#553 - Thaddeus Russell

Thank you.

It's, we were saying right before the podcast got started, it's always a weird thing when people sit down. It's like you don't want to talk too much because there's so much to say on the air. You don't want to get it out before you get to air. But I was saying it's appropriate having you on today because we're just now going to war with Syria, right? And we were just talking about how bizarre this ISIS thing is and how it's just american people know we don't want to go to war with Syria. It was this big thing, and Obama was on television, everybody just openly rejected it left and right. It was pretty much the american public was like, we're done with war. We want to get out of Afghanistan. We don't want this Iraq thing anymore. We don't want to go to Syria. And so everything just sort of calmed down. And then all of a sudden, ISIS rose up from the ashes. And this ISIS thing with different names. ISIS, I've seen it. ISIL.

Right.

Yeah. And I was saying, I don't like to get conspiracy oriented because it's so easy to do, but if you wanted to, you would say, well, this is obviously, they've come up with a mechanism to get us into Syria.

Yeah, sure.

I mean, so there's two kinds of conspiracies. There's an opened conspiracy and then there's a closed conspiracy.

Right.

So I think this is sort of an open conspiracy. A lot of people are saying both left and right, by the way, that ISIS was really a creation of american foreign policy. Not that there were a bunch of dudes sitting in a room in the White House with cigars and saying, hey, we need to create this monster in order to sort of impose american will abroad, but that through many, many conscious decisions over many years in the Middle east, through direct interventions militarily and otherwise, they created the conditions for this bunch of psychopathic 20 year olds with rpgs and swords beheading people.

Right?

So creating a vacuum in Iraq, right, by going to war there, by removing the dictator who was at least holding control over the people and over people like this, funding the rebels in Syria. And also, more importantly, a lot of people miss this. One of the things that's been happening, if you look at it just from a material standpoint over the last twelve years at least, is that the United States has been flooding that area with weapons.

Right? So.

And if you look at there was a great piece, I think it was in the Guardian a few weeks ago. ISIS is using american made weapons, right, that have been coming into that region, mostly into Iraq but elsewhere for just. It creates this. It creates this situation where sort of a self fulfilling prophecy, sort of an open conspiracy. Because you could certainly say that american foreign policymakers and all of them really, and that's Bush and that's Obama and that's all of them really want to have an american presence, a military strong, a military presence around the world and in particular in the Middle east where all the oil not. I'm not saying it was deliberate that they, it wasn't a deliberate choice to create this beast that's called ISIS, but it certainly serves their purposes.

And it seems like if you look at the entire situation in the Middle east, it seems like there's no good way to just get out of there. It seems like. Is there? I mean, please tell. Mean there's a way.

Mean. So I'm an out now guy.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that was the answer in Vietnam, right? That's what the anti Vietnam war called for many, many years was out now, not a gradual withdrawal, which is what the politicians called for because that's the, quote, responsible thing to do, but out now. And I think history proves that was the correct answer to that, right? I think that if the United States had left immediately in 1964, 65, name a year, name a time, it would have been a better thing for everyone. Now, communism would have, the communists would have taken control of Vietnam, but they did anyway, right? And so what we had was instead of about 2 million people, mostly civilians, die, right? We would have had far fewer. We would have had the same outcome essentially, with far fewer. And then also, and we got to talk about blowback, right? So the carpet bombing of not just Vietnam, but several countries during that war caused untold numbers of people to hate our fucking guts, right? America's guts. And that's blowback, right? They didn't come and fly airplanes into our buildings, but it was anti american in many ways. And it also served, and here's a very important thing. It served the interests of the goddamn communists, right? Because the communists could say, look at these barbarians coming here and killing our children and women, right? You should support us. We will protect you from them. So it actually played into the hands of the communists. And the very same thing is happening and has been happening in the Middle east for many, many years. David Petraeus, of all people, said before the Senate about three years ago, he said, us funding of Israel, in particular, us funding of all these corrupt regimes in the Middle east and our interventions is the number one recruiting tool for al Qaeda.

Right?

And it's the number one recruiting tool for ISIS. They say, look, here's these infidels who have been invading us and killing our people and taking control of our resources for decades, right? We will fight back for you.

Right?

And so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If you want to maintain a presence there, which they do, the United States does. You keep creating your own enemies to fight against. It's perpetual.

So what could be, is there anything that can be done to mitigate the disastrous effects of us pulling out and creating this power vacuum? Is there anything that can be done? I mean, once we're already there, we can't go back in time. We can't stop the Iraq invasion. It would be nice if we could. Pretty much no one thinks it's a good idea. Now, today, in hindsight, everyone thinks it was a terrible idea. The only good that came out of it was getting Saddam Hussein out, getting rid of his psychopathic sons. But now look at all the shit you have there, and you have a million people dead, right?

So the anti interventionist argument is simply that pretty much every intervention has a negative consequence. So the less the better, right? So my position is, let's do none, right?

But when you have a guy like a Hitler or someone along those lines that's causing genocide and planning to take.

Over the world, so for Hitler, right, there's a large stream of thought among historians, very respectable stream of thought, that the Nazis rose to power out of conditions created by the allies after World War I. So that extracting all these resources through forced payments from the Germans as reparations after World War I really laid the groundwork for the rise of this totalitarian who said, hey, look what those westerners did to us. They decimated this country. They shamed us. They brought us into shame and degradation. We need a strong, powerful leader. We need discipline. We need order. We need to get rid of these foreign influences, like Jews, who were considered to be foreign, in essence, because they were a nationless people, and the communists, who had allegiance to no state.

Right?

And so many people have argued, not just wacko conspiracy theorists, that it was actually american and western foreign policy in the early 20th century that really made the rise of Nazism possible. Like, that's the greatest, possibly the greatest example of blowback in human history.

That's a crazy example of blowback. It seems like it's a perpetual cycle. Then it seems like everything we've ever done in the past has led us to do more things in the future to combat the blowback from the things we've done in the past.

Yeah, but if you look at the history of foreign policy, and by the way, that's the book I'm working on now. So this is a very appropriate topic for me. You will see, beginning, really, even in the early 18th century, late 18th century, with some of the founding fathers, but certainly through the 19th century and certainly through the 20th century, one continuous thread among policymakers, which is, we must change the world in our image.

Right?

I mean, that's been bipartisan. It's been the left. It's been the mean, the liberals and the conservatives. It's been the Democrats and the Republicans for centuries. Now we must have America abroad. Now, not everyone agreed with that. There were people in the Senate who were sort of isolationists or anti interventionists, but there's been a near consensus among american politicians for about two centuries that we should expand what is great about America. And unfortunately, that has meant killing a lot of people.

Well, that's what everyone's terrified of with the islamic state, is that they want to impose sharia law throughout the rest of the world. I mean, that's what everyone's afraid of. The religion of America, what we subscribe to, versus the religion of sharia law.

Yeah.

So I have an answer for that.

Okay. Yeah.

So good luck, motherfuckers. Imposing Sharia law on the whole world.

Right?

And so a lot of what my work is on now, and I'm not the only one who's done this, is to look at what's actually going know in places like Tehran and in places like Riyadh and in places like Cairo, what are sort of ordinary folks, Iranians and Egyptians and Saudis, actually doing all day long. And you can figure it out really quickly by simply looking at the skyline in those cities. And what you'll see is you'll see these big apartment buildings, these big cinder block apartment buildings. And on top of those apartment buildings are dozens, sometimes hundreds of satellite dishes which are streaming in fox. The Simpsons. Porn