Thursday, December 26, 2013
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Who Has Nukes in the Middle East
RT: Who has nuclear weapons in the Middle East and is threatening to use them. Coming up.
Announcer: Benjamin Netanyahu revealing what he really thinks about America.
The world's top war crimes prosecutor tells us why he helped convict Israel for genocide.
And Wikipedia becomes a battlefield as lobbies try to rewrite history.
RT: The Kuala Lumpur war crimes commission on November 26 found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians. The tribunal states that consistent evidence it heard from eyewitnesses concluded since 1948 there have been:
Mass killings through air and naval strikes, forced expulsion from Israel of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian survivors, massacres of those who refused to leave, and the continued seizure of Palestinian lands for Jewish settlements. Some public roads In Israel itself are for Jews only. Non-white jews are also officially discriminated. Blood banks refuse to accept blood from Ethiopian Jews.
Use against Palestinian civilians of illegal white phosphorus, which the tribunal notes "tears out the insides of human bodies." Land and sea blockades of Palestinian territory, leading to a state of "siege and imprisonment" of the entire nation. Denial of food and drinking water, the stealing of Palestinian water resources, and hundreds of checkpoints on Palestinian lands that create "impossible" conditions of life.
Some see the War Crimes Tribunal as a highly controversial body, and question its authority and legitimacy. We asked Israel's Foreign Ministry for a response. This was their summary:
Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Distorting historical reality by calling Israel's actions "crimes" is an insult to intelligence. There is no siege on Gaza, but a naval blockade had been declared in accordance with international law.
RT: However, The Independent reports that top Israeli officials are on the record admitting a premeditated intention.
Rabbi Eli Yishai, former Israeli interior minister: The goal is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.
Gilad Sharon, IDF reserve forces major and son of ex-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: We need to flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn't stop with Hiroshima, they hit Nagasaki too.
RT: Unaware he's being filmed, Israel's prime minister reveals he wants to inflict "unbearable" pain on Arabs, and claims he's manipulating America.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister: The main thing is to hit the Arabs so painful that it will be unbearable. The world will say we're defending. America is something that can be very easily moved.
RT: Without urgent action, the UN's report finds that Gaza will be "unlivable" by 2020.
Ynet news reports that Israel repeatedly bombs Gaza's only power station.
When treatment plants ran out of fuel last week, thousands of liters of raw sewage again ran in Gaza's streets.
Al Jazeera report: It's not flood waters which this man is struggling to walk through, but human waste and sewage.
Gaza resident: Even our children, if they want to go to school or to the shops, we’re forced to carry them. We've become sick and have trouble breathing and new skin diseases emerging because of this situation.
RT:The past year, says Israeli Defense Force Brigadier Michael Edelstein,"was a great one." Retaliation rocket attacks from Gaza on settlements have stopped, he notes. Yet Israel's reciprocal pledge to help Gaza hasn't been kept, writes The Economist.
The UN's special rapporteur on human rights warns "the world is slouching towards nothing less than a Palestinian Holocaust." Professor Richard Falk thank you very much for joining us. Why is this behavior actually genocidal?
Professor Richard Falk, UN human rights rapporteur: When you target a group, an ethnic group, and inflict this kind of punishment upon them, you are in effect nurturing a kind of criminal intention that is genocidal.
RT: The world's leading war crimes prosecutor helped establish the Genocide Tribunal. Professor Francis Boyle sent President Milosevic to the Hague, he is now working for the creation of the Hague International Criminal Tribunal for Israel.
Professor Boyle, thanks so much for joining us, Israel's now threatened pre-emptive conventional and nuclear strikes on Tehran, what is its legal basis?
Professor Francis Boyle, war crimes prosecutor: Absolutely none. The world court already decided that in the legality of nuclear weapons case that the threat stands on the same footing as the actuality.
'Preventive'or'pre-emptive'warfare was condemned by the NurembergTribunal, but the bottom line is Israel uses its nuclear weapons to terrorize and intimidate the surrounding states in the region, it has nothing to do with defence.
RT: The Guardian reports how close we’ve already come to all-out war.
Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered a'P Plus'alert on Iran's energy facilities in 2010 that would make an Israeli military strike"inevitable." The country's spy chief Meir Dagan notes it was an "illegal move without the authorization of the cabinet," and that Netanyahu was trying to "steal a war."
It's not known what stopped Netanyahu's order being carried out, but it received extremely forceful opposition from two people who were informed - army head Gabi Ashkenazi, and Meir Dagan, who called Netanyahu's plan "the stupidest idea I have ever heard." Both have now left their posts.
Israel's Institute for National Security Studies wargamed precisely the attack ordered by Netanyahu and found two outcomes possible: one - a contained reaction, the other - World War III.
Top saxophonist, producer and author Gilad Atzmon renounced his Jewish religion and Israeli citizenship-the core of Jewish identity, he says, has become racism.
Gilad joins us now it's great to speak to you, why do we keep getting these unprovoked apocalyptic crises?
Gilad Atzmon, author of The Wandering Who?: The more murderous the Israelis are, the more they are horrified that the Palestinians may as well be as murderous as they happen to be. And this is a vicious circle.
RT: Former US Intelligence Estimate Chairman Ray McGovern estimates four in five Americans don't know Israel might even have an atomic bomb, thanks to complete distortions by mainstream media suggesting Iran's the nuclear power.
Fox News report: Iran with their nuclear programme ready to aim those missiles straight at the country.
RT: According to both Jane's Defence Weekly and the Institute of Strategic Studies, Israel's estimated to have 200-300 nuclear warheads.All 16 US intelligence agencies admit Iran's not even trying to build one.
In an article entitled Middle East Pop Quiz syndicated journalist Charley Reese noted simple facts you'd be sure referred to Iran if you relied on mainstream media, when they actually apply to Israel.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting notes absent of any evidence against Iran,mainstream media are now resorting to astonishingly crude racist slurs they'd never dare print about Jews, currently being printed in all seriousness about the entire Persian peoples.
The New York Times claims that "Iran's a land where straight talk and virtue are not widely seen to overlap."
"Persians lie like a rug," smirks The Washington Post.
Investigative journalist and New Yorker contributor Jon Schwarz says we shouldn't be surprised.He found throughout history when officials need the public's support for unprovoked brutality against a weaker victim, they say there's just something fishy about the whole race.
Ex-CIA chief Richard Helms claimed to Congress that "unlike Asiatics[sic]and Eastern Europeans, Americans are raised to tell the truth."
When India refused to join the US in war in Pakistan, President Nixon said it was because all Indians are just "slippery, treacherous people."
James Adair wrote black slavery should remain in place as "savage African nations are cunning and use various artifices and pretexts."
And Native Indians are "naturally given to treachery."
Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak says "Palestinians don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture."
But the top anti-Iranian smear claimed in today's US mainstream is bazaar trickery.
CNN concludes the US-Iran deal must be a "trick in the spirit of the Persian bazaar."
The New York Times solemnly concludes Obama must have been "out negotiated" in the"Persian nuclear bazaar."
"Fooling foreigners is an ancient Persian art form," insists The Washington Post.
Even The Economist magazine, which usually supports US bombing campaigns, from Libya to Syria and Iraq, found it's gone a bit far.
The Economist: Have any of these people tried to negotiate with, say, Mitch McConnell? Somebody has got to put a stop to this whole "Persian bazaar" rhetorical fixation. It's ridiculous, it's ethnically offensive, and its entire purpose is to serve as a smokescreen for disastrously violent policies backed by militarists in Israel and neo-conservatives in America.
RT: Wikipedia is a key battlefield in this war. The Telegraph reports Israeli lobbies building"armies"of editors that rewrite the history books, such as this article on why Palestinians fled Israel. These leaked emails expose the lobby's plans, including infiltration of Wiki's administrators.
CAMERA, pro-Israel lobby: Make relationships with Wikipedia editors and super-editors known as 'administrators.' After we have built our army, we will go to war.
RT: Let's talk with Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar, it’s great to see you. How to explain these coordinated campaigns denigrating an entire ethnic group.
Pepe Escobar, Asia Times correspondent: Obviously they’re being paid, working for the Israeli lobby, paid by their agents in US. It’s very easy to identify these people, especially in the US mainstream media, you know, the usual columnists for Washington Post or the usual people who write op-ed pages for The Wall Street Journal.Fox News, it goes without saying.
RT: Could the deal show Israel's last sponsor America's getting fed up with its behavior?
Escobar: It’s the first time that an American administration’s actually thinking first about US national interests and not trying to do something that would be Israeli first, so this is also a real game changer in terms of US-Israeli relations.
RT: When President Obama was caught with his mic switched on agreeing he can't stand "liar" Benjamin Netanyahu, reports ABC News, there were already signs Israel's losing support from the US.
John Kerry, US secretary of state: The United States has said that they believe the settlements are not helpful and are illegitimate.
RT: America's public censure against Israel's occupation of the West Bank, notes NBC, breaks decades of official tacit approval.
So Prime Minister Netanyahu's claim that he can "move" the United States any direction he likes, no longer seems quite as kosher.
Monday, December 16, 2013
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Putin: Clash of Civilizations
The clash of civilizations according to Vladimir Putin
As always, in his recent Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly Putin touched on many topics including the Russian constitution, the slow implementation of Presidential decrees, healthcare, social issues, the budget, the military and other topics. Yet, I believe that the most important part of his speech is the following one: (emphasis added)
The first point is obvious: whereas the AngloZionist Empire has the use of force or the threat of use of force as the cornerstone of its international policies, Putin's Russia is categorically against this. And this is hardly due to the relative weakness of the Russian military as some have suggested. The Russian military has changed dramatically since the past decade and it has fully recovered its position as 2nd most powerful military on the planet after the US. And yet, Russia has also made a fundamental, strategic, decision to renounce the use of military force except in self-defense or the defense of an attacked ally.
The second point is clearly aimed another key social feature of the AngloZionist social order: whereas the AngloZionist social order enforces the power of several minorities (1%, Israel Lobby, Oil Lobby, Wall Street, Big Pharma, etc.) over the majority, Putin's Russia also categorically rejects this and says that in a democracy the majority view must prevail and while the rights of the minority must not be violated, the minority must yield to the majority.
The third point can be called "enlightened moral conservatism": whereas the AngloZionist empire is essentially "value-free", Putin's Russia deliberately wants to uphold ancient moral values such as the traditional family, the centrality of spiritual and religious values, the clear affirmation that a "right" and a "wrong" exist and that the two should not be confused and the latter should never allowed to prevail over the former.
One could say that this is the Russian version of Alain Soral's "Gauche du travail, Droite des valeurs" (the Left of labor and the Right of ethics" or the "Progressive of labor and Conservative of values"). It is the opposite of the "values" of the AngloZionist social order in which, in essence, says "don't touch my money (= the Right of labor) and let me have sex with whomever I want (=Left or values).
As far as I know, this makes Putin the only non-Muslim political leader on the planet who openly dares to reject the AngloZionist civilizational model and who instead offer another one. Non-violence + majority rule + progressive economic + conservative spirituality. This is the exact opposite of the AngloZionist Empire's model: violence + minority rule + reactionary economic + libertarian & secular morals.
This is the real clash of civilizations which is happening, primarily in Europe. These are two fundamentally incompatible models, two mutually exclusive social and political orders which threaten each other by their very existence and it is no wonder that Putin is so hated by the western elites and so popular with the western masses (more and more people are calling Putin the "leader of the Free World", including in the West) and that even though the corporate Ziomedia systematically demonizes him.
This is also the real reason behind the new Cold War carefully orchestrated by the Western elites. This is also the real reason behind the unprecedented and, frankly, ridiculous involvement of the western elites in the events in the Ukraine.
This is hardly the first time that the western elites feel that Russia represents a civilizational threat just by its mere existence. During the Crimean War Cardinal Sibor, Archbishop of Paris, declared "It is a sacred deed, a God-pleasing deed, to ward off the Photian heresy [Orthodoxy], subjugate it and destroy it with a new crusade. This is the clear goal of today's crusade. Such was the goal of all the crusades, even if all their participants were not fully aware of it. The war which France is now preparing to wage against Russia is not a political war but a holy war. It is not a war between two governments or between two peoples, but is precisely a religious war, and other reasons presented are only pretexts" while Pope Pius X declared during the World One I 'Se vince la Russia, vince lo scisma' (if Russia wins, then it's the schism which wins).
First the western elites declared a crusade against Russia in the name of the Papacy (Teutonic Knights) then in the name of Freemasonry (Napoleon), then again in the name of the Papacy (Crimean War), then in the name of imperialism (WWI), then in the name of racial superiority (WWII), then in the name of democracy and capitalism (Cold War I) and now the next "Cold War II" will be fought in the name of homosexuality and secularism. Truly Marx was right when he said that "history repeats itself the first as tragedy, then as farce".
The Saker
As always, in his recent Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly Putin touched on many topics including the Russian constitution, the slow implementation of Presidential decrees, healthcare, social issues, the budget, the military and other topics. Yet, I believe that the most important part of his speech is the following one: (emphasis added)
We have always been proud of our country. But we don’t have superpower aspirations; we don’t want global or regional domination, we don’t interfere with anyone’s interests, trying to play a patron, we are not going to lecture others. But we will strive to be leaders by defending international law, making sure that national sovereignty, independence and identity are respected. This is a natural approach for a country like Russia with its great history and culture, its vast experience in the area of different ethnicities living in harmony, side by side, in one state. This is different from the so-called tolerance, which is gender-free and futile.Coming from a world leader, these are, I believe, amazing words because they are an open and direct challenge to the dominating ideology of the AngloZionist Empire.
Today many countries revisit their moral standards, erasing national traditions and boundaries between different ethnicities and cultures. Society is asked to respect every person’s right to freedom of thought, political views and private life, which are good values. But now people also have to treat evil and good equally, which is strange, because these are opposite things. Not only does such destruction of traditional values have negative effects on societies, but it is also anti-democratic to the core, because these are abstract ideas applied to real life despite of what the majority of people think. Most people don’t accept such changes and suggested revisions.
And we know that more and more people in the world support our approach of protecting traditional values, which have been a spiritual and moral foundation of our civilization and every nation. We value traditional family and genuine human life, including a person’s religious life; not just material, but also spiritual values of humanism and the world’s diversity.
Of course, this is a conservative position. But as Nikolai Berdyaev said, the meaning of conservatism is not to prevent moving forward and upward, but to prevent moving backwards and downward, into chaotic darkness, back to the primitive state.
The first point is obvious: whereas the AngloZionist Empire has the use of force or the threat of use of force as the cornerstone of its international policies, Putin's Russia is categorically against this. And this is hardly due to the relative weakness of the Russian military as some have suggested. The Russian military has changed dramatically since the past decade and it has fully recovered its position as 2nd most powerful military on the planet after the US. And yet, Russia has also made a fundamental, strategic, decision to renounce the use of military force except in self-defense or the defense of an attacked ally.
The second point is clearly aimed another key social feature of the AngloZionist social order: whereas the AngloZionist social order enforces the power of several minorities (1%, Israel Lobby, Oil Lobby, Wall Street, Big Pharma, etc.) over the majority, Putin's Russia also categorically rejects this and says that in a democracy the majority view must prevail and while the rights of the minority must not be violated, the minority must yield to the majority.
The third point can be called "enlightened moral conservatism": whereas the AngloZionist empire is essentially "value-free", Putin's Russia deliberately wants to uphold ancient moral values such as the traditional family, the centrality of spiritual and religious values, the clear affirmation that a "right" and a "wrong" exist and that the two should not be confused and the latter should never allowed to prevail over the former.
One could say that this is the Russian version of Alain Soral's "Gauche du travail, Droite des valeurs" (the Left of labor and the Right of ethics" or the "Progressive of labor and Conservative of values"). It is the opposite of the "values" of the AngloZionist social order in which, in essence, says "don't touch my money (= the Right of labor) and let me have sex with whomever I want (=Left or values).
As far as I know, this makes Putin the only non-Muslim political leader on the planet who openly dares to reject the AngloZionist civilizational model and who instead offer another one. Non-violence + majority rule + progressive economic + conservative spirituality. This is the exact opposite of the AngloZionist Empire's model: violence + minority rule + reactionary economic + libertarian & secular morals.
This is the real clash of civilizations which is happening, primarily in Europe. These are two fundamentally incompatible models, two mutually exclusive social and political orders which threaten each other by their very existence and it is no wonder that Putin is so hated by the western elites and so popular with the western masses (more and more people are calling Putin the "leader of the Free World", including in the West) and that even though the corporate Ziomedia systematically demonizes him.
This is also the real reason behind the new Cold War carefully orchestrated by the Western elites. This is also the real reason behind the unprecedented and, frankly, ridiculous involvement of the western elites in the events in the Ukraine.
This is hardly the first time that the western elites feel that Russia represents a civilizational threat just by its mere existence. During the Crimean War Cardinal Sibor, Archbishop of Paris, declared "It is a sacred deed, a God-pleasing deed, to ward off the Photian heresy [Orthodoxy], subjugate it and destroy it with a new crusade. This is the clear goal of today's crusade. Such was the goal of all the crusades, even if all their participants were not fully aware of it. The war which France is now preparing to wage against Russia is not a political war but a holy war. It is not a war between two governments or between two peoples, but is precisely a religious war, and other reasons presented are only pretexts" while Pope Pius X declared during the World One I 'Se vince la Russia, vince lo scisma' (if Russia wins, then it's the schism which wins).
First the western elites declared a crusade against Russia in the name of the Papacy (Teutonic Knights) then in the name of Freemasonry (Napoleon), then again in the name of the Papacy (Crimean War), then in the name of imperialism (WWI), then in the name of racial superiority (WWII), then in the name of democracy and capitalism (Cold War I) and now the next "Cold War II" will be fought in the name of homosexuality and secularism. Truly Marx was right when he said that "history repeats itself the first as tragedy, then as farce".
The Saker
DJ Bobo: Everybody
... Music is what I'm living for ...
Everybody loves to dance with another summer romance
uh baby
Everybody likes to move. All the fellows having the groove
uh baby
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Music is what I'm living for
Hit the dancefloor like there ain't no more
Ain't no more time for taking your chance
Jam digidi jam to this summer romance
Wave your hands in the air everyone and everywhere
Move your body jump around check it - it out with the sound
Everybody everybody get up and sing it loud
This is the sound that makes you feel proud
Everybody hear tonight we'll never start a fight
uh baby
Everybody's feeling proud if you feel it say it loud
uh baby
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
When the sun goes down, and the night moves on
The time is right to enjoy yourself
And doing whatever you wanna do
I mean everybody
Pleasure and pain sometimes the same
I'm not ashamed there's no name for the game
The game that makes my heart still pumpin'
Boom boom my body is jumpin'
Love - everyday and night
The sign for peace is shining bright
Everybody everybody get up and sing it loud
This is the song that makes you feel proud
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun...
Everybody loves to dance with another summer romance
uh baby
Everybody likes to move. All the fellows having the groove
uh baby
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Music is what I'm living for
Hit the dancefloor like there ain't no more
Ain't no more time for taking your chance
Jam digidi jam to this summer romance
Wave your hands in the air everyone and everywhere
Move your body jump around check it - it out with the sound
Everybody everybody get up and sing it loud
This is the sound that makes you feel proud
Everybody hear tonight we'll never start a fight
uh baby
Everybody's feeling proud if you feel it say it loud
uh baby
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
When the sun goes down, and the night moves on
The time is right to enjoy yourself
And doing whatever you wanna do
I mean everybody
Pleasure and pain sometimes the same
I'm not ashamed there's no name for the game
The game that makes my heart still pumpin'
Boom boom my body is jumpin'
Love - everyday and night
The sign for peace is shining bright
Everybody everybody get up and sing it loud
This is the song that makes you feel proud
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun
Everybody move your feet to the rhythm of this beat
Everybody sing this song. All the people having fun...
Friday, December 13, 2013
Moyers & Company 121313
BILL MOYERS: This week on Moyers & Company…
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Here you have an obviously disturbed young man. Everybody sees it, his mother sees it, and one way of dealing with it is to buy him guns. And to me that speaks of our mystique of weapons. Perhaps his mother thought the gun was curative in some way.
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BILL MOYERS: Welcome, but be forewarned: a few scenes in this hour are disturbing, because we are dealing with violence and don't want to hide what is true about it. As you know, one year ago this weekend, as you know, 20 school children and six educators were massacred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. The killer also murdered his mother, and then killed himself. 28 deaths in all, from guns. And across America, perhaps as many as 30,000 more have been killed since that fatal day.
This is why I have asked Richard Slotkin to join me. He has spent his adult life delving into how violence took deep root in our culture, from colonial days to now. In his magisterial trilogy, "Regeneration Through Violence," "The Fatal Environment" and "Gunfighter Nation," Richard Slotkin tells how America came to embrace a mythology of gun-slinging settlers taming the wilderness to justify and romanticize a tragic record of subjugation and bloodshed. His latest book, "The Long Road to Antietam," tells the tale of the bloodiest day in American history.
In these and other works, this preeminent cultural historian tracks the evolution of the gun culture that continues to dominate, wound and kill. Richard Slotkin has retired now from a distinguished teaching career of over four decades at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, just 45 minutes from Newtown.
Welcome.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: What were you thinking as the first anniversary of the massacre approached?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, I was thinking of the sadness of that day and just the idea of all those, as one woman at the town said, "those poor little babies" being slaughtered. And I was also remembering with some anger the way in which one of the first knee-jerk responses to that event was a kind of rabid defense of, not only defense of gun owning, but a kind of plea for extending the privilege of gun ownership and the number of occasions, type of occasions on which guns could be used.
And not only that the different places that one can carry guns and also the number of situations in which it's permissible to pull out your gun and shoot somebody. I'm thinking about Stand Your Ground laws, so-called.
BILL MOYERS: When one of these massacres occurs, do you automatically or just habitually think about this long train of violence that you've been researching and writing about for so long now?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, thinking about this Adam Lanza case, the killer in Newtown, at first it just seemed to me a crazy kid doing something almost inexplicably crazy with a gun. As the report has come out--
BILL MOYERS: The state report recently--
RICHARD SLOTKIN: --yes--
BILL MOYERS: --came out a couple of weeks ago.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yeah, the state report has gone into the way in which he used videogames and obsessively played violent videogames. And apparently did research on massacres. And there's a way in which in the individual case you see something that also works on the cultural level. And that is that people will model their behavior on examples that they consider to be heroic.
And that's how mythology works in a culture. There are cultural myths that define what for us is a positive response to a crisis. And it's embodied in media. And we learn it through the media and we model our behavior on that of heroes. And apparently Lanza in the way he conducted the massacre was making the kind of moves that are the standard moves of a person playing a violent videogame.
You'd never enter a new room unless you've put a fresh clip in your gun. So he would shoot off half a clip and then change the clip anyway-- because that's what you do when you're playing a videogame. And that image of playing out a script that's been written for you, that has some value for you as a way of gaining control or being a hero is what he's living out.
And what Lanza did was really to indoctrinate himself and train himself in a way analogous to the way we now use videogames to train the military.
BILL MOYERS: Talk about that a moment, train himself?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes, that is he's obsessed with performing some validating act of violence and he does these-- he treats these videogames as training films. I could do it this way. I could do it that way. And as I follow out the script of the videogame, the videogame validates my actions in various ways. You triumph within a narrative, or you simply score points and build up a score.
BILL MOYERS: There is a video game, believe it or not, it's violent I'll warn you, it's violent -- it allows you, the viewer, the follow the killer of Newtown--
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes, I--
BILL MOYERS: --to follow Lanza, and actually shoot the kids in front of you. You are a cultural historian, not a behavioral psychologist, not a weapons expert. What do you suppose the producer of that video had in mind?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Just simply exploiting the appeal of violence in a particular kind of situation. And also in this case, there's an appeal of transgression, of--
BILL MOYERS: Transgression?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes, of violating everybody else's norms and doing something that really grosses everybody out. You think even, to take a more normative example: the videogame Grand Theft Auto, in which you behave like a criminal, you'd think in a kind of standard videogame you'd be the hero against the bad guys. But the appeal of that is that you get to go to the dark side as, to use the language of Star Wars. And the dark side of the force always has its appeal.
The graphics put you in a very realistic situation so that you're the killer. It's an imaginative leap that in my generation, it took a little more difficulty to make that connection, but we made it nonetheless. I grew up with western movies.
BILL MOYERS: So did I.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: And I'll say John Wayne-- he wasn't necessarily my hero, but he's the type of a kind of hero that I admired. And we played guns in the street. You'd start off-- guns were-- you were cowboys. You'd segue without a break into marines and you'd segue into cops and robbers. But the gun was the thing you were playing with.
BILL MOYERS: And yet so many who would do that never went out like Adam Lanza--
RICHARD SLOTKIN: No--
BILL MOYERS: --and started killing. That's why people are reluctant to say this causes that.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes just to extend my example a little bit, one of the syndromes that people working with Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD was something called John Wayne Syndrome where the young men had internalized the John Wayne model of heroism and one of their problems was they felt they had failed somehow to live up to that model.
And that's the psychology we're talking about here. You internalize a model of heroic behavior from the media that purvey the myths that shape your society. And there's a whole spectrum of responses you might have in relation to that internalized model.
You might not do anything yourself. You might simply consent that the government or somebody act on your behalf, you don't make the war yourself, but you consent that somebody make the war for you, kill the bad guy for you.
BILL MOYERS: The report also says he used a spreadsheet to chronicle previous mass shootings and collected articles all the way back to 1891 about school shootings.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes. Yeah, his imagination is horribly fascinating in a way because he's reaching for a historic-- he's not just reaching for a model. He's reaching for a historically validated model that will somehow invest what he's doing with meaning. What the meaning is, is gone with him, but the gestures seem to me to point to that.
BILL MOYERS: So put it historically what this tells us about the lone killer.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: We produce the lone killer. That is to say the lone killer is trying to validate himself or herself in terms of the, I would call the historical mythology, of our society, wants to place himself in relation to meaningful events in the past that lead up to the present.
BILL MOYERS: You say “or her”, but the fact of the matter is all of these killers lately have been males.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes, yeah, pretty much always are.
BILL MOYERS: And most of them white?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yeah.
Yeah, I think, again this is because each case is different, but the tendency that you've pointed out is true and I've always felt that it has something to do, in many cases, with a sense of lost privilege, that men and white men in the society feel their position to be imperiled and their status called into question. And one way to deal with an attack on your status in our society is to strike out violently.
BILL MOYERS: I guess we'll never understand this. That official report laid out Lanza's troubling behavior. He was diagnosed at six with sensory integration disorder. He couldn't stand to be touched. He had Asperger's syndrome. He closeted himself in his bedroom with his windows sealed by black plastic bags. He didn't want to communicate with his mother, except mostly through emails. What do we take away from this-- knowing we'll never know?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: I think the thing that I'm tempted to do with that is to shift away from the unknowable Adam Lanza to the people around Adam Lanza and his mother-- that here you have an obviously disturbed young man, everybody sees it, his mother sees it. And one way of dealing with it is to buy him guns as presents; buy him fairly exotic, well-chosen models, train him in the use of apparently this elaborate arsenal which his mother had.
And she said she loved her guns and never made the connection to the fact that these guns are available to an extremely troubled young man. And the neighbors never questioned that her love of guns might be putting weapons in the hands of somebody that they found disturbing to deal with. And to me that speaks of our mystique of weapons. Perhaps his mother thought the gun was curative in some way.
We have the gun as a symbol of productive violence in our history has magical properties for a lot of people. And I have this horrible feeling something like that prevented anyone from seeing just how desperately dangerous was the situation which these people were living.
BILL MOYERS: It's almost incomprehensible that when the police went into the Lanza home after the massacre, they found this gift she had left him, a check that was dated the 25th of December, Christmas. And it was to be used by him to buy a CZ 83 pistol.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: She must've thought that the gun would do him good.
BILL MOYERS: Richard, you live close to Newtown and you followed this of course, not only because as a citizen but because of your work in history. What did you see about the reaction of the community in the days and weeks following that that affected you?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: The thing that really got to me most was the strength of the pro-gun reaction that came out almost immediately, that, anticipating that of course there'd be some call for some forms of gun regulation or gun control that there was kind of a preemptive attack on that by a range of organizations within the state, no, it's gun control won't do any good.
And within a couple of weeks I was on a panel discussion in which there were four people who had been typecast as anti-gun which I'm not really-- and the pro-gun people, as if it was a 50/50 balance.
And of course the pro-gun people kind of took over the whole thing because it was-- a bad moderator. So you got the impression that the state was sharply divided. When the governor came out with a program of increased regulations, the majority was so overwhelmingly for it that the bill passed.
BILL MOYERS: I remember that.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: And without any back and forth really about it. So that it turned out that they weren't even a large minority, but they were a minority, minority within the state. And yet rhetorically their presence was very powerful. And the arguments that they were making were the kind of arguments that resonate with our love of liberty and so on. They really to just take this terrible incident and a situation which might lend itself to some sane regulation and just blow it up into a life or death of the republic kind of issue which makes it almost impossible to deal with.
BILL MOYERS: You said you were not anti-gun.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: No, I'm not. There are situations in which it is perfectly reasonable for someone to want to own and use a gun. Hunting is a legitimate and respected and necessary aspect of the ecology.
There are many people in many places, many different kinds of places, rural, far from police, where it makes perfect sense to want to own a weapon for self-defense. So can't say I'm against guns. But then when you go beyond the rational, it gets a little crazy.
Why wouldn't you want if you're a legitimate gun owner, why wouldn't you want gun ownership to be regulated in such a way that to the extent feasible criminals, insane persons could not readily gain access? Why wouldn't you want a prohibition on illegal gun trafficking if your guns are legal and it's a legal sale? Why wouldn't you want rules mandating some program of safe storage of weapons so that people can't be as careless as Mrs. Lanza seemingly was in leaving guns around where crazy people and criminals can get their hands on it? That's where the rule of reason has to enter in, and that's where it doesn't enter in.
BILL MOYERS: There was a surge of sanity on the part of politicians again after Newtown. Truth be told, and as we all know, very little has changed. How do you explain that?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, I think the extreme gun rights position, so called, some once called it “gun-damentalism” connects on a kind of spectrum to more normative attitudes. You have, as I said, reasonable gun owners. Then you have the American consumer. The American consumer looks at the gun as it's a piece of property. The American consumer wants to use his property without restraint, wants to throw his plastic water bottle wherever he pleases, wants to drive a gas-guzzler, wants to play his boom box loud.
Which is a crude way to put it, and yet I think there's a lot to that. Nobody wants to be bothered registering their weapons. Take it a level down from that or level further out from that, there's an ideological level which really kicks in around the time of the Reagan presidency in which gun rights is a very powerful symbol for the deregulation of everything. If you can deregulate that, you can deregulate anything.
And then the last level is what I'd call the paranoid level, the people who think that they have a Second Amendment right to resist Obamacare-- that the constitution protects their right to resist the government, that that's what the Second Amendment is about.
And that's dangerous stupidity and nonsense. But it uses the language of liberty and rights that we're used to thinking of in other contexts. And if you think of all of the rights in the Bill of Rights, haven't they been extended and expanded over the years? Why not Second Amendment rights as well?
And that's the level at which it gets pernicious. But their appeal, their ability to control the debate, I think, comes because their position coincides with the interest of the Reaganite ideologue who doesn't want to regulate anything and the consumer who simply doesn't want to be bothered.
BILL MOYERS: And don't both of those strands, both of those tendencies have their roots deep in our culture, going all the way back to the beginning?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, yes, I mean, the thing that's different, that's exceptional about American gun culture, so called, is the license that we grant for the private use of deadly force. Other countries have similar levels of guns in the home.
BILL MOYERS: Now, Switzerland is a militia state--
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Switzerland.
BILL MOYERS: --and the guns are kept at home.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: But the guns kept at home in those countries are not used to murder individuals. They're not used to settle property disputes, are not used to shoot somebody who comes to your door trick-or-treating and you're not sure who they are.
And what we have in this country is we have a history in which certain kinds of violence are associated for us with the growth of the republic, with the definition of what it is to be an American. And because we are also devoted to the notion of democratic individualism, we take that glorification of social violence, historical violence, political violence, and we grant the individual a kind of parallel right to exercise it, not only to protect life and property but to protect one's honor and to protect one's social or racial status. In the past that has been a legitimate grounds.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, I'm thinking of the Jim Crow era in the south where if a black man is walking on the sidewalk and towards a white man and the black man refuses to give the sidewalk he can be-- any sort of violence can be safely visited upon him because no jury will convict. Cases where-- another book that I wrote about in which a successful black farmer refused to sell his crop, this was in South Carolina, for the stated price. And events escalated from a personal attack to ultimately lynching. So we granted to private citizens the right to police the racial boundary and the social boundary.
BILL MOYERS: You write in one of your books, "In American mythogenesis," the origin of our national mythology, "the founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather they were those who … tore violently a nation from implacable and opulent wilderness." Talk about that.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, first of all I have to say that every nation, every nation state requires a historical mythology, because a nation state is a kind of political artifice. It pulls diverse peoples together. And so you need an account of history that explains that you're actually all the same kind of person or that your different natures have been blended through experience. So what--
BILL MOYERS: We the people?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: We the people. And the United States is a settler state. And this begins with colonial outposts in the wilderness. And our origin has a story then, has to be how did we go from being these small outposts to being the mightiest nation on planet earth? Well, we did it by pushing the boundaries of the settlement out into Indian country. We did it by ultimately fighting wars against Native Americans, driving them out, displacing them, exterminating them in some cases.
And in the process of pushing our boundaries out, we acquired certain heroic virtues-- an ability to fight cleverly both as individuals and cooperatively, and a connection with nature which is particularly critical. As a country really develops you get a kind of American exceptionalist notion of progress which is that American progress is achieved not by man exploiting man, but it's achieved by conquering nature, by taking resources from nature, farmland originally, timber resources, ultimately gold, minerals, oil and so on. In the American model, in order for it to work, you have to say that Native Americans, Indians, are not quite human. And therefore they, like trees in the forest, are legitimate objects of creative destruction. And similarly blacks, African Americans, are legitimate objects of exploitation because they are considered to be not fully human.
So what you get in this, the evolution of the American national myth, really up through the Civil War is the creation of America as a white man's republic in which, different from Europe, if you're white, you're all right. You don't have to be an aristocrat born to have a place in the society. You don't absolutely even have to be Anglo-Saxon, although it helps.
But so among whites you can have democracy. But the white democracy depends on the murder, the extermination, the driving out of Native Americans and the enslavement of blacks. Both of those boundaries, the western frontier, the Indian frontier, and the slave frontier, are boundaries created and enforced by violence, either literal or latent, potential violence.
BILL MOYERS: So that's why you wrote something came from this mythology, something about "the land and its people, its dark people especially, economically exploited and wasted, the warfare between man and nature, between race and race, exalted as a kind of heroic ideal."
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes. That is the frontier story. That's the western movie in a way. That's “The Searchers.”
BILL MOYERS: The movie, “The Searchers,” yeah.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: The movie, “The Searchers.” Yeah. That's James Fenimore Cooper. That's Buffalo Bill. In a curious way you can even take it to outer space, but--
BILL MOYERS: How so?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, space, the final frontier. "Star Trek" was originally going to be called “Wagon Train to the Stars.”
BILL MOYERS: You mentioned Buffalo Bill. Didn't Buffalo Bill say "the rifle as an aid to civilization?"
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes, but that's exactly the American myth. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett's rifle, killing the bears, killing the game, killing the Indians is what makes the wilderness safe for democracy, if I can paraphrase Woodrow Wilson.
BILL MOYERS: And Samuel Colt, who gave us his famous or infamous pistol, there are many versions of a quote either by or about him, something like, “God created men equal, Colonel Colt made them equal." There's even one that goes, "Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal." On and on these variations go. What do you make of that idea?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, that's the Colt, “The Equalizer,” was the nickname for the Colt revolving pistol.
BILL MOYERS: I didn’t realize that.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yeah, and it's a curious-- it represents a kind of shift if I may, that the mythologized weapon, the rifle, is a hunter's weapon. And it's also a soldier's weapon, a plainsman's weapon, but also a soldier's weapon. The Colt pistol is a man killer. It's a weapon that's used as much within the boundaries of society as on the borders of society.
And Colt-- one of Colt's original marketing ploys was to market it to slave owners. Here you are, a lone white man, overseer or slave owner, surrounded by black people. Suppose your slaves should rise up against you. Well, if you've got a pair of Colt's pistols in your pocket, you are equal to twelve slaves. And that's “The Equalizer,” that it's not all men are created equal by their nature. It's that I am more equal than others because I've got extra shots in my gun.
BILL MOYERS: But you write about something you call “the equalizer fallacy.”
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes, the equalizer doesn't produce equality. What it produces is privilege. If I have six shots in my gun and you've got one, I can outvote you by five shots. Any man better armed than his neighbors is a majority of one.
And that's the equalizer fallacy. It goes to this notion that the gun is the guarantor of our liberties. We're a nation of laws, laws are the guarantors of our liberties. If your rights depend on your possession of a firearm, then your rights end when you meet somebody with more bullets or who's a better shot or is meaner than you are.
BILL MOYERS: And yet the myth holds--
RICHARD SLOTKIN: And yet--
BILL MOYERS: --stronger than the reality?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, yes, the myth holds. And it is stronger than the reality. Because those guns, particularly the Colt is associated with one of the most active phases and most interesting phases of expansion. And therefore it has the magic of the tool, the gun that won the west, the gun that equalized, the whites and the Indians, the guns that created the American democracy and made equality possible.
BILL MOYERS: But there are other nations with a particular history different from ours that have been very valid. I mean, Nazi Germany was no slacker, the Soviet Union, Europe, all white countries contributed two wars within 30 years of each other. They have their own peculiar violent tendencies.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: The difference in American violence-- two kinds of difference. One, it's settler state violence, that is to say it's legitimated when it's directed against Native Americans, Mexicans outside the boundaries of society or against an enslaved class within it. Eliminate slavery and you start to make problems there.
We're a colonial society in which we've incorporated elements that the Europeans never really incorporated. And the second element is this democratic individualism that we grant the license to kill to individuals in a way that Europeans don't. Their violence predominately, their mass violence especially, is social, police state violence, class warfare of a violent kind. For us the murder rate, individual violence, lynching--
BILL MOYERS: 30,000 people killed every year by gun violence.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes, and I would take it back even further than that to the period between the Civil War and the 1930s when you had, partly as a result of the Civil War, a society awash in handguns, war surplus handguns, very few law, no national regulation of most things, essentially a sort of a right wing Republican dream of the unregulated society. And what you got was social warfare waged by individuals and groups of individuals.
BILL MOYERS: KKK.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: KKK. But in the south that is on the racial boundary in the south KKK, White Citizens' Council, Knights of the White Camellia against blacks, against their white allies in the Republican party. In the north you have labor wars in which armed strikers are opposed by so-called private armies of detectives, we'd later call them goon squads, but called detectives then, armed to shoot the workers.
BILL MOYERS: Homestead 1892, Ludlow massacre out in Colorado.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Right. So you have a period in the United States as I say from 1865 to 1930 of extreme social violence in which America, a lot of Americans are armed. European visitors all remark on the prevalence of pistols and Sears manufacturers a whole line of men's pants with a pistol pocket.
BILL MOYERS: What about the argument we increasingly hear that we need to have more guns because of a threatening government?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: To me that's the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard in my life. First of all, the government isn't the black helicopter government that they have in mind. But if it were, your guns wouldn't do you a bit of good. And it's an idea that began with the big lie about the reason that Hitler took over in Germany was because he disarmed his enemies. The communists were not disarmed. They were outgunned. And they didn't have the army on their side. There's one, in that panel discussion I was in somebody--
BILL MOYERS: After Newtown?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: After Newtown. One of the spokesmen spoke about the—that oh if the Poles had had more widely distributed guns, the Germans would never have invaded. Right, you know, a bunch of farmers with shotguns standing up to the Wehrmacht. The Japanese didn't invade California because they knew Americans were all heavily armed.
And that the Japanese never intended to invade California had nothing to do with it. It's a pernicious lie. And the reason it's so pernicious is that it legitimates the idea that you have a right to violently resist the government. Most people won't do that. Most people when the cops come to the door, will put their hands up if it comes to that. But there are people, some of these violent tax resistant movements, who take that position very literally.
BILL MOYERS: We continue to hear from a lot of people, notably Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association. Here's what he said right after Newtown.
WAYNE LAPIERRE: The only way, the only way to stop a monster from killing our kids to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
BILL MOYERS: So what kind of society do we get? What kind of social order do we get if everyone is armed?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: To me we get a very dangerous, or if we're talking about the United States, it's extremely dangerous because there are so many things about which Americans feel violently. The country is still very much divided by race. The anger that one hears about things like Obamacare, the rage that's expressed, the level of political rage makes me feel that there's anger out there looking for an object and that the more heavily armed we are and the more permissive we are about the use of guns, the more dangerous it's going to be.
BILL MOYERS: I hear you talking about race and wonder how that has shaped the pattern that produces more outrage over mass killings like this one, and there should be outrage, than over the slow but steady accretion of one on one killings in the inner cities. I mean, over 106 kids were killed last year in Chicago alone.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yeah we don't regard as outrageous in the same way the daily killings in the ghettos and in the black neighborhoods that we do when it's, you know, little white kids in a little white suburb. There's also a difference though in that one is a kind of abhorrent outburst of violence in a part of the society that feels immune to violence.
Whereas we've allowed violence in our cities to become a kind of normative pattern. And actually I shouldn't say we've let it. It's always been that way. It goes back as far as our cities go that they've always been violent places. And the culture has taken a kind of dismissive attitude towards it.
BILL MOYERS: How so? Why, historically?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Historically I think, it has to do with the way in which members of racial and ethnic minorities are not considered to be fully human, so we expect them to behave violently to each other.
BILL MOYERS: And a threat to jobs, a threat to our own standard of life, standard of living.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: That's right.
BILL MOYERS: The Irish were seen as a threat to the wellbeing of the Protestants.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Now, the blacks in the cities were a threat when they were rioting in the '60s, a threat to white neighborhoods. And you got gun control and attempts at violence control as well as measures of social welfare taken in order to avert that threat. But black on black violence in isolated, in urban, neighborhoods leaves white America untouched in both the literal and the figurative sense, even though that is the largest share of the killings that go on.
BILL MOYERS: Well, we talked about videogames. But what about movies? Here's a group we put together. If we find that entertaining, are we in a societal way condoning or validating violence?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: I think it has to do with proportion. There's so much violence and it's so inescapable. If you look at the-- if you sort of did a genre map of the different types of films that are now available, so many of them are violent action movies that if you're taking your repertoire of responses to the world from the art that you consume, violence is the right response in, let's say, eight cases out of ten.
That's the first thing. The second thing is that, aside from just the sheer level of raw violence that one sees, the question I would ask is what kind of rationale are movies now, television programs and videogames, what kind of rationale for violence are these stories providing? The old Western movies provide a very important rationale. And that was the principle that no moral, social, political problem can be resolved in a Western without violence.
Anyone in the Western who thinks you can get away without a gunfight is wrong. And there, it isn't so much the spectacular quality of the violence, because by modern standards, it's pretty tame. But it's that insistent rational: the only way to resolve the situation is violence, and anyone who thinks differently just doesn't understand the way that the world works.
BILL MOYERS: I have actually wrestled for some 20 years with something you wrote in “Gunfighter Nation.” You said that central to the myth, the myth of America, the myth of how we came to be is the belief that “violence is an essential and necessary part of the process through which American society was established and through which its democratic values are defended and enforced.” So we invoke violence because we think it not only saves us but nurtures us and that we have some kind of obligation to use it in the service of spreading democratic values?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yes, and it validates our beliefs, it validates our values, the things we stand for if we're willing to fight for them. Nothing validates them like combat, fighting for them. And, you know, and the frontier myth is the oldest myth. We have a couple of others that work with similar kind of power. One of the ones that I was thinking of when I wrote that was what I call the “good war myth” or the “platoon movie myth.”
And that's the-- it's the newest of our myths, it comes really out of the Second World War in which the United States, which had been always a white man's republic, an Anglo-Saxon white man's republic, becomes through the platoon movie, that ethnically and racially mixed unit now becomes a multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy united how? Through war against a common enemy, a good war, a justifiable war, a necessary war, a defensive war, a war that liberates Asia and Europe through the force of American arms so that our self-transformation into all men are created equal finally, whatever their color or creed or national origin, is achieved through war and only through war.
BILL MOYERS: As you know so well, President Theodore Roosevelt, back at the turn of the 20th century wrote that quote, "mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct … are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yeah, he also said that a savage war, a war against savages, is always a righteous war. And it was certainly what Roosevelt was doing there was taking the American past of Indian fighting and of conquering the west by driving the Indians out, and expanding it to an international stage.
BILL MOYERS: So this idea of the frontier continues to summon us, to--
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yeah. It does, although not often in as literal a way as Teddy Roosevelt would've had it. Two analogies, sort of two examples occur. One is: why is it that for liberals, I'm thinking about Obama particularly, the war in Afghanistan was a war of necessity whereas the war in Iraq was a war of choice. They're both wars of choice. But the war in Afghanistan has all of the hallmarks of savage war, a primitive enemy bent on our destruction, can't make a deal with them, can't liberate them, can only destroy-- I'm thinking about the Taliban and I'm thinking about the Al Qaeda, people there.
BILL MOYERS: Bin Laden hiding--
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Bin Laden, yeah.
BILL MOYERS: --out, operating from there.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: That's a righteous war, whereas Iraq, Iraq was supposed to be World War II, was supposed to be a war of liberation, but it wasn't. And it soon became obvious that it wasn't that. And so you’ve got a kind of public revulsion against that, among some liberals who supported it initially, but not against-- not until recently anyway, not against Afghanistan. And the second piece of that is the economic piece of that which is that the American economy is an economy which perpetually expands without costing anybody anything, without cost to a lower-- without exploiting a lower class.
For the past 30 years it's been perfectly obvious that that's not working anymore. The rich get richer, the working class gets poorer. And yet we still hold to that. Why don't we believe-- why don't we believe in global warning and the consequences of that? Why don't we believe-- because nature's inexhaustible, has to be inexhaustible.
If nature is not inexhaustible, infinitely exploitable, then the American system will stop working. Let's not even say whether it used to work or-- it will stop working, it will fail. And we can't afford to believe that.
BILL MOYERS: So we create myths that help us organize our beliefs against the reality--
RICHARD SLOTKIN: That's right.
BILL MOYERS: --that we cannot factually deny?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: That's right. That's right.
BILL MOYERS: So what is implicit in this notion of regeneration through violence?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: I think it's, for today, it's still our belief in the validity of violence as a way of dealing with the complex problems that as a nation, as a society, even as people, that we face. We still trust to military action excessively in dealing with foreign affairs.
And we still, it's still a kind of predominant mode. We'll cut foreign aid of all kinds, but we won't cut, or not cut as much, military budgets. We'll develop new ways of using force to intervene in foreign affairs, covert ops, special operations, but force still has that critical role for-- it's almost like there-- it's not necessarily the first resort, but sure as hell is not the last resort for us.
BILL MOYERS: I sometimes wonder if Charlton Heston will have the last word on this argument. Here is Heston speaking in the year 2000 at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association. Their nemesis, at the time, was Al Gore running for president as a Democratic candidate, who they said would take away their guns.
CHARLTON HESTON: So as we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words, for everyone within the sound of my voice to hear and to heed and especially for you, Mr. Gore -- from my cold, dead hands!
BILL MOYERS: What do you think listening to that?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: I think the man's an idiot. If the government was actually the kind of government he somehow fantasizes, they would take the gun from his cold, dead hands. There's a wonderful line in the first “Men in Black,” where the space alien comes and wants the farmer's weapon. And the farmer says, "From my cold, dead hands." And the alien says, "Your negotiation is accepted." I mean, that kind of defiance is cheap. Because it threatens a resistance that would be illegitimate if it was undertaken and that no one in their right mind would actually undertake.
BILL MOYERS: But mythologically, what does it represent?
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Well, it's an assertion that you're Davy Crocket. That you're-- well, I guess, in his case, it could be an assertion that you're either one of the revolutionaries at Bunker Hill, defying the British, from the age of the weapon he was carrying, I would assume he was defying the British. Or it could be Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy.
And this notion that if you don't like the way the… if you don't like the outcome of the election, go start your own country. Take up arms against the government and somehow that's a legitimate and constitutional action. It isn't. It's unconstitutional. And if you do it, the government will come and take the gun from your cold, dead hands.
BILL MOYERS: What a conflicted country this is.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yeah, yeah. But think of the resentment and the fear that would lead to that kind of posturing on a public stage. That's the, to me, that's the menace of our time is that undercurrent of resentment and fear and hatred that finds an outlet in the legitimated forms of violence.
BILL MOYERS: Including the killing of 26 people, 20 of them children, in Newtown, Connecticut.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: Yep.
BILL MOYERS: Richard Slotkin, thank you very much for being with me.
RICHARD SLOTKIN: You're very welcome.
BILL MOYERS: Back when Charlton Heston made that defiant boast at the NRA convention – that gun control advocates would have to pry his rifle from his cold dead hands – he must have thought he was back in the fantasy world of Hollywood, re-living his roles as those famous Indian killers Andrew Jackson and Buffalo Bill Cody, whose Wild West, as he called it, courses through the bloodstream of American mythology. For sure, Heston was not channeling his most famous role as Moses striding down from Mount Sinai with a tablet of stone inscribed with God’s blueprint for a civilized society, including the commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
But the good lord seems not to have anticipated the National Rifle Association. Its conscience as cold and dead as Charlton Heston’s grip on his gun, the NRA has become the armed bully of American politics, the enabler of the gunfighter nation, whose exceptionalism includes a high tolerance for the slaughter of the innocent. “Mother Jones” magazine reports that at least 194 children have been shot to death since Newtown. 127 of them died in their own homes and dozens more in the homes of friends, neighbors, and relatives, not strangers. 72 pulled the trigger themselves or were shot by another youngster.
My native state of Texas leads the country in the number of young ones killed by guns. While some states passed tougher firearms legislation after Newtown, Texas enacted ten new laws against sane restrictions on guns. Which is partly why last month, four women had lunch at a restaurant just outside Dallas. It was a planning meeting for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, that’s a group started after Newtown that describes itself as the “Mothers Against Drunk Driving of gun reform.”
As the four women ate and talked, about 40 members of a pro-gun group called Open Carry Texas – champions of guns anywhere and everywhere – gathered outside the restaurant, many of them with their firearms. They said they were there not to intimidate but to make a point. Sure, as if real men need guns to make a point.
So it goes. “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” but if you do, hide behind the Second Amendment, made holier and more sacrosanct by the NRA than God’s own commandment.
We close with a simple public service announcement, produced by the very un-intimidated Moms Demand Action, marking this month’s Newtown anniversary.
ANNOUNCER in No More Silence: On December 14th, we’ll have a moment of silence for Newtown. But with 26 more school shootings since that day, ask yourself: Is silence what America needs right now?
BILL MOYERS: At our website BillMoyers.com, you can revisit my conversation from earlier this year with David and Francine Wheeler, who lost their six-year-old son Ben at Sandy Hook Elementary.
That's at BillMoyers.com. I’ll see you there and I’ll see you here, next time.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
TRN: Pathology of the Rich
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to Reality Asserts Itself.A few weeks ago, we did a series of interviews with Chris Hedges, and one of the things we talked about was the weakness of the left, the weakness of the people's movement, if you will. Well, we're going to continue that discussion now. And Chris joins us again in the studio. Chris, as everyone probably knows by now, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. Along with Joe Sacco he wrote the New York Times bestseller Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. And he writes a weekly column for Truthdig. Thanks for joining us.CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST, SENIOR FELLOW AT THE NATION INSTITUTE: Thank you.JAY: So last time we talked a lot about something you had said in 2008 and you've written more recently about: one of the greatest weaknesses of the left was not creating a viable vision of what an alternative politics and economy looks like, a viable vision of a socialism. But you've written more recently about some other weaknesses, you could say, of the people's movement, and here's one. And I'll read it back. This is a piece you wrote called "Let's Get This Class War Started", which I guess is a play on Pink's song, is it? "Let's Get This Party Started". The quote is: "The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults." What are you talking about?HEDGES: Because we don't understand the pathology of the rich. We've been saturated with cultural images and a kind of cultural deification of wealth and those who have wealth. We are being--you know, they present people of immense wealth as somehow leaders--oracles, even. And we don't grasp internally what it is an oligarchic class is finally about or how venal and morally bankrupt they are. We need to recover the language of class warfare and grasp what is happening to us, and we need to shatter this self-delusion that somehow if, as Obama says, we work hard enough and study hard enough, we can be one of them. The fact is, the people who created the economic mess that we're in were the best-educated people in the country--Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard, and others. The issue is not education. The issue is greed. And I, unfortunately, had the experience of being shipped off to a private boarding school at the age of ten as a scholarship student and live--I was one of 16 kids on scholarship, and I lived among the super-rich and I watched them. And I think much of my hatred of authority and my repugnance for the ruling elite comes from having been among them for so long.JAY: Yeah. People don't understand the elite schools, even at the high school level, that they get--the kids get excellent educations, but they learn the whole culture of hundreds or thousands of years of how to rule. HEDGES: Right.JAY: And a deep, rich understanding of it.HEDGES: Not only that, but they--you know, and George Bush is a perfect example of that.JAY: Well, not so much an example of deep, rich understanding, but--.HEDGES: No, but of how--you know, affirmative action for the rich. And I came--certainly my mother's side of the family--from, you know, lower working class. I mean, people--one of my uncles lived in a trailer in Maine, and certainly people with no means. And I would juxtapose the world I was in with that world. And it was very clear that it wasn't about intelligence or aptitude. The fact is, if you're poor, you only get one chance. If you're wealthy like Bush, you get chance after chance after chance after chance. So you're a C student at Andover, and you go to Yale, and you go to Harvard Business School, and you're AWOL from your National Guard unit, and you're a cokehead, and it doesn't really matter. You don't even really have a job till you're 40 and you become president of the United States. So that was what was particularly insidious, how those small, tight elite oligarchic circles perpetuated themselves and promoted mediocrity (because many of these people like Bush are very mediocre human beings) at the expense of the rest of us, and how with money they game the system. And, of course, now we live in an oligarchic state where we've been rendered utterly powerless, and the judiciary, the legislative, the executive branches all subservient to an oligarchic corporate elite. And the press is owned by an oligarchic corporate elite, which makes sure that any critique of them is never broadcast over the airwaves.JAY: And it's not some, like, inherent evilness or something, but you are brought up as a super-rich or very rich in a culture, in a school, in a milieu where everyone's there to serve you. It's your right to be served.HEDGES: Yeah. It's very distasteful to see, because, you know, I would go to the homes of friends of mine and watch--and let's remember they're children, 11, 12 years old, ordering around adults--their servants, their nannies. And I begin that piece by talking about Fitzgerald, who came from the Midwest to Princeton and went through much of the experience that I went through, and that apocryphal exchange--which didn't take place, but it does represent the difference between Hemingway and Fitzgerald--where Fitzgerald at one point had written--the story is that he said the rich aren't like you and I, and Hemingway is supposed to have quipped, yes, they have more money. Well, Hemingway, like on many things, was wrong. The rich are different, because when you have that much money, then human beings become disposable. Even friends and family become disposable and are replaced. And when the rich take absolute power, then the citizens become disposable, which is in essence what's happened. There is a very callous indifference. I mean, these people--and C.Wrights Mills wrote about this in The Power Elite--they're utterly cut off. I mean, the only people they ever meet who are members of the working class are people who work for them--they're gardeners or they're chauffeurs. They live in self-encased bubbles. They have no real contact with reality. I mean, they don't even fly on commercial airlines. And yet they have absolute power. Now, that becomes very dangerous politically because they're so out of touch and they are able to retreat into their enclaves in the same way that you saw in France under Louis XVI, people retreating to Versailles, or the end of the Chinese dynasty when everybody went to the Forbidden City.JAY: He said "Après moi, le déluge," does he not?HEDGES: Yeah. And that's, I think, you know, so that they will extract more and more and more, because they have no self-imposed limits, without understanding the economic, political, and social consequences of what they're doing. So we have a popular uprising through the Occupy movement where people pour into public spaces to express legitimate grievances--student debt, the next bubble to go down, $1 trillion in debt, which we now saw, courtesy of our Congress, debt rates, you know, interest rates will actually go up in a couple of years, I mean, more than if they'd just taken it from a bank. It's insane. And meanwhile the Federal Reserve is buying $85 billion a month worth of junk bonds and giving money at virtually zero percent interest to Goldman Sachs. I mean, it's insane. The failure to address the mortgage and foreclosure crisis, the failure to address the chronic unemployment, underemployment, which--I mean, half of the country now lives in poverty, including the working poor, or near poverty. And what is the response? The response is to physically shut down the encampments, suspend unemployment benefits, cut food stamps, close things like Head Start. It's crazy. And that's what happens when you have an elite that is that unplugged, and which our elite is. So they will push and push and push myopically out of ignorance until something erupts. And that's exactly where we're headed.JAY: It's interesting. There are some children of the some of the super-rich--and I think Occupy had something to do with it--who kind of woken up a bit to the situation and don't want to repeat the pattern of their parents, get some of the insanity of it.HEDGES: I don't know if they're children of the super-rich. I think that Occupy had a lot of children of the middle class.JAY: No, no, I don't mean the majority of Occupy.HEDGES: Oh.JAY: But they'reI actually know who some of these people are. And it's interesting. They're children of very, very wealthy people, and they have decided that, you know, there needs to be more to life than repeating this, living in this bubble.HEDGES: Well, they may be out there, but I don't think they're a majority.JAY: They're a very tiny minority.HEDGES: Most of them get sucked right into that cult of the self, which the super-rich managed to perpetuate at a rather nauseating level.JAY: We were talking off-camera just before we started how we both knew Gore Vidal, and Vidal used to go on about the total amorality of the super-rich.HEDGES: Oh, he would know.JAY: Well, he would know for a lot of reasons, one in terms of his own life, but also in terms of he knew many of these people.HEDGES: Well, so did I. I mean, and I think that's what I'm getting at, exactly. I mean, you know, I wrote in that column about, you know, being at this boarding school and watching these fathers pull up in their limousines, fathers who had very little contact with their sons, with their personal photographers. And these were famous, wealthy men. And that picture of them playing with their son, which was total--you know, a fiction, would be disseminated through the press. Yeah, amorality, hedonism, selfishness, callousness.JAY: And part of it is the total willingness to accept, for example, that ordinary people's families should send their kids off to war to defend the American way of life, which means essentially their way of life, can die for these things. It's almost a kind of racism. I mean, when the British enslaved the Irish--you don't have to be black and of color to be thought of as less than human. And that seems to be what the super-rich think about most other people.HEDGES: Well, and not just the working class, I mean, the kind of disdain for the working class and also the middle class--I mean, in some way the way that they would speak about the middle class. And, you know, in essence, coming out of the middle class, this was something that struck home to me. Yeah, they inhabit another world, and they have very sophisticated mechanisms of public relations and well-publicized acts of philanthropy to hide their private faces. But how they act when the doors close and how they act in public is very different. And having, as Vidal was, as Fitzgerald was, having been behind those closed doors and seen the decadence of the ruling elite, it certainly marked me for the rest of my life and it defined for me at a very early age who my enemies were.JAY: You quote in your article Karl Marx writing, "The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships," Marx wrote, "the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas." Why did that hit you?HEDGES: Well, because the whole notion of the free market--laissez-faire capitalism, globalization--is a very thin rationale for unmitigated greed by a tiny oligarchic elite. And they have made sure that that ideology is taught in universities across the country. And people, especially economists, who deviate from that ideology have been pushed aside, have become pariahs. And yet the driving ethos of that ideology is really to justify the hoarding of immense amounts of wealth by a very tiny percentage of, you know, the upper ruling class. That's what it is. I mean, the whole lie of globalization, perpetuated by people who popularize it, like Tom Friedman, has already been exposed. I mean, the idea that it's going to lift all of us up and create middle-class and, you know, well-compensated working-class families in the Third World, I mean, all of it's been exposed.JAY: And I think part of it, his point, is that this isn't just some innate ideas that everyone is essentially greedy, these people just happen to be rich, and you're not as lucky you're as smart as they are; it's that it comes from what he calls the material conditions, about, like, how stuff is owned, who has power as a result of concentration of ownership, how things are distributed. It's not that--you know, it doesn't have to be this way. It's a product of how the society is organized.HEDGES: Right. And so in that sense the ideology serves the system, the intellectual class serves the system. Those economists whose voices are heard, who get tenure, serve the system; and those who don't serve the system don't have a job. And that's what Marx was getting at. And I think that's extremely true. I mean, we don't live in a free-market society. We live in a society where corporations at will loot the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve and are bailed out by the taxpayer. And yet that fact of kind of corporate socialism for corporations is ignored. And yet it is--and that's dangerous, because there is an utter disconnect from the language that we use to describe our economic system and the reality of our economic system, which is essentially a system where corporations have become predators on government and taxpayer money. And we're all going to pay for it, because most of this stuff, these bonds that they're buying up, is garbage. You know, it is things like foreclosed homes that on the books are worth $600,000 but in reality, because the electricity has been turned off, the basement's flooded, you'd have to spend money to raise it to put up anything of any kind of value. And that is going to blow right up in our face.JAY: And this idea that you're expressing, that the majority of professional paid intellectuals, professors and writers and pundits, the idea that the free market is the fundamental assumption and starting point, to suggest anything else might work is sacrilegious, and then some people say, well, that's 'cause America's always been like this. America's this center-right country. But it's not true. And, you know, pre-World War II in the 1930s and right after World War II there was a big public debate about what kind of economy, what kind of politics, and there was a real campaign waged to get rid of public intellectuals, get rid of union militants, get rid of actors and directors. Anyone that wanted to have this public discourse was hounded out of office.HEDGES: Well, I write death of the liberal class is really that story, how all of these people were silenced, pushed to the margins, stripped of employment, including, like, even high school teachers. I mean, Ellen Schrecker, the historian, has done a good job on this.JAY: Just quickly, for people who don't know what we're talking about, we're talk about the House Un-American Activities, McCarthyism, and a real campaign to try to move anyone with a kind of progressive socialist idea out of anything.HEDGES: Right. And they were effective, I mean, in a way, far more effective than in Europe. I mean, in Europe, you'll still have a residue. We've been robbed of language by which we can express the reality of what we're undergoing. And that's because, you know, our radical populist dissident movements, those who offered a critique of the power elite, have been banished or silenced.JAY: Now, you write something here which, you know, if you--you would not be allowed to say on mainstream news anywhere. You write:"Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The sooner we realize that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will realize that these elites must be overthrown."There's a massive campaign not even to use the words class warfare. In fact, if you talk class, people accuse you of being essentially anti-American.HEDGES: I don't think you can understand the nature of capitalism if you don't understand the nature of class warfare. You know, if I was running a Wall Street firm, I'd only hire Marxian economists, because they understand that capitalism is about exploitation. Marx got that right. And that gets back to the nature of the ruling elite. I mean, we are the most illusioned society on the planet. The airwaves are awash in lies. You know, they very skillfully know how to humanize figures, I mean, even idiots like Donald Trump, to mask what it is they're actually doing to the rest of us. And I think we have to begin to puncture the very effective mirages that have been created--and corporations, of course, spend billions of dollars to create these mirages--to understand our reality. I mean, look at BP. You'd think BP was Greenpeace, given the amount of commercials that they're running about how much they care about the Gulf, when in fact they turned the waters of the Gulf into a dead zone and poisoned the shrimp and all the other which they're selling us to eat. And yet we don't have mechanisms by which--or certainly within the mainstream. What major network is going to go do a serious documentary on BP? You're not going to confront those interests, because at this point, these interests, you know, they own or control the systems of information, as well as the systems of education.JAY: So your article ends with: "The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is revolt."HEDGES: Well, because the mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform don't work. And you talked about the New Deal. The New Deal was the classic example of that kind of safety valve. And as Roosevelt said, I mean, his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism. And in the stupidity of the corporate oligarchic elite, they destroyed the liberal class. I mean, we still have a self-identified liberal class, but they no longer do anything to defend the interests of those they claim to represent, whether that's the working class, the middle class, labor, or anyone else. And by destroying that safety valve, by destroying that liberal class, those mechanisms that made piecemeal and incremental reform possible, you no longer can adjust the system. So you can't ameliorate the suffering or the grievances of the underclass. And now we're talking about half the country. Now, that means that if you want to resist, if you want to create change, you can't do it through political parties, you can't do it through the courts, you can't do it through a corporatized media. You have to step outside the system and create popular mechanisms, mass movements that will begin to put pressure in a cruder way on the centers of power. That is the only hope we have left.JAY: You say you can't do incremental reform. The elite can't even pass regulations that would serve their own interests, in terms of controlling financial speculation, for example, a simple change in terms of position limits at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that anyone that wants some kind of functioning capitalist system would want to have this so that you don't have another financial collapse as 2008. They can't even pass that.HEDGES: But they don't--the people who are running Wall Street don't give a damn about--they know it's going to collapse. And what they're doing is stealing as fast, as much as they can on the way out the door. There's a very deep cynicism.JAY: Well, they make money--they make money after the collapse as well, 'cause they know the state's there to bail them out.HEDGES: Right. But, you know, this time around it's going to be a little harder to pilfer state funds. I mean, they'll certainly attempt to do that. But, you know, the goal is so self-centered. You have--I think the head of United Healthcare made $1 billion--I mean, it's insane---last year. I think I have that right. But certainly hundreds of millions of dollars [incompr.] And it's all about amassing little monuments to themselves, little empires to themselves. You know, I have relatives who work on Wall Street, and their critique is not any different from mine. The difference is they're just grabbing is much as they can on the way out the door. And I think that is always symptomatic of a kind of dying civilization.JAY: Yeah. Marx was asked once to describe the psychology of a capitalist, and it was what we talked about a little earlier: après moi, le déluge, after me, come the floods. I'll get what I can today, and if the society is toast later, too bad.HEDGES: And I think they know it's going to be toast. And I think they think that they're going to retreat into their, you know, gated compounds and survive it. And they may survive it longer than the rest of us, but in the end, climate change alone is going to get us.JAY: So it's up to us. Don't expect anything from the oligarchs.HEDGES: No. And not only that, they are creating systems in terms of exploitation not only of us but of the ecosystem that, if left unchecked, will ensure the extinction of the human species. It may already be too late, of course. But, you know, allowing the fossil fuel industry or these corporations to determine our relationship to the environment is a form of collective insanity at this point.JAY: Thanks for joining us.HEDGES: Thank you.JAY: And thank you for joining us on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.Don't forget, we're in our year-end fundraising campaign. For every dollar you donate, another dollar will be donated. That means up to $100,000, which means at the end of all this process, if we're successful, we'll raise $200,000. And have all kinds of things planned for 2014, which we'll tell you about in other videos. If you want to see more interviews like this one with Chris Hedges, please click on the Donate button, pick up your phone. There's all kinds of ways to donate. But now's the time.JAY: Thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.
End
DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
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