Transcript
Kevin Barrett (0:00)
Kevin Barrett doing this podcast in audio form up until a few years ago and now putting out video here on Revolution Radio. The greatest of free speech sponsored radio network. Sponsor it yourself. Go to Revolution Radio and check it out. All right. I'm Kevin barrett of kevin barrett.substack.com where you cannot pay me to subscribe to my substack because I have been debanked by Stripe. But if you go there, you'll find your way to the workarounds, including my PayPal donations page. If you like this kind of free speech radio, be sure to, well, support it in whatever way you feel like. So, hey, let's get going. Tonight we have a theme show that is after Luigi Mangione, the CEO Slayer has become a folk hero, necessitating the feds going after him with a death penalty threat and in federal court as well as a murder prosecution in state court. And then we had this news that an anti genocide fighter has just been arrested for targeting the genocidal consulate in New York. So this is an interesting time to talk about that. Virtually non existent. So it's so minuscule, the fraction of human violence that is perpetrated by somebody other than governments, that is non state sponsored violence. There's hardly any of it. I mean there's a lot. But compared to what the state sponsored violence gives us, it's virtually nothing. It hardly even exists. But I think it's still worth talking about. And so we're going to talk about it with one certified expert, and that is David Skerbina. David Skerbina is a philosophy professor. He was a correspondent of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and he published and edited one of his books. And David Scribina is an expert on the metaphysics of technology and the various critiques of technology that have been associated with the supposed with the Unabomber issue and so on. Okay, I just got a message that David is unavailable, so we're going to have to do a little work around here to try and bring him up. How are we going to bring David up? We're going to pull this up, share a link for him, and we're going to send that to him and hopefully he'll be able to join us. And it's kind of interesting how this stuff works, sometimes better than other times. But let's see. Where's David? There he is. Okay. Hello, David. We're going to send you a link here and use this to join the conversation. Use this to join. See if that'll get David Scribina up onto our show. And if not, then we'll find some other workaround. That's the way it works when you're self producing here at Revolution Radio. So the Let me talk a little bit about the second hour. We're going to bring on Michael Brenner. He's an international relations professor emeritus at this point. And we're going to talk about his essay, his very brief essay on anger in defense of anger that he sent out recently. A lot of people are tearing their hair out about the anger that's floating around in American society leading to these terrible events like Luigi Mancione shooting healthcare exec and then the school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, in all of this big this mindless, senseless violence, as opposed to the mindful and very, very sensible violence of the US government supporting the genocide of Gaza, slaughtering 30 million people around the world as a response to the inside job of 911 which was perpetrated by governments. So, yeah, mindless violence, right. Pushing back against the perpetrators of mindful violence through mindless violence. Very few people have done that. And it seems like it's worth worth analyzing. All right, so Michael Brenner comes on there in the first half of the second hour. And then in the second half of the second hour, Rolf Lindgren reports live from Madison, Wisconsin. And Rolf will talk about the school shooting. He apparently probably knows some people that send their kids to the Christian school where the shooting happened because Rolf is a Republican Party events coordinator. And so he sets up these kinds of film screenings and discussions and speeches by politicians, things like that. And he gives away free books at those events. And Rolf therefore has a pretty good kind of connection with that world of conservatives in Madison, Wisconsin, who are, by the way, a minority there. Madison, Wisconsin is about as woke as it gets. It's gotten more kind of blandly woke over the years that I was there. I was popping in and out of Madison from my high school days, which were circa 1972-76. I used to drive over from the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, outskirts of Pewaukee, where I lived, to Madison when I was starting it at 15, when I first got my driver's license and I could drive legally in a car if there was somebody else in the car. I would drive an hour over to Madison and try to talk with the college girls and things like that. And then I went to college there undergraduate years. And I've been popping through Madison, Wisconsin ever since. It's definitely gotten much more vapidly woke over the years. It was always very left wing, but left Wing wasn't as stupid back then as it is these days. Maybe it's just me, I don't know. But we all change our views over the years. I don't think it's me that's changed. I think it's the so called leftists of Madison, Wisconsin. Anyway, the conservatives are now a small minority there and Ralph Lindgren is one of those movers and shakers in that world, that minoritarian world of consciousness. Conservatives of Madison, Wisconsin. Okay, we're having no luck here getting David on, so let me try adding David Scribina again using the standard method of trying to add somebody to the call. Okay, there's David. It says not on this call. Why isn't he on this call? Hey David, what's going on here? He's listed as being having the link shared and stuff, but it tells us he's not available to be on the call. Now theoretically, if he finds the invitation, he will show up, he'll be able to get on the call despite this weird method that seems to be locking him out. All right, he said there would be no need for get the right time zone here with him because that would be crazy if we tried to get everybody at the same time in the second hour. So. Yeah, I don't see any, any emails from him, but yeah. Okay, well in that case we don't have David on. Let's see who could we randomly pull up here and see, see if somebody might be randomly available. Let's see. Looks like Cynthia McKinney isn't on. Oh, Rolf Lindgren's coming on later in the show, but I don't think we're going to bring him up yet and spoil the suspense. Although that, that would be, that would be interesting. Who, who else? If we have anybody listening who is one of our regular Skype listeners who would like to join the show, just send a Skype message here and I will pick up on you. All right. So where do we even start with this topic of non state sponsored violence? Well, I guess I could mention that of all of the life changing events that I underwent as a youngster, which included watching Lee Harvey Oswald's attorney give a talk in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1974 about and show the Zapruder film. And that undermined my faith in the American government. But another work that I encountered not long after that that undermined my faith in the American government even more, at least at the kind of, at the theoretical level, was by a guy named Wolff, W O L F F and it was entitled in Defense of Anarchism. And it's a philosophical work, a political philosophy book that basically argues that there's no rational basis for the notion that governments are magically legitimate. That is, that why do we consider that a government has more right to set the rules that we live by than anybody else than any other, say, bureaucracy or club? Right? I mean, you could just start a voluntary club with your friends and call yourself the government of planet Earth and tell everybody what to do. And why does your club have any less right to be obeyed than, say, the United States, the United nations, or what have you? And the answer, Wolff points out quite accurately, is there is no reason why. There's no real, real reason why anybody should take seriously the claims of governments that they have some kind of special status that gives their rules any kind of special reason why they need to be obeyed, any more than random rules set up by any other person or group of people. So, yeah, it's an interesting argument. And a lot of the counterarguments are really just based on pragmatism, which ends up supporting Wolf's point, which is that ultimately, if you just go along with the strongest force around you, whatever that force is, like if some mafiosi thug is holding a gun to your head and you do what he tells you, that's pragmatically probably a smart move if you don't want him to shoot you. And likewise, if the government is telling you that you would need to, let's say, pay your taxes and you choose to do that, that might also be a smart move so you don't get kidnapped. But there's no reason why it's necessarily the right thing to do, to obey the government, but not necessarily the mafiosi. For instance, what if you could knock the gun out of the mafiosis hand and turn it on him and escape? Would you do that? Is that the right thing to do? Yeah, if you can get away with it, absolutely. Of course it is. So what if you could knock the gun out of the government's head and not pay your taxes? Would that be the right thing to do? Well, there's all kinds of special pleading that the apologists for this myth of government legitimacy that Wolf ably deconstructs in his book In Defense of Anarchism would come up with. But it's a. It's all bullshit. That is, ultimately, there's no a priori reason and no rational reason indeed why you should accept that the government has the right to point the gun at your head and take your money. But The Mafiosis chieftain doesn't so ultimately becomes pure pragmatics. It becomes whatever works in the situation. Now the thing is that governments flourish by pointing their guns at people's heads and then but somehow convincing people that it's okay that it's legitimate for the government, unlike a Mafiosi, to point the gun at your head. If it's government pointing a gun at your head, it's not the gun that's the reason that you obey them. It's because, oh, it's legitimate and there's consent of the governed and there's the social contract and all of this bullshit. That stuff is bullshit. Total, absolute, utter, obvious bullshit. And I could figure that out as a 16 year old reading Wolf's book In Defense of Anarchism in the early 1970s. So that leads us to questions like, given that the vast majority, virtually all violence and aggression and grotesque extreme oppression and injustice that's being perpetrated on this planet today is being perpetrated by governments, maybe people should start knocking guns out of their hands a lot more often. Maybe we should stop going along with this ridiculous habit of accepting violence that's committed by governments, but deploring and hating and reviling violence that's perpetrated against governments or against the will of governments. Like Luigi, for example. Take Luigi. Luigi Mangione. So he killed a health insurance executive. Okay, well, the United states government killed 30 million innocent people as a response to the False Flag act of September 11, 2001. 30 million people. And now the people who are trying to convince you that the US government is some kind of special entity, that therefore it's really not such a big deal that it kills people. But it's so, so terrible that Luigi Mancione killed somebody. You know, those people deserve your absolute utter contempt, scorn, derision and whatever else you can muster to throw at them. So that's, that's, that's my opening rant here. But unfortunately, we don't seem to have David Scribina to see whether he agrees or disagrees with me on this one. But David probably more or less agrees because he wanted to come on here to talk about the issues raised by Luigi Mangione's rising to folk hero status. And of course, among those issues are the issues of the way that extreme injustice and radically bad choices and policies at the collective level can be responded to, maybe should be responded to. There's one discourse that's consistently pacifist, that deplores all violence equally, whether it's committed by governments or by non governments. To be consistent, that position requires you to oppose uniformed thugs kidnapping somebody like Luigi just as much as you would oppose uniform thugs kidnapping, you know, just anybody, rather as much as you would oppose non uniformed thugs, mafiosi or criminals kidnapping somebody. And so likewise, it requires you to deplore the people killed in Syria. US soldiers killing people in Syria. Today they're occupying Syria, stealing their, their agricultural lands, best farming land, stealing their energy producing land. And if somebody gets killed over there, that's just as much of an injustice and just as much, if not more, something you should oppose as some CEO getting shot by some angry anti health insurance guy. I think David Scribina is definitely the guy to talk on this subject with, because again, he's the editor of the late Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who famously was quite eloquent in his manifesto arguing that technological society is heading down, down, down, leading us to hell, and it would be better to blow up technological society through terrorism, quote, unquote, if necessary, by whatever means, work, and take the consequences, which of course would be immense suffering as the technological life support systems we all enjoy today disappear. He thinks that would be better than allowing technology to continue to destroy humanity and the planet, because it's going to get harder and harder and harder to get out from under technology as time goes by. And so those arguments that Kaczynski made back in the what, 70s, I think have seemingly been borne out to a certain extent by events, as many of the kind of most fearsome prognostications of people worried about technology back in the day have proven to have been correct or even understated. And now we have AI deciding how to kill which 200 innocent people should be killed in Gaza so that they'll have at least a 47% probability of killing one Hamas courier. This sort of thing, you know, these kinds of horrors, you know, drones running around surveilling us, the surveillance state being so powerful that it can easily catch people like Luigi Mangioni while he's in McDonald's and they have to make up a ridiculous story that somebody recognized his eyebrows. So Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, which of course has been published and become something of a classic, was then followed up by, I think, a book called Technological Slavery, if I recall, edited by David Scribina. And then David has produced some of his own books on these topics, including the Metaphysics of Technology, which looks at the philosophical critiques of technology that Ted Kaczynski, let's say, popularized through his Terrorism campaign. And I wonder if technology is being used to block my conversation here with David. Let's try him one more time because he actually knows more about this stuff than I do. So there's David. What happens if we try calling him again? He has a couple of different Skype accounts, but I know this is the one that he sent me, so should be the right one. And unfortunately, I don't know, maybe we had a time zone problem. That does seem to happen a little more than it used to since here I am in beautiful Morocco, which doesn't change for daylight time. It hangs out on Central European time and it changes, I think briefly, maybe during Ramadan or something. And, and, and then everybody else is always changing. And so Morocco gets confused. But I don't, I don't think that's the case. I think. I think we have the right time zone for David and he's. He's not showing up. Yeah, well, it's. It's a dangerous topic to talk about. See if. Let's try Gordon Duff. He's an expert on violence. Yeah, it's a good thing Gordon Duff doesn't have the morals of Ted Kaczynski or there'd be mayhem out there. Gordon is the former editor of Veterans Today, which is now vtforeignpolicy.com where I hang out a little bit. Although I've had some technological glitches preventing me from logging in there, which is why I don't post there much anymore. But anyway, Gordon has quite a collection of highly specialized firearms. Has to be seen to be believed. Gordon is a master gunsmith and allegedly has moved in the world of the people who use these kinds of weapons for, well, ostensibly government approved purposes. Three letter agency type stuff. And, you know, his take on all this is kind of, to my mind, a little overly pragmatic. That rather than being interested in the principle of the thing and then the actual philosophical argument about some of these things. Yeah, Gordon has kind of given up on that. He's just interested in getting stuff done. And at some point he said, well, I don't mind killing people, but I guess I just got tired of killing the wrong people. This was an explanation of leaving the three Letter Agency and becoming a bit of a pushback artist. Anyway, Gordon doesn't seem to be available in responding to his messages at the moment. What time is it over there where he is? It's got to be like late morning. So that's not the reason. He's probably busy like feeding his cats or taking apart a gun. Putting it back together or something like that. All right, so we'll skip that. Like I said, he would be a violence expert to discuss this topic with, although he'd probably do that whole brilliant addled rant kind of thing that he so often does, and we probably wouldn't be any the wiser when he was done. Let's see, who do I see? I see a few people read on Skype that probably wouldn't be the right people to bring up for this particular topic. In some of the cases, it would be. Be maybe not the right people for really any topic. Here, let me try. We have a loyal listener here, Patrick, who is green. Let's try. Let's try Patrick. He says, what is today? Is this Sunday. Okay. Okay, well, we're going to try. See if we can reach Patrick here. Let's see, he's. He turned green. There he is. Okay, let's. Let's try him. Patrick Chanel, he was on the show. He was actually a guest here a little while back and did a very good job. Hey, Patrick, is that you?