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NOTE We Who Dared to Say No to War

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Tom, today we're going to be talking about another tactic of resistance, this time against

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war, and your wonderful book, We Who Dared Say No to War.

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You said that this is your least known work.

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I think, well, it's one of them anyway.

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It's one of these titles that sort of fell through the cracks because I had so many things

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going on at once.

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It was between who killed the Constitution and meltdown.

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And so it just sort of fell between the cracks.

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But still, I'm really pleased with it.

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It's an anthology.

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It's the best, most interesting anti-war writings that my co-editor Murray Polner and I could

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find from all the major American wars from 1812 to the present.

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Why do you care about this topic?

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Well, Rothbard said that war and peace is the key issue of the whole libertarian business.

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I agree with him completely.

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I've become more radical on this subject all the time, partly perhaps out of a form of penance

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because I used to be a very conventional middle of the road.

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In the Cold War.

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Yeah.

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And even after, I mean, 1991, I was all for invading Iraq, you know, because my overlords

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told me that that's what we needed to do and it seemed like a cool video game and, you

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But when you stop and think what's actually going on here, that a politician simply utters the word war, declares a war,

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you utter that word and suddenly activities that in normal conditions would be considered crimes become a matter of public policy.

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How does that happen? By what kind of magic? How can this occur? How can that be right?

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Right. So I came to decide that I had to just rethink my whole way of thinking in the early 1990s about this.

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I felt like I had been caught up in the idea that I'm kind of watching a video game and we're getting the bad guys.

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But even if those were the bad guys, even if I accept that, even if I accept the narrative, we're making an awful lot of widows,

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We're making an awful lot of orphans, and in normal morality, if I need to go after some bad guy,

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is it considered acceptable for me to just walk down the street arbitrarily shooting, because I figure that maybe I'll get him?

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I mean, of course, no one would think that, but somehow you just utter the word war, and people's rational faculties just fall out.

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I utter the word war, a politician says war, and now arbitrarily the rights of a whole country's worth of people just disappear.

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They have no rights anymore. If they get killed, it's an unfortunate mistake, but the policy makers will still have their cocktail party.

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It happened even after 9-11. I mean, when the Iraq war, the war on Iraq, suddenly, I mean, everybody recognized Iraq had nothing to do whatsoever with 9-11,

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but it was like, well, clearly we've got to kill millions of people for, or hundreds of thousands of people for, in retribution.

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Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the people whose selection we have in there, one of the 19th century figures, pointed out exactly this,

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Let's say there's a natural disaster, an earthquake or something.

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Well, people's sympathy for their fellow man pours forth in the form of donations and help and assistance.

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But yet, when you think about the people in Iraq who, many, many of them, 50 to 100,000 at least died in the most recent war.

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And some estimates have it as high as a million.

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Well, whatever it is, it's a humanitarian catastrophe.

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And yet, there's no response from the US population.

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Let's get up a collection for these, the innocent people who died.

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Surely there are some innocent people in this country, the ones we wanted to liberate.

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So obviously we're supposed to have sympathy for them. They're suffering under this terrible oppression.

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But yet, if there had been an earthquake in a neighboring country, people would have concerts and whatever, but there's nothing.

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These people are garbage because our government tells them that. They're just garbage.

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They're not entitled to any human sympathy whatsoever.

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What about this doctrine of the American civic religion, that it's because of the wars that we're free?

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This cannot be dislodged from people's heads, and it is utterly irrational.

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Show me a war where the U.S. would have been invaded, and then you have the propaganda things about the World Wars.

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The Kaiser was going to get us one of these days. Come on.

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Anybody who knows anything about Germany at that time knows the absurdity of that state.

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But honestly, all this is part of imperial ambition, it has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the country, it does not matter to the US what the form of government in most of these countries is, or any of them, it matters not one whit, and to the contrary, what it actually does when you wage all these wars, is it allows the communists to claim that the US is just another imperial power looking to take over these third world countries. Why give them the satisfaction? Why not say no? You know what?

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What kind of right-ends are in here? You say it's right-ends of the left, right-ends of the right.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's left, right, center. Everybody's in there.

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Our criterion was, you know, we're not going to intervene in your country.

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We're not going to intervene in your country.

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So here's the choice you have.

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Not between two world powers scurrying for control of your country,

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but between one power that's trying to do that

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and another one that's holding aloft the beacon of freedom.

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Why wouldn't that have been better?

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Exactly. Save us the trillions of bucks.

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Yeah, yeah.

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What kind of right-ends are in here?

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You say it's right-ends of the left, right-ends of the right.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's left, right, center.

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The criterion was, you have to be not a fascist and not a commie.

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As long as you're not either of those, you can be in the book.

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For example, we've got Murray Rothbard in this book.

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He's not the sort of guy you'd normally see in an anti-war anthology.

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But his essay, War, Peace and the State, is one of the life-changing, mind-changing essays that Rothbard wrote

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The Theory of Money makes you understand, think about what war actually is, forget about the songs and the parades and the flags and whatever, think about what's actually going on in this thing, and once you do that, you never, you can never think of it the same way again, and every time you hear things like Saddam Hussein is a big threat to our liberty, I mean you just, I mean you want to laugh, but you're so full of rage, the laughter just doesn't come out, I mean a guy who's spending like a quarter of 1% on the military,

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and we were told that he's got these unmanned drones turns out his unmanned

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drone project consisted of a single prototype of plywood and string and and

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this and yet people think yeah my gosh if we don't go after this guy it was

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believe it and then later the propaganda turns out to not be true and

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meanwhile people like huge amounts of people died over this and this is

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supposed to be conservative this is this is a tendency you trace all the way back

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In fact, one of the things I found most interesting is the War of 1812, by comparison with other

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American wars, is probably one of the most inoffensive, and that's not to say that it's

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a great idea, but I mean compared to some of the other ones.

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And you hardly even think about opposition to that war, you think, well, who would be

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against this, right?

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You've got to go after the Brits for all the things they're doing, things that they stopped

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doing as soon as they finished their war with France, which is precisely what opponents

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of the war predicted would happen.

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This is, this is, they're not going to do this anymore. In fact, they did. It had nothing to do with the War of 1812, but I've got in there a congressman who gives, we think, ah, congressmen, they stink, but they used to give much better speeches than they do now, and his speech against the War of 1812 is just killer because he's quoting all the arguments that people are making for the war, and it's, you know, if you're patriotic, you've got to support it. Same thing. But also, particularly, when we invade Canada, and I hate to say we, it's not we, it's them. Right.

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and AIDS Canada. Well, these poor, suffering people in Canada, they're going to rise up and they're going to welcome their liberators.

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But if they don't, well, then they're just a debased race of poltroons who will deserve whatever we shell out to them.

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Which, I mean, it's ridiculous, and people, thankfully not everybody went for it then, but enough went for it then to make it possible.

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I mean, in fact, at least they had a declaration of war, and there were some votes against.

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100 to 0, like the usual propaganda thing, but there was some resistance, which is why there was a move afterward to actually require a two-thirds vote to get a declaration of war, which, of course, now the way they do it is just they don't even bother with a declaration of war, which they would get on a silver platter if they asked.

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Yeah, right. Did you notice a tendency for support or opposition to war to follow along partisan lines as you look throughout history?

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Yeah, I mean, that does seem to happen, like the Whigs were, as time went on, they became the opponents of the Mexican War,

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although at the time of the Mexican War, when it began, the Whigs understood they better get on board for the war,

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because they remembered what happened to the Federalist Party, which had been, by and large, anti-war during the War of 1812,

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and they were ruined by that. They were destroyed by that. The Whigs didn't want to be destroyed.

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By the end, they got a little bit of guts. They didn't want to be, everybody's in favor of a war at the beginning.

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By the end, they got some guts and they actually managed to censure President Polk,

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arguing that he had unconstitutionally begun this war,

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that he had suggested that the conditions of the war were actually different from reality,

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that in fact the place where American troops had been fired upon was precisely in the disputed area with Mexico.

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It wasn't in clearly undisputed American territory. Well, that changes things.

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This makes it not so unambiguous, but it is true that because for that reason,

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no party out of power wants to be viewed as the unpatriotic party. That is very unfortunate.

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Yeah. Well, I've just noticed it in our own times that when we have a democratic president,

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the right wing becomes more skeptical of war and then it reverses again.

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Yeah, exactly. It's true. What I want this book to show is just that the propaganda surrounding war

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has been there in every one of these wars and it's the same propaganda and at this point how many times can your intelligence be insulted and that these things are atrocities yes the minimum wage is bad tariffs are bad but this is an unbelievable atrocity that goes on on behalf of of intentions that are that are usually very murky and not made clear to the people the people are given propagandistic reasons for the war but the fact is this makes us callous this

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And all moral considerations, that you're a left-wing pansy, if you even have moral concerns, moral qualms.

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This has just got to stop. People have just got to stop thinking like this.

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Yes, there are bad people in the world, but that does not justify indiscriminately.

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And yes, it is indiscriminate. Don't tell me about your Patriot missiles and your smart bombs.

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Because we now know the Patriot missile was a big flop, contrary to what we were told at the time.

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We know that people are going to be killed in huge numbers.

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And we have the further insult of many, but not all thankfully,

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objectivists, particularly in the official objectivist movement,

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actually saying that collateral damage is not something to be deplored.

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It's to be cheered. It's to be cheered.

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These people live in terrorist countries.

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I mean, they actually use this term, terrorist country.

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There's a nice individualist philosophy for you.

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A terrorist country.

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Yes, because to defend the good countries, we need to lay utter waste to our enemies.

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That's individualism and reason.

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There is something about the human mind that just latches on to this way of thinking.

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As I say, I myself was caught up in it for a long time, until finally with that first Persian Gulf War,

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and I saw tens or hundreds of thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers.

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And yes, they're soldiers, but they are human beings.

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They have kids, and a lot of these people themselves, they're kids, too.

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They don't even want to be there, half of them.

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And they're maimed or killed, and they're retreating, and they're being burned alive.

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And meanwhile, we got our yellow ribbons and our Bob Hope specials.

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And I just finally said, I don't know if I can do this anymore.

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I don't know how I can celebrate and have a parade

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when these people are mourning the deaths of countless people

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I mean, you've got to be kidding me if you're going to support that.

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Yeah, I can tell you, Tommy, I guess you were three years old or something at the time,

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but at the Grenada invasion, I remember celebrating.

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I did too.

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Oh, yeah, I did too.

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You remember the Grenada invasion?

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Yeah, I guess.

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We've got to get the commies.

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And if you just read the headlines of the time, you know, it seems like, yeah, it's

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a great chance.

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Something about nationalism, or I don't know what it is, patriotism, or the idea that we as a collective are doing something great to liberate other people that gives you a rush, I don't know.

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Well, you know what's interesting, though, is that I have a friend, Jack Hunter, does a lot of great seven or eight minute YouTube videos a couple times a week.

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And he did one on Reagan, in which he basically argues that the neocons try to claim Reagan, Reagan was one of us, and to some degree they're right.

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But actually Reagan, relatively speaking, especially compared to more recent years, was relatively restrained in foreign policy.

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I mean, yeah, we have the Grenada thing, we have the Libya bombing, we have the Lebanon thing, but the Lebanon thing, he reversed that.

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The Libya thing was a quick one strike, and he did genuinely want to reduce arms.

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He accomplished that at the end. He brought about a peace.

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I mean, then you did have, it's true, you had intervention in Latin America and all that, that is true, you can't deny that, but he was not itching for a major war somewhere.

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Well, you remember the neoconservatives, who were very much against all of his...

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Yeah, right, and in fact today, once in a while, they will admit that he just, you know, he wasn't aggressive enough.

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Sold us out.

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Sold us out, yeah, yeah, they'll admit that.

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Some of the writers and the speakers that you quote in here, what kinds of things do they propose to uproot this pro-war tendency that you find in, particularly among Americans, am I saying?

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Here is where we have some trouble, because you are dealing with a phenomenon like the state that's existed for thousands and thousands of years, and you begin to despair, you begin to think maybe this is just part of human nature.

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But you console yourself by remembering that slavery also existed from the beginning, the earliest civilizations, they had slavery.

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And that has been eradicated, and of course it still exists in some limited places in the world, but that's been eradicated only relatively recently.

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I mean, really, the 19th century, you still had slavery.

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And that sort of gives you hope that maybe the mere longevity of something doesn't mean permanence.

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Like we've gotten by pretty well without slavery, right?

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The world didn't come to an end, we got by well without it.

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Well, without it. But here, I don't actually know what the strategy is, because I think, I feel like we've tried everything.

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Well, you know, I must tell you, after the Cold War ended, you know, one of the reasons I was very excited, I thought, well, there'll never be another good excuse for war, you know.

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I mean, there can't possibly be a good excuse for war after communism's gone, because that's the only excuse I ever knew.

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Right, exactly.

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And then, whoa.

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Yeah, exactly. And you have to remember also, there are, you know, there are financial interests at stake.

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Yeah.

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And you know, if you talk about this, people immediately dismiss you, but I would dismiss them.

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I think it's ridiculous and idiotic not to notice the most obvious thing in the world,

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which is that there are huge profits to be made here. I mean, people aren't in the arms

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manufacture business, you know, for the fun of it, you know, or out of a desire to improve the world.

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And if you look at the U.S. military budget now, look at the nature of the enemy that the U.S.

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The US government says we're at war with. I mean, they're scattered around the world, they're radically decentralized, it's fourth-generation warfare, it's non-state warfare, and yet, the US government is still, you know, they still have nuclear submarines, they're still preparing for World War II, basically, they're still preparing for World War II. The military budget is now, is increasing dramatically, and it's at huge, huge numbers now, against an enemy that, you know, they say,

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These people are going to nuke us or whatever, but whatever they're going to do, they certainly are not the Soviet Union.

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They don't have a million divisions, and yet the U.S. government equips for this, and there's nothing you can do to stop that.

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Every 15 years there's a blue-ribbon commission to look once again at military funding, and every 15 years nothing gets done.

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They get the same conclusions. This is an outrage. The Department of Defense is incapable of performing an audit, and it has been exempted from performing an audit.

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No one knows where the money is going. No one knows how it's being spent.

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It is an unbelievable outrage. It just keeps on going.

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And so it just goes to show that no matter what the nature of the enemy is, they will find a pretext to spend money.

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And so that even, it's so funny to see the right wing talk about we need more military spending.

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They must not know anything about the military budget, all I can conclude.

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Because if they did, they would see that the more money that's spent, the worse and more utterly inappropriate the U.S. military gets.

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In your studies of anti-war movements of the past, did you gain any insight into how wars tend to end? I ask this because sometimes it seems that there will be no end to the war in Afghanistan, no end to the war in Iraq.

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Yeah, well partly the answer involves the nature of different types of war because here you're fighting an enemy that is so decentralized and so inchoate, so difficult to grasp, to get your head around.

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There is no central authority to issue a statement of surrender.

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Whereas, you know, so with Iraq, well, with Iraq you have a state, but with so-called Al-Qaeda, well, there is no real, you know, Al-Qaeda is very difficult to understand who they are, where they are, who speaks for them, you know, who can take credit for what they're doing, who can issue a statement of surrender, where would that come from?

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The Theory of Money and State

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which just vanished, and it became just radically impossible.

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Yeah, exactly, exactly.

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Kind of hilarious in a way, you know, everybody's dislodged.

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Now, before I forget, let me point out also that the selections in here are not just beautiful rhetoric, although they are.

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I didn't write this to uplift people, that, oh, isn't it wonderful that we had all these wonderful people who fought against these wars,

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and it was heroic, even if they were failures, they wrote beautiful speeches. That's not primarily what it is.

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There are great speeches and book excerpts and articles and all that stuff, poems in there,

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But one of the things we want to do with a lot of these speeches is have a lot of genuine

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historical meat in them, so that these selections from these people would actually explain the

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truth about the wars.

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So if you want to know what was really going on in war, X, Y or Z, these people say, this

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is why I'm against it, not just because I'm against all war in general.

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Most of these people weren't against all war in general.

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It was this war because these reasons are unjust or they're lying to us and this is

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the truth.

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It's all in there.

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The War of 1812, the Canada thing, the Mexican War, huge war, I mean I didn't realize the

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extent of the propaganda surrounding the Mexican War, wait until you read the stuff in here

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about that, about all the demands that the U.S. was making of Mexico, Mexico basically

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doing everything it could to satisfy them, the demands got greater and greater, the Spanish-American

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The Cold War is, of course, obvious, but we've got some great stuff in there, and so on, all the way down.

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I mean, we've got a section on the Cold War that my co-editor is on the left, Murray Polner.

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He took a look at it after we were just about done, and he said,

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wait a minute, wait a minute, there's nobody on the left in this Cold War thing.

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I had all the right people.

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Oh, funny.

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Yeah, I had Garrett Garrett and all these people saying, you know, what is this?

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It's crazy, going to bust the budget, what is this crazy thing?

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We have to fight wars, yeah, we have to fight wars all over the world.

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The kind of crazy, utopian nonsense is this, and then later that would become the conservative mainstream.

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He said, well, you know, I think we have to put, like, one... there were progressives against the Cold War.

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All right, we'll put Henry Wallace in there. Fine.

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That's funny. Yeah, that's great.

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So, live in some of our own prehistory.

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Yeah, yeah, that's the goal.

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If you were going to do another project on war after this, what kind of thing would it be, you think?

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Well, I've written myself since then, I wrote a thing for the old Journal of Libertarian Studies on the economic consequences of war.

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I mean, this really brings you face to face with the human effects and what this does to the vanquished and to the victor,

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what it does to your soul to be involved in this.

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But we don't realize the distortions of the military state even when you're not at war, when you're just preparing for war.

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I've looked at the consequences, and I'm going to publish this in a forthcoming book I have in 2011.

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Look at the consequences to civil society, to the university system in the U.S.

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when the research priorities are all geared toward the Department of Defense.

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What does that do to universities? What does that do to their admissions policies?

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What does it do to their research priorities?

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What does it do to civil research for commercial purposes?

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What does it do to that when two-thirds of all your research and development talent is siphoned off into military research and it's not like, well, we'll just pop up more people to do that.

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There's a fixed number of people at any given time who have the brain power to do this type of research, so it's a zero-sum game.

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So we don't even know what the full consequences are, but when you think of what would have been done in the absence of this,

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When you think of a military state that builds up six tons of TNT for every single enemy city,

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when obviously one ton of TNT would be quite sufficient, what would have happened? What

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improvements in our standard of living? What commercial improvements would have occurred

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if we could have had those resources back? All this sort of stuff I've been looking into and

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the effects of it are more dramatic than we can possibly imagine. The distortions in our lives,

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It's a particular concern for people who love liberty, for people who are concerned about free markets, and yet, you know, I've always had this sense, and I'm sure you do too, that there's not nearly enough attention paid to it within libertarian circles.

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And I think the reason for this is that we want to bring conservatives into the fold,

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and we feel like we're going to offend the conservatives, and we need the conservatives

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with us on the free markets.

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And it's not just conservatives, it's sort of the bourgeoisie.

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Oh yeah, it's the soccer moms, too, who want to be kept protected from the towel heads.

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And of course I say that ironically, but you know, there is that concern.

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We want to reach them, and to an extent I understand this, that you feel like you're

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I know you're walking a tightrope half the time, but at some level, and it's true, when I'm in conservative circles and they come, they ask me to speak on topic A, I speak on topic A, I don't come and give a belligerent speech about war, but if they ask me about war, I give them my answer. I'm going to tell them, and by and large they probably know my answer. You know, I remember once being at a dinner party in the 1980s with something like a fanatic peace activist. I mean, she was terribly annoying.

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I think you're correct on everything she said, but we were at a dinner party with something like eight people and she began to rail against death squads in El Salvador, ruined the dinner party completely, right?

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I remember reflecting on this and I decided to ruin the dinner party myself many years later when, I forget now, somebody invaded Haiti, maybe it was Clinton, maybe it was Bush, I don't remember it now.

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Yeah, I think it was Clinton.

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And I remember at a dinner party just going through today's headlines about the U.S. having killed like 60 innocent people in Haiti today.

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I just happened to mention this dinner party wrecked the whole thing.

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There's a time and a place, and it's not to say that you're a coward.

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I have to think about what if I myself in 1991 when I was all for war, if somebody had just come up to me and given me the full-on belligerent speech,

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Which I would have just said, you stupid leftist, get out of here, why don't you move to Spain with your leftist friends or something.

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Sounds great.

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Yeah, exactly. Let's go to Salamanca.

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So I try to reach people where they are. I try to say, well, let me give you reasons why you yourself, given your own stated principles, should be against what you favor on foreign policy.

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And I can say, you know, I'm just one guy, and I, you know, there's only so much that one person can do as, although many times we have great individuals who do a lot of things, but still, we have our limits, there's only so much we can do, but yet I get emails a lot from people saying, you know, I used to have the same view on war that you used to have, and then you at first enraged me, but then I thought about the arguments, and so again, there are arguments that you can make to the left, to the progressive left that will favor certain types of war.

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and you can say but you're betraying everything you believe in but there are arguments you can

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make to the right saying that you're betraying things too that you believe in and you can win

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them over. There is a consciousness raising that takes place. Yeah. Probably more so in this case

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than even in economics. Yeah, exactly. You suddenly begin to realize oh morality is a universal thing

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it should be applied in all cases. Yeah exactly right, exactly right. I was on a panel at Freedom

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and the subject of foreign policy came up, and we had some neocons on the panel, we had middle of the roaders, and we had Gary Johnson, who was good on war.

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And I raised this point, I said, it's not just a question of what American interests are, so-called, which basically means, you know, the interests of our overlords.

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It doesn't mean your interests and my interests, it doesn't matter to me what's going on.

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I said, it's not just that, it's a moral question, and you can't, basically on really the flimsiest of pretexts, carry out what is clearly an atrocity by any definition,

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and then afterwards say, oops, sorry, okay, yeah, those rationales weren't right, but that was a bad guy anyway, so it's probably alright.

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You just can't do that.

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Doesn't it annoy you as much as it does me when people come around on war so late?

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and then when everybody's jumping ship they say or then they try to pretend they

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weren't really does this right I mean all the time you know suddenly the guy who

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was cheering war and denouncing everybody was against it you know it's

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being pacifist or whatever enemies of the trees and yeah and then two years

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later they say well you know actually this war war hasn't worked out you know

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well at all yeah I know that's very irritating I should be celebrating that

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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I don't deny that the people who brought down the Twin Towers were bad people.

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Nobody is denying that.

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But the way they portray everything in the most ridiculous, over-the-top terms of

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the U.S. is the greatest country that has ever existed,

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and our people always have the greatest intentions,

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so everything we do is always one...

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You know, the rest of the world gets really tired of that after a while.

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Well, it's particularly bad on holidays.

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We just got through one the other day, right?

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Right, it was a couple of weeks ago, we had some, I don't know, it was a flag day or some big day when there was a whole day of this propaganda, you turn on the television.

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It speaks to a psychological need for belonging, that people, you know, they've got to be part of something and they're going to be part of this.

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There are other ways to exercise that.

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Yeah, there are, right, but this makes them feel like, well, hey, you know, we're better than that country because we've got this many divisions and they've only got that many.

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I mean, come on now people, like, you know, I mean, go join like a local softball team

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and say your team is better than that team. Please, do this in some other way.

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There are churches, there are families, there's a Rotary Club.

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There are lots of ways of doing this.

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Thank you so much, Tom, for writing this book and for talking to me today.

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Glad to do it, Jeff.