Byline Heads of Agreement Template Made Easy

Byline resolution

hi i'm paul jay welcome to the analysis.news podcast please don't forget the donate button at the top of the webpage we're in a matching grant campaign you'll see all the details uh explaining the matching grant at the top of the page [Music] when president-elect joe biden becomes commander-in-chief of the most powerful war machine in human history it's not clear which joe biden we will be getting is it the biden who supported the iraq war and comes out of a foreign policy tradition of truman and kennedy cold warriors who massively built out the military industrial complex truman who directed the fascist and racist air force general curtis lemay to drop atomic bombs on japan and later directed lemay to kill millions of koreans kennedy who started the process that led to the vietnam war and brought the world to the edge of nuclear annihilation and a pointless confrontation with the soviet union a cold war used to justify the greatest investment in military spending outside of a major war or will we get the biden that fought for the iran nuclear agreement who apparently opposed a trillion dollar investment in modernizing the american nuclear weapons arsenal and was reported to be against the invasion of libya when it comes to rivalry with china when we get beyond the inflammatory rhetoric will biden work with china to deal with climate and a host of other issues or really try to show how strong he is and please the china hawks who want him to contain china and weaken its global economic influence well to better understand what we might expect from the biden administration let's start by taking a look at the roots of democratic party foreign policy and joining to do that is vijay prashad bj is a historian a journalist a commentator he's the executive director of the tri-continental institute for social research and the chief editor of leftward books his latest book is washington bullets a history of the cia of the cous and assassinations thanks very much for joining us vijay thanks paul always great to be with you thank you so to understand the roots of how the democratic party pursues war and foreign policy why don't we start with roosevelt who in 1939 or so denounced bombing of civilians in europe as barbaric and then he joined uh he ordered american planes to join in the fire bombing of dresden and burning alive hundreds of thousands of civilians in japan roosevelt who continued developing the nuclear bomb even after it was clear hitler had not was not developing one so if you think that's a good place to start understanding how the democratic party thinks about foreign policy why don't you pick it up from there well you know paul it's good that you start with franklin delano roosevelt because by all accounts he is the gold standard of american liberalism or at least democratic party liberalism and yet if you look at fdr and then jump forward some decades to the next great shining star of democratic party liberalism that's john f kennedy both fdr roosevelt and john f kennedy oscillate between this hesitancy to use the full force of the united states to use charm a charm offensive you may remember fdr started the good neighbor policy with the latin american countries or the caribbean countries john f kennedy as well you know famously after nixon's quite catastrophic journey around south america john f kennedy with jacqueline onassis well at the time jacqueline kennedy um you know was very much on the one side in the belief that diplomacy charm using the american values you know the city on the hill and so on was going to win the day for the united states there was always that one side of democratic party liberalism but it was a very fragile side because it would snap to the other end to the other in the other direction rather quickly and so you get the other side which is the full force of u.s power military power to be used when appropriate and not necessarily to be used homeopathically but to be used allopathically in all its force um you know you see this with uh john f kennedy because kennedy comes to power he you know great charm and so on and then what do you see with the dulles brothers they attempt to overthrow the government in cuba that's very famous the bay of pigs invasion but it's not just bay of pigs it's a range of different invasions by the marines including in thailand very little um you know understood invasion by the us marines into thailand you know you see this use of u.s power um quite i would say without much hesitancy so with democratic party liberalism you oscillate as i said between on the one side this public charm and on the other side ruthless power i recently read barack obama's new memoir promised land and i mean i'm not recommending it because i found it evasive i found it untrue in many parts and i also found it to be in a way self-aggrandizing which is not not something that you expect to see in such a long book i mean frankly i've read kissinger's books and he's less self-aggrandizing than barack obama is in this particular book but but let's leave that aside he describes a scene in the book which i think captures this oscillation between great charm and ruthless use of american power because face it the united states has the most powerful military can bomb anywhere can create havoc anywhere from the skies from its you know missiles drones and so on so in the memoir he describes the hit list the kill list you know this is famously a man who was against the death penalty when he was a lawyer in chicago a man who comes from that kind of the charm school of democratic party liberalism you know such a charming guy i mean right everybody seems to accept that i used to play a game when obama was running in 08 in the primary and in the election i i used to insist to myself that i read his speeches and not watch because if you watched he was so damn charming you would just want to believe what he said where if you read the speeches you said oh this is just some you know center-right democrat speaking that's a very in fact that's a very good thing but now unfortunately obama is voices in my head so in reading the memoir the charm does come true but you can see there is a sequence obama john f kennedy you know fdr there's there is this trajectory so here's this man from that school of democratic party liberalism excited the base in in various ways comes to power comes into the white house now he is informed that he has the power to assassinate people around the world without a warrant without an investigation without a trial without all the basic architecture of liberalism you can just put a name on the list and the person is assassinated that's an extraordinary power that's a godlike power now you would imagine this sort of democratic party liberalism would you know hesitate and say look this is not on we need to have trials and we need to arrest people they need to have a right to defend themselves just the basic you know points that are there not only in the u.s constitution but you know hello in international law no obama accepts the enormous responsibility you know this is the kind of way they think about it enormous responsibility bestowed upon the united states to maintain order and he says that his chief of staff told him that the reason we need to do this the reason we need to sit on thursday in the situation room and go over a list of people that have to be killed and you have to sign off on this killing the reason we have to do this isn't actually about the enormous responsibility of american power and so on but it's because a democratic party a liberal democratic party president should not look weak i mean that is something that should chill people um you know when you have the appearance of strength allows you to use this amazing awesome amount of power that is going to destroy the lives of god knows how many people this is chilling so when we say let's look at biden's record and so on i fear that you know whatever the oscillation towards reason towards liberalism whatever that might be the enormous capacity of the united states to wreak havoc in the world married with this hesitancy amongst democratic party politicians not to appear weak uh makes them very dangerous people when they're in the white house so i i don't have a great deal of um you know anticipation that biden is going to be the peace president i fear that once more we're going to have another war president because they've in a sense paul they've all been war presidents uh well before we dig in more to what we might expect from biden dig in more to the the mindset of this kind of liberal face which is you know as you say roosevelt is the liberal face and in fact the new deal was about as liberal as domestic policy ever got and of course he was doing it to save a system of private ownership as he said himself but it was a rational approach to it as opposed to fascism which was really the alternative in the 30s and he he even says there's a speech from roosevelt in 39 where he talks about corporate control of government when a group specific group of corporations start to control government he says this is the definition of fascism and he he he warned against this barbaric bombing of uh civilians during world war ii and then he he allows this guy general lemay to become head of stratcom the guy is a fascist the guy's he's i'm not when i say he's a racist the guy ran for vice president after he retired he was george wallace's vice president and apparently he was so crazy right wing and militarist that wallace started getting embarrassed by lemay because lemay was advocating first strike against the soviet union and and he was making wallace look crazy but not only did roosevelt have this guy as head of stratcom and orders the atomic bomb firebombing which is actually worse than the atomic bombs because they they killed in one night in tokyo and they killed a hundred thousand civilians in one night and people should look this up because one of the guys who was one of the pilots wrote about what he saw from the air and he describes tens of thousands of people running into the canals to try to escape the flames and the water itself is already boiling at boiling temperature people start to melt and then there's so many thousands of people running they can't prevent themselves from being forced into the canal the bridges the steel gets white hot like the description from this pilot is is incredible and roosevelt and then had to know all this there's no way these reports don't get to him but this same liberal mindset that can do the new deal can accept the slaughter of tens of thousands of people and then truman as we know now authorizes the dropping of the atomic bomb when japan's already ready to uh surrender the whole thing was was unnecessary and then again in korea i mean it's not like you know they got some after doing it in japan they do it again in korea which never gets talked about what is it like three million koreans i think were killed and the same guy general curtis lemay again so what i mean what is this bloody mindset where they can think of themselves even of being oh we're liberals we're not like the republicans and then do i i don't know if it's more dastardly because i'm sure the republicans in the same situation would be as or even more but completely dastardly you know there are two books i'd like to add to the reading list and fortunately for people in the united states they're both written by people from the united states so you don't have to doubt the authenticity of the writer because i know that there is a let's say there's a seam of parochialism that sets in where if i gave you the name of a japanese writer or a german writer even you might not believe them but i highly recommend that people go back and take out their high school copy of cut of of uh kurt vonnegut's slaughterhouse five uh slaughterhouse five is bonnegut's account of being in dresden when dresden is firebombed and it's exactly those kind of descriptions it is one of the most powerful anti-war books and i don't even think that vonnegut meant it to be an anti-war book vonnegut meant it to be a sincere account of something that totally totally bothered him you know for the totality of his life the second book is is um well there are two but i'm going to suggest one john hershey's book hiroshima has to be read again again these are books that i believe used to be read in u.s high schools i'm not sure it's still being read but hiroshima is an extraordinary book hershey goes right after this horrendous act on japan arrives in hiroshima he's there with a legion of japanese journalists and he writes for the new yorker perhaps the most sincere piece of writing that's ever appeared in that magazine and his book is extraordinary i highly recommend it well you asked a very important question about how do we how do we square this circle between people who have this high-minded sense of themselves and this ruthlessness um in the book that i've written washington bullets it opens with paul nitzer's journey to japan because nitza also goes to japan just after you know uh hershey's essays appeared in the new yorker i mean they knew already you didn't even need um internal secret uh you know oss that is the intelligence agency briefings on what had happened in hiroshima and nagasaki in tokyo and so on nitsa was right there and he interviewed some of the leading generals and people for a long after action um survey that they were doing now here's a person who comes from that american that u.s elite that you know liberal establishment let's call them whether they were rockefeller people or whether they were fdr people it didn't matter they were basically country club elite from the united states from the eastern seaboard and he goes there and he sees the destruction wrought by both the atom bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki and as you quite rightly pointed out the incendiary bombing of tokyo he sees this directly he writes it about it in his report and then very soon after he and his team sitting in washington dc concoct a line which i have quoted i think for 20 years now uh because i think this is really important for an understanding of the bipartisan consensus around u.s foreign policy and the line hasn't changed and it is quite simple of course they use a term which is not used it's arcane and this refers back to their sort of harvard princeton yale you know classics education but they basically write in this important foundational document never repudiated by the us government in other words they've never said that the policy has changed but this is the policy after world war ii they say the goal of u.s policy is to seek preponderant power to seek preponderant power that's the goal of u.s policy you know the the gentler word thrown around now is primacy that the united states must be you know well i suppose if we're going to go all classics in greek and latin it's primus enter paris first among equals although i don't think that this elite sees anybody as they equal they see themselves as superior to everybody i mean this is what in popular culture is known as u.s exceptionalism this is the kind of thing you see every time anybody runs for office in the united states of america whether it's for city council all the way to the presidency they'll always say it's the greatest country in the world has a mission for the world you know god bless america thank you god for making me a citizen of the united states and so on and so forth there is this constant reiteration of the superiority of the united states and its mission for the whole planet now i don't need you know to be a psychologist or even a social psychologist to do an analysis of this i'm not interested in analyzing this but i know that this is the motivation this is what drives them you know this sense that oh gosh we can't allow multipolar world we can't allow china or russia any other country to share the table with us we have to drive the agenda you know what disturbed um the this sort of liberal conservative bipartisan elite in the united states about trump what disturbed them was trump was eroding the moral standing what they saw the self-image that they have of themselves trump was making them look buffoonish on the world stage and they therefore wanted to return in a way to something that resembled how they see themselves which is you know this great colossus of liberalism that stomps around the world putting out fires and telling people how to behave i mean i read the pentagon documents you know on a regular basis and in the last 20 years they've basically continued to say we cannot tolerate any anybody challenging the absolute authority of the united states of america least of all china and i just want to make a distinction you know as i end this answer the distinction is the distinction between power and authority i think nobody nobody should have an illusion that u.s power is as much as it has been you know for a long time and by power i'll just give two examples the united states is the largest military in the world it can as i say bomb destroy anybody enormous nuclear arsenal nobody can challenge the united states militarily in a one-on-one fight not a chance secondly the united states continues to have an overwhelming advantage over world financial institutions the dollar even though marginally declining as a reserve currency marginally declining in terms of the reconciliation of trade you know how people do their bilateral trade russia and china increasingly doing bilateral trade in rubles and in yuan but nonetheless there is no question the dollar is supreme around the planet so united states power is not affected much u.s authority on the other hand has declined greatly in other words the united states is having a much harder time driving its own agenda you know whether it's in trade agreements or it's the climate issue or anything i mean recently one third of the world's population signed a trade agreement it's called the rsep you know the this is all the the countries of australia australasia essentially and and and you know including china as i said australia japan countries that are in a military alliance with the united states against china have signed on to a trade agreement with china that excludes the united states so u.s power remains let's not have any illusions about that but u.s authority has eroded and i think the return of biden to the white house comes with all the language that says we want to reassert our authority again so from the 1940s to the president paul there's been no change in the broad policy which is that the united states seeks preponderant power will not allow any so-called rival to come onto the stage and it has concocted all kinds of really insane hallucinatory theories about how china is a rival and we could talk about that because the chinese have said repeatedly we are not a rival we don't want to become primal sinter powers we are not seeking preponderant power but the united states is and it's the decline of u.s authority that has in a sense if i might use a colloquial this has freaked out the us elite it's truly freaked them out i mean they don't know how to react to this decline of authority and they don't also know how to react to the decline of that technological prowess and you know we can talk about that later yeah well just before we pick up on china um you make i think a very important point in the book and again it's it's called washington bullets and people should really read this uh that this modern imperialism and the culture that goes with it is erected on the structure of colonialism and the culture and of colonialism and the uh you know one of the fundamental principles of that culture is that the peoples of asia africa and latin america especially asia and africa are essentially savages and are outside the realm of of any uh need for norms or regulation i i in your book you mentioned there's a a couple of treaties at one point about how war is going to be fought but it's only applicable to europeans mind you they wound up not following them anyway but they weren't even making a a an attempt to make it look like it would be applicable uh to not you know outside the anglo-american world and european world and of course the united states is founded on slavery and genocide and the approach of the americans to the native peoples slavery as well but the native people because that was north and south had that approach was that these people can be slaughtered for the sake of progress uh in their mind progress and the sort of ability to have such barbaric uh wiping out of civilians it's deeply rooted in in in in the elites and their culture and i think that's another thing you keep raising in the book which i think is very important why we talk about roosevelt when we talk about biden and these individuals and even the parties this is a reflection of how capitalism has risen as a system this is what's happened with the concentration of ownership a system based on private ownership that's gotten to ridiculous proportions now of concentration of ownership and these parties and this culture you know it reflects that as well as what's that great quote from marx about the uh uh the the the something of the past ways like nightmares on the brains of the present what's the that's from the 18th i think this is from the 18th roman where the nightmare of the past weighs on the living the people who are living or the memories of the past at any rate way like nightmares on the living room uh and and so you know when we're we're looking at both the democratic party and and the republican party and this idea which is a reflection of what how they emerged as essentially a single superpower after world war ii and and honestly always were this idea that it was a two superpower world that was actually kind of a crock because while the soviet union had nuclear weapons they militarily there was never a competition for global power and not only that you know i've been i'm doing this film with daniel ellsberg and i'm interviewing him and the great realization for him who was a real cold warrior when he uh goes to rand corporation and starts advising on on the nuclear war strategy his book doomsday machine confessions of a nuclear war strategist the project i'm working with him and he starts to realize that when the this guy same guy curtis lemay who's head of stratcom is telling the president and the world that the soviet union has a thousand icbms and can and has the ability to strike first against the united states and it turns out that they had four and ellsberg starts to realize wait a second these guys actually aren't planning a military expansion or global presence they're not whatever they are domestically they are not a global domineering power they're not trying to take over the world of course but the entire basis of the militarization that takes place in the united states which they use as a form of stimulus because you can't get away with new deal anymore because the elites don't want another new deal but they don't mind stimulus in the form of military spending so democratic party domestic policy gets so linked with militarization as a form of stimulus and then we get kennedy and and so on so okay i don't know if you want to add anything to that or go ahead yeah well firstly that thing about the military as stimulus ruth gilmore ruthie gilmore wrote about this and called it military keynesianism i think that's a very good and opposite phrase it is a kind of military keynesianism and it's i think largely uh restricted to the united states but let's put that aside i do want to return to the colonial roots as it were and this refusal to accept uh culturally that there's been a shift in the world so let's just take libya paul because libya is an extraordinary example of this the first evidence we have of aerial bombardment is in 1911 against some communities in libya when italian planes go and just bomb from the skies you know people riding on horseback people riding on camel they don't have even guns that can reach halfway up to the planes you know and they're just ruthlessly killed from the air the italians write of this in their reviews of their bombing runs they say that you know aerial bombardment they say is educational it's pedagogical um we will show these savages and of course this is how they wrote um that they need to behave themselves and the italian futurists were very much behind this bombing campaign partly they were excited by the idea of this big destructive project as an educational project i mean it's repulsive you know because on the ground real people entire families are being butchered uh with no chance there's no honor in war you know the idea that you have combatants fighting each other and that both have the the opportunity that they might die in that that's how old war used to be understood there was a certain honor and dignity in combat this this is not combat this is slaughter that was 1911 libya 100 years later to the month almost paul the nato planes go and bomb libya again i mean it's incredible it's the 100th anniversary of the first aerial bombardment and nato goes and bombs that country again there was no way for anybody in libya to retaliate against the american and french rafael bombers which bombed from too high up the libyans just didn't have the capacity didn't have the skill to take them on they just bombed the country left right and center okay they bombed using a u.n mandate that is u.n security council resolution 1973. this mandate and i read this very carefully asked for an after-bombing review of the bombing campaign you know it's boilerplate for when you allow a chapter 7 resolution on the un charter when you allow chapter 7 resolution which is not utilized very much by the u.n security council it allows member states to use force it immediately kicks in that after the action there has to be a review well many people human rights organizations the u.n itself journalists i personally also asked nato headquarters we asked have you considered an after-action review after bombing review based on the requirements of 1973 the u.n resolution 1973. well peter olsen the lead attorney for the nato office put out a statement he sent a letter i have a copy of the letter the letter essentially says the following no we are not going to submit our bombing information to any independent agency we'll do our own review it's a secret review we're not going to do this and it's said that if there is any evidence of civilians being killed in libya it was entirely accidental because nato cannot if so far nato cannot ipso factor nato cannot by definition by definition nato cannot conduct war crimes that is to say europeans and people of european descent are not war criminals the war criminal and this is demonstrated in the kind of people that are brought before the international criminal court in the hague the the war criminals are non-europeans uh they are the ones who are savages and they continue to be savages so in 1911 you bombed libya saying we need to use the bombing to teach the savages to basically subordinate themselves to our authority in 2011 you bomb libya again and this time you say well the savages are war criminals because gaddafi was genocidal even though there is no evidence of any genocide in libya in february of and march of 2011 it was all made up by the saudi press there was fighting but there was no genocidal activity but the savage is always going to be the savage and the european is always civilized even though the european ruthlessly bombed libya on the 100th anniversary of aerial bombardment now you tell me when does this culture start reflecting on itself and wonder about its ruthlessness in the world and the way it in a sense you know projects ruthlessness onto people who are not ruthless you know it's always saddam hussein is the butcher it's always bashar al-assad is the butcher but listen you know uh the the un um the u.s ambassador to the united nations madeleine albright is the one who admitted on u.s television you you remember this she admits on u.s television she said yes because of u.s policy half a million iraqi children have killed and she says later she said she regrets using that phrase but she said it she says on television and the clip is on youtube she says on television half a million iraqi children killed by u.s policy is a price worth paying is that not genocidal behavior no no hang on hang on hang on hang on i think it was a price we're willing to pay as if they're the ones paying i mean it's worse than what you said it's true and but here she directly admits culpability complicity whatever you want to say in the murder of half a million iraqi children forget grown-ups and so on and she will never be considered to be genocidal or a maniac or authoritarian these terms are reserved for the darker diabolical forces in the world which is to say the human beings out there who face the aerial bombardment and are always going to be accused of making the west bomb them because you know again this is the old domestic violence justification here is a man hitting a woman and the man says you made me hit you this is the weakest most diabolical form of argumentation but somehow this which doesn't uh is not permitted to you know be taken seriously in a court of law is perfectly acceptable when it comes to international conflict and the use of power to subordinate countries so i mean this is a cultural flaw you know paul this is not even just about capitalism it's not just about you know understanding capitalism helps us understand why these things are necessary but we need to go deeper into a flaw in let's call it western culture to understand the arrogance of this use of power against people not just power but the arrogance of the use of violence against people terrible terrifying violence [Music] i mean i don't think it's just western i mean if you look even in the development of china the development of china as a country the han chinese and the empire was brutally built on slaughters of whole populations of all kinds of other tribes and ethnic minorities and i mean you know it's not like this is uh just western it's just in the more recent history the west has been sort of dominant and and but i guess the difference maybe is the west tries to pretend they're not barbaric when they're just as barbaric as anything in in human history in fact more because the armies in terms of weaponry are capable of so much more devastation than any armies in the past yeah i mean i don't want to be heard as saying that you know the rest of the world is is all kind and peaceful i mean after all attila the han and so on have their own reputations and one doesn't need to be lawyers for them you know they were proud of what they were doing and they were ruthless but i think the point is more what you were beginning to say in the second part just now which is that a structure has been developed um in in in largely in the culture in societies in europe in the united states in canada where there is a reflexive sense that these countries use their power abroad outside their territories for good and that they use their power essentially to shape the world and to be as they say to be the policeman now this is an ironic phrase to global policemen or the world's policeman because you know i mean black lives matter we know how the police within the territory of the united states and canada and in western europe we know how the police forces act so it's kind of odd that nonetheless there is this you know a very shiny image of we are the world's policemen as if that's a good thing i mean look at the way your police behave domestically um you know freddie gray let's name their names brianna taylor and so on well i can name thousands millions of names of people of my friends as well who were killed in these wars um you know people who didn't deserve to die men the ones i know are journalists uh who were killed in in warfare um you know and well you know maybe it's not such a simple thing when you say we are the world's policemen but what they're saying is that when we exercise power we are exercising power for good now the very fact that we end up slaughtering millions of people seems irrelevant and i i think that's a moral question that's why i say paul it's a question in rooted in a cultural conversation about you know racial understanding the kind of superiority this feeling that well if we do the bombing we don't commit war crimes that's what peter olsen wrote i didn't write that he somehow has this image that when nato bombs they don't kill civilians how is that even possible i mean that's just not possible when you look at the technology they don't have such smart bombs you know there will be one or two stray bombs well then olsen says it's an accident we didn't deliberately kill civilians whereas savages deliberately kill civilians this is very ironic by the way that these are this is the kind of language being used because we know that ever since aerial bombardment starts the advantage of aerial bombardment is that you can go beyond the lines the enemy lines and bomb cities and from the very beginning of the history of aerial bombardment the bombing of civilians has been part of the strategy of using bombardment look at curtis lemay who you referred to earlier look at what the united states did in korea you know bombed places where people lived residential areas but actually very much worse than that bomb dams bombed agricultural areas created a famine look at what the united states did in vietnam i visited vietnam and you know i was very sensitive to the idea that the vietnamese was struggling to build socialism in the country and i was questioning them about agriculture and so on and they said you know it's an interesting thing you raise agriculture because for decade plus the united states used the worst kind of chemical weapons you know agent orange napalm and so on in one of the more fertile belts of vietnam's agricultural heartland that was just saturated with chemical weapons and one of the people i was talking to was a government official said to me that we have estimated in some parts of where the chemical warfare happened we will it will take generations before we can risk eating anything grown there now let me ask you is that not bombardment of civilians not the killing necessarily only of civilians at that point but it's a bombardment of generations of people who will not be able to be food sovereign because their soil is saturated by this stuff made by american corporations dropped by the military so that's actually what i'm trying to get at here is and i think in the book i i try to make that point repeatedly in different stories which is that there is this very bizarre cultural assessment this uh self-understanding that somehow people in the united states in canada and by god let's not forget canada here because the canadians seem to have even higher sense of themselves than the people of the united states in very many parts of western europe in france in germany and so on that low countries holland belgium there is this great sense that you know we are somehow moral people and when we do if we are forced into military action by god we only do it in the very best way the nobel prize for peace is named after a man who invented in the west dynamite dynamite was invented in other countries previously that's fine but you know alfred nobel was an arms manufacturer and here we then gave the nobel prize for peace i think the not irony paul because i'm not talking about irony here the hypocrisy cultural hypocrisy is just there in the nobel in the nobel story on a somewhat more positive note i think there's been a shift in public opinion during colonialism i think on the whole there were always some constituency that was opposed to colonialism but on the whole to go conquer a country plunder it bring the booty back to england or whatever european country it was it was perfectly acceptable in fact you know you were doing well if you were winning the plundering contest you know between different european countries and so on um i maybe even up to even world war ii um it was not seen as really such a bad thing to go take over the philippines or do something else but after the defeat of hitler and the experience of the peoples of the world the nuremberg trial uh this was condemned these wars they were called wars of aggression it was no longer it's okay to plunder this the highest crime is a war of aggression and that people got that to a large extent and then the vietnam war for the american people you know they had to be again tricked lied to to get into the war with the gulf of tonkin incident oh we were attacked first and every i mean you go through all the american wars and practically everyone starts with some phony provocation from the other side when really many of the phony provocations have come from the american side time and time again ellsberg was talking about provocation as one of the important pillars of u.s uh military policy phony provocations you should see that i don't know if you've seen the uh the uh they've released the uh some of the transcripts of meetings robert kennedy was in when they were planning an attack on cuba and this isn't very much known that just before khrushchev puts these weapons nuclear weapons in cuba there was a plan for a massive invasion of cuba and there was a list of things they were going to do including get us an airplane that looked like a commercial aircraft paint it with the colors of some national airlines and then shoot it down and then blame the shooting down of the aircraft uh commercial aircraft on the cubans and that's only one example of the kind of things they they were planning but after the vietnam war uh the americans did not have a taste for this war of aggression and they came to understand the vietnam was a war of aggression it wasn't about defending democracy large numbers of people and the next time they want to really have a major war iraq they have a 911 very conveniently and then of course saddam has weapons of mass destruction and there and they're able to try to justify another what is essentially war of aggression um so i think there is a change in public opinion where at the very least they have to lie where they didn't have to lie before uh the lies do eventually get exposed and so maybe now we're we are in somewhat a different period uh from the history times we've been talking about because after vietnam and now after the iraq war turned out to be all [ __ ] there were no weapons of mass destruction uh even some of the people that voted for trump were actually uh they thought he was a a non-interventionist and some of the even some of the people voting for him were doing thought they were supporting a non-interventionist policy i actually don't believe that's true about trump but that's not the point the point is people thought it was so i think now that biden's coming into power here he's he is dealing with the people that are very wary of the kinds of things the elites have done in the past um and uh so at any rate there's a factor here that's somewhat different than some of the periods we were talking about before this is not to say that the people running this foreign policy and military policy have gained any great morality but i think not just americans people all over the world i mean millions of people marched against the iraq war there is a consciousness here that perhaps wasn't existing before at least not at the scale well that's why i wrote this book because i was actually quite horrified paul by the coup data conducted in bolivia in november 2019 when um you know it was a textbook coup and i i very well remember three days before the coup took place i got a call from friends in in bolivia saying this is what's happening the life of morales is an in threat i called noam chomsky you know we hastily wrote a statement released it for the latin american press it came in newspapers across the hemisphere and then the next day uh general williams caliman goes to see eva morales and says you have to step down now it was extraordinary to me to see the world it's you know the great musical um instrument go into effect as the media came in the new york times washington post et cetera et cetera et cetera the guardian all of them said there's no coup uh morales has overstayed is welcome by the way angela merkel has been in office longer than ever morale is nobody says she's overstayed her welcome uh so let's just have that clear and i've never heard any conversation about that and anyway leave that aside avo moralizes overstate is welcome there was fraud in the election they were repeating all this stuff interesting then i saw left media in the west start to say eva morale is overstated welcome he was bad on the environment bad on the environment this is the guy who started the cochabamba process long before the green new deal was a term they pick up one or two straight incidences in the amazon a road and so on and just junk his entire his record so i heard all this stuff and i said oh my god people don't understand how these things work so when i wrote the book the second part two of the book is called manual for regime change in which it essentially goes over step by step you know part one lobby public opinion part two appoint the right man on the ground that's the ambassador part three make sure the generals are ready and in this case it was williams caliman pass four make the economy scream part five diplomatic isolation you know this is exactly what they've done since cuba part six organized mass protests in this in the case of bolivia these were semi-fascist organizations led by that that really gangster luis camacho and his crowd and they can take pictures of them and it looks like it's a mass demonstration then part seven green light the cool this was certainly green lighted and we can you know we don't have time to talk about it and then assassinations you know the way they went after there was a massacre they went and humiliated people like patricia r say it was basically the manual of regime change and i used material from guatemala and guyana kuz in the 1950s to explain these basic principles of how a coup works the last point is called production of amnesia i was interested in the production of amnesia because what happens is a coup takes place 1954 in guatemala a coup takes place and then amnesia has to be produced in such a way that eventually after 20 odd years you'll release the documents on the coup you'll show that the cia actually did the coup but it doesn't seem to matter in public opinion people say well it was in the past it's always in the past everything is in the past nothing is ever in the present it's a very clever clever strategy you know you don't deny that it was in the past you just say we learnt our lesson we don't do it anymore and then here here it is here's haiti 2004. here's um you know uh honduras 2009 i mean for god's sake here's thailand in 2014 and then we have um we're back to bolivia 2019 and so the reason i wrote the book was to basically go to people young people in particular who won't know much of this history and say listen friends this is a cliche they do this over and over again and yes even in 1954 they didn't come out and say we're doing it for united fruit company in which you know the dallas brothers had a stake that is both alan dallas and john foster dallas it's a great scandal that in washington dc paul the two airports are named after dulles and reagan i mean you know of all people at least one of them should be a pretending liberal you know rather than both of these ruthless imperialists at least one of them should have some sort of pretense of charm and liberalism neither the dallas brothers were charming they had a stake in united fruit and they overthrew yakko bar benz because he was threatening what he was threatening marginally challenging united fruit not even threatening to expropriate all its lands which is what i would do if i was the president of guatemala in 1954 he wasn't at that level he was just doing some modest land reform and they overthrew him but they didn't say it was for that they said it was because of communism it was because you know the communist party was friendly with arbenz's wife and blah blah blah blah the new york times wrote puff pieces which the cia basically faxed to them that's how the the reporting worked and i'm telling you it's identical now okay i might not be alive when the documentation is released but we will find and i'm not going to name them that the reporters who reported uh you know from on on the on the the democratic transfer of power to jeannette anyas in bolivia those reporters basically got their commanding orders from if not the cia the state department i mean there was an election in venezuela on the 6th of december i'm going to name him tom phillips of the guardian wrote a piece where mr phillips byline was rio de janeiro he wasn't even in caracas he wrote it from rio de janeiro and he repeated words like charade and so on that are there in the state department statement the u.s state department statement signed by mike pompeo i mean it's not a case that you necessarily need to buy up these reporters you know pay them or whatever but there is a culture of complicity that is shared between these reporters and these events and then later when the bolivian people with great courage you know go to the polls in a huge majority you know it's a landmark thing that they overthrew a coup with a democratic election and brought lucho uh uh arsed to power as the new president of bolivia who has now welcomed evo morales and you know is on stages with him across the country every day eva morales has had those court cases of fraud removed from the the court the courts have said there was no basis for these cases in the first place this was part of the coup process this happened last year paul this happened last year this is going to happen again i agree with you there is a shift in public opinion people are much more decent perhaps than they used to be but they're not vigilant enough and they don't hold these gangsters who run things who have their levers on power they don't hold them to account often enough look uh u.n secretary general kofi annan said in 2004 to his shame he didn't say that in 2003. in 2004 u.n secretary general kofi annan who studied at macalester college very close friends with most of the american elite in 2004 he tells bbc that the george w bush's war against iraq is an illegal war he used that phrase the head of the u.n uses the word illegal there is not one piece of accountability faced by george w bush faced by dick cheney faced by donald rumsfeld faced by tony blair not one of them is ever going to see a court of law you know if something illegal is done by somebody as far as i understand the word illegal that means that there is a jurisdiction somewhere somewhere there is a jurisdiction through which you are capable of saying something is illegal that means somebody should be able to call you to account for your illegal activity none of them get called to account so i mean i'm with you paul there is a shift but it's not really a consequential shift because until you are able vigilant enough strong-willed enough to demand that people who conduct these actions are brought to account until that happens i'm afraid i am rather pessimistic about the direction of world history well i won't be able to change your mind on that because i'm not very optimistic either but the issue of media obviously people don't know what's going on in bolivia they barely know what's going on in their own country never mind bolivia people don't know and the media is so uh dominated except for those you know little things like us and a few other things but you know we talk about this but we don't have any way to get to the majority of people i mean most of the people that voted for trump their media is fox and other right-wing media they don't even hear cnn and of course cnn can be complete war mongers because war is good for their business so they don't get access to any of this information they don't know the history and the deterioration of the public school system i mean people don't even get taught any history that matters if they get taught history at all but there's moments there's moments when it does break through you know the lead up to the iraq war it didn't matter they invaded anyway but it was a moment where a lot of people marched that have never marched before um what i was saying is the difference now is that a straightforward open war of aggression wore a plunder if people understand that's what it is they won't accept it where in you know a hundred years ago they might have accepted it they even embraced it um i'm not even saying there aren't sections of the population now that might still say well we're white and we're superior we're american so [ __ ] everybody else yeah let's go and i don't know what percentage of the population might believe that um maybe it's even in that 20 25 but uh you know that think god's chosen the americans and so whatever god's chosen people do is okay uh but there's a shift yeah i mean just to just to put a point on that i mean trump openly said we should just go and take the oil from iraq and so on and in the waning days of the trump administration he has very cynically um you know violated i don't know how many u.n resolutions but basically and he doesn't have the right to do it by donating the western sahara the sarawi people's lands to morocco and basically donating the palestinian project to the israelis i mean violated so many u.n resolutions i mean this was done brazenly you know i i just i just don't see when it comes to the the crushing crushing blow to the sarawi people um you know by this quid pro quo where morocco recognizes israel and israel that is basically taking over east jerusalem and the west bank syria's golan heights all of which trump gave israel permission to take away he doesn't have he doesn't have the authority to give permission but that's what's happened and at the same time he's given permission as a quid pro quo to morocco to seize the western sahara officially i mean i don't just i just don't see the voices of dissent i don't even see them among the city ranks of the squad and so on in the democratic party i haven't seen anybody come out there and say this is an outrage against u.n resolutions the u.n mandate to maintain the ceasefire between morocco and western sahara which was first set up in 1991 was renewed just about six months ago you know after since 1991 just about six months ago it was renewed and what happens the united states just says you can have it pals if you recognize israel i mean this is just grotesque and i just i look around me and i feel even the left media has basically sat on its you know on its hands on this i mean how many people have written about western sahara commented about this long-standing occupation of the western sahara backed by saudi arabia initially by it was morocco's occupation backed by saudi arabia backed by the united arab emirates and behind all of this for years backed by the united states government now with this in the waning days of the trump administration i just don't see enough evidence to say that we have really walked in a human humanitarian direction out of that old imperial past uh it's a long journey oh i i in my mind it's a long journey from uh apes to human and we're only a little part way there and uh it's a barbaric system uh but anyway i'm i'm a little more optimistic about some shift in american public opinion uh but of course it's the heart of the empire and it's not very hard to pull off another terrorist attack on american soil in which case enough people will get outraged and and something terrible could happen so as a practical matter uh i guess we'll see but i i take some hope from even if the progressives in the in the congress aren't on the sahara story and maybe they don't even understand israel palestine that well sometimes um still the they've there there is resolutions to stop the support for the saudi war in yemen um there's some things that can be built on i don't think it's entirely uh terrible here no i agree i agree with you on that um i think in a way neither you know i should exaggerate the point here i mean it's this is a struggle this is a fight um and i mean the fight is is well worth being involved in i mean i you and i have been involved in this fight our entire lives and i don't think we're going to at this point either surrender from the fight or get to or on the other side you know just get too jazzed up by where we are uh it's a fight well let me let me just say one thing why are we even bothering to talk to each other on camera here uh one because we still think there's some kind of hope and two one of the most critical issues you know gore you talked about amnesia gore vidal used to say usa stands for the united states of amnesia that was his line then he changed it later it got so bad he called it the united states of alzheimer's but but there's been a deliberate attempt in the public education system and the media to completely uneducate not educate people about even basics of history like why did they choose hiroshima and nagasaki to drop nuclear bombs because almost every other city had already been burnt down in the firebombings they were the only things left to bomb because it wasn't like they had some strategic thing in fact the whole thing was [ __ ] they just wanted to show they had the bomb and not just to the japanese maybe more so to the soviet union the vast majority of people don't know it have never heard that the reason they picked hiroshima and nagasaki is because they'd already deliberately burnt down every other city in japan people don't know quite right i mean i i have to say on the point of hope um i mean and this this is something that's important to me i wrote this book thinking very much about and actually my work in the last period has been very influenced by my dear friend eduardo galliano because years ago i asked galliano how he could write such beautiful beautiful books about torture and he said that a book about something so ugly as torture or in this case about assassinations and coups and and so on should not replicate what um the bad side of history does we have to find a way to excavate in that story hope and resilience and and so on and that's why this book is filled with poetry i mean it it starts with poetry it ends with poetry the end of part two is a complete poem about a war and who comes to clean up after a war um yeah i mean i i i feel like um the lifting of the human imagination is very important and and that's exactly that's what that's what we do i mean if somebody said to me what's your profession i would say and it sounds terribly arrogant and i apologize for sounding arrogant i don't have a better word for it you know we say journalist or we say historian whatever but no i think our job is to try and somehow maybe with our fingers and fingernails to lift the human imagination just even if it's a centimeter or a millimeter above where it is you know that's our job that's the job of poets that's the job of people who are political trade unionists agricultural worker union you know shapers and so on school teachers i mean the job is just to lift the human imagination a little bit and hope that people then find the air that comes under gives them some buoyancy and they can fly higher i mean i think that's what we're trying to do really all right let's let's end there so i've been putting off this china conversation because i want to actually do a whole segment on china so sometime in the next i hope in the next week even we'll get back together again and we'll talk about the right you know the quote-unquote rivalry with china and what to expect from biden and so on amazing no no i would love to because i think that's that really does require its own and i've been working on that a lot with john ross in particular he and i are writing a series every six weeks all right thanks thanks very much vijay thanks a lot my pleasure and thank you for joining us on the analysis.news podcast please remember at the top of the webpage there's a uh donate button there's a matching grant campaign on now if ten thousand bucks if you donate it gets matched if you do a new monthly or raise your existing monthly that will get matched times 12. so thanks for joining us [Music] um [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] uh [Music] you