← Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:32]
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To the show. I'm Scott Horton from the Libertarian Institute and he is Daryl Cooper, AKA Martyr made the great historian and podcaster. And this is our show provoked episode, whatever number we're on. How are you doing, man?
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A
Oh, I'm doing all right. You know, missed last week. You and Dave did an awesome job. I would listen to you and Dave a lot, a lot more than I would listen to you and me. But tell him not to tell, Tell that immigrant not to take my job.
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B
You know, and we'll keep him at arm's length. His arm's length, which is a lot longer than mine.
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A
Yeah, you know, yeah, I missed last week. Obviously we had a death in the family. My father in law passed and you know, obviously my mind's been in other places. But as we were getting ready to start this morning, I was just thinking about, you know, like, it's really easy for me. Maybe it's just a personality type, but maybe a lot of us and maybe the Internet culture in general that when we talk about war and when we oppose war, like the natural mood to get in is angry. You know, people are being just. It's, it's unjust and, you know, and horrible. And the natural thing is to get angry. You know, we got the call that my father in law had passed very suddenly and unexpectedly. I mean, it was not at all, um, there's no preparation for. He's. He had a heart attack and you know, his wife had gone up, my mother in law had gone upstairs to grab something. They were just hanging out downstairs on the couch. And when she came back down, he was gone. And so nobody expected it. And it was. There's no time to kind of prepare people psychologically or emotionally for it. And so we got the call at like midnight, 11:30 at night or so. Like that's when it happened. We're in, we're sleeping. And so I wake my wife up and I tell her and you know, like, my wife's a tough, she's a tough chick, but you know, she wakes up and she gets this news and you know, hearing her like hearing her weep and just try to deal with the fact like over the phone with her mom, who's also weeping at like her father is gone just like that, you know, with no chance to like say like a real goodbye or anything and to hear her, you know, just sort of repeat to herself she couldn't think of what else to say. Just, you know, like, no, no, no. And weeping and hearing it just ripped my soul out, you know, and it just got me thinking about the fact that, you know, when we talk about a lot of this stuff, you know, I think it's easy for a lot of people to, to, to see the stuff that we talk about, you know, whether it's in Gaza or any, any of these places. And it kind of becomes like a TV show or a movie or a Frontline documentary to people. Like, however it is that, you know, it's, it's sort of, it's content, you know, in a way, content to respond to and to have a take on and all those things or to get angry at, which is perfectly righteous and justifiable. Um, but there's also, I think, like, it's easy, you know, and this isn't just because, like, people look different or speak different languages, although that might add to it, but like, you just the fact that they're not us, you know, it's very easy to just sort of like lose sight of the fact that like, you know, everybody out there, like, have you ever lost a parent? Have you ever lost a child? Have you ever lost a sibling? You remember what you felt, you know, when you got that call? You know, not, you know, there's, there's. I don't want to know. I really don't want to like at all downplay the difficulty of this because in some ways it's a lot worse. But like, you know, when you see somebody decline over time and you're kind of preparing yourself and you know, you're. When it happens, it's, it's, it's expected and you know, it's very painful. But I mean, those ones who, you know, when you, you just get a phone call and you know, your, your husband, your father, whatever, is dead in a car crash. That's it. He went to the store, now he's dead. What you would feel something like that happened is what all of these people feel, man. You know, those people who are weeping and crying and screaming when they're carrying their bloody, you know, mangled four year old, like out of the rubble, they're feeling the same thing you would feel when, you know, when that happens. And it's just, you know, the sadness of it has really been like kind of front of mind for me, I guess these last, this last week or so since that happened. And yeah, it's, you know, maybe it's harder like, you know, if you want to stop this stuff, as, you know, you've been in the game for a long time. Like if you want this stuff to stop, you gotta fight it. You Know, and sadness doesn't get you through a fight. Anger gets you through a fight. And so it's easy to default to that. But, you know, sometimes I feel like when I do just rest with the sadness of it all and the tragedy of it all, it sort of recharges my batteries for the fight, even if I do have to get angry to go back into the fray, you know?
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Yeah, no, I. I totally understand what you mean. I remember when my auntie died in like 2009 or something. She was very old and very sick and, like, it was her time and all of that and still is the worst thing in the world, dude. And so, yeah, compare that to finding out that somebody dropped a bomb on your family member, tore them limb from limb, and like, the worst kind of violence beyond, like, any horror movie, whatever you could imagine. And, like, it's true. I have been off of Twitter. I had to stop doing Twitter so I can finish the Academy. I'm almost done. I'm. I'm doing my last recording, my last sections on for the Cold War course today. So I. I've had to stay off of Twitter, but I got on there just because I had to tweet out my Lex Friedman podcast thing that I did. And so then I was on there for, I swear, just a couple minutes, and I saw so many dead kids, I couldn't believe. I saw, you know, the double tap on the hospital where they killed all the journalists and everything. I didn't. I hadn't read that. That was right on camera. You can see them all standing right there on that little fire escape or whatever it is, what's left of that little staircase they're on. Oh, and they all get bombed. And then page down a little bit and here's some guy dragging his dead 7 year old out of the rubble and all of this. And like, I've said this to my audience over the years on the radio. They're like, you know, any little kids? All right, just think for just a minute, like, I wouldn't even ask you to really indulge in this, but just for a moment. Imagine somebody did this to a little kid that you care about. For God's sake, man. It's worth being angry about. And it ought to be real easy to understand. You know, the no Fly Zone bombings in Iraq in the 1990s, where Bill Clinton bombed Iraq on average every other day for eight years straight, and continuing what I call Rock War one and a half during that time, help him to provoke the September 11th attack against us and everything well, Jeremy Scahill went over there and he interviewed this lady whose son had been killed. And she's just beside herself with grief, as much or more than any lady ever mourned for her son. Right. And this is just a one off. This is nothing in what Americans consider peacetime 1997. Like that was, we were all watching Seinfeld and not caring about things. Norm MacDonald was still on Saturday Night Live, and everything was right with the world. What do you mean? And Bill Clinton just destroyed this woman as bad or worse than he destroyed her little boy, you know, and that's just, it's, it's important to do that, you know, to zoom in on, on the individual examples, you know what I mean? So, like, if that's Bill Clinton's measly, stinking little Iraq War one and a half, and what was Iraq War two really like for those people when W. Bush came and turned it all the way up and, and all of the rest of this, Afghanistan too, and, you know, I like talking about Somalia, and yet I never get a chance to. And then when it's up to me, I put it off. And it, it's, part of it is because it's a little bit outside of the usual chain of events, I usually try to teach the story. It's like one thing caused the other cause the other cause the other. And Somalia is sort of a sideshow to all that. But the same time, like, my God, the amount of grief that the US Government has put Somalia through. And then, I'm sorry, let me get the number right, because Dave DeCamp has a story about today on Antiwar.com about how Donald Trump's now beat Obama's record for airstrikes in Somalia. And I'm sorry, I always forget that guy, Sebastian Gorka, he's in charge of this. You know, that's who they hired to, to kill these guys. So it's, it's 68 airstrikes in Somalia, America's longest war since 2001. 68 airstrikes so far this year. And this is a war that we know on the record that Donald Trump wanted to end his first year in office in his first term in 2017, he said he wanted to end the war in Somalia. And now he's told them, do what you gotta do and continue as he did then and let this continue. And we're supposed to think, what, like, I don't know, they're too far away and they're too black to care about or whatever. But it's just as easy to imagine their suffering, you know what I mean? And including they had CIA torture dungeons there and everything. I mean the worst.
- [10:11]
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So yeah, you know, I, I wonder like, I think about how like some of the things I experienced in the military and this is not being a frontline combat soldier by any means. I was in the Navy and then I was a contractor with the DOD who was usually deployed with the Navy when I would, when I, when I was out there. And so not, not one of the people who has to deal with this kind of thing like, with, with like the kind of real intensity that war can, can put on you. And yet even still, like, you know, we've talked before about one of the things that really kind of just drove me to, to, to stop working for the DoD eventually is, you know, when the war and the real war in Yemen was going on, when Saudis and the UAE were with US support, you know, I mean hundreds of thousands, it sounds like we're dead, God knows how many children, tens, hundreds of thousands of children dying of like disinterer, you know, die basically dehydration from diarrhea. Just things that could be cured like at a country doctor's office in the middle of nowhere, you know, in the US and water will do it, you.
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Know, for even cholera. They don't even need antibiotics, they just need clean water. But nope, we bombed that. Sorry kid.
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And that it's not bad enough that we're supporting like the blockade and the assault that's causing all that, but I would be sitting on a two billion dollar destroyer, you know, guided missile high tech, just the baddest ship in the world, you know, that we built for $2 billion to send it to sit off the coast of Yemen to make sure no food or medicine gets in. While that was going on and watching Good Boys, Good American Boys and you know, on the, on the visit board search and Caesar squad, which I used to be a part of when I was in the Navy, we didn't really ever do much, but at the time, but you know, board the little daos, some little dao that has like looks like it was thrown together with spare parts from like the junkyard at most Eisley or something, you know, and like these guys like trying to make it across literally from like Baluchistan to freaking Yemen. Knowing we're out there, knowing there's all kinds of things out there that you know that, that want to stop them and will kill them to do it. Just to bring some food and medicine into this place. And we would stop Them and board their boat and put them all in handcuffs and put them all on their knees, sometimes blindfold them. And we would search the whole place. And if we found any contraband, which included freaking children's Tylenol, into the ocean it went. We threw it all into the ocean. Pardon me. And like, you know, just to. To really have it hit you that, like, there's a. There's a child on the other end of that trip. You know what I mean? There's a sick child on the other end of that trip that was, you know, that. That. That was waiting for that children's Tylenol that might have saved their lives, you know, and, like, it really. So. So just that, like, really kind of pushed me. And. And I wonder sometimes, like, how the people who are pulling triggers and, you know, thank God, like, Americans, you know, American pilots maybe have to deal with this, but like, American frontline soldiers, not quite as often because at least these days we're a little more disciplined and, you know, we have rules of engagement that most other countries would find ridiculous. But. And that's good thing. But, you know, I think about, like, my uncle, right? My uncle's, like, from the time he was a little kid, he's a hunter, he's a fisherman, he's an outdoorsman. Like, he would have made a great. A great green Beret. Like, he was just. He's just that dude, you know what I mean? Like Tom Selleck mustache, just grizzled construction worker with forearms this big. He's just. He's a man, you know, tough guy. Like, you never see him. Emotion, never anything. And one time he was driving back home from work, and he was just coming around a corner in a neighborhood. So he's going very slowly. He's like, at a stop sign, he, like, edges around a corner and this little girl on her bike just comes out and he, like, bumps her and, like, knocks her off her bike. And she was, okay, she was crying, she skinned her knee, and, like, her front tire of her bike got, you know, bent or whatever. Years later, you couldn't bring that up around my own.
- [14:33]
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Hey, guys. So the expat Money Summit is coming up again this October 10th through 12th, and it's M thorup. He's a really interesting guy. I went and toured Mayan temples with him when on the Tom woods cruise. Him and his wife, and they're great folks, and he is a real expert in all of the laws and customs of, I don't know, however many dozens or scores or maybe even more than 100 countries around the world and knows exactly what you got to do to purchase property and protect your wealth and in some cases, get dual citizenship or whatever you need all around the world. And this year they're focusing especially on Latin America. And the thing is free, so, you know, they have some upsells and things like that, but you can attend the whole thing for free. And it's not a waste of time and broad theory or whatever it is. Step by step, real business. This is how you do it if you want to protect what little wealth they haven't inflated away yet. So check that out. It's expatmoney summit.com and then I forgot if I was supposed to say slash something, but tell him Scott sent you.
- [15:37]
A
I think about, like, my uncle, right? My uncle's, like, from the time he was a little kid, he's a hunter, he's a fisherman, he's an outdoorsman. Like, he would have made a great. A great green Beret. Like, he was just. He's just that dude, you know what I mean? Like Tom Selleck mustache, just grizzled construction worker with forearms this big. He's just. He's a man, you know, tough guy. Like, you never see him, emotion, never anything. And one time he was driving back home from work, and he was just coming around a corner in a neighborhood, so he's going very slowly. He's like at a stop sign, and he like, edges around a corner and this little girl on her bike just comes out and he like, bumps her and like, knocks her off her bike. And she was okay, she was crying, she skinned her knee and, like, her front tire of her bike got, you know, bent or whatever. Years later, you couldn't bring that up around my uncle. Like, he was. It just traumatized him so much. He was so devastated by what almost happened there, you know, and nothing happened really, like, nothing permanent, you know, and he's a. And he's a tough dude, man. And like, you know, I think about what a person, like, the mental state, the like, you know, the things you have to tell yourself and teach yourself to just over and over again and condition yourself to. To believe and think about the world. To be able to do that on a daily basis, except back over her a few times to make sure she's dead and do that and still be able not only to go to sleep at night, but to go to sleep thinking that, you know, you had a good day's work, that you were out there doing what you had to do for your country or whatever. It is like, you know, we forget how much, like, when you have to do something like that, you're really twisting your own soul out of shape in. In really important, powerful ways. And so we tell people, go over there, do these things, because this is a good thing. This is what your country wants of you. It's. Everybody's going to be proud, and so you go do it. But there's still. I don't care. Unless you're like a complete psychopath. There's still this part of you that you got to shut down if you're going to be able to. You know, I. I may have mentioned this on a previous episode, but I was talking to one of my buddies who is a multiple tour Iraq guy, and now he's. He works for, like, a private intel company. Very connected dude and very smart. He's got a. He's got a PhD in international relations from NYU, but he was like a staff sergeant. He's just. He's badass dude who's. No. Thinks about this stuff a lot more than, like, maybe your average soldier. And he was telling me just maybe a month or two ago when he passed through and we were visiting that among all the different job ratings and things that the military, our military had over in Iraq, one of the. One of the ones with just the highest rate of PTSD of any of the jobs were not like frontline combat soldiers or, you know, any of these things. They were truck drivers. And it was because al Qaeda and Iraq, they knew that Americans, American truck drivers, don't want to run over a crowd of kids. And so they would put a crowd of kids in the road and set an ambush. And if you stopped, you were dead. And so we told our guys, you can't stop. And so they didn't stop. The ones who stopped got killed. And so they didn't stop. And they got that in their brain now for the rest of their lives, you know, and. And it's like there's the angle of, you know, look what we're doing to these other people, you know, who did. Who weren't coming here to the United States to hurt us. We went there to hurt them for rationalizations that we came up with. But then I, you know, I think of those truck drivers and I'm like, man, like, look at what we're doing to them. Like, look at the position we're putting this guy from freaking Topeka or Des Moines. You know what I mean? Like, we're taking this dude who's just a guy with a family probably, or Whatever. And we're putting him in his position. Position where like, okay, now you've killed six children. You watched them like go under the hood of the truck you were driving and you felt the bumps as your tires went over them. And now you get to have nightmares about that for the rest of your life, you know, and it's like, look, I'm not a pacifist. Sometimes you gotta fight. But God damn it, like, can we? Like, it's just, you better have such a good reason if you're gonna put your people in a position to do those kind of things to other people.
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B
You know, it's interesting too that there's always a form of war porn in American entertainment media that says that, oh man, this war was so hard on us, the terrible things that we had to do. Which of course are true. But then it still makes the Iraqis or the Vietnamese or whoever extras in our movie where, yeah, you think running over a kid is bad? Try being the dad of a kid that got ran over and you weren't there to be able to protect them or whatever because the Americans already rounded you up the day before or whatever it is. And living through that, or being the kid that got maimed and crushed but not all the way killed or whatever, that's a hell of a lot worse. And so then you have people really kind of criticize that whole genre of American like war veteran inspired art there as being so like self serving and self important or whatever. But then at the same time, like, no, man, like that's really all we got. That's the best we've got is let Daryl say those things. Where would be recruits can hear him that like, yeah, man, they on the TV ads during the football game, they make it look like a lot of fun, but it's not a lot of fun, man, as you know, you're going to be. You know, there's a book like this about the, the interrogators in Iraq. It's called none of Us Were like this Before. It's like you're saying these are good kids from wherever, they're out there serving their country. I don't know. The job is in your imagination when you join up. I know it is because I never did join up, but it was my same imagination as a kid growing up is you're gonna fight the Germans out in the field somewhere where everybody you're shooting deserves it and it's okay. And you're the heroes fighting the villains. Nobody's told you're going to be patrolling in Paktika, killing local posh tunes for daring to resist you trespassing on their property or doing night raids in Fallujah or whatever it is to these innocent people. They don't sell it like that at all. That's not what any of these people think they're getting into here. This guy knows something. Beat it out of him. And like, oh, sir, yes, sir. And they're all still responsible for their actions, but that is the position that they're being put in, despite the mythology. And so they do need to hear that kind of stuff up front from the likes of you and whatever. And even if it is self important, after all, we are the Americans, not the Iraqis. So it's just like I just did an interview with Adam Heyman about the new movie Warfare, which is about a bunch of guys holed up in, I think, Ramadi in a house where they just bring all the trouble onto them and they portray them as very likable and relatable characters. And, and it was funny because me and Adam were debating about is this an anti war movie or not. I think it's like, you know, it's a Rorschach test for you. These guys were there, they show it in the end credits, how they help direct and show here's what happened and how to mimic us doing it. And it was all based on a true story. And, and all the individual guys portrayed in the film were real, you know, characters, real men. And so if it's you or me, the moral of the story is what in the hell are these guys doing holing up in this house in the middle of this neighborhood, bringing on all this heat? Like, what's the purpose of any of this? It's so completely crazy. Whereas there's another point of view on it which is just, wow, what an adventure. What a bunch of stuff that happened. And whatever they were doing there, that's like above your pay grade when you're a soldier, right? You don't worry about that. That's somebody else's job. And ultimately it's the elected president's job to decide. And so your job is just working to keep Jimmy and Bobby alive and, and Enrique and whoever you're out there with, trying not to get killed, no matter what neighborhood they plopped you in the middle of. And so I could totally see the war through that soda straw, as Robert Gates would say too, where you're living in a very quick moment at a time and looking through a very narrow lens and not able to see what's really Happening at all.
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Until I think any. Any movie or book or story that portrays war realistically is almost inevitably an anti war film. You know, and that movie did a good job of it. I mean, it was a movie that basically had no story at all. Like, it was just, these guys are in this place now, they're under attack. And here's what it was like. And it was not pretty, and it was not enjoyable, and it wasn't heroic. Like, it was not, you know, but.
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You see what I mean? We're like, you could project onto it. Well, they were there for no reason, or you could project onto it. Well, they must have been there for some good reason.
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A
You know, the thing is, like what you said about, sir, yes, sir, like, this is above my pay grade. The president, the elected president, the elected representatives of the country that I, that I serve have told me to go here and do this. That's. I mean, you have to have an army that works like that. Go ask like, you know, the Spanish Republicans during the Civil War, how it is when, like, you know, a private can raise his hand at any time and object to something a general says, you know, right there in ranks. It doesn't work. So, you know, this is how you need it to work. But in order for that to happen, you got to be able to trust the decisions that the people up there are making. And when it's just become clear over and over and over that, you know, you get, like when you talk about Bill Clinton, like, you know, like, imagine being the pilot who carried out that airstrike or that, you know, that series of airstrikes. And, okay, you find out that there were, you know, there was collateral damage or there was this or that, and, you know, this is something that you've prepared for since, you know, officer candidate school or whatever. But then to realize and to understand and really know, I mean, because we have a pretty good, you know, a lot of information that Bill Clinton made that decision, like, casually. You know, it was just kind of like it was. There wasn't like a group of generals sitting around a table for days discussing, like, look, you know, we have to do this and debating it out. Like, you know, is this like, you know, the collateral damage? It's gonna happen. Is this just something we have to accept because this is so important or what? They didn't do any of that. And they never do. They're just like, huh, what is somebody maybe, yeah, okay, blow it up. And that's like, that sounds. I mean, you know, again, I'll give us more credit than certainly than I would give Clinton in the 90s or the Israelis today. When we were in Iraq or Afghanistan, we took a lot greater care, honestly, than probably any military, the history the world's ever taken. But I think my point, and you know, whenever I say that to people and bring up all of the steps that went into our rules of engagement, we wanted, you know, you had like two independent, not talking to each other, lawyers, like in the food chain, like the decision tree, you know, to make a lot of these strikes happen. There's a lot of layers, even if they were rubber stamp layers for the most part, and I don't know that they were. But my point in like even bringing that up to people is that like, even then, you know, even when we're taking steps that nobody's taking, Vladimir Putin is not taking in Ukraine, you know, the Israelis are not taking. Even then, kids just dropping like flies, you know, innocent fathers and mothers and everything else are just dropping like flies when we're doing these things in Iraq, you know, and, and that's. So that's like the best case scenario is that like you got a bunch of adults over in another country and they're just killing a bunch of kids and, and women and dads and stuff. And like. Yeah, it's just, you know, when you.
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B
Guys, when you brought me onto the jocko show, that was how he opened the show. And here's a guy who fought in Ramadi, right? And I know he fought in East Baghdad, and he's saying, oh yeah, when we go to war, we kill children. They are. What can you say? They're in the middle of it, man. They're caught up in it. It's absolutely unavoidable. So don't talk to me about killing the enemy without talking to me about how many innocent children you're willing to accept also being killed too. Because that's how it goes. And non negotiable, dude. That's reality, you know, and, and enough already. I cite this guy, Amos Fox, who's a colonel, who writes a lot about all different stuff. I quote him, I think, and provoked about some Russia stuff too. But in, in enough already, he. I talk about how he had written this paper where he coined the phrase precision paradox, where he talks about when we bomb Raqqa, we're so careful, we'll even bomb like just one corner of the house. And not only that, but we'll make sure that we fire the rocket in the right, from the right direction to make sure that the explosive blast is going to go this way and not that way toward the child's room and this kind of thing. And they're so careful the way they do it. And then, huh, at the end, they've destroyed all of Raqqa and killed everybody. There's thousands of people dead everywhere. And they, very carefully, one corner of a building at a time, destroyed every building in the city. They leveled the place. They just did it very, very carefully. And then by rationalizing that they're taking that much care to do it, then there's no limit on how much they can do as long as they're being careful. And then. So he's the one who coined the phrase active duty US army colonel strategist wrote about this in whatever war college journal I forget Exactly. And talking about how they absolutely just destroyed Raqqa. They completely destroyed it very carefully with their little pin prick strikes, you know, just like you're talking about. Yeah.
- [29:16]
A
And you just wish, I mean, like, you know, I don't know, I mean, maybe, like, maybe we're a little utopian, like. But the, the thing that people often bring up when you say these things is like, look, that's just the human condition, man. You know, like, go back thousands and thousands of years, probably millions of years. Look at the animal kingdom. Like, this is, this is just how the world works. And if you, you know, you're being soft because you can't accept it or whatever, and, like, you just have to, like, harden yourself up and, like, look reality square in the eye kind of thing, you know, like, they're grizzled veterans from there. The funny thing is you don't hear veterans talk like that very often. That's the funny thing. And if you do, they're like, you know, rear echelon types or guys who are in the Navy with me. You don't hear a lot of jocko types ever talking that, you know, and especially guys who have, you know, who've lost their own. But even ones who haven't, like, you just. It's not often you hear him talk that way. And anyway, it's like, okay, so, yeah, Genghis Khan behaved this way. What is. I mean, you know, what else is like, natural is like massacring the neighboring village and like raping all the women. That's. That's natural. That's how history works. That's like how the human condition, you know, has always, has always been like, so what? It's just a. It's just an excuse to behave like animals, you know, and, and, and to the fact that we have to reach back to examples like that to justify our behavior today with everything that all the lessons of history that we should have learned by now, you know, the fact that we still have to reach back to like the dark ages to, you know, to look for a comparison that we can like, you know, measure up to favorably in order to justify our own actions today in 2025 is just insane, man. It really is.
- [31:10]
B
It is. And it really sucks too. I always look at it like, you know, never remind the neoconservatives, but the neoliberalism of like, you know, the very center left, you know, Bill Clintonism I guess you could call it, or whatever, free markets and democracy as he would call it, sort of like this funhouse mirror sort of horror movie version of libertarianism where it's at the base, there's a lot of free markets and private property and little D. Democracy, self government kind of themes all built into the thing. But in large measure, of course, it's just an excuse to expand the American empire, enforce the dictates of Washington D.C. in terms of policy results on countries all across the world, overthrow their governments if they stand our way, launch aggressive wars if we have to, to do all of this stuff. And it sucks because I think even their real half ass bastardized, you know, understanding of free markets and democracy, if they had just refrained from all these stupid wars and had even been spreading this horror movie, you know, Bill Clinton version of, you know, corrupt crony capitalism, right, and, and rigged elections, that man, that would have been so much better for the world than what they decided to do that they did not have to decide to do, which was to wage a 35 year war in Iraq and you know, everything else that has come with it and, and all this imperialism and completely destroyed it and then to, and just think in the post Cold War era, if it had just been, you know, not utopia, but just a Ron Paulian government or even a Buchananite government, much more protectionist, but still not completely isolationist like they smear, you know, and just think of the example set that like we can have social cooperation with people who aren't anything like us and who, and we don't have to like them, like personally in any way, but we can still do business and that's what helps us all get along, is having interests, interests in common and, and working together on solving them. And as you said, like, oh, we don't raid the next village. Yeah, no we don't. When was the last time the Austinites all went to Elgin and raped and pillaged everything or whatever. Right. So not that I'm being. Trying to be too much of a statist here, but no, our security forces don't allow for situations like that. The national government has been able to keep the peace and, and hell, the people have been able to keep the peace between the states in this country, you know, since the Civil War, at least since they were done conquering the West. We haven't had a major outbreak of violence in this country since then, you know, what, 130, 150 years. So of course it killed a lot of people around the world. But it just goes to show though, that, yeah, no, we can just go. The idea that there'd be some permanent beef between Texas and Louisiana is unthinkable. It'll never happen. It could never happen. So then Genghis Khan, nothing. Right. So what, that there was a war? That's like saying, yeah, but there's always been slavery. Yeah, well, there's always been people who said there shouldn't be. And finally they won that argument, at least in the civilized world. So what, we should just take that back and give up like Barack Obama in Libya and just go ahead and re. Legalize the thing?
- [34:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's a. Yeah, we got to do a short show today. I gotta get going. But yeah, it's. It's a tragedy. And like, you know, I just. Yeah, really, like, especially talking to so many veterans that I just, My friends, you know, that, that I've known either from my time or just with the DOD or just people I've met since and seeing people, like, seeing these guys, you know, tough guys, trying to work through now, like, trying to work through the. Maybe grief is too strong a word, like they're not there yet, but work through the, the understanding, like the new understanding that all of these things that they did, you know, all of the things that their friends died for and lost limbs for and, you know, the things that, that they themselves had to do. Looking back and realizing that, like, they can't tell their kids about this stuff in that, you know, they can't tell their, like, their kids that here's why we did it and here's, you know, like, you can't tell them, like we went over because the Germans were, you know, invading the world and we had to go over there and gosh darn it, stop. You can't tell them anything like that. You know, you just have to tell them that, well, the government told me to go over and go to this place that hadn't attacked us that had talked some shit but like. And we went over there and just destroyed the country and killed a ton of people and you know, in firefights. Like you tell your seven year old daughter, by the way, sweetie, you know, I actually killed a seven year old girl when I was there and watched her father, you know, pick up a gun out of anger and killed him too. And that's what I did, you know, and just that's a. I'm making that example of. None of my friends did that but like, you know, but people did, you know, or you know, they, they just, yeah. Did things that they can't talk to their kids that they're never gonna be able to tell their kids about, you know, because they, they're just, because they're, they'd be, they're afraid of how their children would look at them and for good reason because it's how they're starting to look at themselves a lot, a lot of times. And, and that's upsetting, you know, because these are good guys. I mean like the thing is like when, you know, it's like when, when Chris Kyle when American Sniper came out and there was this like very brief like week long freak out in the media and on social media about what a. You know, it was like it was just sort of a, a quick hit of like baby killer, like redux stuff from Vietnam, you know where he's just terrible guy in the Iraq war's awful and he was a murderer because he was fighting in Iraq all these other kind and it's like, I mean I think one of the, one of the big ones, he's a racist because he called in his book, he called the Iraqi savages or whatever. And it's like, you know, man, like look, he's a freaking, he was a, like a good old boy from Texas who's you know, 9, 11 happened and he joined the military because his entire social system, from his parents when he was born to his teachers, to everybody, every piece of media content basically he's ever consumed, just the entire cultural system that's built around them told them that this is a good thing to do. And if you go do this, you're, you're, you're, you're doing something that is really like self sacrificing. You know, you're doing this like not for yourself, for other people. And that's what the lesson is, that's what we're all inculcated with. And the thing is you have to be able in a healthy country, you have to be able to inculcate your population with that mentality, you have to be able to put in their heads really deeply in their hearts that if we ask you to go somewhere and do something, then you're the good guy. You know, no matter what happens over there. Like, you know, like, we're doing this because we have no choice or because the outcome otherwise would be so horrible that we have to put you. You're the man we're going to send to go do this job. You have to be able to tell your people that, you know, and we just can't anymore. And there's no even. You know, and it's so awful, too, because you talk about, like, just what a. You know, using a being that city on a hill, like that shining beacon of good influence out there. And like, the craziest part about the post Cold War period is that we had 1989 and 1991 just like a perfect pitch, perfect example of, like, how that works and how. How perfectly it can work. You know, we didn't invade Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. They just got their blue jeans and rock and roll and underground mixtapes and stuff, and they didn't want that anymore. And if you go back and look at the Arab world, like pre1967 or 73, the Americans were very popular. Go back to the King Crane Commission right after the First World War, when we sent a commission over to greater Syria in general, but focused on Palestine, to just interview the people and talk to them about, like, you know, what do you want to happen, like, after this? What's like. And just overwhelmingly they said, well, we want the Americans. If it's going to be like a mandate system or some kind of thing where there's going to be like an overseer, which, you know, was going to happen. They said, we want it to be the Americans. We don't want anybody else. We want the Americans. And if not the Americans, and, yeah, maybe the British and we don't want the French. That was like their, you know, that was their position kind of. But, like, they all wanted the Americans and they all had a positive view of the Americans. They. They thought we were the people who fought for, you know, we fought a revolution against a. Against the British thing and all that kind of stuff. And we're those guys, you know, and like, the idea that we would be going over there enforcing, like, you know, essentially being the enforcement arm of like, a global colonial empire, like, this is like a pretty new thing that people saw America this way and it could have gone a different direction. And it's almost, it almost makes me think that like, you know, you talk about like, you know, whether neoconservatism or neoliberalism, it's like unless there's like something that, you know, you're attacked and you're defending yourself, you know, you're in a hard alliance, you know, somebody invades Britain or something and we're just in a 100 year long hard alliance with them or whatever we're going to go to help defend just whatever these, the things that like 98 of the everybody but a pacifist basically would accept as like a just a just war. You know, it's like if you, if you. Yeah, I lost my train of thought there a little bit. Sorry.
- [41:17]
B
It's all right. Because you're gonna miss your plane.
- [41:18]
A
So that's probably why I'm. Yeah. Where my brain is right now. But look, everybody, I will, I will be back on my game next week. I've been, I haven't been, I haven't been pulling my weight and I almost got myself replaced by, by a migrant worker last week. So.
- [41:39]
B
Mass migration, our culture, man. Damn, Brooklyn. Listen, I got to do a little bit of business here because it's business is business. Moondoz Coffee. Just go scotthorton.org coffee or scotthorton.org and look in the right hand margin there's. I've been getting nothing but great feedback from everybody drinking it because it's really good stuff. Moondo Coffee there. Scott Horton flavor. And also buy all my books and check out my 10 hour, 10 and a half hour long podcast that I did on the Lex Friedman show which you can play on double speed and listen to in only five and a quarter hours. And that's it. See you next week, Sam.