of the fact that character is often, if not most often, displayed by the type of principled individualism that manifests itself in resistance to usurped authority or resistance to supposed or entrenched authority that is doing things that are morally impermissible.
There's nowhere in this character matrix where you can find recognition of the virtue of the whistleblower, somebody who bucks the so-called chain of command in defense of a higher principle.
Somebody who says, here I stand.
I can do no other God help me.
Amen.
That's what Martin Luther said when he famously bucked authority.
That's supposed to be, of course, the founding insight of evangelical Christianity.
But unfortunately now you have what somebody like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom I mentioned in my piece, and he's one of my personal heroes, back in the 1930s called positive Christianity.
The idea that Christianity exists basically to reinforce authority and to provide a supplement to a regime, to an institution of government that supposedly is God's minister in the world.
That was what the positive Christians or German Christians were preaching in the 1930s.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was down to his chromosomes are deeper, a very serious Christian, rebelled against that, rebelled against the supposed authority of the German Christian church as part of the confessing church movement, one of the founders of it.
If he were alive today and among us here in the United States, I think he'd recognize this type of, I'd call it pseudo-Christian worship of authority as being exactly the same stuff that he confronted back in Germany in the name of positive Christianity in the 1930s.
And I think he'd recognize that the bloody handiwork of what's being done by the imperial military in the United States is the direct kindred of what he confronted in Nazi Germany.
That's a horrible realization to make about a country you love.
Well, but you know, especially among conservative Christians, it seems like there's that kind of, you know, hardcore knee jerk, red, white and blue patriotism too.
And even if the founders had a lot of problems and did a lot of things that a lot of us don't like and wrote a lot of powers into the constitution that the government shouldn't have and things like that, still, they said a lot of really good stuff.
And we're all brought up from the time we're little kids on sometimes you have to overthrow your king.
You know, this is what makes us all Americans.
Will, how can they ignore that?
I'm not so certain that they're ignoring it as that it's been eclipsed by what they consider to be the more urgent moral priorities here.
Or perhaps you're dealing once again to speak in the unfortunate historical idiom of Germany circa 1933, 1934, once the Nazis had come to power and their appeal to the bourgeoisie, if you will, was sort of similar to what you see in terms of the really embittered nationalism that's taken hold of our country today.
They're supposedly defending the permanent institutions against godlessness and the Bolsheviks and so forth when they're promoting an agenda that's not measurably different from it in moral terms.
That back in the 1930s, the Nazis came to power and said there will be no second revolution.
And so a lot of people who were suckled on the stories of the rebels, the people who had overthrown established authority in the 18th century as American colonists to create an American republic, believe basically that that is the grand exception and that anything that manifests itself as revolution and rebellion has got to be in the direction of overthrowing what was established.
And they all got to have a real headache this morning then, because the Democrats are in the White House.
Yeah, that's where things, of course, sort of start to chase their own tail, is that for the eight years of the Bush reign, they were saying basically that the moral absolute, the absolute definition of patriotism was immediate deference to establish authority in the White House, that support for the dear leader was constant with support for the country.
And, of course, there was a polarity shift, not a pronounced one, but in partisan terms, of course, in 2008.
And suddenly, rather than being the who in the equation, they were the whom.
That, of course, is Lenin's formula.
The key question in politics, according to Lenin, is who does what to whom?
Everybody wants to be the who.
Nobody wants to be the whom.
You want to be the pitcher rather than the catcher.
And when you have a shift between factions that way, suddenly the who and whom change places and you hear exactly the same rhetoric issuing from the opposite party.
So you have people like Ed Schultz saying, Barack Obama is my president.
All I need to do as an American is that he said that we have to go and bomb the Libyans because they have been involved in things that have hurt our country.
That's all I need to know.
And our duty is to support our leader in the White House in this time of war, which, of course, is a transliteration, albeit in a perhaps more literate sense of some of the things Sean Hannity was nattering about four or five years ago.
And the objective here, of course, is that in 2012, in 2013, actually, January of that year, suddenly power will be in the right hands again.
And so the the Christian nationalists believe that all we have to do is get this usurper out of the White House who's doing exactly the same things that Bush did anyway.
But once you get that personality out of the White House, then once again, they can resume with their unchecked worship of power as incarnated in the dear leader.
And it's perfectly revolting.
And none of these sides apparently can ever get their head around the idea that, hey, in four or eight years, there's going to be another usurper with all the power that you're giving to this guy.
The wheel will turn.
They're all usurpers when they're not your guy.
What a joke.
Anyway, got a lot of democracy.
It will.
All right.
Hang tight, everybody.
It's Will Grigg.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
The book again is Liberty in Eclipse.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with the brilliant Will Grigg from freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
We also host a radio show.
You can find the archives there.
Just click them hyperlinks.
The book is Liberty in Eclipse, and this article is called Imperial Priorities, Obedience First, Character Last.
And it's about this I don't know what what kind of business you call it, character first that brainwashes the people who go there into loving authority.
However, kind of vaguely defined, I guess it seems that legitimate authority to be obeyed is authority from the guy that I would have voted for if I bothered to vote that day or whatever.
And then it's fine.
Supposed to do whatever they say.
But I was hoping, Will, that you could or anyone in the chain of command between you and them says to, I guess.
But I was wondering, Will, if you could explain a little bit in more detail about the actual training of cops and military officers by this group, what exactly is going on with that?
Can you tell us?
I can only take a guess because I used to be in a job in which I underwent in a very distant and somewhat attenuated form some of the character first education.
That means that every month I'd receive an illustrated little booklet I was supposed to put in a black binder were referred to quite frequently.
And the booklet used a cartoon illustration of an animal to display a given trait in the character hierarchy.
These 49 character traits that were described by Bill Dothert and then later adopted by the founders of the character first program as the defining attributes of good character.
And I didn't really have much to do with that.
Look at it and stick in the binder and forget about it.
That was the extent of my involvement in the program.
The problem with the training that is provided to law enforcement and military is that you have to be a subscriber.
You have to be a member of this group in order to receive the training.
You have to put the money up and you have to be under some form of contract or discipline, quite frankly, to know specifically what they're receiving.
But I can tell you what they're not receiving.
What they're not receiving is any kind of moral instruction about what true character consists of when it is rooted in permanent principles and in the non-aggression principle specifically.
I mean, there is one moral law in the universe, if you will, as far as we know.
We've not discovered any others.
And that is the non-aggression principle.
And as a Christian, I believe it was best stated as do what others as you would have done unto you.
I mean, you cannot do to somebody that which is not proper to be done to you.
Government is in the business of violating that with almost everything that it does.
I'm really having a difficult time identifying anything that government does that isn't a violation of the golden rule.
And of the two great commandments, I believe, as an adherent of the Christian faith, character first, I should point out, is the same program that Gothard was promoting back in the 70s and 80s and to some extent today that involved an outreach to civic officials that continues their people like Rick Perry and Sarah Palin, who are very, very close to Bill Gothard.
They, as government officials, either governors in the case of people like Rick Perry or the mayor of Wasilla, which I think was the last job that Sarah Palin ever finished, have been involved in implementing some elements of the Gothardite agenda in terms of designating their city governments to be character compliant or such like.
Character first has a similar outreach going on and it's very much the same program.
It's just that character first has secularized the program.
It takes up the overt references to God and to the Christian concept of theology in order to make it more marketable to the people who have actual money to spend.
And of course, you're talking about government.
Character first is a military contractor, I contend.
They're in the business of weaponizing moral indifference by teaching people that submission to authority is the highest moral good.
And they do not, and I think this is something we cannot overemphasize, particularly given the perilous condition which our country is in, they do not recognize or teach the necessity of people of character to rebel against incumbent people in positions of power when said incumbents of whatever background or whatever their title are doing things or mandating policies that are morally wrong and almost always definable as constitutional crimes as well.
You don't have any kind of support in this entire educational program for the whistleblower, for the man of conscience.
And by way of illustrating that point, at the end of the article I talk about the case of Bradley Manning.
Here is a guy, almost at the very bottom of the chain of command, who was seeing in real time things that were war crimes.
They were against, of course, the statute, they were against the Uniform Code of Military Justice, they were violations of the Constitution, they were violations of the laws of war going back centuries.
He was the only one who had the moral character to speak out against this at some great expense to himself.
This young man describes himself as an atheist.
There are other things in his background, of course, that Christians would find completely unacceptable, but he acted the way that Christians who believe what the New Testament teaches should act when confronted with the moral necessity of standing in the breach to defend the innocent.
And yet, once again, the parallel is striking to me.
This guy is from Oklahoma.
Character First is headquartered in Oklahoma City.
I actually spent a couple of days at the Character First headquarters five or six years ago, and I want to emphasize that we're not dealing with people who are cartoon caricatures of depraved hypocrites.
They were personable, they were friendly, they made a gift to me of a very nice burgundy leather study Bible that I had intended to buy, but they just gave it to me as a gift, and that's something for which I'm grateful.
But what they are promoting is a moral universe in which Bradley Manning would be looked upon as a bad employee and as a man of no character at all when he was doing the sort of thing that a man of character should do, which is opposing crimes that he was a witness to and which he felt himself complicit.
Under the Character First matrix of values and ethics, Bradley Manning would have to be considered a criminal, and the people in his chain of command would have to be considered model employees.
Oh, that makes perfect sense, and it's perfectly consistent with American history, right?
Well, if you look at American history through the lens, perhaps, of some mirror universe where Spock has a beard, I guess.
I mean, American history, of course, if you understand it with any kind of honest appreciation for what actually happened, American history begins with the principled rebel, with people who take back authority that has been lent to people to act on their behalf, that has been used to aggrandize those who exercise it in ways that are quite incompatible with individual liberty and human dignity.
And so, really, if you take a look at what's going on right now, once again, in the last segment I'd mentioned, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his conflict with the so-called positive Christianity movement in Germany, we're dealing with exactly the same type of a conflict here, where these groups are promoting what Bonhoeffer would call positive Christianity, albeit transliterated into American idioms and using the cultural resources of our current society.
And I do want to point out as well that when we're talking about drone warfare, or we're talking about torture, these are policies that should be promoting widespread and passionate opposition from Evangelical Christians, of course from Roman Catholics, from people of conscience of whatever background, but particularly from those who represent, I think, the biggest recruiting pool for the military and law enforcement, which would be Bible Belt-style Evangelical Christians.
These are people who are proud members of a tradition that goes back to rebels like Martin Luther, and for all of his weaknesses and faults and failings, the one thing that people of good faith of any background should admire about Martin Luther is that he saw abuses, he spoke out against abuses, and he understood that it was more important to behave in what his conscience defined as a morally appropriate way than simply to defer to authority.
And that's something, once again, that the Bill Gothard program, whether it's called Character First or by any other label, simply does not recognize.
As far as they're concerned, that's rebellion, and rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, which of course is a more important and grievous sin than slaughtering innocent people halfway around the world by remote-controlled drones that are operated by joysticks.
And of course, the most deadly killing technology I can identify is the drone controlling the joystick and not the drone that is controlled by the joystick, and the operating system of that deadlier drone, I believe, owes a great deal to the Gothard approach and to the Character First approach to anesthetizing the conscience.
Well, you know, I'm not sure if you saw Glenn Greenwald's blog today, where he talks about the war on terror in Yemen and Somalia, and he's quoting a photojournalist who's been cataloging the drone strikes in Pakistan, and talking about just how angry everybody gets when five houses get bombed by a JDAM or a Hellfire missile.
And I don't think this makes it into there or not, I'm only, I guess, using my imagination on this one, but it seems like the least fair fight ever, that the people of Pakistan must notice that it's robots, where even if in a million years they can throw a rock that high, there's not even a man flying the plane that's killing them.
So there's just, I mean, at that point, it's not much of a wonder why you have somebody like Faisal Shahzad go and try to blow up Times Square or something.
There's no way of fighting back, even imaginable, when you're fighting a robot.
I mean, that's got to look really bad in just PR terms.
And the most powerful empire ever, but they won't send their troops.
They just kill us with robots flying around in the sky.
Yeah, it literally is something taken from science fiction, whether you're talking about Skynet in the Terminator series, or perhaps the Cylons from the most recent reimagining of Battlestar Galactica.
It's a robot war conducted by an impervious empire against a rebel alliance, and we're on the wrong side of that equation.
Yeah, but we're doing what we're told to do, and that's what's important first, right?
Apparently so.
All right, well, I guess a little bit more of the mystery of the American mind solved for us there by Will Grigg.
Thank you very much for your time, as always, Will.
You take care, Scott.
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