Lew Rockwell comes on The Alex Jones Show to report that Ron Paul will not endorse Mitt Romney, but the conversation ends up going well beyond that. By the time the interview is over, Rockwell has put into perspective exactly what is going on in the world, what government is and what politicians are. Simply awesome. Find the hour to view this, you will not see the world the same.
@21.20min: Great line for a Ron Paul T-shirt "The Minister in the Whorehouse"!!!
ReplyDeleteA question to Ron Paul Libertarians on radical Islam and the idea that Muslim extremists are plotting and planning to kill us every day - Are these just lies? Or did we do this to ourselves? Which is it?
ReplyDeleteBecause it seems that brilliant men like Lew Rockwell want to have it both ways. How can it be? He scoffs at the notion that Muslim extremists in Yemen (or under our bed) are trying to kill us - these are just lies to advance the police state - but then implies that it has been precisely our aggressive foreign policy that has turned these people against us. So an obvious question stares us in the face (and brings up further questions in the meantime). Which is it? Are these lies or are they really trying to kill us?
It doesn't have to be one or the other. The state helped incite the violence by sanctioning, bombing, occupying, kidnapping and torturing. But the state also trumps up threats, conjures up bogeymen, lies, and propagandizes the people in order to keep them fearful and blinded to what is really going on.
DeleteAlso the radicalization was specific policy we pursued. Most of the korans used in radical madrassas were printed and given free during the Soviet/Afghanistan war to radicalize the population.
Delete"In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation."
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/abc.htm
Oh, this old trope. Poor use of false dichotomy there, too. The Muslim extremists that want to kill the American soldiers and their allies are trying to do so because the American soldiers have invaded their lands and propped up despots in their lands long before invading! They are fighting against power, or fighting to control that power.
DeleteAt least you all acknowledge the threat. But is the answer to ignore, to retreat, abandon our interests overseas, leave our allies to fend for themselves, and wait to be attacked again, and WHEN it happens, only to offer that we brought it upon ourselves? Sounds like you have ZERO plans to deal with the threat and only offer apologetic sympathy for our enemies.
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DeleteThe US goes overseas to:
Deletea) kick the hornet's nest and provide more excuses for using the military on our dime;
b) waste trillions in weapons so the military complex can then build new ones on our dime; and
c) spread Clintonista social and economic policies around the world and turn the entire planet into Detroit.
You Republican warmongers are just brilliant. Great thinkers you are.
Bob, I am not claiming to be a great thinker, just observant of the fact that radical Islam is at our doorstep. Dangerous elements of this ideology have aligned with the leftist (globalist) movement and have stealthily infiltrated our society - our media, educational system, government, and military. I like you libertarians for your brilliant economic minds, but I don't hear any answers in response to this ever-growing threat of violence against America and the west. Or maybe that is the solution, to do nothing about it?
Deletejoeyfrat,
DeleteIf we must stay over seas to protect our 'allies' and our 'interest,' which could be more appropriately termed the military-industrial, engery-industrial, etc... then when does it stop when every single individual who does not love America and does not approve of an aggressive foreign policy is dead? You must realize more attacks result in more collateral damage which in turn results in more 'terrorist'? In other words its a positive feedback loop that favors TPTB.
You are more likely to die from a bee sting than a terrorist attack. The war on terror is a bunch of nonsense.
Deletehttp://www.infowars.com/more-americans-killed-by-bees-and-wasps-or-falling-televisions-than-by-terrorists/
I guess if you only count Americans on American soil and you leave out 9/11, then yes, by the numbers, you are more likely to die from a bee sting.
DeleteShoe bomber, underwear bomber, Fort Hood shooter, failed Times Square attack, numerous other thwarted plots (over 50 KNOWN foiled attacks since 9/11) - burying your head in the sand is a good way to explain to yourself that the war on terror is a bunch of nonsense, that they're not really trying to kill us. I used to do the same thing when I thought about the Federal Reserve, that these people knew what they were doing - they had our best interests at heart.
"I used to do the same thing when I thought about the Federal Reserve, that these people knew what they were doing - they had our best interests at heart."
DeleteWell, hopefully some day you will realize that the military industrial complex doesn't have your best interests at heart.
Oh, and about your thwarted plots, the government usually is the one who sets those up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxR3ytbX2xU
Thanks Dan, I respect the judge immensely and it was interesting to hear him speak on that subject. He acknowledges 17 plots set up by the government - some might call it entrapment, I would call it taking preemptive measures. But regardless, THAT LEAVES 33+ PLOTS THAT WE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH. All of those were conspired completely by our enemy. I'm sure the judge was thorough in his research, because he had a point to make. SO BY THE NUMBERS, over 2/3 of the time the government has NOTHING to do with creating these plots.
DeleteJoey, the first thing we should do is stop our policies that are creating more terrorists. You agree it would be better to do nothing than to put ourselves in even more danger with a hostile policy correct?
DeleteSecondly, it's not a do-nothing strategy. We should leave their countries, start spending on defense rather than offense to stop any further terrorist attacks, imprison those who started and continued these abhorrent wars, give trials to those suspects who have been indefinitely detained without trials, etc. There is a lot we can do. But the first thing we should do is stop making our situation worse. All we are doing is making the world hate us more and more. For every innocent individual we kill, families of those individuals are increasingly radicalized. If your sibling or parents was an innocent person, and a foreign country bombed him and killed him as collateral damage, would not you be upset?
The point is that you have a better chance of dying from a lightening strike or a bee sting than you do from a terrorist attack. The government would have you believe, however, that the threat terrorists pose is prevalent and even somewhat likely. This is the "terrorist under the bed" that Lew was talking about. It is drumming up paranoia in order to make the public more receptive to police-state policies in America.
DeleteOn the other hand, it is a fact that the U.S. has been wreaking havoc in the Arab world for decades, overthrowing their governments, killing innocents, destroying property, and occupying their sovereign lands. Does this make the Arabs hate us? Would they like to kill us? Of course. Just as you or I would hate it if a foreign power were killing our citizens with air strikes, destroying our homes and public buildings, and occupying our towns with troops.
Most Americans are unable to sympathize with Arabs in this regard due to that fact that they perceive 99% of Arabs, at least the ones living in Arab countries, as terrorists or future terrorists, and ascribing a sub-human factor to the entire race of people. Americans are simply unable to put themselves in the Arab's shoes.
@joeyfrat You are clearly uninformed about the facts of the "bomber" incidents you cite. The FBI routinely concocts these very scenarios and then actively persuades and equips mentally challenged or desperate foreigners to carry them out using FBI provided dummy weapons. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.html?pagewanted=all
DeleteThank you all for your comments as I try to wrap my head around this issue. I read and hear what all of you are saying. What I am NOT hearing though, is what to do about any of this. Sure, we could stop our aggressive policies, shut down our bases around the world, give civilian trials to war prisoners, etc, but these people won't give up their plans, they won't simply "stop hating America" and stop trying to cause us harm. It is IMPOSSIBLE for us to understand the mindset of a mother who would be proud of her child for growing up to be a suicide bomber, to kill hundreds or thousands of innocent people.
DeleteThat rationale means that we have a war on terror forever then. We started it by being interventionists, we experienced blowback as a result, we continue to intervene because of the blowback, thereby causing more blowback and greater hate in the muslim world.
DeleteIt is utter stupidity to use that as a reason to continue a policy of failure. It's a cyclic and neverending operation then.
Either; keep fighting a war without end and enjoy all the little benefits that go along with it like decreased civil liberties, further degradation of our currency and economy, and additional loss of life.
Or; stop the intervention overseas, use those saved resources for domestic defense, reducing our nation's debt, and repairing our economy.
It would seem that either way we are going to have the worry of terrorism. At least by stopping the intervention we save a ton of money, have perhaps a slight chance of eventually reducing the amount of terrorists that look to us as enemy number 1 ( also ceasing further bloodshed that will lead to new terrorists being added ), and could return to a nation that protects the civil liberties of its population.
Either way has its drawbacks but one gives a possible way out and may provide benefits in the long run, the other simply continues a path of destruction that leads to .... further destruction.
Dusan, even better was one from the interview from RT:
ReplyDelete"You can't expect to change the government from the inside. That's like thinking you can change the mafia from the inside."
How do you police the police? The Athenian democratic city-state was a tyranny of the majority. Socrates was put to death for what he said. But for most of its history Athens was a tyranny or an oligarchy. Should we eliminate the state and hire private security guards? The medieval peasants tried that. The security guards became knights and the peasants became serfs. Through most of history it has been the strong who have ruled the weak.
ReplyDeleteRockwell, following Rothbard, wants to promote a vision of a free society which has never existed for long on the world stage. Those who have power will use it to their advantage, and, as Lord Acton noted, "power corrupts." So how do we get out of the dilemma? Not by branding the state a criminal enterprise. The difference between the state and the criminal is in the area of legitimacy. The very definition of a state is an institution with a monopoly of legitimate violence.
We do not end violence by ending the state. When no violence is legitimate, all violence is equally legitimate. That is a slippery slope. We police the police by establishing social institutions that restrain the power of the state. The individual is helpless against the mob. We need institutions to constrain the mob, and we need institutions to restrain the state. Such institutions are unique to each society. We cannot build them on the basis of some ideology. Our constitution has failed utterly in Latin America. It requires practical experience and understanding of personal relations in the community.
That, roughly, was Burke's message to the French "libertarians" idolized by Rothbard. They brought terror, not freedom. We are not going to overthrow the establishment. It is bringing itself down. We need to restore past institutions and create new ones to restrain the power of the state. But wholesale destruction of the present system and efforts to erect some perfectionist ideal will not lead to freedom. It will take wisdom and compromise, not ideolgical purity, to restore the freedoms that we see slipping away. And it will be the incompetence of the oligarchy, not the superiority of our message, that will give us that opportunity.
Our goal should not be to gain power. Even libertarian power is not to be trusted. Our goal should be to a have prominent role in the restructuring that follows the collapse.
Security guards became knights = proof that private provision of security doesn't work.
DeleteBut the state, the 'thing' that in the 20th century alone was the directly responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of people is still a viable option somehow.
I'm not even going to bother talking about meaningless nonsensical terms like "social institutions" and its supposed "legitimacy".
"The difference between the state and the criminal is in the area of legitimacy. The very definition of a state is an institution with a monopoly of legitimate violence."
DeleteWow, that's some pretty direct question begging you're engaged in here...
"legitimate violence" - is that what they call it when a cop tazers a pregnant woman?
ReplyDeletePeople such as joeyfrat amaze me when they say things like: "It is IMPOSSIBLE for us to understand the mindset of a mother who would be proud of her child for growing up to be a suicide bomber, to kill hundreds or thousands of innocent people."
As if the bumper stickers and yellow ribbons aren't the same thing? Ah, nevermind,...